* Posts by My-Handle

862 publicly visible posts • joined 20 May 2011

Adobe: Take user data to train generative AI models? We'd never do that

My-Handle

Re: Riiight.

I agree, adobe's software is much more focussed on keeping it's user base via abusive practices than by actually being a good product.

My main issue with CC was down to bandwidth. I live out in the sticks, on a 2Mbps connection. I bought photoshop (business requirement) and tried to install it. Not only did it insist on downloading half a dozen different bits of Creative Cloud before I could even start installing photoshop, but it swamped my internet connection for hours while it did so... then timed out and failed the installation at about 80%. Could I restart the download from where it left off? No.

I contacted Adobe customer support and asked if there was an offline installer I could use (one that I could download from a different location and bring home), but I was flatly told "No. Get a faster internet connection". Damn, I wish I'd thought of that. I eventually found an offline installer that some kind soul had left a link to on a forum. It was even still on Adobe's servers.

Even once installed, Creative Cloud kept trying to update it's products on an aggressively regular basis, downloading gigabytes of data each time, swamping our internet connection. Seriously, even basic websites wouldn't load on any other machine on the network. Photoshop got relegated to a laptop that ended up spending most of it's time offline, just to keep the connection in a working order.

Adobe's general software design is built around actively abusing the user base who paid to be there, out of a misguided idea that it makes it hard to leave. In my case it made it almost impossible to use. I can completely believe that they'd pull a stunt like this and actively lie about it.

Apologies for the rant.

New IT boss decided to 'audit everything you guys are doing wrong'. Which went wrong

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Same here. It's pretty usual for a company to do the bare minimum to keep it's staff around. I've worked for several that do things like give out below-inflation raises (if any) for years in a row. They consider it good business. But suddenly it's a big issue when an employee doesn't show up to work and give it every ounce of their soul? No. Treat me like that, and I'll treat you the same in turn. I'll show up and do the bare minimum I need to do to get paid. It's not quiet quitting, it's treating the contract the same way the company is.

I would point out that I have also worked for some companies that did better than that. Generally, they got a much better result from me and the rest of their staff.

Twitter starts auction to flip the bird, furniture, pizza ovens, gadgets galore

My-Handle

Re: How shit is your grasp of value....

"Tossing it away? That takes effort and cost money"

True. An ex-employer once renovated an old warehouse area into new office space. They ended up with about ten large flourescent tube fittings that had been stripped out of the warehouse that they'd have to pay someone to take away. Word went around on the grape-vine and I ended up being offered them by one of the directors (I have a barn / workshop that is woefully lit). He was happy that a bunch of junk he had no use for just went away, and I was happy that I got some lights that actually worked.

I was reasonable to ask to WFH in early days of COVID, says fired engineer

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Re: Massachusetts in the early days of COVID

I would say I'm surprised, but I have fairly low expectations on how low some companies will go.

I think I'd have a tough time doing most of those even here at home. My power sockets are under desks and generally covered. The nearest shop to me is three miles away and would require ten or twenty minutes of driving to get hold of a current newspaper, and would defeat most of the point of working from home. Lastly, I have a stubborn streak in me a mile wide and I hate being made to waste time just to satisfy someone's dictatorial streak.

Fortunately, the last couple of companies I've worked for have had a general policy of "If the work's getting done, we don't care where you do it from" (with a few sensible caveats, of course).

Third-party Twitter apps stopped dead with no explanation from El Musko

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Re: Twitter is a pretty small ‘app’

Scale is also an issue. It's a hell of a lot simpler to put together a blogging app or site for a few authors and a few dozen readers than it is to do the same for millions of each, spread across an entire planet.

On the small scale, you'd have a single full-stack dev managing most functions. Database storage is a single SQL server and a handful of queries. On the large scale, you have entire teams of DBAs making sure that data is stored, retrieved, backed-up and cached efficiently across many data centres and locales.

This can’t be a real bomb threat: You've called a modem, not a phone

My-Handle

Re: Tick tick tick

"Daydreaming is a favourite pastime too, because there's an entire world inside my head"

Just one?

