* Posts by I ain't Spartacus

10674 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009

Lawyers face judge's wrath after AI cites made-up cases in fiery hoverboard lawsuit

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Re: motion in limine

collinsl,

I've never observed a trial - or watched the couple the BBC have been allowed to show, as experiments. So my only experience is jury duty. And of course there's a lot of it you don't see. But I got the impression (I've done jury duty twice) that a lot goes on in the judges offices, as well as the courtrooms. At least on the circuit courts. There's probably a relatively small number of regular barristers and the judges move around, but in a limited area. So I suspect they snatch a lot of trial planning meetings about stuff for the future - if they happen to be in the same place for other trials.

Talking to the ushers it was clear that there were lots of meetings going on with the judges, that were unrelated to the case we were on that week. I guess some were formal hearings in the court, the others in the offices in the non public bit - that the jury get to walk past on the way from court to jury room (at least in the more modern of my county's two Crown court buildings.

I was surprised how little time I spent in court, as a juror. Even on a week long case. Though that could partly be down to it only being relatively simple assault cases.

It's like an iceberg. The jury only see the top. By design. It's a bit scary, when you can see there's movement behind the curtain, but this has been deliberately designed to exclude telling you vital stuff - you'd like to know to make a better decision. But the very idea of a non-expert jury requires that you be kept in the dark about some things. You're then having to give your verdict on trust.

One case involved a nightclub fight, where everyone had been offered some kind of deal to avoid prosecution in order to try and get their testimony to convinct just one guy of the more serious assault (stamping on someone's head). Understandable, but made me queasy, and slightly disgusted as the person who started the fight smugly told us what happened from the witness box.

We didn't convict because even with being let off prosecution there weren't enough good witnesses. But I still worry as much about not convicting a possible vicious face-stamping bastard as that we might have got it wrong about the one we did convict in a different case.

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Re: Course of least resistance

It would be so easy to have the computer bring up all the cases that the AI has found for you - like a proper search tool should - and then you could check if they were relevant. This might even act as further training data for your internal AI - when it turns out half of it is picked randomly, and the other half is made up.

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Re: motion in limine

I'd be surprised if there's any legal system that operates jury trials that doesn't have a system for the judge to decide what evidence to put the jury, with both sets of lawyers arguing about it first.

My last jury service was quite interesting - assault and GBH (grevious bodily harm) - because the prosecution lawyer broke these rules. He asked a question, and before the witness could answer the judge had interrupted and said, "we already agreed you couldn't go down this line of questioning." To which the lawyer replied that he was trying to develop a different point. So the judge let him continue.

A couple of minutes later, he asked the same question again, and the judge virtually levitated out of his chair. And shouted, "stop!" very loudly. He then got about ten words into a very loud and angry verbal dressing-down - then stopped - turned to us in the jury and politely said, "I'm very sorry but the jury will need to retire while I address this issue". As the usher led us to the jury room you could hear him shouting through the not-as-soundproof-as-I'd-initially-thought door.

We found this quite amusing, back in the jury room. And the bollocking must have been substantial, because we weren't allowed back in for nearly half an hour. And were then told to ignore the last bit of evidence as none of it was admissable. Prosecution barrister was a chastened man for the rest of the afternoon.

Ransomware isn't always about the money: Government spies have objectives, too

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Re: North Korea

I believe the Noth Koreans have also been accused of faking dollars bills.

I'm not quite sure how you expect to make a few millions in a few days with a diplomatic passport though. You could use the diplomatic bag for smuggling. But the problem is that the locals might catch you, and then you get PNG'd (declared persona non grata and sent back home). At which point your government have to find a replacement and you get into trouble. That limits what you can do, given foreign domestic intelligence agencies tend to keep an eye on the North Korean embassy - because most of their job is going to be spying, making money and getting round sanctions.

That leaves them having to do legal stuff - or be very clever if they're going to get involved in crime.

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North Korea

Large chunks of the North Korean government are not fully funded. They have to spend some of their time doing stuff to fill out their budgets. The army will use some of its troops as agricultural labour - in order to both help the economy and get needed food to keep its conscripts going. North Korean embassies have to run businesses in order to pay their own salaries - foreign currency is a particular problem for their government. I saw a BBC piece on their London embassy a few years ago. Some of them were even driving minicabs - some of the businesses might be a lot less legit than that.

I was listening to an interview with a North Korea expert at the weekend who said that this was even true for their intelligence agenices. Hence the attack on the Bangladeshi Central Bank a few years ago - despite the fact that Bangladesh are one of the more friendly countries towards them. Or more likely because of that, because it allows them to get people inside.

