* Posts by streaky

1743 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jul 2010

NHS England published heavily redacted Palantir contract as festivities began

streaky

What makes you think the NSA would wait for the NHS to ship it off post-anonymisation if they wanted it? If the NSA wants data, they're taking it - particularly when you consider all the sketchy contractors involved with data handling for the NHS.

Windows 12: Savior of PC makers, or just an apology for Windows 11?

streaky

Power Users..

Much like how they liked to demonstrate how much contempt they had at Microsoft for gamers a couple of launches back, are they still going to be demonstrating how much contempt they have for power users?

If you're a normie and really don't care you're using Apple products, if you're a nerd you're already on Linux - power users are all MS have left; when we go MS's desktop business model is completely shot, so why they keep trying to drive us away is beyond me.

Or put another way: I have a super-ultrawide, please stop turning my task bar into mystery meat (and other legitimate gripes).

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

streaky

Re: The ones they do pay are on a knife-edge

It's an entirely viable business model, many people have amassed much wealth doing it. That's YT's business model, enabling that. What YT needs to do is not be arbitrary.

streaky

I wouldn't mind..

But YT refuses to pay content creators I like. The ones they do pay are on a knife-edge, even the tame, run-of-the-mill, milk toast creators can't say anything or do anything for fear of a completely arbitrary and capricious monetisation system. This is just YT being greedy and wondering why nobody is on their side - nobody likes you, we're just stuck with you - there's a difference. We're not always going to be stuck with you. Remind me, why shouldn't I use an adblocker again? The commercial failure of youtube will be a boom time for the internet and we'll all be dancing on your grave.

Open source license challenges part 461: Element plots move to AGPLv3

streaky

Never AGPL

Using the AGPL and silly licences like it are a guaranteed way for nobody to use your code and miss out on the financial and development support that useful Open Source projects receive. At our business we're banned from using it. There are always other projects, you're not that good, get over yourself.

How have we gotten so far from the principles of open source?

streaky

Re: Prusa is in the same boat

As an owner of Prusa 3d printers, there's only one thing to say about that: oh no, how will Prusa survive with cheap, low quality Chinese clones?

Firstly, Klipper is better and more flexible than Prusa's firmware. Second people buy Prusa's hardware for the quality - the answer to this is blatantly obvious. Thirdly they need to stop being greedy - every time they release new hardware it takes them like 18 months to get catch up with production (they never actually do it just falls off to the point that they no longer have a huge backlog). If Prusa are even talking about this whatsoever somebody there needs to get a grip, it won't make a blind bit of difference to their business but will make them pariahs - the fact they've been forced down the XL path by other companies making product they don't and they're now choosing to copy underlines the problem: delusion and hypocrisy.

Developing AI models or giant GPU clusters? Uncle Sam would like a word

streaky

Basically

Leave the West if you're working on AI 'fore Uncle Sam and his buddies get their hooks in and destroy your business by either theft or nerf.

It took seven years but over-40s fired by HP win $18m settlement

streaky

Re: I think this is a win for HP by default

Per my comment above, loser pays is a natural immune response against exactly that sort of thing - if you make the case more expensive by dragging it out and adding other legal costs that aren't necessary when you have no hope of winning it goes on top of any payout you will have to make when you lose - it also stops lawyers walking off with all the money *and* is a natural immune defence against frivolous lawsuits. There's a reason the US is the lawyer capital of the world, and not having the loser pays rule is a big part of it. Whole thing is a bit of a scam really.

streaky

Forget the legalities a minute

Speaking as somebody who is 42 and is the only one who knows what they're doing in my work peer group, I honestly don't know why you'd want to do this. Burn the institutional memory, throw away the experience - and, yes, it's illegal anyway. When you're offloading people, if the problem is "you're over 40" surely it would be easy to articulate why every individual in that class was no use to the business in a way that doesn't involve their age - implying they didn't have an articulable reason and they were all a benefit to the business. Makes no sense.

streaky

Re: The a-holes with the most money win again

Well, lawyers are the winners here. 'murica.

This is why loser pays systems are best.

Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle

streaky

Re: Applicants should seek counsel

It's the UK, you're getting actual damages, they reopened the process so it's what.. travel expenses and whatever it cost to have your suit dry-cleaned and some sheets of paper?

Come work at HQ... or find a new job, Roblox CEO tells staff

streaky
Pirate

WFH

Sucks to not have a long-standing WFH contract that predates covid.

It works fine if business doesn't fight it every step of the way - some people like working in an office and all the nonsense that comes with it, and good for them, but many people, especially self-motivators (who I'd argue a rational business would want to employ) don't.

Cat's out the bag, and there's massive opportunities where it's viable and embraced.

