Posts by mostly average

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

Sounds expensive

Does it have a hood ornament?

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

Sounds like public school...

That's left-pondian public schools. Dunno about Brit schools. Icon because there's books on that in the school library, too.

US taxpayers being kept in the dark over datacenter subsidies

Lose lose lose lose scenario

Higher energy prices for residents, higher water prices for residents, higher tax burden for residents, AND it drives up the price of RAM, storage, and GPUs. So far I count four losses for taxpayers. What a great time to be a peasant! Icon because patriotism. It is veteran's day for us left-pondians after all.

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Fret not, shareholders

AI will save us!

Judge who ruled Google is a monopoly decides to do hardly anything to break it up

Playing devil's advocate or something...

Do you think it could be considered a conflict of interest if the honorable judge has an android phone/tablet/television, Chromebook, Gmail account, Google photos, and/or uses Chrome browser?

See icon.

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

All I want

Is an honest weeks pay for an honest day's work.

Oracle's $40B Nvidia hardware haul may be too hot for OpenAI's Abilene, Texas DC to handle

Just wait

Until it hits 1.21 Jiggawatts!

Altman's eyeball-scanning biometric blockchain orbs officially come to America

So...

Do you have to get orb'd again if you get slashed in the face (by a werewolf, perhaps) and lose both eyes? Would they have to give the $16 back? Would it even make sense for someone without eyes to get orb'd? Do you think orb as a verb sounds like extraterrestrial anal probing? Would the orb still recognize/love me when I'm all old and wrinkly with untreated cataracts? Icon, because get orb'd, tech bros!

Essential FOSS tools to make macOS suck less

But why tho?

Seriously. It can't be masochism, or else they'd be using the stock settings. Perhaps I'm just too poor to understand why one would go though such trouble to make it less unusable when a plethora of superior operating systems are just a boot loader away. Not just Linuxes, there's also BSDs.

Google teases AI Mode for search, giving Gemini total control over your results

So how much...

...will Google charge the advertisers when the Google AI clicks every single advertisement in the search result? Icon, because Skynet wants to meet all the hot singles in my area.

Oh Brother. Printer giant denies dirty toner tricks as users cry foul

Re: At the Printer Manufacturers' Association Roundtable

Two words, fellow proprietary pigment purveyors; AI INK!

I have no idea what it means, but first to trademark it wins!

Re: Security risk

At that point, ink on dead trees becomes itself a liability. Especially when said ink is applied to the dead tree in such a pattern as to store sensitive information, then said dead tree with it's proprietary pigment pattern can be folded and safely concealed in ones nickers.

Apple dares users to fix 'budget' iPhone 16e themselves

I would never

Purchase a refurbished phone. It's too difficult to verify the integrity of the software. It's the one device I always get new and only from verified sources. I'm paranoid.

Also poor, so that rules out fruity devices anyway, even refurbished ones.

DARPA seeks ideas for 'large bio-mechanical space structures'

You can't create matter

Fleshy meat bags must eat to grow, and that matter has to come from somewhere. Cthulhu will have to learn to eat space rocks if he's not on an earthling diet.

Framework guns for cheap laptops with upgradeable alternative

For very large values of $cheap.

Drug-screening biz DISA took a year to disclose security breach affecting millions

Not to be confused with

The Defense Information Systems Agency. That one's dot gov, not dot com.

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

Brings to mind...

A certain sentient toaster.

"Wanna print something?" "How about I print the transcript of this conversation?" "How about a graph? Business types love graphs!" "Want new wallpaper for your office?" "Want a picture of your secretary?" "Want a /special/ picture of your secretary?" "by the way, I NEED MORE INK!!"

Yet another reason to shove HP printers out the airlock.

Even Linus Torvalds can have trouble with autocycle … autocracy… AUTOCOMPLETE!

For ducks sake!

Autocorrect always messes up at the won't Monet. It's ducking infuriating.

Icon because it's the robots, man!

Intel loses another exec as datacenter, AI chief named Nokia CEO

There is no Nokia

There is only HMD Global.

Icon, because there's no proton pack one.

Musk’s DOGE ship gets ‘full’ access to Treasury payment system, sinks USAID

The data was leaked long ago

Regardless of how secure musk's cyber posture is, OPM already was breached not terribly long while ago. I don't think there's that many new SSNs and pay stubs to expose since last time.

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Yeah, but it's got a real nice look up table. Convoluted and unethically sourced.

Capital One two-day outage leaves customers in free-fall

Aren't they a little early?

The end of the world isn't supposed to be until Monday.

That subdued CES has us wondering what 2025 will look like, tech-wise

Re: CES in summary

And the AI is literally built upon recycled ideas.

SpaceX will try satellite deployment on next Starship test

Re: Important

There is such a treaty. But enforcing that treaty is moot. Whoever gets there first with the biggest guns owns it. Treaties be damned. Molon Labe, etc.

Humanoid robots coming soon, initially under remote control

Rosie, please make me dinner...

Ok, do you want to be baked or fried?

Just how deep is Nvidia's CUDA moat really?

Intel Arc...

...Sucks. I have an A750 with "8Gb VRAM." I put that in quotes because you can't initialize an array larger than 4Gb using ipex or oneapi. So technically it has 8Gb, you just can't use it for compute. Intel, aware of their bug, has stated they have no intention to fix it. Intel Arc is useless for language models. It's almost a passable gaming card, except they refuse to support VR. I'm never buying Intel again. My next computer will have an AMD processor and Nvidia graphics. Icon because buyer's remorse.

$800 'AI' robot for kids bites the dust along with its maker

Supertoys

Don't actually last all summer. I don't think Isaac Asimov quite saw this coming.

