Posts by that one in the corner

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?

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

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)

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

Then you get to Gg (that is one fat horse!) and Tg (which is receiving a communication that you find scary; like being told of the fat horse sitting on your lawn - and the neighbour's lawn, and...)

Just accept the cheap offer for transport

But whip up a full scale cosplay version from tinfoil* and cardboard boxes: let *that* get crushed in transit, as the real thing surely would be at that price.

After a few years, when sanity is restored, the museum can just say "you'll never believe what we found tucked away" and put the shuttle back on display.

* there are plenty of youtubers who'll help with that; ok, it is a bit bigger than the replica Apollo hatch, but Nerdforge can do some great trompe l'oeil

Re: Barge?

They sound like the right people for the job; looks like you've got to the corps of the problem.

Re: Risks?

> cosmetic issue of putting 67 or so pieces of shuttle back together with no visible scars.

Cut it along the visible lines between the tiles? Then hide the rewelding job beneath new grouting.

This worked when replacing the power shower and the Shuttle can't be much harder than that. Yeehaw.

Re: Risks?

What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen Nissan Patrol?

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...

Re: 5 year old database?

Beep-be-boop-phweee?

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.

Re: > Brickcom IP cameras

IP cameras are attached to whatever network you decide to attach them to. If you give them an address on t'Internet, that is your choice. All the 100s of IP cameras, and their DVRs & monitors, I've been associated with have been on wired LANs, no accessible gateway to the Internet. If you wanted to view anything, live or recorded, you took yourself over to the relevant site and plugged a wire into an access port.

OTOH you can take an analogue "CCTV" camera and plug it into a broadcast transmitter...

Now, whether any particular IP camera from some rando company is capable of working as *just* an IP camera or whether it "helpfully" insists on only working when it is connected to the Internet, sending all its data to a third-party server so that you (and anyone else who guesses your URL, no passwords required) can have the joy of watching it from anywhere in the world on you smartphone... Well, that was a certainly a choice that could be made...

Windows 11 gets a fresh Start in latest Canary build

Re: IT is going backwards...

Beware the school project involving - papier mache!

It's trivially easy to poison LLMs into spitting out gibberish, says Anthropic

Malicious parties ... get their poisoned data into AI training sets.

What about all the random input that was sucked from the web for their original training and their claimed "continued clear training"?

What did they do to ensure any, let alone all, of that training data was free of this (rather trivial-sounding) "attack"? Want a "trigger phrase" that is associated with "gibberish"? How about "hexdump 256 bytes:"?

Ok, that is 'obvious', in that anyone - well, anyone reading this - would be unsurprised at coming across that and the "gibberish" is rather limited in its content, compared to the selection shown in the sample in the paper. But there are all sorts of other totally legitimate documents that contain, to the uninitiated, total gibberish: have you ever tried looking at a page of names from genomics? And in that case the trigger could be innocuous, such as the cute name of the mutant chimeric bunny rabbit that all 279 research papers discussed; how does ChatGPT respond when Mr Flopsy Toes is mentioned?

How many non-malicious triggers are waiting inside the LLMs? Indeed, how much of the normal LLM habit of descending into madness is nothing more than the routine activation of all those oddities?

Python releases version 3.14 – with cautious free-threaded support

Re: Must be specified with a command such as python3.14t...

> 1. shebangs carry over from Unix...

Absolutely, it was a Neat Hack back in the day: have the program loader look for a magic number then modify the process control structure in response. My "problem" with it is that it is a rather crude mechanism when faced with all the variants of scripting languages.

> 2. "#!/usr/bin/env python" - current python command in environment without worrying about its location.

True, and that passes the buck down to the contents of PATH (so your hash-banged script is in the same situation as your running "python my_script.py"); which irons out one inconsistency. And thankfully env was (eventually) added into Posix, so it is available pretty often (although I still think of, what was it, 2017/2018 when it was added, as "pretty recent"). Although - now, this may just be me, but I really prefer to find *any* way to not keep adding things into the general PATH as things can get pretty messy: every program installed tries to get its bin added to the PATH, so now the earlier programs may be calling a newer executable that just happens to have the same name. All fine if absolutely everyone plays nice, but one bad apple and *poof*.

> 4. Launchers in desktops can bypass all of this if necessary by simply invoking the correct interpreter path for the script directly

That is very much what I'd like to see - as a general mechanism that can be utilised by any scripting language - and without the language interpreter itself having to do any hard work (other than allow the metadata line to exist). If you have installed a Python exe into Windows then that program - well, the version that is provided by python.org at least - has special-case code for handling a subset of shebang lines. Something that is divorced from the actual job of implementing the language. The very fact that there is/has been a distinct Python Launcher is an indication that this is an - interesting - problem and one that is shared by every scripting system.

> 3. Installers can interpolate the python path on ... something an installer can handle.

Assuming that *all* of your installers do actually do that...

