* Posts by chuckufarley

645 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jun 2007

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Truck-to-truck worm could infect – and disrupt – entire US commercial fleet

chuckufarley Silver badge

There is nothing like...

...feeling secure. Too bad so many things will never be secure.

DARPA tasks Northrop Grumman with drafting lunar train blueprints

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Randall Munroe Strikes Again!

https://xkcd.com/2909/

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

chuckufarley Silver badge

Re: Meanwhile over at twitch.tv...

We are not talking about people playing a sim game. We are talking about people watching others play a sim game about checking out groceries and stocking shelves. And sitting through ads or paying money to skip the ads.

chuckufarley Silver badge
Facepalm

Meanwhile over at twitch.tv...

...Of the newest games to capture the attention of viewers is called Supermarket Simulator, and in it you check groceries and stock shelves. So yeah, maybe the masses deserve what they get.

We asked Intel to define 'AI PC'. Its reply: 'Anything with our latest CPUs'

chuckufarley Silver badge

So about those NPU's...

...Intel talks about them a lot. But for the past few years most GPU's on the market have had Tensors cores built in. They are specifically designed to run the neural networks inside of AI models. So I would argue any gamer with Tensor cores in their GPU already has an AI PC. Welcome to the future.

The S in IoT stands for security. You'll never secure all the Things

chuckufarley Silver badge
FAIL

It's the little things...

...like turning off security features to make the kernel smaller (how many distros used in IoT turn off apparmor?), or not locking down TCP port 23 (telnet), or even warning users that are trying to use ssh over an unencrypted connection (all implementations ever).

The low hanging fruit here is really low. Yet a neophyte or an overworked admin either won't know or care.

Trump, who tried kicking TikTok out of the US, says boo to latest ban effort

chuckufarley Silver badge
Trollface

And after all that Zuck...

...did in 2016 to get him elected in the first place. With friends like Trump who needs enemas?

We're not Meta support: State AGs tell Zuck to fix rampant account takeover problem

chuckufarley Silver badge
FAIL

This is an easy problem to solve...

...because all that is needed is to make account take overs unprofitable for Antisocial Networks. That might be a step towards turning them into Social Networks again. However, as long they can make money the easy way and avoid all obligation of protecting the people they use on a daily basis this will continue to happen. At this rate we'll be lucky if ever gets upgraded to a game of whack-a-mole.

Copilot can't stop emitting violent, sexual images, says Microsoft whistleblower

chuckufarley Silver badge

Was the Office of Responsible AI...

... Invented by the Omnimorons of Marketing?

Lightweight Windows-like desktop LXQt makes leap to Qt 6 with version 2.0

chuckufarley Silver badge

Re: According to Portage...

As is often the case I once again must point out the difference between the sizes of source code and compiled code.

Yes, 7 Very Floppical Magicy Things. No, Control or Customization.

If you had just the source code for that OS you still could not build it. And if you can't build it you can't control it.

chuckufarley Silver badge

Re: Other GUI

Ah, you seek Enlightenment.

chuckufarley Silver badge
Go

According to Portage...

...the Gentoo package manager, I would need to download 314,375 KiB to compile LXQT 1.4 on a system. 233,048 KiB of that is because they are using KDE's Oxygen icons. By way of comparison, Firefox itself is 495,690 KiB of source code. So when people say it's lightweight, they mean it. I haven't used it quiet a while though because I have been stuck in a rut with XFCE, but I'll spin up VM to test 2.0 when it get closer to stable.

Sandvine put on America's export no-fly list after Egypt used network tech for spying

chuckufarley Silver badge
Joke

Denial?

I thought it was in the Red Sea...

China breakthrough promises optical discs that store hundreds of terabytes

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Facepalm

Because...

...Some people don't learn from history?

Also, they are not everywhere. They are just everywhere you are looking.

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Mushroom

Re: I thought we learned...

Now that those in power have decided that every living thing on Earth (as well every non-living thing) must endure a minimum of 1.5C raise in global temperatures your data is doomed unless you find find a new storage format. Happy Hunting!

chuckufarley Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: I thought we learned...

Are you telling us that you never learned for the past? Do you still have an eight track cassette player too?

chuckufarley Silver badge

I thought we learned...

...the last time we had optical media that promises of it's durability and longevity almost never panned out. Not to mention the colossal amount of garbage it created.

Skeptical? Who, me?

Wyze admits 13,000 users could have viewed strangers' camera feeds

chuckufarley Silver badge

"The dog ate my home work and...

...This client library received unprecedented load conditions caused by devices coming back online all at once. As a result of increased demand, it mixed up device ID and user ID mapping and connected some data to incorrect accounts."

Wyse is perhaps the worst software, hardware, and business model to ever exist. The lowest bidders get to bid on who the lowest bidder is.

Oxide reimagines private cloud as... a 2,500-pound blade server?

chuckufarley Silver badge
Joke

Will Oxide take...

...Monthly payments?

Microsoft warns Dev Drive daredevils to back up or beware after latest build

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So the moral of the story...

...is don't use the cloud to store data? Done!

Intuitive Machines IM-1 heading for Moon on SpaceX rocket

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Unhappy

I tried to watch the launch live stream...

