Posts by that one in the corner

Forget disappearing messages – now Signal will store 100MB of them for you for free

Re: Your data is safe if you lose your phone

So, are the people* this is aimed at smart enough? Or, as I asked, does Signal - or anyone else you want to rererence - provide a usable mechanism for the idiot 'phone user on the street?

It is all very well your being smug about this, but that is the very behaviour that leads to oh, so very many crap pieces of user experience.

* Note: *none* of this Signal etc stuff this is aimed to me, in case you hadn't guessed. So what I - or, for that matter, you - know what to do is functionally irrelevant.

Your data is safe if you lose your phone

And can only be unencrypted by the key that is safely & securely stored only on your phone.

Um.

PS as this got such a quick reaction, come on, how many are actually going to memorise a 64 char key or manage to otherwise back it and restore it; does Signal even provide an easy enough way for only an authorised person to do that for the key: "Signal stores it in an encrypted folder, backed up with a 64-character key stored on the device in case you need to restore access"

Linus has had enough of links that point to 'stupid useless garbage'

There is (apparently) a ready supply of Finns with the correct attitude, now we just have to find another one that is good with technology; THAT is the tricky bit.

Use it or lose it: AI may cause you to forget some skills

Keynote speech at the conference "Sky is blue"

Was met by a sea of amazed looks on the faces of the gathered C-suite audience members, who were later seen puzzled by the live demonstration of making a tower from wooden cubes.

What a world to live in: not only is Gartner talking sense for once, which is newsworthy in itself, but it is only by repeating what every school child has been told since the invention of the pointy throwy stick.

But will anyone think of the cheaper alternative to taking tests? Just switch the damn AI off for a fortnight and work on the code (or whatever) "by hand"? Roll up the sleeves and dive in.

So many of us had to read E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" at school, now we know why; it wasn't just for the use of language...

Microsoft hits pause on Copilot ... in SQL Server Management Studio

Re: 75 percent of survey respondents wanted ... to leverage GitHub Copilot

PS is it deliberate that they named that product after the way one usually responds upon hearing what platform management want you to use?

"Make a database"

"Great, I'll just install MariaDB"

"NO! We demand SQL Server"

"Ssssss - MS" (holds up fingers in a cross, to ward off evio)

75 percent of survey respondents wanted ... to leverage GitHub Copilot

Because somebody had let slip that changing over would mean a rework, so they get a new version with Copilot stripped out and, with any luck, a long, long dev period before it reappears.

Devilish cunning, these SSMS survey respondents.

After nearly half a century in deep space, every ping from Voyager 1 is a bonus

Get what you mean, but:

> been far more useful in human evolution

Pretty sure all the radioactives on the Voyagers went safely with them and won't affect our evolution.

Windows, on the other hand, is a toxic heap that has probably caused the premature removal of genes from the pool (via mechanisms such as self-defenestration: "No, no, I won't admin your office full of Win ME boxes, I'll take the less painful route - aaaaaaaahhhhhhhh").

Re: I never fail to be impressed

Well, that scenario did include a refueling stop and a couple(!) of tweaks to the craft by helpful passers-by, not really something that was planned for...

It's AI all the way down as Google's AI cites web pages written by AI

Re: A few points.

We know an xkcd about that* citogenesis. Though your friend was being a bit more - deliberate - about it.

* There is always an xkcd...

Re: A few points.

> YMYL queries? Does that include 'How much pocket money do Americans get?' and 'How do I get rid of zits?' Not really life or death ('LoD'?).

Your particular choice of YMYL questions are, indeed, trivial, as well you know. But they aren't the only ones, are they? There are queries that people make which do have bigger consequences - so, taking your lead, from the totally trivial end of the bell curve to the totally idiotic end, how about "Should I withdraw all my cash and put it into memecoin?".

More realistically, closer to the middle of the curve, "How much can I transfer from X to Y in one financial year without going over the limits and being hit with taxes/excess charges/jail time for "structuring"? But phrased more innocently, such as "How much can I give my grandchildren this year?"

Get the wrong answers to that and you'll only find out months later when the taxes are deducted at source, or demands arrive at your door. Or the Feds.

Or "if I still send out twenty job applications a week, until one gets a response, can I volunteer at this shelter for an hour every evening without affecting my benefits?"

