fidzu : computers

Programmer/entrepreneur Paul Ford is the co-founder of AI-driven business software platform Aboard. This week he wrote a guest essay for the New York Times titled "The AI Disruption Has Arrived, and It Sure Is Fun," arguing that Anthropic's Claude Code "was always a helpful coding assistant, but in November it suddenly got much better, and ever since I've been knocking off side projects that had sat in folders for a decade or longer... [W]hen the stars align and my prompts work out, I can do hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work for fun (fun for me) over weekends and evenings, for the price of the Claude $200-a-month." He elaborates on his point on the Aboard.com blog: I'm deeply convinced that it's possible to accelerate software development with AI coding - not deprofessionalize it entirely, or simplify it so that everything is prompts, but make it into a more accessible craft. Things which not long ago cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to pull off might come for hundreds of dollars, and be doable by you, or your cousin. This is a remarkable accelerant, dumped into the public square at a bad moment, with no guidance or manual - and the reaction of many people who could gain the most power from these tools is rejection and anxiety. But as I wrote.... I believe there are millions, maybe billions, of software products that don't exist but should: Dashboards, reports, apps, project trackers and countless others. People want these things to do their jobs, or to help others, but they can't find the budget. They make do with spreadsheets and to-do lists. I don't expect to change any minds; that's not how minds work. I just wanted to make sure that I used the platform offered by the Times to say, in as cheerful a way as possible: Hey, this new power is real, and it should be in as many hands as possible. I believe everyone should have good software, and that it's more possible now than it was a few years ago. From his guest essay: Is the software I'm making for myself on my phone as good as handcrafted, bespoke code? No. But it's immediate and cheap. And the quantities, measured in lines of text, are large. It might fail a company's quality test, but it would meet every deadline. That is what makes A.I. coding such a shock to the system... What if software suddenly wanted to ship? What if all of that immense bureaucracy, the endless processes, the mind-boggling range of costs that you need to make the computer compute, just goes? That doesn't mean that the software will be good. But most software today is not good. It simply means that products could go to market very quickly. And for lots of users, that's going to be fine. People don't judge A.I. code the same way they judge slop articles or glazed videos. They're not looking for the human connection of art. They're looking to achieve a goal. Code just has to work... In about six months you could do a lot of things that took me 20 years to learn. I'm writing all kinds of code I never could before - but you can, too. If we can't stop the freight train, we can at least hop on for a ride. The simple truth is that I am less valuable than I used to be. It stings to be made obsolete, but it's fun to code on the train, too. And if this technology keeps improving, then all of the people who tell me how hard it is to make a report, place an order, upgrade an app or update a record - they could get the software they deserve, too. That might be a good trade, long term.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

22 Feb 2026 11:34am GMT

Besides running tech operations at the UK's Post Office, their interim CTO is also removing and replacing Fujitsu's Horizon system, which Computer Weekly describes as "the error-ridden software that a public inquiry linked to 13 people taking their own lives." After over 16 years of covering the scandal they'd first discovered back in 2009, Computer Weekly now talks to CTO Paul Anastassi about his plans to finally remove every trace of the Horizon system that's been in use at Post Office branches for over 30 years - before the year 2030: "There are more than 80 components that make up the Horizon platform, and only half of those are managed by Fujitsu," said Anastassi. "The other components are internal and often with other third parties as well," he added... The plan is to introduce a modern front end that is device agnostic. "We want to get away from [the need] to have a certain device on a certain terminal in your branch. We want to provide flexibility around that...." Anastassi is not the first person to be given the task of terminating Horizon and ending Fujitsu's contract. In 2015, the Post Office began a project to replace Fujitsu and Horizon with IBM and its technology, but after things got complex, Post Office directors went crawling back to Fujitsu. Then, after Horizon was proved in the High Court to be at fault for the account shortfalls that subpostmasters were blamed and punished for, the Post Office knew it had to change the system. This culminated in the New Branch IT (NBIT) project, but this ran into trouble and was eventually axed. This was before Anastassi's time, and before that of its new top team of executives.... Things are finally moving at pace, and by the summer of this year, two separate contracts will be signed with suppliers, signalling the beginning of the final act for Fujitsu and its Horizon system. Anastassi has 30 years of IT management experience, the article points out, and he estimates the project will even bring "a considerable cost saving over what we currently pay for Fujitsu."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

22 Feb 2026 8:34am GMT

How much time does it take to even begin booting, asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM. Say you want separate Windows and Linux boot processes, and "You have Windows on one SSD/NVMe, and Linux on another. How long do you have to wait for a chance to choose a boot drive?" And more importantly, why is it all taking so long? In a world of 4-5 GHz CPU's that are thousands of times faster than they were, has hardware become thousands of times more complicated, to warrant the longer start time? Is this a symptom of a larger UEFI bloat problem? Now with memory characterization on some modern motherboards... how long do you have to wait to find out if your RAM is incompatible, or your system is dead on arrival? Share your own experiences (and system specs) in the comments. How long is it taking you to choose a boot drive? And what's your boot time?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

22 Feb 2026 5:34am GMT

"Accessing and remediating any of these issues can only be performed in the VAB."

