Posts by Cris E

Tesla burns through a billion as Musk bets the farm on chips and bots

The future is going to be terrific! Golly I sure hope I can employ my Optimus as a chauffeur. I mean, how hard can driving be?

Anyone with a shed, an extension cord, a couple of GPUs and an overdraft is building datacenters. Fujitsu just offloaded five

Re: Private Equity you say?

>> Sold for scrap, then, as I am not buying.

Oh, come now. The whole cloud computing thing is just Someone Else's computers, so why should this be any different?

Sticker shock has execs rethinking this whole AI thing

Wall Street only sees things in terms of Wall Street, not any particular business. Valuations are just the amount of stock the market will bear, not a measure of how much capital a company needs or any function of inventory or earnings last quarter. So when narrative drives excitement and there's more money around than things to buy with it you'll get crazy numbers. Perhaps instead of saying valuation it would be better to call them Infatuations or Optimisms. "What's the Optimism of SpaceX this week?" "I heard OpenAI's infatuation is over $1bn. WTH?"

Re: Not just tokens

Until users get skills they will waste tokens badly, but unskilled people can never be sure if it's them or the system. Would it be better if I was using that other model? How about different prep tooling? How much will they have to spend to figure out what their work should cost? When will they know they have enough skills to guess right?

You'd think an industry would pop up to help measure these things and get some benchmarks down so users could tell what "standard" use cases cost on various models using various tools. You'd think that consultants could save some time and just cut to a simple table of numbers rather than leap from firm to firm teaching new miners how to pan for gold. But they're making much more selling shovels than maturing the industry.

At some point AI will have proven which use cases are bad fits and which are efficient, and companies will only spend too much on the parts that might pay off. But we are not there yet.

Enterprise AI still smarting from leaping before looking

Re: You forgot a word there, Nvidia

Nope. Our revenues and productivity are fine, thanks. In fact our revenues from all industries are great. It's been a really special year and at this point we're just going to sit back and watch the money roll in.

Now excuse me, I must sell some more chips to frightened hyperscalers, who it seems we really need to lend some more money to. Ta ta!

Even banks and hyperscalers are now sounding the alarm about the AI bubble

Re: Was the US government this involved in the Dot Com bubble?

@pipa

It should concern you, since "the government" is more or less equivalent to D Trump's latest whim, and that is almost always subject to the influence of last person who told him how he will personally profit from their advice.

Consider that Oracle is already deep into doing business with this administration and its approval of the massive Warner Bros purchase. As recently as 2024 David Ellison was dropping nearly $1m into Democratic hands and a year later he's Trump's best friend and a major donor. He believes nothing, of course, but he and Trump share an understanding of bribery so I suspect that most government intervention is going to go down the ORA sink hole to cushion the Ellisons' family transition from primarily software to a more diverse portfolio. Color me uninterested in the investment potential on that front.

Re: I got a hammer, find me nails.

@CyberDemon:

Two answers -

1. I could not agree more, this is ruining the development of skills and habits in our young people who may never understand that Work (eg writing an article, researching a topic, anything semi-substantial) often takes longer than 15 minutes. As it stands they can toss whatever into the hopper and in a matter of minutes out comes something answer-shaped, at low cost and of better quality than they could produce by lunch. They may never find out if it's right, or if they could have created something better on their own, because this seems to be good enough and no one appears to want more. Poison.

2. There are cases of highly repetitious work where an AI agent can be useful cranking out iterations in search of something. It doesn't need to create or even be average if it can automate harder tasks in a repeatable manner. Some of the mathematical "proofs" that have been credited to AI and many of the security vulnerabilities it's found are simply cranking through a multitude of low-percentage combinations looking for the needle in the haystack. It's not creative, maybe it shouldn't even be called AI, but it covers ground cheaper and faster than humans and sometimes that's of value.

Hackers shoveled snow for company, were rewarded with network admin access

Re: Interesting

And padding is easily typed asd or qwe and special char is always last so you only need to move your hands once and it's often an unshifted char and yes, still "secure".

Anthropic is removing its covert code for catching Chinese competitors

Re: The biter bit?

>>The cowboys at Anthropic and OpenAI cannot even write a decent scraper. I guess it is because they are all fresh out of uni research departments and so have no real world experience.

No, it's because their tools didn't scrape any decent scraper code and were left trying to write it themselves. Poorly.

