Posts by Czrly

Replace all "Help" Menu Entries in Windows 3.1

Since they've backported (back-foisted) it upon Windows 10 (it hit me, again, yesterday) I ask this: why not go all the way and foist it right back on Windows 3.1, too?

Do you remember those "Help" menus from 3.1? If you don't, you should go and run that in an emulator, unplug your router and try to work out how to use it, offline, just from the help files that used to ship with programs, back then – accessible by help menus! They were often – albeit with exception – actually useful! They were references and sometimes even told you how to do Things with the software or the operating system.

Also: you'd be building up the user-base to validate my argument that there are surely many running 3.1, even in 2024, and they could be blighted with Copilot, too, just like the rest of us.

The balance tipped.

This news should come as no surprise to anyone. This is the standard play for venture-capital (or private-equity) bought "Open Source."

What it means – simply – is that the balance has tipped: the suits have determined that the loss of goodwill from those who flee is less than the stakes to be gained by this change. That, in turn, is trivially easy to interpret: "we" – the users, developers and community – are worth less than the Dollars knocking on their door. That follows by definition.

Why would we trust them, then? They're demonstrating contempt for our worth, as a community, so only a fool would expect them to value us!

WordPress. Bitwarden. VSCode. GitHub. Redis. MySQL. (… and I haven't even started to 'think' to find examples, yet.)

It's Power.

For long and long, I've considered the connection between "crypto" and "A.I." to be the fact that both are bubbles of the most ephemeral kind but, today, I think I've been wrong about that: both are about consumption of power – Watts!

Precisely how the megalomaniacs are punting A.I. is pretty obvious but *why* they're so desperate to do so makes little sense. Is their really enough money to be made from rendering artists, authors and many others redundant? Maybe they're set on positioning themselves to capture "human culture" or something by flooding the channels with 'botshit' but even that seems a little too desperate to motivate the scale of the infrastructure investments. (It would also be too dystopian or nefarious: the megalomaniacs are not that inspired.)

But Watts of power? This is all a counter-move to the acceleration and expansion of green energy.

This is about keeping legacy power-plants operational. This is about keeping the oil-economy flowing and ensuring that green sources cannot hope to bring about the decommissioning of fossil-fuel sources in the short term. This is about keeping old establishments like OPEC relevant as puppeteers of the world economy.

This is also a cynical act but cynical, short-termism is right on-brand for the megalomaniac.

Perhaps they know that "A.I." is stupid and a bubble and hated by the masses and laughably prone to hallucinations and not fit for any purpose in the real world. They do not actually care because "A.I." – the entire industry – is just a "cost centre" to them. Bad press, loathing, even infrastructure wastes are just "costs" and their profit lies elsewhere: these maniacs are firmly rooted in traditional economic structures, investments, markets and capitalism and granting the oil-economy a final lease on life serves them, there. Keeping fossil-fuel chains alive keeps their lobby relevant in government and international institutions.

They're seeing Watts of green power becoming available on the grid and so they strive to sink as many Watts as possible into something: not crypto, now, but A.I.

For Satisfactory players, the TL;DR is this: A.I. is just the AWESOME Sink of real life.

Too Late.

This is irrelevant, now. Unity demonstrated to developers that they could and *would* unilateraly fiddle with the pricing model as and whenever they wanted to. This was the final straw and also served to accellerate interest in alternatives like Godot by orders of magnitude.

I did not dig into the details but I'm pretty sure that they have not relinquished their power to alter the deal again, unfavourably, as and whenever they want to.

Nobody trusts them and nobody should ever trust them.

It's just a fancy product...

Both inference *and* training are just fancy 'tensor'-like product operations performed ad nauseam. Just about anything *could* execute them and nearly everything even has some form of SIMD instruction-set to accelerate them beyond primitive `for`-loops, anyway, and has had for decades. Even libraries which include highly-optimised implementations of the maths exist and have been open-source for ages, now. Particularly for the case of inference (given the weights of a trained model) proprietary and novel advances – alike – only grant a marginal speed-up.

The question is only how *fast* some given hardware can run inference and, there, I propose that the answer is entirely meaningless because the vendors behind this fad will *never* allow LLMs to truly be used in anger, offline. (And literally anything can send an HTTP request to "the cloud" to query models.)