My-Handle

Re: "They even asked for a physical description of the caller"

Should be easy enough to do. I mean, it's not like the various government agencies care that much about it being accurate.

Cops chase Tesla driver 'dozing' with Autopilot on

My-Handle

Someone wasn't watching the preceding grasshopper program very attentively then.

Before they ever attempted re-entry burns or soft landings, they had a couple of test vehicles with landing leg gantries attached. These vehicles started with short hops of a few metres, literally enough just to take the weight off the legs, then worked up to hops of about a kilometer.

A wikipedia link, for your perusal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_prototypes

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I followed the development of SpaceX's Falcon 9 and it's landing capabilities with much anticipation over the last few years. I quickly realised that it was worth paying attention to articles / media showing actual progress (grasshopper trials, test flights etc), but there was very little point in paying attention to what Musk was saying. More often than not, most of what he announced was vapourware - an end goal that might or might not be reached.

BOFH and the office security access upgrade

My-Handle

Re: And now we know...

Oh, no-one wrote that. It's a cut-down, re-skinned version of a video rental shop's hip new "online booking" system from the early 2000s. Committed by one of the doctors' nephews, I'd imagine. Bastard might have even got paid for it.

Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement

My-Handle

Just as it starts sinking.

Voice assistants failed because they serve their makers more than they help users

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Re: The same applies to tv series and games

Terry Pratchett definitely had the right idea there, in my opinion. Each book largely stood by itself as a story, but each also added to the setting. There wasn't really an over-arching plot to the Discworld books, because the Discworld wasn't itself a story. It was a world, and a gloriously rich one.

My-Handle

Alexa:

Sorry, I'm having trouble understanding you right now

My-Handle

Re: Don't know.

Language between people is only as information-dense as it is because the people on either end of the conversation have an appreciation of context. Without that context, you need to fully encapsulate the meaning you're trying to convey within the words you're using.

An example. If I walk into the living room, look around and say "Dogs?" to my other half, she will realise that I've noticed the dogs aren't around and will respond "They're outside". Or if the dogs are present and looking expectant, she might well say "I'll feed them in a bit". An AI assistant wouldn't even realise it had been spoken to (I didn't prefix my question with a command word), wouldn't realise that I had asked a question (it likely wouldn't pick up on tone), nor would have the context of it's surroundings to make sense of the question. This is a somewhat extreme example (i'd likely be a little more verbose, give a little more context in my question), but it demonstrates the various failings well.

My-Handle

Re: Lights, FireTV and heating

"Oh and the drop in feature is handy for asking the kids to come down for dinner."

My dad had a similar feature available to him twenty-odd years ago. We called it "bellowing". I can appreciate it - it's strangely satisfying having a good excuse to try and make the whole house rattle with your voice.

Server installer fails to spot STOP button – because he wasn't an archaeologist

My-Handle

Re: Paint all over everything, including power sockets and emergency buttons?

As someone else postulated up-thread, this may have been a government facility. Most of these in the UK are self-insured, meaning that if anything goes wrong at a government site the government pays for it.

Of course, this is conjecture. As is the assumption that the decorator at the time cared about insurance at all.

I would postulate that the decorator in question could well have been some manager's son's new painting business. In this case, any shoddy work would have been swept under the rug.

Look like Bane, spend like Batman with Dyson's $949 headphones

My-Handle

Similar story here. I spotted two earlier today - both wheelbarrows live in our barn. One big one for hay, the smaller one for manure. The big one even has two normal wheels.

My-Handle

Re: Engineers! Engineers EVERYWHERE!

I once attended a convention where a dyson saleswoman tried to sell me on a vacuum with a digital motor. When I asked why it was any better than a normal motor, she proudly told me it was "zero carbon".

Me being the pedantic fart that I am, with knowledge of how both types of motors worked, said saleswoman then got a full lecture on how that wasn't what "zero carbon" meant, as it referred to carbon emissions, not the use of carbon in the bloody motor brushes, and that how any extra precision of movement that a digital motor might grant probably wouldn't add anything to the movement of extremely malleable, compressable air.

