Posts by SnailFerrous

UK military wants lasers to stop drone swarms without running out of ammo

Re: Sharks!

It's what the Roysl Navy needs.

Who, me? Techie with three months' experience was sent in as the Cisco expert and proceeded to blow everything up

The expert

If everyone else at the company knows nothing about a subject area and you know next to nothing, then you are the company expert. Experienced that too often.

Australian cops cuff alleged TeamPCP masterminds

Avoid the Stereotype

It was the hoodie that gave at least one of them away to the local coppers. Obviously a hacker and a wrong'un. Rookie error.

BOFH: How our Covid ransomware protocol's Y2K blockchain lowered uptime

Warp Factor

Many years ago, engineers at a subcontractor started to use the term Warp Factor to quantify warpage in the plastic mouldings they were making. All so they could get management talking about how things had improved since we had dropped from warp factor 6 to warp factor 3.

Sometimes you have to make your own fun at work.

An off-grid AI sounds like a great survival assistant, but is better left to roleplaying the zombie apocalypse

The Twist

The twist is that in this post apocalyptic scenario, the zombies are the ones who have outsourced their neural activity to their Raspberry Pi LLMs.

A very elite apocalypse too, since they would need to be able to afford to buy a Pi!

Brrrraaaaiiiinnnnssss

Amsterdam activists throw acid at Microsoft datacenter project

Re: Probably not much acid...

And beer. Don't forget the Belgian beer.

Ministers arm under-16s social media ban with least surprising study of the year

Teenagers will be teenagers

Surely being a teenager is all about being moody and not interacting with anyone else in the house, beyond slamming doors.

The best you can hope for with the ban isn't that they'll act like human beings, but that they'll act like teenagers. It will likely be as effective as banning fags and booze was for previous generations. I look forward to it's wild success.

Meta admits its first ‘superintelligence’ was too stupid to survive for three days

Any assistance would be welcome.

"That lab is Zuck’s latest big bet and aims to create a “personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them.”

I'll give Zuck mine now to save his new toy having to spy on me to find them.

Take over the world and subjugate the population beneath my iron heel.

Make cake for breakfast socially acceptable.

Any help in achieving these would be welcome and Zuck can have a minor palace on the same island as my volcano lair ad a reward for services rendered.

AI startup that’s never turned a profit says it'll totally be around in 2047 to close its $19B lease

Re: So .....

I'm putting all my money in tulip bulbs, the Darien scheme, canal and railway company shares and a pet food home delivery web site to ride out the coming crash.

Boffins bet on quantum computers, AI supers to solve fusion fuel dilemma

Minor corrections

We have had fusion power available since 1952 and the Ivy Mike test. It is just that nobody wants to live, or indeed can live anywhere near where it is used.

We also have a very large fusion power station 96,000,000 miles away that has been supplying us with energy for even longer.

Amazon Leo constellation nears 400 satellites as broadband launch looms

The future is a battle between the opposing space robot armies of Musk's head in a jar, vs the space robot armies loyal to Bezos' cloud compute simulated "personality".

As a mere meatsack human, I won't be around to see it.

User swore hacker called General Failure had invaded his PC

General Failure

General Failure would be my hacker handle, if it wasn't too hot to wear a hoodie now.

Oracle outlines all the ways it could lose the farm it bet on AI

Double your bet and you could win your money back.

Large Hadron Collider goes offline to make room for its enhanced successor

Re: So no risk that ...

Whst is this colour "orange" of which you speak?

How the AI bubble could pop and take down the global economy, according to the BIS

Compared with some prior bubbles, we won't even get anything long term out of this. As with the infrastructure for the dotcom boom, most of the investment will depreciate to zero within a couple of years, with the possible exception of the data centre shells, electrical and cooling systems.

Many British canal and railway mania investors lost their shirts, but we still have and use the canals and railways that were built to this day, two centuries later.

UK government wants 'trusted' news sources promoted above the social media noise

At least the lower orders will be consistently misinformed, instead of all that confusing, contradictory misinformation, messing with their poor little heads. As it used to be.

Neuromorphic computing may one day offer AI a power-saving brainwave

Every time this comes up, I have to point out that we already have low power requirement intelligence, already available from some of the human population. Actual brains, not brain inspired.

