Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: BS

Try googling the phrase "flour mill explosion", I'm sure there will be plenty of examples.

Re: BS

This is why you wear a helmet with a visor. I had an unfortunate sparrow end itself on the front of my motorcycle helmet once, when I was riding along at about 40mph. I imagine it could have blinded me if I'd had an open-face helmet.

Stop dragging feet on AI nudification ban, UK government told

Re: Twatter

Or "witter" as that accurately describes what most users do on there.

It started out as "Grok lets users make pictures of women in bikinis without their consent", then it became "sexualised images of women", then it became "sexualised images of women and girls". Then it became "naked images of women and children". Then it finally evolved to "Elon Musk allows paedofiles to make sexual images of naked children for profit, we must ban X and Grok immediately, won't somebody think of the children!!!!!!"

Has it occurred to you, that since "Grok" is an "AI" that includes an image generator, which appears to have either no guardrails, or limited ones which are easily overcome, that all of these things might actually be true? Well, all of them, except how you spelt the word "paedophile".

Re: I'm so tired ...

I did, in fact, get to your third sentence, which, by your own admission in the second sentence, is hyperbole and speculation. Your first sentence is encouraging others to either commit a criminal act in order to disprove your speculation, or accept what you said at face value, and it was grade-A bollocks, so I won't be doing that.

Re: But but

Frozen peaches, get your frozen peaches here! No need to freeze your own peaches!

Re: I'm so tired ...

And you've seen the material causing this hubub, have you?

Have you? I ask, only because actively seeking it out is a criminal act in itself. Personally, I have no direct way of telling what is or is not posted on "X" since I'd already left the platform when Musk bought it, because I was paying attention, and I happened to already have noticed what a repellent human being he is, and how he had immediately started to enshittify it, as he enshittifies everything he touches (whilst having a long history of claiming credit for creations that are not his).

If your reaction to "people are posting child porn" on whatever platform is to go to have a look and check it out for yourself, perhaps you should stop using a computer, before the courts order that you have to stop using a computer.

Court tosses appeal by hacker who opened port to coke smugglers with malware

Re: This is an issue

He was convicted of other crimes, not anything to do with his communications; the communications were just evidence of his intent to commit those other crimes.

If your private communications criticising the government were intercepted by the police, and then you went on to, for instance, try to blow up the Houses of Parliament, it's a pretty sure bet that those intercepted communications would be used in court as supporting evidence to show intent. It would be entirely your fault for failing to keep them secure and private.

Your argument basically boils down to "I should be able to commit a crime, without anyone finding out, how dare the police try to detect crimes and catch me at it."

(Incidentally, this was the argument used to prevent the Metropolitan Police from actually being allowed to detect crimes at the time they were formed as the world's first professional police force; it was quickly realised that allowing police to actually detect crime, rather than simply trying to prevent it, is a bit more effective, and a reasonable trade-off against civil liberties. This was in 1842; you are 184 years late to the party on this one.)

Re: SkyECC man-in-the-middle encrypted messaging service :o

ISTR stories at the time about "EncroChat" (I think this is the same network); they compromised it, gathered loads of evidence, arrested a bunch of people in organised crime networks, then shut it down. I mean, at this point, it would have been public knowledge amongst the crims that it was compromised, so it would have served no purpose at all to not shut it down and seize any hardware used to run it.

Grok told to cover up as UK weighs action over AI 'undressing'

Re: Mona Lisa undressed!

Firstly, consent only applies to living people, and I'm pretty sure the subject of the Mona Lisa is long dead (or we have a bigger, vampire-related problem).

Secondly, whilst we have to be careful around the "is it art" argument, and the exact line between art and pornography is fuzzy, and always moving, obvious art is obviously art, and obvious illegal child pornography is also obvious. Everyone can see what you are trying to do, and the claim you are projecting from it here, but in this case, obvious bollocks is obviously bollocks. That sort of reductionism is just a logical fallacy (reductio ad absurdum is the name of the argument you are trying to use, if you want its proper name, but you are basing it on flawed premises).

Re: What about...

Can you name any other platforms that allow this? If there are others, then yes, they too, should be investigated.

There are plenty of "guardrails" applied to LLMs and other "AI" tools that prevent all sorts of illegal uses, such as getting instructions on how to make bombs. They work with varying degrees of success.

However, here's the thing; in order to produce an "unclothed" image of a person, that "AI" model must have some source material that it has been "trained" on in order to do this. In other words, it has to "know" (and I use that word advisedly, because "AI" has no real knowledge) what the thing it is being asked to generate should look like.

