Posts by Lurko

Researchers warn robot cars can be crashed with tinfoil and paint daubed on cardboard

Re: Have they done the same experiment

"Have they done the same experiment on human drivers?"

They hardly need to. Observation suggests many human drivers' attention is easily snatched away by flashing lights, attractive members of their preferred gender, weird clothing or hair, etc etc. A few bits of tinfoil and colour, less so (perhaps unless displaying an inflammatory slogan).

Mind you, you'd have thought that the safety debate on autonomous taxis would be easily solved, by comparing the safety stats for Waymo and Baidu against the accident data for meatsack taxis in the same operating areas (subject to the usual caveats on data validity). The data exists for both, you have to wonder why regulators in both the US and China haven't done this work and published the results.

Twitter 'supersharers' of fake news tend to be older Republican women

Re: where a small group of people distort the political reality for many

"Somebody having been in politics their entire adult life shouldn't have a net worth in the tens of millions of dollars regardless of whether it's in their name or a spouses (old money excepted, obviously)."

Why the f*** should old money be excepted? Old money gives you every bit as much self interest as the hoping-to-be-new-money, but with a dynastic side order of nepotism.

Recycling old copper wires could be worth billions for telcos

Re: Financially viable?

BT were reported recently to have estimated they can recover 200,000 tonnes from the UK network (and there's reason to believe that's both a considerable underestimate, and based on the trunk and many-core stuff, not reliant on silly estimates of recovering the twisted pair to each property). I suspect the biggest challenge for telcos is legally, safely and economically stripping the insulation, as the ratio of insulation to copper isn't very good on telephone wires, but at least in high volume that can be automated.

Obviously they won't offload that other in a period of years, but potentially that's near enough a billion quid less recovery and processing costs.

Google to push ahead with Chrome's ad-blocker extension overhaul in earnest

But the problem is the same for Brave as everyone else. If you show ads, there's money to go round that might support the development and maintenance. If you don't show ads, then you find the harsh reality that too few people will pay to support the necessary work (much like journalism). At the moment Brave is funded by a collection of investors. How will they get their money back, with a return?

California's Governor Newsom is worried AI will be smothered in regulation

Re: Wow.

A California politician worried about excessive legislation?

By number of bills introduced or passed, I think you'll find California is pretty much middle of the road, surprisingly.

https://fiscalnote-marketing.s3.amazonaws.com/Most_Effective_States2021_v1_v4.pdf

But on the general subject of regulation, having worked both in heavily and lightly regulated businesses, and now as a regulator myself, regulation is largely an enabler. You've always got a minority of mostly SME complainers that regulation is red tape and stops them doing stuff - and sometimes they're right. For smaller potentially innovative businesses regulation is a problem particularly because understanding regulation isn't easy, whereas for larger companies there's plenty of resources to have people looking at regulation both to comply, to spot opportunities within it, or to influence changes to it for commercial advantage. If you're a six man and a dog band developing a new product and living a hand to mouth existence, you can't afford somebody spending weeks reading the relevant regulation, consulting expensive lawyers, engaging with bureaucrats. But that's not a description of the modern AI company, is it? OpenAI used to be five people (plus dog) but now employs circa 1,000 people and has a valuation around $100bn.

If most regulation were pre-emptive, then drugs like aspirin would probably never have been licensed, and lithium ion batteries would be restricted largely to business applications. So what business are mostly seeking is a gentle slope of AI regulation - a few boundaries at first, a bit of guidance, engagement, and somebody in government to speak to. When there's more experience, people (perhaps more voters than business) will want more. And surprisingly, investors often like regulation - I've worked on district heating in the UK, where investment has been heavily constrained because investors are put off by a lack of regulation, and where my employer (who built and operated these) likewise wanted more operational regulation to squeeze out the shysters and fly-by-nights.

Fortunately, most regulation is created ex-post, not ex-ante. Or in English, most rules get written after somebody's already caused a problem, rather than pre-emptively because they might. In the case of AI things are different because people are looking for some pre-emption for fear of especially bad consequences. Arguably the early talk of AI regulation is largely misplaced - the harm of AI doesn't appear to me to be a Terminator series of droids, or other uses and misuses, but it's potentially harm to investors, and to the environment.

