Posts by Pascal Monett

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

Another week, another astonishing claim from some other Chinese institute

At this rythm, by the end of the year they'll be declaring the flying car.

Neighbors angry as another North Korean 'satellite' launch attempt fails

So it blew up ?

The article is not very clear on the end result. I'm guessing rapid unscheduled disassembly.

And where did the remains fall down ? The Yellow Sea ?

And are we sure that there was no flying laser in the vicinity ? That unexpected 3rd-stage snafu could very well have been the result of a bit of coherent light interference with the 3rd stage envelope, no ?

Good thing Nvidia makes number-crunching GPUs – it'll need them to count its cash

Nothing to worry about indeed

Even if the Biden administration tightens the rules even more and nVidia loses the chinese market, it's rolling in dough anyway. It'll just make less and it has an official excuse for why. Not it's fault, had nothing to do with it, etc.

It's financials will continue to look good and, hopefully, that means its employees will remain employed (although nVidia is not IBM on that point).

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

So, another cloud company that screws it up for all of its customers

Hey, CloudNordic, if I was one of your customers I wouldn't be worrying about getting my site back online with your help.

I'd be getting it back online with the help of a different provider.

You screw up in that magnitude, I vote with my wallet.

ICANN warns UN may sideline tech community from future internet governance

No reason to panick

It's the UN. Nobody listens to them anyway, and when they should say something important, they keep quiet.

Let them spout on about ruling the Internet. The existing bodies can just politely take the paper and sit on it. After all, the UN has no enforcement capability.

The UN has never changed anything, it certainly won't start here.

Musk's latest X-periments: No more headlines, old posts vanish, block gets banned

"We may fail"

No, man. You WILL fail.

This is on you.

You have a CEO, why are you making more decisions ?

Are you really that stupid that you don't see how bad you are at decision making ?

To think that this waste of air is the one who got lucky with PayPal and swims in money.

Sometimes Lady Luck would need some sort of consequence alert.

And it's all going down the drain.

Marvellous to watch.

From afar.

You can now fine-tune OpenAI's GPT-3.5 for specific tasks – it may even beat GPT-4

Yeah, but wait until GPT-5, -6, -7 !

Endless marketing cycles FTW !

Space junk targeted for cleanup mission was hit by different space junk, making more space junk

Space trash

Humanity, as a whole, has a tendancy of not caring if it doesn't seem to matter. The only problem with that attitude, is that we often cannot see how it matters before it is too late, or at least much more expensive to correct.

That is why we are choking the sea with plastics coming from bags that have been carelessly thrown out a car window, or left on the beach because the trash can was five meters too far away.

In space, it has been the same thing. The entire space industry has, since the beginning, operated on a it-doesn't-matter attitude. Leftover rocket booster lounging around at 600+ kilometers ? Doesn't matter, it'll end up coming down.

Except that, since the decades we have been throwing stuff up there (and given the cost, with pretty good reason, generally speaking), all those remaining objects are now starting to clutter up Earth's orbital space and becoming, if not yet a danger, a clear nuisance.

All of that because of our human reflex. Like the smoker who just chucks his cigarette butt instead of putting it in the trash bin.

We will end up paying for that as well, in time.

Apple's defense against apps vandalizing other apps still broken, developer claims

Re: Not sure I get it

Good question. There are plenty of Windows applications that can make major changes to system-wide settings. Is that supposed to be considered a bug ?

When I double-click on a PDF and the system asks me if I want to define a given program as default for opening PDF files, I do not consider that a bug. I've been asked, therefor I give or refuse my authorization and I find that that works.

But if I have a application that automatically overrides my existing settings because their developers know best, that is the kind of thing that will make me nuke their application and never go back to it.

Now, the real question is : Skype for Business, that still exists ? Hasn't that been folded into Teams ?

NASA still serious about astronauts living it up on Moon space station in 2028

"the Artemis V crew"

We're at Artemis I, right ?

So that's like the mobile phone industry talking about 8G when 5G has just been registered as a commercial failure, and 6G is still under design.

The only difference is that this is NASA planning. I'm fairly sure that they can plan a space station better than the mobile phone industry can plan yet another useless xG version. The space station will be absolutely critical to anything we get to doing in space in the future.

