Posts by retiredFool

Payroll pirates are conning help desks to steal workers' identities and redirect paychecks

Re: I don't think Dwyer is thinking this through

For me, one of the issues I have with banking generally is it appears as if all you need is the routing number and account number to pull or push money into an account. Which seems a bit nuts. Contrast that with what my brokerage did when I wanted to link to my bank. They did a pair of less than a dollar deposits into my bank and pulled the sum back as one withdrawal. I then on their site had to tell them what the 3 amounts were. After doing so they'd allow transfers. That seemed pretty smart. As opposed to when I make payments from my bank, I just have to put in the routing/accnt numbers and the vendor happily pulls from small to pretty big numbers(>10K) from the account. Sure I have to click on some silly box that says it is me and I am not a thief on the vendor site. Like that is going to stop a thief.

I really wish I could put a flag on my bank accnt that says wait for confirmation before paying an electronic payment. I know not everyone would want such a thing, but it should be an option. Remember when checks took days to clear, why not a day for an EFT as an option.

Lawmakers demand great wall to keep advanced chipmaking gear out of China

Re: American 'allies' need to understand something

Exactly this. Dum dum donald forged the latest trade agreement with CA/MX and now he wants to tear it up. CA/MX should just give the finger to the US and forge ties with China. Because no matter what you agree to with dum dum donnie, he will just want to change it next time he gets gas. At least China sticks by their trade agreements from what I've seen.

Only one in five Euro datacenters AI-ready as builders battle land and labor blues

Canary in the coal mine?

Sorry for all the acronyms in advance. USains will know most.

"The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Tuesday rejected a waiver request from American Electric Power utilities that would have allowed them to sell up to 750 MW in an upcoming “incremental” capacity auction."

Basically AEP found itself with capacity that wasn't going to get used after all because some DC's were not getting built. So they tried to sell it to another interconnect.

GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

And my power company. One year they barely managed one 9.

Trump to hyperscalers: your datacenters, your power bill

Most of the flared stuff is in W TX. There are some pipelines out there, they are building more. Much of that excess gas is now being liquefied and shipped via TX ports. Hence those new pipes to fill those ships. More LN facilities are under construction, more demand. And where are some of those dc's being built? W TX, to take advantage of that gas. There are so many straws being stuck out in W TX the nat gas soda fountain is going to get drained.

Re: TACO trump again

Of course it is optics. How is that 10% cc interest rate cap moving along. It isn't. Pure optics. Look at me, I'm helping the common man, midterms are coming up vote for my team. Me Me Me Me.

I think the problem is getting the CCGT's. I think backordered. I thought they were even repurposing old jet engines to build fast. What are they going to do when nat gas triples though? What are we consumers going to do?

Are those like the ones in Memphis? They had very bad emissions as those were supposed to be "temporary". 12 GW is massive. An average nuke I think is 2GW/reactor. For context 12GW is roughly 20-25% of the entire state of TX consumption at the moment. 50-60GW. Like I said, 12GW is massive for one site.

TACO trump again

He'll back down as soon as they fund another ballroom or movie or token or ...

Taiwan tells Uncle Sam its chip ecosystem ain't going anywhere

Ruh roh shaggy

100% tariff threat in 3, 2, 1... A normal person would think insane to move that much capability to the US so quickly, let alone the "why would they" part. But trump, dum dum donald.

Four horsemen of the AI-pocalypse line up capex bigger than Israel's GDP

Not the shovel maker's problem. Those are bought and paid for by AI guys. No the shovel maker will start making gaming gpu's again, and will price high until demand is satiated. That is the point the shovel maker has a problem. Nvid probably has a bigger problem than TSMC/Sammy/SK/Micron. Their shovels are much more specific.

Curious, any idea how long before a cloud cpu/gpu actually gets replaced? I tried searching but came up empty. While cpu improvements are not much lately, I think gpu still has a pretty fast upgrade cycle. So cpu maybe 4 year schedule and gpu maybe 2 seems reasonable. Although are people replacing x86 with arm, or just adding arm instead of x86. That time before replace is crucial to the calculation of capital cost. Normally the bean counters want accelerated depreciation to write stuff off quickly, but the ai guys are trying to slow it down to minimize the perceived losses. I think they were pushing for a 6 year schedule instead of I think 3 for computers.