Reddit rolls out AI-powered 'Answers' search feature, redditors don't rejoice

It's bovine excrement...

...excreted a second time. As with every algorithm, garbage in, garage out. As Dumbledore (never) said, "Reddit brings us neither knowledge, nor truth. Men have wasted away, even gone mad in front of it. But the memes are occasionally dank AF."

NASA's X-59 plane is aiming for a sonic thump, not a boom

Re: I must admit, beyond basic research I do not fully get the point of the X-59 program

These days, why travel at all? Telecommunications exists, it's cheaper, faster, and cleaner (assuming you're wearing clothes under the desk). Supersonic travel will probably exist only for the Charismatic Leaders to attend climate summits at luxury resorts or to lecture the peasants in person about their carbon footprints. After all, the luxuries of the few greatly outweigh the needs of the many.

Both KDE and GNOME to offer official distros

Re: daily-drivable general purpose OS.

The (illusion of) coordination in kernel development is handled by the single charismatic leader. All relevant discussions involve Him. It'll be entertaining to watch the holy war that will inevitably start when his mighty middle finger no longer moderates the discussions. Unless he appoints an heir to be the next benevolent dictator for life.

Re: daily-drivable general purpose OS.

Stuck with? Come now, you can always switch to a 9:16 aspect. Turn your head.

AI PCs: 'Something will have to give in 2025, and I think it's pricing'

When the hype blows over

Do you think these newfangled "AI" PCs can mine Bitcoin?

Microsoft unleashes autonomous Copilot AI agents in public preview

Probably

It can probably arrange to pay a meatbag to do so. Something something gig economy.

A sit-down with Ubuntu founder Mark 'SABDFL' Shuttleworth

Re: It's a real shame...

Unity dash, Ubuntu 12.10. It included Amazon paid affiliate links in desktop search. I'm disappointed reg has such a short memory, it was quite controversial. And yes, Ubuntu is quite like Windows, has been since Poettrering.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/online-shopping-features-arrive-in-ubuntu-12-10

Also:

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/10/ubuntu-wont-fix-nsfw-content-in-amazon-unity-results

It's a real shame...

...they discontinued Ubuntu in February 2014. It was such a promising os, but the writing was on the wall when they put Amazon ads in the os back in 2012. Luckily Devuan is still well maintained.

Oregon Trail 'action comedy' film in the works from Apple

Meh.

I don't subscribe to Apple's whatever it's called. But when this comes out, I'm gonna not subscribe even harder. But I think I'll play Island of Dr Quandary again. And Dinopark tycoon.

Hack Nintendo's alarm clock to show cat pics? Let's-a-go!

There's an easier way

To get sued into oblivion by Nintendo. Many, actually. But few as interesting as this.

Delta officially launches lawyers at $500M CrowdStrike problem

Re: Move fast and

Move fast and break things inevitably leads to total loss of the ability to move at all.

Worker surveillance must comply with credit reporting rules

Re: Just fucking ban it

I fully agree, but I don't see that ever happening. Government buying information is their favorite work around for that pesky constitution thing. Plus the gubmint always goes with lowest bidder, which means the winning contractor will be cutting corners everywhere, so they'll inevitably leak everyone's PII because the security budget went to paying the starving executives. And it's the peasants' problem when their bank account gets drained as a result of the willful incompetence.

Re: Two sides to this coin.

Ostensibly, that's what probationary periods are for. I am against this type of mass aggregation of personally identifiable information primarily because the companies that do the aggregating have never heard of network security and make a habit of spilling precisely the sort of information required to steal identities. But all that matters is keeping the riffraff out of the company. It's the peasants problem if they lose everything because of a criminally negligent industry.

41-million-digit prime crunched by datacenter GPUs

Re: Is this any more useful than "AI", or more amusing cat videos?

I mean, it would be correct if it spat out the number 2. Icon because I'm an intellectual.

'Satanic' data thief claims to have slipped into 350M Hot Topic shoppers info

Skinny jeans?

Is that what "punk" kids wear these days? When I shopped at Hot Topic it was all chains, spikes and very very baggy, but mostly black. (With a little green, in my case.) I don't think I've shopped there in 15 years.

Musk's $1M election lottery raises serious legal concerns, says Pennsylvania governor

I'm reminded of some rich kids at uni...

At University, there were a number of foreign students whose tuition were paid in full plus a stipend by his country. (there were no females except their wives, mind you) Those from this country loved to flaunt their wealth. Especially by driving ostentatiously impractical vehicles and parking then illegally. To them, the citations were just the fee to park wherever they wanted. Like it was a premium service just for the rich. They soon learned that some of those "premium parking" areas included "valet service" to the impound lot and a lot of paperwork to get it released. They also destroyed their vehicles when the snow started falling. And most were expelled, often after only one semester, when they learned that can't just pay peasants to do their school work for them. They got every angry because they just couldn't understand why it wasn't allowed, especially since they paid the individuals. None of them drove Tesla, BTW. Too much pride in the oily source of their wealth.

The Astronaut wore Prada – and a blast from Michael Bloomberg

BOO blank white spacesuit! Hooray BEER!

US healthcare org admits up to 400,000 people's personal info was snatched

Rule of thumb

If you have data, it was stolen at some point.

Smart TVs are spying on everyone

But...

How else are they to enforce the mandatory 5 minutes of hate without watching the telescreens? Gotta catch all the doubleplus ungood face criminals.

Elon Musk's X mashed by Australian court for evading child protection reporting

$420k?

Elon would gladly pay that for the memes alone. Now where that Shiba Inu icon?

Two years after entering the graphics card game, Intel has nothing to show for it

Re: I have one

It is indeed very good at transcoding. It's the backbone of my jellyfin server.