Posts by John Smith 19

UK government tech procurement lacks understanding, says watchdog

"We actually have a pretty good head of procurement. "

Quite possibly.

But do you (and they) work for a government department?

That's the where the problem lies.

"It's been a characteristic of UK and doubtless many other governments for years."

To which the obvious follow up question would be "Is the UK averagely bad or is there something about the UK Civil Service system that make it exceptional (but not in a good way)?

*Decades* of resellers, consultants and consultants have...

persuaded Ministers that competent internal procurement and project management skills are unnecessary

And 46 years on from Margaret Thatcher this is what you get.

The question is given that the current Administration has a hugemajority (and therefore can do pretty much what they want, although it is usually a good idea to try for consensus if you want things to stay in place ) what will they do about it?

IDK. Hopefully something that will produce some enduring benefits.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Re: "My ISP already knows how old I am"

I am the OP for this comment and I'm upvoting all of you.

You are quite correct that until you're convicted it's only an accusation. Fair point. OTOH what of the "Yes I did have sex with a minor but it was consensual, and the jury agrees and acquits?"

Keeping in mind that as a minor "consent" is impossible by definition. They might not be found guilty but they have committed statutory rape. *

The case looked at in the Alexis Jay report were multiple girls (not "Young women") accusing multiple men and a gradually rising pattern ranging from flattery and small gifts up to physical violence.

I'd suggest any honest, competent police officer hearing that story repeatedly would be thinking "This looks like a pattern"

*Matt "school" Gaetz would probably be in this category. He's never been charged and daddy could probably hire a good enough legal team to keep him out of jail.

"My ISP already knows how old I am"

Excellent point.

The last "Child Exploitation & Sexualisation" Tsar the clod Cameron put in charge of this didn't like this approach probably because she couldn't figure out how to put parent access control on her browser.

Note the default position of British Civil Servants when they are asked to deal with these sorts of matters. This subtly reinforces the "Honestly, this would not be a problem if we just had a National ID card scheme (with cradle-to-grave tracking database in the back end, as TB wanted)"

Require the maximum amount of information to be disclosed.

Meanwhile will Tiktok/Facebook/X/whoever face any penalty for hosting pron?

Requiring browser downloads to have parental controls enabled by default? Making for-profit access to the internet without blocking access to age-sensitive sites a criminal offence? Requiring UK ISP to confirm you are the subscriber ? All (more or less) possible and less draconian. But don't look anywhere near the

There is an old saying that "Politician seek to elevate prejudices to polices," IOW they make their problems our problems.

Meanwhile after the seven yearinvestigation of child rape gangs done done Alexis Jay of real harm done to children IRL of 1000s (literally) how many of it's 20 recommendations have been carried out? It's said that none of them have but OK it was delivered the day (10/10/22?) Liz Truss threw in the towel but honestly, so f**king what? 7 yrs in the making. I'm guessing some of them would cost money but at least a few should have been fairly low hanging fruit.

Perhaps they could start by reminding all serving British police officers of 7 things.

1) The Age of Consent in the UK is 16. 2)If <16 you are a child 3)Children cannot give consent 4)The legal term for having sex with a child <16 is "Statutory rape" 5)Statutory rape is a crime.6)Adults accused of having sex (with or without force) with a child are rapists. 7)The term for children who've had sex with adults is survivor.

The failure of multiple police forces to tackle the same pattern points to a systemic failure of the police mindset, which says some very nasty things about the PoV of a lot of officers. The IOPC investigation (in which one of their investigators was recommended to investigate one of the whistle blowers) and failed to find any senior officer involved in ignoring these allegations) looks to have been quite ineffective.

TSMC plans to have 1.6nm chips in 'volume production' by 2026

Re: WOW

I never claim to be much more than clueless.*

But I have spent a lot of time around marketing people so I've learned to tell the difference between people who know what they're talking about and people who want to give the impression of knowing what they are talking about.

So I did a little looking and found this article on nanosheet which was very interesting.

