Posts by that one in the corner

ATM flashes a port or two for the enterprising hacker

There is also the vandal armed with

A pair of hands and the desire to own a nice router with SIMs being paid for by somebody else's credit card.

Watchdog says US weather alerts are getting lost in translation

Re: Excellent waste of money!

Sez you.

Re: Excellent waste of money!

Do you mean that Deepl translated that into (some other language) as a literal statement OR do you mean it converted it into an equivalent letter cal saying that, if translated literally into English, would make no dense to us?

You keep on saying just saying "Deepl had no issue translating this" and even "In proper style and all" - BUT you fail to give any description of what it is producing, let alone worked examples, let alone any examples.

Not good enough.

Re: English

The problem is, so many speak fluent Neanderthal.

Re: Pathetic.

But is it really worth the cost when there are simpler & cheaper ways to get a useful result?

Continually re-translating weather reports - maybe one day the L5 cache will kick in and the madness will stop.

Tech employees demand their leaders take a stand against ICE

Re: Correction to article

>> covid may have dragged some of your IQ's down a lot

codejunky's apostrophes just have a habit of wandering from where most people would expect them to live and then randomly insert themselves in surprising places.

From the thumb downs, it seems I need to make an apology:

Apparently, balaclavas *are* provided.

> If his gun fired, on purpose or accident, the result will be law enforcement returning fire. That's just what's going to happen.

"Returning" fire - whilst he is being held face down by multiple people, *after* his gun had seen to be taken from him?

> videos of people showing accidental discharges

What are you trying to claim: that after it had been removed from him, his gun discharged and for that he was guilty enough to be shot in the back - presumably for trying to use his Jedi telekinesis?

Re: Dumb move

> identify which employees have too much free time on their hands. Get back to work. They should organize a protest on their own time.

Taking a lunch break is STEALING from the company!

> support ICE

"Do *you* have the right stuff to execute citizens of your own country? Join ICE today*".

* Balaclava not provided.

Re: CSuite are doing the right thing

So you believe that businesses are not governed?

That the people within businesses, from the janitor to the CEO are not governed and are not to have a political voice?

There are arguments about the excess use of business assets (e.g. brown envelopes) in politics, but to go do far as to believe they are to be excluded entirely - well, not very democratic.

US ownership of TikTok off to a rocky start as outage continues into second day

Re: Have they changed the T&C's yet ?

From the land that brough you "Catch 22" comes "TikTok '26".

They could try outsourcing

I understand there is a company in China with a track record for providing this sort of service.

Claude can now disgorge interface elements from other apps

On the bright side

Can we get a non-AI driven tool that uses this interface and allows access to these elements? Perhaps within Canva itself? Or perhaps Jupyter, so you can write a nicely presented tutorial on how to use these other apps without AI, ready to publish when the balloon goes pop.

(At the risk of copy'n'paste web "developers" going recursive and creating a Canva design that embeds, the long way 'round, another Canva design, that embeds...)

Vibe coding may be hazardous to open source

Wait for a "new normal"

But based upon what pricing?

Even if they don't deliberately play silly buggers, the AI pricing *has* to change. So we are just supposed to twiddle our thumbs over the issues until the finances are sorted, by which time how much avoidable damage has been done? Even if (the biggest if you've seen) AI coding turns out to be useful, but then suddenly becomes uneconomic, we're left with half-completed mods everywhere...

KDE Plasma 6.6 beta ships a login manager that won't log in without systemd

Defended the move in a Reddit discussion

A discussion that starts with

>> Fedora 44 ... is replacing the aging SDDM

"AGING"? WTF does that mean?

Does it mean that SDDM isn't able to function on the latest systems? Nothing to that effect is stated there. That SDDM has some other terrible flaw? Nope. Well, nothing that the Fedora announcement wants to mention. In fact, the new Plasma code is starting with a fork of SDDM, so if there were any unfixed flaws (especially given KDE seems to have been the main contributor to SDDM of late) they could be fixed without forking. If they think the code needs a jolly good refactoring - hmm, to do that well you'd fork, this is tue, then refactor WITHOUT MAJORLY[1] CHANGING FUNCTIONALITY (so you can regression test the refactoring). Then you are left with - SDDM version the next. Merge it back to main. Kill the fork. Start another fork in order to make your radical "this is not SDDM anymore" changes. As they are clearly indicating they are at that latter stage, clearly the SDDM code is in good shape.

So, again, what is this "aging" supposed to mean?

