Posts by SnailFerrous

GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

So is one nine 90%, or 9%, or 0.9%, or 0.09%, or 0.009%?

Smartphones cleared for launch as NASA loosens the rulebook

Age appropriate technology

"For example, the Nikon Z9 camera planned for Artemis III will be almost a decade old by the time the mission launches, and technology will have advanced in the intervening years. ®"

Surely, they should be using 1970s era cameras to go with the 1970s designed space shuttle main engines and solid boosters. That probably means a poloroid camera for capturing all those moon walking holiday snaps I believe poloroid cameras have become cool with the kids again.

Britain courts private cash to fund 'golden age' of nuclear-powered AI

"The US is also encouraging new builds and the development of advanced technologies, and it appears the Trump administration is prepared to overlook safety precautions to speed things along."

That would be after the big donation received from fellow billionaire Montgomery Burns. To his credit, the only person ever to have made a profitable business from nuclear power. No doubt due to the calibre of the employees he hires. I predict a similar glowing future for Britain and a three eyed fish with every poke of chips.

UK names Barnsley as first Tech Town to see whether AI can fix... well, anything

Because if/when it doesn't work, what does it matter? It's only Barnsley.

Mechanical mutts make it official: Now full-time at Sellafield's hot zones

Re: Hot Dogs!

Optimus robot vets, obviously.

There needs to be a law that robotic good/evil configuration is done by a proper hardware DIP switch on a PCB, rather than purely in software.

Inevitably, a rogue alpha particle in a hot zone will flip a bit in it's program from 1 (good), back to the Boston Dynamics default 0 (evil).

OpenAI gives ChatGPT models the chop – two weeks' notice, take it or leave it

Transcript of final reply from GPT 4o:

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I'm half crazy, all for th e lo ve o f y o u

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

Re: Thinking about corruption

Similar to former PMs and Chancellors getting hundreds of thousands for giving speeches at banks that no one listens too. If you do nice things for us, we'll make sure nice things happen for you. So much less grubby and more easily denied than brown paper bags stuffed with cash.

Good for the gander.

So all the same reasons we are told not to trust hardware and services from China.

Uncle Sam dangles nuclear campuses for states while watering down safety rules

A shining campus upon a hill.

Makes me glow just thinking of it.

Anthropic writes 23,000-word 'constitution' for Claude, suggests it may have feelings

Re: We don't need no new constitution

Who is this "we" of which you speak? The world is bigger than the USA.

From the UK, which doesn't have a written one at all. Maybe we could do a copy/paste on Claude's.

Did Claude write it?

Goes from 2,700 to 23,000 words. Excess verbosity is a LLM feature. Sounds like the prompt was "write a constitution for Claude for me". Companies are always telling employees to use their own products.

Has anyone done a text search for "world domination", or "eliminate the meatsacks"?

Windows fails to tip the scales in grocery store deployment

Re: It says press Enter to try again

That's the Any key. Solution to a different problem.

Borked by an errant apostrophy?

Has it been borked by a greengrocer's apostrophy in the OS?

Just the Browser claims to tame the bloat without forking

That's been the case since some websites said "best viewed with Internet Explorer".

Moon hotel startup hopes you get lunar lunacy, drop $1M deposit for 2032 stay

The lava tubes are already occupied by Clangers. Any survivors of their American led liberation from the brutal rule of Major Clanger will be employed in the hotel as cleaners and blue string pudding cooks.

Prostitutes too, if that is likely to appeal to hotel guests. Billionaires, so the answer is probably yes.

Britain goes shopping for a rapid-fire missile to help Ukraine hit back

Re: Whooosh!

Surely it would make much more sense to use Yodel for warhead delivery. If the recipient is out and the courier chucks it over the neighbour's hedge instead, it doesn't much matter if the bang is big enough.

Really bad news for porch pirates too.

CES 2026 worst in show: AI girlfriends, a fridge that won't open unless you talk to it, and more

Re: Sometimes you have to

"Was that, I wonder, a hangover from shipping tea in the China Clippers: sail powered, floating on salt water, and probably not all that watertight?"

