Posts by Richard 12 7653 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2009
Launching two every single day would take 1369.86301 years.
The biggest Starlink launch ever was 143 lightweight sats, fastest cadence Falcon 9 has ever done was 134 launches in 2024.
If they somehow did both maximums every year (impossible) it would still take 52 years to launch that many - and the majority would have reentered long before that.
In this situation the deepfake is "face replacement", the AI is not actually answering or attempting to do the job.
The interviewee is actually a foreign agent, who is attempting to get hired so their agency has access to your stuff and/or start of a method of getting "legitimate" money for a front.
Multiple real humans will then wear the mask while extracting everything they consider useful.
Listen to Sheriff Labrador: Be careful of AI face swapping
Those "wasted" minutes are how your staff stay productive.
Redlining anything for even a short period of time can damage it. Keeping it there for a long time will permanently destroy it.
Same applies to staff.
Burning out your staff is just as stupid as running your engine at 100k rpm while stationary.
If "sweeping" is something that only happens during downtime, that also means it does not happen during busy times. And so the longer that busy time, the messier the workspace gets - until there is an incident and everything stops.
Most likely the engineer was the wrong side of the Pennines or Moors.
Manchester to Sheffield or vice-versa is often basically impossible, despite being nominally an hour away. The Snake is not to be trifled with!
A lot of managers only look at the distance as the crow flies, and completely ignore the actual route.
Eg NYC decided to send a lot of kids to the "nearest" school as the crow flies, despite the fact that it's an hour drive along the valley, over the nearest bridge, then back. Having driven past three other schools on the way...
It's the way UK Government Bonds are sold to the hoi polloi.
Most government bonds can only be bought by "institutional investors - banks, pension funds, foreign sovereign wealth funds*. The argument is that the bonds last a decade or more, and normal people don't want to lock up their cash that long. In reality banks don't either, the bonds get resold pretty much instantly.
NS&I was set up to allow normal people to lend money to the UK Government with the right to end the loan at any time. The government of the day tells NS&I how much to raise, and they try to do that.
Which makes it an absolutely trivial organisational function, aside from the deliberate complication of the monthly Premium Bond lottery draws. The back end and apps should cost basically nothing.
* This is why Europe and China (the country) own nearly all US government debt.
New York (Lincolnshire) or New York (New York)?
Business trips are even less suitable. There's a preferred airline, and the site and dates are fixed - which is why they generally cost more, of course.
So it's perfectly algorithmic. There's no scope for AI to add any value whatsoever - but plenty for hallucinations to screw it up magnificently.
Businesses pay travel agents to get bulk deals - "we'll buy X amount of travel if you give us Y discount". That's basically it.
Actually, I suspect the real draw of LLM agents is the idea that nobody is responsible for the decisions made.
After all, if nobody is responsible, nobody can be sanctioned for it - it's one of the main reasons for "design by committee"
In dysfunctional, mostly very large, organisations this is a huge draw - someone gets to claim "computer said so" and therefore it wasn't their fault.
The fun part comes when individual upper managers are held responsible for their use of LLMs and especially agents - because they are. There's already been a very public forced retirement, more will come.
Software isn't language.
Language slowly changes, but that's where the analogy ends.
The purpose of language is to convey meaning between peers. Languages change to better convey the meaning between peers, to better exclude those who are not peers, or to widen the range of peers.
LLM vibe code vomit nearly always doesn't even compile or interpret. So it doesn't even become software.
With careful pummelling, it can sometimes spew out something that compiles, but it has never ever been found to actually work.
The thing is, LLMs make a loss so large that you can see it from Alpha Centauri.
So while the mass-scale copyright infringement companies have to start paying licence fees, it's not going to matter fairly soon because they're all gonna die.
The only question is whether they collapse quickly enough not to take the real economy down with them.
See The Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015
See provision 15, paragraph 1A (b).
As you seem intent in splitting hairs, you are correct that the content of the EIA environmental impact statement is not required to be in the local newspaper, but it is required to be publicly accessible, and the site notices and newspaper advertisements must state where, when and how.
The same applies if it is a "major" development (floor space >1000m² or grounds >= 1 hectare), or affects a public right of way.