Here's the thing. The are all basically FET's. And like all FET's they have a length, width and "height". Now in nanosheet "height" is established by the Si layer thickness between the SiGe sacrificial layers. Potentially that is already 1 atom thick already and the gaps allow developers to circumvent the thickness limitations of the oxide, which is a pretty big deal, and definitely helps.

But that still leave the width of the silicon "line" between Drain and Source, not it's length. That width is established lithographically and the fact that mfgs are so coy about what it is and indicates that it's become a massive PITA to reduce.

The point is there will be a day when that width approaches a single atom and at that point it's game over for all FETs.

BTW "Vacuum electronics" IE mfg radio valves in silicon could manage switching speeds in the Thz range in the 80's. Faster is not just possible, but much faster is possible, at the expense of a very alien architecture.

*Sum total of all human knowledge (and its growth rate) mean I cannot have anything more than a minute fraction of it in my head. OTOH neither can anyone else :-(

WOW

The hottest "Chippie" in town?

That's about 6 atoms wide --> oxide layer of 0.6 atoms???

Blue Origin reaches orbit with New Glenn, fumbles first-stage recovery

On the upside

Well done to Blue for 1st time to orbit

But

They got a lot of practice in with New Shepperd first.

It's a bit disappointing they didn't manage a first stage recovery given the considerable Isp gain of LO2/LH2

SX showed once you can recover the first stage (and reuse it) after a cost effective refurb (that last bit was what f**ked the Shuttle) your profit skyrockets

However that is (in principle) the easy part.

If y ou run the numbers the orbital stage (per unit mass) has about 11x the Kinetic and Potential energies of the first stage (using the F9 stg1 altitude and velocity information. I'm guessing NG has more of the 50/50 velocity spit of conventional ELV's, but I could be wrong).

Time will tell if they become effective competitors to SX.

Crypto klepto North Korea stole $659M over just 5 heists last year

Keeping the great-and-glorious-leader fed is *not* cheap

Even after the diet. *

*I am of course talking about North Korea. Other fat kleptocrats with a massive sense of entitlement are available.

Price-fixing-as-a-service: The claim against healthcare cost-cruncher MultiPlan

IOW "Computer says "No""

Just to be clear a fee-fixing cartel is exactly like a price-fixing cartel. The actual new wrinkle is the insurers outsourced this to a third party "At arms-length."

Note also it's a protection racket.

"Join the network you get this price. Stay outside and you get this instead."

So over time everyone is in the network.

And history shows exactly what happens when there is effectively a single price in the market for a service.

It goes up, and up...

UK prepared to throw planning rules out the window for massive datacenters

Wow, the SEL's are out in force today.

Dailymailonline gone down?

"in the name of Net Zero you'll also be having to give up

your car, foreign holidays, meat, effective heating"

And which constituency will you be running as the Reform UK candidate for exactly?

"Container sized nuclear"

It's true you can build MW sized reactors to fit an ISO container. The US military developed several during the 60's for remote deployment at what are now called Forward Operating Bases.

It's doable if you a) Use bomb grade enrichment. At >20%U235 cores can be tiny b)Put about a 600 radius circle around it. Easy(ish) to do on a military base. Not so easy in a car park.

Here's a little safety figure for you to ponder. It's been described elsewhere so you can look it up.

A PWR Fuel Element is a block of uranium dioxide fuel pellets 17 rows by 17 columns about 14 feet long. It's the standard fuelling unit of a PWR. most of the used ones have been in a water tank for at least a decade.

Imagine one of these 600m from you. For some reason you decide to run toward it.

You will never reach it. The radiation rises as an distance halves. IOW by the time you're less that 0.6m (2 feet) the radiation level will be 1024x higher. You will pass out and if not pulled back you will die.

It's not just the core, it's the generating system that goes with it. Depending on the architecture that's going to get hot as well. Possibly very hot if you're using nitrogen as coolant (that's what the US Army design did). It's not the reactor that's big. It's the shielding around it (and how much of the Balance of Plant has to be inside the shielding) that hurts you.