ICANN warns UN may sideline tech community from future internet governance

streaky

Don't see the issue.

The internet as it stands isn't fit for purpose anyway, we can rebuild, we have the technology, without them.

This'll be China BTW.

Nearly every AMD CPU since 2017 vulnerable to Inception data-leak attacks

streaky
Childcatcher

Plis No Mitigations

We had enough of mitigations with the Intel stuff, OS devs, don't ruin AMD too, make patches optional if they're "needed", I'll take my chances..

Meta can call Llama 2 open source as much as it likes, but that doesn't mean it is

streaky
Boffin

Clegg

Nuclear reactors will only be available by 2022 anyway, so they're pointless. Vote Lib Dem. Or something..

streaky

OSI

Open source doesn't mean "uses OSI licence" and only somebody very stupid would think it does. It's like Apple saying "it can only be a computer if it has an Apple logo from the factory". It's a very arbitrary and more importantly very *incorrect* line in the sand that makes all sorts of false assertions.

Also if nothing else 'Open Source' versus 'open source' - note which one they use.

FWIW though people are going to use what they can get and judge for themselves and play these models off against each other and (rightly) completely ignore the Responsible Use Guide.

Oh and not for nothing but the OSI model is failing because people be getting greedy - both megacorps and individuals (and maybe rightly so - but it is all falling apart).

OpenAI pauses Bing search feature over paywall bypass abilities

streaky

Re: Thank god

I think you may have misunderstood the story, unless there's a joke in there I'm missing the nuance of.

streaky

Bing?

Self-evidently a beta feature, which it states repeatedly - also IDK why people would use the Bing feature anyway when the plugins are available to paid users on GPT4 and they do a better job of exactly this task.

Techie wiped a server, nobody noticed, so a customer kept paying for six months

streaky
Coffee/keyboard

As Project Management Guru Mike Tyson Once Said..

"Everybody has got a kanban board and burn-down reports until they get punched in the face*"

Funny thing is the story sounds vaguely familiar (though I wasn't involved), wonder if I know "Sam".. :)

* He might not have said _exactly_ this.

DigitalOcean waves goodbye to 11 percent of staff

streaky
Alert

US Hiring and Firing.

US hiring and firing practices in the best and worst of times are literally the worst.

Grossly over-hire in the good times so you hammer your margins, then at the first sight of financial downturn make massive sweeping staffing cuts grossly overcompensating causing massive morale drops and general business malaise then when the economy picks up again you have to go on a hiring binge to play catch up. The worst of it is, it makes a downturn a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is why I'd never work for a US business.

Most of the world should have figured this all out after 2008 - the fact the US is considered an investment safe haven in times like this is objectively nuts.

No more free API access, says Twitter: You pay for that data

streaky

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

Still free.

streaky

Chris Bouzy

Anything that will get him out of twitter's data has got to be worth doing.

For password protection, dump LastPass for open source Bitwarden

streaky
Big Brother

Vaultwarden

Just saying. Don't forget to donate.

To protect its cloud, Microsoft bans crypto mining from its online services

streaky

Power

"There is something wrong with a price model that doesn't cover electricity and cooling costs"

Was my thought too, but bare metal servers also don't bill power and you don't see providers mass-banning crypto. Okay it's harder to police, for one of the many reasons why bare metal is just better, but you could write it in your ToS anyway just to cover your rear, if this was a thing. End of the day price appropriately, if you're that thin on margin that those costs matter, which is possible, maybe you should be looking at your business model or figuring a way to charge for wall power usage.

But yeah it probably is that despite the above, plus it could be argued about life-shortening various components.

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

streaky

Re: Q) How did Musk become a Millionaire?

#MightBeTrue

streaky

Re: So what happened to this freedom of speech thing then?

It's a different deal when you're calling out your boss about the business, in public.

Not for nothing but yes, turnabout sucks, maybe certain political classes should have stopped and thought when they were cheering it on and being warned about consequences.

streaky
Big Brother

Power Move

If you're right it's a power move, but be right and make a good argument. Not a fan of GQL myself but people swear by it. [Not an attack on GQL but a more general point] we reached Peak Software some years back where we suddenly gained zero-cost infinite compute power and nobody had to think of things like performance because servers could just instantly produce the data and we didn't have to pay for that CPU time, latency wasn't a thing and data bandwidth was totally free - and thank god because you no longer needed competent software engineers.