At this point, the UK government should be asking Elon Musk how Grok can generate these images in the first place, what source material it has been fed with, and how they can be assured that, since its training data appears to contain material that is illegal in the UK, there is no risk that it will produce other material that is also illegal in the UK.

In other words, in extension to the adage GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), if there is illegal material coming out, there must have been illegal material going in, because "Grok" is not a conscious entity that can make this stuff up for itself.

If, for instance, it has been trained with images of naked ladies, so that its users can tittilate themsleves by asking it to generate an image of a naked lady, but it is illegal in this jurisdiction to make a pornographic image of a real person, then it stands to reason that the model trained with images of naked women must not be allowed to generate images of real people using that training data. Similarly, it should not be allowable to ask it to produce images of children based on that data. Personally, I think that if a person can use the internet and can't manage to find genuine images of undressed women, but instead have to resort to asking Elon Musk to do it for them, then maybe using any sort of computer is not for them. Perhaps a person finding themselves in this situation should also think about how objectifying women in this way might be the reason they are single and living in thier mother's basement amongst a pile of empty take-away containers and crusty socks.

Re: Mona Lisa undressed!

Is that a pornographic image of a child?

(A) Yes

(B) No

If your answer was (A), then please stay where you are, and an officer of the Metropolitan Police will be along shortly to arrest you for distribution of child pornography. GAME OVER.

If your answer was (B), then congratulations on the ability to work a keyboard to the standard required to make a post on The Register's forums. However, the comment is irrelevant and off-topic. GAME OVER.

Re: Almost time

Except that's not such a trivial task.

Your claim is demonstrably false, given that other AI image generators have not been shown to have this problem. But sure, go ahead and call other people idiots.

Re: Almost time

If you leave, it would help the balance though, wouldn't it? You should maybe give up the right-wing trolling and take up an occupation better suited to your skills; perhaps as a shop dummy?

Re: Do you need America to liberate you from your government yet?

When you start taking anything from that man as any sort of truth, especially when the copious evidence from actual observers points to a completely different story, I think we do have to indeed conclude that the only basic thing around here is your intelligence, and that you are quite severely divorced from reality. Perhaps you should consider a different user handle, such as "BlitheringIdiot"?

Re: Almost time

Yes, technically our head of state is unelected. They are also purely ceremonial in function, and have no role whatsoever in government. Your lot elected a fascist. I think you need to give your head a wobble, then read some history books. Try focusing on central Europe in the first half of the 20th century.

Re: Poppers Paradox

The German government has detailed intelligence indicating... ...The discussions, attended by prominent virologists, examined the origins of the virus, among other topics.

"Intelligence indicating" literally means, "we heard that someone said...". My understanding is that this "intelligence" was nothing more than a claim made with no evidence, hence "intelligence" and not "evidence". Those words mean different things, you know.

It's also not unusual for governments to have meetings where they consult subject experts on various matters (well, outside the US, anyway). Just because a subject came up as a topic of discussion doesn't tell us anything about what was said, and what conclusions were reached.

You have used a lot of suggestive language here to make us think that the German government endorses the suggestion* that COVID was a lab escape. This does not, however, say that. It just indicates that someone talked about this at one point. Can you point me to any announcement from anyone in the German Chancellory that has endorsed this idea? Nope, didn't think so.

*I was going to say "theory", or "hypothesis" but realised that the evidence and testability of this idea is far below the threshold for meeting the definition of those words.

Re: Poppers Paradox

It's worth remembering that the only reason that RFK no longer has a worm in his head eating bits of his brain, is that it dies of mercury poisoning, from doing so. Neither the existence of the brain damage from a parasitic worm, or the impairment from a long history of dietary consumption of mercury-containing fish, gives me confidence in his cognitive abilities, and this is before you have to acknowledge that he has zero medical or scientific knowledge to start with. A less suitable or qualified person for his position would be hard to find.