"This is based on 14 years of data that I have had the panels."

And how much storage (battery or otherwise) do you have to flywheel through the dull patches?

Does your system track when you did take power from the mains?

I'm not doubting your experience, but are you seeing the full picture.

"Bugger all in the grand scheme: https://gridwatch.co.uk/"

Good one.

Not as pretty as an alternative site but like the https connection.

And once again shows how desperately dependent on Combined Cycle Gas Turbine power the UK is.

And as long as that remains the case the UK electricity price will always be pinned to the gas price.

"They have to be near all those trading screens in the city."

If you've read the book "Flash Money," (by the author of The Big Short) you'll know that for Hedge Funds it's in the same server room as the exchange servers.

That's because reading between the lines HF's AKA High Frequency Traders are mounting automated man-in-the-middle attacks against actual share purchases and front-running them, using their very high number of cancelled transactions as probes of share price and availability.

Basically if you had their hardware and software you could be equally "smart" in your trades.

"Britain's planning system is still seen as a significant barrier"

Because it is?

I've seen reports saying the issue with the UK planning system is it puts a lot of power to block anything in the hands of a few planning officers. This is at least part of the cause of the "We have no houses being built in this area" lament because when a builder says they want to put up a block the planning officer gets "We don't want them here"

But houses ain't bit barns.

The UK is about the size of a single US state yet HMG has what seems to be a huge number of data centres.

Shouldn't they be trying to reduce that number? Put them in the best parts of the country for cooling and power? The whole of the UK population is roughly 1 3/4 x the size of California.

Just a thought.

Sonos CEO steps down after smart speaker app upgrade hit bum note

"henceforth “always establish rigorous quality benchmarks

at the outset of product development""

Note the use of the future tense in this sentence.

In the 3rd decade of the 21st century yet another company discovers the "Second system" effect described in FE Brooks book in 1975

And (Oh gosh) it appears no one was responsible for monitoring the quality of the software in the upgrade.

Or of checking if it delivered on spec they'd worked out (that's the "Validation" in "Verification and Validation" BTW)

Note this is not startup. They already got a product which it seems people liked (note that past tense).

I've got one of these. I found it in a heap of rubbish and couldn't work out what it was or did. Got some interesting parts. Keypad, USB port, microphone, speaker. Waterproof casing. Rechargeable battery as no power block?

Hands-on jobs to grow fastest, because AI can't touch them

"Us users of AI prefer the term 'bullshitting'."

Can I suggest the term "Gaslighting" when talking to the C-suits?

It's polite but still conveys the idea the system is trying to convince you of stuff that's simply not true.

Remember this is the PoV of the WEF

IE the boss class.

It's what they want and what they fear.

IOW It'll serve as a great con-sultants and con-tractors guide to how to sell stuff to these people over the next few years.

" You think it'd be hard to figure out loading and unloading a washing machine

with an automated laundry basket? "

I kind of do think that.

Because people have been talking about "The robot butler" since the 1960's

Seen one yet?

The thing about successful autonomous robot applications is their environment is either very structured (robot work cell) or very empty (drones flying in the sky)

But houses (especially British houses, with no minimum legal limits on floor plan) are anything but empty.

And robot manipulators are pretty bad at handling things that are floppy which is a pretty good definition of all clothes.

BTW it can be argued that a washing machine is a robot. It senses and manipulates its environment IE it's wash tub and produced a processed result.

"corporations are required to abide by any agreements their AI enters into. "

Now this I like.

Trust your AI that much? Back it to the hilt.

Simple yet effective.

Tesla, Musk double down on $56B payday appeal

"Which would involve "

POTUS stating "The country is a mess. Only I can fix it and it's going to take more than 4 years to do so. I am therefore suspending elections, Congress and Senate until that time"*

That's what complete Presidential immunity for official acts looks like.

He doesn't even need an "Act of Enablement" to do it.