North Korea is unusual in that it also runs straight cash generation via the government. I read a report 15 years ago, that North Korea were believed to be behind at least 30% of online fake viagra sales - and this was done from government owned pharmaceuitcal factories in order to get money. Also the fake online employee scams uses some of North Korea's more talented IT people, again recruited by the government to get cash.

With so many sanctions, as well as such a poor economy, North Korea really needs foreign currency for luxuries to keep the top Party officials onside and also for their various weapons programs - particularly now they're giving ammuntion and troops to Russia. I'm guessing Russia will pay them with tech know-how - as they can't really spare weapons to give them.

Why SAP may be mulling 2030 end of maintenance for legacy ERP

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Facepalm

The sound of whalesong

SAP has long argued that a strong business case exists to migrate from ECC to S/4HANA, especially in the cloud. Greater speed and agility in financial and operational control are among the benefits, it claims.

Does it also leverage the synergies of parallel strategisation in order to drive the operationalisation of efficiency gains on the upside hence enhancing shareholder value in all long-run scenarios?

Why that sounds great! I'll have ten!

For us mere mortals who look at actual numbers - might I suggest that SAP stop sniffing those jos sticks and tell marketing to stop eating the crayons, and come up with some actually measurable benefits to offer.

UK, US, Oz blast holes in LockBit's bulletproof hosting provider Zservers

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Mushroom

Re: “unable to open display”

Weyland-Yutani causing trouble? Is it the bioweapons division? I should take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

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Trollface

Re: The old diversionary tactic

The number of down votes shows how many people are taking the blue pill on a daily basis.

It's not my fault. I have to. I've only got one leg you see. If I don't take Viagra every day, then I'll fall over...

Sri Lanka goes bananas after monkey unplugs nation

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Coat

Re: Monkey need probonobo lawyer?

Perhaps someone misunderstood a lecture on fusion power? They confused tokamak with tocque macaque?

OK. I'll get my coat. The one with the suspiciously banana-smeared copy of Hamlet in the pocket.

Amazon, Google asked to explain why they were serving ads on sites hosting CSAM

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Re: The only sophisticated thing about the advertising industry

I was quite surprised that the advertisers quizzed for this report were happy to admit that they gave all this cash to Google and Amazon and yet those companies provided them basically zero information about where their ads were placed. You guys are paying for this service you know? If you want info, then you have the power to demand it. It would only take a few of the biggest brands to get together and cooperate.

Of course, the immediate next comment does suggest that this whole system is designed to give plausible deniability rather than information. Which is an interesting tradeoff for the advertisers. You want wide distribution of your ads, at low cost, with minimal reputational damage. You'd also like to know how effective your advertising spend is, which is a much harder thing to measure. So maybe the trade-off works best where you can blame the already unpopular Google/Facebook/Amazon, get very little info but also have relatively lower cost and complexity than having to have a lot of expertise in-house to operate your advertising more manually?

It's clear how little Google care from the quality of ads they allow on Youtube - over this weekend there seems to have been a campaign for this one amazing trick, that all men should know, where you use salt and honey to make it last longer - at which point the skip button appears and so my knowledge ends. But I'm guessing it's not a recipe for curing bacon (though I suspect pork is involved) - and nor is it a recipe for honey-roasted nuts...

Were I a legitimate advertiser (of which many were also shown on the same videos) paying for my content to be rammed into Drachinifel's excellent naval history Youtube vids - I'd be pretty pissed off to be associated with shitty spam penis enlargement ads. I should probably just give him some Patreon cash and then block all ads in Youtube.

Eggheads crack the code for the perfect soft boil

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Re: "a total duration of 32 minutes"

Upvote for the Monkhouse.

There's a great BBC documentary called, 'Bob Monkhouse the Last Stand'. He did a final gig, when he knew he was dying (but the people there all thought this was part of his comeback after recovering from cancer treatment). He hired a London venue and invited a bunch of professional comedians that he'd worked with or knew - and in many cases younger up-and-coming comedians that he'd often helped or given advice to.

It's mostly footage of the show, which is warm and very funny - it's more him telling stories of the business rather than his normal stand-up. A lot of people didn't rate him, becuase of his gameshow 50s American comic persona - which was safe for family shows on prime time TV. His stand-up was much better.

Jimmy Carr has a similar game-show persona. Although I'm less a fan of his stand-up, it's still good though. But I've heard him interviewed, when not in character, and he came across as a much more interesting and nicer person. He'd written a book on the history of comedy, and it was clearly a subject he loved and was passionate about, and it brought out a whole different side of him than you see as a viewer.

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Coat

Re: "Incidentally, The Register has a long history of breaking egg stories."

"The video is private" - mus be really horrific!