It's a good thing everyone is not like the mobile phone industry, otherwise we'd have IPv7 in the starting blocks and everyone telling us we need to migrate to accomodate a googleplex ip addresses we don't need.

Hey Joe, those US CHIPS funds still coming? We kinda need them, says Micron

Subsidies are "necessary" ?

So you're basically saying that your company does not have the funding required to do it alone ?

Why should you get subsidies then ? You're already a multi-billion dollar business.

Subsidies are made for small companies that need some help surviving bad times, or agriculture which simply cannot sell at cost because supermarkets are always pushing prices to the bare minimum to maximize their margins.

Subsidies should literally be forbidden for companies that are over a billion dollars in capital.

It's called capitalism. If you can't make it on your own, you don't make it.

Well, that's the theory, anyway. In practice, it depends a lot on who you know, and who you can put pressure on . . .

In any case, funnily enough, I never hear complaints about government intervention when it's question of handouts.

California DMV hits brakes on Cruise's SF driverless fleet after series of fender benders

Well forget the second accident

There is no programming in the world that can prevent a vehicle from being broadsided by a moron who runs a red light. I'm glad there were no injuries and I hope the careless driver will get what he deserves.

But a vehicle that can't handle an oncoming vehicle in the same lane ? I understand that avoidance maneuvers is a whole other set of abilities, but braking is still supposed to be on the cards, is it not ? The vehicle "initiated a braking maneuver". Nice to know. Why did it not stop entirely ? Or did it stop entirely and it's the ambulance that drove into it ? Not clear from the article.

Whatever the case, if driverless vehicles can't handle the antics of emergency vehicles - who are doing their duty as best they can - and become no better than roadblocks, then it's not 50% less that should be on the road, it's 100%, day and night, until the issue is solved.

Now I agree that, given the trouble it has been up to now to get anything near driverless actually working, this is probably a whole new load of trouble for the engineers concerned.

Still, if there is one type vehicle that should always get top priority on the road, it's emergency response vehicles.

And driverless cars should be the first to give way and clear the road for them.

OpenAI snaps up role-playing game dev as first acquisition

Stop misusing that term

"Maybe it's possible they can become more intelligent if they can embody and experience a digital one"

No. Stop encouraging people to think that statistical analysis machines have any intelligence at all.

It's not because we have no idea how they get to their conclusions that there is a iota of intelligence inside the box. There isn't.

It's just mathematical rules coming together in some way that confuses people. Besides, mention statistics and 90% of the room is already asleep, drooling.

You wouldn't say that a movement detector is intelligent because it detects someone entering and turns on the light ?

What you're calling AI is no different from the movement detector. The movement detector just has less circuitry.

High severity vuln in WinRAR could allow code to run when files are opened

Yep. I'll be honest, I used to use WinRar before 7zip came out.

But, ever since 7zip has been available, I had been steadfast in using it and talking about it around me.

Moscow makes a mess on the Moon as Luna 25 probe misses orbit, lands with a thud

"Luna 25, by contrast, tried to make the trip in nine days"

Well that's already a clear sign that this mission was placed squarely under the sign of Brilliant Communist Success Story instead of being careful, taking things easy and just getting there.

They could have spent 40+ days getting there, slower arrival speed, easier to slow down. But no, Communism slows down for nothing. So they arrived much faster, something went wrong (did the political commissar attached to the project take advantage of the situation to sell off a few minor parts, gasket, switch, modulator ? Nobody will notice, right ?), and the burn destined to slow the craft down ended up sending it directly into the Moon.

It must be exhausting to live in a country where everything you do must not only be a success, but also something the higher-ups always need to be able to brag about.

Doing Science in that kind of environment is crazy.

Well it certainly was a short fall !

Need a decent dining spot in Ottawa? Microsoft suggested a food bank

CNET, Gizmondo, others to be found out

So, we're now in the age of "publications" paying AI to create stuff to bring in readership.

Well, now that I know that, I'm not using those site ever again.

If you think I'm going to be interested in the brain farts of something that has no brain, have I got news for you.

The Board thinks it's going to create the perfect AI to "create" it's content, fire all the meatbags and profit ?

Not gonna happen.

Re: This is nothing new.

That's not the point.

Yes, humans have been shitty at their jobs since Oglug failed to keep the campfire burning. So what ?

