Posts by Zack Mollusc

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

Re: 'Female'

Disgusting! They should throw a bucket of water over them!

Re: Descension?

Other Woodpeckers?

Crims hit a $20M jackpot via malware-stuffed ATMs

Stupid design led by beancounting as usual

The ruffty-tuffty metal box which is designed to keep the money out of the grasp of naughty people has a cost which scales by volume.

Early ATM designs had the computer within the metal box, next to the money, only the keypad, screen and card reader were outside the box for obvious reasons.

Enter beancounters, who notice that putting the computer (which controls tens of thousands of euros in ready cash) OUTSIDE the box, so that it can be rewired, reprogrammed and generally hacked, will reduce the unit cost of the box by thirty euros or so.

Hurrah, across a €20,000,000 deployment of ATMs, you can save €30,000 in outlay whilst only exposing €30,000,000 in ready cash to increased risk of theft!!! Bonuses and promotions for all!

Scientists show it's possible to solve problems in your dreams by playing the right sounds

Lightspeed Briefs, for the discriminating crotch

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CJdF3zoL07g

If Microsoft made a car... what would it be?

Re: iCar

Only comes in silver. No boot or glovebox. Not serviceable, instead of changing the oil, you just buy a new one. No fans for either radiator or passengers. Cannot be modified.

Machine learning could yield faster, cheaper lithium-ion battery development

Yeah, no.

I think they are forgetting why we test things.

You think it will be fine, then you test to make sure.

If you think it should be fine and an AI or whatever agrees that it should be fine, you are still at the 'should be' stage and still need to test.

Stash or splash? Lawmakers ask NASA to find alternatives for International Space Station

Re: Based on past efforts (Skylab)

I like the irony of those bloody drop-bears getting something dropped on them for a change.

Re: Low energy to high orbit?

Not saying it is even possible at the altitude the ISS is at, but I seem to recall some talk of 'pushing' against the earth's magnetic field, presumably with an electromagnet.

1. if you don't want a random de-orbit, you need to give it a shove into a planned de-orbit so why not give it a shove to keep it in orbit a bit longer?

2. even unmanned and uncontrolled, it can be a valuable research tool for how materials fare in orbit long term and how to deal with space fungus as well as practice for docking or at least grabbing onto uncontrolled objects in orbit.

3. ISS is around 450 tons. it is not worth worrying about it causing a kessler cascade whilst everyone is frantically putting up tens of thousands of comsats at a couple of tons each.

Bots are taking over the internet and AI users are to blame

Hmmmm....

If bots are indistinguishable from humans in how they browse a website, and humans can no longer obtain any useful information from websites due to enshittification, ads, sponsored results, begging screens, redirection, cookie agreements, timeouts waiting for 27th party java code to initialise and FSM knows what else, how accurate are the results of a query to an agentic AI ?

Does it average the answer between the historical data it has been trained on ( "an arrow in the eye in 1066" ) and the current retrieved data ( "we would like just a moment of your time to bring your attention to our fundraiser")?

'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP

Re: Reality bites

Why not implement a tax on the use of 'foreign' software? Harder to justify £20,000 a year on office 365 when the tax is another £90,000 on top, plus another £90,000 for the operating system.

I doubt that anyone can hide their telemetry from the spooks.

Azure outages ripple across multiple dependent Microsoft services

Re: Perhaps...

It's just you. Those overseas tech giants are currently building agentic AI systems to oversee their operations and therefore the future will be entirely trouble-free.

Microsoft's 'atypical' emergency Windows patches are becoming awfully typical

Re: And ?

Ok then, smartass, anwer me this:

if I don't use Microsoft products to run my company, HOW WILL I PAY TENS MILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO MICROSOFT EVERY YEAR?

No Microsoft contract means no payments to Microsoft. Did you even go to business school?

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Re: Makes you wonder ...

:-)

Look out!

BOFH: Eight pints of a lager and a management breakthrough

Re: "often, in bad situations, doing something can make things worse."

An easy five pints, judging by your username :-)

AWS's inevitable destiny: becoming the next Lumen

Re: "have a life wtihout KFC waiting in retirement."

That is how I read it, too.

Tesla Full Self Driving subscription to rise alongside its capabilities

Re: Nearly there...

Silly me, I assumed that the self-driving systems were using sensors to evaluate the environment. Please explain how you think self-driving systems work and how this differs from my understanding (or lack of understanding).

Re: Nearly there...

I was talking about self-driving cars in general, not one specific implementation. The same problems apply to cameras in that you need to process even more data to accurately infer shape, orientation etc to calculate position and motion. Does that help you understand?

Re: Nearly there...

'within its operational envelope' seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting, there.

