Posts by user555

Big AI's content problem: Take the work, keep the money

non-linked info

Regarding the lacking of links in AI responses to queries. It's about hiding the source material for fear of copyright litigation. IMHO.

Re: much bigger issues

The asbestos of the information age.

Retired man turns spare room into Soviet-era supercomputer

Obsession

It seems the word obsession has been replaced with addiction in people's vocabulary these days.

ASML and TSMC want bigger masks for smaller chips

Re: Why a rectangle?

I thought that was the interim solution that they're talking about moving past.

Why a rectangle?

Why not a 12 x 12 square?

Re: Imperial or metric?

I believe the mask applies to one die area only. To cover the entire wafer requires stepping the wafer and duplicating the exposure for each die position.

And yes, they'll solely use metric measurements in production.

PS: There would've been a time when 200 mm wafers were called 8 inch I suspect. It's just a layman's naming that depends on who's doing the talking to the press.

Time lords prepare to kick leap seconds into the next millennium

Re: An alternative approach

Just like their cartoon - https://what-if.xkcd.com/imgs/a/26/leap_mass_shift.png

As the ice caps melt, the weight is lifted from the poles and evenly redistributed as water. With less ice weight on the poles the ground under the poles is free to rebound and thereby reform the mantle, sucking in the equatorial girth.

One might also expect an increased rate of earthquakes and volcanism as a side effect.

Re: Earth rotation increasing?

Yup, which is why no-one thought this would happen. At least not until it became apparent ... at which point the question becomes why? ... and the best explanation is rate of polar ice loss has become so large it's girth narrowing effect is overpowering the Moon's drag! Which is eye-popping and can only be seen as a dire warning of too much global warming.

Re: An alternative approach

One assumes their ice age story, over what is only a few decades, is euphemistically referring to man-made global warming.

Brit boffins boast of beating barriers to building fusion power

Re: I was head guy of a chip design

That last point, about how much destruction some are willing to inflict, does seem more believable now than I'd have imagined not that many years ago. Gaza is our shame.

The truth nobody wants to admit: Chinese or not, open models are competitive now

It's pretty straight forward what's happened: The supposed advancements over the last few years are just smoke and mirrors. So of course, when not much advancement happens then the field levels out.

LisaFPGA brings Apple's magnificent misfire back in programmable logic

"... doesn't leave you much wiser unless you are are familar with (digital) electronic hardware."

Hehe, that tickles my fancy for some reason.

The Wikipedia article is lacking on the historical evolution. There used to be such things as "gate arrays." So you can see where the naming originates from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gate_array

Gate arrays were designed as mask programmed chips and they were a common sight before FPGAs existed. These things were far more capable than something like a PAL chip, which was mostly just used as address decoders.

Re: FPGA?

The Wikipedia article is lacking on the historical evolution. There used to be such things as "gate arrays." So you can see where the naming originates from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gate_array

They were a common sight before FPGAs existed. Gate arrays were designed as mask programmed chips and were far more capable than something like a PAL chip, which were mostly used as address decoders.

Re: FPGA?

The Wikipedia article is lacking on the historical evolution. There used to be such things as "gate arrays." So you can see where the naming originates from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gate_array

They were a common sight before FPGAs existed. Gate arrays were designed as mask programmed chips and were far more capable than something like a PAL chip, which was mostly used as an address decoder.

Taiwan's train cyber-trauma reveals a global system that's coming off the tracks

SDR's do have limits, especially when considering noise. They do need an analogue filter in front of both the ADC and DAC, same as audio processors do. Audio has a huge advantage over SDR though. The filter there can easily be the simplest R-C filter because audio gets hugely oversampled. That's not so easy to achieve in the RF bands. Depending on how high the target carrier is, it can mean a much more cumbersome and complicated IIR filter is required to achieve a sharp cut-off frequency to allow the sample rate to sit closer to the carrier frequency being sampled.

Of course, if you don't really care about being a noisy transmitter then I guess a cheap filter is enough.

Five Eyes spooks warn AI means infosec incidents can become ‘major operational and financial crises’

AKA, security through obscurity doesn't cut it any longer.

US PC shipments to fall 13% as memory and storage crunch hits budget systems

That's gotta be an optimistic outlook

It's amazing the pain that people will accept in ignorance.

AMD's new desktop CPU oozes cache out of all 16 cores

Re: Its about freaking time...

Hey, I didn't say it was a bargain. One would only be buying such parts to be doing multiple things at once anyway, so judging it on single benchmarks becomes useless. You're never going to get an easy and simple compare.

Re: Its about freaking time...

It'll certainly work as an upgrade for those that already have a AM5 platform and don't need to buy more DIMMs. eg: 7950X.

We tested Intel's new chips for cash-strapped hardcore PC users and they're impressive

Price of DRAM is not to like. Price of GPU is not to like. PC purchasing now on hold.

Anthropic's Claude claws its way towards the top of the AI market

Re: Focusing on quality not quantity

And the somewhat own-goal of "It's really that good." coming out of the Pentagon may have helped out just a little too. You couldn't get a better promo. I bet more than a few average Joe's have switched because of that comment rather than any ethics or politics.

Everything needed to make DNA and RNA found in asteroid sample

Re: So life is older than Earth

I wouldn't be betting on those points. Water is a common ingredient of planet formation. It'd be infused throughout the mantle and would take eons to surface.

