Posts by Andy 73

Canon ships first nanoimprint chipmaking machine to R&D lab

Re: No touching

Can't be so different from the optical process, in that any contaminants in the region of the wafer are going to be catastrophic at that scale of process.

Data harvesting superapp admits it struggled to wield data – until it built an LLM

Do the maths..

41 million monthly transacting users generating 40TB a day is around 1 megabyte of data per user per day.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the vast majority of what they're collecting is garbage. It sounds a lot like "data everywhere" culture has overtaken the company - and an LLM is a symptom not a solution.

That's not to say they don't have a serious scaling problem. Many companies would kill to have that many active users. And at that scale, any data insight can create useful improvements in efficiency. However, if the cost of finding that efficiency is a few million dollars worth of hardware and a large software team on the payroll, then you're just moving the inefficiency around rather than reducing it.

Perhaps not so surprising that they can have so many active users and still be struggling to break even..

Blackstone invests £10B to build Europe's 'biggest AI datacenter' in UK

Announced? Nothing to do with Starmer.

Misleading title and quotes from Starmer. The deal was done by Northumberland County Council, with a little help from Sunak some time before the election.

The receivers acting for BritishVolt did the actual announcing - in April this year - that they'd sold the site to Blackstone.

Elon's latest X-periment: Blocked users can still stalk your public tweets

Re: The story goes..

One downvote... hi Elon.

The story goes..

..an engineer told Musk his account was the most blocked on Twitt.. X.

So, of course he wants you to see his Tweets, even if you block him.

Self motivated as usual.

Amazon CEO wants his staff back in the office full time

Re: Here we go

No they don't. Obviously, and for good reason.

Besides the fact that Amazon don't care, it is entirely up to the individual where they work in relation to where they live. There is no social contract between a company and it's employees to make a specific individual's commute convenient and short.

Re: Here we go

The vocally anti-social are the ones who post on forums like this, "I work from home and I'm so much more productive when I don't have to deal with interruptions from my idiot team-mates or go to meetings that I hate and have people wasting my time". See some of the comments replying to this post.

Is it so hard to grasp?

Re: Here we go

It's literally a Google away.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2023/08/12/remote-work-might-not-be-as-productive-as-once-thought-new-studies-show/

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-01-04/2024-year-employers-clamp-down-on-remote-work-not-so-fast

https://www.gspublishing.com/content/research/en/reports/2023/08/28/6fd0a8a0-3831-4ace-b577-a93337f01ec8.html

https://www.economist.com/business/2021/06/10/remote-workers-work-longer-not-more-efficiently

Chatting to a senior guy in Amazon, they've certainly seen that the initial honeymoon period doesn't last - but it's over a period of a year or so, which is longer than many of the remote working studies run for.

Note also that most Reg readers are motivated IT types, with far lower senior management representation (as you'd expect). People in the forums will be reporting how they feel about remote working (generally positive), not how well their company is performing (which is an issue in the currently very tight economic circumstances).

Re: Here we go

Not every, and not long term.

Yes, many companies saw short term gains... which fell over time, reverting to the mean and then often falling below. Early rushes to remote working were predicated on those findings, but now that many companies have lost the benefit, things are changing.

Of course you're right that the economy has changed - but that doesn't mean companies are lying when they say they need tighter control of their workforce. (Or at least any more than they were lying when they said they needed to hire constantly and promise ever larger perks to out-pace their rivals).

Note specifically that Amazon more than many companies is massively driven by metrics. They're notoriously hard nosed about this, and performance (both individual and in the large) is used to make most decisions. Saying they're not using metrics because you don't like the outcome is really not a very believable stance.

Re: Sorry, but I cant agree with you... :)

> My diary is already always 75-80% full of Teams calls.

Stop right there. If anything you're proposing is to deal with that sort of nonsense, then it too will be nonsense. Meetings are good, sure, but if they dominate your day you are not actually being productive. This is the consequence of corporate managerialism run riot - and if the solution is to retreat to a bunker so you can deal with it, then that should be a cause for worry, not a justification for remote working.

The elder part of your workforce can probably remember when people routinely relocated to be closer to their workplace.

Here we go

Lots of people who like to be treated like adults are going to throw temper tantrums because large companies don't think they can be treated like adults.