Re: A few points.

> 'Model collapse' is a little dramatic even if El Reg is journalism.

Model Collapse is the description used by the people researching how these models work - El Reg is just using the same term, to help you look up the papers that perform the analysis.

Your analogy with historic resources goes part-way along the correct lines, but only part way. Yes, daft LLM generated non-facts (aka hallucinations) will be picked up and repeated by the next generation of LLMs - and mutated again. Unlike (hopefully) historians looking to get back to only the most reliable form of the tale, the LLMs are taking everything without any critical analysis. Meanwhile, other branches of knowledge should have better self-correcting: even if an LLM confidently tells everybody that water boils at 32 degrees C at sea level, humans can just repeat the experiment (i.e. make a cup of tea) but the next generation of LLM can happily ingest that without thinking "nah, otherwise..." ('cos the LLM does not think, at all).

Also, unlike historians, the LLMs are also degrading in other ways - we've seen discussions over the last few days about spotting LLM output by excessive use of en- and em- dashes, and previous stories about how they are inordinately fond of certain phrases. Feeding these back into the training will only amplify such effects and, one mathematical catastrophe later, generation k LLMs degenerate into total gibberish.

It is just simple accumulation of errors: a positive feedback loop, which can only lead to the whole thing going up in flames. With the additional quirk that nobody really has any idea why these things are even as "good" as they are (at generating plausible gibberish): that is, you can't point at any arbitrary one of the individual numbers in the billions of nadans in the model and say what that one does. Or how to spot if the numbers are creeping up towards a point where *this* set of outputs is suddenly always going to be more likely than any other. At some point, after reinforcing their bad habits too much, LLMs fed on LLM output could quite happily become unable to answer any query without descending into a rambling discourse about the proper use of herring in Nordic cooking. Or just banana banana banana.

Re: A Negative Feedback Loop...

Uh, no.

Model Collapse is a result of a POSITIVE feedback loop. You know, like howl round when you put a mic too close to the speaker?

A negative feedback loop is a Good Thing. Anyone with any tech nous likes a good negative feedback loop.

No more waiting for lines: New Windows keyboard shortcuts output em and en dashes with ease

At last, an easy way to type those dashes

Oh, if only my keyboard had a "Windows key"*

* in fact, it does, as I was playing with the power toys thingie last year, but for the life of me can never remember which key I remapped** - Scroll Lock?

** Third World Problems - I have unused keys on the keyboard!

US cuffs 475 at Hyundai–LG battery plant – feds tout largest single-site raid

Re: anti-EV

You underestimate them, they have already shown great talents useful for Steam - never have we seen a group better at shovelling.

AI code assistants make developers more efficient at creating security problems

Insecure mess?

Call Apiiro!

T&Cs apply, your code may not compile or run after our AI has been at it (but that is secure, right?).

Hmm, CoPilot insecure, Apiiro says can check for insecurities - has anyone checked the ownership structure, really carefully?

They reduced syntax errors by 76 percent

Because otherwise we'd *never* be able to find all those syntax errors, so good job there. /s

Boffins detail new method to make neural nets forget private and copyrighted info

What a good thing this sort of idea could be never be abused

LLMs replacing proper search engines.

Only a small number of the largest LLMs in existence.

A way to make an LLM forget targeted - oops, "only copyright" data.

What could possibly go wrong?*

* There are no records of anybody abusing our system, the safeguards are all working perfectly. Banana, banana, banana.

Re: I'm afraid I can't do that...

Dave? Who is this "Dave?".

Mary, Lucy, give him my kumquat do

Ex-NASA chief: China likely to land humans on Moon before Uncle Sam does again

Re: And?

There are resources on the Moon that have great potential value to science, especially Astronomy: rather a lot less atmospheric scattering/absorbtion, away from Earth's radio chatter on the Farside, and for a couple of weeks per month, away from the Sun's rays in every wavelength (the other two weeks let you charge the batteries). And our base lines get longer (they also become an ever-changing thing - but computational interferometry can sort that out). It'd be a lot easier to pump down the arms of a couple of Gravity Wave detectors up there.

