Posts by that one in the corner

Struggling to put your AI aversion into words? Here's a handy glossary

Re: I am an AI dabbler

But are you paying the genuine price for it? Will you find the value is worth the cost when the suppliers stop subsidising?

> crossing and recrossing the Pennines

Well, that is a lovely part of the country, well worth seeing. The AI is more about the beauty than the practicality?

Hide and sleek: Latest Vivaldi release can tuck its UI away until summoned

Somebody check my memory

Didn't Opera, back in the 1990s (when the Web was the *real* Web, amd small furry creatures from Arcturus were *real* small, furry, creatures from Arcturus), have "hiding away all the UI" as a feature? Have memories of writing a presentation as a web site and showing it without any gubbins around, clicking links as required (so not just going into step-by-step slideshow mode).

Your next car might need 300 GB of RAM, and so will autonomous robots

Re: New cars, I've seen them

> especially now the EPA has been reigned in somewhat.

You were doing so well up to that point.

Re: One way to cut the demand in half

I can think of a better form factor for a tyre changing robot than humanoid!

Heck, if you're going to spend the money on changing tyres, do it properly*

* I'm sure they nicked that from Mr Anderson's oeuvre

Re: One way to cut the demand in half

Don't forget to keep the head spinning, to get the full 360 degree view.

OR mount four of them, as grotesques* on the corners of the vehicle's roof.

* not gargoyles, unless you are channelling gutters through them; hmm, wiper fluid?

300GB plus compute to use it all

"Our new fully autonomous EV has a range of up to 15 miles (650 if you rip out the Johnny Cab torso and glue on a new optional extra we are calling a 'steering wheel')"

Brilliant backups that kept data alive for ages landed web developer in big trouble

> IT Crowd ... Not sure they have a Mjolnir

We see them using Mjolnir every episode (of *course* that is Mjolnir, what else would it be?).

There might be one tucked away on a shelf, good hunting!

ttlanhil>> Yes. You messed up.

ttlanhil> Not his fault, no

Ok, good, you've changed you mind.

And yup, maybe Neil could be more paranoid; OTOH, too paranoid can ruin your mental health, so - swings and roundabouts.

Sigh.

> If ... If ... If...

And after all those ifs and maybes, including actively stopping one of the servers being on the update round. Yeah. Sure.

> Changing the name? No, you missed it. The on-site IT team hardcoded the IP address, you can't change its name.

Nope. YOU missed it (and didn't bother reading TFA fully?): we were *told* that the new site was live to the WORLD, so it was using the proper name on a new IP address, but the old site was still reachable. Therefore the name of the old site was changed (either at the domain end, on the LHS of the URL, or the directory end, at the RHS of the URL).

> Sure, by asking the client to compare changes... but not prevented it

WHOOOSH! Nobody said the old site was still there to help catch the problem two years down the road, I suggested it was initially there for the much earlier approval comparisons (and then left, who knows why, possibly because the "please leave" was never given an end date?)

> but that's not what happened here. the old server was assumed to be dead

Nope. Nobody was said to have assumed it was dead. It was assumed that what Gerald saw at home was what all the non-Geralds were seeing at the office, were it not for incompetent IT staff. *Possibly* Gerald had forgotten he used to view the old site (ref my comment about nostalgia) and assumed from that - but that assumption was NOT being made by Neil, who us the one you want to blame.

> Logs ... That there were still requests on a supposedly unused machine

I covered that point as well: *YOU* are assuming (there's that word again) that it was a "supposedly unused machine". The old site *could* have been viewed, at home, by Gerald, creating traffic. YOU do not have any information about that, one way or the other. Heck, having found an old company site by luck (oooh, you've forgotten that any site visible to the world will always generate traffic!) I, as a bystander in the whole thing, may choose to return to it, because - as is often discussed here - web sites tend to get shittier with rewrites and accessing historic content is often useful.

Basically, you are still piling up a load of ifs, maybes and your own worst-case skew on all the assumptions in order to definitively state that Neil screwed up and I'm enjoying myself blowing gently on your house of cards.

Some leaps of logic in there, just to sound omniscient:

> You leave an old server running (which may not get security updates anymore)

The "old" material was the contents of the website, served from a certain IP; why would you think that the OS etc wasn't being kept as up to date as everything else, including the particular beast that just happens to contain the latest website data? Which may well have been the same physical machine, OS and software as was providing the new? As you said, shared infrastructure.

