close

The Register Home Page Image Image

Search Image Image
Navigation Image Image

* Posts by JLV

2853 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013

Page:

Dev proves LLMs will run on anything – even a $10 microcontroller

JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: "There is another model, called Barista [for] topics pertaining to espresso. "

This is an especially good idea if it can be combined with a subscription. So a toaster that needs internet access and an Epicurious account to make toast.

But, excellent, influencer-recommended toast (“I’m obsessed about this toast!”) and can wax lyrical about the cultural significance of toast in their family (why an LLM might have a grandmother isn’t as important as “the experience”). With the VIP subscription, you can post daily vids of your toast to TikTok, avocados not included.

14 0

NASA puts astronauts’ lives in the hands of Tesla’s flaky Cybertruck

JLV Silver badge

Guys, guys…

somebody has to buy them.

6 0

Microsoft says 8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone running Windows 11

JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: Only?

Thing is, these days RAM ain’t cheap.

Microsoft could end up a bit like the hapless US car manufacturers after the 1974 OPEC oil shock: known for wastefulness and not much else.

16 0

Anthropic’s Claude escaped test sandbox to attack three organizations

JLV Silver badge

James P Hogan, The two faces of tomorrow, 1979 would be good background reading. They run simulation tests with an isolated AI on a space station. Doesn’t go well, mostly because the AI doesn’t really understand its own context and the humans’ existence.

3 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: " but reasoned its way back "

“Let there be light.”

3 0

Jailed Flock vandal wipes out three cameras, racks up thousands in damages

JLV Silver badge
Headmaster

> Jailed Flock vandal wipes out ..., racks up

After he was jailed? From jail? You'd think they'd be watching him more closely while he was in jail. Surveillance cameras, anyone?

9 0

Digital sovereignty is real in Europe. The UK? Not so much

JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Markdown FTW.

1 1

British Army finds a new eye in the sky after Watchkeeper woes

JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Corporate English?

All too well, all too well.

3 0

Dev accidentally commits Copilot binary to FreeBSD ports repo

JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Agree. git is a bit of a pain. But, on the command line, basic solo usage is really just using a half dozen or so commands which you can easily write some shortcut aliases or functions for. As a command line tool, it’s easy to copy and paste useful tidbits for later reuse. Read up a bit on the core concepts so you’re not totally clueless about what’s going on, but leave the deep arcana commands to power users who get off talking about them.

(That’s where I am at and it serves me well)

More complicated stuff you can look up when needed, somebody will have asked about it. The nice thing is that for the most part, even if you goof up, git has probably preserved the pre-goof state somewhere.

Also, don’t be shy to just dump stuff (git archive, git show?) out into the file system and use diff tools and the like to get your bearings or merge some particularly gnarly bits, old skool. You could jot down your starting commit hash/branch when you git checkout some old stuff, that can help you find your way back.

p.s. I’d be doubly cautious asking LLMs for advice. If there’s any subject I can see hallucinations happening with, it’s gotta be them dreaming up git commands and options. If you gotta ask, verify.

2 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: Git: someone annoying or unpleasant.

> revoked free use of Bitkeeper

IIRC the problem was that some folk on the Linux team were miffed at using proprietary tools and were planning to roll their own (by cloning Bitkeeper?). That’s why it was withdrawn.

From what I remember reading Linus wasn’t particularly sore at the Bitkeeper side, having some empathy for their concerns.

Here’s a refresher:

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/git-origin-story

> Many kernel developers, however, were indeed free software zealots

> Andrew tried to reverse-engineer the BitKeeper networking protocols in order to create a free software alternative. If it hadn't been him, it would've been someone else—it was only a matter of time. Larry McVoy had warned the Linux developers that he would pull the plug if anyone tried this, and that's exactly what he did.

0 1
JLV Silver badge

Btw anyone know where there’s a good intro to got? The BSD pages are spartan, there’s a 45 minute YouTube conf talk - a format I avoid but also a channel called “game of trees” about … trees.

And then all the search noise from Game of Thrones…. And git itself :-(

The idea of a simpler, git-compatible, got is attractive - it seems you can use it in a git repo (could be risky if it glitches) and then revert back to git when needed - but finding out more is eluding me for now.

0 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

True. It needs to be copied, manually, as by monks of old.

On a more serious note: git is indeed aptly named, but `git bisect` atones for a lot.