And some what ironically, the 4 big guys are costing themselves money. By starting this feeding frenzy of must have now, not only are we paying more for memory and chips, so are they. The real profiteers much like in the gold rush days are the people selling the shovels. Nvid, TSMC, SK, Micron, ... The shovel makers will do ok I think even if the AI thing collapses, simply because we consumers will buy the shovels for PC's, cellphones, ... because we delayed purchases because shovel prices were so high. The shovel makers will experience reduced profits though, eventually their overproduction of shovels will cause oversupply after we recovered from our delayed purchases and the shovel makers will need to adjust production.

I do know a woman who should know better, was bored during the recent snow/winter event on the east coast used chat for fun for a few days (free). She liked it, for two weird reasons to me. It complimented her profusely, she said better than her therapist. And it remembered what she said. I was a little freaked out to be honest. This is not a dumb woman, but got tricked by some stupid compliments. Fortunately she is smart enough not to pay for it.

Re: Profits? We don't need no stinking net profits

Gold is not down.

Machine learning could yield faster, cheaper lithium-ion battery development

I'm not sure how they are testing. With a number like 130TWh, I'd hope they have a grid connection and the testing involves actual grid usage. Tightly monitored, in an explosion proof area. Sounds like they just have it hooked to a giant resistor for the discharge. And I mean giant.

Study confirms experience beats youthful enthusiasm

Re: Experience includes institutional knowledge

Maybe my experience is different than most. At a startup we hired a pretty good tech writer. She'd interview the developers and actually ran the software. She was paid well. This was chip P&R software that really needed good documentation. But as I stated, generally I found it was the AE's that read it, and would answer the customer Q's. Customer did not usually read the manual.

Re: Experience includes institutional knowledge

I don't think you're familiar with the term RTFM. It can be perfectly documented. Problem is most don't read the doc's. I've been in the eda sector for decades. Customers need AE's to tell them what is in the manual.

Let there be light! DARPA seeking physics-defying photonic computers to supercharge AI

Re: Reality check?

Well I expect the VAX was bipolar, maybe ECL based logic. Very hungry power wise, but all there was back then. I actually did a bipolar chip in the 80's. 5W, and all it did was multiply. CMOS really started on a tear in the 80's and as the gate sizes dropped performance got better. I'm not sure there is much left to eek out of CMOS though. Gates are atoms thick now, so once you get to maybe 2 thick, how much lower can you go. I have a suspicion Moore's law is at an end, and unfortunately, the end of moore for less in the electronics world.

OpenClaw reveals meaty personal information after simple cracks

Re: Banned at my employer

It is pretty amazing. I've dealt with companies that remove usb ports from desktops so people cannot use a thumbdrive to take stuff out of the office. And firewalls, OMG. And yet AI has the barn door, windows, skylights, front door, back door, garage door, wide open, screaming steal my data.

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

Re: IPO Pumping

I'm a numbers guy too, and the numbers are just whimsical. Assume a 2 week interval to recycle the rocket, he'd need around 38K of reusable rockets. And then you have to fuel all those puppies. Currently uses NatGas I think to get the H fuel. And you need launch pads, cause you can't wheel a new rocket up every 30 seconds onto the pad. And you need landing pads. The list goes on and on how utterly stupid this is. I'm sure wall street will love it.

Mainstream press

Saw an article on cnbc's front page today saying just that. Shocking really, Normally the press just regurgitates musk's bs with no counter. The article was from a space satellite co. We all know the musk bs is to hype the ipo, so good to see some reality added to the mix.

Server CPUs join memory in the supply shortage, pushing up prices

Another 7.1GW

based on the prediction of 71,000 racks @100KW ea.

Azure outages ripple across multiple dependent Microsoft services

Re: Vibe coding strikes again??

