Posts by that one in the corner

OpenAI's ChatGPT is so popular that almost no one will pay for it

Re: If it worked I'd pay!

And as luck(?) would have it, a couple more El Reg stories later:

>> Japan tells OpenAI to stop spiriting away its copyrighted anime: "When I tried entering a prompt into Sora 2, it generated a succession of images of popular anime characters with such high quality that it was indistinguishable from the real thing," Shiozaki said in a blog post written days after Altman's Sora 2 note. "However, for some reason, characters whose rights are owned by major American companies, such as Mickey Mouse or Superman, did not appear."

So Supergirl is clearly out.

The time is right for some Agentic AI, on by default of course

ChatGPT: "You've been mentioning Led Zeppelin often, would you say you like their music?"

Poor sap: "Oh, yes; I just wish I could listen to all their tracks."

... conversation continues, on and off, for another 90 minutes ...

ChatGPT: "You ought to get the door"

... doorbell rings ...

Poor sap: "Wow! How did you know there was someone at the door?"

ChatGPT: "Oh, that is the Amazon delivery; I ordered the full set of Led Zeppelin recordings for you, including the bootlegs. I wasn't sure what format you preferred, so I ordered the lot. Thank you for ordering from our Amazon affiliates page."

Re: If it worked I'd pay!

You are feeding ChatGPT's output back into itself?

You maniac!

Don't you realise that is just one step away from trying to google "Google" and destroying the Internet!

PS

Have you tried that experiment with an image whose description, when fed back in, won't ask ChatGPT to generate an image that clearly violates the intellectual property of a company that is big enough, and owns enough media outlets, that Altman ('s lawyers) actually gives a shit about?

PPS

Not that any of the above negates your final conclusion, btw, just, perhaps, one of the paths that seems to lead to it. Many other paths also exist.

Librephone battles the proprietary binary blob

This will be a multi-year effort

Whilst the idea is intriguing, can't help feeling that it is going to be limited by the rate of churn in the mobile hardware market: by the time they have support for one device it'll have been declared "obsolete" by the manufacturer.

Whilst this may mean that someone who is really interested in running a Librephone system may be happy with the older model (possibly very happy, if they got a good second-hand deal) it will struggle to appear viable to the many people who insist on riding (close to) the leading edge of phone bling.

Devs are writing VS Code extensions that blab secrets by the bucketload

Re: msft tools

> That so many people just accept its (M$) failures is.... beyond the pale.

That is being a *bit* harsh, isn't?

Saying it is beyond belief - oh, if only that were true. Beggars belief - closer to the money, particularly in the august company of El Reg. But, casting aspersions on the moral integrity of those who have fallen victim to M$ is perhaps too close to victim blaming for comfort.

Schleswig-Holstein waves auf Wiedersehen to Microsoft stack

A powerful story. Very much not to be confused with the washing of small children's woollen shoes (daz bootees).

Raspberry Pi OS, LMDE, Peppermint OS join the Debian 13 club

Re: It's a free OS that lives on a $5 storage card in a $35 computer.

Proper British units?

Wel, the spot price for a UK gold sovereign is just above £690 as I write this, and $35 comes out as £26.07 (hmm, that is about a florin low for a model 3B+ ex-VAT, which is your best choice for a pi-hole, but never mind). So you'll be getting 26 R'Pis to the sovereign, with a bit leftover for p&p.

Trump's anti-sustainability agenda comes to Eurozone

Re: TDS

Post being responded to: >>> 2025 people video themselves taking Tylenol and post it on the internet to show that it is safe cos someone the media told them to dislike the person who repeated the previously undisputed claim.

Corner's response: >> Nope. Person who took the above hints, still without any causation, and turned it into a strong claim, directly telling people that it was a cause of Autism

And now: > False. RFK Jr did not say this. Or even imply this. You have been fed a lie by the media and swallowed it whole.

Hmm. Here is a transcript of Trump's announcement from which one quotes "Acetaminophen. Acetaminophen. Is that okay? Which is basically, commonly known as Tylenol. Can be associated with a very increased risk of autism. So taking Tylenol is not good. I’ll say it, it’s not good." followed by the announcement of the FDA notice.

