Posts by John Smith 19

Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not

" I suppose they could call it an "addon" to the digital id shite."

Speaking of which The Reg has been very quiet on this subject.

Pop Quiz. Who here is a) In the UK b)Changed their job since 2000 c)Not been asked to show proof-of-right-to-work documentation for their new job?

Exactly.

The people employing asylum seekers and illegal immigrants are themselves illegal, acting as money launderers, sources off vapes and untaxed tobacco to minors etc.

IOW "Digital ID! is as much bu***hit as Blair's ID card scheme proposal, and if not backed by the same data fetishists then their replacements in the same roles in the Civil Service.

Tesla board wants to grant Musk $1T in stock, Norway wealth fund says nope

"if they can increase it they can borrow even more money,

attract more investment and their shares sky rocket."

Correct.

IOW it's a Ponzi scheme, like Bernie Madoff's.

Or as the British call them a "Rollover fraud," or "Pyramid" scheme.

The wrinkle is this company actually makes stuff.

Hmmm "the world's largest such fund,"

Would that be because while successive British governments were pi**ing the revue out in tax cuts to stay in power and support the unemployment lines their policies had created the Norwegians used it to invest in their future? I rather think so.

The UK ceased to be a net exporter of both oil and gas decades ago but Norway's wealth is assured.

And as long as they don't hand what's basically an obscene amount of shares (and hence wealth) to the musky one I think they will keep doing it.

OpenAI says models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance

Triggered my first Google AI hallucination

I asked roughly "After Gary Oldman played the dictator of Belarus in "The Hitman's Bodyguard" did he get fan mail from the real dictator" and Google said

"No, because Gary Oldman did not play the dictator, he was played by Tristan Hinds."

Firstly that's a flat out lie.

Secondly WTF is "Tristan Hinds"

"majority of mainstream evaluations reward hallucinatory behavior"

So stop f**king rewarding them then.

FFS.

AI is that hyper confident person in the office who always looks like they know the answer.

Sometimes they really do. But other times.....

And now that "person" is in your phone, laptop, tablet and search engine.

Lucky, lucky us.

Sorry, but DeepSeek didn’t really train its flagship model for $294,000

You say "Mixture of Experts" I say

Blackboard system.

First used to implement CMU "Ear Say* " speech understanding system in mid 70's to target set by DARPA in 1970.Multiple "Knowledge sources" updating/updated by a multi-level data storage area (the "Blackboard") implementing what we might call a "publish and subscribe" activation model. Sound familiar?

*Didn't win, but Harpy, also from CMU, but with pretty much everything hard-wired into it, did, with 60MIPs/sec of speech and 93-97% accuracy rate, on a PDP-10.

So, in fact, when all elements are factored in

Roughly what a Western LLM costs to train up from scratch.

Which sounds a good deal more plausible.

So how does it perform relative to the Western models?

Librephone battles the proprietary binary blob

" not inconsiderable risk of letting something uncontrolled loose on the global GSM network."

What do you think those BLOB are?

And how much of that code is supplied by the relevant countries TLA to back door the phone on demand?

Difficult? Yes. Doable? Also yes.

Worthwhile. Definitely.

Remember folks is is not about "privacy" or protecting the world from narco-paedo-terrorists*

It's about the Cardinal's line of "Give me six lines from an honest man, and I'll find something with which to hang him."

*Obviously the very worst kind.

Trump says Michael Dell is part of the team buying TikTok, with Larry Ellison and maybe some Murdochs

That's M-u-r-d-o-c-h, with a doch, not a dock.

More's the pity.

Mind you, he is howling, and he is mad, IMHO.

BTW I wonder if how the Chinese "Security law" compares against their home-grown THE PATRIOT Act. Still in force 24 years after the events that start it.

As it's about 200 pages (longest law ever written till then. But that was before the FOCF fugly hand-all-the-unfunded-tax-cuts-to-billionaires-n-corporations abortion.

Russian fake-news network, led by an ex-Florida sheriff's deputy, storms back into action with 200+ new sites

"but strictly formally and politically, the current presidency is one of the strongest"

In the Controls-White House-Congress-and-Senate sense of the term you are factually correct.

And yet they are also claiming, despite majorities in both houses, that without the Democrats assistance they will have to have a government shutdown (again), which like the 5 previous USG shut downs will be caused by a Republican government (not exactly strong-and-stable government is it?)