I would compare it to the chip industry except... Synthesis became a thing quite awhile ago. The logic blobs created were huge from some RTL code. No human was going to sort thru the blob to verify it. The difference was it was not an AI, but a highly reliable algo that did the transformation. And even with that, a logic sim is run on the output to validate, along with timing of course. Pity AI is not more deterministic.

X marks the raid: French cops swoop on Musk's Paris ops

Saw this too, "Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino were summoned to a hearing on April 20. Other X staff were also summoned as witnesses." and later it says "After such a hearing, authorities can decide to either shelve or continue the probe, and potentially put suspects in custody." Fingers crossed. Imagine the kerfuffle if Musk was arrested and held in custody in France. Fingers and toes crossed.

Re: Sigh..

I've said essentially this for awhile. If someone wants to follow a gov org, they should do so on the gov org direct website. Twatter was very good at getting gov org's to disseminate info via twatter making it the defacto source of info. Which is what musk really purchased. So kudos to this org for walking from twatter. Now if we could just get the thousands of others to do so as well.

StopICE hacked to send alarming text messages, admins accuse border patrol agent of sabotage

Re: Good

I never suggested beating them up like they have been beating up people. They are goons. But goons like to hide in the shadows. Put a light on them and suddenly people at their church, their neighbors, their kids, recoil when they see them and turn away. And perhaps we might find out not only do they beat up random women, but they also beat their own wife.

Re: Good

Pretti's shooting has now been ruled a homicide. And we have no idea who the shooter was. No bodycam's, masks, in other words, a government sanctioned unidentifiable goon squad. And lest we forget why he was murdered. He was trying to stop the goons from beating up a woman. And he himself was not a large man. 5'10", 147 lbs. Must have been menacing.

Good

Glad to see someone is unmasking these ice guys. I'd be good with someone posting their names, ph num, address, and DL/SS number.

Microsoft's Sinofsky saw Surface fail coming – then hit up Epstein for advice on exit

Re: Citizen Advice

Noticed this also. And for only 1M he would "handle" it.

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

Re: It is unfortunate, but true

So the proud boys got together with the mexican drug cartels to make ice.

Re: It is unfortunate, but true

I expect the group that was hangin with pedo ep is quite large. The director for melania has creepy photos with him. And the secretary of commerce Lutnick has also been implicated. I can think of no other reason except running a giant underage prostitution ring with very very rich/powerful people that epstein had those islands and fancy apartments. He was a pimp of epic proportions catering to the Robin Leech crowd. We have seen it before to a lesser extent with people like Weinstein and Cosby. But this guy seemed to know everyone who was anyone. I can only stomach reading some of what has been released until I get nauseous. What little I've read with things like eps telling a client sure I can send the jet over or come to the island for the big party. Why do I read nothing about follow the money?

Re: Not a Trump thing.

You should be better than fox news. Anti-virals for viruses and dewormers for worms. It is not that complicated.

Re: There is no Sovereign European/EU Cloud.

Weirdly up until trump II, I expect France/Germany/Brits trusted each other less than the US. I'd suggest EU reconsider that and try very hard to form a tighter union. Although the US may break into civil war at the rate things are going. Almost a repeat of the boundaries of the first one.

Re: If you are running a European government…

I'd agree and add that by bringing it home, EU is fostering its own cloud/infrastructure future. It may cost a little now, and capitalism depends on letting you be lulled into saving a buck today, so that the owners can squeeze a buck out of you tomorrow. A game of monopoly anyone?

Re: Not a Trump thing.

How can we forget the implication of injecting bleach as a cure from the orange doctor? Or that orangey got covid and unlike the recommendations the administration was giving to take some pet drugs for eliminating parasites, he got top tier medical care with the latest anti-virals. Or that he was on oxygen with 24x7 doc supervision. Again unlike the rest of us who were told to suck it up and get a backbone. How quickly magats forget the past.

OpenAI gives ChatGPT models the chop – two weeks' notice, take it or leave it

Re: So it begins, small stones that starts an avalanche in the mountains

btc also seems to be falling monotonically the past few days as well.