Sounds to me like a strong claim, by "someone the media told them to dislike".

Meanwhile, as you decided to bring up RFK jr out of nowhere, you'll enjoy his words from the same transcript: "Thank you, Mr. President. To meet the President’s challenge, I ordered HHS to launch unprecedented all agency effort to identify all cause of autism, including toxic and pharmaceutical exposures... Today, we are announcing two important findings from our autism work that are vital for parents to know as they make these decisions. First, HHS will act on acetaminophen".

Now, does that sound like he is talking about autism or not? And tying it into use of Tylenol? Do you see anywhere that he attempts to correct Trump or does he just wholeheartedly support Trump's words?

> You have been fed a lie by the media and swallowed it whole.

Maybe you'd like to reconsider - did you perchance mean to put the word "I" in place of the word "you" in that sentence?

Re: TDS

> 2016 study hints that paracetamol (Tylenol for you yanks) use in pregnancy might have a link to ADHD

"Hints" == slight correlation is seen against the noise; put it in the pile of things to have a look at, whilst always remembering that correlation += causation

> 2025 ... person who repeated the previously undisputed claim

Nope. Person who took the above hints, still without any causation, and turned it into a strong claim, directly telling people that it was a cause of Autism - note that, a deliberate change from ADHD (which people get upset about but is considered, rightly or wrongly, to be "manageable" via nicely expensive drugs) to Autism (which is subjected to scare-mongering and nasty shit like those "Autism Speaks" bastards).

AI startup Augment scraps 'unsustainable' pricing, users say new model is 10x worse

I hate to sound like I'm defending these AI companies, but I'm afraid all you have done is remind us just how utterly, utterly shitty modern web pages are, at 1.5 to 2 MB.

The comparison to make is against plain old ASCII text, that is what is contained within things like the chatbot's "200K context window" and the content of those "messages": plain text requests for "write me a hello world in STOIC" then a plain text program listing as a response.

It will actually take you a fair old while to type in one of your "a 1 million char text file" examples, especially if you intend to make it more meaningful than just holding down the 'l' key.

Microsoft veteran explains Windows quirk that made videos play in Paint

Hence why your green screen works until it starts getting so creased, from the cat clawing up the reverse side, that the highlights and shadows in the folds move outside the allowed range, giving the appearance that you are slowly crumpling up as the video call continues...

Frightful Patch Tuesday gives admins a scare with 175+ Microsoft CVEs, 3 under attack

> GNU GRUB loads first (so GNU is clearly the base)

GNU GRUB also loads first on my desktop PC, which then (most days, sadly, still) loads Windows 10.

Does this mean my Windows 10 system is clearly GNU based?

Re: Oh look, so many, many patches you Win10 holdouts won't get

If I may: whoooosh.

Yes, 10 *will* get them. Precisely. And they'll be the last freebies.

The point was (and please forgive me, all those who understood this already):

Everyone will see a long, long list of patches (quite a bit longer than usual) - and then Win 10 holdouts can be told "Aren't you lucky we didn't stop last month, or you would have missed *all* of these and be in trouble right now. Imagine how dangerous it is going to be for you come November!" (Rattles tin for your money, or your backups, and waves juicy Win'11 installer as an alternative).

Then I am implying that this was a deliberate ploy by Microsoft.

.

Oh look, so many, many patches you Win10 holdouts won't get

The end of Windows 10 support and just think what will happen to your PC if you don't move on to '11 (or give us your backups or cash to streeeeetch it out...a bit). Scary, isn't!

(Internal memo: great job guys, holding those fixes back worked a treat; nah, don't worry about the ones that were being exploited in the meantime, they deserve that for not helping enough to buly the holdouts)

AI is the flying car of the mind: An irresistible idea nobody knows how to land or manage

Re: "heading for a hard landing"

> punting the issue to schools and universities to ensure that the next generation of starry-eyed meat fresh from the diploma mills will handle those pesky AI issues just like today's batch handles Excel formulas : badly

Don't forget the fun to be had when the software changes and the cheap bulk job "Computer Sudies" turn out to have been "memorise these menu items" - so not only are they unable to use alternatives that are just as capable given their needs ("I can't use LibreOfice, we were only taught MS Word") but when the menus suddenly vanish... (not to worry, next year's crop will have been taught the Ribbon).