It seems 'lil Mike Johnson (the Johnson of choice the FOCF whips out when some exceptionally evil, or self-serving policy needs to be justified) can't control his own party, and this time the Democrats will leave them too it.

I do hope the Democrats stay firm, sit on their hands and let the least-experienced house Speaker in about 140 years sort his own s**t out.*

*For a bonus it would be a good idea to run an actual candidate in his district. They literally fielded no one last time round. Maybe they wouldn't win but they would send a message that they are contesting all districts, and all districts are in play.

"incentive..Russian..slingers to further push..Republicans, to..stabilize..current super-majority?"

You are correct. None of course.

Dobbies kiddies, and their paid lackeys like the guy in the article, are paid to sh**-stir.

His goal is not a right-wing or a left-wing government but a chaos government brought on by a wannabe dictator who is actually a thin-skinned man-child backed by a truly vile collection of grotesques from Stephen Miller (Architect of Project 2025 and I think it would be fair to say a Jewish Fascist) Leonard Leo (Fundamentalist Catholic Christo-Fascist) and the little yapping jackals of JD Vance (waiting to fulfil the dreams of his long term boyfriend backer Peter Tiel) and the human weasel himself Mike Johnson, as they wait for decades of take-outs, diet cola and alleged other substances to finally send him to Arlington.

"Its always child porn with people like that. 20 1"

A good working assumption, one recalls Matt "School" Gaetz, who was the FOCF's original pick for US AG.

But apparently not this time.

The worse part is people can't spot this bu***hit

Is that because the AI is that good, or their critical thinking skills are so poor?

Note also, this is not just aimed at the US.

This guy looks like the "Lord Haw Haw" of the 21st century.

I wonder if he knows how his predecessor ended?

AI can now design functional viruses – not the computer kind, either

Odd....

I've always wondered why no one has ever knocked up bespoke plasmids that are ingested by strains of bacteria and produce an internal poison to kill them.

Fun fact. Guatamala 1967. A species of dysentery acquired immunity to 7 antibiotics.

12000 people died.

Antibiotic immunity is spread through plasmid transfer.

Privacy activists warn digital ID won’t stop small boats – but will enable mass surveillance

"Somehow this system seems to more or less work effectively in multiple other countries."

"Other countries"?

S**t, it's how the Conservative MP's choose the next Leader.

But they are sophisticated voters who can understand the sublimities of the Single Transferable Vote, not like the working class scum general public, for whom this is far too confusing.

"oozing from the word salad "

Ahh, so "word salad" is MAGAspeak for a-sentence-with-commas-i-can't-parse.

Got you.

In fact those sentence parse quite easily and are unambiguous.

As someone put it about the late Charles Kirk "I don't support what happened to Charlie, but he did."

Hateful words --> lead to hateful thoughts --> hateful actions.

And as the DoJ report showed (before it was removed. On whose orders I wonder?) 97% of that violence in the US was from the right (<cough> January 6th riot<cough>).

Note also the difference in the scale and the organisation.

"What part of "extrajudicial killing is a criminal act" don't you understand?"

I'd say pretty much all of it, when it suits them.

As Upton Sinclair observed "No man's ignorance is so great as a man whose livelihood depends on his ignorance"

And give how prolific they are you have to wonder what their real job is?

" Governments won't be happy....... "

Again no.

Data fetishists might have allies within the govt, but data fetishists <> government.

These are the Aholes who saw 11/9/01 as an opportunity to stuff THE PATRIOT Act right down the the US legal system.

Where it's been lodged like a f**king tumour for the last 24 years.

It's the Power of Nightmares.

"This isn't the first time Labour pushed for ID cards:"

Your focus is misguided.

It's the data fetishists inside the serionr CS that trot this out every time something comes up that's got the government-de-jour worried.

It was ID cards (and it's ever-so-slightly Draconian "National Identity Register" lets-not-call-it-a-database, but it will over cradle-to-grave surveillance) that flushed Labour down the sh**hole last time.

Stamers admiration of Tony Blair should have noted that about him. .

Until something really firm is done about these these data fetishists (who embody the very worst of the UK "Deep state") they will pop up over and over again.

Watch out for the sticky paws of (non-techy) types from GCHQ, HO, MI% &6.