> set it behind IP/cookie/whatever rules ... don't want to turn it on

Well, you can start by changing its name, so Gerald can make the comparison by opening oldwww.gerald.com alongside www.gerald.com "Happy with the changes now, Gerald?". Now, if you put it behind more layers of "protection", at what point does Gerald start berating you for "making it hard to compare with the old site"? Such as, calling ahead to get it switched on. By the time of the story, Gerald *may* have stopped looking back at the old site, a nostalgic tear in his eye, but we have not geen given any information about that.

> and don't even check that the traffic has stopped (checking logs is not hard)?

Nobody was complaining, the machine wasn't complaining, both sites were being accessed and that activity was being logged; maybe Neil could have wondered about how much activity Gerald thought there *ought* to be, but on what basis? The machines inside Gerald's office would cache the old site, so not generating actual traffic to be logged, Gerald and *every* accessor outside that office would see the updated site and that was logged.

What exactly was Neil supposed to spot in his logs?

Google offers ‘vibe design’ tool that you can shout at to create a UI

What you want your users to feel

Deep embarrassment on your behalf after you've been caught manifesting your ideation in public.

Systemd 260 kills SysV, tells AI not to misbehave

Can you Canute or K'not?

Thanks for providing a link to the Knut (Canute) tale that gives the full and proper interpretation of that story. If one person reads that and stops misrepresenting the story then perhaps, just perhaps, a little bit of good can come from systemd.

Water company wasted $200k on bad answers from an AI model – so built its own slop filtering system

Lost $200k first time around

How much do you think they'll waste on Rozum before they decide to drop it?

Pull the plug after another $200k? $400k?

Or just go chasing the sunk cost because "when this works we can sell it for so much moolah"?

Because, of course, they can pivot from being "experts" on water treatment to being "experts" on LLMs without a care in the world: "honestly, it's not that hard".

Everything needed to make DNA and RNA found in asteroid sample

Re: I'm fairly sure ...

In the 1960s astronomers were finding plenty of simple radicals, including some with carbon - CH CN - although the big stuff was around hydroxyl, as it was found to be creating natural MASERs in at least two wavelengths. And IIRC some silicon radical MASER as well?

By the end of the decade we were finding interstellar water and ammonia; I think also formaldehyde but that may be into the 70s by then? Methanol and ethanol abound, but we were still getting excited about that in 2006 (Astronomers spy 288bn mile cloud of alcohol: "Make mine a double" says Register.

Later on we detected some emissions from amino acids, so working the way up the chain, but not sure it's safe to claim we've found the nucleotides as yet.

We've just had our astro soc meeting, but hopefully I'll remember for next month, Fred will know all about it.

Nvidia wraps its NemoClaw around OpenClaw for the sake of security

The claw terminology dates back to the end of January

If it is THAT old, why is anyone still talking about it????

Still, if they are going to promote this as "a thing" and give it some snappy short name, at least it is better than insisting some twee short bit of script be called a "skill"* : "claw" can be connected to all the relevant emotions for these things, such as scraping across and gouging lines in the wooden floor or snatching skycars full of innocent New New York citizens and devouring them and all their worldly goods in a frenzy of mindless hunger.

I'd hope that calmer minds would prevail and limit the use of these things, but there ain't no such thing as sanity claws.

* I know "they" are pushing that usage with OpenClaw as well; keep hoping that Amazon will chase them for that.

Digital fruit fly brain model walks and cleans its feelers

Re: Progress that kills most of us

Very true.

I refer you to "social structures" :-(

Re: Progress that kills most of us

Scientific and technological advances don't kill.

(Mis)application of the advances kills.[1]

The computers we here are all involved with, even when running "AI", can be used to aid cancer diagnosis, find interesting new astronomical phenomena - or eat absurd amounts of power to make social media posts encouraging suicide. Humans made the choice which one to do.

It is "advancement" in social structures that allows for - demands - the uses we make of technology.

But, given our complete and utter inability to manage those structures, it is sensible that we blame the science. Although it is a shame we have to so lie to ourselves about the real base problem.

[1] and even then, it is purely technology that is a concern, of course, as it is only when science is converted into tech that it can affect us; although, given the needs to remove temptation from the weak moral fibre if the humans, stopping before the science is done is probably a wise precaution.

