Posts by klh

Debian votes to let contributors code with AI

I've been hearing how the autocomplete will produce better slop for the past 3 years. The only thing increasing is the amount of it we are being buried under.

Tech to protect images against AI scrapers can be beaten, researchers show

Re: Who could've predicted...

Like that worked for code. Perfect solution, let's force authors to go through even more hoops instead of shutting down the electricity-wasting parasites.

The whole point of copyright is that you _can_ post things publicly without worrying about people stealing them.

iFixit gives new Fairphone 6 top marks for repairability: 10/10

Re: Still no Qi / wireless charging?

Tbh outside Apple wireless charging is still a bit of a gimmick. The newest version could have fixed that, but they didn't make the magnets mandatory iirc so it still has the same problem - if I have to fiddle with the positioning, I'd rather just plug in the cable and be sure my cat won't move it off the charger.

Though I have to admit charging headphones from a phone was useful a couple of times (but then I can do the same with the cable too).

Teens used encrypted chats to recruit for 'violence as a service' murder ring, Europol says

A worrying focus on encryption

A decade ago nobody would mention that the hitmen were using encrypted chats or code.

Why the hell is there a task group focused _specifically_ on encrypted chat apps? The only people that care whether criminals were using encrypted communication are snoopy governments who need an excuse.

The AIpocalypse is here for websites as search referrals plunge

Re: This AI problem is already (at least) stage 2 of enshittification...

Maybe it will all collapse on itself and we'll get back to the good old web (wishful thinking, I know)

Re: Skip "AI" results in firefox

DDG also added this crap, because apparently people like it. At least you can turn it off though.

Canva to job candidates: Thou shalt use AI during interviews

Re: Guiding AI

About using it as a search, I can't comprehend how people have the patience for it. I gave one a try recently (I think it was Claude?), and it looked as if someone was typing out the answer word by word.

And when asked for sources it provided a list of reasonably looking links with titles, to pages that didn't exist and as far as web archive could tell, never existed.

No thanks, I'll keep to DDG for search.

CIO wants to grow tech team by cloning staff as digital twins and AI agents

I wonder how many C*Os would appreciate being "digitally cloned". Most employees probably wouldn't notice a difference, so might be a good way for corpos to save some expensive salaries.

Turns out using 100% of your AI brain all the time isn’t most efficient way to run a model

Mixture of _experts_. Yet another anthropomorphization of the random bullshit machine.

At least there should be some cheap second hand hardware available once the bubble finally bursts.

Re: What a coincidence... No LLM?

Every time someone mentions fMRI a certain study with a dead salmon comes to mind. Or the fact that every study before 2015 was invalidated because of a bug. The tech is not reliable enough (yet?) for anyone to claim they understand how the human brain works.

Anthropic Claude 4 models a little more willing than before to blackmail some users

Uh, can't wait for yet another wave of uneducated morons claiming the software is self-aware because it "knows the concept of self preservation".

Humanity is doomed, but not because of LLMs.

Google backs down after locking out Nextcloud Files app

Re: They will wait a few months

You are so shortsighted you probably qualify for lasik.

One browser per OEM is all you need. One search engine is all you need. One ISP is all you need. One news source is all you need. One party is all you need. One leader is all you need.

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: Best plan

And after one experience with that at one job I sign all my commits and turn on checks for that everywhere.

Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection

Re: Google has no real developer support channel

You don't really think _someone_ is testing anything in the Play store, right?

37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions

Re: I have this Debian server at home...

Not every os needs to be rebooted for updates though, live patching (including kernel) has been a thing for ages.

Sudo-rs make me a sandwich, hold the buffer overflows

Re: Another day, another attempt to force this on us

Trying to apply C++ ideas to Rust won't work, as evidenced by your last paragraph. Rust doesn't do exceptions, the default behavior isn't to terminate - that's only supposed to happen in case of irreversible bad state.

Acting like C++ with all the unnecessary shit it has is a requirement to develop large/GUI applications tells me you are not really arguing in good faith here.

Chimera Linux ghosts RISC-V because there's no time for sluggish hardware

Cross compilation of complex software with all the dependencies is a mess sometimes. For a small team its often more efficient to just eat the longer build time than debug issues with cross compilation.

