Posts by munnoch

Danish department determined to dump Microsoft

Re: how to do it in half a dozen mouse clicks

LaTeX was awesome for technical papers, but it could throw some serious tantrums if you pushed it too far. Occasionally had to drop back to pure TeX, that was not fun. Loved the spiral bound book with the fold over cover. Proper job.

Around about that time our research group acquired a Mac II which was justified on the grounds of easing the burden of producing papers. I don't recall anyone particularly bothering with it for that purpose but it did see action viewing a certain kind of GIF downloaded from Usenet... I suppose it takes a while for any paradigm shift to occur.

Ease the seat back and watch some video in your car with next Apple CarPlay

It might require a message from the car that confirms the parking brake is engaged. Old school standalone navi systems used to require this. Quite easily defeated by grounding the dedicated connection on the navi unit rather than hooking it up to the hand brake switch. Now it will be a CANbus thing.

So I wonder what the chances are of my 5 year old Mitsubishi getting the required update? Up to zero percent I should imagine...

UK dumps £2.5 billion into fusion pipe dream that's already cost millions

But it will knock 300 quid off of your energy bills. Sometime in about 2525....

UK's Isambard-AI super powers up as government goes AI crazy

Re: In other news today

"LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities"

That happens to me too....

Chinese spy crew appears to be preparing for conflict by backdooring 75+ critical orgs

Re: Well done

Thats the great thing about territorial disputes. Both sides can pick an arbitrary time in history that is advantageous to them and then proceed on the basis that it is the one true interpretation regardless of the situation on the ground in the present day.

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

Re: VAX field service engineers

My Dad never wore his wedding ring for that reason. He started out repairing televisions in the days of valves and got enough belts off of them without needing any other extraneous conductors.

Techie traced cables from basement to maternity ward and onto a roof, before a car crash revealed the problem

Re: At my last place....

Can also be a problem with some satellite positions. For a brief period twice a year the sun is directly in line with the satellite and the ground receiver and drowns out the downlink.

A few years back one of the India stock exchanges would halt trading during that time I presume because some remote offices were on satellite data links. They don't do it anymore. Japanese TV operator WOWOW would also have a similar "Sun Outage".

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Re: Li+ batteries

That's probably more the economics of the broken wholesale market. If its cheaper to buy French nuclear or Norwegian hydro then that's what the market will do. I don't know whether we could satisfy internal demand without the interconnects. The wholesale price would certainly be "interesting" if we ever had to.

Arguments about how we use less electricity now that X years ago are a bit spurious. We use it (or plan to use it) in different ways and in different places so the grid of X years ago is unsuitable for that as evidenced by the plans to build new lines and the wait times for connections.

Take ChatGPT back to the 2010s and they’d think AGI arrived, says Altman

A language model is a model of language strangely enough. Its not a model of knowledge or intelligence even if for trivial questions or to the thinkingly challenged it can appear so. LLM's will never deliver AGI, assuming that such a thing was even possible or indeed desirable.

His ego seems to be directly correlated with his stock price.

AI kept 15-year-old zombie vuln alive, but its time is drawing near

Re: And this is why we

In the case of LLM's its more like xIGO...

VodafoneThree's a crowd – now comes the hard bit

Re: Quality of service

Traveled the length and breadth of Italy last week and never saw anything other than full bars of 5G. Including on trains in the middle of b*m-f*ck nowhere. Trains which btw were cheap, clean and moderately on time. This country truly sucks at everything.

Odd homage to '2001: A Space Odyssey' sees 'Blue Danube' waltz beamed at Voyager 1

You've all seen a Quiet Place?

Just sayin' this is like an intergalactic version of that...

Re: Nice tune

What would we send now? A CD? A flash drive?? A QR code with a link to The Cloud???

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

Re: "Slim never learned how the lazy admin’s career progressed"

The mention of a futures exchange made me think of that particular event. Had a front row seat for it...

AI agents don't care about your pretty website or tempting ads

Suckers

So AI agents are suckered by click bait adverts and dark patterns? I so want those agents to be spending money on my behalf. Not…. Guys just admit that this is all a steaming pile and always will be.

AWS says Britain needs more nuclear power to feed AI datacenter surge

Re: Yes, but then again, No.

Unfortunately, like just about everything in this country, the geography is a bit crap and bland.

There were lots of hydro schemes built in Scotland in the mid 20th century but they are all really quite small in today's terms. There are a couple of larger schemes under construction but by comparison the amount of hydro storage in Norway is enormously more. Hence why they can afford to send us a near-constant 1.4GW almost 450 miles across the North Sea.