Predicting the velocity and paths, in real time, of multiple vehicles, each of which is altering dynamically in response to the other vehicles around it is non-trivial.

How many lidar returns does it take to accurately measure the shape of a vehicle so that you know where the centre of it is so that you can calculate how far it has moved and in which direction since the last calculation when it may be rotating relative to your viewpoint?

And so on.

Nearly there...

I thought from the start that self-driving vehicles looked too much like a problem that could nearly be solved but would always remain just out of reach.

As you keep increasing sensor range and resolution to approach human-like levels ( competent humans, the ones looking at tail lights and traffic behaviour over half a mile ahead ) you get so much data that processing it to identify and predict the paths of other vehicles requires too much hardware and energy to be financially viable.

House of Lords votes to ban social media for Brits under 16

Re: Thinking of the adults

Why bother implanting something in their hands that gives them away even if they make a run for it, when they already have such a device permanently in their hands ? Just install it as an app.

Power scarcity drives datacenters to Texas, where the juice is

Re: Really!

Just use lots and lots of air conditioning units, duh!

Manchester ATM ups PIN requirement to full Windows login

Re: Not the only OS in town...

OS/2 Warp - powered ATMs were much snappier and more responsive on 200mhz hardware than XP-embedded ATMs with 1.2 GHz hardware with all the peripherals the same. And they didn't die if they were power cycled. OS/2 FTW!!

Naturally, management observed that OS/2 worked faster and more reliably on cheaper hardware and so moved heaven and earth to throw money at Microsoft and upgrade the ATMs to XP embedded.

Apple hopes to save Siri from laughingstock status with infusion of Google Gemini

Surely:

Wait until standby mode

If random number is odd

Detect brightness and discard

Lookup userOffset in table and discard

Set to full battery-draining brightness on wake.

Optimus Schmoptimus - Boston Dynamics' humanoid robot is already in mass production

Good point

In fact, why do they always spec evil glowing red eyes in robots? Is it somehow cheaper to make evil LEDs than non-evil LEDs? Is it just that the process of making evil LEDs has been optimised over the decades and now non-evil LEDs can never be competitive?

AI's grand promise: Less drudgery, more complexity, same (or lower) pay

Re: Rational

The Board not giving themselves bonuses is even more fanciful than anything 'AI' has ever spewed out.

When the AI bubble pops, Nvidia becomes the most important software company overnight

Re: Keep following the money

It is much worse than that. If an employee asks for a pay rise, you just say "no" and make them do twice as much work for the same money. When the AI company puts the subscription up to £10,000 a month, then £50,000 a month, where will you find an AI subscription willing to do the work for £0 as an intern to get a foothold in the business? You can blackmail an employee into signing an NDA, but the AI subscription already owns all your IP, processes and data and has been selling them to anybody since the minute you signed up (including the card details you signed up with).

UK prepares to wave goodbye to 3G telecoms as tri-hard tech retires

Re: End Of An Era?? Really??

I haven't worked for a traffic authority, but I have monitored traffic queues in real time at junctions where traffic lights have stopped operating. If you think that traffic is faster with lights you have never seen the lack of queues at intersections with broken traffic lights and compared them with the lengthy tailbacks and gridlock which return as soon as the traffic lights are mended.

Re: End Of An Era?? Really??

Since traffic lights increase both journey times, wear on road surfaces, and pollution, anything which mars their operation has to be a good thing for the planet. Hurrah.

X sues to protect Twitter brand Musk has been trying to kill

squiggle

Before, during and after the name changes, everyone round these parts just called him Ponce, or That Pretentious Wanker Ponce, as in "Jesus, they are playing Ponce again, turn the radio off for a bit!". Nice to hear he did one good thing ever in causing the twats at Sony some grief.

Apple blocks dev from all accounts after he tries to redeem bad gift card

Typical low-IQ Normie

He should have paid more attention when technical people were speaking, then he wouldn't have blundered into this corporate techno-quagmire.

AI superintelligence is a Silicon Valley fantasy, Ai2 researcher says

Ethical RAM fabs

If i were an unethical RAM fab who was being paid to produce wafers that were going into a stockpile, I would 'accidentally' send them all the duff ones and flog the good ones into the scarce and lucrative open market.

The CRASH Clock is ticking as satellite congestion in low Earth orbit worsens

True

We can sleep easy in whichever beds are not beneath any flight paths.

Microsoft research shows chatbots seeping into everyday life

Re: "...chatbots seeping into everyday life"

No, i think seeping is correct. Microsoft are throwing buckets of chatbots all over everyday life, much like someone throwing buckets of piss everywhere, and the chatbots, if I can liken them to piss, then seep in.