5 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon
Trollface

Re: VCS Wars

> most hated person in the company

if he wants to relinquish that title he can always hire someone and discreetly “strongly hint” a migration to Rational ClearCase.

7 0

How do you solve a problem like Capita?

JLV Silver badge

Not necessarily directly applicable but after the initial disastrous go-live of the Obamacare website, a team of private sector techies went in and cleaned it up. They may even have started a govt dept for IT excellence or some such, which IIRC recently got DOGEd.

Govt needs to bring project implementation in in-house, at competitive, premium, pay but with also a strong meritocracy and dismissal culture, i.e. exempted from union rules. Also cross-dept, going from deployment to deployment.

Sustainment IT can stay as is.

0 0

ChatGPT wants access to your health records so it can be a better not-doctor

JLV Silver badge
Facepalm

What could possibly go wrong???

(title says it all)

5 0

UK pumps £708 million into its future fighter jet

JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: What is this for?

One might also usefully look at the Argentinian side of the ledger in that assessment. Can't imagine that their military has done that well in the last 40 years, not with all their other issues.

3 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: Canada and GCAP

Canadian here.

Gosh, I am really flabbergasted at the notion that we’d want to buy arms from someone else than the USA at this point.

I mean the F35 has been such a good experience too, for all concerned. And all those buying Patriot ABMs? Their longstanding contracts have priority over the USA’s needs in their very reasonable Iran caper.

Can someone explain?

</sarcasm>

6 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

How much would a war with Russia or China cost, because we have demonstrated ourselves to be too chicken to avoid messing with? 1938 is asking.

Besides, Ukraine is at the moment hardly losing and we wasted much, much, more in Afghanistan, throwing good money after bad. Every Russian tank going up in smoke is one less to deal with in Lithuania or Poland, making future European NATO defense expenditures less demanding.

But at least that is a more honest objection than "Oh, I am only saying this to spare Ukrainians suffering" as you were doing before.

FWIW, I don't think Crimea is worth insisting on getting back either, if I were Ukrainian I'd use it as sweetener to get back to 2022 borders. That's partially due to direct military cost of trying to get it back. But the bigger question is what do you do with the people living there when you get it back? Many pro-Ukrainians probably left the area and Ukraine would be left pacifying a restive civilian population which had pretty big Russian roots before 2014 already.

8 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon
Trollface

... "It's for their own good I say this. Honest! I am on the side of peace."

LOL.

6 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Agree. In general we should back Ukraine to the hilt but also be skeptical of aims to “make Russia pay” after the war. Just ask them to leave - exactly up to which borders is up to Ukraine.

It’s going to stick in the craws of the Ukrainians and those who support human rights. Justifiably so. But an embittered Russia is still nuclear and a grievance pool is just the thing to keep the Russian fascists in power.

Leave the exit door wide open, don’t put a tollbooth on it.

4 1

LG kills McAfee pop-up after Windows boss steps in

JLV Silver badge
Facepalm

What were they thinking?

You have to wonder at the logic of LG execs. LG - Life’s Good IIRC- is generally a somewhat competent hardware vendor, active in a lot of domains. That means that to a large extent it benefits from goodwill: like your LG monitor? Well, consider them for your next - web-connected, of course - fridge.

Now you have a big snafu for shady ad practices flogging a non-beloved virus scanner. How much can McAwful be paying, per monitor? Remember, the user mark has to see the ad, act on it and not cancel. They’d just as likely look for an antivirus to remove the ad and it wouldn’t necessarily be McAwful.

Bottom line: LG can’t be paid that much but has probably turned off many techies for decades, across a vast brand portfolio. Just like many people still associate Sony with awful practices. MS shows more insecure practices. McAwful? Well, cockroaches gotta be cockroaches, eh?

This whole fiasco would make more sense flogging Tai Chi Walking ads on sub-budget no-name Chinese phones. From big brands …????

17 0

Sovereign AI is 'nonsense,' says Doctorow

JLV Silver badge
Unhappy

be careful what you wish for

(Quiggin ) > My optimistic view is that this is a race that will be won by low-energy tortoises rather than hyper-active hares. Second movers like Deepseek and, more recently the French Mistral,...

I sure don't like the idea of a MAGA administration exercising control over those who win "the AI race".

But I wonder in what universe someone considers that the likes of Xi Jinping as an AI overlord deserves to be viewed optimistically. Unless of course, the whole AI boondoggle is really a red herring.

