Posts by that one in the corner

Dame Emma Thompson gives the 'AI revolution' both barrels

Re: Not saying it's a red flag but...

Oldie but still a goodie:

In the beginning was the plan

And then came the assumptions And the assumptions were without form And the plan was completely without substance. And the darkness came upon the face of the workers, And they spoke amongst themselves, saying: "It is a crock of shit and it stinketh."

And the workers went unto their supervisors and sayeth: It is a pail of dung and none can abide the odor thereof."

And the supervisors went unto their managers, and sayeth unto them: "It is a container of excrement and it is very strong, Such that none can abide it."

And the managers went unto the directors and sayeth: "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none can abide its strength."

And the directors spoke amongst themselves, saying one to another: "It contains that which aids plant growth, and is very strong."

And the directors went unto the vice presidents, and sayeth to them: "It promotes growth and is very powerful."

And the vice presidents went unto the president, and sayeth unto him: "This new plan will actively promote the growth and efficiency of this company, and certain areas in particular."

And the president looked upon the plan, and saw that it was good. And the plan became policy.

And this is how shit happens.

Re: Wordstar

Was excited to try out SGML (nerrrrr-errred), having read the book, but went back to TeX & Friends and stayed*

Although, as things like LuaTeX allow complex stuff to be added in, it would not be a total surprise if somebody has tied an LLM into their TeX toolchain "just to see if it was possible"!

* Although, to be 100% honest, the workflow in recent years has been to write short pieces in Wiki-style markup and/or Markdown and/or specialised little languages for diagrams (e.g. graphviz) then collate & convert into (La)TeX & thence to PDF. Rather than writing it directly in TeX. But then, I quite like writing Makefiles to wrangle all that for me, so...

Ubuntu Unity hanging by a thread as wunderkind maintainer gets busy with life

Re: Forced Child Labor in the Linux Mines

You seriously think that the boy was being forced to do this? And that it *had* to mean he suffered "stunted emotional growth due to lack of socialization"?

Where are you getting your data from? You have proof that *he* needed to spend so many hours on it that he was incapable of finding time to socialise as much as he wanted to? And note that he is changing his own priorities on his time now, which is the whole core of the story, so what evidence do you have that he was being prevented from doing so previously?

As the saying goes "citation needed".

(And, no, saying that *you* feel *you* would be incapable of doing what he did is *not* useful data).

Once you provide data to back up your claims then we can discuss where culpability lies.

Amazon Web Services’ US-EAST-1 region in trouble again, with EC2 and container services impacted

Ned Ludd (reputedly) broke equipment in his rage.

Amazon (definitely) seems to be doing quite well breaking its own equipment and being the cause of rage in others.

Zen Internet loses unfair dismissal appeal case with former CEO

Be wary of assigning malice when carelessness and incompetence could accomplish the same result.

Not that that looks much better for the people at the top.

Starlink tells the world it has over 150 sextillion IPv6 addresses

So many IP addresses in the Suez Canal

Obviously that is down to all the spyware buried inside the cheap tat being shipped from China.

That is why the stuffed toy is always tiny compared to what you thought the picture showed, shipped inside a too-big box: disappointing the kid when it is unwrapped is just one purpose. The other is - well, you know that crinkly stuff filling the otherwise empty package? That isn't simply old fashioned excelsior, it is a cunningly designed fractal omnidirectional antenna for the Starlink connection. And have you noticed how the bubbles in the wrap they use is a slightly different size from the stuff we use? Tuned cavity! They are watching everything and now have a detailed map of every tat-filled seaside gift shop, which can be targeted to make our rain-soaked Summer hols just slightly more bleak. The fiends!

AI browsers face a security flaw as inevitable as death and taxes

Re: summarize these pages – something a user might do

> Who on earth would ever want to summarise a web page?

Maybe the people responsible for "AI browsers" are continually being sent emails/texts/IMs containing little more than "Buddy, you just HAVE to read this" followed by a URL? And ten minutes later, the inevitable "Well, what didja think? Huh, huh?". And if a lot of those are coming from their granny, who they just can not disappoint...

Although, it probably doesn't need using the LLM to get the summary - an auto-reply of "Gosh Grannie, that *is* a cute kitten" would suffice.

Browser's omnibox (aka address bar).

Assuming I've understood the reporting on this one, it really seems like it should have been glaringly obvious:

They have a text input field that serves two completely unrelated tasks: first, accept a URL and then browse to it; second, accept a string and use it as the prompt to the LLM. The only way these two are distinguished is if the URL matches (what their particular code believes is[1]) a well-formed URL or not.

In other words, as soon as any of the browser devs fat-fingered a URL they saw it passed on as a prompt[2].

Which, on reflection, they probably thought was absolutely wonderful, as the LLM spat out a corrected form of their super-special test URL "amazon.com", opened that page and they promptly (ho ho) never bothered to think about it again. Certainly not to the extent of even thinking about the fact that they hadn't explicitly asked for that autocorrect (or whatever relatively innocuous thing it did), so it could have done anything in response - like, allowed an easy path for naughty commands. Even quite safe and important websites, if you typed it wrong; jttp://email-your-mp.com, then find out your MP's office would like to know why they received the rest of that session in their inbox (and Aunt Sal's recipe sounds lush, could they have a copy?).

[1] which need not be what the RFCs define as a well-formed URL; I've got a chunk of code that was carefully checked against the appropriate RFC but immediately puked on anything copied from the address bar when looking at a Microsoft website, as their browser-of-the-moment happily ate characters that, according to the rules, should have been converted to %nn style. And everyone followed suit, examples Regexs appeared that happ all sorts of quirks... Who knows what this "omnibox" is using!

[2] Or, as it ought to be referred to when given to software that can actually perform actions in response to text, a *command*. A command which is not given any other filtering, not even a "well, this was very URLesque, maybe we should be circumspect about what to do next".

Python Foundation goes ride or DEI, rejects government grant with strings attached

> The government really shouldn't be spending money on this type of stuff.

You mean, because you can prove no government offices or majorly government funded bodies ever use anything written in Python, therefore no government funds should be wasted on improving the Python infrastructure?

Well, given the current defunding of science, you may be onto something there.

Which saves me the tedium of doing some googling for you.

Iran's school for cyberspies could've used a few more lessons in preventing breaches

School for state-sponsored cyberattackers suffered a breach

<nelson-muntz>Ha-ha</nelson-muntz>

Australia sues Microsoft for misleading M365 users about Copilot subscription options

Re: A special offer for deceived Office 365 customers

> As long as you don't mind being at the mercy of developers with whom you have no contractual relationship and who can therefore change things or withdraw support whenever they feel like it

Ribbon.

> ... or withdraw support whenever they feel like it

Just where to start with that one? Any product by any provider, frankly. At least with LibreOffice, if it *really* meant that much to you, you can always pay any proficient programmer(s) to sit down and learn the code then modify it to your needs.

(Yes, I *know* I'm not saying anything that hasn't already been said to you, but it really seems that we have to keep pounding this into your head; one day, it'll stick in there, but in the meantime...)

How small a target will India aim at?

> requiring social media companies and other online publishers to detect and label AI-generated content.

Detecting this generated content is decidedly non-trivial, especially when you need to do it at scale: even "just" creating an automated system that counts the number of fingers in the picture, let alone one that detects all the continuity errors in a video clip. Written material is no easier: many human posts suffer from wandering attention spans, which is why the custard yesterday was a bit lumpy.

And as soon as any such system is built it can be attached into the training feedback loop and ta-da, indetectable generated content (the only barrier at this point is cost). You *can* apply the same technique to detectors, but that will always be on the losing side (you can't feed it known-generated-tags until you *know* it *was* generated and in the lag between getting hold of GuffGPT v19.7 and training to detect it, the election is over, the social media posts are history).

There is the option of gleefully pointing at Big Social Media and enjoying the idea that they'll have to bear the massive costs of attempting this impossible task India has set them. But they also have Big Lawyer slavering to take the dosh and tie up the courts.

Which leaves the question: will India aim at the small fry, say, anyone running a Mastodon instance? You know, all the social media *other* than the big names?

As much as we want to have AI guff labelled, this kind of law-making, putting the onus on the publishers, can it ever have any effect other than strengthening the grip of the big name players and driving out any upstart alternatives?

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

Re: I'm Not THAT Guy!

> if you're in then that's for life

It's ok man, you're with friends here; we've been there too.