Singapore to offer enterprises incentives to buy greener hardware

Not that unlikely a location

Singapore has an excellent reputation for an open economy, high levels of development, stability, and the rule of law. Those are all rather more important than cheap and readily available energy, where locations like Nigeria, Russia, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi beckon. Or neighbouring Malaysia.

But a few questions for any resident DC experts if I may:

Ignoring some magic sauce of low power heat removal, or low heat/MIPS* processors, surely any modern bit barn isn't knowingly throwing energy away on wasteful processing - with aircon and ancillaries multiplying the processing power needs by 3 (last time I paid attention) surely power use is extremely high on the agenda for DC operators and designers?

Can SmartNICs really reduce power by an material extent , or are they just shifting the load around? Shifting to a lower power cost location saves money, but then presumably leaves the "losing" DC under-utilised?

For a given useful volume of end-user instructions, is there much variation in power consumed by different DCs and by different technologies such as containerisation?

* Or whatever, your area not mine!

Mystery miscreant remotely bricked 600,000 SOHO routers with malicious firmware update

Re: unhappy security researcher?

Another theory might be the direct or indirect actions of an aggrieved party who lost out in the Windstream bankruptcy. Although Windstream went bust back in 2020, it was last last year that the dust finally settled and the company exited from its Chapter 11 purgatory. There was $4bn in debt written off through Chapter 11, and whilst most would be institutional, it's a certainty that some employees, contractors and suppliers lost out.

OpenAI is very smug after thwarting five ineffective AI covert influence ops

Errmmm...excuse you

"We all expected bad actors to use LLMs to boost their covert influence campaigns — none of us expected the first exposed AI-powered disinformation attempts to be this weak and ineffective," observed Thomas Rid, professor of strategic studies and founding director of the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies

And therein is the problem, the first exposed. Then there's all the ones we don't know about.

Having said that, looking at the online discussion of the Orange Convict's latest newsflow, or online discussion of events in Gaza, I have to question whether there is any difference between irrational, biased shouty garbage from maybe-sentients and the same irrational, biased shouty garbage from non-sentients.

Activist investor pressures Texas Instruments to stop spending cash on fabs

Re: Priorities

Nor necessarily in the long term interests of investors. Basically, the activists investors want TI to dramatically reduce investment in future products and capacity so that the company has more cash that it would then be forced to pay as dividends or in share buy backs. Either dividends or buybacks are expected to ramp the short term price, and that's all these short term shysters want. When they've pumped and dumped the stock, TI will actually be worth less.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries bets big on small turbines for datacenters

Re: It's an interesting concept

"I'm all for local/less centralised power generation closer to the point of demand because it ticks a lot of boxes in terms of resilience/not having to build and maintain massive amounts of grid capability/not ramming up wind turbines in rural parts hundreds of miles from where the demand is (because subsidies and free money)."

In which case, demand has to be built where there's power to be had, rather than hoping to use often meagre local resources to fit demand that's evolved in relation to the economy and policies of the past few hundred years.

I'd imagine the belief set here is that "surplus" renewable energy is used to convert electrical energy that we can't efficiently store into chemical energy which we can. There's a critical assumption here of assuming that there will for a long time be a lot of renewable power that's near enough free. Unfortunately, the concept of surplus renewable output being free is merely a reflection of low levels of battery storage and a 1960s design of power system. Hang enough BEVs on the grid, and invest in grid reinforcement, and suddenly the days of "surplus" renewables are suddenly gone, and renewable power always has a positive price. The same threat applies to historic oddities like electric storage heaters linked to simple time of day tariffs - they're living on borrowed time, and the whole concept of very cheap off peak power should vanish.

Wonder how the cost of energy stacks up for customers

I can see that Mitsubishi will sell whatever customers want to buy. But if they're proposing on site/nearsite gas turbines, driven by hydrogen or hydrogen mix, then customers have the cost and efficiency losses of a hydrogen CCGT. They also need to build gas infrastructure, since for most DCs bulk hydrogen compatible gas connections won't be readily available locally, and that has its own operating costs and new losses. Then there's the whole "where does the hydrogen come from?" which involves some form of power to gas infrastructure, meaning they need to build the generating infrastructure, maintain and operate, compress and store the gas. That's paying for three different energy infrastructures, each with its capital costs, losses, parasitic loads and standing costs.

