Eclipse
And all that is now
And all that is gone
And all that's to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon OpenAI
Posts by Neil Barnes
6971 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Apr 2007
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OpenAI wants to build a subscription for something like an AI OS, with SDKs and APIs and 'surfaces'
Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos
CERN boffins turn lead into gold for about a microsecond at unimaginable cost
UK Ministry of Defence is spending less with US biz, and more with Europeans
Monday 12th May 2025 06:38 GMT 
Oh, hi, Elon... can you give us a good price on some of your smaller rockets please? Don't worry about the payload, we'll do that bit, just some guidance. Doesn't need to go orbital, no need to worry about landing them...
Though on a more serious note, I wonder if cruise missiles aren't a better bet? At least you can turn those buggers around if someone decides it's all been a big mistake.
Microsoft wants us to believe AI will crack practical fusion power, driving future AI
Saturday 10th May 2025 08:22 GMT
Re: AI will crack practical fusion power...
So we've got this non-polluting, non-radioactive, non-carbon fusion power plant, right, and it's clean energy! Says so on the label, so it must be true. And frankly, I'm all in favour.
But... I can't help wondering about _heat_ pollution. Every Watt that comes out of that plant will, sooner or later, end up as heat. Is there perhaps a potential issue, given that this is going to be 'too cheap to meter' power (right, we've heard that before!) that the amount of heat we're generating becomes itself a problem? History suggests that if a resource exists, it _will_ get used.
It's probably already an issue with a carbon-fueled generator; heat when you burn the primary fuel, heat losses between there and the generator, and resistive heat losses in the final uses (ignoring transmission losses), and I'm sure the accountants have some pretty formulae to evaluate the overall efficiency of the system, but is that power ever accounted for as _heat_? Somewhere, everywhere, is getting warm... Consider people living in areas which are uninhabitable without at least some air conditioning, the output of which makes the local environment warmer. It's a vicious circle.
(I suspect it's a lot less of an issue with wind or solar systems; they take heat energy from the environment and (eventually) put it somewhere else. So at least things are constant.)
Top sci-fi convention gets an earful from authors after using AI to screen panelists
Microsoft burnishes green cred by paying Swedes to burn biomass and bury CO2
Commodore OS 3 is the loudest Linux yet
Tuesday 6th May 2025 11:40 GMT
Windows don't just wobble
Like you, this is the antithesis of Linux for me... on any OS the first thing I do is turn off the special effects and sounds, which here would be rather missing the point.
The good thing is not that it is done, but that it _can_ be done. One of these is definitely deserved --->
Altman's eyeball-scanning biometric blockchain orbs officially come to America
TAKE IT DOWN Act? Yes, take the act down before it's too late for online speech
30 percent of some Microsoft code now written by AI - especially the new stuff
Wednesday 30th April 2025 08:16 GMT
the blurring line between documents and applications
One ring to rule them all? No thanks...
I make data. I choose a program to generate it; I choose a program to process it. Those two programs may or may not be the same as each other; there may be more than one choice in either field. But _I_ choose...
Chinese carmaker Chery using DeepSeek-driven humanoid robots as showroom sales staff
Meta bets you want a sprinkle of social in your chatbot
Duolingo jumps aboard the 'AI-first' train, will phase out contractors
Wednesday 30th April 2025 04:38 GMT
I have to admit to a certain fascination with language learning: even with four years total immersion in German, I am still unable fully to express myself with anything like my fluency in English, nor to follow a complex program - say, a detailed news item or a political discussion - on the TV or radio.
I note the difference between the Duolingo course (it's not English->German, it's American->German and they're _not_ the same) and tutored classes: the first has you learning long lists of answers mostly by wrote with zero feedback except 'right' or 'wrong' (for example, when I did it, a single incorrect letter in an answer (including using a correct English spelling rather than the American) would make it wrong with no explanation); the second teaches you not German but German grammar... fine for an academic but not so good for someone who just wants a pound of tomatoes or to know who's Chancellor this week.
Surely there must be a half-way house - German As She Is Spoke? - that I have not yet discovered. Duolingo certainly isn't it; in its beginnings, when they _promised_ there would be no adverts nor charges (hah!) it wasn't too bad, but once they started that idiotic 'gamifying' of the courses it became silly - and very irritating.
After leaving citizens on hold for 798 years, UK tax authority has £1B for CRM upgrade
Tuesday 29th April 2025 13:24 GMT
Re: £1 billion (thousand million) over 15 years
Depending on the overheads - assume around 50% - and the average salary - is thirty grand a year enough to get sufficiently skilled people? Probably not... then you're looking at around a thousand people.