Leonard Leo and his patient decades of packing courts with members of the Feral Society have paid off. Non billionaire view the Roberts SCOTUS as one of the weakest lead and most corrupt in the Court's history. They are right.

*Sane washed to strip out all his usual babbling, rambling incoherent BS.

"Steve Austin, astronaut. A man barely alive."

Well if we're playing a quick round of "Real life tropes"

Minion 1 What happened?

Minion 2 He was skinning up a fat one with his cybertruck on autopilot when it mistook a brick wall for open road. It's fine but he's a mess.

Third man Let me through here. I'm a doctor.

Minion 1 Who are you?

Third man I'm the head of Neurlink research and this man is my patient. He must be taken to our facility immediately to prepare for surgery as part of our RoboElon programme. Within a week we'll have an avatar of himself up and round. He'll have better hair, less blubber and a light tan while retaining all his essential qualities my patient is known for.

"I'd give odds against Musk lasting til midterms."

What is that. 500-600 days?

The FOCF all-junk-all-day diet or President Musk's frequent "Interventions" in his assistants "concepts"*

Tough call.

People have been hoping for a massive heart attack/stroke/diabetic coma for years but he keeps noshing that stuff down. But, y'know tomorrow could be the day that lifetime of eating, drinking and (allegedly) snorting s**t finally catches up with him but he's like a cockroach. And of course that still leaves JD Shady in the picture. He's read "The 48 Laws of Power" and at 40 offers decades more grief to the US people. Of course he could come out and marry Peter Theil and become a nicer person. They'd make a cute threesome. Him, Peter and Peters money.

*As in "concepts of a plan" for replacing the ACA.

"Hiring a random Luigi would comparatively cost a negligible amount."

My $deity that's almost as callous and lacking in empathy as, well, Leon.

Think of all his poor children who won't know their fathers (very special) form of love to them ever again.

I'm feeling quite tearful just thinking about it.*

*Mind you isn't the villain's motto "Love of evil is the root of all money" ?

Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook

"needs to treat each citation it finds as a single unique token,"

Consider what you're asking in programming terms.

A program "recognises" some data as not just data but data to restructure itself and how it recognizes future data.

It could be argued that is a true example of intelligent behaviour.

Do you think that's happening with ANN today?

I don't, but I don't know everything so I'd happily take some citations of work showing it is happening.

Real citations, not ones hallucinated by an AI.

"The correct answer from AI should be "I don't have a fucking clue,"

Which ironically would be the answer an actual AGI would give if it hadn't been trained on the subject. Possibly without abuse (although if I'd been supplying the training set...)

One example of this is if you google "Plasmid." There are 2 kinds of plasmid. They are totally unrelated to each other yet Google usually normally spews up only one of them.

Pattern recognition <> understanding.

"If it can't lie - it ain't AI."

Nice.

"What developers do when they don't have that capability is quite conservative,

call it defensive coding if you like."

So just to be clear this is what conservative use of LLMs looks like.

Who wants to see not "Conservative" use of LLM's looks like?

The latest language in the GNU Compiler Collection: Algol-68

" but created a REAL variable called DO20I, assigned it the value 1.1, and

executed the code once, with "I" undefined, likely zero. Oops"

I've heard this story about one of the early NASA space probes but didn't know the details.

I think it rather proves my point that you really can have too much flexibility.

TBF FORTRAN really was the first HLL that got standardised :-(

IIRC Simula-67 was a *major* influence on Smalltalk

Which in term coined the term (IIRC) "Object orientated"*

*On a personal note Simula067 looks like it's got all the features needed to implement a blackboard system straight out of the box. It's not often appreciated that the "Hearsay" voice recognition system was not built in Lisp but Sail

"a proof that van Wijngaarden grammars are equivalent to Turing machines."

Which raise the question "Are all notations powerful enough to describe a turning complete language* so capable, or just this one?"

Sorry that was just the first thing that popped into my head.