Technically, all of this is feasible, I've seen all elements done. Whether it's ever going to be economically feasible I can't see.

Elon Musk's xAI scores $6B in its series B funding round

Re: This is what's wrong with the tech industry

"Investors have no idea how much money they're wasting sometimes. I'm surprised that they don't demand independent parties to evaluate internal business efficiency."

I've run such exercises, they inevitably focus on comparable, transactional processes that rarely hold back a company. You could have a business where the cost to pay an invoice is ten times that of a world class processing business, and it wouldn't contribute to as much as a rounding error on the P&L. The problem with efficiency is that it is a very small component of total shareholder return. With management, you need them to be effective rather than efficient. Unfortunately, common metrics for management effectiveness tend to be either presumptions or proxies (eg employee engagement is often used in this way).

But we already have the tools: A company's accounts already exist precisely to show over time how effective management have been. So anybody who wants to measure management effectiveness, look at the P&L, balance sheet and cash flow statements. Does the business make a profit from its ordinary activities? Are sales growing profitably? Is the business making a credible return on capital employed? Does it have a reasonable balance of financing between debt and equity? There's a whole load of other strategic and commercial questions worth asking, about the risks the business has, whether it has a clear and credible strategy, etc However, most investors are only interested in the total shareholder return which is often driven almost entirely by the sentiment amongst potential buyers rather than the fundamentals visible in the accounts. And that means the big tech stocks are worth hundreds of billions of dollars despite paying no dividends, having fatally flawed governance, and in some cases no obvious path to generate a reasonable return on capital employed. Accounts are backward looking, value is usually defined by expectations of the future, and in that last respect the effectiveness of management includes its ability to bullshit investors. Musk's clearly doing very well on that metric, along with Zuck.

And talking of Elmo and Zuck, where's my cage fight? That Musk is pathetic, all mouth and no trousers.

Thanks for the memory, South Korea tells nation's chip makers – now build processors

Re: Reverse tax

Well, global semiconductor market size is estimated at $610bn a year by one widely quoted source, I'll let you gather the data on the subsidies!

iFixit divorces Samsung over lack of real commitment to DIY repair program

Re: So Samsungs supposed repair program was all for show

"It's the same game, but with different nuances in different sectors."

True, but I don't begrudge people making money. What I begrudge is when they do or try to make excessive profits either because they won't supply parts, or they charge too much for them.

"The only washing machines designed so the bearings can be replaced (bolted drums, not welded) is Miele, and their machines cost 3x more than rivals."

I'm not sure that's true, a search for washing machine bearings pulls up plenty of makers selling them, including for my current machine. I'm sure it's true at the bottom end of the market, but that's because many customers buy purely on price, and its cheaper to make.

"Hotpoint readily charged me 20 quid for a small injection-molded door latch which melted, despite my protestation that a door latch on a hot thing should have been designed not to melt."

Hotpoint. 'nuff said, that's the company who had to recall around 600,000 washing machines because of a fault where the door locking mechanism can overheat and catch fire. Was yours one that should have been recalled and fixed at their expense? If this is recent, perhaps worth contacting Trading Standards to report it, see if it's covered by the recall, or its a new problem that Hotpoint need to fix.

"A Hitachi circular saw can be repaired for 60 quid, a new one from Lidl is 50 quid."

Hitachi power tools are comparable quality to Makita and DeWalt, and whilst the Lidl and Aldi power tools are good for the price, you're comparing very unequal products. If my Makita breaks and costs £60 to fix, that's probably a better investment for me than buying a new but much cheaper product.

"Building a car from the spare parts catalogue will cost you at least 3x the forecourt price of the car"

Of course it would, and it should. Maintaining a spares inventory and distribution system is incredibly expensive, far more so than most people recognise. There's a need for take a risk on the volume of parts that go into spares inventory, there's a separate timing risk that the maker has to pay to make the parts but they may sit in inventory for a decade or more before a customer pays for them, a need for IT to track the inventory and people to operate the IT and to keep systems alive for many years, for storage in warehouses to hold the parts for years, for some poor beggar to go and check the inventory from time to time, for security to protect the warehouse 24/7, for logistics processes and contractors to distribute the parts, for intermediaries to retail parts and take their own cut, there's risk that a part gets superseded by eg a safety or regulatory change and all the existing inventory becomes scrap, that the inventory contains parts that aren't working from new, that long term storage results in corrosion, dried lubricants, perished seals, or even that the handling of inventory results in mis-location of parts in which case they're probably lost forever, yet still occupying expensive warehouse space somewhere.....a long time ago I worked for a motor manufacturer, and all that I've described is the reality for the materials handling team of a manufacturer. And every new product, minor or major manufacturing change means additional parts need adding to the inventories.