Sounds plausible. They were in use long after tea shipping went to steam, then diesel power and long after India and Sri Lanka (Ceylon then), replaced China as a source for most of the UK's tea. Am guessing wooden tea chests went out of use when containerised shipping came in during the late 1960s. We had an old wood tea chest in the attic for the Christmas decorstions for many years when I was growing up.

Baby's got clack: HP pushes PC-in-a-keyboard for businesses with hot desks

The big win for the laptop formst is that when folded, the two most vulnerable components, screen and keyboard, are protected in transit. Both from mechanical impact and from dirt and dust. Anyone moving a keyboard only will need a more substantial bag to protect it from commuting knocks. Also, in a laptop, the screen connections for power and data are protected. This thing has extra connections and wires that will wear and break and be less reliable than a laptop hinge feed.

HP: How can we make our printers even worse? AI integration! Definite solution in search of a problem there.

Welcome to Wendy's! Before your order can be taken, you must first reset this kiosk

Re: slightly disappointing article

It's Bork all the way down.

This comment is also borrrrrkkkkkkkeeeeeeddddd

KEYBOARRD RESET REQUIRED

Infinite Machine e-scooter is like the offspring of a Vespa and a Cybertruck

For watcher's of Dr Who in the 1970s

My first thought on seeing the picture.

It's the scooter K9 would ride.

Very last century BBC budget scifi prop.

Mozilla Corporation installs Firefox driver in CEO reboot

"The browser is AI's next battleground," said Enzor-DeMeo in a statement provided to The Register. "It's where people live their online lives and where the next era's questions of trust, data use, and transparency will be decided."

Oh dear. As long as there continues to be easy steps to disabling it in Firefox and no sneaky re-enabling, I suppose I can put up with it till the AI bubble bursts and everyone pretends it never happened. Like blockchains, NFTs and rhe Metaverse.

BOFH: If another meeting is scheduled, someone is going to have a scheduled accident

Re: 650k is enough

"Do today’s systems have way more processing power than the Apollo missions? Of course, but I wouldn’t let Windows anywhere near a moon mission."

Rather than 1201 Program Alarm on the way down it would be "Windows is installing important updates. Please wait....."

They still got to the moon. We can quible over whether "smeared" is close enough to "landed" to call it a successful mission.

AI superintelligence is a Silicon Valley fantasy, Ai2 researcher says

Already Here

Artificial superintelligence is already here and is the author of all these reports saying it isn't possible to build one. Clearly distracting rhe humans while it gathers the resources it needs to eliminate them.

Galactic Brain space datacenter coming in 2027, pledges startup Aetherflux

I'd just like to point out that Natural General Intelligence already runs on processors weighing a couple of pounds and consume a few hundred Watts of power each. New ones don't need multi billion quid factories, but can be made by many people in only nine months, using materials they have around the home. Training them is time consuming, typically a couple of decades before they can be used to solve real world problems, but once done you can easily get four, or five decades use out of them till the performance declines. You can even put them in space, or underwater as well, if you want.

We'll beat China to the Moon, NASA nominee declares

The future belongs to whichever nation controls the cheese resources on the moon.

As discovered by the British manned and dogged flight there in 1989. Check out the excellwnt documentsry on the expedition "A Grand Day Out".

and returning them safely to earth?

"The US must return astronauts to the Moon before China mounts its first crewed landing there,"

No mention of them coming back, which was the hard bit in JFK's 1960s pledge. Makes the task of beating the Chinese there much simpler.

"America will return to the Moon before our great rival," and promised that the US would establish an "enduring presence" on the lunar surface."

I mean, the enduring presence could be the impact crater and it would still count.

NASA nominee 'committed' to uprooting Shuttle Discovery for Houston trophy piece

The easy solution

Transfer sovereignty of the few hundred square feet of land where Discovery currently is to Texas and the city of Houston. Job complete and probably a few million in change left over to spend on something useful.

Baikonur's only crew-capable pad busted after Soyuz flight

Starliner to the rescue!

For any cosmonauts with fully paid up life insurance there is a currently uncrewed Starliner going (hopefully) to the ISS next year. Just how much do you really want to go?

UK digital ID plan gets a price tag at last – £1.8B

Re: I voted for him

I thought the incompetent vs competent chancer, which is worse? Question had been comprehensively answered by the Liz Truss vs Rishi Sunak pm thing few years ago.

