Posts by Daedalus 1230 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Oct 2009
When cloud computing came along, all these companies signed up, not counting on the fact that a few large suppliers were going to control access to all their data.
Now AI is going to be supported by a few large companies, and everyone who signs up will eventually face the choice of paying through the nose or trying to implement AI themselves without having anyone on board who can actually do it.
All these deployment delays have nothing to do with the suits outsourcing everything, so that they have at best skeleton crews on site. Or worse, perhaps, the dress shirt and designer jeans crowd are staring at stacks of boxes while their minions desperately phone around for any kind of help.
Did the writer of this article take account of the likelihood that all those scrapped Chromebooks would not be quite, what is the expression, fit for purpose because of not being gently handled? Cracked screens, abused and contaminated keyboards, broken hinges, destroyed data ports and other motherboard issues, and of course the horrors of old batteries.
People and electronics are a bad mixture. It's no coincidence that in the days of photocopiers, having the copier in a locked room with a designated operator, however inconvenient it was for the "got to have it right away" brigade, improved the MTBF immensely. Now we have the same problems with printers ("How was I to know it needed special transparency sheets?").
I never did find out what the Beehive was, but it was somewhere and we had to write code as if it were going to run on the Beehive. Or at least take account of the Beehive's data protocols. You see, it was the 80s and a world famous chemical company had been in the process control automation business for decades. So many decades, in fact, that there was a machine colloquially known as the Beehive that dated from the 60s.
Never mind that there were systems that could run whole sections of chemical plants autonomously. There was still the Beehive, and there was Fortran IV, which was the language in vogue when the Beehive went into service. And which therefore was the language in which all work had to be done. Just for good measure, the programming rules said that each statement had to have its own label number whether it was the target of the dreaded GOTO or not. Earlier writers had helpfully left gaps in the numbering to allow statements to be inserted between, but of course those gaps were usually filled up by the time I fetched up there for the worst year of my career.
Did I mention that the developers there were among the least talented I have ever encountered? There were two gurus who weren't going to let new ideas get in the way of their retirement.
Oh well, they want editing, I'll give them editing. Delete 100 statements and replace them with the originals plus whatever I needed to add, all nicely renumbered. Make that 200 when necessary. This all had to be submitted as a "job" rather than done on the fly with an editor, as I was used to by then. That's their problem.
Turn the wheel the way it goes, only more so.
Who knows what mysterious parameter was being monitored?
I'm reminded of one of Asimov's Multivac stories. The three controllers get together after Multivac "won the war" to compare notes. One admits that the incoming data was so bad he fudged it a lot, even adding random numbers sometimes. The second says that he had his suspicions about the programming, so he would adjust the output to fix it according to his thoughts. The third, being the top guy, admits that he himself had many doubts about the whole thing and occasionally resorted to the most ancient of computers.
"Heads or tails, gentlemen?"
That's not how you modernise an old solution running on ancient hardware. As an intern?
You find somebody who can do it outside the company. You agree on a price, get them to submit for the job, split the proceeds, then both of you disappear so there are no comebacks.
You might have to change your name.
My feelings exactly. Granted some people have no ability to put things into words, but that's what L1 and L2 people are for. If only they would do their jobs instead of just "the needful".
How many times have I sat there steaming while some bozo Ummed and Erred their way through what should have been a simple speech? I want to grab them by the throat and say "Talk as if it was important for people to understand you!".
Once I overheard a cubicle drone trying to contact somebody in Mexico without knowing Spanish. I offered the services of a bilingual friend, who got him through to his contact who actually spoke English. The drone then proceeded to talk in circles, wasting the effort and everybody's time.
Florida Man, in addition to his other mistakes, has "sold" his Fortress of Floritude to a company "controlled" by none other that Florida Man Junior. With the expressed agreement, no doubt, that he be allowed to reside and continue all his activities, legitimate or otherwise, in that place. This is evidently to prevent said Fortress from being breached by the Evil Empire of the Law. As a bonus, he gets funds which will aid him in "campaigning" (no doubt against his imminent incarceration).
