Posts by matjaggard

Re: describing the allegations as "concerning."

Well aren't you all pleasant people!

A lot of people using these are blind - they have small speakers in the arms and so a bind person can suddenly be able to read signs, know what's around them, call a family member if they feel confused or concerned.

But instead of reading a story like this and thinking "these tech companies should stick to the law" you just call for them to be illegal or worse, "euthanise" the users.

You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Am I surprised the tech companies need a wrap on the knuckles? not at all but that doesn't mean we should ban innovation.

No, they've been totally clear that it can and will make mistakes.

I think you're wrong, I think despite us not paying them like they'd get in the private sector lawmakers are at least 90% *trying* to do the right thing but sadly the odds are stacked against that outcome. They don't have the tools they need to make the right laws so they have to take advice and that advice generally comes from people with enough money to get to lobby them.

The whole funding model, choice of politicians and lobbying rules all need to change to fix this. Thankfully here in the UK we do the bare minimum of limiting political spending but it needs to go so much further.

Re: Having tried vibe coding

This is not vibe coding. This is an expert using a new tool like Clause or Copilot.

Having a AI write code for someone who fully understands and problem domain but can't code, and is willing to sit and chat to a tool for hours can produce something pretty good. That's Vibe Coding. Outputs can be functional, you can start a business with it before needing to re-architect at some point. The code is actually pretty well laid out and well written if you can ignore the excess of comments and emojis.

Our current issue is how to deal with this in the longer term. Do you have a moment when it's thrown over to proper devs? We've learned from old methods of testing and hours of Jira ticket writing that throwing things over the wall to the next team doesn't work well but how do we handle this if not?

I'm very tempted to down vote just because I wish this wasn't true.

Re: Not a bug, a feature

Either way the message is clear - it's better to exploit or sell the vulnerability than tell Microsoft.

This is why my boss chose Macs for my whole department at Barclays - basically IT were less good at locking them down than Windows machines which meant an order of magnitude less time fighting against the Request system to get the software you needed.

Re: While we're here, whatever happened to Ruby on Rails anyway?

My company uses it and we all hate it. It's very fast to get something working and very slow to keep it working because of all the magic it does. Things just magically get changed from camel case to snake case for example, types are impossible to follow and can change as you use them due to the "becomes" keyword, and Robocop is more Nazi than police by default.

I think you've all missed the point here. The discussion is about how much compute was used and how much that would cost. The human input is ignored for this discussion and hardware costs aren't massively different between locations because shipping is cheap.

I think you might have a touch of confirmation bias in your reading.

I also dislike black boxes in my code but I don't mind LLMs because I know how they work and from experience where they don't. Probabilistic output is not quite the same as a black box.

I've not found it any harder going back to code I've accepted from an LLM vs code I wrote myself. I just don't accept anything bad from the LLM.

AI doesn't solve all problems, probably not more than 5-10% but that doesn't make it useless. It makes it a tool that you can learn to use and those who do will likely succeed more than those who don't in the long term.

Re: I still fail to see the point

Well in my experience it's because it just works. My app has uptime of 5 nines and I've never had to do anything much with the DB except pay through the nose.

Re: nobody asked for

I think the use of the phrase "nobody asked for" in saying what Microsoft are doing is to miss how business works. Tech businesses that *just* do what people ask for will fail because anyone can listen to people and produce something that fits their stated needs. The difficulty is fitting their actual needs or doing something brand new that people haven't thought of.

That's where AI is currently and it will change our entire world - especially for developers who need to understand and eventually embrace it or may as well quit.

Re: Rewrite needed

The bigger question which isn't even asked here is who will own this? Will we as a nation own (at least some of) the resulting Intellectual Property and/or facilities and companies that this could create?

I agree with what you said but you've missed the vital points - the free upgrade from Windows 7 and the inclusion of non-genuine versions as a valid upgrade path.

Re: Incompetent vs Nefarious

Hanlon's Razor is one I normally live by but it has sadly been burnt on this particular fire.

I doubt it's that explicit or sinister, Hanlon's Razor is worth remembering.

The issue here is that none* of our MPs have the required technical understanding to properly scrutinise policy. I saw once a finance guy saying that everyone either has power or understanding of how to solve issues, never both. I think it's our popularity contest version of democracy plus the fact that we don't pay MPs enough to attract clever people (unless they're clever enough to know they can help a mate whilst an MP and get a lucrative job afterwards) that causes the issue.

*a guess, not fact checked.

Re: What it is, exactly, that’s unique about security as a system requirement?