The last person to watch it is still suffering from shell-shock. Mental health is no yolk and so El Reg were panned for making such an eggshibition of themselves. Although some people say this is just modern wokery and that people shouldn't need to be coddled - and should be more hard boiled and not be so liable to crack under the first sign of pressure. The uneggspurgated video will be available as an easter egg in the next El Reg DVD box set.

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Gomez Adams,

Of course soldiers can be toasted! Are you some kind of toast-ist? Bread can live whatever way it wants to - and you shouldn't be trying to dictate its life choices to it! Although, at risk of kink-shaming, I draw the line at fucking marmite! Bleurgh!

Soldiers can be toasted or untoasted, brown or white - sometimes I even butter a floury bap and tear pieces off it to dip in my yolk.

A friend of mine met a guy who likes toasted crumpets with butter, marmite, peanut butter and jam. He should be burned as a heathen!

I'm a relatively recent convert to taking my tea black, so don't feel I have the moral justification to demand everyone else ditch the milk as well. Although I did frequent a lovely chinese restaurant in Brussels that served their green tea in twee Laura Ashley style cups and saucers with sugar and milk provided. And I'm prepared to call that out as plain wrong. Although saying that, green tea ice cream is delicious, so maybe green tea could work with milk too?

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Happy

Re: "a total duration of 32 minutes"

Eclectic Man,

I'm glad to make you smile with my silly portmanteau word. I was very pleased when I came up with the word flunchy, that kind of silliness makes me happy. Mostly when using it I have been met with derision from my so-called-friends and family. But I still soldier on with it - mainly to annoy them, if truth be told.

They all laughed at the Wright Brothers' genius too!

Although, as Sagan said, they also laughed at Bozo the clown.

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Re: "a total duration of 32 minutes"

I want it ready when the toast is done!

Mishak,

Well are you going to be pleased! Latest research has just what you need! A toaster that ensures perfect exterior toast crunchiness to interior fluffiness ratio (a wondrous state we shall heretofore refer to as flunchy). This is achieved with alternate heating and cooling cycles, meaning your breakfast toast can also take 32 minutes.

Glad to be of service.

Share and enjoy!

Poland’s 2nd astronaut brings pierogi to the ISS party

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you make something where you don't really like a lot of the constituent ingredients and it turns out utterly wonderful - how does that happen?

The secret of quite a lot of traditional cuisines? You get to eat what's left after the rich people have eaten most of the actual meat. So you come up with haggis, or steak and kidney pudding or Chinese dim sum (dumplings).

I've had some lovely dim sum - but it's not always clear what some of them were made of. Perhaps best not to ask?

And then there's whatever the hell Brain's Faggots are made out of...

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ArrZarr,

Not, of course, forgetting the wonderful Czech beer. Yum.

I know some people that went to Czechia and got to eat things like liver dumplings for breakfast - and big slabs of fatty pork. Not a diet they were particularly happy with. But I suspect there's probably been a whole generation of people eating vast quantities of meat, in compensation for so little of it being available during the years of communism. You don't see a whole cuisine when you visit, especially as they were at a wedding in the middle of nowhere, and the families weren't that well-off.

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F.Frederick Skitty,

Since you recommend Czech cuisine and I know absolutely nothing about it - could you recommend a couple of dishes I could look up and see if I can try? I'm always in the market for learning. Especially when it's yummy.

Latvian Pierogi with bacon in are the only ones I've tried.

Robot dogs learn bomb disposal tricks in trials

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Re: IED disposal

Robot dog destroying a real IED would likely result in the robot dog also being destroyed, if it's the Boston Dynamics version.

Not necesarily. Although this is why they are testing it.

A lot of bombs are disarmed by using a small explosive charge to separate the detonators from the rest of the explosive - hopefully without setting the main charge off - or by breaking up the explosive. It might not even be particularly dangerous to place the charge - the danger lies in going and standing next to the bomb while you do it. Unless there are loads of booby-traps - but they take time, effort and skill that the bombers may not have.

Often this is done with a remote controlled tracked vehicle, about a quarter the size of a small car. But that needs relatively level and unobstructed access to the device, and if it can't get there, then old Muggins has to walk over and do it. Exposing themselves to an unknown timer, sniper fire and/or command detonation of the device. The dog can walk, so can get to many more places. It can be operated remotely in order to place its charge, but does it's walking autonomously. So you get it to place the charge and leave, as you would with either the vehicle or yourself. Then remote detonate your charge and hopefully reuse your robot, or human bomb disposal officer (if they had to do it).

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Re: Be careful what you say!

Cabin Pressure was also... Brilliant. What other word could I use?

And Cumberbatch managed to only miss one episode, while making vast quantities of money in Hollywood. Radio does not pay well - and only gets good people because it can be recorded relatively quickly in the day before theatre engagements - or a couple of epsiodes at a time in the middle of film or TV work.