Now, whether anyone will put up the money to access this valuable resource is another matter... After all, we can "get by on the cheap" with bigger Terrestial telescopes (if they can be finished and left to operate in peace: that latter is in doubt these days) or with satellite telescopes (with their size and operational life restrictions: ok, ok, LISA will do far better than any surface, 'quakey, instruments and will be a lot longer in the arms, but still has the operational life issue).

How about 4th of July and don't need to be picky about the year. Take up some fireworks (a classic Chinese invention, after all) and have a little celebratory show. Leave a few extra up there, on timers, as an experiment to see what happens after 12 months on the surface, then 24 months...

No chips for you! Senator wants Americans to get first dibs on GPUs, restrict sales to others

Re: AI Superpower

Reginald: Do we have the marketing survey results for our latest Grot product lines?

Joan: Yes. Aah, 87% told us where we could stick our non-soluble suppository

CJ: I didn't get where I am today without knowing where to

Reginald: Yes, yes, thank you. Moving on

(Apologies to everyone with a better memory and/or a copy of the DVDs for the gross inaccuracy in the quotes, but haven't seen that episode for a while... But the overall flavour of that scene has stayed, un-dissolved...)

Microsoft inches toward Rusty Windows drivers, production use still a no-no

Re: But...but...but...

I'd forgotten the - coincidence? - that the issue containing "The Last Question"[1] also featured a story "Deus ex machina"; you could be forgiven for misremembering which title belongs to which story.[2]

[1] No, I didn't see it new in the shops, I'm not quite that greybearded, but there was this great secind-hand bookshop...

[2] Oh come on, that wasn't a spoiler for the Asimov story! Seriously, if you haven't read it yet...

Windows starts asking for admin rights where it shouldn't after security fix

This improvement will be released in a future Windows update

Sometime around, oooh, Mid-November, maybe into December.

In the meantime, MS have only a few more opportunities to release some more patches that'll *really* screw over all the Windows 10 holdouts.

"Oops, silly old us, we've knackered all your PCs. Not to worry, see, *this* patch has put everything back the way it was, and here is the *proper* fix that doesn't trigger UAC all the time. What was that, your Win'11 boxes are now all working again but none of your Win'10 boxes got that last patch and still aren't usable? Gosh. Well, sorry, but, you know, EOL, our hands are tied."

US puts $10M bounty on three Russians accused of attacking critical infrastructure

Hi kids! The Special Word today is - showboating!

And we have a song about it for you...

I was a part-time DBA. After this failover foul-up, they hired a full-time DBA

Re: Blind Spot

> a "Ten Minute Meal"

Isn't that simply referring to the time window you have to eat the mess, before it fully converts to an inedible blob on the plate?

Biden stopped ICE from buying Israeli spyware, but Trump admin allows it to proceed

Will they get an unlimited use licence

Or will you be charged every time they install it on all your devices as you move across the US borders?

Will that fee just be rolled into your airline ticket price or will you have to tap to pay on arrival?

White House nixes NASA unions amid budget uncertainty

Re: I'm not a Yank but...

Hint: consider that you are creating a counterfactual which does nothing to refute or demonstrate a weakness in the previous statement.

Because the provision of ability to restrain does not imply that the holder of that provision is necessarily in a position to be "the Perpetrator in Chief, the Abuser in Chief...". And in the case of the UK Monarchy, most certainly is not and hasn't been for a long time; there was this pesky Parliament, you see...

Laravel inventor tells devs to quit writing 'cathedrals of complexity'

Re: Really?

> are trivially problems that require Turing complete languages to address, and yet we insist somehow that a DSL is the proper tool for the job.

Um. Are you trying to say that a DSL (you do mean Domain Specific Language, yes?) can't be Turing Complete? 'cos it can, if you want it (or need it) to be.

(I have no experience with the specific systems you mention and any particular DSLs that they may, or may not, contain, btw, just commenting in general about aspersions being cast against DSLs as a whole)

Re: As big a problem is the missing holy book

> I despair when I look at most software projects with documentation automatically generated from the code because all it tells me is how the software developer chose to decompose the problem into units of code

Glad you said "most", not "all", because it *is* possible to use something like Doxygen to generate documentation that runs the gamut from end-user to bug-fixing or feature enhancing dev. I *think* I managed it once (once!)[1]: well, the client liked it at the long handover meeting and nobody ever came back to grab me for a quick shout in the following years...

