Posts by Sorry that handle is already taken.

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

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

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?

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.

OK, Google: Are you killing Assistant and replacing it with Gemini?

Re: Provided they fix it

That certainly sounds like a "new experience" to me

Re: Bloody Samsung...

That's the problem with all "smart" TVs - a few years down the track support ends and then the apps either stop working or simply get deleted. It's a scam that's been going on for more than ten years now and I don't understand why consumers still give it any attention. Or are there a significant number of people who buy a new TV every three years?

Given their past shenanigans, I wouldn't trust a Samsung TV to actually have obeyed an instruction to disable Wi-Fi, as opposed to silently searching for a nearby open access point and spying on me.

Re: Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

As long as it can still be disabled I'm happy. I'm not optimistic, though.

AMD looks to undercut Nvidia, win gamers' hearts with RX 9070 series

Re: Probably not worth the upgrade...

No these are real prices for real products, at least.

No, you don't need datacentre products, you need a Quadro. The current high end is effectively an RTX 4090 with 48 GB of VRAM and none of the CUs disabled. Its replacement is effectively an RTX 5090 with 96 GB of VRAM and none of the CUs disabled, and is apparently days from an official announcement.

Re: OK, might as well ask.

Tom's Hardware maintains comparison charts which can be useful, although they exclude the absolute low end parts. For example the 1440p ultra non-RT chart shows that almost everything modern outperforms an RX 580. Either an AMD RX 7600, Intel Arc B570 or Nvidia Geforce 4060 will outperform what you have by a factor of about 2.

If you're doing generative AI work, the VRAM becomes important and, per PCPartPicker, the least expensive cards with at least 16GB appear to be the Intel A770 and the AMD 7600 XT. I have no idea whether they're very good at it, though, and I'd simply avoid the Intel A series.

Re: Probably not worth the upgrade...

I was pricing up new bits recently and sweet jesus, an R7 9800X3D is over AU$900 and an RX 7800 XT is over AU$700. They really saw us coming didn't they.

Re: Reality

Permadeath is the absolute worst

Re: LLM

I asked a similar question about the "neural processing units" being added to CPUs these days. The answer was to do with precision. LLMs don't need high mathematical precision, so they perform really well if you can trade off precision for more OPS. Traditional CPUs don't do that very well, but GPUs do.

I don't see the point of AI upscaling at all. I'll live with bigger pixels if it means not seeing weird artifacts everywhere.

Yeah, it's almost like they want you to pay for that privilege...

AI models hallucinate, and doctors are OK with that

Re: On Hallucinations

No you've missed the point. Labelling only "bad" outputs of, say, an LLM as "hallucinations" deflects from the fact that all outputs of an LLM are equal. They're all hallucinations. It's not a useful, or even constructive, distinction.

On Hallucinations

Generative AI models are just complicated mathematical predictive models. Calling unwanted outputs "hallucinations" is an attempt to deflect (from the fact that "hallucinations" constitute 100% of their output) and to anthropomorphise them (so that people believe they're capable of "understanding" the idea of "truth" in the first place).

iRobot may be iDead in iYear

Re: What was Amazon thinking?

How did it in the first place grab this iconic name?

By filing a trademark application before anyone else did.

Re: Robot operated Broom cleans home, not phones!

£600!

And there are people who still wonder why it's going out of business?

Re: Question

If you think it's bad when it happens to consumer devices, consider the bankruptcy of Chinese EV manufacturer WM Motor, which caused major loss of functionality in the ~100,000 vehicles it had sold when its servers went down in 2024.

$16B health dept managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn’t gone well

I've also seen an engineer use Powerpoint to mark up and comment drawings.

Which, when you're familiar with it, can be more convenient than doing it by hand. But also, Powerpoint?!

I've seen people screw up annual budgeting in Excel by simply multiplying weekly budgets by four to get "monthly" budgets, then multiplying that by 12...

I've also seen people manually enter calculation results in Excel after working them out with a calculator.

Uncle Sam mulls policing social media of all would-be citizens

Ahh yes the "land of the free"

Rolling eyes emoji

Hisense QLED TVs are just LED TVs, lawsuit claims

Re: I wonder

Smasnug, surely, if they're Chinese?

California goes ape with bill to crown Bigfoot official state cryptid

Re: Why let Oregon rake in all the tourist dollars?

Long live the republic!

Looks like paywalls are coming soon to a subreddit near you

"the so-called Front Page of the Internet"

That should be the self-described front page of the internet. Nobody calls it that.

This open text-to-speech model needs just seconds of audio to clone your voice

Zyphra's Zypher Zamba Zonos

Zounds!

LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab

Re: "ShartPoint"

Freudian slip?

Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data, including DNA, in one big Oracle system for AI to study

Re: Omniscience is the game

When Stephen Colbert said "reality has a well-known liberal bias", this is the kind of thing he might as well have been talking about. Because apparently nothing's obvious any more.

Larry Ellison can get bent

Title

Trump’s cyber chief pick has little experience in The Cyber

And we probably learned from the best...

The sheer amount of information that people have given up today is something that Hoover could only have dreamed of. Now that the tech bros are kowtowing to or even working with the executive (and, presumably, also the legislature, now apparently merely a vassal of the executive), the possibilities for abuse are endless.

Kakistocracy

The headline could really be generalised to "Trump's <agency head> pick has little experience in <agency's functions>".

It was never about much more than cronyism, with a side order of destroying trust in government systems. Shame too few Americans could see that.

though this time, it's not proprietary company information but state secrets of the US of A

And not just the state's secrets. By way of example, the previous (conservative) Australian government developed a habit of leaking the personal information of private citizens as a way to threaten and suppress them. We'll no doubt see that kind of thing on a whole new level from this American regime.

DOGE geek with Treasury payment system access now quits amid racist tweet claims

Re: Bah!

One might assume that being a terrible person makes you a terrible candidate, but the Americans sure proved me wrong.

It isn't just the 77,248,118 who did vote for him, it's also those – almost twice that number – who could have voted against him but didn't. They're all culpable, maybe not equally, but culpable all the same.

In the Charlie Sheen sense

Musk’s DOGE ship gets ‘full’ access to Treasury payment system, sinks USAID

If you aim a shotgun at your left foot and pull the trigger, and then aim it at your right foot and pull the trigger, it is true that you have just had a great deal of success in shooting off both of your feet. But you have also shot off both of your feet.

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

Well... Functionally, an electric toothbrush is very closely related to certain toys of an adult persuasion.