Lets be real: Twitter has been one software engineering fail after another since day 0. At some point it became vaguely stable because they figured out how to horizontally scale it but it just shouldn't need the compute resources it does, this one of the many reasons why it was a money eating machine above all else: it's a very simple piece of software at it's core and it just shouldn't be that way, it's orders of magnitude simpler than say Facebook, this is why they had trouble doing easy things like editing tweets. They also struggled to monetise the platform too but if you have a base platform that doesn't eat money that becomes way less of a pressure.

I'd go back to first principles and rebuild (yes, from scratch) the thing to be efficient as a first priority and make good choices that allow it to be extended in useful ways in future, but apparently I'm not down with the kids and live in the olden times when we had to actually pay for resources. But no seriously come up with some good torture tests and make people pay for slowing down the system and expenditure with finding savings elsewhere.

Girls Who Code books 'banned' in some US classrooms

streaky
Pirate

Haven't read the books..

.. but a quick perusal of their website highlights some fairly obvious reasons.

Turning your kids into activists (under the guise of something actually useful I might add - presumably they never expected anybody's parents to check their aims and the content) isn't a good way to make them into contributing members of society who can pay their own way. It does the other thing. Also not for nothing there are better ways.

Unless they're after racial studies grants (which are not long for this world).

You may now downvote me for being right.

Prima facie it's a good cause, I suspect the reality is radical leftist intersectional ideology and nobody is supposed to mind, right?

Cloudflare tries to explain why it protects far-right forums that stalk and harass victims

streaky

Some day

These people (as in the people who try to get these sites dropped by service providers) are going to find out what tortious interference is.

Carry on with the insanity and lies.

Also smol PSA: Keffals isn't under attack because of Kiwi Farms, Keffals in under attack because Keffals is Keffals - go watch Keffals for yourself and figure it out for yourself.

Amazon books rocket flights for its Kuiper broadband internet satellites

streaky

Re: Obviously.

"OneWeb are targeting businesses and institutions rather than domestic customers"

Starlink are doing both. There is a reason for OneWeb to exist, but they are actually in competition.

Might point was you can guarantee they skipped SpaceX ideologically rather than as a business decision - SpaceX are looking for excuses to launch stuff into orbit, they're desperate for more customers because the more customers they have and launches they do the cheaper the platform gets.

streaky
Terminator

Obviously.

Because why use the most stable, busiest and most cost-effective launch platform to launch your sats? Amazon aren't sat on endless cash for nothing y'know?

Amazon aren't going away any time soon, doesn't mean you have to run your business like it's a government with masses of wastage and poorly-selected contract partners. You /could/ do other, interesting things, with that money and I suspect some would argue you could pay your warehouse staff more - but what do I know, it's a free market and whatnot..

I talked about this with OneWeb when the whole Russia thing blew up, people thought I was nuts for suggesting that they use SpaceX (and should have been all along) - like it's bad to make your business more streamlined on costs or use the best available launch platform, you're not in competition with SpaceX you're in competition with Starlink and Starlink is going to exist regardless of if you use SpaceX to launch - at least keep your costs down and successes high and give yourself a fighting chance.

I own that $4.5bn of digi-dosh so rewrite your blockchain and give it to me, Craig Wright tells Bitcoin SV devs

streaky
FAIL

Re: In summary then ...

It's like suing a central bank because you dumped your cash in a fire. About as valid a legal case, at least.

Web3: The next generation of the web is here… apparently

streaky
Terminator

Yikes

Rumour has it you couldn't edit web 1 and you certainly couldn't own bits of it (this was actually said, in testimony to congress, by a supposed expert, I shit you not), or something (presumably the infra was all owned by aliens and the lizard people and all the content was written by AI, or something).

I hate people and don't want to live on this planet any more - it's these sorts of morons who don't know what they're actually doing who are advising governments on a pandemic that should have been over last Northern Hemisphere summer but for the dragging it out with explicit intent of feeding cash into the mouths of the likes of Pfizer.

Sigh.

Kremlin names the internet giants it will kidnap the Russian staff of if they don't play ball in future

streaky

Oh noes..

Pretty sure I know what my response to that would be..

Sovereignty? We've heard of it. UK government gives contract to store MI5, MI6 and GCHQ's data to AWS

streaky

At a loss

"Hopefully the data will be properly encrypted with user-held keys."

As opposed to what? AWS just providing the platform..

Windows 11: What we like and don't like about Microsoft's operating system so far

streaky

Power Users

Pretty clear Microsoft hates us. This is about all. I have many complaints - the biggest is the new taskbar; Microsoft have spent a lot of effort over the last decade or so making it harder and harder and harder to switch between tasks, now it's all but impossible - the more wider monitors are a thing (I have a super-ultrawide myself) the more Microsoft go out of their way to pretend everybody uses a portrait monitor and nothing else.