I'd agree with most of that, security is hard.

The first sentence I'm not convinced by. Firstly because using a system in a way not intended is frequently not a security issue and is often very valuable. Secondly it's sometimes the requirements that cause the security issue.

Re: Knowing your Rs from your elbow

That's why they asked similar questions such as how many s's in Mississippi

Re: Is there anywhere Doom has not been implemented?

I assumed it was how you could tell if a machine was Turing-complete.

Re: terribly nice but

I don't think AliExpress itself is an issue, the stores on there vary hugely but almost all of this type of hardware is made in China anyway.

The router you linked to is more expensive, has all ethernet ports at the slower speed (so to get almost equivalent you could buy a cheap gigabit hub) and as far as I can tell it's not FCC compliant, but it does have other great features like the 3 mPCIe interfaces. I think it's really designed for a slightly different use case.

Who are "they" and what are you talking about?

Re: Neptune is jealous

Miles per gallon will be obsolete before it is changed. I do find it frustrating when I can't configure systems to give me distances over a mile in miles but shorter distances in meters.

The article already mentioned that this likely falls foul of GDPR so Europe is out too.

Re: MS seems to have lost it... big time

Everyone is talking with such favourable tone about WSUS but seems to be forgetting what a pain in the arse it was to use. I'm glad I've moved out of Microsoft systems management I feel slightly nauseous thinking back to attempting to patch a Windows server on an air gapped network. Linux made this stuff easy.

I'm not sure I'd agree with "a lot" because the hardest thing for me as a C-style language developer to learn was the borrowing of data and variables in Rust. I think you'll basically have to rewrite all the C++ code anyway to make it provably safe.

I'm happy if we have a new Safe C++ language to compete with Rust to keep them going in the right direction, but it's not going to be an order of magnitude easier to learn for a traditional C++ developer.

Re: Loss of Full Control

You're wrong in your assumptions about loss of control and magic. That's not how Rust works. You are in full control, there's no magic* but you are limited to only doing things that are provably safe.

*Actually all languages have magic. C will magically handle passing arguments to functions using registers and putting things on the stack where needed. Library functions are magic until you read the code but mostly we don't, we rely on a human description.

Re: i8088

If AMD had not been around then someone else would have got there but not until Intel made masses of cash. There wouldn't have been enough incentive for Intel to compete and so they would have become complacent and someone else (potentially even ARM) would have beaten them by the late 90s I think.

Incidentally, can someone ensure this happens to nVidia sometime soon please?

Re: The software industry keeps digging its own grave

I don't understand why all the commentards are so against this concept. Human + AI make a pretty good combination for some tasks and I don't see why this wouldn't be one of those tasks. AI can likely translate 90% of the code to safe Rust, humans can review places where it fails or where it outputs unsafe code (the advantage of Rust being that unsafe code is labelled as such). This is an easier task for AI than static code analysis because where the AI fails in code analysis there's nothing to indicate to the human where the failure might be.

Re: Canary Deployment

Actually Crowdstrike does have exactly this type of system - customers tend to opt for earlier releases using test systems. However CS allow some updates to skip that process and this was one of those. Many customers only found out about this skipping when their systems crashed.

Re: Defies belief

They couldn't come up with the "wrong" conclusion due to who this report was funded by.

I'm not saying Oracle have done anything right ever, but this report is just propaganda funded by Azul.

Honestly, who do you think reads The Register? We know what a cloud is!

Re: Another tip for integrating LLMs into your project

But experimentation (or "stuffing an LLM shaped peg into any hole you can find) is how most innovation happens. I personally love it currently.

A really good example is Pulumi AI - makes learning this excellent alternative to Terraform much easier.

Another is energy supplier Octopus who are using LLM to gather information and write emails which are then edited or checked by humans before being sent out to customers.

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

Can we really call the base of a pizza a "pie"?

Re: Great chance to get some free experience

I'm not sure it's very valuable. Anything you do with these can never be used for making money. I'm not sure about other people but even on personal projects I'm always aware that my work could be valuable but if I started on one of these products I never can. Even a document I create inside a VM could never be used for business purposes presumably.

Re: The good clickAI

In the short and medium term, clicking blindly on all ads will just give money from mostly smaller companies to Google and Facebook.

I do commit ad fraud constantly, assuming the description in the article is correct - I click on adverts for companies I dislike (mostly temu currently) and on some adverts in apps that I do like. I never buy stuff from ads though - with the exception of Google Shopping which is frustratingly helpful.