When in doubt cherche-the-PPE graduate. They usually have the arrogance uber-confidence and complete ignorance of why what they want to do won't work to sell this to their "masters"

Trump backpedals as Hyundai factory ICE raid enrages South Korea

"The infinite delay."

I don't think they'll put out just because of the treatment of their staff by the local Aholes,

Personally I'd look at the costs and benefits of a US plant. The question is will it be a real plant or is it just a piece of "Performance art" that will be under construction while the FOCF is in power (with minimal investment) and then shut down or if it's really going into actual production.

I don't know enough either way to say. Either could be a smart move, give the wild mood swings of the Toddler-in-Chief.

"So we're a "papers, please" country "

IDK. Are you a buzzard (US vulture)?

If you are, then yes.

And (just like Nazi Germany) they were elected after a previous failed coup attempt (by a wafer thin majority of your neighbours, which explains his deep desire to jerrymander the hell out of Con-gressional districts before the mid-terms), except the FOCF didn't even see the inside of a jail cell and the notion of him actually writing a book in such a cell if he did is laughable.

Not alone in that BTW. OTOH Argentina flushed their main Ahole, Bolsinaro. We dumped Bul***it Boris (although the grifter-in-Chief AKA Reforms CEO is looking a bit unflushable. At the moment).

That still leave his Argentinian counterpart "El Loco." The bozo who gave Leon his chainsaw. An unfortunate accident with said chainsaw remains an unlikely longshot (although I bet someone is running a deadpool on him).

Of course in the US because of it's astonishingly fragile democracy you'll need to flush a few more down the pan.

You might call it a "Regime change." Remember the FOCF bitched for 4 looooong years how he'd been cheated out of 2020 (he hadn't). You think he's not going to take a run at 2028? He hasn't let the Constitution hinder him up to now. Why would any sane person think it's going to stop him now?

Not"

Very.

It's the one where the FOCF got on the phone and told the guy running the voting process to "Find" another 11 000 because "I know I've won."

Of course non of these people are US citizens so I don't think they can vote.

But I'll bet the folk who want to work in this plant are US citizens. And they might be a bit miffed at the delay in getting their first paycheck.

Curious connections: Voyager probes and Sinclair ZX Spectrum

"M&B helped when I was developing a co-processor for signal acquisition and DSP back in the '80s."

I'm quite sure you weren't alone in that, before Ti brought out the TMS340 range and that took care of an awful lot of those sorts of things. Prior to them Intel had a funny thing out the 2920, very odd.

Re: Mick & Brick

In a parallel history microprocessors come out a bit later and people realise that Unix (which at this point was available for the copy costs of a distribution tape) gave them access to all the dev tools they'd need to host a modern (for the time) OS onto their custom hardware, allowing them to write in C instead of whatever assembler they'd invariably managed to knock together.

People were running phototypesetting systems and image processing systems on custom processors in the late 70's. The tech could deliver substantial performance, but doing it all in some one-of-a-kind assembler meant it never got the critical mass to go mainstream.

What might have been.

"i mean … what?"

They are talking about UV eraable EPROMs, which had a clear "lid" on them.

This meant you could stick a bunch of them in a UV eraser (IE a sealed light box with a UV tube in) that could mass wipe them.

Wildly implausible, but real, unlike this gadget, which sounds plausible, but never existed.

"74181, I think you mean? "

Quite correct.

In fact the '181 is mostly 2 input OR,AND, NOR and NAND gates, with a smattering of EORs, about 90+ all told, but that's again from memory.

I think it's still a pretty good building block.

Re: A 280 processor?

Indeed.

Someone hasn't proof-read the copy. :-(

Now if they switched on narrator and had it speak their copy their ears would have detected the dud instantly.

For all old NASA computer stuff

The classic is "Computers In Spaceflight: The NASA Experience" by Tomayko, written in 1988. It's everything from Gemini up to Voyager and Galileo, with a side order of the ground systems running checkout.

I like it because it shows a time when people didn't just write language, they hacked whole processors.

Lots of oddball word lengths, often opcodes with built-in ECC due to the fear of radiation flipped bits (this at a time when most of the memory for all of these was core store, whose radiation hardness was pretty impressive).

IIRC the most "Advanced" actual microprocessor was the RCA1802. An SOS design. It still amazes me the silicon layer in it was 0.5 micrometres thick.

For any of you who've seen "Space Cowboys," you'll find quite a lot to keep you amused as well.

