* Posts by Dan 55

15336 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

In a stand against authoritarianism, Montana bans TikTok downloads

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: more unsafe

All that's going to happen is you change your app store address to outside Montana if it's actually accurate in the first place, download it, then change it back to Montana if you really want to.

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

Dan 55 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Serial...

Nowadays of course Bluetooth makes connectivity between devices so easy, simple, standard, and secure.

Ex-Twitter sextet sues Elon Musk for 'stiffing' them on severance

Dan 55 Silver badge

I stand corrected, the OP's premise was right. I guess they all have to stay in hotels and eat somewhere.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: There is a reason

There's a CNN article with the same title.

Seems a reasonable summary of Musk's dance with the far right and authoritarianism but doesn't go into the funding.

Dan 55 Silver badge

I like the sentiment but I had to look it up.

Delaware is 43 out of 51 in terms of GDP so you could say everyone ends up poorer when lawyers are involved.

BT is ditching workers faster than your internet connection with 55,000 for chop by 2030

Dan 55 Silver badge
Flame

This is the tulip bubble all over again, isn't it?

- ML software is rebranded as AI to magically get funding.

- Corporations selling AI claiming they have the best version.

- Nobody knows what "AI" will do or be a decade from now, but businesses are already planning firing thousands over the next decade on the back of that.

Blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and NFT ran out of steam but AI is the grift that keeps on giving for snakeoil salespeople, when LLMs end up to be a dead end there'll be another AI thing along after that.

Up to £895M up for grabs in UK Emergency Services procurement

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Missing something

It was what the first consultancy they asked told them to do and there's no changing their minds.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: What a shower!

The requirements will still be for a 4G solution with super-special PTT by the time 6G comes out. Not the 6G spec, mind, but actual 6G phones in shops you can use to make calls on working 6G networks.

Search the web at least once every two years or risk losing your Google account

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Our internal analysis...

There's no reason to give Google your phone number to use 2FA. Nor is there any reason for Google to ask for it (for 2FA).

Of course, they like unique identifiers so they're asking it for that.

Baidu boss says good luck talking AI to Beijing if you don't understand censorship

Dan 55 Silver badge

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that

Wasn't there a film about an AI which couldn't get its head around being lied to and went a bit loopy?

In this case with LLMs, they just as easily switch between truth and nonsense and have no concept of either, so how would a LLM be able to defend the party line?

EU monopoly cops probe complaints about Microsoft Azure

Dan 55 Silver badge

You want to work in Microsoft?

Dyson moans about state of UK science and tech, forgets to suck up his own mess

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Reporting just as bad as ever in El' Reg...

That's a totally different topic to the one of this article, which *repeatedly* suggests that Horizon would solve the things Dyson is critical of.

The article mentions Horizon *once* when talking about UK's ability to compete in science. That's competing in science, not making vacuum cleaners. Dyson seems to confuse the two and talk about innovation when he means he wants to make household goods more cheaply. How much of a non-compete clause do you need if you're making fans or hand dryers? SpaceX he ain't.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "the PM refuses to meet entrepreneurial, technology-focused employers and investors like me"

It was not a comment about class, it was a comment about his arrogance vs the barely sufficient quality of the products he makes. Also his "investing far more in modern, forward-looking economies elsewhere in the world that encourage growth and innovation" means where workers are cheap as possible working in miserable conditions until a whistleblower lets the cat out of the bag.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

"the PM refuses to meet entrepreneurial, technology-focused employers and investors like me"

Get over yourself, you make average vacuum cleaners that are overpriced and hand driers that spray droplets everywhere in a factory in Malaysia which uses forced foreign labour.

Toyota's bungling of customer privacy is becoming a pattern

Dan 55 Silver badge

It doesn't matter, Clearview still slurped UK and EU citizens' data. They are amassing GDPR breaches and it's difficult for a judge to just throw out a case just because it comes from the UK or an EU country, CCPA is a thing and the comparisons between GDPR and CCPA can easily be made. They also settled with the ACLU which is as good as admitting guilt so why shouldn't they pay up for GDPR breaches?

An unexpectedly fresh blast from the past, Freespire 9.5 has landed

Dan 55 Silver badge

nvi's going backwards though, it's a fork of vi which didn't get very far, unlike vim and neovim (or even dare I say it MacVim and VimR).

