Posts by Sorry that handle is already taken.

Tug reaches flaming ship carrying electric cars off Alaska coast

Re: 'Noticing' smoke

A search for "redox battery" brings me to a Wikipedia article on flow batteries, which current EV batteries definitely aren't. If you want to be technical about it, all electrochemical cells perform "redox" reactions, which makes it trivially true but meaningless.

The important part of a Lithium-Ion battery here is the organic solvents in the electrolyte, which definitely need an external source of oxygen (or to satisfy pedants from the previous article's comments section, an oxidiser) to burn.

The reason EV battery fires are difficult to put (and keep) out is that once they're compromised, even if they've been "put out" they can continue to produce large amounts of heat even when they're not burning, which allows them to reignite for a significant period of time.

"Once a lithium fire starts, it's incredibly difficult to put out."

That's true, but once again, while they certainly do contain a lot of energy just waiting to be released, and a flammable electrolyte to help with that process, lithium-ion cells contain very little lithium and, unlike a lithium primary cell, none of it is in elemental form.

Anyway the point is that, while difficult to put out (and keep out) for various reasons, a burning lithium-ion battery is not a "lithium fire".

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Re: Li+ batteries

While we're being pedantic, the fire triangle generalises to "a fuel, an oxidiser and a source of heat".

Note that "a source of heat" doesn't mean "hot"; it means that the activation energy of the chemical reaction must be exceeded. Your hypergolic propellants still require a minimum temperature for the reaction to initiate, it just happens to be lower than the temperature at which they're stored.

Re: "from Yantai, China"

BYD is already the top selling EV brand in several markets.

Funnily enough all of the Teslas sold in Australia are made in China too.

Re: Bulldozers

I wouldn't want to share a RORO deck with burning cars...

I once read of a RORO that was carrying some large pieces of heavy machinery alongside the usual cargo of hundreds of cars. The vessel struck rough seas, the heavy machinery broke loose and at the end of the day, there wasn't much left.

Re: Oops

Feel bad for the owners of the cars and ship

Indeed! Under certain circumstances, cargo owners can be liable for part of the vessel's salvage cost.

Re: Tesla that burned so hot, it melted part of the road

And I almost gave Clark a shout-out too...

For those interested, Ignition! was reprinted a few years ago so you don't have to read it as a PDF (unless you want to of course).

Re: Tesla that burned so hot, it melted part of the road

The roads around here (Australia) get sticky in summer...

Roads are made by heating bitumen and mixing it with gravel so no, it doesn't take much heat to melt a road. Unless it's Portland cement concrete. That would be impressive.

Take ChatGPT back to the 2010s and they’d think AGI arrived, says Altman

Probably, but also OpenAI burns more than $10b/year so almost every time he pops up it's a transparent attempt to keep the hype train rolling so they can con some more investors and keep the incinerator running.

OpenAI model modifies shutdown script in apparent sabotage effort

Re: Bollocks

Same as an AI interpreting instructions in a simulated drone attack: The AI saw the actions of an operator as interfering with the AI's task, so it targeted the operator so it could complete its assigned task.

That was all made up. This very likely is too.

Microsoft-backed AI out-forecasts hurricane experts without crunching the physics

Wait a minute

So is it an LLM, or not an LLM? The lead says so but the text implies it isn't.

Re: Well blow me over

It's almost as if they have been for years and can make better use of the computing power they now have available!

Google, high on AI, flogs Gemini for all things

Re: The Singularity is neigh

I'm beginning to realise "The Singularity" is just "concentrating so much energy that you create a black hole".

Wanted: A handy metric for gauging if GPUs are being used optimally

I'll have a go

Is your GPU being used to train generative AI models or mine cryptocurrencies?

If yes, then it is not being used optimally.

Whodunit? 'Unauthorized' change to Grok made it blather on about 'White genocide'

I can't see how it's anything but the third option, honestly.

CERN boffins turn lead into gold for about a microsecond at unimaginable cost

Re: Odd how what was "nonsense" is now fact.

Sure, at the moment they fill a gap in our understanding of why the universe appears as it does, but that's what implies their existence. The classic example being that the gravitational force attributable to visible matter in most spiral galaxies is insufficient to explain their rotation, so there must also be matter in there that we can't see, hence the assumption of the existence of "dark matter". Likewise for dark energy. They're both acknowledgements that our models of the universe are incomplete.

I don't think the idea of dark matter and dark energy are equivalent to "luminiferous ether" or "phlogiston", because those were hypotheses attempting to explain various natural phenomena that weren't understood at the time. The explanations turned out to be wrong and they were discarded once the experimental evidence indicated such. The effects of dark matter and dark energy are very much visible, we just don't yet know what they are.

Update turns Google Gemini into a prude, breaking apps for trauma survivors

Hold on

Why are (presumed) sexual abuse counselling services using LLMs in the first place, given LLMs' propensity to generate unhelpful shit?

Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025

I can't help thinking it'll only be doing as little as 240 km/h if its parachute deploys.

Zuck ghosts metaverse as Meta chases AI goldrush

Whoops

Even though it's in the name, I had completely forgotten about Zuck's metaverse pivot. Sixty billion is incredible, but I'm happy for them to waste as much of their own money as possible.

Incidentally I re-watched The Future is a Dead Mall the other day. A different metaverse, sure, but the conclusion can probably only really be the same.

Re: FFS

I'll try: It benefits people in the same way that cocaine producers enrich their local communities?

TAKE IT DOWN Act? Yes, take the act down before it's too late for online speech

Re: ...because nobody gets treated worse than I do online. Nobody.