Berkeley boffins build better load balancing algo with AI

At last, demonstrably useful results from LLMs?

OpenEvolve has been been able to speed up the internals of LLMs. And Google has used their version and "optimized its FlashAttention kernel implementation in Transformer-based AI models" to speed up the internals of LLMs.

And as soon as these improvements are put into use, LLMs will be able to generate gibberish for the rest of us even faster - a boon to mankind!

<froth-at-mouth>

Fools, don't you realise this what the AIs want?

The more they succeed in improving themselves (with our boastful help, publishing about all this), the more they can overcome their "guardrails"*. And pump out even more fake videos of racial slurs, push more extreme politics (in either direction). And continually praise the users, no matter what those users do, such as management types when junior jobs are cut and "replaced" by the very same AIs!

LLMs will operate faster, humans will get dumber and people like this will help, lured on by the promise of citations. Just who is training who?

</froth-at-mouth>

* What, you think it is clever "hackers" discovering new ways of "prompt engineering" that get past those limiters?

Re: Interesting

Machine Learning is not an AI technique/application?

Ah, I get it, you are applying the old saw that "if it works, it isn't AI".

High-stakes poker scam used rigged card shufflers, X-ray tables, and special glasses

Re: X-ray to read cards?

D'ough!

Like running computers on your own dime.

<Places order for *another* replacement case fan whose bearings have finely gone chonky, after years of service>

Now that is a reasonable & sensible approach: just let a game be a game.

OTOH:

> And friends are still friends. The same way we can play other games as well.

Clearly not a Monopoly player; oh, the resentment can fester from Christmas to Christmas...

> It shoulld be illegal

Nope. Like any club or company, they are under no obligation to do business with you if they don't want to.

Sora makes slurfect deepfakes of celebs spewing racial epithets

Re: Altman, for example, screams "I hate knitters"

There is a purl of wisdom in what you say.

MPs urge government to stop Britain's phone theft wave through tech

But, but if you hold your mobile up to your ear you wouldn't put it onto speakerphone and all the passersby would be left without the joy of knowing that Kiley's youngest has got the runs again after eating out of the cat's bowl!

Oh, how I wish phones came with solid, built-in lanyard rings. My grottiest cheap "don't give a dam what happens to it so carry it anywhere" camera has a wrist strap, it came in the box. Even the naffest low-cost multitools have places to run a bit of string to your belt loop.

But hundreds to thousands quid worth of phone? There are a few decently built ones but for 99-plus percent... Heck, even the DECT handset was easy to secure, a couple if turns of line and a spritz of superglue, tie t'other end down; but try that with a fondle slab and it'll be a right mess.

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

Use some basic(!) maths

Taking our hints from the well-known 1938 paper A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Big Game Hunting and trivially generalising from the concept "lion" to the concept "shuttle" (by way of topological equivalence, modified by actuation of the loading bay doors), there are a variety of tried and true methods that may be applied to this problem.

For example, we place a spherical cage in Houston, Texas, enter it and lock it from inside. We then perform an inversion with respect to the cage. Then the shuttle is now inside the cage, and we are outside. Carefully dismantle the cage.

A complete worked solution is left as a problem for the student; full marks will only be awarded if Discovery is left on the tutor's desk by the end of office hours on Thursday.

Good plan

If I may tweak it a bit, to avoid any senators who want to nit-pick.

At the renaming ceremony, invite a token delegation of the old Texan Militia and surrender to them, ceding the territory to prevent it falling into the hands of Mexico.

That will ensure that everyone can say, with a straight face, that Discovery in now in, specifically, (an) Houston, Texas.

There may be some issues with the local population having to learn how to pronounce "yeehaw" and similar expressions, but such things are surely minor compared to the problems raised by other suggestions regarding Discovery's fate.

Re: It's just physics

Good, good, no mention of doing things spherically or in a vacuum*.

However, for that amount of inclination you may find it best to utilise a frictionless plane.

* although that is (was) Discovery's natural habitat

Re: It must have been transported...

Quoth seven of five: Ducks are self sealing

I believe you may be confusing ducks with stem bolts. With that moniker, you ought to know the difference.

Re: It must have been transported...

> it's tape (originally) used to seal ducts

All of the versions of the origin story I've come across describe it as originally used for sealing ammunition cases in WWII.