...But it was mainly just people from SpaceX and IM talking about how great they were. Not up to par with other NASA streams.

Mozilla CEO quits, pushes pivot to data privacy champion... but what about Firefox?

chuckufarley Silver badge
Go

Re: Firefox just does not work on some web sites.

Just wanted to say that believe it or not, my iPhoneSE 11 still gets updates. That's the nicest thing I have ever said about Apple.

chuckufarley Silver badge

Re: I remember when...

Fair to whom? As I said, things have changed over time. So I don't see the need to call foul over apples vs. oranges. It is evolution in progress. I don't know where it will wind up but I do think that we are losing more than we gain when the code base for any complex enough web browser must contain a poorly implemented OS. Hopefully with time this problem will be solved.

chuckufarley Silver badge

I remember when...

...You could download the Mozilla Firebird beta and it was less than 1 MB in size. After about 20 years no one has been able to match the wonderful lightweight experience that it game the user. Times have changed and the internet along with it and operating systems too. So in the coming years I can see myself moving on from Firefox. But only when I have to. Even now I have other browsers installed though I only use them for certain tasks. Maybe someday browsers can go back to being small tools the do simple things but I don't think that's likely. They will just be replaced by things that mask the bloats and memory usage as part of the OS.

AI PC hype bubble swells, but software support lags marketing

chuckufarley Silver badge
Joke

AI PC's Dominating in 2027...

...means that 2030 will be the year of the Fact Checking PC that corrects all of the hallucinations generated by our AI PC's.

Square Kilometre Array prototype 'scope achieves first light

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Happy

I can't wait to crunch some numbers...

...because a lot of the data used by scientific Distributed Computing projects through BOINC comes from things like this. Milkyway@home is using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to build the most accurate map of our galaxy, Einstien@home uses data from radio telescopes (MEERKAT, Arecibo when it was active, etc.) plus LIGO to investigate objects of extreme gravity, and of course LHC@home is using real world data from CERN to not just process data from experiments but also model experiments before and after they are run.

My point is that there is going to be so much data that it will take decades to work through. Some scientists are even going back to data gathered by the Pioneer and Voyager missions and applying modern computing techniques so see things we couldn't see in the past. The money saved by the science teams and the quality of the results they get from volunteered processor time speak for themselves. And this a good thing in the era of carbon credits.

IBM Cloud is upgrading a datacenter and users will have to halt their Power VMs

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Meh, At least...

...users aren't voting against Democracy for "reasons."

AI PC hype seems to be making PCs better – in hardware terms, at least

chuckufarley Silver badge

This is why I like keeping things on a central file server accessed with a stupidly fast network. I can access my pics or my games or some other part of my data and even though the laptop might only have 4GB of RAM the iSCSI server has 128GB plus a dedicated 256GB NVMe filesystem cache. The flash storage and the RAM are faster than my 10Gbit network and those are much faster than the SATA SSD in the laptop.

chuckufarley Silver badge

Reaching Critical Mass...

...will need more than hardware solutions. Most Generative AI models a person can run on their own hardware use CUDA or OpenCL for inference and not the Tensor Cores that have been built into the latest generations of GPU's. Keeping the total power draw and the waste heat to a minimum will likely involve making sure computers are using every software and hardware optimization available. Of course the Extra Oomph we are seeing could just be "Window's Dressing" and most users could find themselves being billed for cloud services when little Timmy asks his computer to write an essay about the dangers of plagiarism.

OpenAI bans long-shot presidential candidate bot for breaking T&Cs

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Coat

So the company...

...that trains AI models by blatantly ripping off copyrighted materials is allowed to punish those that break it's T's & C's? Pot, meet Kettle.

US agencies warn made-in-China drones might help Beijing snoop on the world

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Back in my day...

...we had balsa wood models powered by rubber bands. Just saying.

Non-profit startup offers certifications for AI models that respect creators' rights

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Thumb Up

The bridge is being built...

...Now let's hope someone doesn't set fire to it. While this is only a single step it is at least a step in the right direction. If generative AI can get to the point that minimizes risks for the artists, the people that train the models, and those that use the models then perhaps new art can flourish that otherwise would never have been seen or read. Even though AI is currently very powerful and able to somewhat mimic human imagination by doing math with artistic styles it can't imagine on it's own. Just provoke the imagination of it's users. Which makes it a worth while tool. Hopefully the Nash Equilibrium is reached and there is a phase transition.

Then AI might become boring like putting people on the moon and we can get on with the next phase of hype.

Could immutability be a Leap too far for openSUSE users?

chuckufarley Silver badge

I like the idea of immutable Suse...

...I haven't tried any of them yet but I like the idea. I just hope they don't say "Oh, everyone is on immutable now and our next step is to force them onto a rolling release."

That would be the end of me using Suse.

Why we update... Data-thief malware exploits SmartScreen on unpatched Windows PCs

chuckufarley Silver badge

Re: I know that data has to be stored somewhere...

While I do hope we'll get there, I think a few decades is a bit optimistic. The biggest hurdle is making it unprofitable to collect too much data.

chuckufarley Silver badge
Meh

I know that data has to be stored somewhere...