I'm not sure if I feel proud or ashamed of that, to be honest. It does get my goat when marketing drones just spout off words and ideas without the faintest idea of what they're talking about.

Musk's Hotel California erected at Twitter HQ, as some offices converted into bedrooms

My-Handle

Re: Future conversation

Don't be silly.

By all accounts, Musk doesn't hang around long enough for any of his kids to call him Daddy.

How do you solve the problem that is Twitter?

My-Handle

Re: "How bad will its fall be?"

I don't think you'll need to. The way it's going, it'll melt into a pile of radioactive, toxic goo all by itself.

Two signs in the comms cabinet said 'Do not unplug'. Guess what happened

My-Handle

We had a similar issue at an ex-employer's. A network relay lived in one corner of the boiler room and connected to the next building over. Signs aplenty on the plug and socket it was plugged into. Until the spanner-monkey that came in to service the boiler decided that the sign didn't mean him and he unplugged it to plug in his drill. Next building over lost all connection to several site servers and the world at large. The IT director (whose office was in the next building over) was in there like a shot and tore the guy a new one, and he wasn't typically a shouty man :)

'What's the point of me being in my office, just because they want to see me in the office?'

My-Handle

Re: I personally got a mortgage on £25k a year

About 7 years ago, £140k, 10k deposit. Got me a rather nice place in NI.

Next?

My-Handle

Re: Contract clauses

The average salary in the UK in 2022 was £27,756 (ONS). Naturally, this varies by region.

I personally got a mortgage on £25k a year (albeit a few years ago), and I drive a car I bought second hand.

Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back

My-Handle

Re: Also in the news: "Musk to abused H1B visa holders: I am your tormentor"

Wow. Just think about that for a second. These are people who:

- Survived the first round of layoffs

- Had full WFH privileges removed and had to start working from the office full time

- Decided to forego 3 months severance and agree to "hardcore" hours at high intensity

Only to have a nitwit who doesn't understand your code glance over 10 screenshots of it and tell you you're fired anyway. And that 3 months severance you could have gotten is now only 4 weeks.

W. T. A. F.

Multi-tasker Musk expects to reduce time at Twitter, seek another leader

My-Handle

Re: 4D Chess

Except:

- Twitter isn't being kept legal, and senior staff chose to quit because of it (see issue re FTC consent decree - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63593242)

- Many people, including industry experts and ex-Twitter staff, are openly wondering how long the platform will continue operating for without the staff to properly tend to it

- "Savings" from people being let go / quitting aren't actually enough to bring Twitter back to profit, especially given the extra $1B per year of debt payments Elon saddled it with

- Twitter's main source of revenue, advertisement, has been drying up as advertisers look to avoid the chaos that has happened in recent weeks. Furthermore, if Twitter's user base begins to dwindle (as sign-ups for other services like Mastodon indicate might be happening), then Twitter becomes even less of an attractive proposition for advertising

It's all very well declaring "4D Chess, check mate", but the game is Monopoly and Elon's playing it badly.

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

My-Handle

Re: Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Men and a Man. Amen.

I wonder whether that was the initial reason why Elon tried to buy Twitter - he thought that he'd be able to control the narrative and say whatever he pleased. It might have worked, if he'd gone about it in a more subtle and strategic way.

People and culture in general are still adapting to the sheer amount of information that is now available to them. Humanity has actually gone through a change like this before, shortly after the invention of movable type enabled the printing of newspapers. There were quite a few publications at the time that printed whatever they liked, with no recourse. Measures appeared over time, from journalistic standards, libel laws, and even general public awareness of what could be expected of trashy tabloids.

Finally, as a sanity check to see whether we are dealing with a bot or a person, would you be able to answer this question AMFM1? Do you prefer crunchy or smooth peanut butter?

My-Handle

Re: Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Men and a Man. Amen.

It's been a while since I dusted off the old AMFM1 translator, but let's see what it makes of this....