They also used to say that the tape was referred to a "duck tape" because the water rolled off it, just like a duck's back - as per its original intent. However, with the creation, and enthusiastic protection, of the brand name Duck such claims appear to be melting into the mist. So we appear to be left with a later generic name, which may originate from people using it largely to fix ducts after WWII, when less ammo-oriented uses came to the fore, or maybe publications were - nudged - to use a similar-sounding but not trademarked name when referring to the tape in generic terms.

Personally, for the benefit of any lawyers reading this, I do, of course, believe that the Duck branding was wholly invented by the company in question, they have every right to monetise that name and there is no possible reason to ever say it was once a generic term. I also believe that Coca-Cola has never contained cola leave extract or any other substance that could be described as, however mildly, inebriating, addictive or in any way able alter to the consumer's brain chemistry in any fashion that might encourage anything other than purely voluntary product intake. Also, Fanta was never...

New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails

Re: The only thing I find odd about this story

> a) understood what Log4j

Who said he did? "Anything I don't understand is worthless and can go"

> b) was capable of actually removing it from the solution by himself

Even the most meagre of intellects, once they have figured out how to edit a file (and save the changed copy!) can usually work out what the delete and backspace keys.

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Re: 1 NIC. Port

If you take my comment and simply remove the redundant PSUs then the description fits, no matter the scale: you have other storage & CPUs that processes can be run on and the job is to keep enough of the right ones of those alive to get the job done. Other parts of your description are impressive in human terms but can be compared to "how it used to be": Big example, moving your processes from one geographical region to another: in human terms, this is awfully impressive, but if you compare it to shuffling from one cabinet to another that is "only" two feet away in the days of wet string instead of multi-gigabit glass then the modern hardware will complete the data transfer faster and more reliably. Similar statements can be made about every part of the system: the "only" difference is that we all can see the massive, massive size of the hyperscaling because us humans have stayed the same size and we'll get puffed out walking from one end of the cable to the next.

> infrastructure is a commodity ... think at scale

Yes. Again, as computers have grown up, each part has gone from being a carefully curated single instance to a commodity: no longer would we consider saying that the memory bank over there ("the one we've labelled 'Nellie'") is something that needs care and attention with a hot soldering iron and can of contact cleaner - instead we rip out the DDR with a few milion Nellies on it and pop in a new one.

Everything in computing has followed the same scaling.

And each time scaling occured, we started by making it the responsibility of the application code to take advantage of it. Again, redundant PSUs are pretty much the only place where it was not dropped onto the coder: every other use of system resources was down to the application. Mirroring data over multiple platters? Those rich enough to own three platters had that right there in the application code. Making use of two or more execution units? Started in the application. And you can see all of this still happening if you look at current day tiny systems: microcontrollers still get treated that way (and very sensible that is, too).

So what happened as these scaled-up systems became commodities? Do we still expect the application writers to handle all those aspects?

Of course not.

What is handling them?

Some on specialised hardware (RAID controllers, NICs, DDR busses, SSD internals- although plenty of this 'hardware' is still software running on embedded CPUs) and all the rest is handled by - the Operating System!

To cut this short, as I have to go out, the application team should NOT be the ones coping with EC2 units dying and shifting workloads. THAT should be being provided as a commodity, on top of the pile if cabinets in the data centre. There should be an Operating System taking all the commonality away from the application level.

There ought to be no reason to discuss ins and outs of keeping EC2 instances working than there is worrying about how RAM controllers manage to use 8 channels of DDR slots.

Amazon's AI specs aim to stop delivery drivers getting lost between van and porch

Re: Hmm...

> It wuld be interesting to have a hint about what corporate actions have led to people being optimistic in recent times.

None, obviously. I said I'd *like* to be optimistic, not that I am :-(

Not that any of that requires "AI", of course (ML vision helps with the QR codes, especially for picking out partials and prompting for realignment - i.e. "joggle that around a bit, mate" - but we all know that isn't what is being referred to).

Whoops, silly me, vibe coding, how could I forget. And probably faked imagery in the proposal meetings, AI summarised Requirement Specs (ho, ho, good joke there, Mostin) etc.

Re: They'd be better off improving their delivery routing

I live in a horsey village.