It's suited the vocally anti-social to work from home, alongside people who genuinely thrive in quiet, controlled environments without a long and tiresome commute at either end. Yes, working from home is a benefit and you can get lots of work done.

However... and it's a big however.. I'd be willing to bet Amazon are sitting on a bunch of metrics that show teams that actually work as teams in the same shared physical space perform better overall. This isn't just about the high performers who can go and work miracles in their back bedrooms, it's also about the people who need mentorship, people who value social interaction, those that don't actually have a convenient spare office at home and end up working in an awkward space in the corner of their flat and those who just don't want to work at all.

I'm sure I'll get plenty of downvotes from the people who regard themselves as special, and those who think the corporates owe them something for being so clever, but the reality of working for a company is that you're working with a bunch of other people - and guess what, a few millennium of social evolution can't be magically replaced by once a day Zoom calls, despite claims to the contrary. Yes, it is truly nice to work from home if you have the right environment, but the people who employ you are going to be looking at the performance of remote teams and making decisions based on what works best for them, not what's nicest for you.

The case for handcrafted software in a mass-produced world

Testing times ahead...

It seems to me we've established fairly well that most testing only exercises some subset of functionality, and particularly weakens when we're integrating components.

We've also established fairly well that existing models are not robust, in that they are prone to get derailed by "the most likely problem" (expecting things that look more like their most common training data than the specific prompt they are responding to), giving answers that we politely call hallucinations, but which could more bluntly be described as "wrong". Lest we forget - they do not reason, despite ongoing attempts at reducing error bars.

So, whilst the advanced auto-complete we're currently seeing can no doubt speed up the time taken to get an idea down into cold hard pixels, there is little evidence that the output can in any way be trusted. For a sufficiently large system, reasoning about the kinds of bugs that auto-generated code might harbour becomes a significant exercise - and one that we can't magically hand over to imaginary tests.

So the hand plough gets replaced by the tractor driven plough, which is certainly faster but still requires a more skilled operator to achieve the desired results.

UK pensions department's project to unite government ERP systems comes to £1.9B

That works out at...

£6,750 per employee.

Online media outstrips TV as source of news for the first time in the UK

Re: If you want the truth...

Agreed.

The interesting thing about the debate audience is that more people will decide "who won" based on second hand reporting, than actually watched the debate. And the amount of spin being applied to that second hand reporting is quite astonishing. I've had to take a second shower to wash off all the hyperbola.

(Edited to add: note that I'm being very careful not to endorse either candidate in the debate, or summarise their relative performances - knowing that if I show any sign of political bias it will guarantee down votes from people who object to <party-x>, regardless of the point being made or the reasoning being given. Luckily The Register doesn't filter or order posts according to votes, but most other social media does, perpetuating the bubble)

If you want the truth...

... probably best to give up now.

The ongoing fight for eyeballs, and the dominance of data in the media has meant that most outlets and commentators are tuning their output for attention, not some value of "truth". That largely means telling your audience what they want to hear, or causing some sort of strong emotional response (of the "they're eating our cats!" variety).

The reporting of the recent presidential debate is a case in point. Those searching for news are being fed wildly asymmetrical views of how the debate went, and a huge number of online users are spending their time trying to find (and share) the report that fits their views. A rational external view is that the "attention filter" is denying a significant portion of the population any fair analysis of the candidates and their campaign. That not only helps a weak candidate, but also fails to challenge a stronger candidate to fine tune their policies. We're seeing the results across most of the West, with significantly weaker political parties, much higher distrust and ineffective governments.

Unfortunately, for many people, the knee jerk reaction is to hunt for the media bubble that is "more truthy" rather than recognise that being fed a better flavour of slop is still eating slop.

What is missing from the web? We're asking for Google

If you want to go there... I wouldn't start from here

Both advanced markup and interactivity are horrible hacks on top of a format that was designed to express content with predictable semantic meaning in a static and stateless manner.

So we have the basic problem that code, styling, layout and content are weirdly spread and unreliably synchronised between a bunch of files each of which is not quite designed for the task in hand.

It would be an interesting exercise to design something that isn't "the web", but provided the functionality that is kludged on top of the web, with full knowledge of where we want to get, rather than a complicated set of legacy concerns. Of course, in turn that would become legacy, but... well we don't miss MySpace do we?