Bring on the Butlerian Jihad.

A modest proposal: Reformat everything to make documents more palatable to AI

Pretty please, reformat all your stuff to make it easier for us to steal.

Uncle Sam considers buying a seat on the Titanic

Privatise the profits. Socialise the losses. Standard procedure since the 2007/8 banking crash. The only scceptable form of socialism. There won't be any profits from AI till at least after the crash. Possibly not even then, so the upcoming big losses need to be shunted on to the oiks ASAP.

NASA's Secret: Moon astronauts will be rocking Prada underwear

With inflation and the stagnation of the wages of sin over the past two decades, the Devil now wears Primark.

California may let Linux bypass age check

Won't someone please think of the children!

Seeing age inappropriate stuff on the internet AND learning about Linux? Mentally scarred for life.

NASA to pull an IKEA by dropping tons of plastic, metal, and glass on the Moon

Obligatory mention of the missing allen key in the shipment. Hope the lunar base contractor takes more care checking the packing list. Or dropping the only allen key in the lunar regolith and all the astronauts on hands and knees trying to find it. Better make it a bright, contrasting colour.

UK MPs slam digital ID rollout as a 'fiasco' after botched launch

Re: Palantir must be unhappy

And Palantir will replace them with a more compliant government.

SpaceX pitches itself as integrated interplanetary proto-monopolist in IPO filing

Re: the Great Man's head in a jar

Greatness is measured by wealth. It isn't called net worth for nothing.

I look forward to a future where the Great Man's head in a jar can order you to be thrown out of an airlock for accidentally referring to X as Twitter.

UK Typhoon jets fitted with bargain-bin drone busters for Middle East sorties

What war?

This is for the war on Iran that the UK is absolutely not taking part in, yes?

Iran hints it could interfere with submarine cables in the Strait of Hormuz

Re: Yo Ay-Rah, Jerhume Brunnen-G

The very stable genius didn't hear about the Vietnam war, due to his bone spurs interfering with his hearing.

Re: Are they allowed to do that?

Special military operations can go on longer than originally planned. Just ask Trump's crush Vlad the Invader.

Europe tests laser links as satellite comms outgrow radio

Has this been tried?

Since the majority of the planet's surface is water and mountains make up only a small percentage of the land, would it make more sense for the lasers be mounted on the heads of cartilage skeletoned sea creatures of some sort?

Tencent admits GPUs only pay for themselves when powering personalized ads

Re: Improved personalized advertising - WOW! Can't wait /sarc. The enshittification continues.

What's an advert?

Ublock Origin. Makes the web usable.

Get it here.....

Oh hang on, this is starting to read like an advert! Targetting a market open to using it and quite often will already be doing so. And I'm not even getting paid.

Man jailed for packing printer with something more expensive than toner: Cocaine

"Australian government data suggests cocaine retails for AU$300-$400 per gram ($215 to $290), and methamphetamine for around AU$50 ($35). Cartridges for your correspondent’s color laser printer cost AU$139 ($100) apiece and a third party toner refill vendor sells 45 grams of the colored dust for just $8.40."

Official HP cocaine and meth cartridges, with the DRM chips are much more expensive than that. Only buy genuine HP drugs, not the poor quality aftermarket stuff. It's for your own good.

Tech is now rolling out the old grievance grift

Re: You lot were being paid?

Turn your hobby in to a career.

I've done 22 hours of hating Palantir this week. Where do I send my time sheet for the next payroll run? Or does that make me an hourly payed Palantir hater, rather than a salaried professional Palantir hater?

Minister gives Palantir's NHS platform a clean bill of health

On the plus side, integration with the MoD's Palantir subscription will allow a health minister to call in drone strikes on patients with particularly expensive conditions, union picket lines and other obstacles to cost effective management.

NHS to close-source hundreds of GitHub repos over AI, security concerns

A mixture of security by obscurity and bolting the stable door after the horse has departed. Neither are known for their success rate.

Palantir CEO: 10 percent of the world 'professionally hates us'

Mistake?

. “Maven met its moment across real world events in Q1 … When the stakes are highest, when failure is measured in lives and readiness."