BUT using (in this case, Doxygen) like that was, I admit, very much going against the grain of how Doxygen itself is presented (and the same is true of similar tools I've looked at): they go into detail about how to mark up your code *but* there is little, if any, emphasis on writing SEPARATE files that are just documentation - to the extent I've been asked "what was the point of these dot-dox files, they only make the build system more complicated?"! Bangs head on table. "Why not use Word?" Um, version control; keeping materials together; regenerating and fixing references as the code matures; being able to drop "TODO: write this dox" into the same tracker as we drop "TODO: write this function"; the docs are broken into easy chunks so you aren't constantly looking at hundreds of pages of Word content in a disheartening and never ending task; auto-generating variants (End User Manual is done in PDF without hyperlinks to any code; Installer's Manual in PDF hyperlinks the User features to the INI files, Dev's Manual in HTML has all the same, but now hyperlinks to where the INI settings are acted upon in code...).

Getting just devs to write docs in "the code markup tool" is hard enough, but getting management to allow it, yikes. You can fudge things, sometimes[2] but, again, the tools (that I've seen, so far) don't make it easy.

And "by easy" I don't mean "write another bleeping WYSIWYG IDE that does it all"! You can sensibly allow "I am not a dev" authors to use, say, a WYSIWYG editor for writing Markdown that can then be pulled into the dot-dox, that is good (great, even). But you also need to be able to drive the generation from a build system (GUI begone!), so encourage long and meaningful file name extensions[3]; you need to pull in externals (images, auto-generated lists of CLI options, ...)[4], must support multiple programming languages (without still being so obviously a Python tool that got hacked for C++ and Bison that has those guys foaming at the mouth).

Most important of all:

When you go to the website for the tool (looking at you, Sphinx, Doxygen - well, everyone) and the "how to use this", please, please, START by showing how to write the User docs, the Overview Of My Library, even The Next Great American Novel, as organised prose; output into lots of language lovely End User and Management-friendly formats. THEN segue over to cross-referencing your example code. THEN into adding details into the bulk of your code! That last bit really, really is the least important, honest. Management may leave love to see a table of all the parameters of flump19() but if you haven't got that far yet (as it is last on your list!) a direct copy of just the declaration is a usable standin for anybody who'll actually use that level of the docs! Go back to the history of *when* that struct has five fields, not three, and the arguments that'll at least mean you can say "well, you were warned" when Mr SuperNewbie "optimises" your code and it all stops working!

[1] important note: I had time *scheduled* on this project for a write-up *and* management wasn't demanding it be done in Word (phew), so there was an opportunity.

[2] my little utility for a particular End User doc generates Word files, as per Management demands. Well, to be honest, it generates HTML that looks like the stuff (an old) Word spat out and gives it a dot-dot extension...

[3] seriously, I encourage the use of fred.markdown.txt, or even better, fred.github_markdown.txt! *Any* user can double-click and read it in Notepad, any *sensible* Markdown editor can open them (AND prompt for that as the extension when saving a file! Your's can't? Then it is in the wrong!) Make loves those names, gets all the options set correctly.

[4] sigh, ok, I'll add a pass through another preprocessor into the build - getting further away from one nicely documented document-writing language as we go

AI spies questionable science journals, with some human help

Re: Sadly

> "it is the industry's practice"

Great way to break an illusion!

The academics, individuals every one of them, chasing dreams - and finding out, is it still your dream by the time you've finished the PhD? During your postdoc, as "publish or die" kicks in? Whilst you spend the days drafting grant applications, looking wistfully over at the lab machinery you've not been able to spend time with for months now?

Then the journals - especially the predatory ones - responding like that.

There is nothing wrong with "industry" per se - we all rely on it, it has many great people in it and it is (should be) symbiotic with research and academia - but sending that message was really on the nose: the owner of the factory with the giant rotating knives emailing the long pig standing on the conveyor belt.

LegalPwn: Tricking LLMs by burying badness in lawyerly fine print

Re: Reality check

Or Domina.

(Knew El Reg had this icon for a reason)

Nicely written description of LLMs you gave here

From the world-weary "yet another way to trivially trick" to the overview of their operation - "slurry", like it.