Re: Poppers Paradox

The counter-point to this, is for people who make ridiculous claims, and demand counter-proof, or who demand a spoon-fed version of complex and well-worn discussions rather than just looking it up for themselves. Quite often those "proofs" consist of the overwhelming weight of accumulated scientific work over a number of years (for example established climate science), and people challenging them feel content to form an argument based upon the flimsiest of counter-evidence (for example an editorial piece in the right-wing press funded by fossil-fuel industry interests). Clever argument might make these appear to be equivalent to those who are not well-versed in the subject, and for those whoa re, it is often exhausting having to continuously argue against the same bad-faith arguments, to avoid an "alternative consensus" forming that is not based on any real evidence. The "virus escaped from a lab" explanation for COVID-19 being a good example of this, a "conclusion" that very much appears to be based on politically-led interpretation of cherry-picked and flimsy evidence (for example, taking things like "is possible but unlikely" to mean "is probable"); in the Wuhan example, the existence of a lab studying coronaviruses looks like a smoking gun until you discover that most large Chinese cities have at least one such lab studying respiratory virus, for the very simple reason that they are a threat to human health, and this is how medical research is done (not only in China, but in many countries), and it would have been notable if there was no such lab in a city of this size.

Re: Poppers Paradox

Sky News and the Daily Mail, and indeed all news organisations, are subject to regulations about how the claims they can make must be backed by evidence. This is demonstrated by the retractions that the Daily Heil has to print when they get stuff wrong (I believe this is not infrequent, but since I don't read this rag, the headlines being quite enough for me to identify obvious bullshit, I have to take this second-hand). This is also, incidentally, why "GB News" is not a news channel, despite its name, and is, instead "entertainment"; for the sort of people for whom being made angry by discriminatory rhetoric and half-truths is entertainment, presumably.

The "free market" doesn't care whether the money is theirs or not, as long as it can get hold of it.

"There are paedos using your platform"

"Oh dear, let's do something about that, like seeing if we can get their money".

A great example of how the "free market" solves problems, yeah?

Ofcom officially investigating X as Grok's nudify button stays switched on

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

Absolute horsehit. Nobody knew about the Rotherham grooming gang. Social services and teh police should have detected it, but there were failures.

The far right only got invovled when Tommeh decided that he could get some good old-fashioned money-spinning outrage going by jeopardising the court cases, after it had finally ben detected. If I remember, he was in contenpt of court when he started publicly naming people who were sub judice, raising the very real prospect of a mistrial, which would have resulted in the scumbags in question getting off on a technicality.

You are doing yourself no favours by attempting to revise well-documented history.

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

Yes, you could do it; it would be a crime to do it, and distributing those images would be a further, more serious crime. If, somehow, you had superhuman abilities, and could churn this things out quickly, and could provide a service to do so, that would be a much more serious crime still. If you use an "AI" to do it for you, suddenly it's not a crime? I don't think so.

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

It's not being used for that, though. OFCOM are currently investigating the case, and their measure of last resort is the power to ban access to, and to ban payment providers from allowing transactions to, the site in question. Before this point, the regulator will enter into discussions with the owners of Grok about preventing access to illegal material in the UK, and taking reasonable measures to prevent it. If Musk refuses to engage with the regulator, then, and only then, can the measure of last resort be taken. If "X" is so intimately tied to Grok that one can't be blocked in the UK without the other being, then this is a problem of Elon's making, not the regulator's.

In other words, "banning Twitter completely" will only happen if its owners continue to flout the law after a full and proper investigation has been carried out, and they have been given ample opportunity to abide by the law in the UK.

Also, if this site is the only place you are getting particular news from, then you need to be really careful about making sure you have properly verified that story, because it's quite likely to be bullshit, or a highly biased take, with cherry-picked information at best.

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

You pillocks seem to think that everyone knew about these gangs at the time. If that's the case, why didn't you do anything about it? Perhaps the answer is that, due to failures in policing and the social services, largely due to underfunding, but also due to negative societal attitudes towards children, and especially girls, of lower socioeconomic status, the crimes in question went undetected. To be honest, it's pretty much the same reason the West Yorkshire Police took so long to catch the Yorkshire Ripper; institutional failure.

I know it's a popular trend to blame Starmer for everything (nobody mention Jimmy Savile, etc. etc.), but if you had any ounce of intelligence you'd pick the fights that have some evidence to back them up, it's not like the man isn't failing in myriad other ways, such as toadying up to the fascist president of the United States, or failing to tax the ultra-rich.

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

The problem with talking about "grooming gangs" is that it displays a certain amount of ignorance, and some implied racism. For starters, the term is used almost exclusively as a shorthand for "Asian grooming gangs," and as such, in reference to one high-profile case.

In reality, child sexual abuse is a real problem, not just here, but across the world, and for a situation to fit the description of a "grooming gang", it needs to be a situation where two or more adults are involved in the sexual abuse of a child. The fast majority of this happens in the home, and the vast majority of it is committed by white people, because the vast majority of the population is white. The likes of Yaxley-Lennon like to focus on the cases where it has been done by non-white people as a racist wedge, implying that certain populations or communities are more likely to be the perpetrators, and to use this to stir up racist hatred, and in turn cynically gather donations, so he can enjoy holidays in Spain, and lots of cocaine.