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

Let them eat cake

Unfortunately the biggest single proponent of electric vehicles appears to be more interested in preventing public transport infrastructure from being developed than actually producing affordable low emissions transport.

..followed by the Marie Antoinettes of EV commentary who conveniently ignore the astronomic prices of their premium vehicles whilst berating people who dared to suggest that they might have range anxiety, and concerns about accessibility, affordability and convenience.

The obsession with battery EVs being the "one true powertrain" has been a curse on the industry, and the dishonest lobbying by evangelists has led to some extremely questionable policy decisions around the world and set back wider research by years.

We can and should decarbonise transport - and EVs will undoubtedly be part of that - but the end result will be (should be) a mix of solutions, from alternative fuels through to better public transport and right on to walking and (gasp) avoiding having to travel in the first place.

China is beating the world at scientific research, think tank finds

Re: They're using a flawed metric

Indeed, "China leads in semiconductor chip fabrication"???? Really?

Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails

The QL.. and other failures

In retrospect it's easy to point out singular decisions that led to machines being failures, but the reality was that at the time the picture was far muddier.

There were lots of reasons the QL didn't make it, including Sinclair's obsession with low prices, the use of microdrives and the incredibly messy launch and production delays.. but in the context of the time none of these things were particularly unusual. Everyone was making a range of compromises in order to make computing affordable and available, before mass adoption made winners out of certain technologies and dramatically reduced their price.

It's worth noting that the lack of GUI on the QL came in part from Sinclair being quite upset that his most successful product to date was seen as a toy to play games on. The QL quite deliberately had restricted graphics (technically fewer colours than the Spectrum) and terrible sound (there wasn't even direct enough control of the beeper to pull off some of the multi-channel tricks the Spectrum had begun to use). Sinclair wanted it to be a serious machine and made decisions that actively went against the grain of increasingly capable rivals that could present a GUI and the beginnings of digital media.

Google trains a GenAI model to simulate Doom's game engine in real-ish time

Recreating other people's content

It's interesting to explore how far this model is effectively and accurately recreating the data it's been trained on. It looks like it is - in which case the various copyright lawsuits have even more solid grounds to suggest that these sorts of 'generative' models are not making unique new output, but re-packaging stuff they have seen with a little additional noise.

The big limitations here seem to be that this isn't really a "controlled" output - no-one is going to be able to ask a machine to creatively come up with a game for them any time soon. It's taken a slice of Doom and predicted what happens next, for a very short time frame. Even when limited to Doom, it's not clear how internally consistent that prediction will be. Wil it render "well known scenes from Doom" that have robust spatial relationships between areas, demonstrate retained state and all the other hallmarks of an actual game? At this stage I'm guessing not.

Still... it looks pretty. It won't take long before someone does the same but for a more modern game engine graphic style and people will claim that "great strides" are being made. We're easily fooled by the shiny stuff...

Woman uses AirTags to nab alleged parcel-pinching scum

Re: "police declined to pursue the matter"

Thieves once broke into the place where I stored my bike... and stole the bike lock. Get a bike that bad and it's yours for life.

Shein, Temu escalate epic e-commerce squabble

Re: "late-stage capitalism"

It's not robber-baron capitalism if you have a choice to buy a product that meets your ethical requirements. Per the article - you do not have to buy from Shein or Temu. Nor do you have to shop at Amazon or Tesco or Walmart. Robber baron industrialists exploit a lack of choice, not the low morals of their customers.

And... from an economic point of view, we actually do want low prices, and a system that encourages them. We want to do the least amount of work for the highest amount of reward - which involves maximising productivity and minimising costs. Hence we've gone from not being able to afford heating, plumbing and holidays to warm houses, hot water and trips to Australia in the middle of winter.

Of course this will get down-votes from people who don't like Musk or Bezos or billionaires in general - but that ignores that non-capitalist countries have just as many problematic individuals, and (on the whole) a lot less central heating. It is possible to recognise that Musk is an asshat and also think that being warm in winter is a good thing.

"late-stage capitalism"

The phrase "late-stage capitalism" really confuses me, especially when applied to China that has barely got through "early-stage capitalism".