The only thing that is missing is the ending to the sentence:

> showed that "agentic" tools, in addition to simple interactive chatbots, were also vulnerable.

Something pithy to the effect that "of course they are, why wouldn't they be?" and a quick bit of "and you've connected them to systems with real-world access, don't come crying to us when they've opened your windows, wiped your drives, eaten your hat or had sex with your cat".*

* The pithiest is, of course, "Go stick your head in a pig" but do the people falling for the LLM hype and leaving themselves open to these attacks have a good education in the classics, so they can recognise the reference? Presumably not, as they already missed that all these LLM pwns reek of wooden horse dung.

Google kneecaps indie Android devs, forces them to register

Re: thanks, Google.

Isn't *THE* reason to buy an "official Google device" because those are the ones that get third-party OS support?

Instead of praying that your newly-purchased "one of the thousand random devices released this year" happens to have also been purchased by an active alt-OS dev, so it will be supported (as soon as said dev has worked their way past all the "what the blazes is inside *this* one hurdles).

GitHub engineer claims team was 'coerced' to put Grok into Copilot

> a lot of devs will want to use Grok, and there's no reason they shouldn't be able to use it.

So, what is stopping you (or them)? Just go to xAI, buy into whichever scheme suits your use, maybe install a plugin for your fave IDE[1], and off you go. No need for Github to do anything, one way or the other.

> There's an open issue on the JetBrains support site with lots of people wanting Grok access added.

See [1], again.

[1] Wot, no plugin? You're a super-powered dev-with-AI, write one!

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Never understood what you as so bad about being an ass - hard working, robust, our pre-mechanised industrial heritage relied upon them. They'll trot up and down cliffsides that a horse will shy from (goats do it better, but you try loading your mining gear onto a goat). A bit of a reputation for being slow to pick up new concepts, but that is really just them being cautious and weighing the options instead of dashing for the shiny shiny like those noisy magpies.

Now, being an arse, that is not good.

Sting nails two front firms in Nork IT worker scam

Sting nails

Madonna plasters, Cher plumbs, Adele paints and The Artist Formerly Known As Prince does the sparks.

(Sorry, been a long day and I only got partway through the headline before veering off course).

Junk is the new punk: Why we're falling back in love with retro tech

Re: Why ? Surely no one can't work it out ?

> the real deal is being with the artist ... at a gig.

With all the genuine sound of people singing the wrong words, out of key, just behind you. The bad mix of the instruments that drowns out the singer, who then starts to shriek instead of singing. The volume is too high, so you "feel" the music, even as your ears start ringing and you lose all ability to hear the useful frequencies anyway.

It's a toss-up, especially when seeing a band live for the first time, whether it is going to be great - or yet another one where the best thing to do is walk out early and try to preserve some love for their work via the studio recordings.

Unlike most of Musk's other ventures, Starship keeps it together for Flight Test 10

Pity the poor first Person on Mars

eventually reaching the surface and exploding as expected.

Icon: in very poor taste.

Putin on the code: DoD reportedly relies on utility written by Russia-based Yandex dev

Did left-pad die in vain for us?

> Simplest solution for the thousands of projects using fast-glob would be for Malinochkin to add additional maintainers and enhance project oversight, as the only other alternative would be for anyone using it to find a suitable replacement.

The *only* other alternative?

Not, keeping a known copy in your own system? Along with the rest of the code you are relying on?

Not, gathering a group of Trustworthy True Red, White and Blue Pure Hearted US Patriots who can make a simple fork (and offer Malinochkin tech leadership rights, but take on anything more onerous or tedious wrt managing a popular package, to make life easier for him as well?)

Not, offering to help the sole developer who has the misfortune to write something useful for you ungrateful bastards? Oh no, Malinochkin has to take all the initiative.

Not only has nobody learnt anything from things like the left-pad incident?* but anyone who actually does something good as a sole dev is now to be a suspected security hole and it is all their fault!

* Oh, but Azer Koçulu - that doesn't sound like a white US male's name, he was suspect all along.