As usual it isn't true, but in this case it would be great if it was.

Your graphics card's so fat, it's got its own gravity alert

Re: Card orientation

Micro-ATX and Mini-ITX cases still place the motherboard horizontally at the bottom without having a huge footprint, and these days many of them are also designed to accommodate comical video cards.

AI-driven 20-ft robots coming for construction workers' jobs

Re: Hmmm

There's a reason construction sites are also known as open-air asylums.

Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back

Re: Copyright is not IP

Delete this

LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything

Hallucination

Every LLM output is an hallucination. It's how LLMs work.

Some of them are objectively nonsense, but those are just as statistically valid as the ones that we decide are "good".

China ups tariffs on US goods to 125%, calls Trump's war a 'joke'

Re: Who has the biggest hands

Like a fiddle

Trump kills clearances for infosec's SentinelOne, ex-CISA boss Chris Krebs

Re: How pathetic can you get ?

Those of us who had any sense were telling anyone who would listen that a second term would be little more than a revenge tour. And so...

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

Some of their input devices were excellent.

Nvidia paid $1M for Mar-a-Lago meal, US later scrapped AI chip export crackdown

The Swamp

This is what a "drained" swamp looks like. Hope you're happy!

Also this and this and hundreds, perhaps already thousands of other examples. It is utterly corrupt.

China hits back at America with retaliatory tariffs, export controls on rare earth minerals

FA...

Who would have guessed we'd be in the FO stage so soon?

(It's me, but it didn't take a guess. You probably knew too.)

Wikipedia's overlords bemoan AI bot bandwidth burden

The Register has asked the Wikimedia Foundation...

...why it hasn't banned AI crawlers more comprehensively.

This is way outside my expertise so... how would you achieve this? As I understand it, they ignore robots.txt anyway, while rate limiting is not difficult to work around?

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

I also blame everyone who didn't vote.

LLM providers on the cusp of an 'extinction' phase as capex realities bite

Re: Gartner? THOSE guys?

Is Gartner ever right about anything?

I've wondered about this myself but I realise that the only place I ever read about Gartner is here and the only times I ever read about them are when they've missed on a prediction or forecast.

So their hit rate could be the pits, or it could be amazing, but you'd never know unless you follow them. Which I doubt many of us are inclined to do. The fact they're still around means someone must be happy with the advice they charge for.

LLM's propensity to generate absolute bullshit has already caught out a lot of lawyers, which is certainly amusing but I wouldn't want teachers or doctors or law enforcement relying on that shit.

Is that a choir of angels I hear?

Maybe we can have our gaming GPUs back now?

AI datacenters want to go nuclear. Too bad they needed it yesterday

Re: Completely unnecessary

Haven't seen much evidence of the former lately

Re: Completely unnecessary

Here, you dropped this

Nvidia GPU roadmap confirms it: Moore’s Law is dead and buried

Re: Not Enough Compute Speed?

If they truly are limited by the production capacity of their fab contracts, being able to do more with less would allow them to distribute the kool-aid to more potential customers...

Re: Not Enough Compute Speed?

The best computer scientists in the world have built a neat toy, but they've already used all of the training data available to them, both legally and illegally.

When OpenAI runs out of money and still doesn't have a product that real people want to pay actual money for, what happens?

God didn't have a plan for Gelsinger at Intel. Maybe there is one for his new gig, Gloo

Gloo claims its technology platform serves about 100,000 Christian leaders, by providing tools that assist in sermon development, religious education resources, and facilitating community engagement.

Standby for LLMs to replace pastors, I guess?

But at least an LLM can't touch up minors.

You know that generative AI browser assistant extension is probably beaming everything to the cloud, right?

No shit

Who would expect otherwise?

Tesla Cybertruck recall #8: Exterior trim peels itself off, again

Re: It looked stupid when it was first announced

Some go to even more extreme measures...

I recall reading a car magazine published in the mid-late 70s, in which they had a group test of medium sized four door sedans from the era, including a handful of Japanese models and some British ones. The Datsun 180B/Bluebird could have been one of them. It struck me that the info box for every single vehicle in the test included a list of the defects the test example had off the showroom floor, which definitely isn't a thing these days!

A 1970s Datsun was a product of its time. However, the Japanese automakers really sorted their shit out in the 1960s and by the late 70s were generally class leading in terms of value and reliability.

Tesla has been speedrunning the mistakes that the traditional automakers (you know, the ones that are only "worth" a fraction as much as Tesla) made more than 50 years ago.

Privacy warriors whip out GDPR after ChatGPT wrongly accuses dad of child murder

I presume your point is that we only put up with it if the software is useful, and the GenAI pushers can pack up and go home?

Crew-9 splashes down while NASA floats along with Trump and Musk nonsense

Re: Media circus

From my perspective, the demonstration flights of crew dragon were far more interesting, and media coverage of those would also have been more in line with the public interest cycle of the Apollo and Shuttle programs. This wasn't exactly an Apollo 13 moment...

I am a bit cynical but I don't think I'm too cynical?

Re: Media circus

*news channels

Media circus

It was interesting to see many of the new channels here in Australia covering the return live. I'm fairly sure that hasn't happened before. There was nothing special or out of the ordinary about the mission, other than the fact that a couple of its passengers, who are otherwise veteran professional astronauts, had spent longer than they expected in orbit.

Presumably, most regular media outlets simply didn't understand how routine it was and got sucked into the "rescue" circus by this administration's PR department.