What does it even mean, other than a knee jerk dislike of businesses that make large profits? What is the assumed "final-stage" of capitalism, and why aren't we going to get just more capitalism, organised differently? How many times do you have to say capitalism before it starts sounding weird? And... given that capitalism has delivered us everything from heart valves to mobile phones, why are we now objecting to it when other people do it? Isn't that just late stage colonialism, trying to keep down the savages?

(For reference, yes businesses and individuals can achieve excesses that go way beyond the pale, and break both real laws and a range of moral codes - but like democracy, this imperfect system has not yet led to a better alternative, despite the dreams of many armchair economists. We can certainly do capitalism better and more fairly, but so far we've not really found anything to replace it.).

Sorry, Moxie. Blaming Agile for software stagnation puts the wrong villain in the wrong play

Re: This...

Agreed.

You can take it as read that Innovation Weekends and Hackathons are not there to innovate or risk disrupting an established business - they mainly function to allow devs to blow off steam and senior management to pretend that their main job is to NOT BREAK THE STUFF THAT WORKS.

It strikes me that Black Hat devs are encouraged to build the sort of hyper-focussed deep knowledge that encourages heroic acts of anti-social development: "Leave me alone, I gotta fix the Internet". That's the antithesis of incremental, collaborative and generally 'boring' construction that leads to both evolution and the occasional revolution.

Not that Agile automatically generates innovation - but when you're taking on a moderate to large project with a lot of uncertainty, it can be a reasonable tool for managing the process of development without the usual superstar antics.

From windfarms to Amazon Prime, UK plans to long range test six drone services

Re: Eight years late

Since when did your plane weigh 250 grams? You are held to different regulations because you alone weigh around 300 times that of a basic drone, even before you step into a plane or helicopter. If you don't understand that, you probably shouldn't be flying.

The basic drone rules deal very clearly with safety around airports and other aircraft - no-one is objecting to those, and they've been established for years. That said, even with some people deliberately breaking the law, and despite millions of drone flights every year there has not been a single manned aircraft that has been seriously damaged by a drone strike. In fact only four strikes have been verified worldwide in the last decade (one of which was a hot air balloon!) - all of which were delt with without incident.

The issues have been caused when regulation that has nothing to do with sharing airspace has been delayed and complicated as the CAA tries to deal with hysterical nonsense that has no basis in anything other than Daily Mail headlines. Just to be really clear here - this is not about avoiding regulation, but about the failure to provide clarity, consistency and simplicity at exactly the point when new businesses were being established around innovative technology. We are massively behind the curve in the UK and likely to remain there as companies gave up waiting for questions to be resolved and moved elsewhere. That's nothing to do with a lack of safety, but the impact of poorly managed and over-zealous regulatory capture.

I am of course sorry that people breaking already established laws have inconvenienced your ATC - but that is nothing to do with the mess that drone regulation has been under the last few governments.

Re: Eight years late

Clearly you have no experience in the area. I can only assume you work for the government.

Weight restrictions have been critical - specifically the cut off between different classes of drones that were divided into too many tiers, with banding that was beyond the available technology at the time the regulations were first introduced. It meant that the only drones that could be purchased were in a limbo of maybe/maybe not being unable to fly. When some of these machines cost thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds the answer has been that responsible businesses simply moved elsewhere rather than run unnecessary risks.

This is not a question of safety despite the moronic headlines - a lot of use cases are a long way away from people, and it turns out most drones are remarkably good at not causing damage. It's just that uncertain rules made it impossible to invest in technology that might at any moment be banned. Hence agricultural drones being built and used in South Africa, Asia and America.

So what exactly are you saying good riddance to?

Eight years late

The CAA and government reacted to the early rise of drones by making a complete mess of introducing regulation (because nothing helps an industry grow like the uncertain threat of being unable to use the expensive equipment you rely on), running a series of pointless consultations and setting the restrictions so low that many nascent businesses just closed up shop (or in at least a couple of cases, move country to somewhere that supported them).

As a result, the UK can boast virtually no home-grown drone manufacturers, very little business activity and strangled skills in the technology. Ignoring Amazon, there are plenty of great uses for drones, from agriculture through to construction, and on to safety and rescue, asset management and of course recreation. These are being explored in the USA, Africa, Asia, Poland... basically anywhere other than the UK.