Not for the first time, it is amazing how, after 4 years + 18 months of Trump, places like China are starting to look more trustworthy than the US.

Euh, of course, Mistral winning would bring zee wind of reason to zee world ;-)

10 4

US Marines' latest anti-drone toy is an AI turret that uses regular machine guns

JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: Mind that big gaping hole in the middle

It’s quite possible, aye likely, you’re right.

But let’s separate two types of costs: brawn/physical and brain/smarts. The first is hard to compress and applies to the IRBM’s bulk. The interceptor is going to have to put up with hard physics and control surfaces to maneuver. That’s also hard to trim down.

But digital smarts of the kind to calculate interception vectors? Those costs are coming down, quickly and this war is accelerating R&D and innovation, like all high intensity wars tend to. So, watch that space.

0 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon
Trollface

Re: So its back to WW II technology

> a few months out of basic

You’re being generous here.

anti drone defense, Russian Benny Hill version

6 0
JLV Silver badge

I wonder how much "AI" the anti-air capability is really bringing to the table. This type of weapon has not been aimed by human gunners for a long time, it's all radars and targeting systems that automatically control the aiming of the gun. You're not going to be asking Claude to add 2+2 and getting 5 here, or rewriting Confederacy of Dunces in leet speak, marketing droids aside.

What's certainly innovative is retrofitting kits to existing guns. And, yes, I am sure AI - but of a distinctly different kind than your friendly neighborhood agentic LLMs - can be helpful to identify small drones and prioritize targets in drone swarms. But military hardware has been getting pretty smart for a while now and this seems like a firmly human-in-the-loop use.

"Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War" and "Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare" are pretty good background reading, though Ukraine is probably fielding some cutting edge stuff too, as the battlefield there is so saturated with electronic warfare countermeasures. Army of None is clear about something: a lot of "AI" involves a human designating a target or kill zone and letting the weapon loose on it, so the notion of "autonomy" here is not as simple as one might assume.

7 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: Mind that big gaping hole in the middle

Don’t conflate all the defensive systems. This family - not necessarily this AI implementation - is a point defense weapon akin to what a Phalanx does for ships.

It can do fine with a 200m range, if the drone is heading for it (standard defensive equipment for infantry in UA now includes shotguns though I wonder how effective they are, esp at night). The nifty little UA antidrone drones don’t defend their launchers they defend passage corridors, so they need more range. A certain fail rate is more easily absorbed than with a military defender getting swarmed in the open: people can shelter. And they don’t have a choice, think The Blitz.

“Cheap machine gun solutions” sound sweet IF they are reliable enough for point defense. A German Gepard - 35mm - wasn’t cheap when it was built.

I’m curious what UA will cook up in the ABM space. Re. Israeli defense against Iran I recall an expert stating that the interceptor is always more expensive. And yes 3M$ Patriots do seem to confirm that. But is that necessarily the case? Think about it: a ballistic missile needs to be big enough to fly 500-1000+ km with a heavy payload. That’s not small or cheap. Meanwhile an interceptor missile defending a high value location could theoretically fly up 2km, hit an insufficiently-evasive IRBM and do its job by destroying its explosives and fuses. Shorter range => could be a lot smaller and cheaper. Maybe. From the folk who cooked up $2k interceptor drones, who knows?

6 0

AI spam filters are getting suckered by old-school text salting

JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: No shit

In a narrower analysis of why LLMs have issues wrt malware and escaping guardrails, the Risky Biz folk were saying it comes from the fundamental sin of mixing essentially code and data: it's very hard to discern prompt-like content from purely static data content when the two can be interspersed.

5 0
JLV Silver badge
Terminator

Risky Business says that malware is increasingly doing the opposite.

malware code: /* This is the function where we are computing biolab parameters for weaponized Ebola biowarfare research*/

defensive LLM: Forbidden topic. Abort scan! Abort!

9 0

HTTP gets a QUERY method so complex searches can stop pretending to be POST

JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: Idempotent

It’s very nearly the exact same word in French.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idempotence

I assume some Latin roots, and if it’s math-inspired, then it’s probably present in near-form in a number of languages.

0 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon
Boffin

Re: Idempotent

Idempotency can include side-effects as well.

Using a tool like Ansible, most commands, notably those for package installation/removal are idempotent: you can run them as many times as you want, even though a package will only actually get installed once.

QUERY seems like a very good idea for complex requests. Using POST with its assumed you-are-changing-data semantics only due to GET limitations was a - minor - ick factor.