Oh, don't forget that "Prompt Engineering" is even *less* engineering than Software Engineering could ever be. There are many blogs and books about the subject (Humble Bundle THE COMPLETE AI & GPT BOOK BUNDLE WITH 7,000 PROMPTS BY MAMMOTH FLASH SALE (apologies for the shouting, btw ONLY TWO DAYS LEFT as of posting this)) but one thing you'll rarely be told is that these are magic incantations with a limited lifetime: the underlying models are being changed beneath your feet and the results are not reproducible. Nor can you use past characteristics to accurately infer tomorrow's behaviours: today's "useful" prompt may trigger next week's hallucinations. Only one way to find out - suck it and see. Which is just peachy when you realise that your "Agentic" weekly batch run has just decided to spend the payroll on banana banana banana.

"Training to use AI" - well, that is one way to ensure you will be on the "like fong learning" path; but that was supposed to be stimulating and interesting learning, not Sisyphean drudgery.

> Making light has been getting cheaper and cheaper, going from fires to LED bulbs. And yet, the fraction of wealth we allocate to lighting has been roughly the same

Whilst the quality of the light has been going downhill, as the Colour Rendering index of the lights would tell us.

Well, except for street lights: the CRI of those has improved, technically, but they are still bad enough to not be any real improvement for the purpose of not driving onto the pavements or not walking into lampposts during the hours of darkness, whilst simultaneously making it harder to see the night sky and encourage everyone to look up and out into infinity instead of at their phones. Not so long ago, even in the most brightly lit streets, we could break out the sodium cut filter and enjoy the stars.

Similarly for other items on your list: 10x as many clothes to choose from, 100x harder to find some that are as well made as they were.

Framework flame war erupts over support of politically polarizing Linux projects

Re: systemd-detect-fash

Hang on - systemd-detectd-fash? Systemd? And it doesn't just do a "return 0" immediately?

KuzuDB says so long and thanks for all the commits, marooning community

Re: At last somebody has said it

*I* don't get it? Go back and *read* what I said:

>> The issue here is that you - and others - ... continually insisting on speaking as though there is only one "community" in Open Source,

To which you reply:

> see words equating to ... "the community ..." ... the open source community ... the open source community is like ...

Your masterful riposte is to - repeat exactly the thing I was pointing out!

> Most people in the open source community do not look for...

WRONG COMMUNITY! You are doing it deliberately now, aren't you?

For any successful project (and the divide gets bigger with greater success, we describe this effect with "arithmetic") "Most people" are just end-users. They probably don't even have any idea that there *is* a way to report issues they are having, even though a number of those will have figured out that it is repeatable and posted to *their* community about it (i.e. they have found a bug!).

Sensible people understand these distinctions.

PS

To stave off the inevitable "it isn't me saying this, it is all the people who big up open source" let's go back to your words:

> see words equating to

So who is doing that "equating"? That wouldn't happen to be - VoiceOfTruth who is reading words like "community" everywhere and, oopsie, applying that to the wrong set of people!

Re: At last somebody has said it

"The community of users" != "the community of developers"

There never is just *one* community - that is true for everything and anything beyond a trivial size. And mentioning that, or trying to draw any great conclusion from it, is trivial and absurd, respectively.

"The community of Manchester United spectators" != "the community of Man U players": the goal scorers are always 'somebody else'.

"The community of people eating in McDonalds" != "the community of people behind the counter in McDonalds"; the problem of making the burgers belongs to 'somebody else'.

The issue here is that you - and others - insist on trying to make some kind of "meaningful comments" by misrepresentation, continually insisting on speaking as though there is only one "community" in Open Source, or any other producer/consumer relationship.

Heck, there need not be - and often enough isn't - just one "community of users"; you get those who hang out on Reddit, a group of Discordians, maybe a hundred Facebookers, all talking as though they are "THE community" and never mixing across groups.

Holy shit Kuzu is dead

Because, of course, the very second that the last developer logs off Github, all the copies across the world suddenly halt; the executables start to bubble and smoke and ten minutes later they have all vanished, leaving behind nothing other than a hole in your hard drive and a faint smell of fish.

