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• Post #4026092

  Apparently, if the on-site refund won't work for a cancelled train (because it's an Advanced ticket and there's normally no refunds _for change of plans_) then The Train Line's support options are phone call, WhatsApp and Twitter. And by "support options", I mean "a WhatsApp chat bot" that'll quickly say "sorry, you need a human" and give a 3-5 minute wait time before they black-hole you and don&#3...

• Post #4026091

  Playing "Overlord 2". One of the loading screen tips was "Never take a succubus home to meet your mother". It also suggests boiling a phoenix in oil instead of cooking/baking it, because the direct heat only encourages it 😁

• Post #4026090

  It bothers me slightly that Overlord 2 says "Autosave" but it doesn't mean "save here". It means "saved your progress". So when you go back to the game then you go _all_ the way back to your lair, have to pick the mission from the map again, get dumped by the last portal, have to re-recruit your minions, and then wander however far it is into the level between your entry portal and where you were actually at. All of the progress save...

• Post #2514726

  Melissa Joan Hart is apparently 50 today. She's still a witch who explains it all to me 🤩

• Post #2474231

  Does anyone have any good recommendations on things to put in an `llms.txt` file on your website? Apparently it's a pseudo-standard now and LLMs may read it to get a "better understanding" of your website before processing it. My current content is here: https://ibboard.co.uk/llms.txt #FuckGenAI #LLMs #SysadminProblems

• Post #2474230

  I *love* it every time I get to work with Polars (like Pandas, but wrapping a Rust library) or Spark. The power and cleanliness is amazing. Such clear and efficient transforms on data 😍 I wish I needed to use it more often. And I wish I knew more of it so that I didn't have to keep digging around and finding what the right function is again. I've probably got Pandas and Spark books somewhere in the 170+ software-related ebooks that I have from Humble Bundles. But… I just don&am...

• Post #2474228

  Me at work: Here's an example of where Copilot performed "analysis" of data based on tags and pre-existing training instead of the (actually identical) data it was given. And then it bullshitted some statistics when probed. Be careful when you trust GenAI to do analysis for you. Colleague: Everyone knows that Copilot is rubbish. Me, in my head: Yes, that's exactly the message to take home here 🙄 #FuckGenAI #WeAreDoomed

• Post #2035435

  Some companies are a) trusting to "AI" agents instead of hiring real people (which couldn't possibly go wrong) and b) returning to metrics that are basically "Lines of Code" but more expensive! I can't wait for all of the providers to start charging at a rate that covers their costs and watch these idiots crash and burn 🙄 https://www.404media.co/startups-brag-they-spend-more-money-on-ai-than-human-employees/ #FuckGenAI #IdiotCEO

• Post #1677805

  OMG, Kagi Translate as "LinkedIn Speak" as a target language 😆 Which apparently translated to "Thrilled to announce that Kagi Translate is officially disrupting the localization space! 🚀 Grateful for the opportunity to leverage "LinkedIn Speak" as a target language. 😆 It’s all about driving impact and fostering global synergy. #Innovation #GrowthMindset #Localization" (Probably actually just "LLM: Generate me some corporate garbage...

• Post #1268597

  I wish version control CLIs had a "write commit message with diff below" option. Yeah, sure, the list of modified files is helpful. But sometimes I've made multiple edits and it would be helpful to have the full diff available so that I can write a better summary! (I should probably just have another tmux 'tab' and switch between the two… but I generally only keep one tab per folder most of the time!)

• Post #1268596

  I saw something recently about how we're "already cyborgs" because we outsource memory and calculations and stuff to computers and… Does that mean that we've not really been "just human" for thousands of years? We've actually been human/animal hybrids for thousands of years since we started riding horses to improve our movement speed and started training dogs to perform herding tasks for us? 🧐 (We've presumably then spent a fe...

• Post #1268595

  BBC News: Team Scotland condemns 'abhorrent' racist abuse aimed at its models Will you look at that. Anonymous bigots online are being arseholes, and even Sharron Davies has weighed in with an uninformed view on "feminism". Who could have expected that from a transphobe? 😐 (The skirt isn't that short, there's a longer one available, athletes are choosing the shorter one, and the model was probably wearing the heals so that she wasn't TI...