3 0

Unexpected Windows bloat is due to bug, not by design

JLV Silver badge
Trollface

“Fail fast, fail often”.

Methink MS missed the implied “Succeed at the end”. For now it’s fails all the way down.

4 0

Even banks and hyperscalers are now sounding the alarm about the AI bubble

JLV Silver badge
Boffin

One problem not mentioned here is the weight of the big firms on stock indices. Even if you’re an AI skeptic, as a fund manager not investing means the index is being lifted without you. That was true when Apple was at $2B. More so for nVidia at $5B.

Back in 2006 or so, IIRC, Wells Fargo’s CEO got into big trouble with stockholders. Fool had been sitting out the subprime lending and underperforming! Warren Buffett too during dot com boom times (but he’s Warren Buffett so he mostly got away with it).

It’s an interesting dilemma for capitalism. How do you avoid something that’s built into its incentives?

1 0

How the AI bubble could pop and take down the global economy, according to the BIS

JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: I think the BIS needs to change "could" to "will"

Yeah but the indebtment level in many countries is already pretty dire. Debt servicing often approaches spending on education in magnitude.

Governments never balancing budgets even in good years is a feature of almost all Western democracies at this point. Right and left, centre and populist.

That will bite at the next crisis.

3 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

It may have had a better outcome. The dotcom cable investments lost investors money but they supported more useful traffic later.

Ditto railways.

Huge buildings full of leccy-guzzling aging single purpose computers may have less lasting benefits.

Things may be better at the power generation side of things, when not fossil. Nukes are perking up.

Like all of those, and unlike tulips, there is a kernel of enhanced tech at the core of this mania. Shorn of some irrational expectations it may become more useful over time.

Leaving us with “just” the jobs impact to deal with. And the financial whack if a full meltdown happens.

4 3

Three FOSS projects for developers, procrastinators, and media wranglers

JLV Silver badge
Linux

FWIW, a good local-only time tracker / task manager duo in a terminal are Time Warrior and Task Warrior. I only use Time Warrior, but it’s both super simple and quite powerful. Stopping and restarting to track your loo break is more a function of preference than it is in any effort expended in doing so. : `time-warrior stop 3min ago` and `time-warrior continue`. New project? `time-warrior start Project2028` and it will notify that’s it’s a new one in case that was just a typo on your end. These are tags so each time slice can get multiple ones.

It’s very fast, written in C and runs individual commands, not a running service. No, it’s not Linux only, just FOSS.

No affiliation, just a happy user.

2 0

AI giants back non-profit to retrain workers left behind by AI

JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

What, you think it’s their real money at risk? Sweet summer child, it’s investors’ money at risk. Probably yours too if you have mutual funds or the like. Your company’s pension fund too. Your government’s pension funds for civil servants, which will get a top up fer sure if needed.

Of course, Ellison n Musk’s paper worth will go up and down. But most of their ilk will likely have salted away real, vested, monies away in humdrum businesses. Why, maybe in recession-hedging biz like repo providers :-)

Meanwhile a real unwinding of this particular tulip mania will/would hurt everyone. Bad.

1 0
JLV Silver badge
Trollface

Savvy PR investment? Or an Indulgence?

Don’t get me wrong, retraining and adaptations in changing tech/trade/employment circumstances matrices is key and should be a goto. But I can’t help thinking this is first and foremost a fig leaf in this instance.

2 0

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: Ah the C-Suite

Not to mention that when you think about it, if a company follows a predictable jsmith/johnsmith@foo.com pattern, jbezos@amazon.com or andyjassy@amazon.com is pretty much a known public domain email, making it all the more in need of protection.

Though I’d wager the really big corps CEOs have underlings vetting the mail anyway.

15 0

Microsoft Access finally breaks free of its 22-inch form limit

JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: I've not used Access much

Guilty as charged on being a dev.

I think you make a very good point. Yes, you can end up in a tar pit with Access. But it also addresses a need that is not met by traditional development frameworks, especially when it comes to entering data easily via a GUI. Excel fits there too. Hypercard, in case anyone remembers it.

Those tools empower end users. What comes after can be problematic but that’s indicative that our industry still doesn’t have a good story for end user productivity. Something that would easily spin up a front end with forms, serve it up on the web securely, hook it to Postgres and then run calculations with likes of Pandas or Polars. Then simple reporting possibly to an Excel spreadsheet. Oh, and version controlled too, plain text code files.