Just to prompt readers to say "oh, goodie, we're getting something new, that MUST be better" (well, except your not, you're starting from that same aged code)!

[1] you are allowed to remove functionality that really, really, nobody uses, or shouldn't still be using: e.g. when we told you three years ago that the background colour is to be set from the config file, along with everything else, but we still left in the code to read from that environment variable 'cos it wasn't doing any harm, but now that is the only env var being read...

How one developer used Claude to build a memory-safe extension of C

Re: Consequences, anyone??

I note he doesn't give any comparisons between how much time he thought the vibe had "saved" him versus the time he needed to spend on that debugging.

> "Surprisingly, the bug was in code Claude had generated, that I had cut-and-pasted carelessly," he said. "With hindsight it was a silly code mistake I should have caught..."

Because he knows he still has to go over the generated code with a fine-tooth comb but failed to this time; how much is this effort costing? (Or *should* be costing, see below...)

> I'd not expected or intended to have Claude make any change to that block of code.

Surprise! Well, not if you've been keeping up with the stories around here. What steps had been taken to *tell* Claude not to change that block? Any at all? And the cost of taking those steps, had they been taken, would have been - more of less than the time occupied by hitting the bug, trying out Deepseek...?

> And because the code was valid but the logic wrong, the compiler didn't catch it.

Um, is this implying that he has been always expecting badly generated code to fail compilation and not routinely going over the stuff that happens to compile? So his "I should have caught" (above) is really more of a "I should have caught because I *should* have been using that fine-tooth comb but actually hadn't been very much at all", so the "with hindsight" refers to not bothering much at all rather than missing just that one thing?

Also missing is any information about how long he has been using LLMs to work on TrapC - the cynical among us (cough) might wonder if he had been doing it all au naturel from 2024 up until very recently, hence his change from "release by Jan 1" to "aiming at Q1" as he practices for his new course in February.

When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

Re: History doesn't repeat itself

Out of interest's, which tools are you referring to?

Back in the eighties, I associate "fifth generation" with the Japanese Fifth Generation Hardware projects, which were going to run declarative languages really quickly, leading to things like declaring "Prolog is the language of the fifth generation"[1].

But I don't recall anything in particular being called 'fifth-generation programming tools' - not even "The Last One". However, I missed many things in the 80s and 90s (only got around to seeing Pet Shop Boys live last year!) so...

[1] quickly followed by people claiming that "Prolog (and its pals) *are* fifth generation languages", and because Prolog has a 'database' of clauses, and because those people had a database-like thing as well but couldn't claim it had a resolution engine on top therefore said people started calling them "fourth generation languages" and the bookshelves of Foyles groaned under a weight of tomes proclaiming that "This 4GL can save your company" and "No, no, THIS 4GL will do it better".

Git along, little dogies

Ok, not using it in *quite* that way, but still verbtastic usage.

Or, more familiar these days, "G'wan, git ow orit".

Knee-Deep in the CAD: Boffin gets Doom running inside a design modeler

Re: "Really hurts when you get fragged"

> sorry about the xitter link, but it's the only one I know about

Try an xcancel link

To make things really easy, try the X → XCancel Link Converter

Re: Next installment

You could start by sending the frames from OpenSCAD to your 3D printer. Use a multi nozzle jobbie and the plain coloured facets will be reproduced nicely.

If you used a printing service, like Shapeways* and you can get the "play by mail" experience.

* Other (many other!) printing services are available; frame rates may go up or down; your better half may go up the wall, demanding to know where you think you are going to keep all this junk.

Trump says he got a deal for rare earths in Greenland, but they won't come easy

Re: @Thomas Steven 1

>> is creating a more hostile world

> But go on about the hostile world

>> is creating a more hostile world

Spot the word? MORE. That is M - O - R - E. Is creating a MORE hostile world. The man who believes he should have won a Nobel Peace Prize.

Re: Trump … told about Great Circle routes

Surely he can't manage a fixed bearing with so many screws loose!

Although rum in all those diet cokes might go some way to explaining...

Re: @Thomas Steven 1

> During Trump's first term he made clear that NATO needed to be serious about defence in a hostile world and not hide behind the US, and they laughed

(Note: not a direct quote from your comment, I've added the apostrophe for you)

They laughed (well, more chuckled nervously) because they were not quite sure that Trump was serious; now, we are all very well aware that Trump was serious and, yes, indeed Trump's US is the serious threat to NATO and is creating a more hostile world.