I hope you are not suggesting that Liam's buried alter-ego is starting to rise to the surface, making its presence felt first as an unconscious movement of the left hand across the keyboard of one of Mr Proven's vast collection of computers. The alter hides its meagre but growing control of the limbs by saccades: every time it wishes to move or risks making a noise hitting the space bar it first triggers a flick of the eyes and works whilst the primary's visual system is blind, allowing the hand undetected freedom. A hand that has logged into The Register but, unable - yet - to create its own account, has resorted to ticking "post anonymously?" as it crafts comments designed to weaken the resolve of the primary and allow the alter more freedom to interact with the world!

Re: The Fly

Will they remember to hire that programmer who always works on the computers in Hollywood SF films?

You know, the one who has the foresight to put in the ability to diagnose fusion at the genetic level of two organisms in a teleportation device.

So that we can get a blow-by-blow as the two brains fight for control of the body.

Microsoft points at Samsung after Galaxy app bug locks users out of C:\

Re: WTF am I stuck with this MS shite on my Samsung ?

Because you bought a Samsung computer with Windows installed?

If you don't want any Microsoft stuff installed you're gonna have to go Linux*

* or one of the BSDs, FreeDOS, Minix, BeOS...

Inside the datacenter where the day starts with topping up cerebrospinal fluid

Re: OK, I'll ask the question.

No, Newsround is on first, Who's on just before the *Nine* O'clock News.

Using human cells to play Doom "undermines the dignity of the human person"?

I can guarantee that you, yes, you at the back of the auditorium, are, this very day, doing far worse to far more human cells than giving them the chance to play a video game.

AWS S3 turns 20 and reaches ‘hundreds of exabytes’

It's not unusual, or even odd

> odd metrics: “If you stacked all of the tens of millions[of] S3 hard drives on top of each other, they would reach the International Space Station and almost back.”

Surely this is simply Amazon making it clear that they already have a strategy to beat Elon in the "orbital datacenters" race: now all they need to figure out is a bit of sideways to go with the as-described up and voila, Biiiiiits In Spaaaaaaaaaaace.

Outsourcer Telus admits to attack – may have lost a petabyte of data to ShinyHunters

Re: Attitude Adjustment Needed

> THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT YOU HAVE BEEN AFFECTED !!!

Or "we have seen no evidence that you have been affected"[1] otherwise they might be accused of falsehoods as the pile of evidence grows.

[1] see also "la la la la, I can't hear you"

Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs

Re: A cartoon at IBM

See also "Good Omens", and Sergeant Deisenburger who was guarding the US air base is magically teleported home to his farm; as he strips off his gear he talks to his Mom:

Mom: Hello? My goodness! Tommy?

Deisenburger: It is indeed myself, mother.

Mom: Well, I thought you was in England.

Deisenburger: Well, yes, mom, I am normatively in England, mom, protecting democratism, mom, sir, but I just found myself here at home.

Mom: Well, that’s nice, hon. Your papa’s down in the big field with Chester and Ted. You want some apple pie for supper? It’s bakin’ day.

Deisenburger: That’s affirmative, Mom, sir.

Mom: That’s wonderful.

Deisenburger: Uh, mom, if any throughput eventuates premising to interface with Sergeant Thomas A. Deisenburger, telephonically, Mom, sir, this individual will be-

Mom: Tommy?

Deisenburger: Aw, heck. If anyone calls, I’ll be down in the big field with Pop and Chester and Ted.

Re: Shhhh!

Well, they'll leap at the chance to get into any modern kid's mind "Newspapers exist! They are cool! Just remember all this big noisy machinery when you buy one!"

Re: ... And PowerPoint

> Is there a specific word for nonsensical diagrams in PowerPoint decks?

Untufted?

Will make sense (well, hopefully will make sense) to anyone who has read Edward Tufte's work, especially his 2003 "The Cognitive Style of Power Point"[1], which was incorporated as a chapter into his 2006 book "Beautiful Evidence".

For everyone else, a well-tufted product is hard-wearing, resilient and doesn't fall apart as soon as you grab it and give it a good shake.

And for the Special Few, you can simply say "Tufty!" and distract them with a squirrel.

PS

I'm aware that bringing up Tufte's work can raise a few hackles, but dang it, at least then we're talking about the subject; too many books titled "infographics this that and the other" just get read in silence, turning pages and looking at pretty pictures, then put down and never mentioned again.