Ubuntu 25.10 plans to swap GNU coreutils for Rust

Re: License

For someone who tries to point out an apparent cult like behavior in people who care about FOSS, your incoherent babbling looks suspiciously close to a conspiracy theorist rant.

And if you think putting your code online with no license at all is anything more than wasted bandwidth then you only show you are too ignorant to participate in this discission.

Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code, says its rise is inevitable

I wonder if COBOL programmers behaved like C ones are today.

Critical PostgreSQL bug tied to zero-day attack on US Treasury

Clickbaity

Kind of clickbaity title. _Technically_ true since psql is part of Postgres, but nobody with a sane setup has to run and deploy the bugfix.

Piping output from a PHP script into psql has to be the stupidest way to pwn yourself I've seen in a while.

Re: Exposed psql?

That would give you arbitrary code execution on the machine you are running psql on. Not very useful.

Stargate, smargate. We're spending $60B+ on AI this year, Meta's Zuckerberg boasts

Re: Someone should train a LLM on Trump's decrees

That's literally what LMMs are trained on. Garbage in, garbage out - you'd get an ExecutiveOrderGPT with output similar in "quality" to the original.

Google's 7-year slog to improve Chrome extensions still hasn't satisfied developers

Re: Chrome

I wouldn't call Servo a derivative of Gecko, afaik they are writing new stuff. Some of that stuff ended up in Gecko, but the you either have a cyclic dependency or at least a reversed one :)

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Re: "it would suck"

Kernel afaik uses no_std, so it doesn't need to abort on OOM

Oracle starts laying mines in JavaScript trademark battle

Re: Unpopular opinion here

Go learn some history before accusing anyone of stealing anything.

The naming was on purpose and with Sun's blessing.

What happens when we can’t just build bigger AI datacenters anymore?

Re: Better algorithms?

DeepSeek, as most of these models, is not Open Source.

Where does Microsoft's NPU obsession leave Nvidia's AI PC ambitions?

> We don't expect it'll be long before beefier NPUs make their way into desktop silicon.

Please let the bubble burst before this waste of silicon infects desktop chips. If anything, NPUs should be add-on cards, that's kind of the whole point of a desktop.

Copilot invades Microsoft 365 Personal and Family for an extra three bucks a month

Re: Path to profitability

I agree that MS provides a convenient option, but I can't understand how people didn't jump ship when they "modernized" the UI at some point while LibreOffice had an actually familiar interface.

Granted, MS fought very hard by making docx files hard to work with, but 90% of the population never used the features that didn't work.

MS users are doing it to themselves, even if alternatives are free, easy to find and better.

Intel, AMD engineers rush to save Linux 6.13 after dodgy Microsoft code change

No code ever should be merged without review, I wonder how that even happened? I thought Linux had a pretty strict review mechanism.

Linus Torvalds offers to build guitar effects pedal for kernel developer

Re: principles of circuit different from tracing the circuit

To be fair, some PCBs _are_ art :)

Fining Big Tech isn't working. Make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain

Re: Small thinking

It's probably hybrid in the sense that the LMM parses the conversation but search is done using conventional means based on what the model gathered from the chat? That would be a sensible approach and what LMMs are generally good at.

The popular "write me an essay" LMMs are not able to do that because of the way they are built, that information is lost during vectorization, otherwise they'd have to annotate every other word. They don't persist knowledge, just linguistic probabilities.

Here's a list of thousands of artists Midjourney's AI is ripping off, creatives claim

Re: I don't think copyright law can handle this...

I know the comment is old. But licenses are based on copyright. And the default is you have no right to do anything, then the license grants you some more or less limited rights.

If you are not allowed to resell or give away the work or derivative works it doesn't have to specify exactly that you can't train an LLM using it.

Arch Linux installer now slightly less masochistic

Re: Dumbing down

> That shell isn't an available option right now because I'm in the installer

Not to take anything from arguments for TUI vs script, but you have 6 other virtual ttys available.

Panasonic brings its founder back to life as an AI

Re: "making the AI necessary"

BS language models aside, I bet they already have shrines to the guy given the culture around business in Japan.