But the Souvenir Program has so many perfect sketches.

Also, if you noticed it only recently appeared on iPlayer recently - it's being broadcast on Radio 4 Extra at the moment (which I'm sure is why) you can get it elsewhere.

Fourble Linky is a not very user-friendly website with absolutely loads of old podcasts and Radio shows, plus the odd book reading. Much of it is BBC or NPR stuff. It's got all the Clive Merrison and Michael Williams 90s Sherlock Holmes BBC recordings on it. Which are the best Holmes in my opinion. Partly because Merrison is wonderful, but also because Williams' Watson is perfect. He's not played as stupid, just nowhere near as clever as Holmes and sometimes deeply frustrated with him - while still liking and respecting him. They're also, I believe, the only pair of actors to have performed the entire canon, including the short stories.

It also has the Toby Stephens adaptations of Philip Marlow and James Bond that the Beeb did a few years ago - which are quite fun. Though sadly not the McLevy series. For comedy I'd also higly recommned High Table, Lower Orders and In the Red - both top quality silliness from Mark Taverner.

I'll shut up now. Yellow car!

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Be careful what you say!

Command your robot dog to "Fetch!". Then watch as it retrieves the bomb and brings it back to you, dropping it at your feet - tail wagging - expecting a treat. Kaboom! Nobody wants their final words to be, "Bad Doggie!"

John Finnemore has an excellent (safe for work)sketch about sniffer dogs Linky to YouTube

But then John Finnemore's Souvenir Program is a work of true genius, and he has a sketch for nearly everything...

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

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Happy

Re: BRB, just checking the garage…

Oh shit! Is that what I did when I was drunk last night?

Apropos of nothing, does anybody want to buy a secondhand Cybertruck? One careful owner, never been in the rain, mint condition.

Dave Gorman claims to have bought a hot air balloon on eBay, at 2am, while drunk. Oops. Bit awkward when the courier tries to drop that in your wheelie-bin and run away.

OpenAI unveils deep research agent for ChatGPT

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Re: I think I understand why ...

Zolko,

Humanity's Last Exam was designed as a benchmark. Specifically a benchmark for testing "AI". Which is odd, given we don't have any AI, we just have LLMs. But that's a different question.

Whether tuning some sort of LLM-based research bot to answer the questions in that test is a useful measure is another question. I'd suspect the answer is no. But an accurate, automated research assistant would actually be a useful thing.

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Black Helicopters

Re: OpenAI deep research managed an accuracy of 26.6 percent.

I had a quick look - there's a bunch of questions I could easily answer, with just a few minutes of looking up. There are others that I don't have even the basic knowledge of the subject matter to known how complex the answer is, without first having to do some research into it. But I'd expect to be able to do better than 1% - although can't evaluate how much better without spending time analysing the questions.

But the real problem with "AI" - or at least the current trend for using large language models and claiming it's AI - is that theyre designed to put text together in realistic sounding ways. Had you actually designed something to do research, then you'd design it to look for information and then tell you if it's found anything or not. Even if it fails to find the answer, if it's able to give you its search history, you should at least have a map of useful places to look (or to avoid looking). But we're not using research toools, we're using language simulation models. So what the thing does is spit out some plausible sounding text - and if you're lucky it's actually based on the information you were looking for.

At the end of which process you now have a document containing some correct information, some partially correct information and some totally made up bollocks. But no way to tell which is which , without doing the research yourself anyway! What we don't have is a tool capable of looking at a question and answering it - we have a tool designed to look at a question and give a plausible sounding answer that might (or might not) be based on searching the internet or some curated training data. Further mediated through a set of bolted on filters (guard-rails) designed to stop the output being obviously racist, stupid or dangerous - with unknown effects on the output.

I'm still annoyed that he (she/it/they) broke the rotor blades though. Even if JPL were interrupting your BBQ?

It's not even reached the level of amanfrommars1's output yet. And he (she/it/they) is currently broadcasting from a place with no running water, while being buzzed with helicopters and dodging NASA's laser-armed space tank.

AI revoir, Lucie: France's answer to ChatGPT paused after faux pas overdrive

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Re: "cow's eggs as a nutritious food source"

Swans? They could break a cow’s arm, soon as look at them.

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Re: "cow's eggs as a nutritious food source"

since Henry VIII was notoriously lactose intolerant

This is a commonly held myth - believed to be down to a transcription error in copying Hollinshead's Chronicle. The Chronicler said that "he wasse intolerant to milk and it brought him forth unto a toweringe rage - which led him to cause much cruelty in the eyes of both menne and God." However, this was an error in copying by an inexperienced monk. Later scholarship suggests that Henry VIII was actually intolerant to MILFs - hence his embarrassing record of divorced x 2, beheaded x2 plus one died in childbirth (described by David Starkey as a great career move from Jane Seymour - as it didn't give Henry time to get tired of her) and one survived.

