Posts by Zack Mollusc

Hacking US crosswalks to talk like Zuck is as easy as 1234

Re: Polara

Bona!

NASA doubles odds of Moon hitting near-Earth asteroid

Re: Our moon has protected us

Serves the stupid dinosaurs right for congregating at the Chicxulub impact site.

FAA closes investigations into Blue Origin landing fail, Starship Flight 7 explosion

Re: I read a rocket scientist describe how Starship is doomed

If the problem is resonance, a scale model would not have revealed it. Hopefully they can alter the shape enough for it to not resonate with whatever frequencies are hitting it, without adding too much mass.

Or maybe Starship will never work. If that is the case, how else will we get hundreds of tons to the lunar surface?

Boeing's Starliner may fly again, pending fixes to literally everything

Re: Whether or not astronauts will be aboard has not been decided yet

"He's fallen in the water!" - Little Jim

Uber CEO warns robotaxis can't find a fast route to commercial viability

Re: Autonomous vehicles

Tell that to the robocar that ran up the arse of a bendy bus. It made the erroneous assumption that the bus would accelerate and presumably ignored the sensor readings of the, and I must stress this, BACK END OF A BUS, which it proceeded to plough into.

Under Trump 2.0, Europe's dependence on US clouds back under the spotlight

Re: "It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds"

You beat me to it :-)

It is also no longer safe to play russian roulette, smoke eighty a day or drink mercury.

HP Inc to build future products atop grave of flopped 'AI pin'

Bizarre!

If they had "highly skilled technical talent", why didn't they tell them about the AI Pin that was being developed? Their input would have been valuable, Shirley?

Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet

An even more cynical person would say that the vast majority of company emails and presentations are devoid of facts/contain misinformation/go unread/are not understood by the recipient.

SpaceX claims another Starship success, but fumbles the catch

Re: "the achievements of SpaceX are substantial and gamechanging."

Very true. There is a chemist and accountant on youtube who has been carefully monitoring the Starship programme. The first test flight of starship wasted three billion dollars of taxpayer money. The second flight was a waste of three billion dollars of taxpayer money, as was the third and so on.

Also, and I don't know if anyone else has spotted this, Spacex has yet to land a single colonist on Mars. It is all broken promises.

Re: Huge progress?

Questions which can only now be investigated having proven that the engine can be relit in zero g.

OpenAI to charge $200 per month for ChatGPT Pro

Re: Could be worth it

Hehehe, all the magazine and therefore web articles on 'how do I make some money?' assume.

a) you have huge outgoings which can be cut ( don't pay insurance on the Bentley when you only use it two days a year!)

b) you have assets sitting idle ( did you know gold has monetary value? Sell a few dozen of those gold ingots you have in the loft) ( why not rent out some of your properties in Monaco ?)

Boeing union workers in US reject contract: 96% vote to strike

Easy fix

This is just a problem of perception. If boeing just edited the job titles of all their staff to contain the words "executive officer" , then it would be possible to pay them all seven figures with bonuses and other perks.

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

Re: Beyond me

When you finally leave school and look at any decision made by any company ever, you will realise what a stupid remark that was.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Re: Related?

You can bet your bottom dollar that, should Crowdstrike survive this episode, they will cut staff numbers to release funds to pay bonuses to C-suite and hope they can continue to extract as much money as possible for as long as possible.

Breaking the rules is in Big Tech's blood – now it's time to break the habit

Re: Free Microsoft software, anyone

Even if this were possible,

A) the software would still be microsoft code, full of bugs and bottlenecks and spyware.

B) giving away the software for free would not stop companies from paying $millions to microsoft for the same or inferior versions. If there is no money involved, how do you skim any of it off for yourself and who will bribe you to sign the contract?

Peloton faces lawsuit over claims it pedaled past privacy

So..

.. they were peddling the data?

Windows: Insecure by design

Re: I'm hard pressed to imagine what practical use it would be for anyone.