Also lots of bit slice hardware (you might like to look at "Mick & Brick" if you want to dig deeper) and stuff built round the the TTL '171 ALU, as used by the Xerox PARC Alto, PDP 11, DG Nova, and pretty much anything else that was on the minicomputer market in the 70's and 80's.

Happy reading.

HHS warns US health care industry to share data with patients or else

We'll see

On the surface a good idea.

But it smells like another data fetishist data grab.

UK.gov decides tech projects worth billions are major but not 'mega'

If only they'd called it.

The "Government Infrastructure Major Projects Portfolio"

The the PAC could have required senior civil servants to "Bring on the GIMPP"*

*Yes, I know. 100s of £Bn is a serious matter, but occasionally a little light relief is helpful.

BAE Systems surfaces autonomous submarine for military use

At last

Decent range, decent cargo space, autonomy.

And a supplier that won't ask too man questions for the right price.

A proper narco-sub for the serious-and-organised trafficker.

Home Office delays £816M English test contract despite market engagement

"Why so expensive"?

Simple.

HO Civil Servants believe that HO needs are soooo special that only a bespoke,from-the-ground-up solution can deliver their soo special needs.

BTW that price will probably be over 10 yrs, so it's (inc VAT) £86m/PA, across 268 test centres.

The obvious challenges are a)Prevent cheating, so need chain-of-confirmed-ID and b)Deliver English test without any English dialogue. c)Manage both test data AKA the "Question bank," like the UK driver theory test(which will need to change over time) and d)Candidate ID data.

We know a)HO's history with large IT projects b)Their data fetishist love of ID cards (which I see are surfacing yet again as the "answer" to the problem of asylum seeker*

*rather than figuring out how to fund, equip and train staff to clear the backlog at an average rate of 750 cases/week (maintainably) then the backlog (and the cost to support the backlog goes down.

Two scrubs, one Starship: Third time lucky for SpaceX?

So, did it manage a *complete* orbit

If not you could still be looking at basically a ballistic flight

TBH for a fully reusable TSTO we are nowhere near the real game changing bit yet.

Every successful TSTO has managed to get stg2 into an orbit and SX has gotten stg1s back 100s of time, some more than 10x over.

Still waiting for that first stg2 re-launch after refurb.

" 280 tons (per wikipedia) vs V2 230 tons. "

That's a 21% increase.

Like from say a 150Hp engine to a 181Hp engine.

I think you'd notice such a difference.

"Idjut, everyon nows it was the Dims manipoolatin "

Not bad, but the OP's was a IMHO a minor classic.

"it would be nice to do a short test and an autopsy to see if"

I've heard this called a "Burp test."

These things can be surprisingly informative, despite very short durations.

The question to ask (and ideally answer yes to ) is "Has the engine reached steady state?"

If yes, then the fact it lasts (and I mean this literally) 1 second or 20mins doesn't matter.

"Why should we want to send people to Mars?"

A lot of reasons, starting with the obvious "Next decades must-see vacation spot for the seriously wealthy"

The real problem is finding a reason for them to stay

And despite all the usual space-opera BS about this subject finding that reason (or reasons) is kind of tough.

Best case it ends up like the planet "Beta Colony" in GM Bujolds novels.

A place with "Kind of a low tolerance for social failures" as Miles Naismith describes it.

Atlassian's move to cloud-only means customers face integration issues and more

"Cloud" or as I like to think of it ...

..server-farm-in-unknown-jurisdiction (but if USian then still subject (24 years after 11/9/01) to THE PATRIOT act.

Back in the day it used to be Get new shiny CASE tool --> But tracking database.

I'm amazed this is not a ripe area for FOSS

I'm even more amazed that in the 3rd decade of the 21st century people still struggle to code multi-user accessible database.

As an ex DB2/400 guy I never worried about this. because that was baked in and rock solid.*

BTW Am I just paranoid or are there a lot of AC's on this topic?

*And AFAIK still is.

Classic Psion fan releases proof-of-concept language server for OPL

Impressive

No idea what" Language Server Support" is.

Yet.

Elon outs $16.5B Samsung chip deal Tesla asked to keep secret

"Our grey matter runs at how many watts?"

Not many.

That was rather my point. Yet they do what a Petaflop of processing, based on modern estimates?

And it was Carver Mead's point in 1989. The book is the result of his teams work digging into how the brain does so much with so little power, and how to mimic it using a conventional CMOS fab process.

And it's been known since the 70's that in fact our eyes do substantial pre processing (David Marr, sadly no longer with us). So yes high end camera is a fair description of our eyes.

I don't know who voted me down. Probably the usual chorus of SEL's. I strongly doubt it's anyone who's read Mead's book.

And yet that <2Kg lump behind most drivers eyes manages to do pretty well

With just a couple of (high end cameras).

Y'all think doing this stuff may be doing it a bit wrong?

Just a thought.

Mine's the one with a copy of Analog VLSI and Neural Systems in the oversize side pocket.

"Dodging bills seems to a key tool in Elon's toolbox."

Wonder where he learned that "Skill" from?

Trump pushes EU into trade 'deal' that several EU leaders aren't happy about

Let's see what Putin's little b**ch Orban does

He's a nasty piece of work.

AI is an over-confident pal that doesn't learn from mistakes

" Meh "I don't know if you're aware about what happened in Holland"

The British did it about 40 years ago with the "Alvey" project.

One of the pilot projects was an "Advanced Knowledge Based System" to interpret/implement Social Security rules.

Not sure how it ended.

My guess is "Not well."

"So, is the article saying that all GenAI suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect?"

Pretty much exactly what it's saying.

That hyper-confident guy at work who always knows he answer (and will tell managers as such), except of course when you ask them something and it turns, "Well, no, but I know something that's quite like what you're asking about."

And what does "Introspection" even mean with a LLM outside of it's "Learning" phase?

wouldn't that need it to have a sort of "weak" learning ability that would, gradually shift it's views. Call it a "Life-long" learning mode.

Smells like more BS to mean. Even calling it "Introspection" seeks to humanize what is basically a statistical token generator with no real understanding of (and I mean this literally) anything.

Tesla bets on bot smoke screen as political and market realities bite

"The usual suspects are a lot quieter than usual."

You know that can't last, right?

"Special K"

Does not make you special.

Why a human shaped robot? Well.......

There are lots of use cases (often in food/drink preparation/dispensing or general "housekeeping") which could be automated out without a humanoid robot being needed. The UK has had automated (self cleaning) public toilets for decades, why not such a thing applied to a hotel room for example?

There are IMHO view 2 reasons they are not.

1) Because each one requires a serious development budget and will need the operator to front some serious cash (and commitment because if you want to go this way it's likely to need a ground-up build approach) for the hardware (and it's inevitable support contract) but will capture only a relatively niche market having done so. And then the competition will start to move in.

A company could be built around doing this in one sector, then using the lessons learnt to expand into other sectors (possibly with some reuse of subsystems. Standardised pneumatics? Hydraulics using edible oil? Well tuned algorithms to recognize tables, chairs and wall/skirting board/floor transitions so they can tell when someone is occupying them or furniture has been moved?)

2) The people who usually get into these businesses recognise part of why people go out is the experience of going out, and the closer that comes to a)Place an order on the "Just Eat"* app b)Await arrival c)Open boxes and nosh down the more people will say "F**k it let's just stay in." Or even just stick the burger box in the microwave and DIY entirely. Which let's be honest is some peoples idea of "cooking" already.

OTOH a machine that can fit into these environments and can be customised to them, looking like (for exampled) Big Hero 6 in a McDonalds-style fast food restaurant or something more somber in a Michelin starred restaurant (but basically the same internals). BTW there are some interesting lessons from the nuclear industry, where you get semi robot/manipulators. Some times under direct human control, some times running recorded sequences (with an option to run sped up/slowed down, which can be very useful). Interacting with humans I tend to think of them as avatars of their operators,

Mind you one thing will never change. Whatever Musk's timeframe is double it.

*Other food ordering platforms are available

I guess Americans have never heard of "Shadow Robtics"

Who were founded on the idea that the whole built environment is built for human shaped, sized and roughly massed well humans.

But then I guess the "Richest man in the world" (who as Bill Gates pointed out help starve some of the poorest children on the planet) isn't much interested in history.

And I suspect there will come a time when history isn't much interest in Elon Musk either.

And remember a 30% drop in Tesla's share price means that there's a lot more price to short.

major near term use case f..modelling the latest styles in upscale clothing stores.

But that would just make them showroom dummies