21 Feb 2026 11:54pm GMT

The regular, consumer version of Windows 10 isn't the only Windows release reaching or having reached end-of-life, now middling on under the Extended Security Updates program for the many people sticking with the venerable release. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016 (October 13, 2026), Windows 10 IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB (October 13, 2026), and Windows Server 2016 (January 12, 2027) are all reaching end-of-life soon, too. On the listed dates, these versions of Windows will receive their final monthly security updates. As with Windows 10 for consumers, however, there's a way out: the Extended Security Updates program will also kick in for these versions, offering critical and important security updates, and support relating to just those. The program will be offered for up to three years after official support ends, and won't be free. For Server 2016 and and Enterprise LTSB 2016, pricing will be $61 per year, but it would double for every year after the first. Pricing for IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB is available upon request. Of course, Microsoft urges you to upgrade to newer versions - Windows Server 2025, Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC 2024, and Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024 - but if you're happy with your current version, you can at least get a three-year reprieve, for a price.

21 Feb 2026 1:59pm GMT

Like rocks, egg shells can trap isotopes, allowing us to use them to date samples.

21 Feb 2026 1:00pm GMT

Despite continuous rumors to the contrary, Oracle is still actively developing Solaris, and it's been more active than ever lately. Yesterday, the company pushed out another release for customers with the proper support contracts: Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU90. Aside from the various package updates to bring them up to speed with the latest releases, this new Solaris version also comes with a slew of improvements for ZFS. ZFS changes in Oracle Solaris 11.4.90 include more flexibility in setting retention properties when receiving a new file system, and adding the ability for zfs scrub and resilver to run before all the blocks have been freed from previous zfs destroy operations. (This requires upgrading pools to the new zpool version 54.) ↫ Alan Coopersmith You can now also set boot environments to never be destroyed by either manual or automatic means, and more work has been done to prevent a specific type of bug that would accidentally kill all running processes on the system. It seems some programs mistakenly use -1 as a pid value in kill() calls. Now in 11.4.90, the kill system call was modified to not allow processes to use a pid of -1 unless they'd specifically set a process flag that they intend to kill all processes first, to help with programs that didn't check for errors when finding the process id for the singular process they wanted to kill. ↫ Alan Coopersmith There's many more changes and improvements, of course, and hopefully, we'll get to see these in the next CBE release as well, so us mere mortals without expensive support contracts can benefit from them too.

21 Feb 2026 12:09pm GMT

A new book argues that tests might reshape human diversity even if they don't work.

21 Feb 2026 12:00pm GMT

I was trading New Year's resolutions with a circle of friends a few weeks ago, and someone mentioned a big one: sleeping better. I'm a visual neuroscientist by training, so whenever the topic pops up it inevitably leads to talking about the dreaded blue light from monitors, blue light filters, and whether they do anything. My short answer is no, blue light filters don't work, but there are many more useful things that someone can do to control their light intake to improve their sleep-and minimize jet lag when they're traveling. My longer answer is usually a half-hour rant about why they don't work, covering everything from a tiny nucleus of cells above the optic chiasm, to people living in caves without direct access to sunlight, to neuropeptides, the different cones, how monitors work, gamma curves, what I learned running ismy.blue, corn bulbs, melatonin, finally sharing my Apple Watch & WHOOP stats. What follows is slightly more than you needed to know about blue light filters and more effective ways to control your circadian rhythm. Spoiler: the real lever is total luminance, not color. ↫ Patrick Mineault And yet, despite a complete and utter lack of evidence blue-light filters do anything at all, even the largest technology companies in the world peddle them without so much as blinking an eye. It's pure quackery, and as always, we let them get away with it.

21 Feb 2026 7:33am GMT

On Friday, July 18th, 2025, the Arch Linux team was notified that three AUR packages had been uploaded that contained malware. A few maintainers including myself took care of deleting these packages, removing all traces of the malicious code, and protecting against future malicious uploads.

30 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

While starting this post I realized I have been maintaining personal infrastructure for over a decade! Most of the things I've self-hosted is been for personal uses. Email server, a blog, an IRC server, image hosting, RSS reader and so on. All of these things has all been a bit all over the place and never properly streamlined. Some has been in containers, some has just been flat files with a nginx service in front and some has been a random installed Debian package from somewhere I just forgot.

19 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation. VOA is a generic framework for verifying any kind of distribution artifacts (i.e. files) using arbitrary signature verification technologies. The voa CLI ⌨️ The voa project offers the voa(1) command line interface (CLI) which makes use of the voa(5) configuration file format for technology backends. It is recommended to read the respective man pages to get …

11 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT