Posts by retiredFool

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

Re: 5 million?

At least it wasn't for the supreme leader. Dumpie' is spending billions on his ballroom, and his arch. Heck I think he dropped more than 10m on his reflecting pool that disassembled itself with water.

Re: Note to self ...

Russia has taken a bit further, they are conscripting North Korean's with Kim's help. Kim of course is getting help with his nuke development in exchange.

Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic over Claude powers it didn't have

Re: Oh look

MAGA musk is dropping more benjamins. Just announced he is supporting that ultra maggot Paxton, the guy even many repub's can't stomach in Texas. You'd think that in red red Texas an R for senate would be slam dunk. But no, they opted to run a guy who cheated on his wife, used state funds to pay for the cover up, and committed securities fraud. What a candidate. Trump will have an orgy with him. Unless the Dem wins. That would be some egg on trump/musk's faces.

I think what should have happened was trump would have been convicted at his impeachment last time. Perhaps a flaw in the two party system, which is not mandated by the constitution. Electing more judges as you say becomes problematic. Soon you have hundreds of supremes. One thing that might help some is make it a general vote instead of a electoral college one. But requires a constitution change, fat chance. As it is, there are only a few tossup states that elect the prez. The rest are in the bag. So I do pity those in purple states, the advertising must be incessant. All those dollars concentrated in maybe 8 states.

As to dominant power, frankly I'm not sure about that. The US dominates in let's see, social media, finance, entertainment. China dominates in manufacturing, mining, ore processing. I'm not sure which is really what counts. Militarily, I'm not sure I'd want to see who'd win US v China. Iran is showing the US isn't all that much like Ukraine showed Russia isn't all that.

And really it may not matter. Because the US has become such a dick in the world, and restructured what is considered acceptable behavior, India has just given the finger to Pakistan on water rights violating a 80 year old document. Both are nuclear equipped. I could see lack of water a reason to pull the trigger. They don't like each other much anyway.

Re: Foot-Gun Moments...

I agree difficult, however, Putin's travel list is shortened dramatically. He would be arrested if he lands anywhere with ICC jurisdiction. He has warrants for his arrest. Of course in retaliation, putin put out warrants for ICC judges. I imagine the likelihood of a ICC judge wanting to go to Russia for a nice dinner is way lower than say putin wanting to have dinner in Paris. Or cruise the Spanish, French or Italian coast. I'd also suggest that given trumpie's current behavior, it is in the realm of possibilities the ICC issues a warrant for him. He just started a tussle with SK. So he has pissed off all of Europe and has started working on Asia. He already isn't all the popular with LatAm. Heck if I were Ireland, I'd confiscate his golf course. You know just because they feel like it. They should wait for the warrant first. Then when he pops over to throw a hissie fit, they could arrest him.

Re: Oh look

Another buck from elon, thanks for the downvote, keep em coming as long as elon is paying.

Re: Oh look

I noticed that too. It makes me think musk drops a few benjamins daily/hourly to pay people to troll ALL the forums and vote for his interests.

Re: Foot-Gun Moments...

It is pretty amazing just how gruesome these guys are. Like the sinking of the boat that had been dismantled. I think they should fear when trump sails. Because if a competent administration replaces this one, war crimes could be on the table for many at the top. Now maybe the supreme's let donnie off the hook since well, presidential immunity, those disciples will not enjoy the same protection. I'd happily convict them and send them off to gitmo for the rest of their lives. Or maybe Colombia, That might be a sweet justice.

And the true irony is how the R's at least claim to be strict constructionists of the constitution. At least I think that is the word they use. But much like the states rights thing for abortion, until scotus ruled roe v wade void. And then all of a sudden, federal usurps state's rights.

In a weird way

The US has become more of a dictatorship than China although competitive with Russia. In the case of China, the CCP really does constrain what Xi does. In the US & Russia, no one is stopping trump & putin. I'm just waiting for people to start falling out of windows in the US. The old ICE director is concerned about someone in the trump admin whacking him. There was a story about him losing his security detail and the guy is scared. And he was appointed by trump. Somehow I guess he did not suck hard enough I guess or beat up enough immigrants.

VMware swings its focus back to low-end server virt, promises vSphere Standard upgrade

Legal?