[1] which title does start to sound a bit buzzwordish, even though he is using the words correctly; OTOH that might itself encourage the buzzword-inclined to pick it up.

That should be

"reverse the polarity of the neutron flow"

*if* you don't mind!

(that groaning, wheezing sound is Jon Pertwee, slowly rotating in his grave)

Re: They probably 'reach out' all the time as well

We should start basing software releases on Phrygian Half Cadence and add a management dashboard widget to display a real-time analysis of releases to QA based on Tagg's Model Logistics*

* total bollocks, I just looked up some fancy words, but it'll be fun to see how quickly it spreads and becomes "industry standard" in the boardroom.

I'll pass this on to management

So they can run it up the flagpole and see who salutes*

* in memoriam, all the management-speak of yesteryear.

GitHub infuriates students by removing some models from free Copilot plan

Re: Economics lesson for life

"If your AI coding session continues for more than four hours, seek immediate medical help. Do not use AI coding if you have a history of heart conditions or high blood pressure. Do not drive or operate heavy machinery whilst under the influence of AI. Long term use of AI may impair cognition or your ability to perform without AI. Do not consume any product containing grapefruit whilst using AI."

Claude charts a new course with charts, of course

Periodic Table of seething anger

Does that "periodic table of idiots" have an entry for those who insist on making "periodic tables" of any old guff - and then insist that this means, as in the example here, blindly copying just the *shape* of the Periodic Table of the Elements and cramming in random examples of guff into arbitrary places on the diagram?

Don't know how it is nowadays (don't need to risk the blood pressure by checking) but a few years back, after the (entirely necessary, even now) backing for STEM (to get students interested in those subjects) started becoming mutated by - certain types of people - into STEAM, there was a sudden outbreak of adding in the "A" by getting pupils to create those kind of awful pictures and proudly displaying them.

Approving coverage of this on the telly box (sofa dollies covering the "rise of STEAM" - aaaaarrrgh!) was pure "old folk shouting at the glowing box" fuel in Corner Mansion! If these arts teachers even vaguely tried to take the STEM stuff seriously they'd encourage the pupils to actually lok for *real* periodicity, or other patterns, and illustrate those. So instead of, say, gluing cut out pictures of shoes from fashion magazines on top of good old H, He, Li, Be (you know how it goes) and ending up with random nonsense, they could have looked at, say, construction methods, materials and social mores (all if which btw, are sound topics for artists to investigate) and produced an arrangement that demonstrated how the footwear illustrated these dimensions. Hey, you never know, they could even end up with empty slots for the shoe that hasn't been made (yet)!

DR-DOS rises again – rebuilt from scratch, not open source

Re: I loved DOS

DirectX allows you to create a direct memory mapping to a portion of your video card's memory, which can then be displayed anywhere on the screen (e.g. overlapping a window or, if you so desire, overlapping the entire display). If your video card allows it, you can even choose the colour depth/ format and have it mapped on the fly to match the rest of the screen (e.g. you deal in YUV and it displays in 32-bit RGB). So you can have a VGA-sized area and run your old code (recompiled) on that.

Just be warned that cutting out the GPU, even if it is just an oldie stylee 2D accelerator card, and relying on the CPU for all your image generation may end up feeling rather slow...

One can safely ignore the OSI.

They don't actually *do* anything, beyond lying about inventing the phrase "open source" and advertising themselves - mainly by convincing people to use a URL into their website as though it is in any way "authoritative". They don't host any useful examination of what the different licences provide for and/or where they are applicable.

That isn't any definition of "antisocial"!

You mean, at best, "asocial".

And what on Earth is that prattling about "political"? Is every word you don't know the meaning of "political" now?

Good grief.

> but it's just such a nonsensically antisocial thing to do.

Nonsensical - probably.

Antisocial - nope.

Releasing this as binaries only isn't causing you, or anybody else, any harm: nobody is using it, as you point out there is no reason for anybody to use, other than mild curiousity, so the whole thing can be ignored without any loss. The only possible damage, the only antisocial bit, is the waste of time reading the article. And there are far more actually antisocial publications than TFA[1]!

Leaving aside active harms, there is the description of "antisocial" as a pattern of simply not caring about the effects of one's actions on people, but if the effect is barely even a "meh" then it is hard to say that description applies. Otherwise we'd be railing against all the projects on SourceForge/Gitlab/other places, whose existence doesn't make one jot of difference to us.

