Posts by David M

Nvidia hits the gas on autonomous vehicle software

Complex environments

"It uses deep learning and foundation models trained on large datasets of human driving behaviour [...] This means that vehicles are designed to benefit from vast amounts of real and synthetic driving behaviour data to safely navigate complex environments..."

I bet they haven't trained it on any of the roads around here. In recent times I have had to deal with...

• A car reversing back around a roundabout towards me, presumably having missed its exit.
• A peacock crossing the road in front of me.
• A bollard in the centre of the road where I had to drive round the wrong side of it because someone had parked so badly that I couldn't fit through on my side.
• A longish segment of road where parked cars leave only one car width, so if there's a vehicle wanting to come the other way, you and the other driver have to do a to-and-fro negotiation as to who goes and who waits.

And those are just a few examples - something unique and unexpected seems to happen fairly often, and if the training data doesn't cover it, who knows what the AI would decide to do?

£127M wasted on failed UK nuclear cleanup plan

This is the UK

s/center/centre/g;

ASUS to chase business PC market with free AI, or no AI - because nobody knows what to do with it

Everybody?

“Everybody wants AI ...” [he said]

I don't. So not quite everybody.

Estimating AI energy usage is fiendishly hard – but this report took a shot

Microwave oven consumption

The microwave oven equivalent figures fail to take into account the fact that the magnetron in a microwave oven is only about 65% efficient, for example my 800W microwave has a rated input power of 1270W. So taking one of the examples from the article, 3.4MJ would correspond to 3.4e6/1270 = around 45 minutes, not an hour as stated. The point of the article still stands, of course—that AI uses a shocking amount of electricity to deliver very little value—but we might as well get the engineering right.

Annual electronic waste footprint per person is 11.2 kg

Software longevity

One problem with phones and 'smart' devices is that software/firmware updates often stop after a ludicrously short period of time, rendering older devices dangerously insecure. I just tried to update the firmware in my DSL router and discovered that the manufacturer (Zyxel) classes it as 'end-of-life' and will no longer provide updates. It's about 2½ years old.

Post Office finally throttles delayed in-house EPOS project

Reminds me of Danny (or Gordon) Kaye...

"In April 2024, the Post Office tendered for a vendor..."

Did the Post Office also ask for the vessel with the pestle, or the chalice from the palace? Or even a gâteau from the château?

Management-speak

... "omni-channel customer journeys."

Oh dear oh dear.

Britain's cyber agents and industry clash over how to tackle shoddy software

Re: Grift

The entire purpose of a door lock is security, so purchasers are likely to give at least some thought to how secure it is. If, on the other hand, I'm buying a smart lightbulb, or an audio streamer, or some other internet-connected appliance, I'm unlikely to even consider its level of cyber security unless it comes with some kind of official rating or warning label.

Signalgate lessons learned: If creating a culture of security is the goal, America is screwed

Re: Maybe, just maybe

I completely agree, but as an aside, I feel that referring to Mr.T as "the Orange utan" is highly offensive to us orangutans. Ook.

GCHQ intern took top secret spy tool home, now faces prison

Official Secrets Act?

I'm surprised that these actions didn't violate the Official Secrets Act, which he must have signed when he joined GCHQ.

Altnets told to stop digging and start stuffing fiber through abandoned pipes

This is th UK

s/fiber/fibre/g

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

I have a 1982 HP-11C calculator. It still works perfectly, is extremely well-made, and thankfully does not require support. I wouldn't dream of buying an HP product nowadays. How the mighty have fallen.

TechUK demands that Britain's chip strategy is crisped up

Re: National Semiconductor Center?

Thank you - I was about to make exactly the same comment.

Feds want devs to stop coding 'unforgivable' buffer overflow vulnerabilities

Re: Really?

I'm not sure that follows. Just because the US Government doesn't practise what it preaches doesn't necessarily mean that what it preaches is wrong. The principle that certain software security vulnerabilities can easily be avoided and should not be tolerated applies regardless of who is saying it. Of course it would be better if the Government led by example, but the idea is still sound.