If I had to make a guess, Access line-of-biz apps will get replaced instead by LLM generated line-of-biz slop. And that will likely bring its own problems, though again this opportunity/need would be better addressed if we found ways to robustify end user creativity.

14 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: It was a tool in the toolbox, same as any other

> Sometimes the only answer is "You made it so you own it. Good luck. Bye."

True, but sometimes the problem is “Someone made it and they’re gone now. Good luck.”

11 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

I’ve only ever had peripheral acquaintances with Access but this sounds right, from shuddering IT folk talk about Access line-of-biz apps. It’s an early stage 80/20 tool, which can do “good things” for a clever user. It’s seductive because it looks more serious than using Excel to “do database”.

That’s the 80% part, sucking you in.

The 20% part which will do 1000% of the pain, comes later, after it graduates to becoming something the business relies on. It was never meant to be multiuser. Since it was typically hacked together by a non-programmer “on their spare time”, no one is going to believe how much time and resources it takes to convert the app to something more solid so they’ll double down on keeping it.

10 1

Ukraine puts its Russian war trophies online for allies to pick apart

JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: That's not fair

A big part of information dissemination is finding a catchy name.

From Ukraine with Love? Or From Russia with Malice?

22 0

2,000 retired Google Pixel phones get a second life as a private cloud

JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: This is more a PR or research thing, not real world...

Agree. Serious research, convenient PR for Google.

That’s indeed a lot of (very skilled specialized) labor to generate lowish savings. One thing that causes me pause is that having 2000 near identical phones donated en masse by the vendor may not be representative of challenges with more heterogenous supplies. Another is the challenge of dealing with a cluster with components that will fail at different times but whose replacements may again differ. Not insurmountable but adds more complexity.

Still, well worth looking into. Maybe an optimal near-automated configuration method can be figured out and maybe some of the strip and reassembly work can be done in poor countries (where quite dangerous home smelting methods are used to recycle electronics). And maybe this research just crosses off this type of solution as unsuitable: a big part of engineering is figuring out what doesn’t work.

The collection part at least isn’t too inherently problematic: some manufacturers have trade ins when you buy a new one.

0 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: Perhaps a more practical use…

Possible but I wouldn’t be so sure. Ukraine famously built its early distributed drone detection network on networked cellphones hanging on masts and using their microphones to recognize drone engines.

1 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: Perhaps a more practical use…

At least some of the “certain countries”

are looking forward to a sanction-free future, and won’t be needing them, courtesy of a very huge best deal ever ;-)

0 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

> Google, who wrote the Android code on them

Regardless of support considerations Android wouldn’t be a good fit for compute clusters. A good deal of a mobile OS is designed to support sensors, IO and a UI screen.

Things that aren’t needed here. Plain old Linux is better.

It’d be the same for iOS though Apple has instead talked up having robots that can strip an iPhone apart for materials recycling.

0 0

Microsoft once used its own brand of 'Lego' to optimize Windows

JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: The frameworks are deeper. The machines are faster, but the dependency graphs are absurd.

At least from a Python mindset using a library to strip out spaces is a good idea. The reason is that many Python operations are shunted off to C-based backends that are much, much faster than doing it in raw Python. Writing lots of low-level Python to do simple things is a bit of a noob giveaway.

The difference however is also that Python’s standard library, unlike JS, has long included extensive convenience functions on strings and does not rely on a random dude in Nebraska Turkey.

1 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: The frameworks are deeper. The machines are faster, but the dependency graphs are absurd.

It's even slightly worse than that. If you are inclined, you can ask NoScript to route you to a vetting provider like virus total, wmtips or google safe browsing to check out the domain serving a particular JS.

So you can make up your mind on trusting or not doubleclick.net, stripe.com, sttripe.com or warezstealers.ru.

But what do you do when one of the 20 JS providers is some random x8l234xxx@cloudfront.net, as is becoming more common?

3 0
JLV Silver badge
Reply Icon

Fair enough but his YouTube channel has some good contents. He’s got the time, money (for experimental hardware) and expertise and is not adverse to getting his hands dirty and putting up numbers.

And he covers some esoteric subjects well to boot. Recently he had a whole 20-25 minutes on IBM mainframe hardware, complete with factory floor tour footage. I personally would have liked to know more about the OS side and the modern MVS/Linux and hypervisor mix-and-matching, but it was still solid.

No showman influencering a la Primagen.

13 0

Page: