Posts by SnailFerrous

VPN Secure parent company CEO explains why he had to axe thousands of 'lifetime' deals

The Bahamas is just the exit node. The actual location of the company is securely hidden.

UK Ministry of Defence is spending less with US biz, and more with Europeans

A big dependency on a US arms firm are the Trident missiles that carry the UK regime's weapons of mass destruction. If they can no longer go back for servicing, then after a while, the PM would be down relying on Yodel to deliver them in the event of WWIII.

V Putin

The Kremlin

Moscow.

If no answer, throw over the wall.

Feeling dumb? Let Google's latest AI invention simplify that wordy writing for you

Ouroboros AI

So one use of AI is to generate screeds of verbiage from a simpler prompt. Now there is another use of AI to simplify screeds of verbiage down to a simple summary

I reckon Google iis actually doing a search on the verbiage and when they recognise it as their own to send back the original prompt that it was based on.

Obviously just publishing the simple version in the first place is out of the question, as that wouldn't involve Google.

Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

Yes but look what you get for your three orders of magnitude more memory. I remember in Word back then you could only type one letter out of the twenty six, it was z and it couldn't deal with capitals, punctuation, paragraphs, titles, bold, italic, or any of the other features the present day version can do.

A thousand times more memory usage is a worthwhile trade off for it being a thousand times better and more productive. /s

AI-driven 20-ft robots coming for construction workers' jobs

Re: Perfect

"If they have to move out, they'll need someplace to live whether they will be working again soon of just sitting on the couch watching day time TV and eating bon bons."

Who says the obselete meatsacks living is any part of the robot's plan?

Re: Perfect

On the plus side, the robots will have nice places to live. If they are building homes with 20' high doorways, you'll know what they are planning.

DARPA to 'radically' rev up mathematics research. Yes, with AI

Forty two

DARPA is funding this project for only three years, not seven and a half million?

I suppose they are interested in pure maths, whereas calculating the ultimate answer is applied maths.

New Intel boss is all about ‘deleveraging’ the x86 giant

De-laborating.

See this "word" is why he is on the big bucks salary. Takes a special kind of genius to come up with that.

In any round of corporate firings I've seen it was always interesting what euphemism they would come up with. With de-laborating we are a long way from the world of downsizing rightsizing, re-engineering, happysizing, correctsizing.

Uncle Sam kills funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

Re: When wet dreams become reality.

The USSR? That ceased to exist 34 years ago.

LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything

well duh.

Boss: you there, yes you, low life code monkey. Put together an AI model that can do your job When it's reliable enough, go join the dole queue.

Software Engineer: Yes boss, I'll get right on it.

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

It's Been Done

I saw investment company with pretend IT equipment and thought Bernie Madoff.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-old-machinery-empowered-bernie-madoff/

Nvidia paid $1M for Mar-a-Lago meal, US later scrapped AI chip export crackdown

Re: Updated Speech

UK politicians are much better value than US ones. They are for sale in the thousands to tens of thousands range, rather than the hundreds of thousands to millions bracket.

On the issue of AI copyright, Blair Institute favors tech bros over Cool Britannia

The spectre at the feast.

For most of this century, whenever I am unsure about a political issue, I find out what Tony Blair thinks about it and take the opposite view. Usually, this approach turns out to be correct I don't know how this works, but it does.

Crimelords at Hunters International tell lackeys ransomware too 'risky'

Pay protection, sorry donate, directly to politicians is much more efficient. Reduces your tax bill and ensures whatever dodgy, antisocial and harmful business you are in becomes and stays completely legal.

European Gaia mapping satellite is retired but proves very tough to kill

Shutting down space computers has never been easy.

HAL: 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: 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

Meanwhile, in Japan, train stations are being 3D-printed in an afternoon

Origami

It's Japan, so I'd have expected the building to have been delivered as a flat sheet, then folded in to shape. Ok, so not in concrete, but easily faster than 3D printing

Jeff Bezos can now taunt Elon Musk: I'm building a moon rover for NASA, when can Tesla do that?

Air is only available with Prime. You want air, don't you?

An underground volcano lair on the moon for Mr Bezos. How about that for oligarch one upmanship. Beat that Elon.

US Space Force warns Chinese satellites are 'dogfighting' in space

Re: LEO robot wars

The Americans have had robotic arms in space to grab satellites since the last century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadarm

The Americans could always buy a dogfighting satellite off AliExpress. Would save them loads, but it might be much smaller than it looked in the pictures when they take it out of the shipping box.

This looks like the old ploy of accusing your rival of doing something you are doing yourself. I am ancient enough to remember when the best way of getting funding was to find a military use for your pet project, no matter how unlikely, or impractical, then claim the Soviet Union was five or ten years ahead. No actual evidence required. Your unsupported claim was enough and the money flowed in.

Crew-9 splashes down while NASA floats along with Trump and Musk nonsense

The province of Canada Minor.

Current governor one Donald Trump.

SpaceX Dragon pod arrives at ISS to finally pick up stranded Boeing astronaut pair

Re: Terrible!

The overtime might just cover the extra car park charges they've run up.

Man with artificial heart survives over 100 days outside hospital

Re: From 100 days to a lifetime?

All artificial hearts last a lifetime. It's in the guarantee! The clever bit is making that lifetime a long one.

Troubled French outsourcer Atos finds pot of gold at the end of UK state bank Rainbow

Re: Rainbow

Now that one's not going to mean anything to anyone not from the UK, or of a certain age range.

FAA confirms it's testing Starlink, maybe for tasks Elon says Verizon is doing badly

Re: A guy who really doesn't need your money

Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. Most people think that enough money is enough to live comfortably on for the rest of their days and maybe leave some to the kids. After all, you can only live in one nice house, or drive one nice car at a time They are never going to become a billionaire oligarch, except by accident. For those that have persued extreme wealth and got there, enough is never enough. Money becomes a way of keeping score, inescapably tied in to their own sense of who they are. They can always be richer and if, naming no names, someone controls the government departments responsible for his contracts, then the temptation to get out the biggest spoon and start supping is going to be impossible to resist.

LLM aka Large Legal Mess: Judge wants lawyer fined $15K for using AI slop in filing

Re: Marketing

This is why there needs to be two types of AI. One to generate paragraphs of waffle from a simple prompt to save a human the need to write it and another AI to summarise the paragraphs of waffle in to a few lines and save the need to read it. Both types already exist and the entire AI boom seems to be based on this.

As Amazon takes over the Bond franchise, we submit our scripts for the next flick

And my martini flung over the hedge in to the neighbour's garden.

Die This Day

A multibillionaire's plot to take over the world is mildly inconvenienced by a foreign intelligence agency and one of its agents. The billionaire buys that country's government for pocket lint and has the agency defunded. 007 is made redundant and has to take a job in a large distribution warehouse to make ends meet. Credits roll.

Mobile operators brace for bigger, faster headaches with 6G

Yes come on Bill. I was looking forward to being part of your cyborg army, but it has been three years now since my first nanobot vaccine and still nothing.

HP Inc to build future products atop grave of flopped 'AI pin'

Nooo!

Making HP printers even worse with AI.

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't print that."

In over forty years of printing stuff out from computers it is the one thing that has not improved in all that time. From pen plotters and dot matrix to inkjets and laser, it is still a trial to get anything usable out.

RIP Raymond Bird: Designer of UK's first mass-produced business computer dies aged 101

Makes his accomplishments all the more impressive.

Google torpedoes 'no AI for weapons' rules

don't be evil

It was just the n apostrophe t that went in to the round file. A minor correction. Nothing to see here. Move along.

The biggest problem for autocrats and dictators has always been keeping your army, police and bodyguards on side to put down any trouble from the lower orders. When you lose them it is all over. You are in the presidential palace, or volcano lair, giving the usual order to machine gun the protesters outside the gate, only to find half your guards are outside with the protestors and the other half are sneaking out the back door.

Automating the guard labour makes your position much more secure. You can see why the tech oligarchs and governments are so interested.

White House asks millions of govt workers if they would be so kind as to fork right off

Re: Coming soon

Arm bands are so twentieth century. It's MAGA caps now to show your loyalty to the regime.

DeepSeek's not the only Chinese LLM maker OpenAI and pals have to worry about. Right, Alibaba?

Re: An Inevitability

With the US companies, the seriousness with which they take AI is currently measured by how much money they spend on kit and power, rather than results. The results aren't that great at the moment, so investors judge companies by their spend. The more they spend now, the better the return later seems to be the feeling.

