Posts by Flocke Kroes

We don't serve pies, but we do like a Pi

Re: Doubtless the password has been secured

Doesn't matter, either because there is no keyboard or because you have a root shell right in front of you.

/etc/rc.local is executed near the end of the boot sequence and it is the obvious place to put something specific to this machine like starting the software that allows tipping. I am not sure which would be faster: properly diagnosing the problem or just re-imaging the SD card. Before doing either it may be worth checking for a corrupt file system and/or a defective SD card.

Deepfake hiccup unmasks suspected digital certificate fraudster

Re: Shiny Shiny!

I was expecting you comment to end with "someone will be along soon with an AI hologram faker".

Elon pledges to give Nvidia a virtual monopoly over the stars

Re: Starmind

Skynet was already taken.

Re: He's not doing it because it is feasible

AI companies showed that investors will dump billions into companies that talk big but make no profit. Musk decided he wanted some of that after Altman walked off with his money. Full marks to Musk - he was able to turn over $7B revenue into a loss and he is literally promising the Moon. The big difference between him and Altman is that Altman knows better than to burn his own money.

SpaceX revenue rockets while AI spending burns billions

Re: losses from AI operations fell to $1.3 billion

Grok still exists but requires only a small fraction of SpaceXAI's infrastructure to support its users. The bulk of the infrastructure is leased to AI companies with profits revenue.

Re: Another quote from the lying sack of shit.

The plan was to ignore the requirements (3 profitable quarters) for being included in the big index funds. S&P refused to bend over. If they had they would have been selling a small percentage of everything in the index to buy SpaceX. Demand would have exceeded supply and the priced would have jumped up. As it is demand cannot sustain the IPO price. Next up employees are going to cash out at their first opportunity instead of trying to ride it like a meme stock.

It is publicly traded so we do see more of the details

Space Charges connectivity $20M per launch. Add another $50M to get to commercial prices then multiply by 200ish launches per year and you get $1B. That would be a an impressive profit for Falcon without putting a serious dent in Starlink revenue. Starlink can also comfortably fund Starship. SpaceX is building out launch infrastructure and manufacturing capacity as if massive orbital data centres were a good buy. Starlink revenue can also buy the large chunks of spectrum SpaceX has been snapping up.

The place SpaceX goes into massive debt is AI data centres. Data centre spending massively exceeds Starlink revenue. They generate some income by being leased out to real AI companies but that is a competitive market propped up by investors not customers.

Re: Another quote from the lying sack of shit.

Musk followed that quote with weasel words the Shotwell walked it back. Musk has gutted the SEC and has the remaining employees' home addresses from stolen payroll data. With that much power he should be able to lie like a president instead of this wimpy wittering.

Good news! You will not have a use for a decent new PC because AI will be hogging all the power. Instead, go for board games and candles.

They do care. Starship has burned a boatload of captal but that dwarfed by AI expenditure. Starlink and Falcon can fund Starship at least four times over. They do not supply a quarter of the cash going on AI.

Investers care so much they are shorting the stock: a third of the current trades are shorts.

The AI bubble is already popping; we just don't know it yet

That one has a propellant leak too. IPO price was $135. It quickly jumped to $210 and dropped to about $100. Currently at $108. That should be enough for another batch to cash out until the price drops to $100 again. At some point people are going to notice that SpaceX's promised total addressable market was based on orbital AI data centres with chips sourced from the moon. Can holders will be desparate to cash out at any price once the fools let that sink in.

Competition in AI

It was not about getting the best reviews for your models, getting chips / resources for new data centres or even getting revenue from customers. The big fight was for investor capital. Demand massively exceeded supply. Instead of filling all of them investors had to pick a toilet to flush their money down. They started to pay proper attention to how toilets work. We have reached the stage where the early investors are looking for greater fools. I am sure there are lots of them but the entire species does not have enough money between them to cover early enthusiasm.

Re: All I want...

Alltman is an experienced crypto scammer. I have confidence that when the faecal matter reaches the air circulation unit other people will be asking "where is my money" and Altman's lawyers will answer "where you cannot get it".

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

Re: Could have been worse

dd if=/dev/zero of=$(mount | awk '/ [/] / {print $1}')

Dev who gave HashiCorp its name returns with a faster terminal multiplexer

Re: Target application is agents

Because agents are too stupid to pick a sensible tool out of the box for bulk transfers?