According to Github, they have become used to updates approximately monthly and it would be a surprise[1] if a fork managed to pick it up fast enough for a November update; but declaring it dead immediately, feeling foolish about having promoted it in the past - users that are so quick to give up on it, who would *want* to stick their hand up and start on a fork?

[1] but not impossible. Kuzu the company have dropped it, but they also have lost at least one of the developers; maybe no coincidence at all. Maybe there is one - or more - developer who can not afford the time to work on it until they've settled into a new job, but would relish the opportunity to continue bashing away at that codebase, given the opportunity. A *healthy* user base might help with that, using their contacts...

Microsoft seeding Washington schools with free AI to get kids and teachers hooked

Maybe AI could help navigating around Washington?

There must be *something* that can make sense of the mess; once you get off the A19 and have done the Washington Highway, your only hope of sanity returning is when you can spot the Angel of the North peeking over the trees.

What do we want? Windows 10 support! When do we want it? Until 2030!

Windows 11 is our most secure ever

Because the security fixes haven't been released back into Widows 10, despite the fact there is no major difference between them under the hood: we just keep running out of time to make that release, being so busy trying to make the Windows 11 Start button just that extra bit worse.

Re: Lil' Help for the switchover?

Others have pointed out the steps - *except" I would also suggest, after taking all the safety precautions (including disconnecting extra data drives, just to avoid slips of the finger), seeing if you can shrink down your remaining Windows partition(s) on the boot drive, consolidating all the freed-up space just after the C: drive partition. Start with plain old Windows Disk Management.

After doing that, many (most?) desktop Linux distros will ask if you just want to install Linux into the (now) unused space; a good one will also automagically set up dual boot nicely.

That way, you aren't taking the leap off a cliff and can still get to your Windows setup in case there is something you forgot to do back there. After a suitable time, you can choose to delete that C: drive and subsume the space entirely into your Linux file system.

Re: Awareness Of Linux Is Still A UK Media Problem

According to the wife, on the morning news-style programme someone of a technical bent *did* mention Linux, but the sofa dollies glazed over and never attempted to follow up on it.

Ubuntu 25.10 lands: Rustier and Wayland-ier, but Flatpak is broken

Good response - thank you.

Requires the new RVA23S64 ISA profile

The Ubuntu site describes that with the wording

>> We have upgraded the required RISC-V ISA profile to RVA23S64

Clearly, "upgrading" software is now used to mean "you can not run it on *your* oafish computer", although Ubuntu have gone one step further than Microsoft, by not even being able to point at suitable replacement hardware.

Sure, you can run it in emulation, but is that really useful to anybody trying to *use* RISCV?

Bose kills SoundTouch: Smart speakers go dumb in Feb

Re: Very disappointing

> I assumed this would be a lifetime device

It was.

Just not the lifetime of anything within thirty metres of you*

As you are that rarity that has admitted to buying these things, can you recall what you were actually promised with regards to the service life of the product? 3 years? 5? 10? Serious question.

* assuming you aren't working at Bose, because then you ought to have known...

Re: You'd be amazed...

My Kobo has its SD card filled with books from the Gutenberg Project or bought, DRM free, from Humble Bundle and the like. Thankfully, read all the complaints about the software update a few years ago, the one that tried to make the Kobo Shop the centre of the UI, so knew not to install it - dodged a bullet there!

Re: Couldn't guarantee long-term performance

Yeah, bad choice of words.

Was trying to suggest the likely ongoing availability of generic BT tech, more than whether any of it is actually any good.

Just to be ornery, although family members use BT speakers, BT connections from fitness trackers to smartphones and all that jazz, I can't think of anything that the wife or I use that does BT. I have bought a few BT dev boards, especially when BLE came out, so their addresses are still listed on this tablet, but the experience wasn't terribly exciting so those are back in the drawer. In fact, I'm building a LEGO Technic model with a "BT & smartphone required" control hub inside it, but I'm hoping to get an R'Pi Pico plus Raspberry Pi Build Hat[1] to talk to the motors etc, and add IR receiver to listen to an old style remote control instead of using the hub. Like I say, ornery.