Although I'd argue that he only beheaded 33% of his wives - which perfectly reasonable behaviour in a long reign - and two could just be a coincidence rather than a habit...

More details are available in my new book, 'Henry VIII: Top Geezer and Total Legend or Complete Bellend - a Meta-Historical Perspective' - published by the Hull University Press and available in all good bookstores at the bargain price of £494.99.

Mental toll: Scale AI, Outlier sued by humans paid to steer AI away from our darkest depths

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Re: I've seen things man!

You just expanded my knowledge of humanity by another quantum... I knew about Goatse, but had never run into "2 girls one cup".

OldSod,

You weren't supposed to bloody look at it!

If your friend said jump off that cliff, you wouldn't actually do it would you?

Except of course... I listen to a podcaster who was using that line on his kids, when he remembered he'd been on a stag do with loads of ex-army mates - and that's exactly what they'd done. The thing that makes it worse, is one bloke was encouraging them to do it, and none of the rest of them really wanted to - but allowed themselves to be bullied into it - all except one brave soul who said - this is silly and refused.

I'll just reset my faith in humanity rating one level lower...

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I've seen things man!

I was a forum mod back in the early 2000s. Is there compensation for all the Goatse and 2 girls one cup posts that had to be deleted and the ban-hammer deployed?

On a serious note, it's really easy to do mental harm to yourself online. If you've followed the Ukraine war, or Syria, Myanmar, Nagorno-Karabakh, there's now so much footage online you can find yourself watching all kinds of horrors. Not to mention all the ISIS / Al Qaeda death-porn and beheading videos. I've followed some of the OSINT accounts on Ukraine, and you can learn an awful lot from watching some of this stuff - if you remember that the footage getting released is going to be highly selective. You don't tend to post footage of your own failures, for example. Some guys have also strapped Go Pros onto themelves and stormed trenches - and it's just like watching a first-person shooter game - except it's not. It's very real. You don't want to traumatise yourself, but also you don't want to beecome some kind of ghoul, or become callous. I've tried to watch only the stuff that shows how the tech works, but even there - if a tank blows up then often a crew also just blew up - and it's important to remember that.

It's not sport - and just because you can watch it from your comfy armchair, doesn't mean real people aren't really suffering. Although I was happy to laugh that Prigorzhin got his richly deserved fate - I don't think it's funny that some Russian kid, who probably got conscripted got shot because he poked his head round the corner of a trench at exactly the wrong moment.

Also I still can't believe Microsoft had ordinary staff trawling for child porn. Even the hardened police teams on the online child protection teams have to have counselling and all get burned out doing that.

Europe, UK weigh up how to respond to Trump's proposed tariffs. One WTF or two?

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This sounds like wishful thinking

Of course it would make sense if everyone could agree, and we could all have a unicorn, sunshine, and roses. Plus a big helping of Mom's apple pie.

But there's no agreement within the EU over how to deal with Trump. There's even less likely to be a deal the EU can agree on that they can also agree on with us.

Also if healthy negotiations and common sense were likely between the EU and UK - we wouldn't have the Brexit deal we ended up with. Which was a much more limited deal than either side wanted. Getting common sense and compromise now seems even less likely, given that all discussions of trade deals seem to come down to people talking about "victory" and "defeat" - trade deals that work are about mutual benefit - and you're never going to get Trump to buy into that. To be honest, there didn't seem to be much of that on display from the EU Commission during the Brexit negotiations either - they seemed totally obsessed with "winning". And then ended up settling for a much looser relationship than they wanted. Interesting to see how the "great negotiator" Barnier performed as French Prime Minister, briefly at the end of last year. And that was just negotiating one years' budget...

Good negotiation is about trying to fit two sides positions together in the most advantageous and least destructive ways possible. Unless you're Trump, in which case it's more about looking "strong" and shouting a lot, often achieving very little. But saying you're "a winner". I'd say there was quite a lot of that from the EU back in day too - and I still don't think there's been a huge amount of change. The bitterness has cooled - but at the time I said relations wouldn't normalise until all the political leaders involved had gone. We've still got Macron, von der Leyen and Tusk - they might look a tad silly if they offered up compromises that were "literally impossible" 5 years ago...

Plus, I don't see anybody seriously talking about a comprehensive trade deal with Trump. I'm sure there will be negotiations, on particular issues, but Munchau called for a replacement for the TTIP - which collapsed in 2016 because both Trump and Clinton came out against it in the election. And it wasn't exactly popular in Europe either - there's no way the French would sign up for it, given their political climate. I regularly read Munchau's blog, and listened to his podcast while it was running - but I think he's dived into pure wishful thinking here.