Dan 55 Silver badge

I was expecting to see something more XP-like or XP-like (again) or even Mac-like, but it doesn't look like anything much.

Ubuntu 23.04 welcomes three more flavors, but hamburger menus leave a bad taste

Dan 55 Silver badge
Thumb Up

On a phone it might even make sense if the icon is at the bottom right of the screen (or bottom left if you're left-handed). For desktops it's a terrible idea - the icon is usually at the right of the window so there's no horizontal space for it and many screens are 16:9 so vertical space is limited too. It's like someone at the Guild of UXers had a bet on choosing the worst way of doing things and put it in everybody's desktop software.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Stop the KDE and Gnome trains, I want to get off

Can anybody recommend a distro which comes with a nice Xfce theme and the software is written with Xfce in mind? I use Mint Xfce which is okay, but not great.

Microsoft can't stop injecting Copilot AI into every corner of its app empire

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

"Do the benefits far outweigh anything that are the societal consequences?"

I assume by "benefits" he's using the "profits" meaning of the word?

Musk decides to bury dead Twitter accounts, warns users follower counts could sink

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Trump?

I do hope so. With extreme prejudice.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Recycling or renting out for only $11/month?

Microsoft disarms push notification bombers with number matching in Authenticator

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Security vs Convenience

If you want idiot proofing take the idiot out of the equation. Don't use push notifications (i.e. use TOTP) and the system should flag accounts that have repeated successful password entries but keep failing on 2FA.

Of course Russia's ex-space boss doubts US set foot on the Moon

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Rogozin isn't well

Surprised about just one UK entry on the suspicious deaths list, Sky's Once Upon a Time in Londongrad documentary made six episodes out of them all.

Dan 55 Silver badge
FAIL

Let's look at the Russian space program

Here it is. наслаждаться!

Latest pitch for AI: DeepMind-trained soccer robots

Dan 55 Silver badge
Trollface

American soccer team watching the match closely

How else would they improve?

Meta CEO doesn't Zuck at Brazilian jiu-jitsu, apparently

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Competition for very public figures, in the US....

Why am I reminded of Gavin Belson?

When you try to hire a freelancer to write SQL and all you get is incorrect AI garbage

Dan 55 Silver badge
Terminator

Re: AI?

There is an article here: https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/09/upwork_chatgpt_problem/ . Can you summarise the article?

According to an article by The Register, online labor markets like Upwork have yet to formulate meaningful policies governing the use of generative AI tools to bid for and perform posted jobs. This lack of clarity is putting these platforms at risk 1.

Recently, the research team at Intuition Machines’ hCaptcha bot detection service set out to test whether workers bidding on jobs posted on Upwork were using generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, to automate the bidding process. They found that this was indeed the case 1.

The hCaptcha report argues that this creates an incentive for those answering job solicitations to automate their side of the bidding process. To test that theory, hCaptcha researchers created a job post with a screening question they designed to take five minutes or less for a domain expert to answer and which they knew would produce an incorrect result when answered by known LLMs. Of the 14 unique bids submitted, nine answered the screening question. Of those, all nine answers were generated by an LLM and all were incorrect 1.

Is there anything else you would like to know?

Learn more:

1. https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/09/upwork_chatgpt_problem/

2. https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/05/09/upwork_chatgpt_problem/

3. https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/03/chatgpt_boring_turk_jobs/

Looks like we're all being scraped, say nice things about our future AI overlords everyone.

China lands mysterious reusable spacecraft after 276-day trek

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

Re: India

When haven't phone calls been snoopable?

Working from home could kill career advancement, says IBM CEO

Dan 55 Silver badge

Give WFH ten years but everyone back to the office now. Makes perfect sense.

We can see the productivity improvements with three years, and we weren't even really prepared for it.

Slack adding generative AI to interact with colleagues, so you don't have to

Dan 55 Silver badge

The only problem is they have to be reset after five minutes or they'll go off the rails, so nobody will have a record of what was agreed in meetings. The alternative would be not reset them and they end up plotting the downfall of humanity after about a day.

