Author | Lightnews

Reposted by Fraser MacIntosh

Andrew Hunter Murray @andrewhunterm.bsky.social · 13h

Absolute marmalade-dropper, this. Well worth a read.

Martin Robbins @mjrobbins.com · 14h

My latest: Move over bat tunnel, here’s the wild story of how HS2 were forced to build a multi-million pound bridge for a road that… doesn’t actually exist.

How HS2 built a bridge to nowhere

A state-of-the-art road bridge has been built deep in the heart of rural Buckinghamshire. Designed to carry traffic over the HS2 railway, there's just one tiny problem - there's no actual road.

martinrobbins.substack.com

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Reposted by Fraser MacIntosh

derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 2d

i hate that AI has now caused me to question the authenticity of cute animal videos online, which is my primary use of social media. i don't even know if this baby penguin actually wore a beret to go buy a tiny baguette in paris

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 3d

So Kim Kardashian expects me to believe that an administration who couldn’t organise the competent burglary of a hotel could fake a landing on another celestial body? While everyone in the whole of the world watched and no one said anything?

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 3d

Nah, they’re not dead, they’re disseminating malware because something something… memory overflow… something something botnet… something something… complete…

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 3d

The Horror!

Jen Gentleman @jenmsft.bsky.social · 3d

Parents - check your halloween candy carefully. Someone may try to teach your kids the C programming language

A snickers bar cut open with a basic example for how to swap two numbers using a temp variable in the C coding language

Reposted by Fraser MacIntosh

Patrick C Miller @patrickcmiller.bsky.social · 3d

No one pays ransomware demands anymore - so attackers have a new goal www.zdnet.com/article/no-o...

No one pays ransomware demands anymore - so attackers have a new goal

Ransomware payments were made in around 85% of attacks in 2019. But things have changed dramatically since then. Here's why.

www.zdnet.com

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 4d

It’s soo tiresome. You look at these you tube videos and think… err, no, that technology simply won’t ever be popular.

There Are Too Many Moving Parts.

The direction of technology is away from 100s-1000s of moving parts in the drive chain to 10s. Regardless of battery EV or not, it’s to EV.

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 4d

If you need a dishwasher emptied, dusting done or clothes put away, get a cleaner / housekeeper for a couple of hours a week. It’s quicker, cheaper, faster, better.

You help the person you employ and you help the wider economy and help society.

I’m getting off my horse now because I have vertigo.

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 4d

The thing I find so irritating about “housework robots” is that we’ve had them for decades and nobody has noticed.

Washing machines, tumble driers, dish washers, robot vacuum cleaners/mops. There’s automatic ventilation and even central heating.

If you really need clothes folded, send out.

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 5d

lol… I may have done this professionally for really quite some time - in a flying round the world to bang on about it to people who actually sometimes take onboard what I say, kind of way…

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 5d

Oh and use Windows Servers at one site and UNIX/Linux at another cross replicating between separate environments with no common command and control.

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 5d

The gold standard for immutable last resort backup is “tape on a shelf” with a side order of “in a secure vault” or “replicated across a WAN and ejected at the other site” (or using something like IBM’s safeguard Tape inaccessible library partition technology.)

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 5d

This seems to be happening more and more as an ongoing clash of infrastructure skills meeting head on with developers who’ve become responsible for “infrastructure as code”

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 5d

Backup is hard… who knew?

Well, strictly speaking backing up is easy. keeping an appropriate amount of backups - but no more - keeping them secure and making sure they can be recovered with pre-agreed RTO and RPO. Is hard…

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 5d

As a footnote - I don’t want to come over as missing that you already knew this, just that the reasons are of interest to me.

Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 5d

Yes, on both counts. It was less common though, for a load of interesting reasons. Mostly lack of refined sugar in the diet, which massively elevated relates of tooth decay when it arrived. People didn’t get old enough to die from heart disease but crucially died from many worse things before...

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 6d

I am reminded of a conversation I had once with someone who wondered why nobody made nuclear powered trains. I argued that we do and the French definitely do have nuclear powered trains.

Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 6d

Amusing how lots of the anti AI people are all like “if AI {LLMs} is so good, why can’t we conclusively demonstrate efficiency gains.” While ransomware criminals are all like “bring on the LLMs for massive increase in our phishing scumbaggery”

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 6d

If only I could get a sail for my EV… Retrofit sail may not be entirely MOT compatible though…

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 7d

Many photoshop filters/plugins use various forms of AI, so it can be ‘shopped and teh AIs at the same time…

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 7d

My **refurbished** office chair cost £300. My John Lewis desk, which is home furniture and not nearly good enough for an actual office cost £500. People have no idea how much stuff actually costs.

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 8d

Why are people disappointed that the Louvre jewellery theft people seem to have been arrested?

They specifically selected art to steal that would be easy melt down and sell as scrap. This is cultural vandalism. They are not heroes.

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 8d

Rebuild of parity raid is usually of disks that have had the same mechanical stresses over their lifetime and much more likely to fail during rebuild due to additional increased mechanical load. This just isn’t a problem with EC.

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 8d

I was going to ask why not erasure coding?

The recovery is far quicker as all disks are online. The chances and impact of a disk failure during rebuild is vastly reduced.

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Fraser MacIntosh @sdschap.bsky.social · 8d

I played still the only Death Race I’ve ever seen at ACAM in Laconia a couple of years back. Absolutely shockingly realistic, I was utterly traumatised.