Posts by TaabuTheCat

Classic

Nothing like inviting an automated hacker to have a go at your environment, day after day after day.

Hey idiot, the call is coming from inside the house.

Parasites

When you consider the end goal of all these parasites - Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, etc. - is to put all knowledge behind a paywall, then the "theft" being reported needs to continue full steam ahead.

Call me cynical, but I can easily see a future when there are no search engines, no open web, only "Ticketmaster/Venue" exclusive deals where anyone creating new knowledge cuts a deal with their AI partner to sell them what would been openly available on their website. And if you want that information, you'll have to pay one of these fucking parasite middlemen to get it.

Gender?

"Treat age as a strategic variable in the same way firms now treat gender, skills, or succession risk."

Gender? Really? Still flogging the tired old trope that women are somehow less valuable, less reliable, less productive, moody, etc. Ad nauseam. Or did I miss the point of gender being a "strategic variable"?

Sure Gov

"Williams points out that satellite operators need their licenses, which will be tricky to renew if they behave badly and stomp over places where their signals don't belong."

Easily fixed with another $250M campaign contribution.

Yeah, right.

When people tell you who they are, believe them.

Idle minds and all that

They really are playing with fire. A whole generation of unemployable grads disillusioned with the job market, saddled with college debt, and unable to find employment. That's not going to end well for any of us.

Don't bury the lede

The really interesting part of that announcement: "As part of these updates, we’re also enhancing our workplace safety and security measures so we can continue to provide a workplace where every employee can do their best work.”

Sure going to be interesting to see what that means.

Sharepoint?

I'd like to think they did the right thing and took down their Sharepoint servers to check for compromise and then patch that lovely weekend zero-day. Actually surprised there haven't been more reports of outages today.

Attorneys must be wetting their pants

Can you imagine the discovery requests coming for this data?

Donny Trump and the Troll Factory

Just a big 'ol green light to all the election interference money and appeasement can buy, in 2026 and beyond.

Want choice? Support alternatives like Servo

https://servo.org

We can talk all day about wanting independence from Corporate browsers. Make it happen faster by actually supporting projects like Servo! I have. (And no, I have no affiliation with this project. I just want more choices than we have today.)

Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right

Regression after regression, critical bug after critical bug, most undocumented even though Palo knows about the issues but refuses to put them in the "Known Issues" doc. So we all get the find the bugs all over again and blow up our production environments and waste time opening TAC cases when a day later they just update the case notes with "known issue".

The last year has been a total shit show, and it's not getting any better. I've worked with Palos for 15 years and never seen anything like this. It's absolutely horrible to be supporting this product right now. Every "upgrade" is a minefield; they aren't doing even the most basic QC/regression testing any more. If it boots, it ships.

Pictures!

If you want to be one of the first to see images from the fly-bys follow @[email protected] on Mastodon (you are on Mastodon, right??!!). He'll be doing the raw image processing and posting images as soon as the data is available.

How did it ever get approved?

Easy, it's the same group that approves one broken PANOS release after another.

Can't believe El Reg missed the subhead

Man cuffed for stealing BATS-mobile! POW!

Can't come soon enough

Imagine living in an apartment where you have rock solid fiber connectivity, only to be told that come next lease renewal you have no choice but to start paying for internet provided via decades-old coax from the incumbent cable company - for more than you're paying now. Don't want it? Tough - it's on your monthly bill regardless. Refuse to accept the additional terms in the lease renewal? Tough - move out. That's exactly what's happening to my daughter. She's moving out. These ever-expanding "gun to your head" sales tactics are becoming common across all market segments. The enshittification spreads like the parasite it is.

Brilliant strategy?

Don't confuse caring about the life of a product - even a good one - with making money. I don't think Broadcom gives a shit about VMware. I think they were just quicker than other PE sharks to realize they could extract ransom-sized renewals long enough to make lots of money and then dispose of the corpse once it's bled dry. Welcome to end-stage capitalism, captured regulators and companies that actively do everything possible - legal and illegal - to stymie competition. Enshitification? You bet.

All because of crypto

Isn't it amazing that the only useful thing crypto is good at, other than duping suckers, is paying ransom? Get rid of cryptocurrency and the problem goes away. What are they going to do, demand $15M in gift cards?