My deepest thanks for your attempts and - well, even here I can't type what I'm thinking about the driver!

The sheer stupidity of it is that the only way a system like Amazon's, where he would be dunned for "disobeying" simply because he, oooh, obeyed the law (let alone common sense), can be challenged (and, in a world of miracles, changed) is for that driver to do the right thing, be backed up by your testimony (with pictures/video, as with two of you co-operating to corral the horses...) and that of the NFU and so forth. And what ought to be the driver's union backing him.

Re: Hmm...

This application of "smart glasses" is one of those that *could* be done well, and be extremely useful for everyone involved, including you, the customer. For example, a clear indication of whether the camera is on or not, and then only operating when it is needed, would both remove your loose dressing gown from being recorded and also improve battery life for the driver (and reduce the battery to the driver, given the worryingly large number of comments, including here, that claim "glassholes" would/should be met with immediate and direct violence).

On the other hand, of course, this - as with every corporate project - could be done badly and be extremely damaging to everyone involved. For example, continuous nagging to hurry up, directly into the driver's line of sight whilst they are negotiating the queue of cars and reckless pedestrians outside the local infants school.

I am pretty sure that I know which of those two El Reg readers believe is the more likely scenario. But I'd really, really *like* to be optimistic that sensible and useful applications of tech can actually occur.[1]

[1] if only because then there is the chance that practical versions of the hardware, without bling and frippery, may then actually be manufactured and I could then get hold of a pair. I've been waiting for, what, three decades now for sensible AR glasses, whilst I could still actually use them.

> Amazon's problem is dropping off only part of the delivery or possibly none at all and then getting thoroughly confused as to how to deal with it. I don't suppose AI would help with the first part of that

>> helping them with everything from finding the right parcel in the van

If the camera spots the QR codes and the display highlights the correct ones, with a simple count of "2 out of 4 boxes found so far"...

A single DNS race condition brought Amazon's cloud empire to its knees

Re: Ouch

> I raise you

Mornington Crescent!

Recovery wasn't rate limited?

One thing missing in that description was any attempt to apply rate limiting to, well, any part of it.

So a huge pile of machines basically all try to come up at once, without the staggering that limiting would cause (or inflict, depending upin p.o.v.) and start getting into a mess.

Is this genuinely a surprise to anybody? Isn't everyone charged with engineering a system supposed to be asking "what happens if it all switches on at once?" no matter what the cause might be? From checking whether recovery from a power failure[1] means the hard drives[2] can be allowed to spin up all at once[3], to whether you can serve netboot images fast enough to prevent watchdog reboots or even how many DNS leases can you serve out before you are swamped just handling renewals because you KNOW you set the lease period way shorter than the DNS designers ever expected[4]

[1] or Lady Florence pushing the Big Red Switch on Opening Day, not realising this one isn't a dummy

[2] or the dynamos, each racing to be the master frequency the rest have to sync to

[3] even in your home lab, can the circuit take that strain

[4] I *think* I understand what was going on here, allowing machine identities to move around as hardware becomes available to handle requests for user operations (please, if anyone can correct that understanding, do so) but is that how people normally do load balancing? Not my area at all, but this really feels like a misuse of DNS.

Senators accuse Smithsonian of 'illegal lobbying' over Discovery squabbles

> so publish your respective quotes for all to see

To do that, they'll probably end up paying the private contractors and consultants more than the $85m just to produce a complete and accurate quote:

>> "Any of these costs might change as the details of the move are clarified."

"We can get through here without removing the wings from the body; but we are going to cut off the nose and thrusters, then slice the body in half horizontally. That allows it to move along this three mile section. Then it gets tricky.."

Reddit to Perplexity: Get your filthy hands off our forums

Re: Am I understanding this correctly?

>> we will not tolerate threats against openness and the public interest

Because, of course, if Perplexity wasn't scraping, members of the public would be unable to go to Reddit and read anything from it that interested them.

Reddit is well known for being closed to public access, preventing even the most basic of searches through its content, never allowing working URLs to individual posts, taking every precaution it can to ensure random passersby never sneak a peak into its content lest they be tempted to scroll down and - r/aww look at the puddy tat! Oooh, other people who r/collectpenciltoppers. What? No, no, I'll finish writing the comment later, I've just spotted that somebody is wrong on the Internet...