Note that 1000m² is a single storey building only 32m square, so not particularly large.
The article wasn't about small DCs on brownfield land, it was big ones (so major development) on greenfield (so very likely to require an EIA)
Which is what I meant.
The surprising part is that site notices are not always required. A planning authority can choose to post letters to immediately adjoining neighbours instead - something that can result in nobody being consulted at all.
Statutory consultees are supposed to be the backstop for that - but are often ignored.
But we are being transparent"
The guy's nose could be used as a space elevator.
Such shenanigans is explicitly prohibited this side of the pond. In the UK something that kind of size would require an EIA, which the law requires to be published in the local paper as well as physical signs at the proposed site. Smaller and change of use requires notifying the neighbours, which can be letters instead of signs.
That doesn't stop developers trying though, they regularly ask for meetings with the local government to be held "in camera" prior to the formal planning application. Entirely to make the false claim that they've "engaged with the locals"
Got to start somewhere.
Running at 56Ghz and reduced power consumption will cover for a lot of the increase in size.
It's also certain that the size can be reduced in future - both TTL and CMOS started much larger and rapidly shrank as the processes were refined. Same will happen here, unless it dies on the vine when the LLM bubble bursts.
Those don't cover the 2.4GHz band, let alone 5Ghz so would need some kind of downconverter. I'm not sure what other SDRs could have been used that cover those bands.
There are certainly far cheaper ways to manufacture this, but they require specialist knowledge that this artist doesn't have. So it wouldn't have been worthwhile for a one-off piece - a few hours of an RF designer's time would cost more than the high-end SDR they used.
I also suspect that they'd originally intended to monitor a much wider band, but found that there wasn't anything happening that looked interesting. Most of the licensed bands are probably basically continuous, and that's rather boring.
After all, this is an art piece.
Just, don't put them in places where the local power and water infrastructure is already massively overloaded.
DCs can be damn near anywhere. The whole of the UK is about 2ms across, and thus totally irrelevant for 99.9999% of applications.
Parts of Scotland have to turn off windmills because there isn't grid capacity to export the power to England, Drax, Hinckley etc prefer to stay at a constant load, there's swimming pools that could use low-grade waste heat and the like.
A little actual planning goes a long way.
Scotland has a surfeit of wind power because there isn't enough load nearby and the interconnects were never designed for it.
It's so unbalanced that generating plant is regularly turned off - and the operators compensated for not being permitted to supply.
If the load were up there, this wouldn't happen.
Putting the datacentres within the M25 instead of roughly 2ms further away from London (and actually slightly closer to most of the population), means spending about a hundred billion on additional interconnects from Scotland.
Fibre optic would be millions, a saving of a several orders of magnitude.
In your frothing you missed a really important glaringly obvious permission: "as required to provide the service".
In order to serve you a web page, I need to process your IP address. As that's required to provide the service the data subject specifically asked me to do, and explicitly provided their IP, I have permission to do that.
I also have permission to store that IP address for a reasonable time in relation to providing the service - so yes, connection logs are fine.
I do not however have permission to attempt to link that IP with any other data, or to retain it forever.
GDPR is a very reasonable piece of legislation. There is nothing onerous at all, unless your business revolves around abusing personal data.
When something goes wrong they have the number of a six-figure executive who will get it fixed NOW
No, they don't. They might think they do, but in reality they have the phone number of a phone support desk who will follow their "executive called us" script.
"Account managers" in these extremely large companies aren't there to get anything fixed. Their job is to make soothing sounds and placate the angry executive who called them. At best they'll escalate to the appropriate product management team, who will add it to their pile.
Why? Because they know that the customer cannot leave.
FOSS suppliers know that the customer can leave relatively easily - moving a LAMP stack between webhosts is trivial, basically only limited by data transfer rates and contractual terms - they care, because they have to.
And as for indemnity:
Fujitsu provided software they knew was unfit for purpose, and appear to have conspired with their customer to divert the blame onto hundreds of postmasters so effectively that many were wrongly fined and even imprisoned. If there was any actual indemnity then Fujitsu would be paying a significant part of the compensation costs - yet they've paid exactly zero.
If Paula Vennells is eventually prosecuted for her part in this miscarriage of justice, do you think any Fujitsu executives will ride to her rescue? Or will they merely phone it in if ordered by the court?