Re: Dare I say it?

Seems it's a cultural thing at Samsung - cost and availability of spares is poor for non-electronic goods such as their otherwise excellent vacuum cleaners.

But actions have consequences - my S22 phone is coming to the end of contract, I'll not be looking at Samsung after reading this article. Which may seem counter-intuitive, but although I don't plan to keep handsets long term and repair them, I value the option on behalf of the next owner.

'Little weirdo' shoulder surfer teaches UK cabinet minister a lesson in cybersecurity

Re: Basic failure

I'd agree, but they've still got a certain angle of view. If you've genuinely concerned about the privacy of what's on your screen then don't have that content on screen in a public place. I don't expect much of MPs, Mercer is a former soldier, he really should know better than this, and know when to take some responsibility.

Then again, this government has never taken responsibility for anything.

Brit council fumbles Oracle Fusion launch, leaving SAP to die another day

Re: "Oracle remains a suitable product for the Council"

It's not avoiding the recognition of failure (which could still be the case, but is separate), but simply addressing the question of whether the work to date needs to be entirely written off, or can in fact be used as part of the ultimate system. In almost any floundering Sporacle fiasco, there's plenty of stuff that does work, a load of stuff that doesn't yet but can be made to work, as well as some bits that don't work and will need throwing away and re-doing.

Re: With all that wasted money

"could the UK government not hired software devs themselves to develop a solution for all its councils, parishes and countys"

To be effective that would require standardisation of all council processes, a big job itself, but more than that for national government to interfere in local government that way would require new primary legislation. Government would need to draft and debate a green paper in both houses, then there's say two years behind the scenes work to to do the research and identify scope and options and consult the public and all stakeholders, with a white paper (policy) pushed through both houses towards the end of that time. Once the policy is set, then somebody has to draft and lay legislation, again more work, more parliamentary time, say a year. This is just to give government the powers to force councils to adopt standard processes, four+ years and at that point in time not a single standard process has been designed. Such intervention by national government risks being a hot-potato, to be subject to long winded legal challenge from from councils concerned their powers are being over-ridden, from the ill qualified busybodies who comprise the House of Lords, and from local authorities of a different party to the government who just want to throw a spanner in the works. Any objection of those types will likely end up in the supreme court, and add at least two years to the timeline. There will also be well funded legal and PR opposition from the likes of Sporacle who aren't going to give up this lucrative market without a good fight. Assuming central government can get the powers, they'd need more time to consult on the specifics of processes and the way they plan to procure and manage the new systems - at least another two years, and at the end of that time you'd be looking for your first candidate council to pilot the standard processes and IT.

From a political point of view it's a total non-starter, no self-interested MP is going to back a plan that takes an absolute minimum of seven years to even get started, will cost millions, has plenty of risks, and involves back office systems for councils, when barely a third of the population can be arsed to even vote in local elections. This may seem defeatist, but much of this is down to how democracy works. In countries that don't have democracy, change is much much easier.

"Anybody looked whether there are figures published for successful vs. unsuccessful implementations of such things from a body such as the National Audit Office?"

Whilst not exclusively so, NAO generally become involved only when things are looking grim and have already gone wrong. It's a pity NAO don't issue an annual "when things go right" report, because public confidence in the public sector is extremely low, in large part because all they ever read about is the failures. But if I can throw in a private sector comparison, I worked for the energy sector for a decade or so and one of my roles was tracking the performance of all our competitors. During the period 2009-2015, five of the six then-largest suppliers "upgraded" their customer accounting and billing systems (mostly SAP, but at least one maybe two Oracle). Of those five players, all ran into various serious and expensive problems, resulting in customer debt write-offs, re-work, additional costs-to-serve, huge reputational damage, and repeated regulatory intervention and fines.