> Greenland because it's on the ballistic missile trajectory to the US from both Russia and China

At least that is better* than the old threats of the Cold War escalating and the US moving it into the "European Theater", with big bold arrow that went right across to Moscow, starting from Spain.

* "better" because it implies that the Whitehouse has finally bought a globe and been told about Great Circle routes, probably with the help of string and a Sharpie, instead of pointing at a flat map and thinking they had to go through the whole of Europe otherwise the materiel would have to go out the door, along the corridor and back in the other door to go around behind the map.

Rare earth buffet party pack

The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has confirmed that Trump didn't make any geography mistakes during his speech, implying that his target really is Iceland. Expect the presidential order to be signed soon, followed by a serious discussion* about the technical challenge of open-strip mining the prawn vol-au-vents.

* Hey, the money has been allocated, grab it!

Marching orders delayed: Veterans' Digital ID off to a slow start

Re: What do they expect?

Vladimir has the email of a very talented young lady who lives in your area, she is good at the picking of the pockets.

Re: What do they expect?

Hope the ticket seller made it EXCEEDINGLY clear that their tickets were only going to work "stored in the devices' wallet" (whatever the bleep that means). It is not amusing to find out only you've paid that they are going to play silly buggers with you. Bad enough when we got caught out with an unexpected QR code, before we had wasted money on flashy phones that could show those and after we'd stopped bothering running a printer at home[1].

Lawn - you know the drill by now.

[1] Wasn't persuasive enough to get an uncomplicated laser printer into the house when they were still easily available and ink jets are stupidly expensive to run for the sporadic printing we did, so once they died we've left 'em.

As Oracle loses interest in MySQL, devs mull future options

Re: "It was backed by AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap"

> in response to a joke that seems to rely on the assumption that They Might Be Giant invented or popularised the phrase and are indelibly associated with it?

Because that original joke did not, as far as I can see, rely in any way on any assumption about TMBG inventing or popularising the phrase, that misapprehension had come out of nowhere. Nor even that they are "indelibly associated with it".

Quite the opposite, in fact. Yours is the *only* time I've heard of anyone trying to make that assumption (although, the parlous state of the youth these days and my efforts to keep away from random feeds off the more popular social media sites, I may well be missing a common occurrence).

What *is* apparent from the joke is an expectation that, having himself spotted the cadence and then added to the front of the phrase a word sequence we could more readily recognise, just to hammer it home, Pickle Rick assumed - or, at the very least, hoped - that some readers, perhaps even the AC he was replying to (which may be yourself, or may not; it's a mystery, it's a mystery, it's a mystery to me) would make the connection and have a wry smile. Clearly a sadly misplaced hope.

As for my previous short comment - well, I was going to just write "No shit, Sherlock" as a response to a statement about the bleeding obvious that seemed to come totally out of left field (see previous three paragraphs) but in the end I thought that was a bit blunt to start the weekend, so left the icon and merely expressed that it is fascinating to find someone who thought that that needed saying.

So, in conclusion:

> Am I missing something here?

Only that you seem to have inserted an over complication into a simple joke, extended it to a level of absurdity - and totally failed to land that balloon, producing a statement of staggering mundanity, and one that is insulting the intelligence of your readership, instead.

Lummy, one liners really don't bear the weight of examination, do they.

Re: "It was backed by AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap"

Hyah!

Re: There’s that one part of Microsoft Office nobody ever uses…

Well duh!

EVERYONE knows that the correct Microsoft app for a small database is Excel!

Re: "It was backed by AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap"

Fascinating.

Those figures show that, as a legacy product, there are a lot of people still running their applications, the ones they started a long time ago, that are chuntering peacefully away and providing useful functionality without feeling any great need to make sweeping changes to them.

You replied to a comment about starting *new* projects.

How an experienced developer teamed up with Claude to create Elo programming language

I've looked at Claude from both side now

Oops, sorry, that was Joni; forget I said that, don't want to cause any violinski to this threadski.

> rather than creating tools that can help fix/mitigate the risks in the already written code that so much of the world now depends upon

You do know that languages *are* tools, don't you?