SpaceX just about nails Starship test flight 13

Re: Starship cost

Project cost is currently around $15B but that includes one complete and three partial launch sites, one huge manufacturing site and two bigger ones nearing completion, engine manufacture at Hawthorne and engine testing at McGregor. Starship has taken a large amount of time and money compared to Falcon 1, 9 an heavy but the cadence ramp up should be fast compered to other new rockets.

Manager showed off his DOS prowess – with a command that wiped data

Re: it takes some minimum level of competance to correctly spell

(){ :|:& };: was not a smiley signature. It is something you really do not want someone else to type into a shell you left open when you took a quick break. (Do not FAAFO on a computer you cannot easily power cycle.)

The good news is that it takes some minimum level of competance to correctly spell

:(){ :|:& };:

FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

Patents

I do not know if the promise still stands but years ago Microsoft promised not to assert its patents against standards compliant implementations of OOXML. Of course if any such implementation was ever created it would not render OOXML documents the same way as Microsoft Office. Creating something compatible was and probably still is an invitation to litigation.

The way out is the same as it was 20 years ago: Use ODF.

The last Space Shuttle returned to Earth 15 years ago

Commercial space on firm fixed price contracts was near death when it started. Boeing gave the projects legitimacy by bidding on commercial crew. Failure was more than anticipated - it was required. Boeing had the political connections to lobby for more money (and they got some). The plan was for SpaceX to fail and Boeing to convert the contracts to cost plus with a percentage going to political donations. Technical incompetence from Boeing was seen as an opportunity for their skilled lobbyists to increase the budget and delay the delivery date. SLS was going just great until SpaceX threatened to make it redundant. Boeing had to actually launch (at tax payer expense) to justify their yearly billions.

Latest Musk merch drop runs entirely on child labor

Re: No Autopilot

I am sure you can pre-pay for autopilot at a discounted rate. Delivery: always next year.

I could not see any brakes but not all balance bikes have them. On the other hand, real balance bikes have a saddle clearly shaped for going and stopping. I not not sure what Tesla was thinking/smoking with their saddle.

SpaceX Starship Flight Test 13 takes issue with the 'flight' bit

Re: Hollywood accounting

To a large extent Musk chooses which parts of SpaceX make money by setting what each division pays for services from other divisions.

The external price of a Falcon 9 launch is $74M but Starlink only pays $20M. Move the internal cost towards the external price and Starlink becomes less profitable but it brings Falcon 9 into profit. Starship with its factories and launch sites has run up huge bills. Starlink could pay off that investment if Starship promptly becomes fully and quickly re-usable. The big thing Starlink cannot do is utilise the full capacity of the factories nearing completion. This is where the wheels fall off the plan.

xAI's actual revenue comes from renting out bit barns to other AI companies. Those companies have revenues but not profits. At some point investors are going to work out they are funding AI - not AI customers. SpaceXAI's promise threat of 1,000,000 AI satellites is just big numbers to justify a big IPO. The IPO did not raise anything like enough money to launch a fraction of those satellites. AI profits are negative so that leaves Starlink as the cash cow. By the time SpaceX is ready to launch AI satellites in quantity Starlink will be competing against Amazon Leo. Musk has done well when the competition is expensive. Jeff has done better at entering a contested market and emerging the sole survivor.

NASA's Artemis III will need three rockets to do the job Apollo did with one

Return to the original plan

Back in 2004 the plan was to launch an Earth Departure Stage (EDS) and an Altair (Lunar lander) together to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). They would be joined by an Orion with crew. The EDS would take Altair and Orion to Low Lunar Orbit (LLO). The Altair would do a return trip to the Moon and the Orion would bring the crew back to Earth.

Step forward 24+ years and the big change is that EDS becomes propellant launched separately and transferred to the lander, which takes Orion to LLO.

The big advantage of distributed launch is you do not need to design a huge dedicated Moon rocket that barely flies every other year. Starship an New Glenn will recoup their development costs with Starlink and Amazon Leo.

EDS+Altair were intended to launch on an Ares V (188,000kg to LEO). Ares V died of cost plus delays, budget overruns and lack of progress. The commercial launch market has grown to the point where a 100,000+kg to LEO rocket is required for mega constellations. SLS could do 100,000kg to LEO but at an astronomical price and nothing like often enough.

Lucky 13: SpaceX aims for July 16 Starship flight test

Re: Did anyone think before posting?

Instead of posting here you could have written to SpaceX and asked them to come up with a plan to recover and re-use the second stage of their rockets.

Microsoft emails Windows 10 holdouts: Fine, keep your old PC another year

Wallet voting

A significant proportion of the population have refused to buy a new computer for Windows 11. Microsoft has the choice of keeping the door open to so people can stay with Windows 10 or finding out how many will experiment with Linux. Looks like someone at Microsoft understands FAFO.