...But why in the hell is so much of it stored at all? Wouldn't we be better off with a small attack surface and a smaller bag of goodies for the bad guys to steal? The thing that really bothers me is almost everyone reading this already knows what I mean and there isn't much measurable effort being made to communicate the urgency to the average end user. Windows isn't the only place the bloat puts people at risk. On my Linux desktop I try to avoid the truth about the /home/user/.* directories by telling myself "Hey at least you are using some encryption here." Which wouldn't matter if a bug like this could by used by the new in-kernel SMB server. It's not likely that I am risk of much, but I know I have to be at risk of something.

Memtest86+, the little RAM tester, flexes FOSS muscles with v7.0

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You can also...

...install Memtest86+ directly into your Linux desktop/server. Adding it to the grub boot menu is usually done automatically and them you have the option to boot into it without needing a USB stick.

Need to make some 3D models but lack the skill and talent? Say, have you tried... AI?

chuckufarley Silver badge

Re: It may be hard...

It's just a small change, it's a large enough change to make it unique. Read a bit more on AI and IP related court rulings from 2021-2023.

EDIT: https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/24/copyright_ai_art_us/

chuckufarley Silver badge
Coat

It may be hard...

...For the businesses to make money off of these 3D AI models. If you can't copyright the content (and you can't because it's AI generated) then how do protect the IP in your product?

Uncle Sam will pay for your big ideas to end AI voice-cloning fraud

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If the Politicians...

...Would just stop talking the risks of AI voice cloning would be reduced by over 50%.

In surprise move, Gentoo Linux starts offering binaries

chuckufarley Silver badge
Linux

Gentoo has made great progress...

...Towards making the Stable branch actually stable. In the vast majority of cases people will at most need to adjust their "USE flags" which govern which features are enabled when compiling a given package. See https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/USE_flag for docs if you have never tried it. One of the problems with a source based distro is that if a file becomes corrupt or if a system's software is years out of date there may not be a clear and easy path to get the system back to a stable and updated state. So for years Gentoo has offered the "tinderbox" or unoptimized binaries that can be downloaded to help recover a system. However these only covered the base system and not even the most commonly used programs in the Portage tree. I see these new binaries as not only a time saver but also a simple and effective way for neophytes to troubleshoot. If a program is misbehaving, just download the binaries and try to run it. It it still fails then you either have a deeper problem or the problem is something that needs a bug report.

Personally I don't see myself using it but it's really nice to know it's there. If a person is running lower end hardware and wants to get up and running ASAP this is a wonder path forward. Otherwise you need to do some extra (although not too hard) work. For example my home server even has a carefully curated Gentoo VM that serves as a remote package compiler for my laptop via distcc. Both approaches are elegant solutions in my eyes.

Mozilla CEO pockets a packet, asks biz to pick up pace the 'Mozilla way'

chuckufarley Silver badge

Re: What Is This “Market Share” Business?

Read "Homesteading the Noosphere."

chuckufarley Silver badge

Hopefully...

...The AI bits can be turned off when running ./configure because otherwise this is going to be a huge problem.

How do you teach a robot dog new tricks? Throw it a string of hex, a crayon, and a canvas

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Alert

Wot I think...

...Is that another artist has discovered the media of automation.

GLHF in 2024!

China bans export of rare earth processing kit

chuckufarley Silver badge

LiDAR? Really?

Just for that China can't have any of my Corned Beef Hash on St. Patty's Day.

Philips recalls 340 MRI machines because they may explode in an emergency

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Re: Back of a Motorcyclist?

This sounds like self employment to me.

chuckufarley Silver badge

Re: If you aren't full of shrapnel you will probably suffocate

They don't have to navigate stairs. Thanks to Russell T. Davies they can fly.

Calculating Pi in the sky: Axiom Space plans to launch 'orbital datacenter'

chuckufarley Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: I wonder

I wonder how the tidal shearing will affect the glue holding the MicroSD cards in place.

Study uncovers presence of CSAM in popular AI training dataset

chuckufarley Silver badge

I wish I could say I was shocked...

...or even slightly surprised but no one ever said that humans directly employed by StabilityAI reviewed every bit of potential training data. Who in their right mind would say "I'll take all the money you are willing to give me so that I may become intimately familiar with the worst of the worst of the worst content the Internet has to offer?"

Then again, who in their right mind would train AI's with uncured data sets? Yes not just curated, but cured, like an XMAS ham.

To be fair and fully disclose relevant info, I use Stable Diffuse a few times a week and I am glad that I do not own any of the stock. These things need guard rails for their guard rails.

Millions of Xfinity customers' info, hashed passwords feared stolen in cyberattack

chuckufarley Silver badge
Boffin

Re: In a more direct way...

It takes time to maintain things, even digital data constructs. Human effort billed in fractions of a life time. By not fixing it they get a teenie tiny bit more profit. If you get rewarded for cutting corners more often then you punished for it punished it becomes profitable.

Quid Pro Quo.

chuckufarley Silver badge
Joke

Re: In a more direct way...

...I find your naivete appealing. Do you come here often?

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