Posts by Pete 2

Talk is cheap

> Three-quarters of remote workers based in the UK's capital city would demand an inflation-busting pay increase – or quit altogether – if asked to give up their right to flexible working.

A least they say they would. But experience tells us that most of them wouldn't.

One place I was working (as "hired help" not as a permie) continually held meetings to discuss the lack of morale in their workplace. The hot topic was always the questionnaires their HR dept kept putting out and the results that said over 50% of their IT staff were thinking of leaving. However, hardly any of them ever did.

It turned out this was just grumbling, blowing off steam and that the only people who did leave (hence the need for bringing in outsiders) were the few talented individuals with initiative who easily found jobs elsewhere.

Do what we say, not as we do

> "What we also know is that it could maneuver; that it had propulsion capability and steerage capability and could slow down, speed up; and that it – it was on a path to transit over sensitive military sites,"

So, much like a U2 or SR-71. I feel there is much "pot calling the kettle black" in this latest situation.

I wonder if Santa Claus be giving USA airspace a wide miss this coming christmas?

Basic Business B****cks

The first (some would say: only) function of a consultant is to make the boss look good.

Therefore when writing a report for a C-level, it is vital to know what they want it to say.

It is just as vital to make sure your own backside is covered, in the event that the fan gets pointed in your direction. Which it inevitably will be.

If you want to change the mind of such a higher-up, the only two strategies are to suggest their proposed course would be illegal, or to provide another option that is cheaper.

Always keep a folder (directory: for the initiated) in your workspace named "evidence". Make sure the files within are updated regularly - so the metadata is fresh and that the contents are encrypted. The contents can be anything you like - the quality of the coffee, the tastefulness of your colleagues attire, the weather, who the gossips are. Just not anything actionable. The idea is for people to know you have it, not what it contains. Extra joy can be had from naming the files after people in your workplace.

The perfect hack

> Teams Premium will offer a slew of new features. For example, intelligent recap promises to offer "automatically generated meeting notes, recommended tasks, and personalized highlights,"

So when the minutes of the meeting report that the finance and purchasing committee unanimously voted to buy £1000000 of Microsoft products, who could possibly challenge that. After all, it's in the minutes - so it must be right .... right?

Next up: the AI recommends that the company buys an upgrade to the newest Microsoft AI. Repeat all over the world. One step closer to AI domination.

Wrong direction

> even with the cuts, the company grew headcount significantly over the past year.

And looking at the (see link in article) financial results, 2021 revenue was $117bn but in 2022 it was $116bn.

2021 costs were $71bn but in 2022 $87bn

Income from operations in 2021 were $46bn but in 2022 $29bn

and net income for 2021 was $39bn down to $23bn in 2022.

This does not look to me like a business which is building on success. With the exception of their costs and expenses, all their key financial metrics were down in 2022, compared with the year earlier. And "down" means a 30-40+% fall from 2021.

Microsoft to the rescue?

> Businesses are likely to sweat device assets for longer this year as they spend conservatively in a weakening economy

Maybe what businesses need is a new version of their O/S that is so bloated and slow that it demands an entire new range of power-hungry PCs to run it.

Isn't that how it's always been done in the past?

Dear intruder

We have a system that will (maybe, we hope) isolate all those naughty Linux devices from accessing our fragile and bug-ridden Microsoft network.

So in the future please only try to hack, crack, frack or whack us with one of the operating systems that we can (maybe, we hope) isolate.

In particular, it would be absolutely lovely if you would refrain from using BSD or any of its variants, ChromeOS, Android, macOS, Haiku, z/OS or any of the other hundreds of operating systems that our Windows Defender team haven't got around to learning about.

Thanks a lot.

Your fiends at Microsoft

Text only

> 500 individually steerable beams, and is able to provide data speeds of up to 150Mbps across an area as wide as 15,000 square kilometers

So should we assume the marketing dept. got hold of this and that the coverage is really 300kbits/sec per beam (per cell) multiplied by 500 beams = 150Mbit/sec

With each beam covering 30 sq km, any / all users would have to share that bandwidth between them. And that's if the 5G signal can penetrate clouds (of the meteorological kind)

Standing on the shoulders of giants

> that'd run you in the neighborhood of $4.28 million just to train it.

But that isn't how people learn. That one day someone decides that something you know is obsolete, so you have to return to primary school and start learning The cat sat on the mat and everything else you've ever know, all over again.

People learn incrementally: building their knowledge on what the already knew. Sure, there are times when a paradigm shift comes along and people have to relearn a skill or set of rules (such as when a country changes the side of the road its drivers drive on). But those a few and far between. And usually highly compartmentalised. When the UK when from pounds-shillings and pence to decimalised currency, that did not mean anyone had to relearn how to read or write.

So it should be with training AIs.

Strike!

> it's entirely made of loose boulders and rocks

So what is needed is a bowling champion to plot exactly what path an incoming "bowling ball" would need to take to scatter all the largest rocks onto different vectors. Maybe they would all hit Earth at some point, but I suspect lots of little space rocks falling in geographically dispersed areas is better than one large one.

Dear Rich Bastard

Apparently this sort of thing happens from time to time.

More to follow

> Ultimately, it's expected to phone home to Microsoft to let the mothership know if you're running an old Office.

While this may not fall under MS's definition of "malware" it is undoubtedly spyware.

We should also expect that there will be consequences!

Once this has detected old - and legitimate - versions of Office, that will not be the end of it. I can reasonably expect that it will be followed by more probes for other legal but old software. Maybe MS will even sell the ability to detect out of date software to third parties, so (for example) my old version of Photoshop might get flagged, if Adobe pays for a similar payload to be installed.

And after that, will come the inevitable nags, telling me I *have* to upgrade. Maybe getting more urgent and annoying as time goes on.

My only hope is that the biggest benefit of running out-of-support versions of Windows: no more unwelcome updates, means that my VM's W7 and earlier instances will not fall foul of this surveillance.

A maze of twisty little phones ... all alike

> Price is the obvious weapon phone vendors wield when ...

... when all their various products are pretty much the same.

As far as functionality goes:

Communicate with people? Yes

Take photos? Check

Display "content"? Got it!

Store information? Yup

Use the internet? Affirmative

Manage location? Mais oui

and possibly controversially, but with the lack of alternatives: Confirm identity? Tick

The only real differences are "meta" properties such as battery life, screen size, bragging rights, durability and just possibly: security

Errata

> written with the help of AI, after it was found some contained incorrect information.

How absolutely awful. Writing articles containing incorrect information should be the sole domain of human writers. Though I doubt if a machine would ever write anything as meaningless as " to cover topics from a 360-degree perspective."

Although it's not unreasonable to expect that the job function of a publication's editor is to check basic information, spelling and grammar.

Screen rights?

> That's how a US-China war over Taiwan would play out

At least, that's how it would play out if the americans made a TV drama / military ra-ra, series about the possibility.

However, in real life I doubt that things would be that dramatic¹. Other sources see more nuanced approaches than a head-to-head military strike.

The chinese like to play the long game. To move slowly over years or decades, rather than a wham-bam, it it moves: shoot it style more in keeping with cheesy hollywood productions.

Although part of their strategy is to build up their own, domestic, semiconductor industries. While they lag behind what is available in Taiwan now, the long game might have them passing other countries technology in due course.

But where's the action-thriller in that?

[1] Although a couple of years ago the american military reckoned an attack could come as early as January 2024

Just ask it

If people are worried that a piece of text was written by ChatGPT, can they not just ask it?

Say "Hello, did you compose this text?" and if the answer is yes, then you know where it came from.

Whether the AI would be smart enough to detect subtle changes in wording, such as substituting another word with the same meaning, would be worth knowing, too.

Needs 5 minutes to start up

> Microsoft is reportedly considering investing $10 million in autonomous vehicle startup Gatik

So will their products now stop at inopportune (and frequent) times to install trivial updates?

And take far too long to switch off once you get to your destination?

And every time you want to look in the rear view mirror, you have to wait until all the advertisements it is displaying, have finished

Double bubble

> The story has at least one happy ending: Clarence was paid for the job even though his work washed away.

... and hopefully got another commission to reinstall the replacement system when the museum was reinstated (if it was rebuilt?). Maybe, this time with flood alarms added.

Your probem is not my emergency

> What was to be done? Would Bill need to abandon his family, and his holiday?

It seems to me that the people who caused the problem are the ones responsible for fixing it. If they cannot, then it might be time to replace them with others who could. Or better: with true professionals who would avoid the problems in the first place.

I have worked for outfits that have absorbed other companies. Including their less capable IT departments. It would not surprise me if those depts. lack of ability and (frequently) their antiquated systems was a factor in their parent companies owners wishing to get rid of the problem.

No comments

> Writing is a difficult task to do well

And writing documentation is so difficult that very few do it - and fewer still keep it in step with code changes

Personally I'm not too concerned about arts students using technology to do what is so mundane that a computer can do it, too. It sounds like their courses need to be dragged out of the nineteenth century. Was there the same furore when quill pens were replaced?