Also, Trump might take some kind of symbolic short term "big win" and shut up about it for a bit. Which would be a lot simpler to agree than a proper trade negotiation. On average, trade deals take a decade.

Oh, and finally, the EU's trade surplus with the US is in goods the UK's is in services (though it might be in goods as well, I'm not sure).

Musk torches $500B Stargate AI plan, Altman strikes back

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Devil

Re: Fusion

Who needs fusion? With $100 billion dollars, you could just convert your coal power stations to be dollar-bill-fired. OK, they emit a bit of CO2 - but it's paper-based, so renewable.

I believe I've just invented perpetual motion. Can I have my Nobel Prize now please? I'll take it in cash. Kerching!

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Re: Ostensibly it's all private money

Weird how tight finances are until the banking sector needs bailing out. Then they can magically find $14Tn (yes, with a T) from down the back of the sofa (read: the Fed printed it. Because printing is actually fine within certain parameters).

But that money can't be found for anything useful, like schools or infrastructure.

rg287,

Banking is all about confidence. If you lend the banks a couple of trillion dollars of just printed money - then they literally can't go bust. However you can then recall those loans 2 years later - the banks were literally forced to take that money in the UK and US, whether they wanted it or not - then you have literally spent no money. In fact those forced loans to the banks made a small profit, as they all had to pay interest on them. The loans were paid back and the money was destroyed (un-printed?) again.

This was purely an excercise in confidence building and had almost no effect on the economy - other than stopping a catastrophic banking collapse and possibly lowering interest rates somewhat.

Other money was printed and used to nationalise, or partially nationalise, banks - which is different - but again they were then slowly sold back to the markets and the money un-printed. So again minimal economic effect. No spending has actually happened in the real economy.

Other money was printed and used to buy government debt. That actually created inflation - as government spent more than it otherwise could have. Which was good, because at the time we had a severe risk of deflation - so inflation was useful. However when the same trick was tried during the pandemic, we overdid it a bit - or at least didn't reverse the QE fast enough, and got 10% inflation in one year. That is the economic constraint. You can't print money to spend on schools and hospitals without using up real goods, services and labour from the real economy. In a depression that's actually good - causing inflation where you have none (or worse negative) is a good thing. But do it in an economy not in depression and you get inflation.

Printing money to stop banks imploding, which they don't spend, and then taking that money back doesn't really cause inflation - so you can do it anytime you want. Basically it's different - because it's not being used in the real economy to compete for goods, services and wages.

Also remember, the banks were not "bailed-out". They were given loans at interest (higher than base rates) if they were solvent, or they were nationalised at very low market prices and then sold back for a profit later. All these measures cost the banks (or their shareholders) money and made profit for the governments. I don't think we're due to fully sell RBS until next year though. The government even made a profit on Northern Rock - which was nationalised after it went bust. Or, as I rather suspect, was made bust by the Bank of England in a misguided attempt to teach the banks a lesson (moral hazard), even though it was technically solvent. Whereas RBS were nationalised and given loans even though I'm willing to bet they weren't solvent - but winding them up would have been a disaster so it wasn't done.

Sage Copilot grounded briefly to fix AI misbehavior

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Re: Sage Copilot’s accuracy, security and trust have been prioritized every step of the way

Are you sure you know wtf you are doing?

How can you doubt it? Senior management are doing their jobs completely correctly! There are important buzzwords to implement here! Heaven forfend that the company not be up with the latest fashions! This would be unacceptable! Just because yo-yo's were pointless and pretty boring, it was vitally important for playground-cred that you had a Duncan Firewheel. Well it's just the same. When the CEOs meet in the golf clubs and the airport lounges - nobody wants to be the one being laughed at by everyone else for having a Tog Houer or Ralex on their wrist - or a fake Manchester Utd kit from down the market. That would be unbearable.

One must have the latest AI shinies. Perhaps a discrete gonk on the executive desk? A scattering of cloud and just a soupçon of synergies.

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Pint

Re: When a small number of your customers might mean ALL your customers

Phil O'Sophical,

Thank you. I don't know how I missed that. I already knew you could just get images or video, but hadn't even wondered what happened if you clicked on web button.

Every day's a school day. I'm so pleased I'm going to reward myself with one of the custard creams my colleague has brought.

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Re: When a small number of your customers might mean ALL your customers

Equality,

There may only be a small number of uses alpha-testing Sage's crappy AI - but that doesn't mean they haven't used ever customers' data to train it, and so the potential is that everybody's data has been revealed (at least in part) to this small number of users. Lovely.