Something to do with the crinkly bits...

Re: Yes, but then again, No.

Mostly due to grid constraints. If we can't move it within our own country to where its needed we might be able to sell it to Europe via the interconnects. Its not often and pretty piddling amounts compared to what we regularly import. Ireland does take a pretty steady supply from the UK however. How many of those electrons speak with a Welsh accent is difficult to measure.

An interesting case is when our windmills are going full tilt and the wholesale price craters the Norway interconnect consumes from us to refill their reservoirs for free which they can then sell back to us later. Most days it runs full tilt towards us. Must be a nice little earner...

https://grid.iamkate.com/

Re: Alternatively..

But then how will we be a powerhouse???

... whatever the fuck that even means...

Meta's still violating GDPR rules with latest plan to train AI on EU user data, says noyb

Re: Consider...

And you think social media out-pourings constitute reliable content? God fucking help us...

Google DeepMind promises to help you evolve your algos

Correctness

You can measure whether or not the optimised version is more efficient, but how do you know its actually correct?

Amid all this hoopla about AI writing code I've yet to see a single report of AI writing *tests*. Maybe because that's just fundamentally impossible. Turning fuzzy requirements into a concrete specification in the form of test cases requires some actual intelligence.

Get the tests right and the code is easy, that's the core of TDD. If there are no tests to support the AI generated slop then the overhead of proving its right before accepting it greatly outweighs any possible advantage.

Boffins warn that AI paper mills are swamping science with garbage studies

Re: Shit "research"

In a sane and logical world, maybe. But such a world wouldn't be producing AI-anything in the first place.

Paul McCartney, Elton John, other creatives demand AI comes clean on scraping

Re: Do it your way

I always find it a bit odd that in this day and age that ministers talk proudly of having written to someone asking for clarification etc.. I presume what really happens is a flunky gets the other party's flunky on the phone and they take it from there..

Re: Don't Care

"so mixed and mashed that it's NOT even remotely related to what went in."

That's not the point. The point is that the LLM has to ingest the work in its entirety in order to build its model. This is not fair use. Fair use only allows use of a small fragment of the original work.

If the LLM can be made to work with a couple of paragraphs of a book or 30s of a song then, sure, that's fair use. But this is not what's happening.

Computacenter IT guy let girlfriend into Deutsche Bank server rooms, says fired whistleblower

Re: Computacenter - Not The First Time

Girlfriend (at time, now wife) was a receptionist and had access to the boardroom... 'Nuff said...

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

Bad electricity

Back in the 80's when I was writing 8 bit games we were close to release of a big coin-op conversion but there was a persistent report of it crashing randomly from the testers. Very occasional but they could always eventually get it to crash but with no discernible pattern. However, we absolutely couldn't reproduce the problem. Went back and forth like this for days, maybe weeks, without resolution. Xmas was approaching. We tried to convince the publishers that it was bad electricity at the testing site but they weren't having it. Eventually did get to the bottom of it and indeed it was a software error.

If its the one I think it was then it was the B register getting overwritten as an occasional side effect of a subroutine call. Solution to temporarily store the value in a memory location with the very appropriate label of BSTRD,

Re: Yep

Once lived in a long narrow house. Had a couple of long runs of CAT cable from a switch at the front of the house to devices towards the back of the house. One day a BIG thunderstorm came, sheets of water running down the windows (Asia where they know how to do thunderstorms properly). Then there there was a mighty flash and a simultaneous boom. If the house wasn't hit then something very nearby was. The devices at the back of the house were taken out. No smoke but no more comms so dead. Annoying because one of them was the internet router and the other was a first gen ATV, expensive at the time. The switch lost the use of those ports.

UK's smaller broadband operators face tough road ahead, consolidation possible

76/20 (occasionally 80/20) connection here.

I really don't understand the use case for those multi-hundred megabit home connections. How many UHD streams can you watch at once? No more than the number of people in residence so that hardly touches the sides. And of course most people are on wifi without realising that its the bottleneck. Its just a bit of willy waving.

There has to be wholesale access for altnets to work. Not everyone needs a static IP (or has any concept of what it is), but those of us who do will want to stay with their existing ISP's, whilst taking advantage of a fatter pipe.

Re: Openwretch

"Openwretch still can't keep their hands off plugging BT"

Its not hard to keep the illusion going as majority of the population naturally conflate BT with "the wifi".

OpenAI pulls plug on ChatGPT smarmbot that praised user for ditching psychiatric meds

"more “human-like” AI"

Its completely more human-like. At least it displays a lot of the traits of the humans I've had to interact with in my time.