Orbital datacenter gold rush needs an environmental review, FCC told

Re: Viable

You are using the wrong definition of viable. The heat problem gets worse with size as the heat has to be transported further from the compute area to reach the edge of the radiators. Pick a size not much above current satellites and heat is an already solved problem. Solving the heat problem like this exacerbates the communication problem. Instead of GPU's talking to each other over short physical links they have to talk to each other over longer steerable laser links. This takes more power, moving parts and increases latency. The extra latency restricts the type of problems orbital compute can work on.

Now imagine trying to fit the last paragraph and a description of how restrictive latency is in a single tweet that can be understood by a PHB. Without such a tweet steady investment will cause the share price to climb and that is far more important than making a profit.

The radiation problem is easily solved. Just don't worry about orbital data centres giving the wrong answer some of the time. Being wrong in subtle ways does not limit growth of AI share price now. By devaluing the skill of people able to check the results fewer checks will be made and tolerance of error will grow like nVidia's shares.

The problem you missed was dodging. Around 7,800 Starlink satellites dodged 300,000 collisions in 2025. The new problem will be huge clusters of slightly bigger satellites having to dodge debris in a coordinated manner. That will add extra propellant to the mass budget. Proposed data centres are in a higher orbit than Starlink. A failed thruster makes a satellite and immediate danger to the rest of the cluster. Instead of de-orbiting in months like Starlink the higher orbits take years or decades to fall into Starlink altitudes. The solution is the same as before: as long as the problem cannot fit into a single tweet that can be understood by the majority of investors it does not impact share price.

As a bonus these issues create a valuable use case for AI: identifying dangerous tweets so they can be blocked before going viral.

Ex-NASA boss points out small flaw in Moon landing plan: No lander

Re: How to land the kitchen sink

We already know what Bridenstine wants as he has made this clear before: a cost plus contract for a Lunar Lander. I am sure something simpler than Starship or Blue Moon 2 can be proposed. Building such a thing cost plus would be more expensive and would take longer to be abandoned than the current landers actually getting to the Moon..

Trump wants flags and footprints 2. The 2028 deadline is not that important to him as he expects to be president for life. Even he could work out that SLS was not a Moon program and he proposed cancelling it. He was told it was a jobs program (tax payer's money to big contractors who buy politicians.) Trump has simpler ways to collect tributes but stays with SLS + Starship/Blue Moon because they are the quickest route to Americans celebrating Trump's return to the Moon.

Space enthusiasts vary. Some prefer robots. Others would like a sustainable human presence on the Moon. A re-run of Apollo gets no support from either group. Doing something more requires in orbit propellant transfer.

I smell desperation. Blue may be out for at least the rest of the year but Starship will launch again perhaps this month, more likely next followed by monthly after that. SLS's days are numbered. EUS and ML2 have been cancelled. ICPS is end of life and limited supply. SLS's only future is delivering Orion to LEO and cheaper rockets can do that. Cost plus is ending and Boeing know they cannot do firm fixed price. Unless cost plus Apollo V2 gets votes real soon the plan is dead.

Zombie ‘who owns Unix?’ lawsuit comes alive again

Re: Pam

PJ did her best to remain anonymous partly because she wanted the site to be about the law, not her and because she wanted privacy. She abandoned Groklaw after credible threats against her family.

Re: So, what is it

SCO died long ago. Their business went to Tarantella. A company call TSG (The SCO Group) called themselves SCO to look like they had standing to litigate. TSG went bankrupt and a trustee was appointed. The trustee was legally required to create a creditor list - which he did in the most expensive way possible. He used every cent TSG had to hire the bankruptcy judge's law firm to do that work and any other work he could convince the judge was justifiable. When the trustee had exhausted every asset TSG owned (and the revenue held in trust for Novell) he started selling things TSG (and SCO) never had like to copyright to Unix and the right to litigate. I remember Xinuos in the list of bridge buyers but I do not know which bridge they bought.

I do not remember a settlement. It would not have been with SCO or TSG. I have confidence in IBM's lawyers. I am sure that whatever the settlement was IBM paid nothing and the other party permanently abandoned their doubly fake standing to litigate. This could be one of the other bridge buyers or the one that settled claiming the settlement does mean what it clearly says. Sometimes convicts write complaints in crayon* because they literally have nothing better to do.

* because they are not allowed sharp objects.