The actual problem, from a criminological point of view, is that child abuse is a hidden crime. We already know this, so it's unclear what the purpose of an enquiry into it is, other than as a political stunt to keep the agitators and right-wing press quiet. The sensible thing to do would to be to ask those well versed in criminology, in child protection, how we can best improve detection and punishment of these sorts of crime. The answers here are likely to be to reverse the "austerity" funding cuts that were made to policing and social services that led to these bodies being underfunded and overstretched, but this sort of nuanced and adult conversation doesn't fit with the argumentative nature of social media, or attention-grabbing headlines in newspapers and on news sites, which measure their success by engagement (and thus advertising revenue) and not by truthfulness.

But sure, put the blame on one useless politician, even though this is either his sphere of expertise or his remit. Whatever you do, don't put the blame on people saying, "we've had enough of experts".

I'm not sure what you think the job of the DPP is, but it's not criminal investigations, or social services. These are where the failings were in the Rotherham case. The DPP's job is to be in charge of the CPS; the CPS's job is to prosecute people who have already been arrested by the police, who have in turn gathered enough evidence to get a positive charging decision from the CPS. The two things are not directly connected in any way, and if you think they are, you need to go away and educate yourself on how the criminal justice system in the UK actually works, including the clear separation of policing and the courts.

Re: "asking Grok to generate a naked image of Musk"

I'm glad I've not seen it, but I'm assuming this is the origin story for Jabba the Hut?

Re: apple & google showing how scummy they are

I noticed the other day, whilst watching a video on a popular video platform, that the frequent ads, which seemed to come every minute or so, which is incredibly distracting from the actual content I wanted to watch, were mostly obvious AI fakes of famous personalities (a newsreader whose name I forget, Martin Lewis, and Kier Starmer were amongst the ones I actually paid any attention to) touting obvious get-rich-quick scams.

The industry doesn't care at all about these obviously fraudulent ads, the only purpose of which could possibly be to scam people, and I can only conclude that they only care about the income from them, given their frequency, which was much more frequent than the genuine, but still annoying ads for recognisable products.

These firms do not, indeed, care, except about making heaps of cash. If it's at the expense of your safety, your reputation, your livelihood, your life savings, or even your life, it's entirely moot to them.

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

Why do I have to listen to your arguments when you did nothing to stop Ghenghis Khan from marauding over Asia in the 13th Century?

Now do you understand why I picked you up on that particular bit of tub-thumping?

For context, I don't like Starmer, but the reason I don't like Starmer is because he is a shit PM, not because of things he didn't do in the past both because he probably knew nothing at all about them at the time, and because they were firmly outside of his remit if he had.

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

Is that you, Tommy ten-names? "Grooming gangs" is it? With a capital "G," no less, like a proper noun.

Not to get mired in all that nonsense, but what part of being head of the CPS at the time has anything to do with police and social service failings, under a completely different government, a good number of years before Starmer was even the leader of the Labour Party (that one is a proper noun, so gets capitalised, FYI)? Is there a reason you have singled him out over, for instance, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, or what-his-name, the guy who doesn't know what an umbrella is?

UK regulators swarm X after Grok generated nudes from photos

Re: I don't approve of xAI allowing this to happen

Presumably, he thinks giving women the right to vote was a "bad law".

Seriously, the very thought of equating women's suffrage with child pornography is so horrendously offensive that this person probably needs their hard drive checked by the police right away.

Re: I don't approve of xAI allowing this to happen

You think? I'd like to see some of those solid, peer-reviewed studies, please.

Is google broken on your computer? If you want to go and find something out, the onus is on you to do it for yourself, not on someone else to spoon-feed it to you.

I'm assuming you're the same AC moron who always posts stuff like this, but it's entirely possible there is a cohort of anonymous idiocy here on this forum.

Re: Let's just become less prudish

It's most likely a pretension from the Victorian middle class, which is where all the "prim and proper" stuff comes from. You'd probably find a properly posh person would ask if you wanted tits or legs, and call you a cunt while doing it.

It's like the analogy of the ocean liner going full steam ahead; lay off all the stokers and it continues to move even after the engines have run down, it doesn't just stop immediately. The bigger the ship, the longer it takes to stop, due to the inertia, and with Xitter, the inertia was around 1Bn users.