This is an area we could have excelled in (having a healthy aerospace and automotive high tech sector), but it was screwed up by an understaffed CAA, a civil service that saw a great opportunity to keep a few more staff busy, and a government that responded to Daily Mail headlines by promising meaningless and much delayed regulation. Astonishingly this is being treated like an academic exercise by those on the gravy train, rather than a sector that we could actually compete in on a global scale.

Well, I say astonishingly. Most people in the business were predicting this result eight years ago, and regularly ever since.

Silicon, stars, and sulfur make Apollo's unlikely legacy

> "Science is corrupt"

Thus we usher in the new scientific age where people arbitrarily decide they don't want to believe things that have been deeply studied and resolved through evidence, "just because".

Musk deflects sluggish Tesla car sales with Optimus optimism

Optimus optimism

It's not clear why anyone would by Optimus over one of the dozen or so other humanoid robots being developed (and in some cases, already being used in service).

Musk sold the idea of Tesla as being an unassailable disruptor to the industry. He's dropped the ball - as simple as that - and is reliant on tariffs to protect his company from competition.

Now he's trying to invent a whole new unassailable lead, having demonstrated that he can take a unique opportunity and loose it. This doesn't seem to be a good gamble.

If the only value (according to Musk) is autonomy and Optimus, then the message is clear. Anyone investing has to consider this a startup, not a company with any expectation they can deliver a new global scale business model.

Re: Energy generation?

Best in class software is not a defensive moat, it's something competitors can challenge and replace.

Tesla sales, market share dip in EU while other EV makers grow

Re: First mover bonus no longer enough

There's only so much you can force a market...

Governments have been known to make grand gesture moves like this with long deadlines, then relax or even remove the requirements when it becomes clear that the economics or industry advancement are just not achieving the goals they set out. Net Zero 2030 is likely to suffer the same fate as energy storage and low carbon baseline supplies have not spontaneously come into existence just because some politician made a big speech.

Robotaxi

The reason Musk tried to abandon the cheap new model and move to Robotaxi is that the growth story for Tesla as a car manufacturer has come to an end.

The stock market (particularly retail investors with little experience) believed the endless growth model where it was claimed Tesla would first dominate and then destroy the "legacy" auto manufacturers. This story gave Tesla a potential growth path to dominate market share of all vehicles sold (not just EVs). People were looking at Toyota's market share and then multiplying it by a silly number.

Buuut... not only have the mainstream manufacturers fought back with credible (if not insanely competitive) offerings, but Chinese manufacturers have taken Musk's vertical integration model and demonstrated they can outpace him. Teslas are less reliable and fresh than 'slow' mainstream cars, and more expensive than new EV entrants. No more growth model.

So Musk has lost all interest in being a car company. Existing owners don't seem to have realised it yet, but the Y/3 might just be the last mass manufactured 'traditional' Tesla and may see very poor long term support. If Robotaxi takes off there is little to no incentive to producing a normal car that cannot compete against rivals.

And for the moment, for Musk, it doesn't matter if Robotaxi takes off - it provides a vital new growth story that can keep the stock price high. I'm guessing we'll see a 'semi-concept' rolling vehicle in October with promises the software is "nearly there"... trials in 2025 and then endless delays to a generally available service. That should keep the story alive for at least five years, and the stock price exactly where Musk needs it to be.

Here we go again. And again. Musk threatens to pull Twitter, SpaceX out of California

Re: The ultra-rich boy who cried wolf

> I am free to take whatever measures are necessary to teach you that.

Oh bless.

Re: This Isn't Typical El Reg Snark...

There is a point where a pattern of behaviour goes beyond needing gentle mocking to outright criticism.

Sure, we can disagree where exactly that point is, but moving three multi-billion dollar companies because you don't like a law that is absolutely irrelevant to their operation is... quite something.

And at least in the UK, we get quite critical when people mix politics and business.

Re: Business suicide

The thing is, his companies are severely over-valued by normal metrics. That is down to his ability to bring investors on with a vision of "jam tomorrow", offering world-changing ideas that are just around the corner, honest.