Blue Origin spins up lunar gravity for New Shepard flight

Extremely unique...

"New Shepard's ability to provide a lunar gravity environment is an extremely unique..."

Sorry, but something can't be extremely unique. It's either unique (i.e. there's only one of it) or it isn't.

AI pothole patrol to snap flaws in Britain's crumbling roads

Depth measurement

"...It is able to calculate the width, length, and depth of potholes it discovers..."

I wonder how an ordinary optical camera can measure the depth of a pothole - surely that would need some kind of radar/lidar/sonar.

Blue Origin reaches orbit with New Glenn, fumbles first-stage recovery

Re: Good & bad

The technology has clearly moved on since Thunderbirds. Now you can barely see the strings at all.

We did warn you – 2025 may be the year AI bots take over Meta's 'verse

F.B.Purity

A big thank-you to the makers of the F.B.Purity browser plugin (fbpurity.com), which does a pretty good job of filtering out the worst of Facebook, so all I see is posts from friends, and from groups that I follow. Without this plugin, FB would be unusable.

Zuck takes a page from Musk: Meta dumps fact-checkers, loosens speech restrictions

I look at FB through a browser with an ad blocker and the plugin from fbpurity.com installed, and that makes it usable - I see nothing but posts from friends and from groups that I follow. Which is how it should be. Occasionally I look at it on my phone (without the filters) and yes, it's then 99% BS.

UK government plays power broker with small modular reactor suitors

Re: Hmm

There's also geothermal, which might be worth a try, if we could find a way to make deep enough holes.

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

Re: I have one problem with USB C

I had the same problem, but then found that little blanking plugs were available, and work very well, so no more fluff!

The Europa Clipper stretches its wings as launch nears

Mirowave oven efficiency

"Together, the arrays will produce approximately 700 watts of electricity at Jupiter, or just enough to operate a small microwave oven."

The magnetrons in microwave ovens are only about 60% efficient, so a 700W microwave would consume around 1100W. This could be a problem for anyone on board the Europa Clipper who fancies a jacket potato.

What do Uber drivers make of Waymo? 'We are cooked'

Re: Taxi

The in-car conversation problem could easily be solved—with AI! If I was in charge of Uber, right now I'd be secretly recording all of the conversations going on in my vehicles, and using them to train a giant LLM so that it could hold optimal 'taxi driver' chats with passengers. "Do you know who I had in my cab the other day...?"

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Re: C128 the Hero!

I did know one person (in the UK) who owned a TRS-80. I also saw a fair few being sold, as I had a Saturday job in Tandy around 1980. Which also meant that I got to play with one quite a lot, as nobody else in the shop had a clue.

Gamers who find Ryzen 9000s disappointingly slow are testing it wrong, says AMD

Re: Software Optimization...

All modern processors optimised for themselves, with out of order execution, executing multiple instructions in parallel, elaborate branch prediction, all manner of caching, etc. I think the problem is one of diminishing returns - we've got so clever at all of this optimisation that further improvements require increasingly complex hardware and only give marginal benefits.

Former Fujitsu engineer apologizes for role in Post Office IT scandal

Where were the tests?

Where were the tests? Surely a system like Horizon would have had thousands and thousands of tests—unit tests, integration tests, directed tests, random tests, etc.—plus coverage analysis to ensure that everything was being tested, and a regression system to run the tests regularly. So Mr Jenkins wouldn't have to 'accept' that everything was working, he could just look at the most recent test results. Or am I being naïve?

ASUS creates a substance: Ceraluminum, which fuses aluminum and a ceramic

UK spelling

I wonder if they'll call it ceraluminium in the UK.

PumpkinOS carves out a FOSS PalmOS-compatible runtime environment

Still alive

I still use my Palm T|X. And sync it to linux with pilot-xfer.

Hold up world, HP's all-in-one print subscription's about to land, and don't forget AI PCs

Sweating assets

My 1982 HP-11C is still working fine.

