Posts by TheBruce

India bans open source messaging apps for security reasons. FOSS community says good luck

Re: Confused Old Person Here.....

Not wireless comm expert, but maybe if we can generste enough background noise and hide actual coms in it.

Oracle's examplar win over SAP for Birmingham City Council is 3 years late

SOP

Thats seems to be Oracle's standard ops. Over promise and under deliver. But all professional services do this.

Techie wiped a server, nobody noticed, so a customer kept paying for six months

Re: Removing resources and no-one noticed

Worked at a company of 200 employees or so. We all had to send weekly status reports to the owner. After four months I just started recycling them. Firgured he wasnt reading them all.

Re: Removing resources and no-one noticed

We knew no one was reading monthly report. Took a lot of resources and paper to generate and we were told oh no its very important, can do without it. So boss says put a new header on the report notifying that the report would be terminated by a date certain unless told otherwise. After a few months stopped generating the report. Never got one complaint.

Ex-Tweep mocked by Musk for asking if he'd actually been fired

Re: The price of Elon Musk aplogy

It ain't a jury, its the clause that said if fired we owe this guy $100 million (at least that is my understanding)...

ChatGPT has mastered the confidence trick, and that's a terrible look for AI

Re: A very good BS generator

I've worked on a lot of government contracts and they require writing a lot of BS that nobody actually reads just check off another box.

Open Book Test

In the near future rich kids won't need to hire someone to take tests to get into an elite University. A chat bot trained to specialize in a field could probably be put into a small portable computer and hooked up via smart glasses and a "hearing-aide". The glasses would scan the question, feed it into the chat bot, and viola an answer is provided.

p.s. I think the hearing aide method is better as it could be an actual hearing aide with connectivity to feed the answers. Whereas projecting the answer to the glasses might be detectable.

Re: "It’s a Dunning-Kruger effect knowledge simulator par excellence"

I asked ChatGPT if Dunning-Kruger effect is real. It took 4 paragraphs to say probably yes. I then asked it if "It’s a Dunning-Kruger effect knowledge simulator par excellence". Got into a back and forth discussion until it finally conceded that its possible that an AI could appear to have Dunning-Kruger but it can't actually have it cause it doesn't have emotions.

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

Re: Honesty kills

I've worked with too many frauds that retired successfully to accept your first comment. Over here in America a bunch of idiots voted one into office who still isn't wearing prison garb.

Oracle staff share news of sizable layoffs

Nothing Ever Changes...

Almost 30 years ago saw this with Oracle. All of a sudden the help desk help would suffer. Seems like they had laid off all the higher paid support staff. Kept seeing this happen over and over again.

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

The wonderful hide all read emails. When the COO calls screaming that we have deleted all of their read emails...

Tesla Autopilot accounts for 70% of driver assist crashes, says US traffic safety body

Re: "a recall of 830,000 Autopilot-equipped Teslas"

True, but there is the possibility it is hw related. Say a fault in a sensor.

Did ID.me hoodwink Americans with IRS facial-recognition tech?

Bunch of Blah Blah Blah

I love how they always claim they saved tax payer monies, "Five state workforce agencies have publicly credited ID.me with helping to prevent $238 billion dollars in fraud. " This is standard fair with government agencies claims trying to justify all the monies spent on crap solutions. I've been in too many briefings by government agencies alluding to how much fraud exists and what they are doing to stop it. In all that time not one presentor showed us actual fraud to justify their claims. My belief is these systems exist to make money and not really prevent fraud. I believe these companies are just better at committing fraud then Thanos.

We can bend the laws of physics for your super-yacht, but we can't break them

I take it you have never worked with one of these fools. I did for nearly 18 years (I was paid handsomely). Here is one example. This CEO calls the CIO and says his phone is broken get is fixed now. So the CIO sends the top Manager and 5 IT staffers (including me). We get to the CEOs office. He dials the number and it fails. He does this again and it fails. He does it again... He is pissed, he is dropping the f-bomb left and right. Yelling that he is the fucking owner and his phone should never fail.

The Manager calmly asks for the phone number and requests that he try. He selects speakerphone and dials the number correctly and it works. The CEO claims we must have fixed something. We all shuffle out of the office apologizing that we will never let that happen again.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. We had one guy on staff who's job was to take this abuse daily. He had a list of things he had to check every morning before the CEO arrived. The newest thing added to the list was dial a number and check that the CEOs phone was working.

FTC sues Intuit for false advertising, says 'free' TurboTax isn't always free

Re: Classic bait and switch

I filed last year and it was free. I started this year (for 2021 tax year) and at the end I can't file for free. No option. I even went to file free and get a but we checked if you needed to file a form (which I didn't) so now we have to charge you BS.

Went to IRS website and found several programs. Found one that I could use to file electronically my Fed and State returns at no cost.