Hmm... people are miffed that people like Elon and Trump can (could) spout off on Twitter with little legal recourse... Elon needs a girlfriend / handler / someone competent to rein him in and have his back, might be a reference to Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX.

That's the best I got.

Twitter begs some staff to come back, says they were laid off accidentally

My-Handle

Re: Modest proposal.

The BBC ran an article about Mastodon on the front page of their news website yesterday, so I'd say that chances are good that Mastodon could take Twitter's crown over the coming months

Big brands urged to pause Twitter ads until Elon's learned how this all works

My-Handle

Re: Meanwhile Mastodon is suffering

Sorry, you're saying an alternative and preferred service is being "ruined" by having a sudden influx of new customers?

I mean, yes it's a high pressure situation. But I don't know many business owners who would complain at a situation like that.

How I made a Chrome extension for converting Reg articles to UK spelling

My-Handle

I appreciate that any anti-American sentiment is like a red rag to a bull for you, but it's bad form to insult a man just because you don't agree with him. Your point, querying the source of his statistic, may well have been taken more seriously if you hadn't.

My-Handle

That's because it's spelled "Lough".

[Speaking as a half-Scot, half-English man living in Northern Ireland...]

My-Handle

Re: Kaliphornia

"I can't be arsed to type ... whoosh."

It's ok, we were all thinking it.

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

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Re: Bad design

I'll bet on a VW Touareg as the young lady's courtesy car.

My mother-in-law has the same, and it's rare enough that I drive her car that I have to go searching for the sodding switch every bloody time. Even worse, the left stalk has an icon similar to a headlight on it, where the headlight controls are on every other car I drive, seemingly just to screw with me.

My-Handle

Re: Bad design

Part of the problem is that terms like "obvious" and "intuitive" are based on experience. If you have experience driving one type of car, it's obvious and intuitive how to drive another, despite minor differences in the control layout.

If you've never driven a car before, god help you if you try to drive it without instruction.

Data loss prevention emergency tactic: keep your finger on the power button for the foreseeable future

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Regarding the rapid toggling of the power switch...

For a while I ran an HP Proliant DL385 2U server as a desktop machine in my office, fed from raw mains. No UPS or anything like that. Our house gets occasional power cuts, usually only for a second or so at a time. I noticed that the server was always absolutely the last machine to turn off due to a power cut. A blip in power that would reset every other device in the house, from the microwave to other desktops, that machine would just ride out. I can well believe that an older server with a hard-power button would run right over a quick toggle.

CEO told to die in a car crash after firing engineers who had two full-time jobs

My-Handle

Re: Judge on results, not appearances

I once got fired from that kind of a job because I made the fatal mistake of wondering aloud if I could automate pulling numbers in from a website into Excel. In front of the old lady whose job it was to do that cut-and-paste. 3 behind-my-back complaints to HR later and my temp contract was terminated. That was one hard lesson for my tactless teenage self.

In a following job, I did exactly that and trebled the output of an overworked team. Earned much kudos from my team-mates (who now had breathing space) and the manager.

PayPal decides fining people $2,500 for 'misinformation' wasn't a great idea

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Re: re: a main stream banking/financial organisation

"Can payPal debit you £2,500 whenever they feel like it? Well, if it's in the Ts&Cs you signed up to, what do you think?"

In the UK at least, contract law does not come above state law.

Rookie programmer's code goes up in flames ... kind of

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Re: Is this me or not?

I've had that kind of situation before, as a developer in a professional setting. Also working for a well-known shop chain, as it happens.

I'd updated one bit of code. Maybe five minutes later, something apparently unrelated fell over. My supervisor told me to go take a look at my code and find out how it had caused the issue. To start with, I agreed. It is a reasonable inference to make off the cuff.

An hour later, I reported back and said that I couldn't find any link. I was told to go back and look again.

A further hour later, I reported back with the same. Once more I was told to go back and continue looking, as my supervisor didn't believe in co-incidences. I pushed back, saying that if there was a link I can't find it, someone with better knowledge of the system needs to take a look.