Just to repeat my very first line: this is NOT purely a Python-specific issue and, in fact, the more times that anyone can come up with a "well,Python has done xxxx ever since yyyy" or "well, if you always use this Python utility to create your installer it will do it for you" just indicates that there is more stuff that can be separated out into distinct utilities, totally divorced from any issues around implementing a scripting language interpreter, such that those utilities can be used for Python, Lua, Rexx, Shrimp, Lisp, Smalltalk, Basic, Fly, Asymptote, Box, Fennel, Lilypond, Gri, Perl, PHP (boy, does that need correct version matching!), PIC, the macro language I wrote a few years ago..

And, of course, Intercal.

Must be specified with a command such as python3.14t...

IMPORTANT: the following rant applies to all the other scripting languages; Python is singled out 'cos it is the biggest and 'cos TFA about Python illustrates the point nicely.[0]

The article shows the Python launcher being used, to allow the user the choice of which version to use, including being able to select a copy built with free threading enabled.

Which is great, if you happen to be in the right position of (not inconsiderable) knowledge, for example if you are the author of the script. For you, Python is like this.

But heaven help the schmuck who is simply trying to run some program to do something useful: hang on, I've got to run this script using this command when I'm in my PC, but Jim's PC has a different random collection of Python environments so it works better to use *this* command, wonder what is the best one to put into the documentation for Fred going onsite tomorrow? We're dealing with real-world Python. Who knows which copy has ended up first on PATH? How are your virtenv's today?

Why is it left up to the end-user to *have* to know, for each and every script, what magic invocation is going to work this time? Sure, give them - give everyone - the ability to make such a selection, but only when they are ready for it! The author knows if this code needs free threading, or uses features from release 3.2 or later, or even if this is old Python 2 code which still works fine[1], so why not provide a way for that knowledge to go into the code?

"The solution", as provided by Python (and other scripting languages) is the hash bang line at the start. Assuming that the environment understands these (as it isn't really Python doing it, is it; we're just piggybacking on the shell) then, yay, you've just hardcoded assumptions about where the runtime is sitting: is it #!/bin/python3 or #!/opt/bin/python - or even #!~/bin/python ? Forget about OS portability! And even locations for one OS are changing over time: Linux (well, some portion of it) is trying to rearrange and merge the morass of directories inherited from the Olden Days of small drives and scattered partitions...

How about putting requirements into the code, instead of a hash bang line, then let the "python" command (not a special, extra, launcher name like "py" but, from the p.o.v. of the user, the real thing) take a gander and do the very best thing it can. Otherwise generate a decent error message, explaining that something extra needs to installed and why. Ok, in reality this means that "python" would be the launcher and would know about proper runtimes in executables with tedious names like "python_v3.2.17_freethreaded-plus-my-test-optimisations-v0.03_build532685_svn6732".

Make this launcher an entirely separate project, so that it can be applied to any scripting language (with appropriate tweaks to e.g. handle different comment notations so it can pick out its metadata and work without necessarily changing the scripting engine at all).

[0] yes, yes I should be off posting about this on the Python forums, on the Lua forums and everywhere else; but I reckon I can get away with being more ranty here whilst I polish up a nice polite way to broach it to TPTB.

[1] or you are looking for regressions and have checked out of version control the first copy of the company product...

McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits

Re: I recommend a three tier pricing system

Stop with the AI, or there will be tiers before bedtime!

Mars’ powerful whirlwinds blow dust everywhere, could affect future missions

Re: "It's difficult to understate the importance of the dust cycle."

Understate, overstate, rambling free, the power of dust devils is tricky to see.

How chatbots are coaching vulnerable users into crisis

Drawing correlations to the tobacco industry.

> Brisson: "It took decades for that industry to say, 'You know what? We're causing harm.'"

It took that industry decades to say that out loud and in public (and then only because they were forced to, to put messages onto the packets, curiously worded: "The Surgeon General...", if you wana believe what the gubbermint sez). Decades that were filled with them knowing full well how much harm they were causing. Decades full of public denial, adverts claiming "8 out of 10 doctors...". Decades full of lobbying and backhanders.

> OpenAI: "We'll keep learning and strengthening our approach over time."

Engineers design and build in safety factors from day one, hoping that their constructs never cause harm. As time passes, and they grow confident in the designs, they can agree to slim things down, until compared to the latest versions the originals start to look like excess materials and inelegant over-engineering.

AI peddlers[1] barely design anything, flinging out whatever they've cobbled together so far, hoping that their constructs somehow make money. As time passes, and everyone grow less confident in the designs, seeing the harm being caused, they reluctantly have to start thinking about what they are doing, until the latest versions start to look like they may now be made of twigs compared to the original's loose straw.

> Brisson: "I don't trust their capacity to self-regulate."

Too damn right.

[1] don't want to use "Software Engineers" here, though that would make it read better, as at least some people who use that term *do* try to create & follow standards & practices wuch as SIL etc.

Amazon turns James Bond into the Man Without the Golden Gun

Re: The B Ark

LEMON???