Could this new strategy be a way to satisfy the court cases that are in play? I'm with the group, too little too late. Judges may say it is enough to avoid massive payouts though.

Cops, CrowdStrike disrupt Sality botnet by poisoning the network and diverting into sinkholes

Re: Network Resiliance

And ran on a budget of only 150K for all that time. If their primary payload was eggjagger, and the estimate is 150K of "winnings", fairly efficient operation. Something sounds amiss.

Microsoft and AWS build the multicloud bridge they said customers barely needed

Re: Fees?

Exactly what I was thinking. It would be like AWS/microsoft standing in front of the big slot payout. Wheels spinning balloons falling and chips flying out of the hopper.

Green Party wants to slam the brakes on UK datacenter construction until water and energy use are sorted

Re: Water usage

I've said this before, and I think worth repeating. Water evaporates and comes back as rain, agreed. The problem is it may not come back as rain where it evaporated, or where/when you want. As evidence of just how badly that can get, Lake Meade, hoover dam is getting close to deadpool because of overuse. And so the literally millions of people, businesses and agriculture that rely on that water source may find the taps are dry all of a sudden.

Another visible example is California's central valley. They have pumped well water massively over the past few decades. If it was all "recycled" as rain, why has the land fallen over 28'?

You don't want to be backward and poor

At least according to the great clown oracle, donnie says objecting to DC's will make a community backward and poor. If ever there was an argument for opposing DC's, donnie for them is the bestest.

Re: Water usage

Water is great stuff for cooling. Environmentally nontoxic to evaporate, energy transfer is very large (>500cal/g evap vs 1cal/g to raise it 1 degree C). And at one time, we'd thought it was limitless. And unfortunately the tech bro's still think it is.

Anthropic cracks down on hijacked user accounts mining AI tokens

Re: Sounds as generous

Am aware of cost difference. But for reference, every time donnie shoots a tomahawk cruise missile at Iran, there went 2M up in smoke. And we have fired way more than one. Way way way more. So the entirety of aid for a major international disaster is less than 2 cruise missiles. So generous.

Sounds as generous

as the aid the US is giving Nepal. I heard a US official touting the US was donating 3M to help 10,000 families over the next 3 months. Doing the math, wow 100 bucks/family/mo. So generous.

The balkanization of virtualization will de-throne VMware, which doesn't mind a bit

My experience has been in eda. There was a co called Mentor that really did have the best DRC/LVS, No one disputed it. Then Cadence started offering the following to its customers. We will give you our DRC/LVS for free. Cadence had the lock on P&R and layout. Oddly, the bean counters told engineering you will use cadence DRC/LVS and like it. Well, they did use it, but didn't like it. Because the bean counters stopped approving the Mentor purchases.

Datacenters face direct hit from China rare earth curbs, as clock runs out on escalated licensing chokeoff

Re: Wouldn't it be just a whole lot easier…

So the magats in america?

Re: Canada has rare minerals

Problem is donnie's been an ass to lulu too. What if Brazil gives the US the finger too? I mean what is an agreement these days but toilet paper. Donnie's even ripped up his own agreements with Canada and Mex. Donnie may well get what he wants, all products will be mined, and manufactured in the US. Because no one else will sell them to us. And needless to say, the selection of products in that scenario will be much less broad than it is today. Much.

LibreOffice 26.8 is out – local first, and with no AI

Re: LibreOffice 26.8 still lets you switch to classic repositionable toolbars

Also a latex user. May be old, but works very very well.

Re: "Professional Typography"?

Agree, I use libre for my small biz. I'd never send anything but a pdf to a customer. I thought that was pretty universal. And Libre makes it trivial to export a pdf.

Startup bags $7M to build drone-interceptor-in-a-backpack systems

What strikes me is only 7M. For something that could have real impact in a real war. Add what 5 zeroes if you want to talk about an AI co with unknown value.

Re: Big fleas have little fleas

I like hornet and add bee, wasp, yellow jacket. Things that sting.

Nuisance-call blocker fined £190k for being a nuisance caller

Re: dead relative left me 5M

Well to be fair, I did check with my brothers. None got a letter. At least one is probably more publicly known than I, so that added another scam mark. The letter itself had some inconsistencies like it talked about a pay on death bank account but then talked about the insurance required. So was it insurance or bank money? Domain was sketchy as well. Had been created only a month before by a guy in Texas for a legal firm saying it was in Canada. It also had the classic, we take half you take half. Which I'm sure had I responded would have entailed me sending them money to get the process started. It just screamed red flags. But I am aware real inheritance can fall out of the sky. Like winning the lottery. I'm just not that lucky.