Being the man-in-the-middle to serve the 'AI' responses – capturing usage and prompts and all the telemetry and metadata – is the very product they're building. Why would they ever let that run offline? Forgoing gatekeeper status would be arse-about-face, for them, because the perceived value in interaction data is their only business case.

Any hardware vendor punting "AI compatible" hardware is not just pulling a fast one because just about any Turing-complete machine with a product-op *could* execute the algorithms (perhaps slowly) but because users will never truly use the capabilities.

Sure, the open-source algorithms and open-source model weights are cute to run, offline, but they are only a curiosity. Although the hardware vendors are punting chips capable of slightly faster execution of these algorithms with those models, nobody with the funding or power to drive this fad forwards intends for those models to find main-stream use – I predict that they will disappear from public consciousness exceedingly quickly.

Think about how many algorithms *could* run locally, on-device, on any modern smartphone but are, instead, served from some cloud data-centre, somewhere, where some corporation receives all the data. Think about how many services *could* operate just perfectly over everyone's LAN, without ever crossing the firewall or being routed outside the subnet. Hardware vendors don't seize upon these 'capabilities' to promote their stuff only because none of these are in the headlines.

Coal-Fired?

Would that be "Germany" as in "*here*, this Germany" ... that I'm living in... that shut down all its nuclear "Atomkraft" power-plants under pressure largely lead by the greens who were manipulated into opposing nuclear power, decades ago.

THIS very Germany that had to re-open coal-fired power-plants when the "Ostpolitik" policies were shown to be failures and the pipelines carrying liquefied-dead-dinosaurs from Russia were limited?

THIS Germany that imports electricity from aged and decrepit nuclear plants placed conveniently far outside the borders as to be immune from the anti-Atomkraft lobby in the Bundestag, yet close enough to annihilate quite a damn lot of it, should they go boom as the misguided fears of the past foretold – the same fears that were over-played by, yes, the Greens, in fighting against Atomkraft and achieving a massive win for Big Coal, back in the day?

Whatever power Microsoft draw to power those data-centres, they have no moral right to do so – certainly not for "A.I." – but it gets worse because they'll surely buy their power wholesale and it will surely also be discounted! On the ground, consumer electricity prices are sky-high and the need to convert to electric heating – gas heating being phased out – will be punishing to many people and families in the very near term. Spending Watts on the stochastic parrots of the already-rich is not going to insulate all the old houses or lower heating costs.

In a sense, this is very much a direct waste of resources on "artificial" algorithms in spite of the real-life humans who need them, and all so that a corporation's profits can increase in line with the latest fad.

Ich bin doch wutend.

That means no re-installs?

Let me get this perfectly straight because it is important to me: this means that, should something disturb my Windows 10 activation on my old hardware or should my disk drive fail, I can never re-install, even though my PC has been running Windows 10 for many years – originally from a Windows 7 upgrade?

I can't upgrade to Windows 11 – don't have a TMP and my motherboard is rather dated – and, even if I could, I *would* not because I consider it to be a step backwards in usability, privacy, openness and, outside of those, it's no advancement in any way that matters.

There's nothing wrong with my old hardware (i7 7700, 1080ti era) and no earthly reason to upgrade it.

Frankly, I'd actually be perfectly happy to DOWNgrade back to 7 except that nothing supports that any more. LOTS of games, software, tools and even modern programming languages and compilers have dropped Windows 7 support simply because they did not want to or could not afford to expend resources maintaining it, given that Windows 10 was a "free" upgrade path.

This is basically a pure, end-game distillation of the EEE tactic, except I'd personally omit the "Extend" part because I honestly can't think of a single Windows 10 feature that "Extended" functionality in a way that I actually wanted or needed. And, basically, this goes to show that Microsoft could put paid to anybody's use of their OS at any time on their own hardware, even if one had a formerly valid and legal license. The can choose to alter the deal at any time.

Meh. I've migrated 99% of my use-cases to Linux, anyway. I only boot Windows 10 for a few games, now. But I was planning a fresh re-install to clean out some unwanted stuff – like old Adobe and Apple bloat left over from other abysmal software that I once used, have uninstalled, and will never touch, again – and now I see I can't ever do that, again!