Broadcom 'bulldozes' VMware cloud partners as March deadline looms

Re: Question

There could still be a time bomb embedded in it. Reason of course is "we want to make sure you update every n years"

Question

I don't use any virtualization, so I don't keep up. I do see the headlines about this fiasco though. So the question is, can bcom revoke your free access to this workstation product in the future? If they can, I'd assume it is a matter of when not if given their prior behavior.

Feeling taxed by layoffs, IRS turns to AI helpers

Re: In other news

My expectation is DOJ will argue for the kids to get the money. Of course they always promised to release those returns as part of his run for prez, but liar liar pants on fire as usual.

It should be open and shut. The agency was not complicit, the guy who did it was fired/arrested. But in trump world, we know how it ends, trump has a bagfull of money

Oracle seeks to build bridges with MySQL developers

Wife beater

Oracle is much like the man who beats his wife, or the US with donnie's tariff policy. Promises promises.

Tesla revenue falls for first time as Musk bets big on robots and autonomy

Waymo just hit a kid in I think Santa Monica during school pickup time. I don't know about the rest of you, but during school pickup, I drive super slow expecting a kid to pop out of nowhere. Waymo has also been caught illegally passing school busses 19 times in Austin. And I consider Waymo's self drive light years ahead of fsd. I expect within a year tesla will have killed someone in austin with one of their robo's. Will people wake up then, doubt it.

Re: Brainz!

Yeah I thought China was generally doing more "fit for purpose" robots that actually get deployed in factories. I just saw where Lear is opening a completely "dark" factory in I think Michigan to make seats. I doubt they care if the robots look human in that factory. So not just China.

Re: Needs money

Totally agree musk's basic operating process is always, "look over there" when he has financial shortfalls. But he can't use spaceX to prop up tesla. They are separate co's. Really I expect musko has lost interest in cars and will extract whatever money he can by selling those shares and then riding on the spaceX cash. I expect spaceX has a bigger moat around it. BYD and other Chinese co's are eating his lunch. That was probably going to happen no matter what, but he accelerated it by loudly supporting a nazi in both Germany and US.

If you're one of the 16,000 Amazon employees getting laid off, read this

Re: Cynicism about my previous employer would not have helped me

Unbridled capitalism which is pretty much what exists in the US today is the game of monopoly, just with millions of players. All but a few are bankrupt now and it is down to a few left playing. We all know how the game ends and it is not going to be pretty.

ICE knocks on ad tech’s data door to see what it knows about you

Re: I hope they know

Tech has really become a monster. Short of everyone going Amish, I don't know how it gets fixed. It is all about greed and maximizing the human desire to save a buck. And of course the advertisers are doing it to make a buck off those trying to save a buck.

AWS's inevitable destiny: becoming the next Lumen

Karma

I imagine Amazon makes more on the Chinese products they sell than the Chinese manufacturer makes. Justice if someone does it to Amazon.

EU looking into Elon Musk's X after Grok produces deepfake sex images

Why is anyone surprised?

This is the same guy who has his cars named S3XY. He is likely thinking the porn industry has always been lucrative. His AI co needs something they can charge real money for, answer, porn.

UK border tech budget swells by £100M as Home Office targets small boat crossings

Re: Home Office targets small boat crossings

If they take a cue from the trump playbook, borders have no meaning. And of course if you really want to keep out immigrants, get a goon squad like trumps that just shoots/kills willy nilly. /s

I don't know about UK, but in the US the R biz owners love their immigrants(illegal) in private. They can short them pay, make them work in horrible conditions, and what are they gonna do, call law enforcement? In the US the key areas tend to be home construction, meat packing, hotel service people, restaurants. The country could not function without our illegals.

No one talking about a datacenter could be a sign one is coming

Re: Shh... Don't let the pleb know.

Agree, if anything it enables "insider" trading. The mayor can either directly, or if has a brain thru friends, can trade on what is now non-public info. If the info is out in the open, their is no "insider" to trade.