To stretch the analogy, if that ship, now unpowered, and unsteered, hits an iceberg, it's going to sink. What might constitute an iceberg for Xitter? A regulatory ban in the UK and EU due to unacceptable content moderation might put a pretty big hole in it.

Re: I don't approve of xAI allowing this to happen

Oddly enough, that was the last book I read (that wasn't non-fiction at any rate).

GNU Terry Pratchett.

Re: I don't approve of xAI allowing this to happen

Yeah, I don't think the "jailbait" argument has ever worked in court.

Re: I don't approve of xAI allowing this to happen

If you are generating pornographic images (dirty boy), the onus is on you to prove that they don't depict a minor. I think the law is pretty clear on that. It's probably best to not do it in the first place.

Oh, and in the UK, I believe the onus is also on you to prove you have the consent of the person it depicts, if it's a real person.

Re: I don't approve of xAI allowing this to happen

1. Fake CASM can be created without harming children and is therefore an acceptable way for paedophiles to feed their desires without resorting to real CASM.

2. Fake CSAM harms children because it encourages/enables paedophiles to progress to real CSAM.

I think that the studies that have been done, have shown that (2) is what happens. Satisfying a paedophile's urges normalises and reinforces them, leading to escalation. The same goes for domestic abuse, which often starts off as verbal abuse, escalating to violence, and, in the worst cases (two women a week in the UK), murder. Similarly, serial killers often show cruelty towards animals, before moving on to killing animals, before killing people. There is clear escalation, and this is why creating images of child pornography even where no child is involved, or creating pornographic images of adults dressed up to look like children, without clear verification that they are adults, fall into this category of illegal material.

There is always the question of how we handle people who have sexual desires towards children in a compassionate and ethical manner, and where psychiatric treatment, or voluntary chemical castration is possible, and appropriate, these are options, but showing them some CP to get their rocks off, so they won't go out and attack a child is not the way to do it, whether it depicts real children or not, not just because of the ethics (although that really should be enough), but also because it has been shown not to work.

Re: Storm in a teacup

Do we go after the camera manufacturer when someone produces a sexually explicit photo of a minor?

We would, however, go after a photographer who takes nude pictures of children on request, as well as the person requesting them. Grok, in this instance, is equivalent to the photographer, not the camera manufacturer.

Re: Let's just become less prudish

There's a world of difference between simple nudity, and generating nude images of children. Whilst a family allowing an unclothed toddler to run around on the beach isn't pornographic, you can be damn sure they'd scoop that child up and leave if there was a creepy bloke in the bushes spying on them. The Grok users doing this are very much those creepy blokes.

There is also a big difference between choosing to allow your own naked body to be seen by others, such as one might do sunbathing on a nude beach, and some creep spying on you getting dressed, or making drawings of you unclothed. I'm pretty sure there are laws about how the latter things are not permitted. It's not about nudity, it's about consent (and stalking).

Re: reasonable

I think you have hit the nail on the head here. The article is about how skeezy men can use Grok to make skeezy images, and this person's immediate response is, "I think I'll try that," neatly exposing himself as one of those skeezy men. I hope his female "friends" work this out before it's too late.

There's a lot to unpick here; first of all, you seem to be suggesting that we kidnap people we don't agree with? Moving swiftly on from that, you then rapidly conflate the regulators (OFCOM), who are a statutory body set up to apply the rules as set by parliament, and the government, who are the ones who would be putting new rules in place for OFCOM, except as far as I am aware, the current government has done no such thing (the regulations in question having been put in place by the previous lot). Then we have some sort of claim that the UK is going crazy due to regulation, when we are living in a country where most of the problems can be laid at the feet of lack of regulation. I'd ask the question about which new regulations you think the current government has put in place that you disagree with, but I suspect I'd be in for a long wait before I got an actual answer to that question. Bear in mind that I'm no particular fan of the current government (or the previous government, or, in fact, any of the governments we have had in my lifetime; it doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in), but I do try to at least base my arguments on observable facts, not simply rhetoric. It might be fair to say that some of the governmental attempts to reduce harm to children from adult content on the internet are wrong-headed (age verification, for example, is just moronic for a number of reasons), but prevention of CP is one of the goals that I think most people would agree with.

Now to the "meat" of your comment. Did your "friend" give you permission to take her image and try to produce an undressed (or less-dressed) version of it? This is a strong ethical no-no if you didn't contain explicit consent for this. Does this friend indeed exist at all, and did this in fact even happen?