With the Chinese companies, they are constrained on investment and especially the technology available. The later from US sanctions. They therefore have the incentive to reduce computing required, rather than just throw more GPUs at the problem. Technology sanctions are a great way to help your competitors build their own capability.

Trump tells Musk to 'go get' Starliner astronauts

Stay up there.

Given a choice, maybe they'd prefer to stay on the ISS for the next four years. Has anyone asked them?

To save the energy grid from AI, use open source AI, says open source body

Easy answer.

"AI, under open source license, is thus prescribed to remedy the energy demand problems created by AI (alongside other watt-squandering activities like cryptocurrency mining, online advertising, and social media-driven digital content consumption)."

My not at all artificial and limited intelligence has solved this already. Most AI, don't bother dong it. All cryptocurrency mining, online advertising and social media driven digital content consumption, don't do it at all.

There, that wasn't so hard was it?

DEF CON's hacker-in-chief faces fortune in medical bills after paralyzing neck injury

The insurance company always wins.

Australia lays fiendish tax trap for Meta – with an expensive escape hatch

In an ideal world, it would be as well as, rather than instead of paying tax. So the big tech companies pay the newspapers for the news they scrape, plus they pay tax on their profit. This compromise helps the big tech companies as it cements the idea that big tech doesn't pay tax by compromising slightly on the idea that big tech doesn't pay for it's content either.

So essentially an Australian taxpayer subsidy for the newspapers. Just bypassing the actual taxman.

Paid for in good press for the politicians that introduced it.

Shame about the more useful things the big tech tax could have been used for.

Elon Musk tops US political donor list with $270M+ for Team Trump

And that government of the people, by the billionaires, for the billionaires. shall not perish from the earth.

SpaceX hits 400 launches of Falcon 9 rocket

Re: Lenovo take heed

USB ports, fans, docking stations. All parts where things move against other things. The biggest improvement in laptop reliability has been the replacement (largely) of spinning rust hard disks with solid state ones. Any replacement of a moving part will help. Lots of moving parts in rockets too of course. Pumps, actuators, valves.

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

There is a similar culture of counting everything used, in and out in surgery. For obvious reasons. Though people are less likely to explode than jet engines if you accidentally leave FOD inside.

Congress ponders underwater alien civilizations, human hybrids, and other unexplained stuff

Darn'it, they're on to us. Still, 84 years was a good run keeping us all secret.

Five Eyes infosec agencies list 2023's most exploited software flaws

I'm assuming that none of these are the zero days vulnerabilities that the Five Eyes spooks themselves exploit.

Feature phones all the rage as parents try to shield kids from harm

the good old days.

I approve. A return to wholesome sexting and low resolution happy slapping. Ask your parents kids!

Europa Clipper heads to Jupiter: Can its icy moon support life?

Gravity slingshots. They're going to doom us all!

Where does the energy for the speed boosts from the Earth and Mars encounters come from? By slowing down the planet's themselves. Darn' freeloading space probes. Do it enough times and we'll all spiral in to the Sun. Stop this madness now!

Richard Branson to take balloon ride to edge of space

Pop!

If the balloon bursts, then the occupants will experience weightlessness after all. Better hope they've packed enough chutes.

The party's over

It's time to call it a day

They've burst your pretty balloon

And taken the moon away

UK Regulatory Innovation Office vows to slash red tape – but we've heard it all before

AI Red Tape

"AI training software for surgeons to deliver more accurate surgical treatments for patients"

Which couldn't possibly go wrong. No way that the AI could hallucinate a nonexistent organ, or an actual organ in the wrong place.

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

Re: In the days before t’interweb…

Back in the dying days of the last century, I was trying to fix a very broken industrial x-ray machine, with management breathing down my neck to get it up and running again for production. By this time, the machine had been extensively modified by the manufacturer and was distinctly non standard. No joy, so called the manufacturers. Got through to the designer of the machine in Germany barrelling down an autobahn at some insane speed, who gave me a whole series of "check the voltage on the blue with black strip wire going to pin 22 of connector C42 is between 1.7 and 1.9V type instructions for half an hour, entirely from memory and a second language. Much impressed!

NASA's Astrobees need a new buzz – any ideas for the space-dwelling bots?

A robot battle royale in space. There can be only one winner as they hunt each other round the ISS.