*On the basis a full computer language can cope with any problem that you can state well enough to design a program to solve.

> no way I'm going to spend time continually typing those words in full all day

I'd never realised how few devs are actually touch typists.

Can I suggest it's not your keyboard. It's your tools?

Seriously in the 3rd decade of the 21st Century your editor can't handle part of this?

I'm pretty sure GCC comes with something to do with this.

No, I am not starting a flame war by naming any editor. I'm just pointing out that whatever you use should have this.

My college editor had this. It read the language suffix and the same set of keyboard shortcuts coughed up the language specific way to do whatever I needed.

"As for Pascal, it's something I think Wirth should have been embarrassed about. "

I was referring to the report when I was talking about A68 and since I've never had to implement it my impressions are just that, impressions.

However the quote above is likely to be one that will be contentious.

AFAIK Wirth's goals for Pascal were a)Compile it as fast as FORTRAN in an academic environment and be a good teaching programming. On those terms it succeeded very well.

The examples that Wirth gives in his books are quite substantial (like indexing every word in a Pascal program). And Knuth's team built Tec and Metafont in it.

Your right that pascal lacks several features that various third party developers attempted to address created incompatible variants. Remember, Ada is a Pascal derivative.

Keep in mind in the 60's and 70's built-in I/O was SOP for languages. IIRC only "system" languages like Coral, Bliss and BCPL had I/O in libraries. IMHO had pascal supported pointers to procedures (although it sort of looks like it should, and Delphi relies on doing so). Likewise it's requirement to fix the size of array being passed to a procedure looks like a massive PITA. The workaround required the full implementation of the standard, which I think was rarely fully implemented. IMHO the failure of those three features killed it till Turbo Pascal (and Brookhaven, which offered high end compiling and Turbo compatibility).

"Algol68 allows spaces in identifiers."

Back in the day that wasn't unusual.

So did FORTRAN.

No doubt with just as many hilarious consequences at debugging time.

"RPG was a tool for migrating off of assembler?"

C calls them "Keywords," Pascal called them "Reserved words."

I've only ever seen "Opcodes" used in (multiple) assemblers.

The only plugboards I've ever seen were in factories controlling NC lathes.

The original RPG, RPGII and RPGIII (and in fact RPG/400) had prefix flags that could bypass the execution of an "opcode" (which was also a function of ARM assembler. One of the reasons I felt right at home with RPG when I first looked at it but which I guess if you come from an HLL background was going to be a "WTF is this about" moment).

It also had an implied logic loop (because of it's origin in creating reports).

TBH I'd say the nearest thing conceptually to it (for those who've never seen RPG/400) would be AWK.

I don't know how many people ever actually used the logic loop capability. We were taught RPG as a standard programming language, just with some unusual coding rules, and the requirement to see up all the I/O before you start the logic (so, much like COBOL then).

Quantum? No solace: Nvidia CEO sinks QC stocks with '20 years off' forecast

AFAIK all the *real* QC's I've seem are basically *analog* computers

These are "programmed" by changing the interconnections between units and the values of various coefficients associated with each unit (integrators, amplifiers etc). Your "program" is actually a wiring diagram with annotations.

I doubt 1% of any of the Vultures here has ever used one of these things (more likely if you've got some history in control systems or aircraft*).

But IMHO what most here would call an actual computer means something you can control with code.

MS's Q# supposedly does this but I can't make head nor tail of it. Anyone here used it IRL?

My instinct is that designing from the ground up algorithms to use the (theoretical) power will be like designing algorithms to make full use of parallelism of HPC arrays, only worse.. Depending on your PoV Amdahl's_law , Gustafson's_law or Gunther's Universal_Scalability_Law are relevant.

But time will tell who's right I guess.

*Each Concorde nacelle had 13 "computers" running the inlet and the nozzle (Olympus predates FADEC by decades) but AFAIK only 1 was a "proper" programmable digital computer. Ferranti?

"Altman Garnering Income."

Nice

"your path probably leads through Jensen and his chip shop,"

Nice.