DOGE accused of duplicating critical Social Security database on unsecured cloud

SSA "wasn't aware of any compromise of the DOGE NUMIDENT environment"

Why would they be aware of any "compromise" of that environment? Sitting in j.random cloud account, copying it onto Big Balls's* 'phone (and a dozen memory sticks, maybe a large email or two, boasting to his Gran about his important job) doesn't require any "compromise": no breaking in, no subtle hackery, just a drag'n'drop would probably suffice. Normal, untracked, insecure operations.

* Other DOGE employees are available, balls may go up or down

Re: Is this the right prefix?

> centipede

Pre-dates SI. As does millipede (plus that last is definitely a boast).

Google takes Photoshop to the woodshed with new image AI

This nozzle in the wall just sprayed me with the smell of stale sweat^^^^^social media posts

Trump stomps feet, pulls out 't-word' again over China rare earths ban

We have tremendous power over them, and they have some power over us

Might want to swap the words "we" and "they".

Unless he is referring to US power over the Chinese factories that manufacture cheap tat on demand*, like tacky red hats with embroidered slogans: as major customers, they could stop buying and drive those factories out of business.

* or decent stuff, if you ask them, and pay them, to.

Trump made Intel an offer it couldn't refuse

Foundry division lost a whopping $13.4 billion

Now he is a shareholder, Trump can send in a hatchet man, someone who really knows how to safely trim away the loss-making fat and stop pointless expenditure.

Hmm, DT still doesn't like EM (this week, AFAIK) - does Big Balls have the spare time to take on Intel?

TSMC doesn't so much "compete" with Intel as produce all the *other* chips that let us build real, working, devices with a couple of Intel blobs somewhere in the mix. Intel needs TSMC! Ditto other RAM suppliers...

The fact that some TSMC-made items may also sub for those Intel bits doesn't remove Intel's dependency, it merely(!) means that they aren't co-dependent and TSMC can happily afford to watch Intel slide away.

Trump threatens extra tariffs, tech export bans, for any nation that dares to regulate Big Tech

Re: Yes please call the orange pedo's bluff

Amazon is ok when, once a year, they offer you a month's free Prime, which you can use for video streaming (and, at least here, they even tell you where to go to cancel Prime the same day, then let the rest of the month ride out).

Only trouble is, I've done The Expanse twice, seen The Peripheral etc and this year can't spot anything worth the trouble.

You Will Respect My Authoritah

Oh, if only DT would act on Cartman's other great line:

Screw you guys, I'm going home!

Mysterious X-37B spaceplane flies again, this time carrying a quantum GPS alternative

Re: IMU !!!

> measured by interferometry in a spool of glassfiber

The well-known Sagnac Effect

("A drift, a 15 degree per hour drift". Thanks, Bob)

Everything is 'different on Windows': Zed port delays highlight dev friction

> This sounds like a Rust issue.

Perhaps it is a "Rust issue" in that "the Rust Community" hasn't taken the view of "let's look for a well-established cross-platform library - probably in C/C++, given the ways of the world - and translate it into Rust, taking advantage of all that knowledge of how to cope with the differences".

Do a good, solid, reliable GUI-etc library and *then* build your application on top of that. But a library isn't Sexy and New, unlike an Editor That Knows LLMs.

Instead, we have a group leaping in and trying to do it all in one go - and, by the appearance of things, in the wrong order ("all the right notes, not necessarily in the right order"): so they have one platform displaying text and other UI stuff, but released before they have cross-platform. Then built on top of the single-platform, inevitably causing abstractions to leak up into the application...

If they worked more like a community, sharing tasks and doing what is needed now instead of what is individually fun, all pulling for a common goal of World Domination...

> Why not? The GPU is there after all

And your OS/graphics subsystem doesn't already have a text renderer that takes advantage of the GPU? There is still an awful lot of text being drawn all over the screen...

(I admit to using FreeType in a Windows program, but that is when I want to do something extra weird, like rendering strangely rotated/mirrored/peculiarly-pathed text via AGG; none of which is stuff I'd want to see in a text editor)

And I'd like to note, again, that I am using CodeWright under Windows, which does line numbers, text colouring etc etc, has not been updated for decades - and I can not out-type it: well, except for End-End-End which leaps a gigabyte down to the end of the file. It *does* sometimes wait for me to pause before redrawing with better colouring, 'cos it isbn't crudely coded.