An A.I. can write *enough*.

An A.I. cannot write anything that is truly of interest to me or many of us, perhaps – aside from a curiosity at what the algorithms are capable of through scientific interest in the numbers and mathematics, of course – but I fear that they can still write *enough*. The truth is simply that there's a very low bar for content. Enough is easy to achieve.

Consider Netflix as a case study. Today's binge-watchable series are invariably one-trick ponies: they have mastered precisely one of the story teller's arts: the hook to bring you back. Every episode is a waste of time, meaningless. Characters are not developed, worlds and places are not explored, theories and philosophies are not elaborated, in fantasy the story does not indulge, and questions it does not confront. Instead, in the dying minutes of any episode, a hook is placed simply to get the viewer to begin the next expisode in which nothing at all will happen, either.

Ceasing between episodes is consequently uncomfortable but, should one abandon ANY of these "binge watchable" things at T=10 minutes into any episode, one very quickly realises that they've no real reason – besides boredom – to pick it up, again.

Can an A.I. write this? Surely it can or it will be able to, soon – perhaps only two academic papers down the line.

Researchers have studied how free pornography and "tube-sites" exploit the dopamine loop in the brain. If A.I. could reproduce this exploit with matter that is both free of taboo and that does not trigger any interruption by a refractory period, the result could be devastating.

Could A.I. power a pleasure-button that many – like rats – would press until they die? In fact, it will not be necessary to press the button – we've "autoplay" for that and the 60-second video format – close the feedback loop with "telemetry" and any control engineer can tell you what can be built.

Will I then be able to disable the sponsored search engines?

Will I then be able to disable the sponsored search engines?

In its current state, iOS Firefox will automatically enable sponsored links on the home page – to Amazon and other evil actors – and require to you manually turn those of and it will also include sponsored search engine plugins to those same evil actors that I can't find a way to disable. These buttons appear when you activate the search/address bar and, as I said, I can't find a way to turn those off.

Firstly, enabling and supporting evil actors like Amazon should not be done. Secondly, why can't I turn those OFF?

Until Mozilla allow me full control of and confidence in my browser, once again – or, even better, just not include those traps and parasites at all, ever – I honestly do not care what rendering or HTML engine is running behind the scenes. Frankly, Mozilla also have bigger problems, elsewhere, including the state of Desktop and ESR Firefox.

The end of the rule of Apple's WebKit is great but it is not the end of the problems browser users (that's everyone) face, today. In fact, I would even doubt it is the most significant!

Neither Surprising nor Revealing.

If Microsoft are doing this, Google either are doing it too or have already done it – perhaps even already rejected the possibilities. Microsoft are certainly not breaking new ground.

Whatever the case, however, none of the actors in the Search-space are doing it in order to improve their Search offerings and thus regain market share.

Their motives will be profit – one way or another – and, sadly, the utility-value of Search is not measured in Shannon Information.

The answers-to-queries ratio is almost anathema to these companies and their exploitation will not change that. We should not expect or even hope for a return to the golden-days of freely accessible, online answers to our questions.

Simultaneously, we should be starting to realise that just expecting our own stake-holders to "search for it" is not reasonable any more, and design our own products and references and documentation and code-libraries and lookup-tables to reflect the fact that our users, too, are deprived of useful search engines. When you next read a nice, ergonomic, friendly-faced, human-language error message in your terminal and know, for certain, that THAT will be useless – even quoted – to search, yearn for those good, old-fashioned codes and numbers and appendices full of tables, from the past.

This content was not generated by a robot.

Enthroned upon the porcelain, a thought occurred to me: that new twenty-nine-American-cent tier makes no sense in today's inflation-driven economy but it absolutely DOES when one goes and re-reads that Reg. article on the Internet of Shite[1].

That's fairly clairvoyant of Apple – neigh Jobs-esque! They've seen Stable Diffusion and ChatGTP and GitHub Co-Pilot on the horizon (neigh: already bloody here too soon) and they know the flood is coming. They do not want bucks from it – cents on volume will do.