We're not supposed to be making pseudo-AI to make the same (or worse) mistakes we do. We should be making it to do better.

It's not better because it's not AI. It's just statistics, and a human has to program the damn things. Not to mention train them.

Hold the Moon – NASA's buildings are crumbling amid 200-year upgrade cycles

Re: NASA is responsible for it's budgets

Of course, every agency is responsible for its budget.

But that doesn't mean that it decides the amount of budget it receives.

It's budget requires X billions to function properly. That is a known quantity. Congress allocates Y = X - too much.

You're saying that's NASA's fault ?

A license to trust: Can you rely on 'open source' companies?

I love this article

Especially since I said just about the same thing 7 days ago, concerning HashiCorp.

Nice to see that I'm not the only one with this opinion.

LG's $1,000 TV-in-a-briefcase is unlikely to travel much further than the garden

There are solar-powed USB chargers

Found that kind of stuff on Amazon. You'd need a nice bit of extra trunk space to store one (or two), but apparently, if you've got the sunlight, they can do a fair job of keeping your laptop charged.

What they would do with this, I have no idea, but it's better than just leaving it to an external battery.

What DARPA wants, DARPA gets: A non-hacky way to fix bugs in legacy binaries

Re: How did they allow themselves to get into this position anyway?

That is the marvel of the software industry.

You need to realize that source code used to be treated like gold. You had the rights to the final product, but if you wanted the source code, you paid extra (and I mean HEAVY extra).

And that's not too long ago either. About ten years ago I was working for a European Institution that had a business-critical Notes application for which it had paid a ungodly amount of money to have the rights to the source code (and that was accompanied by an iron-clad contract in which, if ever said source code was published anywhere, a number of first-borns would have to be sacrificed on a night of a new moon).

Even today, having the source code is not a given. Go ask some web designer to do you a website and get the quote for having the website and the source code for all of it. I'm thinking you'll be looking at a different figure compared to just the website and support.

Personally, I've always programmed in Lotus Notes. For me, it was a given that the applications I was writing for the client would not be code-locked.

I know of quite a few software houses in Luxembourg that don't do that today.

Well, first of all, it's Da Gubbermint. You are doing your patriotic duty in letting it reverse-engineer and modify binaries for which there is no code.

Second, those EULAs, apparently, all belong to defunct companies whose programmers are likely retired today (if they are still alive), and whose IP has not been bought by some company still in activity today.

Third, even if that IP had been bought, there's a fair chance that the accounting department (or internal library) has no clue that they have the rights to that code. Also, there is a non-zero chance that, even if they know, they have no desire to tell anyone because they don't want to put a finger into the update process of a software for which they might have the source code (having the IP rights doesn't mean you have the code) but don't have anyone capable of modifying it.

Because if they show up and make a fuss about IP, then they run the very real risk of being liable for the changes.

I know I wouldn't want that.

Our AI habit is already changing the way we build datacenters

"first of its kind datacenters"

Is this another Musk-level brain fart ?

It's a datacenter. It uses ungodly amounts of power, generates equally ungodly amounts of heat, and that heat needs evacuating. Oh, and on the side, it may be somewhat useful.

It's not because you're building it with the latest in-house doo-dad that the situation changes.

Call me when you've invented a datacenter that doesn't need cooling. THAT will be first-of-its-kind.

Re: Smoking hairy golfball

Thanks for that. I'm going to keep that reference.

Resilience is overrated when it's not advertised

Failover backup redlining

The issue is not the failover, it's the idiot who designed a failover system with less resources than the production system.

If you design a failover, that server needs the exact same configuration than the one it is replacing.

Not doing that is stupid, and this was the result.

I would have thought that you wouldn't need a degree in computer science to understand that. Apparently, you do.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has a left wing bias – at times

a politically neutral 'truth'

Unless we're talking about science (and even then), I do not think there is any chance that the "truth" cannot be biased by politics.

I mean, water flows downhill whether you are republican, democrat or whatever else, right ?

Pi, for example, is famously known as 3.14159 (and an infinity more). That did not stop some US legislator from attempting to pass a law to "simplify" Pi to, IIRC, 3.

God knows why, but one thing is certain : if politics cannot stay away from basic mathematical truth, then there is no truth that can remain politically neutral forever.