Welcome to 2024: Volkswagen really is putting ChatGPT into cars as a gabby copilot

Oh dear

I recently acquired a newish VW, and I'm already fed up with the amount of unnecessary technology in it, complete with very poorly-designed user interfaces, and so-called 'assistance' features that don't work properly and just end up being distracting, which is the last thing you want when you're driving. I don't want to think about how much worse the driving experience would be with an AI assistant trying to 'help'. It's tempting to say that I'll never buy another VW, but I fear that by the time I need another car, all manufacturers will have gone the same way.

Scientists mull Solar Radiation Management – a potential climate-change stop-gap

Totally agree. We need WW2-scale sacrifices, from everyone. Unfortunately no government would ever consider this because it would be be political suicide. It's possible to get support for sacrifices on this scale if there's a really obvious and immediate threat, e.g. an evil army massing on the borders. But climate change is happening too gradually, and it looks a lot like the danger won't appear severe enough to justify the necessary drastic steps until it's too late to turn things around.

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Ditto with my 41-year-old HP-11C. A beautifully-made thing, slightly battered but still working perfectly. And I remember back in the 80s/early 90s, there would be labs full of HP test gear that was totally solid and reliable. And expensive, admittedly (hence HP = "High Price") but you felt you were getting your money's worth. Those were the days!

40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

My understanding was that Wirth designed Pascal to be a teaching language, and gave us the more flexible Modula2 for real applications.

Governments resent their dependence on Big Tech

Re: The benefits of hindsight

Government departments clearly don't have the skills or resources to build their own IT systems, but what they do need is a few senior people who understand both the workflows and the technology well enough to ask the right questions, to define appropriate requirements, including for security, and to be able to monitor private sector development and deliverables to ensure those requirements are being met. I suspect that a lot of problems stem from the fact that nobody in the organisation has much of a clue about IT, so it's easy for suppliers to pull the wool over their eyes.

China's top EV battery maker announced a breakthrough, but top boffin isn't convinced

Charger power rating

Quick calculation - EVs seem to get around 6..7km to the kWh, so 400km would require at least 60kWh of charge. To get that in 10 minutes would mean a charge rate of 360kW. Even the fastest chargers don't currently get anywhere near that. And I believe the highest charging voltage currently in use is 800V, at which 360kW translates to 450A, which would need a rather hefty cable and connectors. None of this is insurmountable, but it's going to need a lot of infrastructure improvements to make this new battery technology viable.

Post Office Horizon Inquiry calls for compensation to be brought forward

BBC investigation

The BBC radio series about this (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j/episodes/guide) is very well-researched and informative. And horrifying.

Amazon Prime too easy to join, too hard to quit, says FTC lawsuit

YES and NO

I was impressed (in a bad way) by the Amazon checkout dialogue box that said "Would you like a free trial of Prime?" with big YES and and NO buttons. On the 'NO' button in tiny text it said "NO, I don't want to miss the opportunity to try Prime!" So effectively it was another YES button. I eventually found the real 'no' option, which was even tinier, and lurking in the corner of the screen.

Decision to hold women-in-cyber events in abortion-banning states sparks outcry

Re: Mixed Feelings

I sort of see the point you're trying to make, but to me the victims of these laws aren't just those who are directly affected. I would never visit one of these states—I'm not LGBTQ+, but what about my friends or colleagues? The idea that someone I know (or even someone I don't) could be punished for this is horrific, and I wouldn't want to be somewhere where that might happen. Conversely you could argue that the abortion laws don't affect 50% of the population, but only the much smaller proportion that might actually seek an abortion, but again that's not the point—these laws take away every woman's rights, whether they're directly affected or not.

Study recommends mandatory 3-year vacation so astronauts' brains can recover

Reduced gravity

I wonder how this would affect those in reduced (but not micro) gravity, e.g. in a Lunar colony at one-sixth g.

Excess profits on Motorola's Airwave estimated to be £1.3B

Market not working well

"...concerns that the market might not be working well."