AI agents: Cause of database sprawl. And also the proposed solution

Re: Mandelson Effect

Exactly like how "no one is coding", which is to say mostly not true and maybe the lessons from that trend aren't written yet.

How the AI bubble could pop and take down the global economy, according to the BIS

Re: In other news

> Just to be pedantic here, but the Holy See isn't in Italy, it's in the Vatican, which is a nation in its own right, enclaved within Rome.

Also being pedantic, that would be pedantic no matter where you said it.

Microsoft Access finally breaks free of its 22-inch form limit

Re: It was a tool in the toolbox, same as any other

Back in the days before easy web interfaces it was a decent option for front ends, or at least a lot more decent than Java-based frameworks or huge Visual Basic projects. You could cobble together some screens and plop them in front of a SQL Server back end without a dev team and it could survive some growth with backups and multi-user lock support.

As part of a huge Y2K effort we had to deliver an app to search thru the documentation for all the new infrastructure and applications. Alas no one had budget or time to build it, so some interns were tasked with a read-only Access app to distribute. Worked fine for years. Horses for courses, not everything is nails, etc, but in the right place it was so much easier than the early java frameworks.

Bold move, Cotton: Trump administration tells US techies it expects American quantum computer by 2028

Noble, almost JKF-like

"We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people...We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too."

Oh, wait, that was JFK. Makes me sad to see the decline of rhetoric and higher causes.

Only half of US datacenter capacity planned for 2026 is actually under construction

Re: Interesting

The AI providers are also starting to buy one another to reduce competition and consolidate revenue streams and access to hardware and training data. The little guys are reaching the point where they can stop pretending that they're going to make it for the VC money and begin hunting for the best buyout before the collapse.

Re: Why Texas?

>>Lack of regulation. Cities and counties have almost no ability to block construction of datacenters

Along those lines of minimal regulation, TX leads the country in renewable energy production by a wide margin. New centers can bypass the waiting for turbines by just setting up a huge solar or wind array in the middle of nowhere and side-step a big chunk of that problem. The other issue in TX is the water. They may have desert-like amounts of sun and the wind may never stop blowing, but it's really arid out there. That's why so many data centers are appearing in IA and NE: same low levels of responsible govt, same wind and sun and cheap land, but lots more water.

Re: Shock...

"Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!"

Re: Money and power to burn?

You know, the stuff real patriots use (Roads! Guns! People with Guns!) and not the tools of the weak and sickly (academia, public transit, admitting to weakness).

Claude celebrates Anthropic's stock market float with blockbuster ... outage

Re: Monster year

The inner circle guys are going to get rich (surprise!) and individual investors are going to end up holding the deflating balloons. Color me shocked.

Re: REPORTEDLY, Anthropic earns more in revenue

Oh making more is certainly important. You have to have a story to sell to investors, after all. There's just little chance it'll ever be enough to cover the bets, so we're on to the next funding source where it's easier to gather money but harder to slink away unnoticed. Still wouldn't let anyone I know invest in it (unless they get in early and sell by lunch time -- there's plenty of money to be made for the inner-circle folk.)

Threat hunters find Google API keys still usable 23 minutes after deletion

Re: Propagation/Synchronisation Problems are Not a New Thing

They can propagate lots of stuff around the world very quickly when they want to. Database syncs waaay faster than 20 minutes, for example. The difference is that when they want to crow about a feature they make it fast and when they can make money on the lag they don't

Cloudflare to fire 1,100 staff whose jobs just aren’t AI enough

Re: Can't wait for this bubble to burst

>> I am not saying there is a finite basket of fixed jobs that needs to be defended as-is, union-style. I am saying we are doing a shit job of managing these transitions.

We are doing a shit job. But instead of jobs we need to think in terms of a fixed number of incomes that need to be provided for, somehow, by someone. That number is approximately the number of citizens that will otherwise starve. Currently most are covered by jobs paid for by employers, and the balance by the state and private charity organizations in the form of rent subsidy, food stamps, homeless shelters, etc. In the future there will be far fewer employees needed so the share of public assistance will need to rise. We won't pay taxes, we don't like "those people" living near us, and the idea of not working (royalty excepted) is still looked down on. It's going to be a rough transition to get around those things while fending off mass unemployment and economic re-sizing and frankly we're pretty selfish so I don't expect things to go all that well (in the US at least.)