[1] like the dross that came up this afternoon claiming to be a helpful article about Python but got literally everything wrong; luckily the error messages from CPython had some actual content...

PS

watching the oven timer tick down is so boring, have resorted to typing out irritations about word usage, just to occupy the time!

District denies enrollment to child based on license plate reader data

Re: Don't they get scrotes cloning license plates over there?

> You've heard of convicts making license plates?

Yes, yes I have. I forgot that aspect as I don't like to dwell on State-sponsored slavery that our (non-US) government isn't prepared to fight against.

Don't they get scrotes cloning license plates over there?

You know, to cover up their hijinks.

"Ok, you've proved you live here but we're not giving a place to the child of a woman whose car has been videoed ram-raiding jeweller. Look, there you are right now, on live TV, in a car chase with the cops!"

BOFH: What physics defines as impossible, sales calls a challenge

Re: "You have my word for it"

> 'Trust me!' ... except when it's ...

"Trust me, I know what I'm doing"

-- Sledge Hammer

Re: That OS...

> yet-to-be-discovered superior...

I was assuming that is the one kmorwath is designing for us.

White House activates Yu-Gi-Oh's trap card by using anime clip for war comms

Re: Getting into the realms of fantasy here

> Helium: US is #1.

From now on, when I see somebody in a video saying "US #1" (or similar) I shall now assume it is being said in a squeaky voice.

Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns

Re: The Idiocracy!

From one of the *other* tourists who was detained by ICE, quoted in that article:

>> She has a message for other tourists considering a trip to America: “Don’t go – not with Trump in charge. It’s totally out of control over there. There’s no accountability. They don’t seem to need a reason for detaining you.”

Re: The Idiocracy!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton-valid-visa-detained-ice

(You had a typo in the href)

Iran plots 'infrastructure warfare' against US tech giants

Targeting Palantir

Must have been an interesting conversation:

Down with the Americans!

But, Palantir - they are on our wavelength, fighting the good fight.

True. Although I worry that they are better at it than we are and might take us over.

Sage advice. Go on, add them to the list.

China’s CERT warns OpenClaw can inflict nasty wounds

Curses, they've seen through the subterfuge

After all that effort to get paid actors[1] in the Western World to pretend that OpenClaw is a Good Thing, so that it would be leapt upon by the Enemies Of Democracy in their never-ending theft of Good Old Yankee IP, Peter Steinberger's attempt[2] to bring down the Evil Empire has been rumbled.

[1] ok, there have been a few of Our Guys who were taken in and ran OpenClaw, but you have to expect a certain percentage of casualties from friendly fire when the stakes are this high.

[2] this must have been his intent, surely; no sane person would just release such a monstrosity on an unsuspecting populace!

Whitehall seeks lone C++ coder to keep airport passenger model flying

Re: What a Mess

They need a more modern language; say, COBOL. It has objects now!

AI has made the Command Line Interface more important and powerful than ever before

I hope you have the full-sized drawing table and high stool to go with that puck!

Haven't seen one of those in an age, good find.

A "mouse" is something you drag around the desk to move the on-screen pointer (the 'P' in WIMP, the 'M' being menu, of course).

The SpaceMouse is a joystick that has a whole load of motion axes available - but you plonk it on the desk and there it stays. Not a mouse. In the same way that a trackball is (usually) not a mouse.

> Gamers have not flocked to it though

Aside from it not being marketed at them, although I'm not a gamer I'm quite surprised that they haven't: I'd've thought the range of motions would fit in a 3D game as much as it does 3D CAD. It does reportedly take time to get used to but that shouldn't be a barrier (except for the instant gratification crowd).

Still, what would I know, I can't justify mouse costs beyond a couple of R'Pi mice for the desktop and an inexpensive jog dial thingie.

Microsoft ships VS Code weekly, adds Autopilot mode so AI can wreak havoc without bothering you

Re: Might I suggest VSCodium?

> However, I have been successfully using VSCodium set up in a container using a Dockerfile I wrote so that it can be appropriately isolated from the host system, and even from the net if desired .

Sorry, is this supposed to be a programmer's editing environment or the macguffin in some third-rate SF thriller? "Look out, the IDE has escaped containment and The Institute has been overrun by zombie processes!"

Pity the poor fools who just want to write a quick bit of code and haven't got your skillset in writing a Dockerfile (personally I wouldn't know where to start with that, so far not having had any need to run Docker)!