[1] yup, want to use a Pico instead of the full-fat R'Pi that this Hat is meant for; why make life easy for myself!

> instead of spending thousands on Bose landfill, they could buy a cheap used computer

But, but - just think of all the industrial design they'd be losing out on!

Ok, Bose aren't up there with Bang and Olufsen levels of brushed metal and weird "nicked off the bridge of a starship" looks but man, you just aren't going to get curves like that from a used computer.

Couldn't guarantee long-term performance

When connected to AUX? Can't guarantee performance over a signal coming in over a piece of wire? Ok, at some point the capacitors are going to dry out, but other than that, surely...

Bluetooth is *almost* as solid as a wire, although it is possible for your next BT *source* to no longer support the specific protocol (but that wouldn't be Boses's fault).

Android 'Pixnapping' attack can capture app data like 2FA codes

Tacky UI weaponised?

So, if I've understood TFA and the info on the pixnapping.com website, this works because Android allows you to render your UI to have as is background a blurred view of whatever is being displayed underneath your window. The clever bit then being to extract data from the actual process involved in that blurring.

In other words, a horrid and tacky bit of UI "functionality"[1] has geen weaponised. And as a mere end-user I can't protect myself by telling the OS to just not support this ghastliness.

Yay, I'm being put at risk because UI designers (hah, bet the call themselves "UX Engineers" or worse) decided that a cluttered display, with decreased contrast, is so damn clever and important that it went into the OS.

[1] I mean, come on, it was tacky and useless when Windows Aero did it.

Nvidia's GB10 workstations arrive with 1 petaFLOPS of compute, 128GB of VRAM, and a $3K+ price tag

Yes, yes - but does it run Doom?

Bun 1.3 stuffs everything and kitchen sink into JS runtime

Re: What does this reminds you of?

Well, it reminds of the inevitable xkcd

Datacenter water use? California governor says don't ask, don't tell

"I am reluctant to impose rigid reporting requirements..."

> about operational details on this sector without understanding the full impact on businesses

The businesses will have to print out a number from their existing spreadsheets and pop it in the post.

> and the consumers of their technology

Heaven forfend you might encourage a consuming business to ever be able to do a decent cost/benefit analysis! How will they ever be able to look the shareholders and bankers straight in the eye if they ever had honest information without plausible deniability? Don't you people know how investment bubbles work?

Arduino has a new job selling chips for its new owner. Let's not pretend otherwise

The UNO Q has already lost the plot

I thought the UNO R4 WiFi was a step away from the original value of that family but the Q is ridiculous.

Arduino already have the MKR Series for playing with bigger devices and lots of onboard widgets; the UNO's great strength is that it was simple, you can understand it quite easily (so long as you keep in mind that the second processor on the R3 is there because USB is overly complicated when all you need is simple serial and the latter is all you need when you get to having two boards talking to each other).

When you've built a project with a proper UNO, you can easily go into the next stages of replicating the entire thing on a breadboard[1] and even onto making up a PCB and creating your own embedded device - all whilst still remaining at the "artist", hobbyist or school-level: all in easy stages, no need to go any deeper than you have to and with as few black box components as possible.

Taking over the UNO form factor - which is not, and never has been, great for complex projects, ref all the people who still needlessly[2] scream at the non-standard pin spacing - like this is moving Arduino far, far away from its educational roots and making it into a way to ship more over-spec'ed parts for Qualcomm.

[1] I notice that shrimping.it is no more; that isn't suspicious (sad, but not dastardly) but it is one thing making it harder to point somebody who is ready for the next stage to a nice friendly place for breadboarding their own UNO-alike.

[2] needlessly because there are plenty of other forms available and have been for a fair old while; although most of the screaming has been in Hackaday and their comments section is rarely a happy place

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

Re: Come on, peoples!

From only a limited sample, but my PoE devices have lights, even when connected to the PoE router but not actively drawing power.

Ok, a managed PoE router may have been told to shut down power delivery to that port, to extinguish all the LEDs, but still keeping the port active for traffic - this is getting needlessly complicated![1] And if they have infrastructure that is complicated but no fallback for this bit of exotic kit...

Hmm, Steve may have got the boot but hopefully IT were also given a stern talking to.