Had an unusal scam

They sent me an actual USPS letter in the mail. And that cost around 60c these days. And they setup a domain name, more money, although likely spread across multiple marks. But crazy, like I'm going to respond to a dead relative left me 5M.Yeah, right. I'm already too busy with trying to get my lottery winnings from a ticket I must have bought in Nigeria.

I like it. I get the corporate veil thing, I have one, as I don't want to be personally sued into oblivion from a angry powerful customer. BUT if I was willfully violating the law with my biz, I SHOULD go to jail.

Researcher shows how Claude Code can be tricked simply by asking it to summarize a website

So who is the better hacker

We see stories about AI hacking into stuff, and stories about humans tricking AI into getting hacked itself. Seems like the humans may still be the craftier of the two.

Microsoft's virtual intern Teams Facilitator will be late for the meeting

Isn't it obvious

The delay is because they tested it and not everyone was annoyed with it. They are working on enhancements so everyone tested absolutely despises it. Then, "ready to ship".

Industry that built the problem offers to sell you the solution

Re: We could pay

Now that is a good idea, have an upvote.

Re: We could pay

Good point, make it a sales tax on their revenue.

We could pay

with a tax on AI. Double win, could deflate the bubble a bit since that cuts into profit and they'd get to pay for the mess they created.

With the money, we could hire people(maybe the ones being laid off now) to actually look after the control systems in person and disconnect them from the cesspool created by AI.

More than 100 water systems were hit in July cyberattacks

How could this be a surprise to anyone?

Still have my site up. I get maybe 1% real traffic, 9% bots, 20% probing for open ports, 70% looking for any php, json, ... exploits on the web server. Continuously. Like packets every second. And that is with blocking about 1/4 of the internet at the firewall level staticly. And of course dynamic blocking for various patterns. Thankfully some statics are easy where you can whack a block with a /8.

I can't imagine what additional effort would happen if someone found a IP address to be "interesting" and be something like a water system behind it instead of a boring static website.

Flock shock rocks cop cam vendor as protests mount

One local case

My city doesn't use flock but some of the neighboring ones do. Pfluggerville just cancel'ed their contract. They put garbage bags over them until they are removed. Their council cited unrestricted access as the reason. So one more dripped away. Hoping for a tsunami.

Apple defies memory shortage with new Mac minis

Re: Apple need to make their own memory on chip

The "recipe" for making big ram chips and logic chips is different. You optimize slightly differently for the needs of the two. One thing you can be sure of when it comes to chips. They optimize the begeejus out of it.

Nitter no more? X sends in the lawyers to shut down open source project

Re: The web, uh, finds a way...

Most likely. I do find it ironic though that X, FB, etc all the folks that are scraping the world for their pet AI find it objectionable when someone else accesses their property without permission. Hope a judge points it out to them and tells them to pay legal costs to nitter for the inconvenience and a cool billion for pain and suffering. But who am I kidding, leon just bought the judge a nice home somewhere. I hear Thomas is cheap.

Nigel Farage wants to scrap 'suffocating' UK GDPR

Re: Sigh

There should be a "insightful" button. Great comment.

Tesla to recall almost three million vehicles over hidden door handles

I'm jealous. Orange man would not allow it here.

Agree completely. I said years ago when "premium" cars first started getting touch screens and digital gauge clusters that it would become the standard. Because its cheap. And now it is standard. To the point they have removed all the buttons and dials. I'm basically waiting for buttons to come back. Everything I've considered is all but buttonless. The Lucid, the Rivian, Polestar, ... I get a good button costs a couple bucks, but you'd think with an auto costing 60 grand they could afford 6 or 7 for HVAC, seat, infotainment... I get the Chinese ones don't have them, they sell for 1/3 to 1/2 of the western one. They squeezed every penny out and gave the cost redux to the buyer. China is doing something about no buttons. I thought next year even. I'll guess China auto's will cost an extra 50 bucks next year. Ouch./s

I'd seen it had killed a few. Frankly surprised that it is acceptable to put a label on it to "fix" it for the current ones.