I love Notepad++

Notepad++ is one of the most *useful* tools I've worked with over the years. Powerful, fast editing (column mode FTW!), great search and replace, plug-in support, continuous save, remembering everything you had open the last time you closed it, and on and on. One of the first apps I install on a new machine, and I would gladly pay for it if it wasn't free. Congrats on turning 20!

You missed a remarkable part of of the post-mortem

"the overnight staffing at the site did not include an experienced operations or electrical expert — the overnight shift consisted of security and an unaccompanied technician who had only been on the job for a week."

For what I assume is a Tier 4 DC hosting critical services? Flexential have some 'splaining to do.

I don't think you understand the point of "fediverses"

"...its distributed nature and "fediverses" appear to represent a needless barrier " - Needless barrier? Hardly. Yes, it's not as simple as just logging into Twatter, but the whole point of Mastodon and the fediverse is to make sure another Twitter shitfest can never happen again. It's the very distributed nature of the fediverse that prevents any single person or entity from owning the platform, and ultimately hitting the enshitification phase that we're seeing now with all these monolithic, psycho-owned platforms. So maybe an additional barrier, but desperately needed.

5G Sucks!

I can't tell you the number of times I've had two or three bars of signal, tried to use the browser and.... nothing. Look at the icon and it's 5G. Every. Damned. Time. On 4G if I have any signal at all pages load. Maybe slowly, but they load.

Please oh please phone makers give us a way to force the radio back to 4G. I'm so tired of marketing driving the experience in reverse.

Anyone else using Kagi?

Not free (well, free to test), but so far it seems to return a lot more relevant pages without all the spammy site aggregator crap Google returns.

Morning wood

Another damned erection without authorization.

Google's Privacy Sandbox

More like a litter box, and the advertisers are cats. This cat knows what happens in there.

"discovering concrete causes"

Oh, you can bet some scientists are going to discover concrete all right. In it, splattered on it, or up against it - 100% success rate, guaranteed.

LLM. All your works belong to us.

I will leave you with this, by Naomi Klein, from an article very much worth reading:

"Because what we are witnessing is the wealthiest companies in history (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon …) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein

Nice guy

I had the pleasure of meeting Bob at a conference may years ago. Walked up, said hi, started to chat and 30 minutes later the conversation was still going on with him telling stories about 3Com, USR, etc. Genuinely nice guy, not the least bit full of himself. Fair few people can claim an engineering achievement with such reach and longevity. Very happy to see him recognized.

Seriously?

If those coming in are complaining it's a "ghost town", here's a thought for you. Try practice-sharing one of the many empty desks with another one of the complainers. and do it right next to another pair of desk-sharing complainers, ad nauseam, until none of you have a single moment of peace. It will be good practice for what's coming.

This piece nails it

One of the more succinct articles I've read on the subject: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

Something awesome he also built...

May I present the "Soundbar of the Gods". https://us.creative.com/soniccarrier/

Why? Because he could.

Appropriate use?

Having owned a Tesla for three years and been through many versions of FSD (and in all fairness, usually improving with each release), there is zero chance I'd ever be using FSD in a tunnel. Your options if something goes wrong are less than zero. I also encountered the phantom braking many times over those three years and learned to immediately hit the accelerator when it happens to tell FSD to get its head out of its ass. Still, it's very easy for someone behind you to think you're brake-checking them and I'm kind of surprised there haven't been more road rage incidents reported based on this behavior. I lived in Texas when I owned my Tesla. You can guess the popularity of being brake-checked.

"Alignment"

"... top talent aligned with our multi-cloud and SaaS transformation objectives."

Three of the wheels were wobbling so we took it for an alignment. Shame about those wheels, but problem solved! (I love corporate-speak.)

If you know what I know

The only way to know if ChatGPT is giving you the right answer is to know the right answer. But I agree it can be convincing and it's not just Stack Overflow where it's starting to make an appearance. Good news is, you can usually recognize it's Chat giving the answer because bloviation, and lazy people are just cutting/pasting entire "answers". I wonder if the word diarrhea is intentional - heard something about the eventual paid version being charged by the characters of output.