What do you mean 'this week'? We are at war with Easasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Stability AI stabilized by investment from Silicon Valley royalty, new executive team

AFAIUI

The third step is profit.

Humanity's satellite habit could end up choking Earth's ozone layer

Re: Plenty of better reasons to prosecute Musk

Hmmm... Starship is not close to being a functional system in the same way as the shitty Wright Flyer completely failed to carry any passengers at all and the pile of crap that Lindberg threw together never got anywhere near crossing the Atlantic to England.

Well

I would assume aluminium is used in satellite construction because it is light. If the vast Muskrocket performs as is hoped, you could make the aluminium parts from something heavier but less damaging.

Pack of GM Cruise robo-taxis freeze, snarl up Friday night traffic amid festival crowds

Re: Johnny Cab

Accidental downvote. Sorry.

Self-driving cars safer in sunlight, twilight another story

Re: From the paper in question

Ideally the signalling would be in an 'open-source' kind of format so that it is easily recognised by all. If the signals were in a form that humans could detect, that would be even better. Maybe a bright purple light positioned so that it shone towards the following traffic and was triggered by the decelleration of the vehicle it was mounted on.

That is my suggestion: an AI system continuously monitoring the vehicle's velocity via gps, lidar, cameras, gyroscopes ,magnetometers and ouiji boards so that it can detect when the brakes are applied and light up a bright purple light or lights on the rear of the vehicle to inform other road users, robotic and human, of the braking manouver. Simple but effective.

From RAGs to riches: A practical guide to making your local AI chatbot smarter

Hallucination problem solved

Well, that has cleared that up. AI has no intelligence or reasoning powers, so it will be fine to have it refer to a business's internal processes, procedures, and support docs because they are comprehensive, correct and free from any ambiguity.

We need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this network

Re: "This being 20 years ago now"

I am baffled by sales/marketing. Is there any evidence that this influence affects everyone, or are there certain sub-groups whom it affects?

Microsoft's Recall should be celebrated as the savior of SMEs and scourge of CEOs

Re: What happened to ask the user?

Yes, and below that speed, such as a trials bike at near standstill, you steer the front wheel in the direction you want to go.

Re: with every keypress and mouse click – they're automating their way out of their jobs

Jesus, has anyone here ever been employed in business?

If someone employs you to do something, be it create a workflow from an existing process or whatever, nobody is interested in that goal being accomplished. The only thing that matters is that it looks like you are doing it and you have some result which looks like what was expected.

If an LLM hallucinates its way to a plausible outcome, that is mission accomplished. Perception is reality.

Re: What happened to ask the user?

Even a trials bike at near-standstill?

Re: What happened to ask the user?

Anyone in a senior position did not spend much time on the shop floor, how are they expected to understand what they are looking at?

Re: Nope

If you don't have it in stock, take the order and payment, claim to have shipped it and direct shipping enquires to a call centre/chatbot who can stall until the customer gets bored/dies.

This is on like day two of business school.

Windows 11 24H2 might call time on that old NAS under the stairs

Well...

My computer regularly connects to malicious servers in order to steal my data, I put up with this behaviour because inertia. If, in addition to this behaviour, the latest version of this spyware will also make my NAS unreachable then it may force me to overcome my inertia and go over to a different OS.

Will Windows drive a PC refresh? Everyone's talking about AI

Re: The end of the PC

An AI will save you half an hour by delivering the answer much faster. It will be the wrong answer, but it will be much faster and often plausible.

UK law gives green light to self-driving cars from 2026

Re: @ravenviz

Easier, too. No need for sensors to detect other road users, traffic lights or one-way systems, no need for precision gps to keep to the correct side of the road and off the pavement/grass etc. No requirement for lights or indicators.

Just make sure that it is painted black and the person on it is wearing dark clothes at night.