Oh, and this is government, so you'd need to budget for two thousand middle managers, too.
Tuesday 29th April 2025 09:31 GMT 
digital channels intended to ease service pressures didn't help as expected
Perhaps that might have been because people didn't _want_ to use digital channels?
Anything to do with the tax office beyond the very simplest query is a descent into madness. Even what may be a simple query (e.g. why is my tax all screwed up for the fifth year in succession?) which may have a very simple answer from a practitioner knowledgeable in the art, is emphatically _not_ simple for the person on the street who needs an answer. If it were, they wouldn't be asking... and a robot script doesn't cut it.
People, on the whole, need to talk to people, not machines. And if the tax office needs more people to answer the phones, it should hire them. It might even be able to get their income tax right.
Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, economists claim
Windows profanity filter finally gets a ******* off switch
What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack
Google goes cold on Europe: Stops making smart thermostats for continental conditions
Monday 28th April 2025 09:15 GMT
Re: Meanwhile
You are not alone in this lack of ambition.
Indeed, my German house has no direct thermostats wherever, apart from those integral to the Fernwarme district hot water system; there are individual thermostats on each radiator, mostly set at zero for the rooms we rarely use.
Old-fashioned, I know, but it suits us.
DARPA to 'radically' rev up mathematics research. Yes, with AI
AI-driven 20-ft robots coming for construction workers' jobs
Signalgate lessons learned: If creating a culture of security is the goal, America is screwed
Hydrotreated vegetable oil is not an emission-free swap for diesel in datacenters
Friday 25th April 2025 20:03 GMT
removal of traditional fossil fuel diesel and subsequent replacement with HVO
So, you remove fuel that's already bought and paid for and replace it with HVO? That sounds less then economical... why not wait until you've _had_ the power outage and burned off some of the existing fuel? Yes, you're going to get no immediate CO2 benefit from the old fuel, but it's a one-off cost.
AI training license will allow LLM builders to pay for content they consume
As ChatGPT scores B- in engineering, professors scramble to update courses
UK-based self-driving car startup Wayve heads to Japan for more driving data
RIP, Google Privacy Sandbox
How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux
Pharmacist accused of using webcams to spy on women in intimate moments at work, home
Canada OKs construction of first licensed teeny atomic reactor
Trump fires NSA boss, deputy
Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud
Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs
Thursday 3rd April 2025 14:46 GMT
Re: The economic "plan" behind the madness
Last time I drove a US automatic rental - admittedly, twenty years ago - it was clear that the engine, gearbox, and cruise control weren't talking to each other: a sudden drop of two gears to accelerate 5mph while cruising, or gears suddenly changing half way around a corner. It's clear that I don't drive in the US style.
(But then, my local service garage is always amazed at how little brakes I wear out: I don't drive German style of roaring up behind someone doing 100kph faster than them on the autobahn, and then jam my brakes on at the last second...)
Mozilla is rolling Thundermail, a Gmail, Office 365 rival
Wednesday 2nd April 2025 04:45 GMT
Re: cheers
I've used Thunderbird for years but to be honest the latest changes - Gnome effects, I surmise - leave me unhappy. I could live with - though not particularly enjoy - the change to hamburgers instead of menus, but replacing text in context menus with cute little pictures (e.g. for print or delete) with no text alternative really does my head in. So I tried Evolution again, but that seems to require a manual population of the contacts list, instead of doing the obvious addition of every received non-spam mail address (or even offering a menu option to do that). Maye I'm missing something obvious; I like the general look of Evolution.
But that said: I don't want a lot from an email client: a way to view mail without clustering mails into 'conversations' - I don't like that threading - and a way to send mail using a contacts list. I don't need or want all the bells and whistles of integration with office suites. I appreciate that my requirements may not those of other users, but I prefer the 'do one thing and do it well' philosophy rather than 'include the kitchen sink just in case' approach.
Privacy died last century, the only way to go is off-grid
European Gaia mapping satellite is retired but proves very tough to kill
Malware in Lisp? Now you're just being cruel
Today's jobs Microsoft thinks could use an AI assist: Researchers and analysts
US defense contractor cops to sloppy security, settles after infosec lead blows whistle
50 years ago the last Saturn rocket rolled out of NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building
Judge halts DOGE's union personal data grab at OPM, Treasury, Education
Wednesday 26th March 2025 06:34 GMT
Re: I'm not sure that the "judicial" branch really understands that the data has long flown the
It'll be an interesting situation (in the sense of the old Chinese curse) when/if the judiciary jails people for breaking the law - as in this case - and Trump immediately pardons them.
Oh, wait, he's done _that_ before.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