And therein lies the problem that will never be overcome. How can the model possibly pick the outliers in its training model that represent real ability and insight whilst pushing back against the tsunami of poison and shit?

Trump admin freaks out over mere suggestion Amazon was going to show tariff impact on prices

The first rule of

Tariff Club...

Duolingo jumps aboard the 'AI-first' train, will phase out contractors

Duos

I wouldn't want to work for a company that refers to its employees as "Duos" anyway.

Google goes cold on Europe: Stops making smart thermostats for continental conditions

Re: Bollocks

TRV's can't bring on the heat circulation to arbitrary rooms at arbitrary times, only the main thermostat can do that.

If you spend the day upstairs in your home office you need to heat your living space downstairs at the same time so that a bit of heat bleeds into your study. And at the weekend your study will be heated to the same temperature as during the week unless you remember to twiddle the TRV when you knock off on Friday. So not a particularly efficient set up for that scenario.

I have a big old drafty Victorian pile and fitted individual room stats and actuators on the radiators instead of TRV's. Any room can be at any temperature any time. And the heat is supplied from a thermal store so boiler cycling is completely independent of what the circulating pumps are doing. Its the right system for this building, it wouldn't be the right system for a modern airtight build.

The stats are Heatmiser's "networked" via RS485. The protocol was reverse engineered donkey's ago. I have enough spares to last a lifetime. But vast majority of people can't get their hands dirty with home brew.

Hydrotreated vegetable oil is not an emission-free swap for diesel in datacenters

Re: It'a s start.

"price charged by the highest cost supplier, normally the gas powered CGT"

On recent days when wind and solar have been through the roof in the UK there has always been a few GW of gas still on the bars. I've come to the conclusion that its deliberate...

Potentially its a technical thing because you need spinning mass for grid stabilisation but the last few remaining nukes and bio-mass (spit!!) should still be enough for that with pump storage and battery to get us over the humps. So, yeah, really suspicious that we get so close to not needing gas but never actually get past the line...

AI training license will allow LLM builders to pay for content they consume

Re: How much would a LLM training cost?

I don't know about you but I value my intellectual output at more than a few pennies.

Class action lawsuits are one-off events and the injury involved is usually quite mild e.g. phone battery didn't last as long as it could have. A better analogy would be if you are injured due to someone's negligence and unable to lead a productive life from that point forward. You would be compensated on the basis of lost lifetime income. This is what the Bros are trying to do to us all. Suck the life-force out of us and and sell it back to us as a monthly subscription.

The problem isn't the distribution of the compensation its that the real value of what they are misappropriating is gargantuan even for their very deep pockets.

Re: How much would a LLM training cost?

"I don't think this will work."

What you mean is that their business model isn't financially viable if they have to fairly compensate content creators. Since it requires every last scrap of human thought to be shovelled into it before it becomes even vaguely viable then unsurprisingly the compensation bill would be excessive.

Usually when a business is faced with that situation what they do is find a different opportunity, one that can be made to work fairly and ethically, or make the process more efficient or whatever. The point is the onus is on the business to change something if they really want to carry on down that road. The alternative course of action to fuck right off and leave us all alone is also available.

Its a bit like Ford decided that if they had to pay for the steel that goes into their cars that would make them too expensive for consumers so they just help themselves to it from the foundry. [To us an analogy that the MAGA's out there will understand...]

Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back

Hollywood Plot

Reclusive billionaire sinks his fortune into building machine that he claims will revolutionise life as we know it bringing about great prosperity for all. There is only one problem, its powered by the minds of the very people he wants to save and for the project to succeed they must be fed into it one by one until no one is left .

ChatGPT burns tens of millions of Softbank dollars listening to you thanking it

Re: Something's very wrong with their software.....

The most common response thrown at the Alexa in our house whenever it fails in the incredibly basic task of turning on the television (Harmony integration) and plays a random radio station instead is ALEXA F*** OFF. It does at least work...

No rest for the rocketry as NASA's Easter weekend heats up

Re: Go home musk

Once you factor in the efficiency of a thermal power station at converting chemical energy into electrical energy then the transmission losses then the round trip losses from the EV charger to the battery and back to the motor then I'm not convinced its that much more compelling than just running a modern fuel-efficient ICE. Its probably better but its not like 2 or 3 times better.

If we didn't all insist that we have the God-given right to drive around in 2,000kg+ behemoths that barely fit on the road and don't fit in most parking spaces with leather clad and electric operated everything, and we didn't drive like the riders of the apocalypse are after us then things might not be quite as fucked up as they are. But that would involve some personal sacrifice and that'd never do....