BOFH: Are you ready to raise our expense account limits now?

Re: B&Q sell those

Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Nutri-Matic Drinks Synthesizer: "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea"

Microsoft's GitHub shifts to metered AI billing amid cost crisis

Re: who knew The Register was such an easy mark for private-equity PR?

You are correct, but to be fair there was another very clearly awful angle where a related company that sold shrimp was pumping money out of RL through extravagant, unsustainable seafood sales. The vile PE lizards were working on multiple levels.

Re: And so it begins

Maybe we can save on output tokens by having Github just send out links to other companies' code that suits our needs.

C'mon, be honest, how much of what we all do is really that unique? Billing? Inventory? HR? Social media and content mgmt? Lots of health care and insurance and law and whatever other industry you want to name has been done fairly well and Github has a pile of it. They may as well just send out what's sitting there and make some money, save us all some time.

Magnificent irony as Meta staff unhappy about running surveillance software on work PCs

Re: It's all a bit shit really...

There are almost certainly deeper malign dreams out there, but most people are going to see lazy, rapacious retailers grabbing the lowest hanging fruit and not making much effort beyond that. Eventually they'll offer to help you vote or invest or sell your parents' organs, but for now they'll just aim for an extra $39 per plane seat.

We'll see how well the Meta Ray Bans do trying to read my handwriting. It's so inscrutable that there's a good chance even I won't be able to tell if it was interpreted correctly. My writing is so bad these days that it acts as an impetus to get on those tasks quickly before I forget what I was thinking.

The spaghettified DBMS chart that shows Oracle's crown is slowly slipping

Re: ABO

Ah, the Inertia Tax weighs heavy.

Re: This ain't DBMS vendors, it's cloud

Usually, sure. But corporate life is rife with shrink-wrap packages written for MS SQL or ORA or whatever and you just load them up because it's 100x harder to try moving them to some secondary platform (if it's possible at all.)

Customers revolt as GitHub Copilot 'fixes' rate limits

Re: Claimed-by-GH "Abuse"

I think the abuse was happening in the board room, and the abused marketing director who drew this up was looking for an out.

Re: the first hit is free…

Last weekend I was talking to a CS student expecting to graduate in a month without any idea how to make a living. I told her to hang on, the next year or two would be bad, but once the initial dust settles and companies realize they've cut too many programmers they'll start getting back into the market. Back when so many companies sent jobs to India there was a lull before they figured out how much less they got at that price point and they brought some work home. it's going to be bad while they figure things out, and many jobs won't be back, but some will. I am 24 months from hanging it up so someone can have my job when I go.

Telling an AI model that it’s an expert programmer makes it a worse programmer

"You are going to have to maintain this code"

I wonder if you could lead it to other behaviors you desire, like commenting and following standards. If it never has to consider understanding the output then everything is green field and you can always do whatever strikes your fancy. But code that's readable enough to understand and modify would be novel.

Microsoft publishes a workaround for Samsung's C:\ drive woes

Oh, did we skip a step?

"Then the user must create a batch file containing commands to restore the correct permissions and run it."

Wow, there's a lot in that step. If I knew the correct permissions...

AWS giveth with its right hand and breaketh with its left

Re: Missing the point (by a lot)

I'm not sure how you can write a piece like this somehow implying that the serious choice is between PG13 and PG14 when 15 and 16 and even 17 have been out for years. Our default has been PG15 for quite some time. PG14 is EOL on AWS next year and we're already starting to move our older apps up to avoid the Extended Support charges. We're far more concerned about having flexibility to choose better moments to do the upgrades than anything else.

Would also like to point out that we're not using Glue for reasons similar to those mentioned above. If you're stuck on it then you're stuck, but that was never a best of category kind of tool selection.

Microsoft ships VS Code weekly, adds Autopilot mode so AI can wreak havoc without bothering you

Re: The end is nigh !

After a few weeks of doing little but reviewing junior dev code there's a solid chance these Sr Dev "reviews" start trending down an LGTM road to perdition.

AI vs AI: Agent hacked McKinsey's chatbot and gained full read-write access in just two hours

Re: from "when mckinsey comes to town"..

"Well then have some accidents so we know the seat belt checks are justified. Jeez, do I have to do everything around here myself?"

Re: Ho Hum !!!