So we can refer to any CEO's fab/design house as a "chippie"?

Excellent.

NASA's lunar Roomba set to suck up Moon dirt for study

Impressive

Space rated electric motor + pump+bearings --> solenoid operated valve(s) + compressed gas canister.

Space rated parts are seriously expensive.

The thing to remember about "vacuum" cleaners is that they create a vacuum relative to earth sea level. That relative difference is enough to strip dirt out of carpets etc to drop it in the bag.

The difference on the moon is need to add some atmosphere first to get the dirt in motion.

Really clever bit of lateral thinking.

I wish them good luck with the mission.

Elon Musk's galactic ego sows chaos in European politics

"http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/"

Interesting.

Not mad about the only HTTP connection or that it's a private company (they appear to be a firm of Chartered Surveyors), IMHO excellent UI.

This really shows what sources are supplying the UK market and it's fascinating.

It really lays bare how desperately dependent the UK is on gas powered gas turbines.

They say Hinkley Point C's twin reactors will supply about 7% of UK's entire energy demand.

Now, what happens to 3.55 of that when one of them goes offline for the 30-50days it takes to refuel one of these. From other plants the core takes 10 days but there's a lot of other stuff that can only be done (or is most convenient ) with the whole reactor shut down. That's what you get when you buy a design that was built to run submarine propellers on a single lifetime fuel load.

No, pretty sure he's just on a shit-ton of ketamine.

Occam's Razor would suggest that.

"make it inhospitable to Saudi dissidents?"

Don't you mean "Cut them off at the knees"?

"ketamine-riddled world’s richest man."

Why?

That comes under fair comment and freedom-of-speech protections.

The only "law" it breaks is the "I'm-the-richest-man-in-the-world-and-people-can't-say-anything-mean-about-me" Law, which probably only exists inside Musk's head.

Now if I were to refer to him as "Space Karen" that might be viewed as offensive.

Hmm. "Moses Mike and the Orange Jesus"

Band name?

"Like any party trying to get votes then."

You'll be one of those "Low information" voters like the types that voted for the FOCF.

In fact it's more like the Leave campaign during the Brexit referendum under Johnson.

No rules about putting whatever s**t you like on the side of your bus sooo let's put a massive lie and a question (that looks like a promise but is actually a question) on it.

There's nothing to stop us. Then "F**k, this is terrible. What are we going to do now." Well Boris you're going to have a day when 60+ members of your govt get tired of your s**t and do the walk.

BTW the Brexit "Dividend" to the EU is up to £23Bn and set to rise to about £30Bn when it's done. And with > than 2million of the old codgers who voted for it already in the ground there's fewer people working to pay for this. That's more than the black hole Labour found in the accounts.

Not to mention the running down of the UK car industry which supports 38 000 direct jobs (and a shedload more in the supply chain). In fact even the fisherman (who supposedly this was going to help) are pi**ed off about it.

"or you simply shut down your feelings temporarily as a defence mechanism against public meltdown."

Which makes his behaviour even less defensible.

As I noted it's not the lack of empathy, it's his repeated ability to behave like an a88hole that makes him an a**hole.

He claims he has Asperger's Syndrome. I've no idea if he does or not. I'm sure there are many people with this diagnosis who are thought of as very decent people by those who deal with them.

He is not one of them.

"only done to wriggle off the hook for the $100m donation to Reform."

Very plausible.

$270 --> FOCF --> Whole country of 360m

$100m -->7x loser --> maybe get another country of 60m.

Musk must have felt like he'd been played like a banjo at an Ozark hoedown.

Like when he'd realised what "Parental consent for your child's gender reassignment surgery" actually meant.

I reckon there's a ton of money to be made off Leon if you come up with some really-plausible-but-very-expensive-plan-to-stop-all-gender-affirming*-surgery

*Excluding hair plugs, bottox and penis enlargement surgery of course.

"What's the difference between God and Elon Musk?"

God has started worshipping Musk?