OK great, UK is building loads of AI datacenters. How are we going to power that?

Re: Hmm

Solar generation in the UK during the last few sunny weeks was astonishingly high, hitting some 11GW at one point. Middle of the day obviously.

What I fail to understand though is how its seasonality (daily or annually) is in the slightest bit useful to solving the overall supply situation as it doesn't even vaguely align with peak demand.

It seems like the industry is already cannibalising itself.

Forget Signal. National Security Adviser Waltz now accused of using Gmail for work

Re: Proud to be dumb in government

Isn't this why they have staff and chiefs of staff(s) to keep them on the straight and narrow?

This sort of thing would get you instantly censured in the commercial world and yet politicians around the world routinely flout the rules. Its almost as if they are actively trying to avoid their faulty decision making becoming a matter of public record...

GCHQ intern took top secret spy tool home, now faces prison

Re: Please

"overwhelmingly Posh"

My experience of ex-officers in civvie life is that few of them were raised posh but officer training teaches them to put on an accent and to act overly entitled. Rationale probably that it helps with the chain of command if they appear to the ratings to be one of their "betters". In the commercial world they make great salespeople for the same reason.

Re: How?

My last place was hardly Spook Central but was similarly locked down. They would even detect if a local drive had been swapped out in case you saved stuff to it and disassembled the machine to take it home with you. The only way I could think of to exfiltrate stuff (which I wasn't particularly interested in doing as nearly all of what I worked with was written by me...) was to OCR the screen one page at a time....

Anyway, not much of a vetting job by whoever gave him the placement.

Raspberry Pi Power-over-Ethernet Injector zaps life into networks lacking spark

Looks very much like a rebadged PowerDsine 9001.

Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment

Re: VMS was where I started

Interestingly (or not), I bumped into X.25 again a couple of years later in my first job via the Sunlink package for SunOS. We were working on handlers to talk to a stock exchange system that ran over synchronous serial lines so needed the HDLC low-level drivers from the package. This was all witchcraft to me at the time...

Re: VMS was where I started

I did a bit of googling and an RP-06 jogs the memory. So maybe not 10MB but 100 or 200?

I do remember the drive looked like a top loading washing machine and sounded like a jet engine when it started up.

Pure sci-fi for a 19 year old...

VMS was where I started

First year at uni was all on their cluster of VMS VAX 11-750's that we accessed via an X.25 network. Between 2nd and 3rd year I did an internship at FMC at Warley who were also all VAX/VMS. Got to play around with various tape drives and removable disk packs (about 10MB istr -- which model would that have been?) whenever we needed to move our software down to Dagenham. A coworker told me his problem solving work flow was to first call DEC support to come check the hardware and whilst he waited for them to turn up he would have a look at his software.... He was only partly joking!

After that I got my first experience of unix on a university PDP 11 (wish I knew which model it was). I absolutely hated the absurd brevity of the commands and its all-lower-cased-ness as compared to the sophistication and refinement of VMS. But that set the direction for the next 40 odd years during which I've been pretty much exclusively unix. Two very different worlds, only one of which is still with us.

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Re: (earthquake, volcano, typhoon, sea monsters...).

I'm not sure why the split would make the grid inherently less reliable? In 2023 Japan consumed over 3 times the amount of electricity as the UK (more people and more industry) so either side of that 50/60 split on its own would be larger than the UK grid. There are also DC interconnects between the two sides.

Depends on where you live in the UK whether you consider the grid to be "too" reliable. For the last few winters its been fairly common for large numbers of rural properties to be cut off for days at a time after a weather event.

Re: Questions will doubtless be asked

Thanks for that. I always wondered why early railway electrification schemes were at 16Hz and now I know.

Re: Questions will doubtless be asked

I remember when a barge with a crane on it took out one of the main power lines serving Tokyo. I was looking out the office window wondering why the street below appeared to be filled with fog. That was all the backup gennies kicking in. Our building was unaffected due to being on a different power feed. Apparently it was standard practice to alternate each building in the CDB across the 3 different lines serving the city. The Japanese take resiliency a little bit more seriously than the UK due to the omnipresent threat of multiple natural disasters (earthquake, volcano, typhoon, sea monsters...).

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: hot plug

Yep, common with EV chargers that plug into a 13A socket. They are restricted to 10A but as they run for many hours at a time the fuse holder eventually gets a bit melty and the live prong starts to look distinctly second hand. I replaced the plug on mine with a commando plug. Its wired directly to a 16A breaker which has a very similar tripping characteristic to a 13A plug top fuse so equally well protected.