These IT upgrade SNAFUs are the same whether public, private or voluntary sector, but the private sector is far better able to hide these problems as there's little or no transparency. For private companies it is necessary to monitor a company very closely (as was my job) to spot when things are going badly wrong, and even then it required strong sector knowledge and availability of performance data from regulators.

The reason any ERP or CRM upgrade usually becomes a mess in both public and private sectors is because large organisations are change averse, it's what they do. Whether councils, energy suppliers, supermarkets, insurers, banks, pharma companies, airlines etc, large organisations exist to provide consistency, repeatability, low unit cost, and risk-aversion. They have slow, complicated decision making. They are inherently and by design ponderous rather than agile, conservative rather than innovative, introspective rather than fast-learners. Whilst they have all manner of project managers, PMOs, agile coaches, scrum masters, six sigma black belts, the reality is that they're designed to hold positions not to dance. Even their culture (which over-rides any strategy bullshit) is about that repeatability, about intentionally making change slow to impossible. Then, when it becomes "necessary" to change the IT infrastructure, it turns out that internal communication is not good for doing new stuff, knowledge turns out to reside in selected employees heads and not recorded elsewhere, experience of planning, costing, and executing large scale change is absent; Senior management of a stable organisation turn out to be exactly the wrong people to oversee and make decisions about such change, delegation and accountability are lacking, etc etc.

In both public and private sector, some of these large change projects go right - but they're the exception. In the local authority space, we often hear the idea of "why don't they find a working system and duplicate it", indeed I've made such comments myself. It can work - the sixth of the original big six energy suppliers, E.ON recently did this, but despite taking the system used by the best performing company (Octopus), E.ON were fined £5m twice last year for severe customer service failings, and languish at the bottom end of customer ratings in Which research.

Dell latest to enjoy speculative soar as AI bubble builds

Re: Pump and Dump

"Really … how long can the AI Bubbie last?"

About 5-6 years is typical for investment manias. Looking at a non-scientific choice of stock indicators (Nvidia vs Nasdaq) I'd guess the mania started at the beginning of 2023, so the bubble will burst mid to late 2028.

Forget feet and inches, latest UK units of measurement are thinking bigger

Re: Incommensurate units

"As far as I have understood the tip of the blade has to stay below the speed of sound"

Speed is limited by the durability of blade coatings and materials and in practical terms results in a blade speed about a third the speed of sound. Aerofoils and propellers do work just fine at supersonic speed, but there's no need for wind turbine blades to go fast as the size of the rotor determines power output, not the rotation speed. Unlike commercial aircraft that spend most of their time in the essentially weatherless stratosphere and have regular maintenance, wind turbines have a long hard life battered by rain, hail, seawater or salt (or sand and dust in water free locations), and the blades progressively suffer from leading edge erosion based that varies in large part on the linear velocity of the blades. That erosion roughens the blade edge and reduces its efficiency, and once the coating is gone then the blade structural material itself starts to disintegrate. This degradation is inevitable, and reduces turbine output by about 1.8% a year, based on a UK research study.

Nice summary in the link below, although the idea that there is in fact a magic bullet coating solution if not quite the truth - evidence shows that applying leading edge tape solutions actually causes a further 1-3% reduction in output.

https://weatherguardwind.com/leading-edge-erosion/

And today's curious fact - the lowest drag on a wind turbine would occur if it has a single blade, not three. Because that would create unmanageable stresses, they need two or more. Two is feasible for smaller designs but still have balance issues, and that's why most wind turbines have three - a pragmatic choice, not an efficient one. There is work to create a single "bladed" wind turbine that doesn't rotate, it essentially wobbles. Search Vortex Bladeless if you're interested.

Re: Incommensurate units

The do exist, mostly as fashion accessories for eco-business parks, government or academic campus installations. Nominally they're more efficient and don't have to turn into the wind, most designs don't scale well, as a result they're too close to the ground to get decent wind speeds or high outputs, and there have been problems of cost and reliability.

There have been a few serious attempts to build large scale vertical axis turbines, but so far results have not has persuaded investors that its a better bet than the well proven horizontal axis turbines. One main proponent is Norway's "World Wide Wind", who have a funky two stage contra-rotating vertical axis design as their web site shows, and claim very high potential outputs that eclipse the largest horizontal models of today, but it's still at the government-funded seed capital stage. As a personal observation, most things that involve the words "contra-rotating" never really become mainstream, and even if it is in fact better technology, it's in danger of being the Betamax of wind power.