I follow Deep Learning Twitter[2] and they are not off the money, here. That flood *is* coming and, if you're a small developer with small dollar-apps on the Store, it is coming for *your* lunch. However innovative you may be, if you are small and independent, shere grunt-work can replace your efforts. Perhaps the quality and flair and spark might be lost but the new A.I. Store Barons will have essentially limitless grunt power at their hands and that power will be optimised for marketability and store appeal and click-through rate. Most notably, this will all come sans-scruple and independent devs and creative-types tend to carry those and even occasionally hold Morals.

In this flood, pearls will be lost long before they can even present before the swine; diamonds will be irrelevant in the exponentially-scaled rough.

[1] IoS is definitely Internet of Shite-with-an-E. Of a good dram of Whisk{e}y, one might say, "there's the shit" but, were one to say, "that's properly shite," one's judgement would be conclusively the contrary.

[2] The Bird Site is bad. But, if you're in "tech" and do not follow Deep Learning Twitter – at least lurkingly-passively – you are not doing due diligence. Just note that many of the pioneers and visionaries in the field do rather tend to re-tweet a lot of shite so supressing their re-tweets is advisable.

Sigh: Consumer's going to lap this right up.

If Epson do know two things, they are, in this order: (1.) that this is not about the environment but rather about their turn-over and bottom line and (2.) that marketing works in the printer market and the consumer does not know better – green-wash the turd and the consumer will lap it right up.

In my opinion, an Ink-Jet printer is basically not a printer. You can't print with it because it is always either empty, dry, clogged or broken or, if it is none of those, then the print job just isn't worth a whole new set of cartridges that will be junked when the time comes for the next job because, by then, one of the first set of states will certainly apply.

Hell, I'd love to say that I lived in a place where laws banned such things from the market. Ink-Jet is a blatant scam – a false product and a con. Sure, I could believe that it is *possible* to build a worth-while Ink-Jet printer but I just can't believe that any sales and profit motivated corporation ever would and LEAST of all: Epson.

Also: what, precisely, is "Mechanical Energy"? That's just BS of the highest order.

What's a Virtual Asset?

Do you mean Intellectual Property? I trust European courts and am fairly certain that Hong Kong and China hold no jurisdiction over anything I'd be remotely interested in.

Do you mean some cultish, misguided fantasy of "ownership" of something accessible by a URI, the requestor of which is NOT authenticated by the server? Because that's just crazy shit!

I really wish that people would be more blatantly accepting of this craziness or else, one day, we might all wake up in a world where someone actually relevant – not I – begins to recognise these claims of "ownership" and "home" and, then, we're properly fucked!

Mozilla not even mentioned?

The article fails to mention how the same thinking plagues the Open Source world, too, in MANY, MANY cases. On prime example: Mozilla Firefox.

Sure it's FOSS but Mozilla appear to be hell-bent on proving that "irrelevance" is achievable by those holding the reigns of a FOSS product, too, and, in fact, that they can mimic Google in removing every feature anybody actually wants and adding tonnes and tonnes of cruft that nobody asked for.

All of this – whether in the corporate world or without – stems from the same fundamental truth: nobody, today, achieves a powerful role while retaining a moderate attitude or an understanding that just-being-brilliant-at-something is enough. The ONLY way to the top is to fully subscribe to the cult of owning everything, always increasing everything, beating everything. And, of course, everything must be maximally monetized – just a fair profit is not enough.

That'll make a nice Linux build box to run "C.I." in my WFH-environment, locally..

.. was my first thought.

I just woulnd't want to put Windows on it.

No Solidarity with A.I.'s run for profit!

This story prompts one primary question: *why* do I consider giving my code and insights to other humans (via GitHub or StackExchange or the like) to be alright if the thought of Microsoft-controlled Co-Pilot exploiting the same is anathema?

I think this is a story about solidarity and, quite simply, I don't hold any solidarity for corporations. For other coders, I can at least try to believe that I'm helping out a human being who may very well be living a similar life to my own – past and present. Their high-functioning thoughts may very well be being exploited and, frankly, any little helps, right?