An attorney says she saw her library reading habits reflected in mobile ads. That's not supposed to happen

Re: Can the game access the tablet's microphone?

Would you be the type of person who looks at a computing device with microphones, cameras, gps, internet access and an operating system and applications provided by companies who can make money selling your information and say "Whelp, can't possibly be that spying on me, must be psychics to blame."?

Cops developing Ghostbusters-esque weapon to take out e-bike thugs

Re: Because you don't want to accidentally brick a Tesla

Just to address the driving without number plates issue, it depends where you are. Bradford, UK no longer enforces number plates for Audis, BMWs, VWs, quad bikes or motorcycles.

Microsoft claims it didn't mean to inject Copilot into Windows Server 2022 this week

Re: Misnomer

..but can you trust the provider of the tool you use to check what is running?

China 'the most competitive market in the world' for the iPhone says Tim Cook

It is obvious

The current range of iphones is far too thick to appeal to consumers. Apple need to reduce the thickness by another 0.1mm,

Tough luck, bosses, AI is coming for your job, too

Interesting..

The best part will be the research into what management actually does, and what they base their decisions upon.

Maybe we can save enough energy and resources to halt climate change by replacing all management on the planet by a single, faulty, 4004?

CEO of UK's National Grid warns of datacenters' thirst for power

Re: off peak power

Surely this is an opportunity for Taylor Swift to produce nudes of Taylor Swift cheaper and faster than building and powering a data centre?

Windows 10 failing to patch properly? You are most definitely not alone

Re: non-optional updates

Accidental downvote due to fumblefingers. Sorry.

Copilot pane as annoying as Clippy may pop up in Windows 11

Wow!

Hadn't thought about iTunes for years.

I remember having to download it to use an iPod that I had been given and the first thing it did was rename some music files without asking for permission.

There was apparently some switch in the settings for 'do not make changes to user files without asking' , but I didn't know that at the time .

Anyhoo, it became obvious that Apple had spent a great deal of time and effort to make it as difficult as possible to copy data to and from a storage device so I threw it in the bin and deleted iTunes.

Ah, memories.

World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads

They have a point...

1.0 is a very unusual family name. It is not all that surprising that they thought you were a bot.

Why login to Meta?

Why is it necessary to log in to Meta? I thought they were surveillancey capitalisming everybody? Surely they know who is accessing their systems?

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

Hehe, I was going to ask the same thing.

Someone had to say it: Scientists propose AI apocalypse kill switches

extra layer?

Is this proposed kill switch a replacement for, or in addition to, the preset kill limit that killbots have?

It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down

Re: THIS!!!

The trillions spent on AI would indicate that returning erroneous results is not a problem.

just use website technology

Use of industry standard website coding techniques would stop these attacks.

Pretty hard to download someone's bitcoin wallet when every request is intercepted and redirected and requires the execution of 3Gb of javascript, solving of 12 Captchas, consenting to tracking and watching 20 minutes of advertising before timing out and making you start again.

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

Re: Cybertruck - the gift that keeps on giving...

Oh, bravo! Made my day.

250 million-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released – but the internet isn’t built to use them

Odd.

I find it strange that IPV4 has been running out of addresses for twenty years, has run out of addresses ten years ago, and now bitter infighting on a global scale for this scarce resource which is vital for commerce has pushed the price up to an eye-watering $30.

Really?

$30 when streaming companies want $5 for a one-time viewing of a heavily compressed SD resolution version of a fifty year old B movie that is in the dvd bargain bucket at the supermarket?

Attempts to demolish guardrails in AI image generators blamed for lewd Taylor Swift deepfakes

why is nobody...

..discussing the horrifying work being done by geneticists? I recently saw a documentary about a gigantic deformed mouse which had escaped from the lab and was driving a steamboat whilst whistling. I have not been able to sleep since.

An established AI player is in nasty trouble – in this market? What? Why?

Re: Ask Dr Theopolis

On the catwalk?

On the catwalk?