If he were not the head of Tesla, its valuation would plummet. The same is true of SpaceX, Solar City and a lot of his other enterprises. Without his public persona, the dysfunctional and sometimes unprofitable state of those businesses would dominate their valuations.

So, for the moment most of his investors, and most senior management with stock options desperately need him to stay on. Many personal fortunes depend on Musk continuing to claim that any day now he's going to land on Mars, solve self-driving and end world hunger (though I gather that's dropped off his to-do list, he's a busy guy).

Yes, the businesses themselves would probably perform better without his mercurial and childish whims, but the stock would still tank. That means he's got them by the balls. There is not a single C-level executive who would dare oppose him and loose their retirement fund.

Should it all collapse, we will suddenly get a lot of stories about how they knew it all wouldn't work, but couldn't get him to listen...

Moderation

Praise to the moderators here, who took a rather emotive post out of the forum.

Personally, I would have kept it, since the responses and voting made it clear that the views being expressed were - at best - in the minority.

The conversation remained pretty civilised too, but it's understandable that sometimes moderation is necessary.

Re: The ultra-rich boy who cried wolf

> Free speech does not mean you can avoid the consequences of unwise comments.

Note that I didn't claim it should.

If you threaten violence or actively prevent someone saying something you do not like, then you are not supporting free speech. You are making it conditional.

Otherwise we could claim that Russia supports free speech - it just happens to lock people up for life if they say the wrong thing. But that's ok, because it's just the consequence of unwise comments, eh?

Re: The ultra-rich boy who cried wolf

> I support free speech, but....

No, you don't support free speech then, do you? The word 'but' pretty much negates anything you go on to say. You explicitly threaten violence if someone says something you don't like.

Just to remind you, Musk has claimed not just to be in favour of free speech, but to be a "Free Speech Absolutist", whatever that particular brain-fart is meant to mean. If you believe that, then I have a flight to Mars to sell you.

Re: The ultra-rich boy who cried wolf

I'd be interested why you think the famously thin skinned one has restored free speech anywhere, when he is notoriously controlling on what can be said through any of the work places and platforms he runs.

The evidence seems to disagree with you. The fact he released information that conveniently damaged his enemies doesn't make it free speech, does it?

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Direction of travel

"While it is important to understand that the technology is still a driver aid and can easily be overridden, it is not hard to detect the direction of travel"

That's a relief, because negative speed would surely really confuse the system.

Former Fujitsu engineer apologizes for role in Post Office IT scandal

Re: Unimpressed: false dichotomy

"This includes adhering to Part 33 of the Criminal Procedure Rules and the Code of Practice for Experts, neither of which he's never read and didn't even know existed."

I do not understand why you believe this. It is certainly what he claimed, but as has been pointed out - HE WAS LYING AND WAS SHOWN TO BE LYING.

The rules are short and to the point. He was emailed them. The fact that he outright lied to the committee, and was proven to have lied should tell you the important detail you seem unwilling to accept. His testimony cannot be trusted.

Re: Possibly controversial opinion...

I've read it. It's one page. It's mainly a list of elements that the report the expert witness submits and signs must contain.

If he signed that document without reading it when prosecuting a pregnant woman facing jail, then this isn't a matter of ignorance or being a "fall guy" - it's deliberate incompetence.

Further, he was questioned during those prosecutions and continued to claim the system was not at fault. That's not a question of misunderstanding what was being asked of him - it's indicative that he had no intention of engaging with the legal process.

Re: Unimpressed: false dichotomy

I suggest you read those rules yourself. He could not have submitted the required report without either adhering to them or perjuring himself.

The required report elements - that he will have to have read and signed - cover those obligations. They aren't legally complicated.

Nor do they change the meaning of truth. If he said the system had no bugs, and was not remotely accessed, it doesn't matter whether he knew the meaning of "export witness" or not - he would still be perjuring himself if he knowingly lied, or demonstrating his ignorance otherwise.

Re: Unimpressed: false dichotomy

@Howard Long

"There is plenty of evidence that he's a nerd who understood the software well, but has no legal training, and should never have been presented as an "expert witness".

Given that other engineers have described the Horizon system as fatally flawed from an architectural point of view, extremely poorly implemented and with a swathe of bugs, if he genuinely "understood the software well", not only would he have known that it had serious problems but he also would have known that remote access to the system was built-in and used on a regular basis.

