Posts by Pascal Monett

Just another reason

to not rush into a service offered online as soon as it opens.

Wait a few years, to see if it is viable. Because, if you don't, you stand a good chance of being disappointed and losing money.

I love it

Every half-brain change Elon makes to his "platform" is continually blowing up in his face.

I just love watching that.

"Grab is now working to adopt a single font"

Kudos to Grab for a momentous job, and special points if they do open-source their app sizer. I'm sure many other developers will find that extremely useful.

But there is one thing I don't understand : the multiple font issue. Why does it even exist ? Why didn't Grab specify the working font at the beginning of its project, and stick to it ?

I would have thought brand identity would be a consideration, but apparently Grab has multiple teams and each team made its own UI decisions.

That doesn't strike me as a good idea.

"Copilot remains a technology to keep an eye on"

Yes, indeed. Any reincarnation of Clippy needs to be erased, preferably with a flamethrower.

There is nothing AI from Brokzilla that can benefit anyone but Borkzilla.

"We've always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products"

Yeah. Well, making the Founding Fathers black is really going to rock the boat on that score.

The real question is : how much other information is going to be biased and transformed with Google AI ?

After all, bias can go both ways. Either you show the truth, or you don't.

And if you don't, you can't be trusted. Cleopatra wasn't black, however much some people in Hollywood would like to think.

US lawyers

They are a species that is in dire need of becoming endangered.

So you spent a few hundred hours preparing and presenting a case ? That does not justify $300K/hour in any way, shape or form. You did your fucking job, and for that you should be paid no more than your already exorbitant $1000/hour fee.

This is ambulance chasing at its finest. I certainly do not support His Muskiness in any way, but these scum need to be put down. Period.

"labelling deepfakes with permanent unique metadata or other identifiers"

I really wonder how that will work reliably. I imagine that some kind of watermark will be visible on the video, likely not in the middle. So, if it is at the bottom or along a side, anyone who cares can just crop the watermark out and republish the video without it. If the watermark is on the top, that would likely risk cropping the person's head and that would rather severely impact the efficiency of the deepfake, so maybe the watermark should be on the top.

But, given that I have no idea what the identifiers are supposed to be, I might just be spouting nonsense.

Ah, SolarWinds123

With security like that, you don't need to be a hacker to get in.

"We have received requests"

Oh, so that's all you need ? Requests ? Not even many requests, just requests.

Okay then, here's another request : make your smartphone batteries user-replaceable, please.

There, you've got the request. When will that happen ? Never ? So there's more to it than just requests. Probably the fact that shutting down an entire continent of a market might make your money pile grow a bit slower.

Methinks that is more likely to be the cause.

"Our now proven robust lunar program"

Now proven ? You've launched one mission and it landed on its side. That doesn't sound very proven to me.

But hey, nothing like tootin' your own horn, right ?

"It has helped to save thousands of lives over recent years."

Really ?

Prove it.

Nobody needs to buy an AI PC

But Borkzilla, Chipzilla & co need to sell AI PCs on the understanding that more cores, more GHz and more pixels is soo last millenium, so the only thing that marketing can think of to lure in the bait customer is now AI.

I'm sure that, by the time AI has tired itself out in marketing eyes, quantum will be the Next Best Thing^TM.

But what will come after that ? I'm guessing marketing will have an apocalypse moment then.

"traffic to Stack Overflow has steadily dropped over time"

And that will continue in inverse relation with just how much Stack Overflow considers itself a money-making tool versus a public utility.

The more Stack orients itself towards making money and locking down its content, the less people will go to it.

Tek Tips is a site that has never changed its objective : being useful to the public. It has competent people in every one of its forums, and I have never had a bad experience on that site.

Stack, on the other hand, has form in restricting its content unless you pay, thereby declaring its basic intent. Stack is not my first choice destination to solve a problem I might have.

"analysis of more than 4,000 clusters [..] prior to optimization"

Sure. It's called hindsight.

Once the project is rolling in production, it's easy to know what resources you need after a while.

It's a lot more difficult to forecast what you need before the project is started, especially when you have no experience managing projects in the cloud.

Companies will adjust their resources soon enough - the beancounters will see to that.

"regulate virtual assets"

All assets are virtual these days. Since COVID, I have touched actual, physical money less than half a dozen times. Funny money does nothing to improve on that.

Taking the fall

So he's resigning because of something (one of) his predecessor(s) did ?

Wow. our CEOs over here really have it good. Most of them wouldn't resign even when they did screw up. Those who do resign are mostly made to do so by the Board.

Honor ? Yeah, they've read about it.

"now Electronic Arts is letting workers go"

I'm really sorry, but anyone working for EA, given it's history, is just asking for the pain.

"the new system does not have that functionality"

Why ? The previous one did. Who decided that that was not needed ?

Because somebody made that decision, and now, somebody is dead directly for lack of that functionality.

I think a lawsuit for wrongful death is the least that should happen.

Land and expand

I like the ring of that. It's like settlers reaching a new world.

Whether the locals will be extinguished or not is another matter . . .

Ah, Partition Magic

I still have the installer for it. I have used it extensively and it has performaed flawlessly without fail. I have never found a better, easier to use tool to resize and/or move partitions.

A purchase I have never regretted.

"Perform a hardware factory reset"

And poof! say goodbye to your entire, lovingly-crafted network setup.

I've got a hunch that there will be a fair number of people who won't want the hassle and will prefer to roll the dice.

Not saying they're right, just saying they couldn't be bothered.

"Jensen Huang believes"

I'm sure he does. He's an electrical engineer, not a programmer. Obviously, he thinks that, as long as you can find some code on the Web, you don't need a programmer.

Unfortunately, there is no pseudo-AI that is going to code Salesforce, or SAS, or an ERP. I don't care that there are now "prompt engineers", you still have to know where to place the prompt in the code.

Programmers are not going away any time soon.

So, he's thinking about the children, eh ?

Somebody check his hard disks to find out just how hard he's thinking about children . . .

"replete with AI-based noise cancellation"

Sorry, since when does noise cancellation need pseudo-AI ?

We already have noise cancelling headphones, and they work fine without bullshit AI.

Talk about polishing a turd . . .

"We are investing billions to grow our network"

About fucking time.

"Touchdown! This week, America landed a spacecraft on the Moon for the first time since 1972"

Yeah, on its side.

After two other countries did so much more successfully.

But hey, never miss a chance to USA! USA ! USA!

"more than a third of respondents intend to replace their current handset within the next year"

Ok, but how many respondents did not intend to replace their phone at all ?

Because I don't intend to replace my current phone until I retire.

In 8 years.

"This is messed up"

Oh, Elon, there are so many things that are messed up in this world.

And you are doing nothing to help.

"willing to sell Bing, which you wouldn't do if it was a strategic asset."

Ooh, burn. So, Borkzilla wanted to one-up Google, found out the hard way that it's not so easy, and is now stuck with something it can't kill because it integrated the damn thing into every part of its OS.

Sounds like schadenfreude to me . . .

"enabling the interaction with physical objects"

Um, like the pen I have in front of me on the table ?

I am willing to believe that a laptop has more power than a AR ski goggles, but you're not walking around with a laptop, so interaction with physical objects is pretty much going to be limited to, oh, my coffee cup is behind my screen, <reach out and grab it>.

Pff. Marketing. I never stop being amazed at what nonsense they think of to make us spend our hard-earned.