He took a look. My change hadn't caused the issue - someone else had uploaded a change at the same time and had been keeping their head down the entire morning. Fair play to my supervisor, he did apologise.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

My-Handle

Re: Obligatory XKCD

There are a few of these strips that I'm now starting to recognise just by their numbers.

327 is another one popular amongst software developers.

My-Handle

Re: Live Printer

About 10 years ago, also in a rental property. The owner had previously installed an after-market jet or bubble system in the bath, which had long since ceased to work. It was a nightmare to use, because all the little jets stood maybe 3mm proud of the surface of the tub. My other half and I just bought one of those rubber mats that older people put in their bath to stop slipping and put it over the obnoxious little things. Didn't think any more of it.

Until a guest of ours took a bath, went to touch the tap with her toe to get a top-up and got a very sharp recharge instead.

Turns out that the system hadn't been made safe before we moved in, nor was there any fuse or place to turn off the feed to the system's electrics. Those little jets, with the weight of a human on them, had pushed back though slightly and had let just enough water drip on to the electrics to live the entire tub. The electrician was horrified - he himself only avoided a shock by virtue of a voltage-detecting screwdriver.

These same owners later tried to bill us several hundred pounds in damages (a wall hook had fallen off, which was reported at the time) and extra cleaning fees when we left. They were not so gently reminded about the death-trap they'd left, which would undoubtedly be brought up should they decide to ignore my reasonable counter-offer and take things to a small claims court.

My-Handle

I've occasionally had someone trot out the old "You're good at computers, you should know this stuff" statement.

My somewhat sniffy reply is usually something like "You aren't good at computers, so how can you make that judgement?"

Apple exec sues over 'ageist' removal of $800k stock bonus

My-Handle

Re: Older employees are a pain in the arse.

They're also a bit less susceptible to corporate bullshit because they've usually seen it all before, often several times over. That "corporate bullshit" => English gets very big and well exercised.

Update your Tesla now before the windows put your fingers in a pinch

My-Handle

Re: My car's window ...

It's a Toyota from the mid-90s. I've been told by several people, my mechanic included, that Toyotas from that era don't tend to go wrong :)

My-Handle

Re: My car's window ...

Upvoted, purely because I also drive a car that's old enough to have non-electric windows.

On a side note, the two other vehicles I own have both had issues with their windows, where they will go down but not up. The old car has never had a failure with it's window mechanism.

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

My-Handle

Re: What?

Or even without an inspection of the area to be worked on first? This line rang alarm bells for me:

"revealed a lattice of cinder blocks above the datacenter, rather than the expected pleasingly solid slab of concrete"

How much effort would it have taken to lift a ceiling tile and take a look at the state of the actual ceiling before deciding what work needed doing?

Our software is perfect. If something has gone wrong, it must be YOUR fault

My-Handle

Re: UX Designer?

Not allowed to due to excess of microscopic nasties in the general population.

(Late reply, I know, but I felt the question should be answered).

My-Handle

Re: UX Designer?

I've been on the other side of this, as the developer of a large system when a UX designer was called in.

The UX designer couldn't come in-house to talk with the devs, and the scope he was given by senior management only ever grew.

By the time he was finished, he had produced a design for a new section of the website that would need a Google-sized team to pull off. Can't blame him - it looked good and it was what he was asked to design. But there was no way in hell I'd ever have the time or resource to build it.

Yeah, we'll just take that first network handshake. What could possibly go wrong?

My-Handle

Re: The guiding principle

I could be wrong on the detail, it was getting on for a decade ago. I barely knew what JSON was at the time. I've not seen anything like that from Google since, I admit.

My-Handle

Re: The guiding principle

2 downvotes already... harsh crowd today.

My-Handle

Re: You'd have thought that a company the size of Google would have thought...

Yep, definitely was my mistake. That was the lesson learned.

My only defense there was that I had only just started down the path to becoming a software developer. I was trying to cobble together a program in VBA (that'll invite the downvotes :D) to help out my team at the time.

Some things you only learn by making the mistake.