7+ Taskbar Tweaker used to resolve these problems and make Windows 10 usable, now it can't because they've reengineered how it works. If you only use a single browser window and that's your day - great, but you might as well just have a chromebook. I have a lot of horizontal real estate, let me use it please, Microsoft.

The snaps thing, yes, again, super ultrawide, super useful. A lot of third party apps including one of MS' powertoys let you do this kind of stuff before but nice to have it in there - but you see how this conflicts with what they've done with the taskbar? They pretend everybody is using 4:9 monitors with the task bar, but yet include stuff that's useful for those of us with 32:9 monitors. Very bizzare.

The good news is that the wsl2-wsgl stuff works extremely well so maybe we can dump the shell entirely and just use gnome, kde, xfce or whatever. Could be an option worth exploring.

OVH data centre destroyed by fire in Strasbourg – all services unavailable

streaky

BRB..

Making backups..

Palantir and UK policy: Public health, public IT, and – say it with me – open public contracts

streaky

Public Data

The benefits to society of open data about a reasonably large nation's health that can be mined and new things found that weren't known before, potential treatments, being able to spot disease clusters before anybody really knows they are happening and all the other things you can do with this data are obvious - properly curated and well anonymized by people who know what they are doing of course - and it probably isn't illegal here what happened given it is actually, technically the government's data to basically do what they like with in our law; I personally want to feel like taxpayers are getting value out of that data and in this case I don't feel like we are. That's what really matters here.

'Massive game-changer for UK altnet industry': BT-owned UK comms backbone Openreach hikes prices on FTTP-linked leased line circuits

streaky

Rofl

"not part of the relevant market where we have significant market power"

Yeah only basically all of the market. I remember when they were supposedly broken up pointing out it was in name only.

Surely they don't think they're going to get away with that?

Microsoft warns against SMS, voice calls for multi-factor authentication: Try something that can't be SIM swapped

streaky

Re: U2F

I usually register 3 keys, one on my keyring, one sits in a fire and water resistant lockbox and the other normally stays at my parents' house. Having just one key is nuts, you're absolutely right. If you can backdoor it using email or sms or something then there's no point in it - most services that support it offer recovery codes, which is a little questionable but I keep them in a password vault that supports secure notes, although that is secured by.. U2F so probably not practical :)

My biggest issue I'm having with U2F (which should be *universally* supported by now, it not being by banks, Paypal et al is criminally negligent) is dumbass companies who support U2F and *then* force you to click an email link or something after, so dumb..

streaky

Re: U2F

"Interesting project, but at the moment it only works on Chrome."

Incorrect.

streaky

U2F

U2F

U2F

U2F

Also U2F.

Not difficult.

Iran sent threatening pro-Trump emails to American Democrats, Russia close behind, says US intelligence

streaky

Re: Uhm

Why would Trump condemn people who have done nothing wrong?

streaky
FAIL

Uhm

Why would anything to do with the proud boys make people vote Trump. It's an operation to discredit Trump, on behalf of the Biden family.

Nice disinformation though.

Don't leave your laptops at repair shops, kids.

Four years after Europe sorted this, America is still going around in circles on data privacy in stuffy hearings

streaky

Re: Yikes.

No the problem is we *do* know how the EU works, thanks. That's why we want far away from it.

streaky
Mushroom

Re: Yikes.

"that the eu gdpr is objectively better for consumers than the current POSL the us has"

Nice straw man argument, shame that's (clearly) not what we're talking about - quite the opposite in fact. Yikes.

https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-data-protection-gdpr-general-data-protection-regulation-facebook-google/

https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/25/1/108

Facts matter.

streaky

Re: Yikes.

"we can’t fix them from outside"

There's no evidence to support the statement "the EU can be fixed from the inside" - we've been trying for decades, used carrots, sticks and outright bribery and it's just got worse every administration. The only way to fix the EU is to tear it down.

streaky

Re: Yikes.

It's not entirely clear that "Europe" didn't make matters significantly worse and we know that the GDPR was *heavily* lobbied to favour the likes of Facebook, Google et al against potential competitors, for example, not unlike what happened with the TPD.

Until the EU sorts out its lobbying problem and outlaws things that are even illegal in the US, it's never going to produce good legislation, on anything.

streaky
Big Brother

Yikes.

You lost me at "Europe sorted this".

Fighting an insurer over lockdown payout? UK policyholders just won an important COVID-19 test case

streaky

Questionable..

How the insurers ever thought they would win given some of the policy wording involved.

TL;DR:

If there's a pandemic, we'll pay out.

There's a pandemic.

We're not paying out, you're not covered in pandemics.

Either these people are covered or you mis-sold many of them insurance, would you like to talk about compensation now or later?