The abbreviations are common because they're very long words, relatively difficult to spell, and have at least two different spellings in the various dialects of English.
The somewhat odd i18n and L10n are also very easy to search for, because they're somewhat odd.
It also avoids the term "translation", which is a small part of the whole - that some US-based project managers and developers seem to think is the entire thing - while most simply ignore everything outside US-English, sadly.
Perhaps, but the price increases needed to break even on that trillion-dollar hardware within the 3-5 years that it lasts are so ridiculously high that literally nobody would pay it.
That kind of price increase is "customer ceases to exist". So they just ... won't pay it. No matter what Salesforce say.
Instead there will be a few hundred Tesco-like court cases for breach of contract, and everyone else will leave and eat the pain of changing CRM, because the alternative is certain death.
Not really. In canon it simulates larger spaces by projecting the background and moving the floor the players are standing on.
There are real-life VR rigs that do that same - very expensive of course, so effectively bespoke. Never tried one. Would like to, but I'm not spending that kind of money!
I don't think it's explicitly mentioned with regards to the holodeck, but as Star Trek has artificial gravity it can also apply arbitrary acceleration forces on the players, so presumably it can physically re-center everyone without them noticing.
So, single player would be trivial and work in any space big enough to wave your arms and legs without hitting anything.
Multiplayer holodeck is much harder, but presumably works as long as everyone is either sufficiently close to each other in-game, or is far enough apart that they can have their own slice of simulation.
There is at least one episode where they explicitly talk about the holodeck being physically too small for the number of people in it, so had to make sure they stayed together.
Where it got really silly was the myriad of ridiculous breakdowns, of course. But hey, it's a TV show.
From the very beginning it was obvious that VR was for gaming.
Heck, even the examples in fiction are almost entirely games. The Star Trek Holodeck is used purely for recreation in all except maybe two episodes.
The Quest 3 is very, very good, and a huge amount of fun.
The trouble is:
A) It's impossible to advertise. It has to be experienced to find out whether you're in the majority who enjoy it or the minority who absolutely hate it.
Nobody is going to spend that kind of money if there's any chance they're in the latter group.
B) There aren't enough games because they're hard to develop and test. Many of them also need tethering to a big beast of a PC, because deploying to "native" is harder than it should be. So it's not really a games console, raising the cost further.
C) You need a pretty big room with a relatively high ceiling to play most of the games. Most people don't have a 2.4m cube they can dedicate to gaming.
D) You often end up having to stop because the batteries need charging, not because you wanted to.
E) The above combined means that game sessions are often a slog to start. You can't just hit a button, grab your controller of choice and play, you have to clear space, start your PC and Steam, put on and adjust the headset, verify the space is clear, launch Steam in VR, then finally launch the game.
Those merely reduce the "net loss".
The "new" state pension is £12k per annum, so you'd need an additional private pension income somewhere around £40-50k to be paying back enough through income tax and VAT to cover only your state pension.
Average private pension income is unclear, but seems to be about £10k, so returning about £4k in income tax and VAT (assuming half of total income is spent on VAT-attracting goods and services)
I am happy to pay towards your pension. Pensioners need a decent standard of living, and many do struggle.
I'm also happy to pay towards your healthcare and other services and benefits, because pooling risk is the only way everyone can afford to "not die".
I am however very irritated by the boomer "I paid in all my life so I'm entitled to £loads" attitude that I often see. They paid for their parents and grandparents. I'm paying for them.
That's due to the demographic bomb.
Everything done by a government is paid for by the current workers. Pensions, healthcare, defence, education etc, it's all paid for by the people actually working - either at the time, or over the next 10-20 years.
Never by the people who used to work.
This only works if the people working outnumber the people who aren't.
Because families have been getting smaller for a long time, the retired are going to outnumber the working pretty soon unless something drastic happens.
The only ways for rich countries to avoid this are to either accept significant immigration, or to prevent people retiring.
The productivity gain was small in monetary terms because the things being produced got a lot cheaper.
They got cheaper because you cannot sell things to the masses if they are too expensive for the masses to actually buy.
This is also what the AI bubble has entirely forgotten.
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