> Elo is intended as a portable way to handle form validation, e-commerce order processing, and subscription logic

So, if you have "already written code" that has problems (and maybe a few interesting risks) because it is spreading its form validation etc across all sorts of strange places, maybe the best thing to do is to look for a language that is designed to represent them, gather together all the necessary logic from the old code, write it out in a consistent fashion using this new (to you) language and, in doing so, make it easy to spot where the inconsistencies and unfortunate holes have crept in. Run the compiler, generate new, fixed, code. Oh, and make damn sure that your build system now treats ONLY the new descriptions as "the source" for those bits, no committing any compiler output into the source tree, even if it does happen to be readable to you.

The "big languages" that we've all heard of are, numerically, only a small fraction of the set of (very practical and *extremely* useful, in their domain) computer languages in daily use. There is a whole field of "Little Languages" dedicated to creating task-specific languages. (An awful lot of them seem to be written in XSLT at one point in time, resulting in too much XML being written by hand, but that is yet another topic we can get sidelined into).

Not all risks and other problems can be fixed by this method, of course. Well-known issues like memory overruns, for example. But there is no point in railing against a method because it doesn't immediately fix all the problems - and piecewise replacing unsafe old stuff with new code generated from (hopefully) a declarative form will zorch any overruns that may have been lurking in there...

MX Linux 25.1 brings back switchable init systems

> are still permitted by Poettering to setup journald...

Give AgentP time, he is a busy man and will come back to give journald his - full attention - soon enough.

China’s Deepin Linux gets a slick desktop - and, yes, built-in AI

Re: Opinion is NOT truth ... also applies 'Vice Versa' !!!

Did anyone try to call it call it "critical"? Must have missed that.

> not ... even serious "at all"

Just keeping a backup of your data? Data you have a personal interest in? You don't take your backups seriously? The creator of Git doesn't consider backups seriously? People who want to compare their logs without inaccuracies in the copy don't deserve to have that development process treated seriously?

Just because that particular piece of software, like an *awful* lot of software, isn't involved in life-critical operations isn't any reason to treat it less than seriously, as something that doesn't deserve care and attention.

Which is a totally different situation compared to the guitar pedals, where, just like any other generative art, an unexpected outcome, a serendipitous error in the calculations can, often does, lead to an interesting new output, one that is worth keeping and exploring. There is an argument there FOR deliberately playing with vibe coding, in order to see just how it is going to mess up. If you are not convinced, just look at the amount of fun singers have had - and all the money they have made - from getting the settings on autotune software "wrong"! I believe there is life after love!

Re: Couldn't immediately see much difference from before

> They only get the feedback from ~10% noob users ... so possibly 90% of users are ignored

Hence

>> useful options ... were disabled/removed because "telemetry showed nobody used them"

Re: Opinion is NOT truth ... also applies 'Vice Versa' !!!

> Subsurface dive log software would have been created with AI as well

No, that is a serious piece of software with a serious purpose. Linus is very clear that everything about his gUitar pedals is about having bashing out something for shits and giggles.

> Dave Plummer ... is currently very invested in AI/vibe coding

Very invested? You may be confusing his - straightforward - delivery style for something else; once again he is at the point in life he can fiddle with anything just for a diversion. Now, his Vaxen - *they* he has invested in!

Couldn't immediately see much difference from before

You mean, no pointless changes every release just because they can? No scouring every display and dialogue box trying to find out where the useful options have been moved to this time (only to find half of them were disabled/removed because "telemetry showed nobody used them").

When can we in The West see that kind of innovation in computing?

Tesla Full Self Driving subscription to rise alongside its capabilities

Re: Pay now for a service you may never get

> See 'Trump phone'

What? Where? Out in the wild? Show me!

Awww, you were just crying wolf again, weren't you! So unfair. One of them *will* show up, one day. I'll win this scavenger hunt, just you wait and see.

Re: Typical musk

Remote control for your Teslataxi?

Not so much thinking Bond as The Avengers[1] where we see an over-the-shoulder view of a screens on a desk; one shows you on the interior camera, one the forward view, whilst a third shows your social media posting history. A line on the latter highlights the words "Elon", "Cybertruck" and "twat". A clawed hand comes into view, grasps a joystick, moving it sharply to the right. The camera screens jump violently, change to static and then to black as the unseen observer flicks a large toggle switch. The hand withdraws back into the shadows and the camera pulls back to reveal the large spartan room: behind a curtain one side of an Optimus is clearly visible, slowly raising one arm then - the sound of a whipcrack[2]. Paaa-pup-pup-PAAA dum-dum-dum-dum-dum..

[1] the proper one, with Steed and Mrs Peel; ok, I'll allow Purdey.

