Author Archives: pappp

Deloitte refunds Aussie gov after AI fabrications slip into $440K welfare report

Posted on 2025-10-06 by pappp

Source: The Register

Article note: Lol. The major consulting firms were always slop machines to create fake justifications and outsource responsibility, but if people start finding out they're genuinely just sending unchecked AI slop, the grift will fall apart.

Big Four consultancy billed Canberra top dollar, only for investigators to find bits written by a chatbot

Deloitte has agreed to refund part of an Australian government contract after admitting it used generative AI to produce a report riddled with fake citations, phantom footnotes, and even a made-up quote from a Federal Court judgment.…

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Laptops create systems. Phones feed algorithms. The asymmetry determines power

Posted on 2025-10-05 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: There are some interesting exceptions to the rule (in both directions), but the broad distinction between consumptive and creative use of technology is something we should be way more careful about as a society. I've been harping on the difference between general-purposes computers as devices for empowerment (Kay's "Bicycle for the mind" bit is clever, especially in context, even if it was later and more famously used by Steve Jobs who went on to be one of the people most to blame for ruining it), and locked down media-consumption machines as devices for coercion for more than a decade.
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I spent the day teaching seniors how to use an iPhone

Posted on 2025-10-02 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: iOS really is fucking ghastly if you aren't used to it. I don't own an iOS device but regularly try to help other people with them, and Apple seem to have done their absolute best to make nothing discoverable. Did I just make a gesture by how I was holding the device? What did it do? Can that feature only be accessed by a gesture? Can I long press this control for more options? What's tied to the effectively-mandatory vendor account? Why is it auto-completing wrong passwords from the integrated password manager and how do I change them? What the hell information did it autofill on this site/service when I "Signed in with apple?" How do I do "back" in this app, the method I used in the other app doesn't seem to apply? ...
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Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ

Posted on 2025-10-02 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Oh look, a timely example of why notarization / any flavor of blocking user installation of apps not specifically approved by the vendor like Apple has been doing and Google is barreling towards is unacceptable. If the vendor (and hence any entity that can leverage the vendor) can control what you do with a device, it isn't yours, and it isn't a viable platform to participate in society from since the mechanism is now literally being used to control political speech.
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Windows 7 marketshare jumps to nearly 10% as Windows 10 support is about to end

Posted on 2025-10-02 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: ...Yeah. If you're going to run an unsupported OS, you might as well run a good one. It really is a hilarious degree of validation for the claims (that I wholly agree with) that Windows has been getting steadily worse since 7 in almost every meaningful user-facing way.
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Charlie Javice sentenced to 7 years in prison for fraudulent $175M sale of Frank

Posted on 2025-09-30 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Another update for the list of folks from the "Forbes 30 under 30" list later implicated in a crime. Who could have guessed that selecting little ladder-climbing sociopaths is similar to selecting for frauds and predators. /s
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EA will be a very different company under private ownership

Posted on 2025-09-29 by pappp

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Propaganda + VC Extraction Machine. What and ugly failure mode our society has ended up in.

This morning's announcement that EA plans to sell itself to a consortium of private equity firms is one of the biggest business stories of the year. The $55 billion deal is the largest leveraged buyout in history and will send ripples through the world of high finance, both within and outside the gaming sector.

But even players who have no interest in the business side of the game industry should be paying attention to the news. Analysts who spoke to Ars Technica said that the privately owned version of Electronic Arts will likely be very different from the old public company, in ways that could directly affect the kinds of games the mega-publisher produces.

A $20 billion hole to fill

One of the biggest differences between a publicly owned EA and a privately owned version is that the latter will be saddled with roughly $20 billion of fresh debt provided by JP MorganChase, which is being used to help finance the leveraged buyout. Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter estimates the firm will be on the hook for roughly $1 billion a year in service payments on that debt after the deal closes.

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F-Droid says Google’s new sideloading restrictions will kill the project

Posted on 2025-09-29 by pappp

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: F-Droid is one of the primary reasons I use Android devices. It lets me get software which is curated to be Free, Open-Source, not subject to vendor tampering, and most importantly non-extractive. Breaking the model of a more open platform is essentially breaking the value-proposition of Android as anything other than "iOS for poors" and I'm astounded Google is willing to do that.

Google plans to begin testing its recently announced verification scheme for Android developers in the coming weeks, but there's still precious little information on how the process will work. F-Droid, the free and open source app repository, isn't waiting for the full rollout to take a position. In a blog post, F-Droid staff say that Google's plan to force devs outside Google Play to register with the company threatens to kill alternative app stores like F-Droid.

F-Droid has been around for about 15 years and is the largest source of free and open source software (FOSS) for Android. Because the apps in F-Droid are not installed via the Play Store, you have to sideload each APK manually, and Google is targeting that process in the name of security.

Several weeks ago, Google announced plans to force all Android app developers to register their apps and identity with Google. Apps that have not been validated by the Big G will not be installable on any certified Android devices in the future. Since virtually every Android device outside of China runs Google services, that means Google is in control of the software we get to install on Android.

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To digital natives, Microsoft’s IT stack makes Google’s look like a model of sanity

Posted on 2025-09-29 by pappp

Source: The Register

Article note: This should really just say "All extant groupware is fucking terrible, if anyone ever produces a non-asinine offering, it'll be the biggest disruption to enterprise computing since the end of Netware in the early 90s"

A millennial does battle with Redmond's enterprise tools and comes away reeling 

Comment  Probably the single most common argument against switching to Linux is the absolute non-negotiable requirement of many organizations to have Microsoft Exchange. Here's a fascinating glimpse of the view from the other side.…

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Update Notice of Centauri Series – ELEGOO Official

Posted on 2025-09-27 by pappp

Source: Published articles

Article note: Hey! They got shamed into admitting the Centauri Carbon line is running modified klipper, and complied with the open-source license requirements. I bet it'll be good for them in the long run, since many of the irritations with those have been firmware bugs, and the community will fix that shit if they can.
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