SUSE to flip back into private ownership after just two-and-a-bit years

"merging it with an unlisted Luxembourg entity"

So, a Swiss investment bank wants to take SUSE off of public scrutiny to do a deal with some unnamed entity hosted in Luxembourg.

The fact that it is in Luxembourg practically implies it is some entity belonging to an international conglomerate. Money meets more money.

I hope this means that the people working on SUSE are safe, but once again, this deal has nothing to do with improving SUSE and everything to do with managing investor interests.

And backroom deals are best done far from public scrutiny.

You decide if that is a good thing or not.

India's digital public goods diplomacy scores wins around the world

India shows no signs of stopping, or slowing, its digital diplomacy effort

Hey, if it's good, why not ?

We're going to be influenced by someone every day we get up. Might as well be by something that helps.

'AI-written history' of Maui wildfire becomes Amazon bestseller, fuels conspiracies

Jane Friedman

To discover that you have credits for books you never wrote must be quite a surprise.

To not sue the pants off Amazon for publishing such lies is quite a surprise to me.

I think she was quite nice to just ask for their removal from the store. This goes way beyond some unpleasant comment on a forum. If it were me, I would want to know how those "books" got into the store, who is responsible for uploading them and why nobody checked that the purported author had nothing to do with it. And I'd want a judge to back me up on that.

Apparently, either Amazon is creating drivel and happily selling it (not entirely impossible), or the publishing controls at Amazon are so laughable a six-year-old can get around them with a throwaway email account and maybe a forged ID using stock model photos.

Neither is good or Amazon's reputation, but maybe Amazon doesn't care (entirely possible).

YouTube accused of aiming ads at kids after promising it wouldn't do that

"Personalized advertising has never been allowed on YouTube Kids"

Then why do you have a tag specifically dedicated to treatment for kids ? The fact that they are watching YouTube Kids is not enough ?

As usual, there is what a company says, and there is what a company does.

Google is clearly capable of being aware it is dealing with a child. To trust Google, the most powerful ad broker in the world, to do nothing with that data is something I fully expect the government institutions to not do.

Not without ironclad proof, and the mere words of a spokesdrone are not proof.

Tesla knew Autopilot weakness killed a driver – and didn't fix it, engineers claim

And the marketing continues to support the lie.

Even in this article, Tesla's Autopilot is dubbed "super-cruise-control". That, from a publication that has already posted at least one article about a Tesla plowing into a police car on the highway, under said "super" cruise control.

Everyone in the media continues to treat Tesla as if they have something special. They don't, and that fact is killing people.

So stop treating it like it is something it doesn't deserve.

At best, it is enhanced cruise control. Not super, and certainly not Autopilot.

I know what you did next summer: Microsoft to kill off Xbox 360 Store

"committed to supporting Xbox 360 gameplay for the foreseeable future"

No you're not. If you were committed, you wouldn't shut the store.

This is the ultimate in slapping the customer. Your patronage is important to us, now fuck off.

Cost of gallium goes up after Chinese export restrictions land

Retaliation

Of course it is retaliation.

In the very arena you would expect responsible, level-headed people to operate, it's all being handled by a bunch of kindergardeners who only know how to throw the toys out of the pram.

And after that, we are the ones who have to pay, get blamed and tighten our belts.

Politics should not be left to the charming idiots who can win elections only to fuck everything up after. It's a job. There should be a proper entrance exam, ongoing evaluations and, if the candidate is not doing the job properly, a swift exit, regardless of whether or not the mandate has run its course.

We can no longer afford to wait for the next election before getting rid of the crazy nincompoop that is ruining everything for everyone else.

Brainwaves rock! Scientists decode Pink Floyd tune straight from the noggin

So, one tiny step closer to the Matrix

I wouldn't really mind a life of leisure in exchange for serving as a battery.

Of course, chuck in fine medical attention and extra-long life while you're at it, thank you.

Virginia industrial park wants to power DCs with mini nuclear reactors, clean hydrogen

"using its own private gas-powered power plant"

Where are they getting the gas from, Russia ?

Or is this a liquid gas deal done at great cost to ferry over the Atlantic a batch of greenhouse gas with the excuse that fusion will be used later ?