As pointed out elsewhere, you do not need to be legally trained to be an expert witness. Your legal obligation is to share your understanding of the matter in hand, be clear on the limitations of your knowledge, and to avoid supposition and conjecture. Complaining that no-one explained to him that just repeating corporate soundbites was not in the job description speaks volumes about his character.

I think his defence on the issue of errors in the software was "I believed they had all been fixed" - that suggests that far from "understanding the software", he had at best a surface level grasp of Horizon (or.. again.. perjured himself deliberately).

I don't think he went to court with malicious intent. I suspect he did not once think about the effect his actions would have on those being prosecuted, and was just happy to have a grand title and a nice paycheque.

Unimpressed

I've seen some of his testimony, and the impression it leaves is that he refuses to take any responsibility for any of the systems and tasks that he was responsible for.

Despite all of the recent evidence, he appears to still believe Horizon only failed in extremely rare circumstances and the majority of the cases against Postmasters were justified. Frankly this is astonishing, given that Fujitsu committed a significant body of staff to continual fire-fighting over the period in question, and staff above and below him are all openly admitting that serious mistakes were made.

That leads us to the conclusion that either he was the most incompetent of managers, completely unaware of either the technical details or the operational reality of the systems he was responsible for, or he has regularly and deliberately perjured himself in order to support prosecutions. Whichever it is, there seems to be a strong case for a prosecution against him personally for the harm and damage he has caused.

Tiny solid-state battery promises to pack a punch in pocket gadgets

Re: Capacity

So, it beats the non-rechargeable batteries by a reasonable margin then? 1000 Wh/litre vs 775/683? And it's rechargeable - presumably with a reasonable life span. Sounds like an improvement to me.

Tesla shareholders agree to pay Musk staggering sum of $48B

Re: Inevitable

> You have to wonder at the competence of those dealing in shares that have kept the price so high.

Retail investors tend to deal on sentiment - and there's no denying that Musk has been a great showman (though that seems to be wearing off... an interesting topic all of itself).

Institutional investors will follow the money if there's enough of it. Arguably the volatility of Tesla shares alone makes it worth investing if you've got your eye on the (very bouncy) ball.

If you invested at any time in the last four years and just kept hold of the shares hoping for the mythical 10x to happen again, you have a 95+% chance of having lost money. However, during that time, if you played the game right, you could have pumped your investment up quite healthily. And if there's one thing the Tesla stock doesn't seem to be short of, it's pumpers.

Inevitable

The value of Tesla is very closely tied to the promises and promotions of Musk - so retail investors in particular are utterly reliant on the man himself sticking with the company, or their shares will (likely) drop to levels that more closely reflect the actual value of Tesla's current business. Their current business is not nearly as healthy as the shares suggest, and likely to get worse before it gets better (if it does at all). He's basically got them hostage.

If you believe the thesis that the current AI revolution is going to lead to AGI (or as Musk puts it "super sentient robots" - whatever that means), then you could argue that Tesla is worth it's current value only thanks to Musk's vision. After all, the guys who actually founded the company only wanted to make affordable electric cars. However, the evidence is that in Telsa, Musk has completely lost his competitive advantage in the EV industry, going from claiming that he knew more about manufacturing than any other person on the planet to telling us that China will dominate the EV industry in only a couple of years.

In AI, he's not even got a working product yet and already the companies he claimed to be obliterating have not only caught up, but are overtaking his (only slightly faked, honest) demonstrations - see Mercedes, Baidu and others for interesting autonomous vehicle tech, Boston Dynamics for robots and Open AI, Meta and Microsoft for general artificial intelligence. Remarkably, Telsa is being out-spent, out engineered and out-paced by those companies only because Musk drew so much attention to the area.

So what's an investor to do? Follow the greater fool theory and hold onto stocks and Musk so long as the dream is not lost and quietly start selling up before the wheels really fall off, or eject him, tank the stock and see all those lovely profits vanish? Not much of a choice really.

It is amusing however that his stock compensation is actually significantly larger than all profits ever made by the company. You have to wonder at the competence of the board of directors that set up a compensation scheme that pretty much guarantees the company is in for some very difficult times....