So blowing up a girls school (twice) and killing over a hundred pupils and teachers with tomakawk missiles wasn't a mistake?

Microsoft's turned Windows into a cesspool, but it wants to do better

Re: What's wrong at Redmond?

Also, change the name from Microsoft to anything else (Use software from Anything Else Corp. It's really good!)

Also, demolish the buildings, plough the sites with salt and build elsewhere from scratch. .

IBM's AI coding 'partner' Bob hits general availability

Shirley Bob is a registered trademark of the Microsoft Corporation, from the mid 90s ill fated operating system.

Two men charged over series of arson attacks on 5G masts

Re: Technical insight

Look for the extra G to tell a 5G mast from a 4G mast.

PowerPoint punishment sent users into an infinite loop after lunch

Boredom is the Devil's Playground

Various pieces of industrial equipment running off Windows PCs, back in the naughties. I'd memorised the steps you needed to change the control software default language back from simplified, or traditional Chinese, Thai, etc after bored night shift staff had been at them.

DeepSeek's new models are so efficient they'll run on a toaster ... by which we mean Huawei's NPUs

When power used (wasted), size of the data centres being built and amount of money being borrowed are the key metrics and bragging rights for AI companies, then there is little incentive to optimise their models for anything other than perceived accuracy. When a company doesn't have access to infinite borrowed money that is gong to vanish in the upcoming crash and the latest and greatest hardware then they can optimise for other things.

Magnificent irony as Meta staff unhappy about running surveillance software on work PCs

"My preferred, and most used, notebook still has pages - and needs to be replaced when it gets full. Capture the keystrokes on that ya buggers!"

That's what the company issue Meta AI Ray Ban spy glasses are for. There is no escape.

Iran claims US used backdoors to knock out networking equipment during war

A country that makes network equipment and also plays the Great Game of Empire.

Embedding back doors in said equipment sold to other countries gives great advantages in any conflict. It is relatively easy to do. It is hard to detect it is either present during peace time, or doing nefarious stuff during a war. It is easy to deny, if caught. It is easy to accuse your rival equipment manufacturing country of doing it, while claiming to be squeeky clean yourself. It is very hard for anyone else to separate fact from propoganda.

Put all that together, then why not? This logic applies as equally to China as to the US.

NASA Inspector fears new spacesuits won’t be ready for Moon landing

If China did announce a moon landing in 2027, NASA could buy some cheap, working, if rather small space suits from Temu. Problem solved!

Growing AI power slurpage prompts MPs to examine low-energy computing

Already exists.

General intelligence is available from a subset of human brains already for around 300W power consumption each. No need for the artificial version. Bring on the Butlerian Jihad.

NASA working on 'Big Bang' upgrade to keep the Voyagers alive for longer

Big Bang

When I saw the title my first thought was crashing Voyager's one and two in to each other to see if the resulting FrankenVoyager had improved power consumption. However, they are heading in to the black in different directions, so that seems unlikely.

Cops hand Motorola £25M no-bid deal to keep 2000-era radios alive

You can buy Acme Metropolitan police whistles for about £10 each. Probably considerably less with a volume discount. There are less than a quarter million police and support staff in England and Wales. So they could be entirely equiped with this robust communications system for well under £2.5 million. Less than a tenth of the Motorola contract. Plus it won't be obselete when 4G is turned off.

Britain's atomic brain trust gives itself till 2030 to unpick fusion challenges

There are plenty of fusion power plants already in operation. The nearest is 96 million miles away. Just need to collect the energy from it.

Attention, gamers: The FAA wants YOU to be an air traffic controller

AI Use Case

Surely a use case for AI, with a chatbot to talk to the pilots. Ok, hallucinating the occasional non existent runway could be a problem, but they get it right 80% of the time and their performance should improve from learning on real world oopsies. "flight 238, come round to 370 degrees and land on runway eleventy."

Much better than having a shortage of meatsack controllers.

"Your landing is important to us. Unfortunately we are experiencing an unusually high volume of flights and all our controllers are busy. Please call back later."

Veterans Affairs has lost track of software licenses amid $985M bill

Re: $985,000,000

The ROI on buying politicians just can't be beaten.