Oracle outlines all the ways it could lose the farm it bet on AI

OpenAI rents from Oracle. Oracle leases from Crusoe. This insulates Crusoe from risk because Oracle pays in advance. OpenAI / Sam Altman has more sense than to commit their own (investors') money into a bubble. Instead they talked about a really big future until Larry's FOMO took control. Altman's background was using FOMO to sell kleptocurrency. He was damned good at it before and has apparently honed his skill.

NASA unsure Boeing Starliner will ever be certified for human flight

Serious current competition to Dragon

Soyuz and Shenzou exist. It is not clear if Shenzou can dock with the Russian ISS docking ports but an adaptor module could be launched.

Orion exists. I am not sure what launch vehicle you would use if you want to be independent of Falcon. It nearly sets a limit on what SpaceX can charge for Dragon. (around $1 billion)

Mengzhou should be ready real soon now.

If Starliner does evaporate the next down the list is Dreamchaser currently scheduled to deliver cargo late this year (NASA would have to accept abort from inside a fairing). Another possibility is Stoke's Nova (Blue origin think they can store liquid hydrogen in orbit for months but I accept this is really straining "serious" and is far from current).

Blue Origin insists New Glenn will rise from the ashes this year after explosion deleted launchpad

Re: Where's all the Jeff Bezos snark ;)

There used to plenty. Jeff has been less hands-on at Amazon. AFAIK, Amazon has reached the limit for enshitification. (For me they became the supplier of last resort years ago so I may have missed them getting worse.) On the rockets side, "Where are my engines Jeff?" has been solved. New Glenn actually launched - leading to competition to SpaceX. There are Kuiper satillites in orbit hinting that one day there will be a competitor to Starlink. The litigation against NASA for not selecting two HLS providers ended. Lobbying congress to fund a second HLS was contraversial rather than pure evil. Jeff was never really into being continuously obnoxious on Twitter. His reputation has mostly remained level or shown hints of improving.

Musk used DOGE to do an enormous amount of damage. So much that it was hard to imagine him earning a worse reputation. He has been tweeting hard to maintain the momentum. Raiding the index funds to fuel the SpaceX IPO has the potential to match the damage done by DOGE.

Jeff does at least an order of magnitude less damage than Musk so gets good wishes for making progress on breaking a Musk near monopoly.

Even the Secret Service won't use company-issued phones

Re: Not a problem

There is a problem. The lack of security combined with the lack of an assassination shows that hostile nations want to keep the current president in power.

Brits still reckon Big Tech isn't paying enough tax

If patents are currently the popular way to avoid tax then that is clearly an opportunity. A tax on money spent on patent licensing and another on patent revenue.

People have tried bribing Trump. It works for a few days then he wants another pay day. The only solution is to stand up to him and encourage others to do the same. He will respond with some angry words that just make him less popular. A few days later he will forget because a different country will have provoked a tantrum.

The new database world according to Google: Inexact queries and AI in everything

Google's plan for the future

Instead of querying a database to get the correct answer I will be asking an AI to give me the answer I want? OK, what is my bank balance?

EU won't force publishers to grant dead video games an afterlife

Re: "intellectual property protections for creators and publishers"

It is not the old games that requires protection. It is the new ones. If gamers have one or several old games that they enjoy playing and can do so with their own servers then they might not buy the next game released. The obvious solution (/s) is to require all gamers to buy all new games so there is no reason for them to be upset by losing access to the old ones.

Windows devs rerolled old code to save precious bytes

If you don't have an instruction cache then fine. As we are going back to the 32-bit era there might not have been a level 2 cache but there probably were small instruction and data caches. That 256K would have come from slow main memory while taking memory bandwith away from the task of initialising the 64k of data. If there was anything useful in the instruction cache before it will all be gone after that unrolled loop. Sometimes the best strategy is to optimise the bulk of the code for space and only optimise the innermost loops for time.

Brit workers waste nearly six hours a week 'botsitting'

Re: Port scan

If you had given permission copilot would have created some typical nmap output followed by whatever commonly follows nmap output on the internet. Now that we have AI, port scanning is no longer necessary to secure networks (/s).

SpacemiT shows off usably quick RISC-V mini desktop

Re: promising

It doesn't have to the fastest chip ever. It only needs to be fast enough. If all the drivers are GPL it has twice the value of anything that will not be supported two years from now. As a bonus it does not come with an Intel Management Engine.

Uncle Sam considers buying a seat on the Titanic

he did learn from bankrupting casinos

He learned who to call to make the consequences of his failures land on other people.