However, if we could get ChatGPT or one of its fellows to accurately comment code (including flagging where stuff had been taken from other sources) that would be a very useful way to get software competed <- typo left in to show this was ritten by a pe4rson.

AI killed the search engine star

> For companies that have become extraordinarily successful doing one market-defining thing

Let's put this as ChatGPT might say it.

For companies that have failed to diversify, or keep up with developments

As The Buggles would call it, today:

Rewritten by machine on new technology

Keeping your parts private

> tracked the physical location of journalists via their IP addresses. ... invasion of privacy.

An interesting concept. Everyone (those us with technical competence do so knowingly, everyone else: maybe not) hands out their IP address with every network connection we make. It cannot be considered private, though the uses it is put to, might be.

Provided you don't hand it to an outfit that does not abide by any laws restricting what uses that information can be put to.

I suppose that ultimately any organization would bend to government pressure to release that stuff, so is there any real privacy to be had?

A simple solution

> But senior people needed to know exactly how this happened so it could't happen again.

Just disconnect the big red button.

Or if that is too easy, rig it so that it has to be pressed twice. And that after the first time, flashes up a message saying Please do not press this button again

Bandwidth

> voice assistants were never designed to serve user needs. The users of voice assistants aren't its customers – they're the product.

While I enjoy a bit of tinfoil-hattery as much as every other paranoid nervous wreck, I think the actual answer is much simpler.

Voice interfaces are too slow. To compound that problem, they are inherently sequential - even worse than video.

An average person listens (for example to an audio book) at about 150 words a minute. 5 letters to the average word and that's 100 bits per second.

People read at nearly double that speed and even better, we can skip all the boring (or irrelevant) parts.

The one benefit that audio does have is that it does not require the user to be focused on the task in the same way as looking at a page or screen does. Hence it is handy for alerts (which could well be what hearing was evolved for) and for giving short, precise, commands. But once you get more than one person speaking at a time, while people can filter that - albeit with some effort - it seems that the machines cannot.

Simulator, simulate thyself!

> have the potential to deliver more than 40x the application performance of our forthcoming NNSA exascale systems

You'd think that an outfit which exists to model nuclear detonations and hypersonic, turbulent, airflow would be able to come up with something a little more certain about the performance of its own futuristic computers.

Can't it model them, too?

The theory and the practice

Yes, you can buy the spare parts you need. But only to repair the newest models (which are the ones that are least likely to need repairing).

Oh, but we can price the parts as high as we like. And if we need to use the most expensive delivery method:? Well, that's just to ensure you get the best service - innit! Plus there's no guarantee that the parts won't be "temporarily out of stock" or that delivery times will be this side of the next ice age.

But legally, we are doing the bare minimum needed to comply with the tightest interpretation of the law.

Going .... down

OK, so suppose Twitter does fail. Who else will it take with it?

The dotcom bubble burst in the early 00's after a period when far too much money was squirted into companies with less than promising financial / business basics. And like many burst bubbles, it didn't take much to collapse the whole mess once the dominoes started to fall.

In the same way that during Covid much money was thrown at tech companies that looked promising, but have since lost a lot of their value as reality kicked back in.

A fine tradition ...

>"Some idiot," he writes, "had put an add-update where there obviously should have been an add."

... of fixing the problems you cause. And collecting brownie points into the bargain.

While some organisations will instantly sack the individual deemed responsible for such ballsups, there is a better way!

It is said that experience is the lessons learned from mistakes made. So what better way to gain that experience than by making mistakes. Combine with the other cliche of that which does not kill you, makes you stronger and a convincing argument can be made to retain all but the worst problem-makers: the people who always seem to be in the middle of every corporate disaster.

And in this case, had "Francis" been given the heave-ho, what are the chances that the replacement, would not have also spotted the same idiotic add and changed it to the obvious add-update?

4 decades too late

> The UK is missing out on investment in the semiconductor industry,

1983 called, they want their transputer hype back

Odd joke revived

> expected to be in the social media company's offices in person 80 percent of the time starting in February.

So 5% on Monday, 15% on Tuesday, 30% on Wednesday, 20% on Thursday and 10% on Friday. Total: 80%

Batteries not included

> The mission was designed to demonstrate the use of low-cost technology to land and explore the Moon's surface.

> But alas, the Cubesat's radios were unresponsive after launch.

A little too low cost?