Space-power startup claims it can beam energy to solar farms

Hmm...

If you could beam energy through the atmosphere without it being absorbed/dispersed past the point of utility, we would surely be already seeing satellites being cooked by ground-based energy weapons.

As humanoid robots enter the mainstream, security pros flag the risk of botnets on legs

Global population decline

What global population decline? It has doubled in the last fifty years.

SpaceX loses debut V3 Super Heavy in ground test mishap

Re: Oh dear

On the other hand, it did not split along the weld seams, so that at least shows the welds are stronger than the sheets that have been welded. That is as good as it gets for welds, isn't it?

Was it a mishap causing overpressure in the rocket?

Was there a defect in the steel sheet itself?

Hopefully, as it was on test, there will be measurements and video that will help the investigation.

Microsoft-SAP pact aims to keep Euro cloud running in a crisis

Seamless failover

Okay, so when I get an email from microsoft telling me that I am now on the naughty list and have no further access to my data on their cloud, I then access my data on their cloud and copy it to a local friendly cloud? Is that how it works, because I think I see a flaw?

Rust on the Moon? Far-side dirt says yes, actually

Fake news

Whilst the Earth is, indeed, spherical-ish, the moon is flat. It only looked round to the Apollo astronauts due to optical effects of light passing through the aether.

Now you can share your AI delusions with Group ChatGPT

TSTRGPT : I feel this meeting is going really well, lots of positive synergy, how about we all keep our energy up by having some toast?

AI slop hits new high as fake country artist goes to #1 on Billboard digital songs chart

Re: "Actual humans with talent"

You can have those statements both be true if the actual humans with talent are painstakingly writing, rehearsing and recording songs that will be commercially successful, ie appealing to the lowest common denominator by being hyper-generic slop.

Rocket Lab's Neutron slips to 2026: 'Our aim is to make it to orbit on the first try'

More broken promises!!!!!!!!!!!!

More delays and excuses from this CONMAN!!!!!

Trillions of taxpayer DOLLARS WASTED on this grifter!!! HYPERLOOP FAIL!!! SELFDRIVING FAIL!!! It is BEYOND BELIEF that...

What?

Neutron?

Really?

Oh, I thought you said Elon.

Sorry.

Good luck to the Rocket Labs team. Space is difficult. Looking forward to seeing it launch whenever it is ready.

25 years of meatbags permanently in space on the ISS

Swappable modules

Can you swap out the modules? Wouldn't they have vacuum-welded themselves together ? would the mating surface revealed still be smooth and true? Which colour of gasket goo does one use in space?

It should be attempted before de-orbit just to see what happens.

Azure's bad night fuels fresh calls for cloud diversification in Europe

Can't fix stupid

There is no legislative way to mitigate incompetence and/or corruption at the top levels of an organisation.

Apple's ultra-thin iPhone flops as foldable iPad hits a crease

foldy screens for bendy iphones

Just a thought, but why not put a foldy technology screen into a normal slab shaped phone? If you sat on it wrong, it wouldn't crack the screen. Might help it survive being dropped, too.

Apple’s AirDrop makes weird latency spikes for Wi-Fi wonks, researcher finds

Re: I miss the obvious first step in this article..

Putting your findings on the internet IS informing Apple in the best way possible. Apple's PR department finding out about a bug that harms their image will get the issue addressed far sooner than an easily ignored quiet word to the engineering department that hasn't been allocated sufficient budget to test for bugs.

Britain's AI gold rush hits a wall – not enough electricity

Re: people power

Yes. A great film Not some great films.

Re: The obvious solution?

I assume those waves that can erode granite cliffs and throw around ships weighing tens of thousands of tons do not possess enough energy to be worth tapping.

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

spacex not innovating

I hear this a lot, rockets have been done, propulsive landing has been done, re-entry and re-use have been done etc. All true, but only spacex is putting them together to build a useful system. Why has nobody else stolen and implemented all this prior work from the last century if it is so trivial?

Wright brothers did not invent the field of airodynamics, internal combustion, control surfaces etc but they managed to put it all together into something which could sustain controlled flight (granted, it needed rails and a pulley to get airborne).

Re: Why so many trips

Well, speed is only the thing if you want to get back to the moon before the Chinese land people there.

If you do a quick flag plant and return, the Chinese will say "Big deal, you did that in the sixties and have obviously stagnated since then. We are building a cool moon base with blackjack and hookers."

You will look even worse if you try and do a flag-plant and scoot but something goes wrong and people die.

Better to fail on a more ambitious mission than a repeat of a simpler one

These are just the propaganda and political reasons which can be grasped by the gormless public, the scientific reasons for developing moon base technology are less easily understood.