Had Microsoft said to the open-source world that their A.I. trained on open-source *was* itself also open source and, additionally, free to use for free-as-in-freedom work – and, also, not useable for proprietary work from which its training data would also be precluded – I expect that the revulsion from the world of coding would be very much different.

Do not break the picket line! Solidarity! No open-source code for corporate parasites!

Remember, please, that GitLab the software is Open Source!

There's one critical thing that's missing from this article: GitLab, the software, is an open-source software!

However much GitLab might try to lean on the fact that GitLab dot com offers some Enterprise Edition features -- not fully open-source -- to free users, the GitLab product stems from an open-source background and the core functionality certainly is still open-source. Many of the supposed freeloaders contributed patches and debugging time and feedback and well researched issue reports and other input into that product!

It is quite dishonest for GitLab dot com, the commercial entity, to simply sum up the cost of keeping some hard-drives spinning! They also should perform the impossible calculation of how much of their income from actual paying customers should rightly be attributed to work from the community they're now spurning.

I don't think anyone on the open-source side of this equation was or is complaining that GitLab dot com brings in income from exploiting the open-source portion of their code base -- it's within the terms of the license. But, to appreciate exactly *why* this feels like a massive rug-pull to many of us, ask this: would anybody have ever contributed to GitLab open-source, had they know they were just free labour for a corporation that chooses to optimise its bottom-line at the expense of this very community -- pretty much just like any other capitalist corporation?

Prolly not, yeah? Capitalism and community don't mix!

I mean, I'm bitter because I've just had to spend a tonne of my time migrating from self-hosted GitLab to self-hosted Gitea. This, it turns out, was a very good decision but I rather liked GitLab, back in the day, and do somewhat resent the way that they've been treating GitLab CE users as second-class citizens for a while -- pretty much making from-source builds too onerous to bother with, forcing the use of Omnibus or official, bloated Docker images, and pushing U.I. junk that can't be disabled, readily, in CE, that nobody asked for, but does nothing but plug an EE-only feature.

The writing has rather been on the wall for at least some years!

Finally, goodbye Chrome!

I have been waiting for this for a LONG time. Finally, I can banish Google Chrome from my PC. (Firefox is, will continue to be and will always be my main browser.)

I downloaded the new non-beta build of Edge-with-Chromium (that's what it calls itself, I believe) and tested it a bit. The headline results are these: the installed `msedge.exe` supports BOTH `--user-data-dir` AND `--app` and that means that I don't need Google Chrome anymore!

I browse with Firefox but I make extensive use of shortcuts that employ these two command-line parameters to create sand-boxed environments for individual web apps that I use all the time. For example, I have a whole user-data-dir for work-related web apps and that's used to get an app-like experience with GitLab, Jenkins, Trello, Slack, etc. -- each one (launched with --app) gets its own task-bar button and its own window, remembers that windows last location for the next launch, and gets its own entry in the alt-tab list, just like a real app. Then I have another user-data-dir for personal apps and some of those apps are duplicates -- I have two instances of GitLab, for example, and, because of the separation of user-data directories, they behave completely independently -- I can even have them running side-by-side with separate logins.

I've had to keep some form of Chrome around just for this, for years. Now, I don't need that any more because I can use the Windows built-in browser. (Not built-in, yet... but soon.)

Do not misunderstand me: choosing to replace Chrome with Edge-with-Chromium is certainly a choice of the lesser evil. Ultimately, Microsoft are going to bundle a browser in their OS so actually using it costs me nothing as far as installed footprint is concerned. Also, I'm personally extremely anti-Google so, if I have to choose between data spies, I'll be choosing Microsoft any day of the week.

I did experiment, in the past, with builds of Chromium sources that had been patched to remove Google's hooks into the code base but, personally, I found them to be very high-maintenance commitments and ended up returning to Chrome proper and feeling dirty for it. Replacing that with Edge-with-Chromium isn't a perfect solution but it is certainly a step in the right direction.

There shall be NO Google software (or update services) running on my PC.

Priority List

> "We regret the content of these communications, and apologize to the FAA, Congress, our airline customers, and to the flying public for them."

The fact that "the flying public" are last in that statement and that the VICTIMS of Boing's negligence were not explicitly mentioned speaks volumes about Boing's priorities.