Of course, Junior, being a chip off the old block, may have ideas of his own. Including, possibly, deciding that Florida Man needs a dose of what King Lear got, sent off on his wanderings, perhaps with New York Mayor Emeritus as Fool (a part he appears to have rehearsed for in recent years).
Looking forward to Florida Man and Fool braving the blasted heath in a storm. In orange, of course.
Anybody care to speculate about the exact location of the company hired to do the archiving? Perhaps one located in a country famed for bait-and-switch staffing, exaggeration of capabilities and certifications etc.? Oh the physical archives may have stayed in the USA, but it's rupees to bhajis that the staff were located elsewhere.
When Richard Feynman went to teach in Brazil, he encountered a system of education that produced people who could spout answers to questions on demand, providing the answers were those they had learned by rote. So asking about "Brewster's Angle" (relating to the polarization of light reflected from the surface of a transparent medium) he could get chapter and verse from students who actually had no idea what polarization or refractive index meant, and couldn't say why light reflected off water might be polarized.
I include this because it's exactly the kind of "learning" we can expect from AI as related to medicine or science.
Every time this sort of debacle happens I'm reminded of the cartoon where the owners of a company are looking at, on the one side, huge computer stacks tended by white-coated acolytes, and on the other, an old guy hunched over a desk.
Caption: "You mean we need all that just to replace Fred?"
Similar story from Reddit: Severely incompetent client of industrial equipment installer orders and signs for an ISDN line without checking to see if it actually was installed. It was not, at least not at the client. The clueless telecom tech inexplicably did the job at a random building somewhere else in town. Inquiries by the equipment installer were stonewalled. Which building got the line? Sorry, client confidential. Well disconnect it! Nope, against company policy to enter a building without a contract.
Second line was correctly installed, leaving incompetent client on the hook for both lines. But installer was happy, at least as happy as you can be with such a client.
It's not just idiocy. When actual evil is at work you stay away, regardless of the opportunity cost. The company could quite easily have hired the dev and then stiffed them at the end, or claimed that the work was not done to spec. At worst, the dev could have been sued for some trumped-up reason.
Marketers, influencers, and a host of “leadership” coaches, copy writers, and content creators are all over social media telling everyone how much time and money they can save using ChatGPT and similar models to do their work for them
Who will break the news to them? What little relevance they had in the world will disappear, and them with it.
Elephant in the room: what was Cellmark doing with Social Security Numbers in the first place? There is no legitimate need for them outside of employment and banking. Unless Cellmark were coordinating with govt. databases, they should not have been requiring clients to submit them.
The techno-kludges of the fanfold era were quite monumental. I remember pictures of large cabinets in which the paper hung as if to let the ink dry, there being some reason to not have it sitting in a stack.
And then - a miracle. Somebody realized that printing miles of paper for people to inspect for problems was a Really Bad Idea.
What was to be done? Answer: print out only the items that looked off. Yes! Exception processing!
Of course, competent programmers are more expensive than old fogies with reading glasses and those funny appliances to keep their shirt sleeves from getting ink on them. But once a problem gets big enough, even the most resistant corporate drone will shell out.
The problem is how big it has to get before the shelling out occurs.
The company has extended automation from Jira to Confluence to make that sort of thing easier: finishing the new version would auto-create the new branch, see the release notes posted for approval, and marketing alerted it’s time to publish that blog post.
What? The idea of marketing being ready to do anything other than insist on last-minute changes is mind-boggling. Certainly if Atlassian are keen on bringing marketing closer to developers, many developers will be updating their CV's. Not to mention the project managers who won't enjoy being bypassed.
As for Confluence, if it's any better than a plain old Wiki I have yet to see it. My recent experience tells me that it's only as good as the people using it. Garbage in, garbage piled everywhere.
Ah yes, the days of mysterious beams flashing from one end of campus to the other. We never did get the lowdown on who was doing what, but there were plenty of candidates in Chem, Physics etc. Green was probably Argon-Ion, Red the HeNe. The only laser I ever worked with produced a 1 microsecond pulse at 1.06 microns, so no showing off with that one. Neodymium YAG glass, if anyone cares. Part of the rig was a delay line consisting of 100m of coax still wound on its reel, artlessly placed on the floor. Simple but effective.