• Post #1268593

  Today in "teenage me would never have expected to agree so much with the pope": https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg0z3n5e5jo

• Post #1268592

  Which product manager at @mozilla needs to be fired for having them waste time on this rather than focus on their core responsibility: the web and email? 😒 https://hachyderm.io/@BenjaminHCCarr/116420507154624678

• Post #1268589

  "George Russell says Formula 1 “would not want to lose” Max Verstappen - but he would “understand” if the four-time world champion decided to leave the sport this year." That feels like a bit like a coded "Please leave! I'll be glad when my role as director of the Grand Prix Drivers' Association no longer involves listening to your self-centred whining" 😆 https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/articles/cj37p3k1nx8o

• Post #978452

  There's FINALLY a sensible suggestion from a one of the relevant government-related policy organisations about how to deal with kids and the Internet! Call for parents to teach their children online privacy like they would road safety - BBC News https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c070v00xzl5o

• Post #978450

  My email server sent me a "spam blocked" notification. It's definitely spam. But the best bit is how the spammer messed up. They've set up a DMARC policy of "quarantine" on their domain (presumably to look more trustworthy) and then not DKIM signed the email. So (correctly configured) email servers will check DMARC and go "Huh, better quarantine that" 😆 #Spam #Fail

• Post #978449

  Seen via Corey Quinn's "This Week in AWS" with the following intro: "Turns out you can't just announce a data center into existence. Nearly half of US data centers planned for 2026 are getting delayed or canceled because nobody stockpiled enough transformers and circuit breakers. The supply chain for boring electrical components is the actual bottleneck choking the AI buildout. Who knew infrastructure required, y'know, infrastructure."...

• Post #978448

  As far as I can tell, the argument here is that China is winning the "making machines that do useful and practical things" race while the USA is winning in the "dumbing down society with untrustworthy text generators" race. Well done, USA? 🤨 Kinda cool (from a purely technical standpoint) that US export controls enforced on foreign companies required China to be creative and efficient, though. Constraints create creativity! https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articl...

• Post #978447

  BBC News: Businesses scramble to get noticed by AI search "Rather than having extensive pages of content, HubSpot are now creating smaller pieces that GenAI can ingest" Much like the move to video on social media, it feels like HubSpot are butchering their own content just to fit in with the trendy new tech that's overall WORSE for users! https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c70n2rjgxeyo #FuckGenAI

• Post #978445

  I feel like Cisco and IBM kinda have a point here in that Random Joe Public probably shouldn't be doing "right to repair" stuff on Cisco switches in a data centre. Most companies wouldn't want their techies screwing around with ad-hoc fixes on devices in the production network anyway! That's what support contracts and hardware upgrade cycles are for. BUT they're also wrong, because the people who DO run Cisco switches should be able to hire who...

• Post #893931

  Corey Quinn with the smackdown on AWS announcements again: > Seven design principles for letting AI loose in financial services. I'd have gone with one: "Don't." But sure, comprehensive observability and fine-grained access controls sound great until an autonomous agent decides to rebalance a portfolio at 3 AM and your only explainability is a CloudWatch log nobody reads. 😆 #AWS #AgenticAI #True

• Post #893929

  Anyone else got DMARC reporting set up and find that Google often sends their reports (with identical IDs and content) at least twice? I got six copies today! 😐 #SysAdminProblems #Google #DMARC

• Post #893928

  My parents asked if I'd watched the Hannah Fry documentary on "AI". Tonight I tried to watch it. Normally I quite like a Hannah Fry documentary. She's a mathematician who can engage without being too deeply academic (unlike de Sautoy and al Khalili - who I also like). But this? I should have given up when I saw the episode titles. 10 minutes in and I couldn't take any more. So much "it's so amazing and transformative" and &a...

• Post #893925

  Ah, the joys of opening a game case for a console and finding that the game isn't inside. And isn't in any of the dozens of other places that you've then looked for it 😑 I miss the days when PC games just came on a disk, you installed it and that was it. I'm sure there was a point where you didn't even need to have the disk in the drive (or No-CD cracks were still fairly safe to download 😁)

• Post #893922

  The worst part about it being 1st April is that we've already had three months of the year and WHERE DID THEY GO?! 😭

• Post #893921

  No Starch Press's "Linux: The Good Stuff" is one of the pricier bundles that I've seen. Don't remember many other book bundles being up at £45 before you get all of them! Feels like it's normally in the $15-$25 range as the minimum "get everything" price. (Although you do only miss out on "System Programming in Linux" and "The Linux Programming Interface" if you drop down to £27) https://www...

• Post #893920

  "Our system for automatically picking targets and recommending them to military planners should not be seen as an automated targetting system" says head of Palantir UK 🙄 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdrm52g4pl2o

• Post #677685

  BBC News: AI toys for children misread emotions and respond inappropriately, researchers warn It's almost as if so-called "AI" in kids' toys (and basically everywhere else) ISN'T ACTUALLY INTELLIGENT AND IS ACTUALLY A FUCKING DUMB AND DANGEROUS IDEA 🧐 But hey, the investors are happy, so what's a little societal damage between friends? 😑 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyg4wx6nxgo #OpenAI #LLMs #FuckGenAI

• Post #677684

  Finished the game "Blue Prince" after 39 days thanks to a lucky run with lots of steps gems and a rabbits foot giving me lots of items! So I've got Door 46… and now there's a whole extra layer beyond "the end"!