Hands up who wants a PC? Lenovo reports declining returns

It's worse than that. Pre-COVID, only people who really wanted or needed a laptop purchased one.

Along came COVID and suddenly, everyone needed one.

Now the splurge is over, and hardware no longer increases performance 10% per year. You can buy the lowest cost phablet and still manage your email and watch YouTube without issue.

It's going to be at least three more years before anyone feels like they actually need a new laptop - barring hardware failures, of course. For most people, they've got one and they don't use it any more, so it'll just pick up dust until they change jobs.

Sorry, Lenovo, my crystal ball doesn't give a very favorable outlook to your future CEO bonuses.

Man arrested in Northern Ireland police data leak as more incidents come to light

So, arrested for accessing published information ?

Well done The Plod. You goofed, and now you're blaming anyone who looks at your goof.

I'm sure the terrorist charges were welcome.

I think Collection of Terrorist Information should be mirrored by a Publication of Terrorist Information.

Then we'd see how many numbskulls remained to goof like that.

Google opens up Chrome 117 Developer Tools box, drops in a few spanners

Chrome

The web browser I only use when accessing Google tools, or Amazon.

For everything else, I use Firefox + NoScript + uBlock Origin, or Brave.

Your sandbox ? As far as I'm concerned, you're in my sandbox.

Former DEC employees to rally against stagnant pensions post-HP

"scheduling a protest day"

Well, you're retired, so you have the time for it.

HP, on the other hand, couldn't care less. You no longer contribute to HP's reputation. The fact that your work built HP up to some heights no longer counts, HP has squandered that capital long ago.

I sympathize, but HP doesn't and DEC and Mr Hewlett are long gone.

You are now reaping the benefits of unrestrained capitalism.

Maybe vote for some social security in the years to come ?

P.S. : saying that from a country that is actively destroying its own social security and medical network, to transition everything to private offices, so maybe we'll have a beer together in the not-too-distant future.

Rising labor and component costs lead to UK product and service price hike at IBM

IBM's support contract costs

It's certainly quite cheeky for IBM to up the cost of support when they've fired all the expensive know-how in order to replace it with pimply-faced youths paid minimum wage or barely better.

ISP's ads 'misleadingly implied' existence of 6G, says watchdog

Let them be misleading

Let them try to rake in customers thinking that they're getting 6G wifi. It's public knowledge that 6G doesn't exist yet, so the customers will become irate and demand refunds and it will be a terrible mess for that company.

They might make money out of it, but they'll sweat every cent they make.

Vietnam admits it has just ten percent of the infosec pros it needs

Ride-sharing on scooters

In Benin, over twenty years ago, they were already doing that.

They were called zems, I think. They were all over the place in Cotonou. You could flag one down, give your destination, then hang on for dear life until you got there. The ride was about 25c in today's money.

Google reportedly designing chatbots to do all sorts of jobs – including life coach

Why turn to an AI life coach ?

Well, one point is that you're sure it isn't judging you.

Second point : with all the bull around wellness in general (soothing quartz bracelet, anyone ?), AI could indeed not be worse.

Final point : people listen to Gwyneth Paltrow, so I would actually prefer they listen to an AI in that case . . .

Check that, maybe they are.

Japan's digital minister surrenders salary to say sorry for data leaks

"such offers from execs and politicians are common in Japan as a type of mea culpa"

Yeah, well there won't be any French ministers doing that any time soon.

Oh, that must be because they're never wrong . . .

Musk's X caught throttling outbound links to websites he doesn't like

Indeed. I'm thinking that a good little CleanURL addon would do wonders to avoid that kind of issue as well.

Re: always on about absolute free speech

Which he has no qualms on quashing himself.

As usual, one rule for the peons, on rule for the ruler.

I really would like Musk to fuck off to Mars, although I can't bear thinking of the plight of all the other people forced to put up with that asshole.

Cruise self-driving taxi gets wheels stuck in wet cement

That seems to be exactly what President Macron thinks.

That's not what I understand when I read "wireless bandwidth constraints that delayed connectivity".

To me, that means that, if the vehicle cannot connect to the mothership in a timely fashion, it's ability to continue is heavily impacted.

That, in my mind, eliminates any possibility of using that kind of vehicle outside of a well-covered city.

No trips to the countryside are possible.