LLMs can be very annoying. When you search for info on UK VAT rules nowadays - Google's "AI" confidently tells you the answer in a nice potted paragraph. With zero sources quoted and so no way of checking if it's even vaguely accurate. You need to keep scrolling until you find the relevant HMRC page, admittedly searching on Google is still usually quicker than searching on their own website.

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

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Re: Good & bad

But using fuel & engines for recovery & reuse is a two-fold fail:

Mage,

It does take fuel to recover a used rocket. But I'm willing to bet that it takes a damned site more CO2 to build a whole rocket and set of engines than the small amount of extra fuel you're buring in order to get them back.

Around 10 years ago Musk said it only took about $300,000 of fuel to get a Falcon 9 to orbit. That was at a time when a launch was costing about $60m and remember you're using less than 5% of the fuel to land the first stage - and the first stage probably only contains around half the total fuel. So you're using maybe $10-$15k of fuel in order to get tens of millions of dollars worth of rocket back.

All of the raw materials in that rocket have had to be mined, moved, refined, moved, machined/forged/cast/some combination, moved around, added to other components shipped around a bit more - until the finally assembled compenents reach the rocket factory. There's an awful lot of exquisitely manufactured bits in them rockets - and they all have to be made on incredibly expensive machine tools - in factories using lots of electricity.

For a quick example, I had a quick look online for the first decent looking analysis I could find. Ballpark accuracy being all I wanted. About 25% of an ICE car's CO2 emissions come just from building it. the rest from the fuel it burns + a bit from maintenance. And that's from a car driving every day for about 10-15 years. Admittedly a much larger percentage of a rocket is made up of fuel - but then they don't fly as often - and we're only using a few percent of that fuel to get the rest of it back for re-use.

Boeing going backwards as production’s slowing and woes keep flowing

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Re: Going backwards?

The CAM ships were a great idea. Just looked that up - via your Wiki page, and there were a lot fewer launches than I'd expected. But 8 kills for 8 launches (and so lost aircraft) - and only one pilot killed - which is suprisingly good odds. Given that every flight ended up in the sea.

We also have to remember that Sea Harriers can land on container ships. The Alraigo Incident. Admittedly that sounds like a bad airport thriller title, but when you're lost and out of fuel any sufficiently flat thing looks like a tempting place to land...

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Re: Going backwards?

There's footage of a test flight where they flew the Harrier under a crane, hooked it up to a special hook on the fuselage and turned off the engines. Some precision flying and crane work there - I mean what could possibly go wrong?

Apparently someone had the harebrained idea of launching them off ships that weren't actually aircraft carriers. Big crane on ship, magic aeroplane. It'll all be fine! It's not like wildly swinging a crane from side to side has any bad effects on trying to hook loads up to it, when there's also wind and sea goes both sideways and up and down. Perfectly sensible thing to test...

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Happy

Re: Airbus “ships” 2 planes a day

How do they stop them flying over the edge?

The circumfence, obviously.

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Megaphone

Pascal Monett,

Troll? Moi? How very dare you!

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Re: They need ....

KittenHuffer,

and then take decades getting a new set of products designed and built .... to get back the reputation that they had before.

I think you go too far. Boeing have certainly taken a lot of reputational damage that'll take years to fix, and then still be thrown in their face in the form of jokes and jibes whenever there's a problem for years after that. It's also certanly not a given that they can fix it.

But they don't need to burn down the whole company, just fix the problems. They'll probably need to jettison some useless managers along the way - who are too wedded to the old system of cutting corners. But corporate turnarounds happen all the time.

There's nothing wrong with their aircraft - apart from some of the designs being dated and at the end of their ability to keep being updated. I think it was 2017 when we had an entire year with not a single large commercial aircraft crash in the entire world. At least half of those planes were Boeing. Air travel is still incredibly safe. It's going to be a challenge to get new designs done, but then it often is.

What they need to do is keep fixing problems. It's not a given they'll succeed - but I think even Boeing realise they're in a hole and PR and bullshit alone isn't going to get them out of it.

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Coat

Re: Going backwards?

If you don't all stop with the terrible puns, I'm going to be viffing angry!

SHARly that's enough now - Ed.

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Re: Airbus “ships” 2 planes a day

Andy Mac,

It's cute that you still believe in the myth that heavier than air things can fly.

Why do you think that airports have jetways to take you to the "plane" - from which you can't actually see the plane? Clearly it's because we're still using airships! All the pictures of planes and pictures of plaen crashes are there to fool the sheeple. We're still flying in hydrogen dirigibles. There was a brief period where we used safe helium, but with improvements in safety standards it was decided to go back to hydrogen for extra payload capacity and to save money. Hence all the helium suddenly becoming available for balloons.