Re: Why Do People Still Use X - Twitter ???

So your problem with Bluesky is that it has moderation? Interesting...

Which would you prefer? 3000 people posting CP an hour with no moderation, or 3000 people posting CP an hour, and it getting taken down? Obviously, the underlying problem is paedophiles here, but with the current administration in the US, tackling that doesn't seem to be a priority for some reason.

Re: Why Do People Still Use X - Twitter ???

It might be an open platform in your eyes, but it is a very uneven one, with very obviously political biased moderation and content promotion, the systems and algorithms behind which are very decidedly closed ones.

One can level the same criticism of Meta. Have you ever tried to report far right hate speech / incitement to violence, etc. and find it "doesn't go against our community guidelines"? Or have you, or anyone you know, been mysteriously banned from Facebook with no reason given or recourse to appeal, via what would appear to be a decision made by "AI"? Bans seem to happen frequently to pages espousing left-wing ideology, but rarely to right-wing ones, or obvious trolls and bots (and no, before you ask, it has never happened to me).

The very problem is that the content promotion and moderation are driven by closed, proprietary systems, with the impetus for the owners to make money from them, not to provide any actual moderation. These huge sites are privately owned, by billionaires, whose interests are in getting hold of your money, directly or indirectly, and nothing more. Of course they are biased in favour of the far right, because, at its heart, the very existence of billionaires is a far right problem; nobody has half a trillion dollars in net worth without half a trillion dollars being missing somewhere else; "wealth" is not created from thin air.

Re: I don't approve of xAI allowing this to happen

Fascist militia are still one level above mob rule, if only because they are organised and centrally controlled.

Re: Not having Elon's ear

Nice mush, promptstitute.

What next, asking the foxes about how their new top-of-the-range hen-house security system improves hen safety?

Re: I don't approve of xAI allowing this to happen

Og draws sexually explicit figure of girl child he likes on the cave wall; the father of that girl drags Og outside and beats him to death, more likely. Moral and ethical standards have moved on a little bit since then*, so we won't be feeding Elon Musk to a sabre-toothed cat any time soon.

*Even in countries where they are currently regressing, such as the US, they haven't quite yet regressed to mob rule...

s/mater/pater/, don't go mis-gendering their daddy now.

AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

AWS has spent two decades conditioning customers to expect prices only ever go down. That expectation is now broken. Once you've raised prices on one service and the world doesn't end, the second increase becomes easier.

It's good old-fashioned bait-and-switch, and lets' remember what the "A" stands for in "AWS", because Amazon has form in undercutting all of the competition, driving them out of business, and then hiking prices when everyone has got used to buying everything from them without checking elsewhere first. Their initial market (books, for those who don't remember) can now often be found more cheaply on other sites (although don't look too closely at who owns them, yeah?)

The point is, though, that the current price inflation is pretty much down to the "AI" bubble. All these data centres being built to run "AI" workloads have driven up prices of memory, and GPUs, the components used by these data centres, in the hope that people will become hooked on "AI" and the vast investments will turn a hefty profit. This, itself, is built on the myth of eternal growth, the fundamental flaw in thinking in most theories of free market economics. Some of us can see the writing on the wall, and can see historical parallels; "AI" is a bubble, and whilst there are use cases for it, there are no "killer apps" that people will pay inflated prices for. As prices rise, which they will, for the companies that have invested heavily to recoup their costs, the economics changes, and people who have switched to using hallucinatory "AI" to provide services because they are "good enough" and cheaper than a human will find that consumers prefer both non-hallucinatory humans to provide their service, and that the costs of "AI" rise above those of human labour. At this point, "AI" growth stalls, prices sky-rocket, and the bubble bursts. The sound of the bubble popping will be heard from the Moon*. The question is, which players are so heavily invested in "AI" that they go down with it? And when will I be able to afford some DDR5 DIMMs for a gaming PC?

For those who think that the bubble won't burst, just recall that a few years ago, the world and their dog were investing heavily in "the Metaverse", and before that, commodity electronics manufacturers were desperate for you to buy a "3D TV", these were relatively small bubbles in terms of global impact (although Meta alone has reportedly lost $70Bn on "the Metaverse", and they weren't the only ones pumping money into it). History is littered with economic bubbles of varying sizes (Tulip Mania, the South Sea Bubble, the Great Depression, etc. etc.) and humans never learn.

*Yes, sound doesn't travel in a vacuum, but the space between the Earth and Moon is not a perfect vacuum, and it will be a very loud bang.