First LockBit, now BreachForums: Are cops winning the war or just a few battles?

Re: Make paying ransom a crime.

And make concealing a ransom payment, or attempting to get any third party to pay on your behalf should attract even more stringent penalties (as already happens with bribery laws).

"20 years of supervised release doesn't seem as much of a deterrent as 20 years imprisonment although I suspect there might have been quite a bit of trading to get there."

The deterrent is mainly in the perp's view of the probability of being caught rather than the sentence. If there were a 100% chance of being caught, then really light sentences would suffice. Say it was 200 hours litter picking - not much of sentence, yet if EVERY time you tried to commit a crime that was your outcome, you'd soon learn the game wasn't worth the candle. If there's a 50% chance of being caught then criminals may well see that as a chance worth taking if the potential payoff is high, for lower payoffs they'd be more circumspect. As the expected probability of conviction declines, the potential maximum sentence becomes less and less relevant.

Note as well that the perp's view of probability is not going to be informed by common sense or facts. I suspect all cyber crims think they're genius hackers, able to ghost in and out of systems without leaving a trace, truly untouchable. So I don't believe a few big takedowns are going to have any deterrent effect. The fact that online fraud in the UK doubled year on year in 2023 to a value of £2.3bn shows that there's more cyber crims and they're mostly getting away with it.

Toshiba to shed 4,000 jobs as part of revitalization plan

Re: New company haiku

Quality work, sir.

Of course it wasn't just "faulty accounts", most of the 2015-16 accounts issue were specifically the implosion of Westinghouse as a consequence of cost overruns on a couple of nuclear power contracts in the US, and the liabilities and mis-statement of accounts were so large that Toshiba leadership had to break up the group to avoid bankruptcy.

Amongst the problems facing Westinghouse were a whole range of QA problems that sound suspiciously similar to those currently reported of a well known US civil aircraft maker, although the full panoply of other nuclear construction problems featured. Curiously enough, the problem contracts were under negotiation at the time Toshiba bought Westinghouse. So whilst the problems had yet to occur, Gordon Brown (better know for his poor economic stewardship) actually ensured that UK taxpayers avoided the costly consequences. I suppose even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Crook brags about US Army and $75B defense biz pwnage

Re: 'a $75 billion aerospace and defense company'

Could be, though presumably they'd fudge the value to avoid being too specific. In which case my money's on either Lockheed Martin or RTX both of whose revenues are in the $68-70bn range. RTX are perhaps still better known as Raytheon, or their engine making subsidiary Pratt & Witney.

Re: So, he's starting to target the military

The total failure of assorted police and security services across the world to catch and punish cyber criminals suggests to me he has few worries.

If you're an autistic teenager who embarrasses a government for it's pathetic efforts for securing their data, then you can be expect to be found, extradited and punished. But hard case extortionists, nope, they've got a free pass, with the authorities wringing their hands about how difficult it is to find these people and stop them.

Tesla nearing shareholder vote to grant Musk $46B

How so? Tesla customers seem to be a subset of Apple customers, and are therefore solely interested in their fix of of carefully packaged technology and brand, and have no interest in what's happening behind the scenes. If shareholders foolishly give away 8%* of their company to keep the Chief Manchild happy, there's no impact on price, all it does is concentrate more of Tesla in his hands.

Market cap of Tesla, £545bn, Elon's demanded extra $46bn. Although Musk already has 20% of the stock, so arguably the non-Musk shareholders would be voting to give Musk 10.%% of their current equity ownership. Let's see how stupid US shareholders are.

Whilst I'd be delighted to see Musk gone, there is no obviously good outcome for the company. Musk has built a business that's loss making to marginally profitable on a culture of shouting at people. If Elmo walks off in a huff, there's no proper corporate managerial culture who can turn the company into something stable. They'll all be lickspittles who treat their direct reports like dirt, because that is the shadow that Musk has cast. A new shouter won't cut the mustard because they aren't known to the business, the company is too big to bring in a true entrepreneur (of which there's very few), it's already been through the "sack the peons and whip the survivors" mode, so there's no value in private equity types, and then you'd have Musk ranting away in public about how everything a new leader does is wrong, because he's proven he's an uncontrolled gobshite.