Re: The ultimate cash grab

If your product is useful you sell it to people. If it is a waste of time you sell it to businesses. If it is actively harmful go straight to the government.

Re: Sounds familiar

The idea of communism considers the needs of all. The usual implementations focus on the needs of the most greedy. The masses get the other side: "from each according to their ability". Some people can work really hard. Others have an exceptional ability to take bribes.

Sounds familiar

Big government. Common ownership of the means of production. The next step is "to each according to his needs". After all, billionaires are the most needy people on the planet.

Amazon Leo's satellite homework is late, but FCC won't flunk it just yet

The other lapse of memory

Amazon bought launches on all the remaining Atlas V's but did not have satellites ready until last year.

NHS prescribes half a million Copilot licenses for its paperwork headache

In one ear...

IIRC copilot interactions are used as training data. If you can guess a piece of someones records copilot may well tell you what comes next / before.

Agentic AI handling complaints: "You have the wrong bank details for my salary", "You can settle out of court for £5,000", ...

Serious ISS air leak forces NASA astronauts to temporarily take shelter in Dragon capsule

Re: why don't they just ...

Cracks causing leaks in PrK have been a problem for years. The doors on each side of PrK remain shut unless access to a Progress cargo vehicle is required. Just shutting the doors limits the amount that can leak but does not fix it. Blocking the leak with Germetall-1 fixes the leak but not the crack. The cracks are still there. The cause of the cracks is unknown. There could be other cracks elsewhere in the station the have not been spotted because they do not leak yet.

One day PrK is going to out with a bang. A likely day for that to happen is when someone is kicking around in there sealing a new crack. The ISS is long past its sell by date. Sudden failure of PrK would send a shock wave through the station that could identify which other modules are badly compromised by cracks. I can see a clear advantage to sitting in a Dragon capsule reading a book while some brave Russian seals another crack in PrK.

Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows

Re: pipe speed

I tried piping through cat multiple times. Each extra pipe through cat added about 13 seconds of CPU time on a 5.5GB file. Over 400MB/s - on a Raspberry Pi 4. Real world time was longer because the data came from a spinning disk. In other words a cheap CPU doing multiple pipes can keep up with a spinning disk. For plenty of real world tasks pipes are fast enough.

UK lawmakers call on government to ditch Palantir NHS contract

Re: struggled with the redesign on the home page

There is no need to struggle. Change your bookmark to archive and never visit the front page again.

Woke means different things to different people. When a republican says "woke" it is intended as an insult. When a democrat hears "woke" it is taken as a compliment. I am pretty sure the comment delay causes bipartisan annoyance.

Blue Origin's New Glenn makes a crater-sized dent in Artemis plans

Re: Aluminium

New Glenn is probably about 100,000kg for stage 1 and 25,000kg for stage 2 - I could not source definitive numbers. It is mostly aluminium but only a small percentage burned. Bits of rocket are scattered all around the launch site. Vulcan uses between 0 and 6 GEM 63XL boosters that each burn about 8,000kg of aluminium powder in their ammonium perchlorate composite propellant. SLS always uses two huge solid rocket boosters, each of which burns more aluminium powder than a complete New Glenn. Hopefully New Glenn will explode less often then SLS launches.

Re: I wonder...

Early NASA had a long list of rocket explosions. They learned from their mistakes and got better. The Saturn series of rockets all had excellent success rate with the V reaching the target orbit in 12/13 launches. Saturn was a part of the Redstone rocket family: Jupiter C scored 1/3, Juno I scored 3/6, Mercury-Redstone scored 5/6 and Sparta 9/10. The next big step was the Space shuttle: 133/135. Space shuttle parts got re-arranged into SLS: 2/2. The shuttle carried people on its first launch and SLS on its second. These manned rockets should not be scored in the same category as cargo or test launches. Far more effort and expense goes into ensuring crew safety.

Switching to commercial:

Atlas V - used to launch Starliner - scored 107/108. Note the V. Early rockets in the Atlas family exploded. Falcon's success record is exceptional, but is built on the experience of early explosions. Electron scores 84/88.

Blue's suborbital New Shepard carried people and scored 37/38. Switching to orbital is a big step up. Successes on the first two New Glenn launches was amazing. Problems with the next two brings New Glenn back to what should be expected from a completely new launch vehicle. This boom really hit the news because it was so big and will delay a bunch of high profile launches.

Not all rockets are American. Russia, Europe, Japan, China and India all got to orbit on the back of explosions. China is making strong progress on commercial rockets: more explosions. Advances in rocket technology come from explosions.