Microsoft 365 Copilot trips over angle brackets, frustrating coders

I'd venture a guess that this is worse and it's the opposite of sanitization. Maybe it's understanding everything past < as the contents of an XML tag? Wouldn't be surprising if the tech around LMMs regressed like that.

Will passkeys ever replace passwords? Can they?

Re: Count me out

This. I don't understand why people still think this is a good idea. The whole point of 2FA is something I know and something I have - I was sure passkeys would give people an alternative to a hardware token, not replace passwords. While a passkey can't be phished, making it replace the password makes unauthorized physical access so much worse.

It's like having an SSH or GPG key without a password.

Though the "I lose the device and I lose access" part is already solved - put the passkey in a password manager that's synced (or in case of hardware keys have a second one).

Rust haters, unite! Fil-C aims to Make C Great Again

Re: A nice personal project, but...

Just use Go at that point, it's probably going to be better.

Slight correction, the guy who named it after himself apparently did it on company time/hardware and one of the rather litigious corporations owns the full copyright.

The irony of mentioning that after recommending Golang doesn't escape me of course :)

Google Gemini tells grad student to 'please die' while helping with his homework

Re: What Kind of Illogical Idiot ...

If the Skynet we were promised turns out to be an LLM I'll be severely disappointed in the human race. Beaten by an overengineered grammar engine.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GNU Image Manipulation Program 3.0 nearly here

Re: Another chance

Every time I ask someone complaining about GIMPs "badly designed UI" how is it badly designed, they either don't know or turns out it's just not Photoshop.

Care to break that streak?

Mozilla's Firefox browser turns 20. Does it still matter?

Like there is a difference. Edge is just Chrome with some Copilot shoved down your throat.

Thanks, Linus. Torvalds patch improves Linux performance by 2.6%

Re: It shows indeed

That lol hurts, it hurts deep

Bitwarden switches password manager and SDK to GPL3 after FOSS-iness drama

I was fully expecting another bait and switch when I read the original news. I was considering migrating to it before, now they have a paid customer.

An awful lot of FOSS should thank the Academy

Re: bit hypocritical?

> and by pure English definition of "open" and "source" they may be right.

By pure English definition "blender" is a person or a thing that blends, hence people expecting the software to make smoothies may be right?

Admins better Spring into action over latest critical open source vuln

How does an application-contained vuln that only affects static resources and requires an uncommon set of settings get a 9.1? Heartbleed got a 7.4.

Even CVE scores are not safe from inflation :D

Huawei's farewell to Android isn't a marketing move, it's chess

Re: Can't understand the apps

The issue starts when companies start forcing apps down your throat. Bank? App. Electronic access to public services? App. Everything else - there is a website, but it barely works and will nag you about an app on every page

Microsoft says more ransomware stopped before reaching encryption

Maybe MS should stop calling SMS a real 2FA solution.

Passkeys are still software, while they might be better than passwords since they can't be easily phished or written down on a post-it, they don't replace real 2FA (not to mention they can't be transferred between vendors yet, so a nice way for MS to make sure you keep using Edge)

Epic judge orders Google to let rivals set up app stores

Re: "permit third-party Android app stores to access the Google Play Store's catalog"

Issue of paid apps aside, did Apple get such a requirement?

Seems weird since even hosting the apks is definitely not free. Do they need to provide an API? How about updates? I'd rather be able to have a say where my app ends up given unhappy users will blame devs and not the store (as they already do with the mess that is Play Store sometimes).

Ellison declares Oracle all-in on AI mass surveillance, says it'll keep everyone in line

Not taking away from the general point, I wouldn't call an 80yo fart a "tech bro".

More like a tech dinosaur trying to earn as much as he can at the cost of a future he's not going to live anyway.

Cloud computing hits the nuclear button amid energy crisis

Re: The New Nuclear Apocalypse

Not defending the pointless LMM craze, but what safety problems?

Re: Pros and cons of nuclear

If the alternative is opening more coal plants, plugging our ears and screaming "green coal" then what is there to talk about?

Until battery tech gets vastly more efficient (and less destructive for the environment) fully renewable solutions won't be able to provide base load for the grid.