US datacenters tripled their water footprint in 10 years

Re: For context...

It IS a problem when it evaporates in Texas and rains back in Ohio. Or evaporates in Vegas and rains in Washington. You're assuming it falls back where it came from. It doesn't.

Re: For context...

What rivers are you talking about? The colorado is completely subscribed. Every drop, well more like 2 drops for every real drop. Lake Meade is expected to hit the deadpool level soon. Now move to Texas. That same name Colorado (different river) is allocated by LCRA and I forget the name for who controls the upper branch of the river. It too has every drop accounted for. Not all that long ago Atlanta was facing a severe drought. And Georgia is pretty wet. So unless the DC's are willing to shut down when there is a water drought, then don't build them. As an example of water allocations, cotton farming in South Texas gets variable amounts based on water availability. It is becoming a thing for farmers to adjust based on how much water they can have. So another question do people want to eat or watch cat videos. Because in many places now, there is not enough water for both.

OpenAI's upcoming Jalapeño chip looks like it'll be an inference beast

Re: Risk of solving last year's problem?

Agree, mask costs are astronomical. Probably 50M for a set, maybe 100 now. So if you only need 1M chips, just for masks 50+ bucks added per part. Then you have the what did it cost to design the thing to add in.

YouTuber's backyard fab ambitions expand from RAM to homebrew LEDs

Re: Love it

My school had a tiny "fab" in the late 70's. Probably 5 or 10u devices was the best it could do. It was not very clean, just a room in the building. I remember thinking very cool and would have loved to have a look around. As you say though, nasty nasty chemicals.

Oracle Exadata Database@AWS offers advantages, but trade-offs remain

When Oracle says it is a good deal

Check your wallet. It is probably missing.

Ancient ‘Who owns Linux?’ case now has one foot very deep in the grave

In a just world

You'd also disbar the lawyer who filed. But that never happens. The ultimate deterrent to having frivolous lawsuits is to make the lawyers pay with their license. They know its frivolous, but everything for them to gain and nothing to lose. They get paid. Perhaps one more deterrent as well. I forget what it is called, but there is I thought a way the court can administer a very severe punishment to the litigant. You can't file any more cases ever. The disbarment and the inability to file anything in the future means the lawyer and client will have a serious conversation before filing suits.

Cloverleaf deal is latest example of Nvidia using its war chest to patch cracks in the AI bubble

Re: People are fighting back

It isn't going to be the drought. It will be follow on effects from the silly wars of Russa/US. Russia/Ukraine shipped enormous amounts of wheat. I believe they are referred to as the breadbasket of Europe. Now they are having trouble getting product out not to mention planting is down. Hard to farm while dodging drones.

And then the US in donald's infinite wisdom clogged up the strait that allows mid-east product to flow. One of those products is fertilizer. So this past planting season went light on fertilizer in the US. Follow effect will be less wheat.

And you know its getting bad when donnie waives some tariffs. 300K-tons of ground beef just got the green light. I remember when as a kid ground beef was the cheap meal. Hamburger Helper was the goto cheap. Now pasta/noodles are pricey and ground beef is just precious.

People are fighting back

in odd ways though to keep DC's out. Story /. reported on where U Michigan wanted to drop a DC on a small area outside campus. Did not turn out well. https://www.404media.co/township-fights-nuclear-weapons-data-center-by-passing-a-moratorium-on-electrical-infrastructure/ Creative idea. Enough to slow it down and possibly get them to move it to more friendly area.

I do think the hype has to pass. For most people, their money outflow is fixed. They pay rent, groceries, insurance, clothes, entertainment, ... There is no "AI" slice. And yet for AI to be successful, AI is going to need a large slice of that pie. That slice doesn't exist. Family budgets are zero sum things, short a raise. And lately inflation has eaten more than the raise(assuming they didn't get laid off due to AI), so families are switching to private labels instead of the P&G, Starbucks, ... label.

French tax authority says break-in exposed data of 600K, including some private messages

Pity no one ever grabs

Musk's, Donald's, Bezos's, Larry's, or a cadre of other super wealthy that are likely mega-tax-cheats and publishes it. But I imagine they all spend for their security. The rest of us, let them eat cake to coin a French term.