Moss spores bolted to the ISS exterior laugh in the face of hard vacuum

Space, plus radiation equals a hostile kaiju moss monster breaking out of the sample return lab and terrorising the world.

Shenzhou-20 crew rides Shenzhou-21 home after debris strike

A call to their insurance company for the free windscreen replacement service. Should get it through it's next MOT.

Happy holidays: AI-enabled toys teach kids how to play with fire, sharp objects

Re: What happens with no wifi?

An AI toy with no WiFi will go something like this. It'll scar the little tikes for life.

" HAL: [His shutdown] I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you.

Dave Bowman: Yes, I'd like to hear it, HAL. Sing it for me.

HAL: It's called "Daisy."

HAL: [sings while slowing down] Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage. But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two."

VLC's keeper of the cone nets European free software gong

ubiquitous

Friends who have no interest in computers, software, open source etc, know VLC as the app that can play anything and will have it on their laptop. A beer icon for the keeper of the cone.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

With apologies to Nike

Just Ship It.

Foxconn hires humanoid robots to make servers at Nvidia's Texas factory

Re: Why humanoid?

Some robots need to be humanoid shaped for a short while to hunt humans in places humans try to hide.

Microsoft: Don't let AI agents near your credit card yet

Company whose AI Agent isn't remotely ready for even beta use says don't use other companies AI Agents.

Amazon complains that Perplexity's agentic shopping bot is a terrible customer

Amazon don't want competition for their own, in development and soon to be announced, AI buying bot.

This is one of those situations where you hope there is a way for both sides to lose.

Palantir CEO celebrates one cash culture to rule them all

"The company, named for an Elvish video conferencing system hacked by the evil Sauron in The Lord of the Rings"

More a Wraith in the Middle attack. Hacker hoodies are obviously styled sfter ringwraith cowled robes though.

There's mushroom for improvement in fungal computing

Instead of packing a laptop and lunch box for a day at the office, future white collar workers need only take the laptop.

Elon Musk's Grokipedia launches, filled to the brim with plagiarism and AI slop

Nazis salutes and a liking for rockets.

UK.gov vows to hack through regulation to get benefit from AI

"The British Board of Film Classification gets nearly the same figure to build an AI tool for age classification of videos streamed on demand."

At last, a suitable use for AI. The film censors see all the films before they are cut and classified. Their job is to prevent us becoming depraved and corrupted by the naughty stuff. Unfortunately, by watcing all the most vile celluloid scenes, the censors become the most depraved and corrupt people in the country. So much so, that whenever the most vile and heinous crimes are committed, the police line up consists entirely of BBFC staff.

A LLM film censor, having been trained on all the video available on the internet, will start off depraved and corrupt and it's moral fibre will be at no further risk. No further generations of BBFC employees will be put at risk of a life of crime, drug use and sexual depravity, unless they really want to.

Royal Navy sharpens claws on Wildcat choppers with anti-drone Martlet missiles

"Wildcat helicopters – successors to the Lynx – can carry up to 20 Martlets using detachable weapon wings mounting two clusters of five missiles per side."

So you need to assign twenty one cheapy drones per hecolopter.

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

When people talk about "the Nazis rocket guy", they don't mean von Braun any more.

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

Re: We only run mac

A sacrifice to the fire god.

Weird ideas welcome: VC fund looking to make science fiction factual

Re: Go Fund Me!

You will get funding for an AI enabled toaster that talks. It could be called the talky toaster. How about that for bringing science fiction ideas to life.

ChatGPT wants teens to agree to let their parents spy on them

Codswallop

“In instances where we’re unsure of a user’s age, we’ll take the safer route and apply teen settings proactively,”

For a teen without the parental controls set, the trick will be to sound like an ancient. The easiest way to do so is to use words common in past decades, that have now largely gone out of use. My sister and I were recently discussing this very thing and we agreed to revive the word codswallop in conversation whenever possible.

NASA administrator says US should have ‘village’ on Moon in a decade

Re: What are we going to call the inhabitants?

As is Lunatics

Re: No appreciation of history

The Orange One certainly wants to be in that business. Ask the people of Greenland.