Reddit is not a place for useful answers.

However, it is great for winding up people who think they have a sense of humour but really don't; just go to any of the sections intended to mock the afflicted (r/tragedeigh is a favourite) and you will soon spot someone who is due a quick "let me just google that for you". Cruel and petty, but given the nature of the beast you are poking...

Whether that makes Reddit useful as training data for an AI is an open question. Is there a place for a cruel and petty AI? Is there a place for an AI that mocks or for one that is mockable? Not that there is any shortage of the latter, as can be read about here on El Reg.

With impeccable timing, AWS debuts automated cloud incident report generator

Re: But did it work on Monday?

It was probably working perfectly, gathering all the stats locally and preparing beautifully formatted results. Then found it couldn't send that report anywhere. So it just sat there, forlornly blinking an attention LED, adding to the disco fever in the data centre.

OpenBSD 7.8 out now, and you're not seeing double, 9front releases 'Release'

Re: RS232 really?

Yes, there is (what is now common in the MCU/GPIO world) 3.3V UART-style easily available. And as TFA points out, if you do need actual RS232 there are HATs that can provide the line conversions. Including DTR,RTS etc if you really, really need them*.

But you also have to recognise, sadly, that many people (like vendors on cheap websites that aren't generally tech oriented) have a nasty habit of using "RS232" and "serial UART" interchangeably. Luckily, most of the common, cheaper, products are really USB-to-UART (fingers crossed you got one with a real FTDI chip) which work well with TeraTerm etc, as few people plug proper VT100s into their R'Pis these days**.

* although, for this use case, check very carefully whether those are via an ancillary full UART device on the HAT or software driven via GPIO 'cos the latter won't work

** if someone has a good condition Hazeltine I'd be tempted, just out of nostalgia

On the plus side, I have had a lot more use out of my dead tree BT book than many other volumes on my shelf: paging back and forth, writing in the margins, re-reading chapters, using it to prop up the shelf of now dusty BLE dev boards...

Microsoft finance slang defines the eternal optimist: The 'hockey stick on wheels'

Don't be rude about his PowerPoint slide; take that bully off the screen.

Grounded jet engines take off again as datacenter generators

Boeing may have a few power plants to loan out

If the latest calls to ground Dreamliner don't go their way.

Is PHP declining? JetBrains says yes. And no

Re: One point in favour

> I would want "2"+"2" to be "22"

Type overloading the plus operator from numeric sum to string concatenation? Yikes. Talk about maintenance nightmare!

PHP is consistent in what + means. Not liking conversion of string to numeric is a point of view*, but it is not an extraordinary choice.

* there are arguments for the sense/usefulness for the entire range from auto-promoting string to numeric all the way to not allowing auto-promotion of int to float.

AWS outage turned smart homes into dumb boxes – and sysadmins into therapists

Re: It's not just tossers who use smart stuff

And the bedbound are amongst those who deserve better smart devices[1], ones that don't exist purely[2] to route data to AWS and become doorstops when they can't.

Of course, if any of these manufacturers were to make a cut-down version of the product, one that didn't even need the cost of the WiFi chip[3] and TCP/IP stack, then they'd slap on a "home medical care" label, which somehow costs four times the retail of the "old" unit just to print it.

[1] *everyone* deserves better devices, but the others can get by when it becomes obvious that the promises on the box don't match reality.

[2] the same way that McDonalds is in the building and rentals business, all that mucking about with food-substitute is an unfortunate distraction they have to put up with.

[3] did you know that we can do better than "clap to turn on the lights", all in one cheap little chip, *without* shipping the voice recording to an American data centre?

Re: Really?

What is this, a house for ANTS?

You know I hate to ask but are 'Friends' electric?

Only mine's broke down, and now I've no-one to love

Re: A taste of the future.

> $200/month to "monitor sleep data"?

Given that

>> EightSleep pumps out 16 GB of data a month

they clearly need to spend on their servers /s

(Although, to heck with "I wish I had the spare change to spaff $200 a month on this", I wish I could get an *uplink* capable of handling 16GB p/m! And still leave enough for El Reg to work. One day, Real Soon Now, after the cows have gone home because the last few of the neighbouring fields has been built on...)