So life is older than Earth

Sounds entirely expected. Also means life was inside Earth during formation.

AWS would rather blame its own engineers than its AI

AI does slop, not mistakes

So it is a human error here. The error is in expecting AI to work at all.

Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way

Re: why ... would anyone ask an LLM to create a password

I'm pretty sure StackExchange didn't require $1 Trillion dollars up front and the power grid of a whole country to keep it running.

AI superintelligence is a Silicon Valley fantasy, Ai2 researcher says

Agreed, but still wrong

The problem isn't the lack of compute, it's the lack of science. We just don't know how to build an AGI.

Datacenters are hoarding grid power just in case, says Uptime Institute

Re: Make them pay

These data centre build outs should also be directly paying for the grid strengthening costs beyond just getting a connection.

Britain's first small modular reactors to be built in Wales

Re: Claim to fame

> We dont just throw it all into a lagoon any more.

Probably only because some greenie complained about it ... followed by the usual countless rounds of over-budget excessively late engineering failures.

Superintelligence probably not happening, but AI will still reshape society, expert panel says

Re: Will AI reshape society? Yes.

Well, it certainly will be central structures of electricity consumption at least.

Beatings, killings, and lasting fear: The human toll of MoD's Afghan data breach

idiots on computers

Oh, man, so this was an idiot giving out editable documents instead of printing the relevant data to a PDF. So predictable. :(

OpenAI's ChatGPT is so popular that almost no one will pay for it

Problem with that is the power consumption. Google will whip OpenAI's ass on efficiency. Otherwise LMMs do seem not bad at being a search engine. Not much good at anything else.

AI is the flying car of the mind: An irresistible idea nobody knows how to land or manage

Re: "heading for a hard landing"

The fact that we supposedly need trained to use it says LLM AI has failed its primary job. It's supposed to be this magically fixer with actual intelligence if all the hype is to be believed.

AI gets more 'meh' as you get to know it better, researchers discover

Re: AI == Divination?

Instead of clarifying yourself, we still have no idea which Doctor you intended.

In other words, LLMs just regurgitate ... with a bit of PRNG added. Thee is no intelligence involved.

AI coding hype overblown, Bain shrugs

No training sounds about right

Probably because everyone is clueless on what that training might be. The devs don't know and the MBAs all just wave hands for some magic to happen.

Commodore Amiga turns 40, headlines UK exhibition

Re: Have a CD32...

nearly could easily be 1997 ... that's feasible, affordable capacities rapidly grew once MSDOG's 800MB limit was crossed.

Microsoft-owned GitHub: Open source needs funding. Ya think?

Single place for funding?

Why not suggest the UN instead? That way every country has decent opportunity to contribute ... Oh, that's right, Trump would get pissy at that idea. Can't suggest that until he's out of office.

Trump AI plan rips the brakes out of the car and gives Big Tech exactly what it wanted

Re: "ideological bias"

There's no shortage of brainwashing about AI.

AI industry's size obsession is killing ROI, engineer argues

Capitalism 101

Lie, lie and lie some more ... Bubbles galore!

Science confirms what we all suspected: Four-day weeks rule

Re: stuff that involves lots of other people being at work

Agreed. I've done stints at two companies that had shift work. The first one had fixed shifts and those that liked graveyard were happy staying on graveyard. In fact they preferred not to mingling with anyone from the other two shifts. The second company had rotating shifts. Everyone hated that.

Sacramento cops scoured energy records to target suspected weed growers, and the EFF has sued

Re: Thermometer

That would have to be incidentally seen. If a cop was to setup camp to monitor even just with eyeballs only, then that would need a warrant too.

Operating a drone for a dragnet like that would be highly unlikely to be granted because it is not target specific.

Unmetered electricity

Isn't it the usual trick to track down where the unmetered illegal taps are? I mean the last thing weed growers want to do is pay for what they can get for free.

As companies race to add AI, terms of service changes are going to freak a lot of people out

Re: We've got to stop sending files to each other

I believe he may have been talking about corporate policies. Where all company data be responsibly managed via controlled means. Laptops being locked down, having no locally accessible storage. The company IT dept sorts it all out. Dropbox would have no place in the work flow.

Google’s Gemini refuses to play Chess against the mighty Atari 2600 after realizing it can't match ancient console

There is no confidence setting. It was simply told it would be beaten, so it agreed. That's what LLMs do.

AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster, study finds

Re: Rolling the Dice

The problem stems from all the marketroid shoutings of how intelligent AI is. And then it turns out there's zero intelligence to it.

Arm muscles into server market – but can't wrestle control from x86 just yet

AI is a huge dumpster. The sooner it bursts the better.

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

Re: Debate?

When I post my comments on US websites, for the past 35 years, I do not use US spellings.

Home Office haunted by 25-year-old asylum system

Or ...

The old system will not be shut down until the full benefit of replacement has been realised.

Membership of New Zealand’s domain registry suddenly triples, which isn't entirely welcome

Re: ideologically driven and fed by/into Neoliberalist policies

Yep, totally a Trojan Horse. He tore the Labour Party apart and killed PM David Lange.

Here's the ugliest global-warming chart you'll ever need to see

Re: I‘m not entirely convinced

True. Which is why, like with public health campaigns, the goal is to get everyone on board so we all move in the right direction together.

And of course, the very purpose of the counter campaigns is to discourage as many as possible so as to make the effort useless for those that do try.