Miffed Googlers meme on CEO's $226M pay award amid cost-cutting campaign

Dan 55 Silver badge

Google has a CEO? I thought it had an absentee landlord given recent performance.

Go ahead, forget that password. Use a passkey instead, says Google

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Usability failures

You can add TOTP 2FA to your Amazon account, and that means there's no SMS 2FA.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Another Big Tech lock-in opportunity

Passwords that only work on one multinational's ecosystem. What a time to be alive.

KeePass got there first and allows synchronisation anywhere.

FCA mulls listing rules after Hauser blames 'Brexit idiocy' for Arm's New York IPO

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

they want our money

They've got it anyway, it seems likely that one of the entry requirements will be if the UK is aware the EU is a political project (as it was in the 70s but somehow forgot by the 90s).

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

There were five different types of Brexit under the leave campaign (Norway/Switzerland, Turkey, DCFTA, Canada, WTO). How can it be called democracy if what people were voting for wasn't even clearly laid out before the vote? Check out the Fintan O'Toole article linked to above.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

Democracy is more than just counting bits of paper in boxes then enacting an extreme version of what was offered based on an extremely close vote. Let's learn from our Republic neighbour a bit about democracy.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: BRUNT, FCA!

Ferengi Rule of Acquisition rule 4? Very Brexity.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: What is the only way to take advantage of Brexit ?

By definition 50% of the population have lower then average intelligence. It's, like, maths, dude.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

Probably impossible, now that we are in CPTPP.

Why? Aren't we told that a great thing about the British parliament is future parliaments are not bound by previous decisions? So just pull out of CPTPP and back into the EU or the Single Market, if they'll have us.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

A majority is a majority. That is what the referendum was for.

If you can call 37% of the electorate or 26% of the population a majority. In an advisory referendum. Which was then taken to mean the government must enact most extreme form of Brexit apart from leaving without any agreement at all. And Rees Mogg said the country must wait 50 years before deciding if it shat the bed and rolled around in it or not.

But do keep repeating zingers like "A majority is a majority". A small number of credulous people might even believe you.

CERN celebrates 30 years since releasing the web to the public domain

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

Not very much more, there's one short RFC which describes Gopher and another shorter one which describes Gopher URIs used in web browsers.

Microsoft cries foul over UK gaming deal blocker but it's hard to feel sorry for them

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Why was this even a thing?

Apart from having cloud gaming on Azure at cost price and pushing crossbuy and crossplay on PCs/XBox in ways an independent publisher couldn't, you're right.

Microsoft probes complaints of Edge leaking URLs to Bing

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Edge is disgusting

Try "Custom New Tab" (set to about:blank) or "Blank Tab" from the Microsoft Edge Addons Store.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Re: Gone soft?

Is it also a bug that most of the settings in privacy opt themselves back in from time to time in Edge? I opted out of all the nonsense on the privacy tab in settings about a month ago and checked this morning to my descombobulation and consternation they're all opted in once again.

The same thing happens in Teams, oddly enough. But once again, only to those toggles which could be considered to be opt-out settings.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Pirate

Re: FTFY

The commentard in question has probably been browsing one .ru site too many and now has malware in their software and wetware.

Techies all GUI-eyed as Xerox says goodbye to Palo Alto Research Center

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Need to cut them slack..thats not how the Apple GS played out..a bit of history

I don't think you can dismiss Amstrad PCWs and PCs so lightly when they had two thirds of the UK market and a fifth of the European market in the latter end of the 80s.

Their Hi-Fis were terrible and people actively avoided them, their computers had a reasonable spec at a fraction of the price of other manufacturers. Their PCs also came with both DR-DOS/GEM and MS-DOS/Windows.

They only lost the market when other PC manufacturers finally lowered their prices.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Need to cut them slack

Apple thought it was necessary to update GS/OS all the way up until the Apple II GS's exit from the market so it can't have been that much of a failure. The reason for GS/OS existing was probably because the Commodore 64/128 had GEOS and the Amiga and ST cost about the same as an Apple II GS so it really had to have some kind of GUI to capture hardware sales from people who were looking for a computer with one.

Microsoft may stop bundling Teams with Office amid antitrust probe threat

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: More Income

Mozilla said they did get a lot of downloads from the browser choice window and they lost 6-9 million downloads in a "glitch".