I confess I don't understand much about economics, but it seems to me that if you have a single monopoly supplier for an essential emergency service, that's not a market at all, and it's hardly surprising that the customer is in a poor bargaining position.

Surely Airwave should just have been a set of open protocols, plus a compatibility testing regime. Then multiple suppliers of the actual equipment could have been appointed, giving some opportunity for a competitive market to operate. Or am I being naïve?

NASA's electric plane tech is coming in for a late, bumpy landing

Re: My plan

Thank you for your comments. You're all correct, of course - it's a rubbish plan, and would never work. Ah well, back to the drawing board.

My plan

I have a scheme for reducing aviation CO₂ emissions by 50% - fly half as much. There we are. Job done. Just organise some kind of voucher system to limit the number of flights anyone can take to (say) two return flights per year. Much easier than all these technical solutions, and could be introduced very quickly. It would only be temporary, of course - the scheme would be withdrawn once truly zero-carbon aircraft are available. I know it wouldn't be popular, but sacrifices are going to have to be made if we want to save the planet.

Uncle Sam sounds like it may actually do something about rampant visa H-1B fraud

Numbers

"The number of H-1B visas available annually is capped at 65,000..."

It so should be 65536.

Cruise emits software fix after self-driving car slams into bus

Unique error

The speed with which Cruise analysed and rectified the problem is impressive.

But I wonder how many other 'unique' situations these vehicles are going to encounter. I reckon that pretty much every time I go for a drive, I see some weird event that I've never encountered before. Some random recent examples:

(1) When joining a large motorway-junction roundabout, met a vehicle that was reversing back round the roundabout.

(2) Had to slow down to let a peacock cross in front of me.

(3) Had to go the wrong way round a traffic island because someone had parked in such a stupid place that I couldn't get through on my side.

(4) Had to disobey a red light at some roadworks, as it became obvious that the lights were stuck on red in both directions.

Really not sure how a self-driving vehicle would have handled any of those. And they're just a few examples.

Wow, so they actually let AI fly an F-16 fighter jet

Weapons hot

I notice it said that "firing weapons" was one of the things the pilot would still do. It's only a matter of time, though...

ChatGPT talks its way through Wharton MBA, medical exams

Full duplex

Education is a two-way process - real students ask questions, whereas the current crop of AIs don't, and you can tell a lot from what questions they ask. Perhaps this could be the basis of an AI-proof exam, where the question doesn't provide all the necessary information, and the student is expected to ask for it.

Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher

Re: The ICE will be with us for...

They'll continue to be on the roads for many years after that, as people hang on to their ICE vehicles, and then sell them into the second-hand market.

Tesla driver blames full-self-driving software for eight-car Thanksgiving Day pile up

Re: Human Versus AI Drivers

I was also taught not just to allow enough stopping distance for me, but also for the vehicle behind. So if something is following too close, I try to allow extra space ahead of me so that I can give the idiot behind more chance to stop. A rear-end crash in those circumstances wouldn't be my fault, but it would still be damned inconvenient.

This seems like a precaution that 'full self-driving' software could handle quite easily.

Financial authorities fine UK bank nearly $60m for platform migration disaster

Will it help to fine the bank?

I'm not clear how taking £48.6 million away from the bank is going to help them to improve. Won't this just impact their customers, in reduced services and/or lower investment returns? It seems to me that we should be directly punishing those responsible, rather than the bank. A year of community service for whoever made the decisions and/or ignored the warnings might make those in a similar position in other organisations sit up and think.

Sirius XM flaw unlocks so-called smart cars thanks to code flaw

Re: Different emphasis

Any software should start with some requirements. In this case, one of those would be "only the legitimate owner can unlock the vehicle." Then there's some software engineering to implement the requirements, then a coder can write the code. And then, crucially, it's subjected to a barrage of tests to ensure it meets its requirements. For anything security-related, that should include penetration testing. So there's a whole bunch of fails here, but the lack of proper testing seems the most egregious. This software is protecting a valuable asset, and ought to have been treated accordingly. Or am I being naïve?