You know, you could have quite a lot of fun setting up websites for these nutjobs, and then having "technical issues" just as their plans were about to come to fruition. Of course, letting the PTB and the PIC listen in on a side channel is a temptation to which you should not succumb.
The real truth that automation and AI expose is that most people are a waste of space. This includes Professors of Rhetoric who, amongst other failings, don't understand that the drones in their classes would be happy with a C or a C+. Finding people who care enough to do something well is hard. You can't do it by awarding participation trophies or passing every failing student on to the next mug. In fact, you discourage those who want to do well by passing those who don't care. The fact that the "don't care" crowd vastly outnumber the "give a damn" crowd means that "democratic" education will always produce mediocrity.
Well, I guess that's our revelation for the week. Apparently even those who are not from northern Europe, are convinced that the acceptable face of venture capitalism is the proverbial white male.
Come to think of it, the company I bailed on last year was just a Harvard and Yale gloss on an Indian boiler room operation.
You can't judge a company by its website.
Bill Gates (for it is he) was so convinced that an install of the latest Windows was bulletproof that, while it was being demonstrated by his VP on stage and on live video across the planet, he pulled the plug on the test PC in the middle of the process.
To say that the VP was "white faced" at that point is an understatement.
The Jupiter mission ship in the movie "2001 - A Space Odyssey" was originally designed with large surfaces for heat dispersion when the on-board nuclear reactor was supposed to be working, running the drive system. These were deleted because they looked too much like fins, which, of course, are for ships that fly in atmospheres.
Instead we had the "seminal" design that we saw in the movie, a spherical habitation module connected to the drive module by a long spine. The novel kept the "fins".
It seems oligopoly is a bad thing unless you're a supplier to HMG, in which case the fewer bidders, the better. The UK had a lot of aerospace companies once upon a time. The myrmidons got tired of dealing with all those proles and directed them to merge into one, the better to engage over lunch at the club.
DEC had a bad case of "firstest with the mostest" which was great in the beginning but produced a culture of corporate arrogance, of the "we don't use standards, we are the standard" variety. They were not ready for the rise of Unix or the advent of the PC clone. They were not alone: several of the "workstation" mini-computer companies just couldn't let go of their proprietary systems, not to mention their huge markups.
...that few are qualified to practise.
I speak from the depths of yet another design doc that tries its hardest to be everything but. Discursive, digressive, talking about what things are not instead of what they are....
And don't get me started on those "look how smart we are" documents.
But let us also ask why that ever larger tome called "Your car and its features" is 98% warnings and 2% stuff you need to know.
He's also working for a law firm, who are considered villains in so many ways, not just for all the litigation, but for charging lawyer rates for work that is done by paralegals, being generally ignorant and entitled in their dealings with IT, etc. etc.
So "cheating" his employer in that case drew no disapproval and more than a few cheers.
Now while working for a certain formerly large and well-known corporation, and later working with former employees, I was made aware of how some people were able to start their own independent operations while also managing projects etc. for their immediate employer. Said people went independent, and then had the effrontery to sell their business back to that employer. Given the amount of backstabbing prevalent among the managerial and executive staff, this was no big deal and really just how business got done, almost like it was the mafia.
Meanwhile on the other side of town, people at a different company were running their churches out of their cubicles. Small time, but just as unethical.
A clear demonstration of the ironclad rule:
The last person to touch the system will get blamed for anything that goes wrong. Anything.
PS, you can start a fire with a computer program. At least, when I was running an unexpectedly long program (in BASIC, no less) using a Teletype terminal (yes, 110 baud, 95 db), the terminal eventually got tired of sitting there spinning its wheels, so to speak, and decided to have a quick smoke. Much to the consternation of all the other inhabitants of the erstwhile seminar room where the terminals were kept. Exeunt omnes.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