Perhaps Tesla needs a new leader who really understands IP, because that's where most of the value is, and the company's future is more about licencing proven tech to other car makers.

Japan may need 50% more electricity for hungry, hungry AI and chip fabs

Hopefully before that point, people will have asked and been able to answer the question "does AI do anything useful, and do we need more of it?"

At the moment the answer's pretty clearly "no".

Destroying offshore wind farms is top priority for Trump if he returns to presidency

Re: What's your point?

"Even in a country with little to no red tape for building a nuclear plant, they still take lots of time to do properly."

At the rate China builds nuclear plants, the advantage of coal is only that its cheaper. Recent nuclear projects have been in the 5-7 years range, and a brand new coal plant is barely any quicker. Even when building overseas, China manages this time frame:

https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-rate-of-nuclear-construction

Re: These are weird times.

Re bin lorry fires: "Pretty good chance it's going to be due to disposable [v]apes."

Indeed, a recently published report indicates a 71% increase in fires in bin trucks and at waste handling facilities, largely due to disposable vapes, which contain a lithium battery (could be recharged, but not as used in these products), and by design the battery still has charge when the vape liquid is exhausted. Put it into a

With scooters, as you say it's the cheap crap (or mixing of unsuitable chargers and batteries, or home built kits), and these normally go bang when being charged, often overnight - in the past year about 11 people killed by these fires, a 78% year on year increase and one fire in London every couple of days.

Re: What's your point?

More significantly than having the greatest number of coal power plants (which could be attributed to history and inertia) is that the CCP have continued to add hundreds of gigawatts of new coal power plants every year, and show no signs of slowing up.

US semiconductor building boom means staff shortages and talent slipping away

Interestingly, there's a commentary on the generally excellent CSIS web site (link below) that links the decline of US chip making pretty directly to the malign influence of economic short-termism, with a special mention for BCG, well worth ten minutes of your time:

https://www.csis.org/analysis/strategy-united-states-regain-its-position-semiconductor-manufacturing

Re: Helpful advice to glorious American Republic.

I'll grant you there are no easy answers, but strip mining emerging economies of their most talented and driven citizens strikes me as a very old school empire mindset.

Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad

Re: Brand sentiment may be faltering.

Unless it was an intentional high-risk campaign, knowing that there might be a few complaints, but the net publicity value will be greater than the safe alternative. I'll wager that Hugh Grant and the other whingers with time on their hands aren't Android afficionados, and they won;t be going without the latest shiney just because they don't like the vibe of an advert.

Dell to color-code staff based on how hybrid they really are in RTO push

"and they can avoid the embarrassing headlines about layoffs"

My perception is that US companies have always been proud of layoffs, and it's pretty clear Wall Street love a good workforce optimization.

I'd judge this isn't about employee effectiveness or output, nor about pushing people out through stealth, it's just Dilbert-esque PHBs who can't cope unless there's peons sitting outside their office. And there's a whole lot of low calibre PHBs around, all acting like a herd.

Tesla devotee tests Cybertruck safety with his own finger – and fails

Re: Similar but very different:

That is very impressive, although it's unfortunately not mandatory, nor (currently) offered for handheld circular saws. A quick google for "circular saw accident" brings up some tales of grue.

Valve vexation: Boeing's Starliner grounded again

Re: The ground is the best place for anything Boeing

"If you want to talk about facts, start with the fact that Boeing have fucked up very very badly. On multiple occasions now."

Which bit about "Without denying the seriousness of Boeing's problems" did you not understand?

"Over time safety should become better, not worse. "

It is. Take a look at the chart I linked, or any other reliable source of aviation safety data.

"Boeing are trying to use their successes of yesteryear to convince everyone they know what they're doing."

Being (and McDs) historic data is much worse than their newer aircraft, so your logic doesn't work. Nobody gives a **** about yesteryear, they care about reliability, safety, operating cost.

Re: The ground is the best place for anything Boeing

"But they are a shit show of a company and the world does not need any more of their disasters waiting to happen"

Without denying the seriousness of Boeing's problems, I'd challenge the statement that they are a shit show creating disasters waiting to happen. In 2023, there were no fatalities from passenger jet crashes or any commercial international flights, that's not incidental, that's down to the work by all of the employees in the aviation industry. In 2017 Harvard published a study that showed passengers had a one in 11 million probability of being killed for every flight, about ten or eleven times your probability of being struck by lightning each year.