You may think your flight only takes a few hours, but that's because they drug your food and change the times and dates on your watches and devices while you're asleep. You might think you've got jetlag, but actually it's a drug induced hangover.

I mean, of course they can't fly. The wings don't even flap or anything!

NATO's newest member comes out swinging following latest Baltic Sea cable attack

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Re: US Navy

Zolko,

You're correct. My apologies for getting my conspiracies mixed up. Seymour Hersch is the once-respected journalist who's descended into conspiratorial lunacy (like John Pilger over here in Blighty) - and Chomsky is the linguist who minors in conspiracies and how the US are at fault for everything, except for the slaughter in Cambodia because that didn't happen...

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Re: US Navy

beast666,

You need to get your conspiracy theories right.

Even Noam Chomsky said it was only naughty Joe Biden persuading the Norwegians to do it for them. With, if I recall my conspiracy theories correctly, a ship that happened to be in dry-dock at the time.

Anyway the spicier conspiracy theory - which actually has some small amount of evidence to back it up, is that Ukrainian military intelligence did it. With a Ukrainian having hired a sailing yacht in Poland - that was just about big enough for the diving kit needed - though not enough for the required safety kit in case something went wrong.

The only evidence for this was leaks from the German investigation, that they were looking into it, but nobody's investigations into Nordstream II seem to have come up with anything concrete, at least that they're publicly admitting - there's just been a few leaks.

The pipeline wasn't running, and didn't look likely to start up, so my judgement is that the risk wasn't worth it for Ukraine to have done it. But I wouldn't bet my house on it not having been them... In my opinion, one of the consequences of the invasion of Ukraine is that GUR (Ukrainian military intelligence) has used the war to clear out most (if not all) of the Russian sleepers and to get good. They're something similar to Mossad now - and when this war ends the Russians are going to continue to regret helping to create this threat on their doorstep. Because they're going to use the same "grey zone" tactics as Russia - but they appear to be a lot more competent than Russia's GRU. They also live in a higher threat environment than Western intel agencies, plus they've been invaded, so they've got fewer scruples. But that could also have the effect of allowing other Western intel agencies to contract out naughty jobs to them - that their own parliaments wouldn't approve. "Oh we're just giving support and training to GUR - we didn't realise they were going to do that!" [shocked face]

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Happy

Re: US Navy

Not Steven Seagal. Surely in this case it would be Chuck Norris.

Tesla recalls 239,382 vehicles over rearview camera problems

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Happy

Can I suggest a compromise? If you're unwilling to accept an electronic system - how about an arrangement of a rear turret and rear-gunner to replace both systems? Give them a powerful enough weapon and you'll have less need for mirrors, as they can reduce the flow of approaching traffic.

Tongue-zapping spoons, tea-cooling catbots, lazy vacuums and more from CES

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Coat

Meow you're just being silly.

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Devil

Re: "The cat would probably prefer the box it comes in."

Sceptic Tank,

You appear to be suffering from dyslexia - or wonky typing.

Cats are evil.

There fixed it for you.

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Re: CES: Man's inhumanity writ large

now we've created a blameless robo-critter so cruelly designed that it can not even escape having its nose assaulted by excessively hot vapours!

that one in the corner,

You're talking about the poor innocent farting cat air purifier bot? Now to be fair, de-fumigating the air after farting cats is a good use for technology. Although there ought to be a dog bed for farting labradors too...

Blue Origin postpones New Glenn's maiden flight to January 12

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Re: As a SpaceX fan

A "fan" ?

werdsmith,

I think I'd also probably call myself a SpaceX fan. I don't think it's healthy or sensible to be a fan of a business you deal with - or even of a business in an industry you interact with. But I've been a science fiction fan since the mid 80s and that's left me with a fascination with spaceflight and space science. As an adult I'd retrained myself to accept that progress would be slow and that there wasn't much chance of more than small (very expensive) government manned programmes in my lifetime - and so I learnt to love all the unmanned science missions.

But of course really I want to fly on a spaceship! OK I'm in my fifties now, so maybe I'm a bit late for that - affordable, commercial spaceflight is still a pipe dream - there are so many problems to solve. But SpaceX have given manned spaceflight an enormous kick up the arse in the last few years - and there's a growing commercial space sector that's looking a lot closer to the predictions of some sci-fi I was reading back in the day. So there's hope - and I'm still fascinated by space so happy days.

Musk is increasingly controversial, but I can still call myself a fan of NASA, SpaceX the ESA, JAXA the Indian Space Research Organisation - and maybe also Blue Origin. Maybe I've got slightly more mixed feelings about the Chinese and Russian space programs, but space stuff is still cool - even if I am now older and supposedly wiser.