[2] they have to cut to the intro at this point as the "robot" prop is infamous for raising its arm too high, falling over and getting tangled in the curtain hiding the frame it is welded to in an effort to keep it upright.

Re: Fine Shield for Drivers

Think we've just found a member of that "certain sort of clientele".

Hacker taps Raspberry Pi to turn Wi-Fi signals into wall art

Other way around.

For example, you can (trivially) see how the spectrum display could be "improved", by using a load of addressable LEDs so the intensity can be shown as a histogram so you can get a technically more accurate representation (and be the envy of all the hifi owners with their bouncing spectrum analyser displays) - but would that work better or worse in its primary role as an art piece that is just meant to prompt the viewer into thinking for a moment about what else is going on all around?

Although I do have a personal gripe about the way this, and other, art pieces still insist on having "the tech" clearly on display, instead of tucking it around the back. It isn't as if even the general viewer is still unaware of the existence of circuit boards, nor is it a novel or unique board (it isn't a *bad* board, just - compare it to circuit sculpture builds, where the tech really is structurally part of the piece). So were I to, say, nick this idea and use it to add some blinkiness to the environment I'd pop the controller round the back. But your mileage may vary.

Raspberry Pi flashes new branded USB drives that promise speedy performance

Remind me again how much Beaglebone Black* boards cost compared to Raspberry Pi at launch? 50% more, wasn't it? And the bit about the R'Pi always being designed to boot of replaceable media? So the class room (or parent or older sibling or precocious wee one) could always trivially swap in a fresh install, allowing the pupil/learner to go to town and potentially "wreck" the machine without any ill-effects or downtime?

Oh, and btw,

> BeagleBone Blacks were booting off on-board storage fifteen years ago.

The BB Black was launched in 2013, the year after the R'Pi, which was, um, add 15 - hang on, need to take a sock off...

* and the pre-Black Beaglebones also booted off onboard storage.

> As opposed to the 25 power cycles a second available from the mains?

You might want to get your mains checked; hint: the hands on the kitchen clock are supposed to go around TWICE a day.

AI conference's papers contaminated by AI hallucinations

Re: Possibly a silver lining ?

Kill off? Hah!

Wait until the "agentic AIs" get ahold of a University payment account: then the "pay to play" junk journals and conferences will go into high gear "we've never had so many worthy admissions[1], time for another on--line only journal and webinar conference".

On the plus side, as none of the authors attending are human, the budget for tea and biscuits between presentations can be repurposed; there is a new jetski model out this summer...

[1] "worthy" == "paid the Gold Fee for speedy acceptance, I mean Peer Review (cough)" after the AI stumbled across a Paypal account that Sociology set up with their normal password.

Microsoft 365 outage drags on for nearly 10 hours during bad night for North American infra

Was this the reason The Register's forums were down?

Really, really hope that an MS outage wasn't the reason I kept getting 404 for the forum pages on all the new Register stories earlier this morning!

Nah, must have been a simple "cleaner pulled the plug" scenario, that is more El Reg worthy.

Cursor used agents to write a browser, proving AI can write shoddy code at scale

Re: Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot. [1]

PS

Or you can use an X repester that removes the need to go to X yourself, such as https://xcancel.com/CanadaHonk/status/2011612084719796272#m.

One expects an El Reg commentard to have the nous to at least *try* looking for things like that. It took CanadaHonk 2 hours, to make it build, btw. Fascinating, eh? That casts TFA in an entirely new light.

Re: Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot. [1]

> A link to Xitter.

So that would be the link in the sentence

>> Some developers managed to compile the code after some bug fixes

yes?

> I'd appreciate a summary

Well, the summary of the content of that link is that it appears to be the case that some developers (summarising the fact that, if you really needed to, you could find out specifically which developers, but knowing that does not change the meaning of TFA) have managed to compile the code that TFA is talking about, overall. HOWEVER the code apparently did not compile and/or function as expected because there were problems, what we refer to as "bugs", in that code. Again, specific details about the nature and number of these problems is not important as it does not alter the meaning of TFA, namely that if this is a good quality code drop then it should be buildable in the gorm presented to the public. The developers (see earlier in this paragraph re their precise identity) were apparently able to correct, or "fix", enough of these problems to complete a build to their satisfaction. Once again, the precise details of those fixes is not salient ss it wiil not change the meaning of TFA to know those details.

OR if you find my summary too long-winded and would prefer a pithier summary of this single point, then perhaps thie following will suffice:

>> Some developers managed to compile the code after some bug fixes.