Unfashionable though it is to say so, the facts are very clear that Boeing aircraft remain incredibly safe, even if they could be safer. Personally I'd rather fly on Airbus or Embraer than Boeing, but even so, Boeing aircraft remain amongst the safest means of travel you can find. I find facts more helpful than emotion.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/aviation-fatalities-per-million-passengers

UK opens investigation of MoD payroll contractor after confirming attack

Re: I'm Shocked

230k service personnel? No, active, trained military personnel is about 145k, with a further 37k volunteer reservists:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/quarterly-service-personnel-statistics-2024/quarterly-service-personnel-statistics-1-january-2024

I'd guess the difference is the bloated MoD itself with 60k civil servants who are probably on the SSCL payroll.

Another military privatisation success

Just like air sea rescue, air tankers, recruitment, military accommodation.

Given that government believe EVERYTHING is better done by the private sector, maybe they should cut out the complication of piecemeal private provision, and just hire mercenaries for all the UK's defence needs. I'm sure minister's mates can put together credible bids to the VIP procurement lane.

Lambda borrows half a billion bucks to grow its GPU cloud

Re: 'Secured'

The trick in high risk lending is to syndicate out or re-sell the debt to the gormless who think that "secured debt" is in fact secure. That's why various pension funds have money involved in the UK altnet sector, which is another dubiously solvent bubble that's starting to deflate.

And let's not forget the cause of the 2008 financial meltdown, which was largely driven by years of unwise lending on a notionally secured basis.

Local councils struggle with ill-fitting software despite spending billions with suppliers

Re: Problems and solutions not welcome

Change is slow and difficult - but rather than letting that stop things happening, the solution is perhaps to work with two or three local authorities willing to define and implement common processes, build a custom system to operate them, but additionally publish the processes so that third party suppliers have the option to build their own offering if they wish. DLUHC could (and should) make this happen by offering the budget for the resources to define the process - in return for a cast iron agreement to adopt them from participating councils. This won't be easy or cheap, but nationally there's no excuse for hundreds of completely different systems and processes.

Once there's a system and a set of processes on offer that are proven to work, risk averse councils will tend to prefer that and when the time comes to move from existing systems it's in with a good chance, and government have plenty of ways of pressuring councils when they so choose.

UK govt office admits ability to negotiate billions in cloud spending curbed by vendor lock-in

Re: shocked

The die was cast by Thatcher,

But unfortunately the Labour party have either followed Tory policies (for example landing £50bn+ of PFI debt on the NHS) or lurched into madcap marxist unelectability. As a result, although the last fifty years has "only" seen 32 years of Conservative-led governments, 13 years of Labour government were New Labour running strictly Tory policies. I doubt that Starmer is going to be radical about anything, so little will change after the coming election.

Re: shocked

Or EU procurement rules, so if projects were worth >£X, they had to be put out to 'competitive' tender

And which then-EU nation was the main cheerleader for those rules?

Bon Jovi, Billy Eilish, other musicians implore AI devs to think of humanity

"Destroying the planet bit by bit to extract ever more obscene profits for their scumbag billionaire owners."

Out of polite interest, where would you say Taylor Swift features on the spectrum ranging from impoverished artist to scumbag billionaire?

Or Jay-Z, Rhianna, Paul Mcartney and others.

UK government sets sights on £8B tech procurement overhaul

Not directly, because there's no requirement to use the framework, and the procuring department/authority can do their own thing subject to the normal public procurement rules. In practice, if there's a CCS Framework then most government departments will use it as it's usually easier than trying to procure outside the framework. If you've got the time there's a detailed assessment of government use of frameworks by the Public Accounts Committee:

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5804/cmselect/cmpubacc/385/report.html

In terms of opportunities for malfeasance, what the Tories could do is ensure their usual mates (eg Fujitsu, Crapita et al) are selected as Framework suppliers - although the same shysters did very well under the last government, so I'm not sure much would change even with a new government.

This is a procurement framework, not a project, and it doesn't have ANY budget. It's the same way that procurement frameworks operate in the private sector.

The actual out-turn value depends entirely on both the projects that use the framework, and their out-turn, so the costs could be well below or well above the framework value.