When all you've got is a hammer and you really don't know how to use it then everything looks like a thumb.

AWS says drones hit two of its datacenters in UAE, urges users to move resources to different regions

Re: Can someone clarify this for me?

>>I doubt the Arab states were expecting to be in the firing line like they are although I suspect that a lot of this is collateral damage from drones either missing the target or more likely being shot down (and they have to come down somewhere). <<

The world has been changing, and just assuming that Iran won't ever hurt another Arab nation has been getting less and less true over the past decade. They lashed out directly at American facilities regardless of what countries they were located in without any apologies. The rules have changed, and those immediate retaliation targets were likely chosen before the leadership was killed. Chaos is coming to the Gulf and thinking that AMZ or GOOG are somehow above all this is an amazing denial of reality.

Microsoft reportedly eyes E7 tier to make AI agents pay their way – like the humans they'll replace

Re: AI

The 1998 hype cycle wants its mindless fervor back.

No, wait, hear me out. You buy your pet food -- dog, cat, parrot, whatever -- on the web site, and it's delivered automatically every week for free. It's free because we take over the market and make up our costs on volume! You can't lose, we win, excellence all the way around. Eh? Eh? Now sign here...

AWS would rather blame its own engineers than its AI

Re: Blaming the humans is just stupid

Not to worry, the systems are getting easier to understand every day, so engineers won't need anything more than AI-based log readers and some agents to cascade the restarts.

Ope, wait, my bad, I meant to say systems are getting more complex and difficult to support every day, and it's approaching the point where cheap companies will stop trying and just equip engineers with AI-based log readers and some agents to cascade the restarts.

Amazon's $200 billion capex plan: How I learned to stop worrying and love negative free cash flow

Re: How are they paying for it?

ORA is an interesting case, where they're fetlock-deep in the NVIDIA circle financing scheme and buying entertainment empires and playing around with Tictoc. They are like the big three in that there's a database product propping up the other bets, but they don't necessarily have the same scale and they are playing much further from home in the movie and tv and whatever else business areas. But they are also somehow going to be spending $100b on data centers in just four years, though they seem to be walking that out a couple more because of shortages of things like chips, power, etc (notably not cash.) It'll be interesting how this plays out for them if the AI bets and the media games turn turtle at the same time.

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

Re: Humans

There is a significant percentage of the population where 40th percentile business drab-speak would be a huge improvement over anything they'd otherwise be able to write. So on that level it could be usefull. But when that 40th percentile voice erases everything above it, then we gots problems. That's not the better future.

KPMG partner in Oz turned to AI to pass an exam on... AI

Re: Modern problems

And modern solutions create modern problems.

Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead

new_website_backup_final2.april.tar.gz

new_website_backup_final2.april2021.tar.gz

new_website_backup_final2.april2023.tar.gz

new_website_backup_final2.april2027.tar.gz

Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

Re: code reviews, anyone?

That's an AI package people would actually buy: review code for efficiency, or security, or standards compliance. Maybe propose changes, but mostly find the stupid.

Unlimited espresso and paid by the PR, what could go wrong?

Re: Dogfooding

It certainly doesn't reflect well on any testing they've done. Were no real users involved in this, or only teams working on the same codebase against the same standards with the same bottomless budget?

Re: Verbose mode

I HEARD YOU ASKING FOR LESS OUT PUT, SO THE DEFAULT HAS BEEN STRIPPED.

No, I didn't ask for that.

OK, WE'VE STRIPPED VERBOSE AND PUT YOUR FILES BACK.

But I still need verbose.

EH, WE'LL SEE. PLEASE DEPOSIT 12000 MORE TOKENS SO YOU CAN SEE WHAT WE DO TOMORROW.

AI can predict your future salary based on your photo, boffins claim

Re: What fresh hell

Not fresh all, I'm afraid. Hot? More money. Tall? more money. Male? White? Look a lot like your dad, the CEO? money money money.

But at least this time it's automated, so faster and no less accurate. Progress, maybe?

Re: Lazy feedback loops

Turns out the most important factor was the metadata that identified the pic as coming from a Goldman Sachs employee. wHOOPS.

Have AI just gin up something lucrative looking. Once you're hired you can replace it with something half-way to what you look like and replace it again a day before you show up with one that's pretty close to your real, pocked, peasant face. Too late, clankers!