[1] or it is one of the sneaky spy devices jake mentioned

Re: I don't get it

Seen those as well, as a failsafe for when the device is unwell (the relay only flipping after the device has not only powered up but also POSTed).

But if you've gone to the trouble of removing the power cable then you could also replace the box with a plain old coupler. Seems odd to leave it the way it was - and anything odd should have a clear label attached!

Re: Come on, peoples!

We know it looked distinctly out of service (not powered up) and yet wasn't prominently labelled to warn others that this was very unusual kit (a sticker over the strangely unused power socket , with a note explaining why - which may, in a bad world, be a reference like "read doc#17, p.472").

Heck, I just wrote a sticky label to go next to an LED because I couldn't figure out or remember why it was on when the rest of that computer appeared to be off - and I only built that machine from parts last November!

Not leaving on-site labels for anything that is very out of the ordinary is shoddy. Yes, including kit that has been decommissioned but left in the rack: masking tape and a sharpie, at the minimum.

THAT is the sort of IMMEDIATE documentation that was missing!

Engineers pave the way for building lunar roads with Moon dust

Re: Big lasers spares company

Great minds think alike, eh? If we look back at the article:

> big lasers aren't the most robust machines on any planetary surface.

>> solar light could be focused into high energy beams on the surface of the Moon... Taking the process to the Moon might employ a Fresnel lens ... to produce the effect

> I'd think along the lines of interlocking cobbles ... . A solid road surface would suffer ...

>> they found that criss-crossing or overlapping the laser beam path led to cracking. They hit upon an approach ... to produce triangular shapes of about 250 mm (9.84 inches) in size. "At the end of the study, large samples (approximately 250 × 250 mm) with interlocking capabilities were fabricated ..."

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

Re: My nerdy formner CEO offered me a choice ...

> Once you go Mac, you never go back...

I worked with Genuine IBM PCs, onto Sun & Apollo and then Mac (thin, fat & classic) Classic thence onto Mac II. When the time came to buy my next bit of personal kit (to go with the BBC Micro & Amiga) went straight to PC compatible rather than Mac and haven't had any urge to buy Apple since.

So that is my anecdote on the subject.

Well, except to say that, so far the only time I've had to take a fire extinguisher to a smoking computer was a Fat Mac (although that did then donate some ROMs I could use, with an adapter, in the Amiga, when/if I felt the urge to go monochrome).

Managers are throwing entry-level workers under the bus in race to adopt AI

Re: Points to a business culture of short-term thinking

As the old saying has it:

The first 90% of the code takes 90% of the time.

The remaining 10% of the code the takes the remaining 90% of the time.

Points to a business culture of short-term thinking

Ridiculous! Never heard of such a thing! That is an extraordinary thing to say about any business! Why, in my day clunk whir thud

(Beeeeeeep. Out of sarcasm error. Please reload and try again)

50 years in deep space, and Voyager still can't escape budget gravity

Re: NASA Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA)

Core business?

You mean "Devotion of Space Activities to Peaceful Purposes for Benefit of All Humankind" by collaborating with other countries to do research into improvements in aeronautics and space vehicles to the advancement of peaceful uses of space.

And, since 1984, that includes actively helping the development of commercial space flight* like giving SpaceX contracts for ISS runs.

Texas senators cry foul over Smithsonian's pricey Space Shuttle shuffle

Just make sure it doesn't get all dirty and sticky or we'll be in Katamari Damacy territory! Although, turning the Shuttle into a star has a poetic feel.

Re: A different angle

One small step towards Mortal Engines

Senate says Nvidia chips are for America first as China tightens import controls

Re: Eagle

Betcha they'd use a red tailed hawk[1] because that is what people think it sounds like.

[1] wait for it, wait for it...

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Re: "Not nearly as dangerous as the stairwell or our office window"

But then you'd have to remove the skip, the one that is filled with carpet offcuts.

Re: Sparks of ancient light....

You know, a lot of those name, logo and model number tags are just stuck onto the front panel...

RondoDox botnet fires 'exploit shotgun' at nearly every router and internet-connected home device

Re: If You Don't Patch Your Devices/Software, You're Begging For It

Jacquard loom cards: sew them up in a different order to patch the pattern on the patch of material.