* Posts by Andy 73

880 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jul 2009

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Europe plots escape hatch from the enshittification of search

Andy 73 Silver badge

Unfortunately..

..the heavy shift towards corporate search manipulation means that even without AI slop, we already seem to have lost the will to produce independent, useful content or services. It's just not worth creating a blog or an independent shop on the internet today, since only global-scale productions are visible to users.

I'm not sure that the EU is in a position to reverse that tide...

Paul McCartney, Elton John, other creatives demand AI comes clean on scraping

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Debate?

" Makers of film, performers of recorded music, and writers of books, have no deep entitlement to charge an arbitrary monopoly-driven price for access to their works; so-called 'creatives' must woo audiences, readerships, fans, and patrons, financially to support their efforts to create new works."

I have no idea what you've been smoking, but perhaps lay off it for a while, eh?

What a chain of nonsense. First a strawman (I made no claim your specific reviled entertainers were part of our rich cultural heritage - though you might want to consider that the point of a rich culture is that you get to hate a great deal of it without negating its value to others).

Then this absolute brain fart of an idea that somehow live performance is required - maybe based on the foolish notion that for millennia we had no means to record and share our creative works? Luddites for progress!.

Followed by "have no deep entitlement"... who was claiming entitlement? That is a very, very different thing from someone saying "the thing that I have produced is mine to decide what to do with". The only entitlement on display here is your weird belief that you have a right to other people's performances and work.

Finally, you don't appear any more erudite by babbling on about da Vinci. I always preferred the works of Leonard of Quirm anyway.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Don't Care

I was wondering where the downvote on my post came from.... then read your response.

Ah.

Either the *copyrighted* work of all these authors and creators is valuable - and improves the quality of output from LLMs - or it is not. If it is valuable, then yes, these guys have every right to retain their intellectual property and determine the terms under which it is used. That's the same reason why you can't just "read a fucking book" without paying the specific publisher who printed it. It's astonishing that you don't grasp that basic agreement you've accepted... I could insert a 'books growing on trees' joke here, but assume it would go over your head.

If it is not valuable, then the LLM companies have no "fucking" reason to be using someone else's content.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Debate?

"Debate rages as to whether AI training should disregard copyright. For example, The Atlantic alleges that Meta, along with other GenAI devs, may have accessed millions of copyrighted books and research papers through the LibGen dataset. Researchers have speculated that OpenAI may have done the same, with the allegations a part of lawsuits over the alleged use of copyrighted material. UK authors were alarmed to find their copyrighted books in the database."

I don't think there's much debate going on. Various organisations have identified that AI training certainly does disregard copyright, and the corporate pirates insist that this is all ok, honest, please just go away.

The fact that creatives and Kidron are being sidelined by our own government shows just how successful corporate capture is when it comes to effective political lobbying. Apart from that one lone voice (being consistently voted down in Parliament), there is no-one else on any side of the political spectrum considering how much our rich cultural heritage is worth - either financially, or to the social cohesion of our country.

Our MPs, and the Lords should be ashamed.

Dems look to close the barn door after top DOGE dog has bolted

Andy 73 Silver badge
Joke

That'll do it...

Yep, that'll really do it.. a sternly written letter. I hope they used green ink and everything.

Trump admin freaks out over mere suggestion Amazon was going to show tariff impact on prices

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: What is the world coming to?

The average person doesn't appear to have a clue... which may be why Trump managed to get elected, and why this is being treated as a threat by Trump who appears to like his voter base to remain ignorant.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: What is the world coming to?

As I understand it..

The proposal was for their Haul site, which is largely wholesale? The costs are fairly transparent there. Haul is in response to Temu - which now quite openly states tariffs on its receipts (to the shock of US customers).

So (a) it was likely suggested in response to Temu getting publicity and

(b) they need to explain to frustrated users why all their prices are going up somehow

DOGE may help Elon Musk's biz empire dodge $2.4B in liabilities – Senate probe

Andy 73 Silver badge

Ummmm...

...seriously? We knew this was the case two or three months ago. I'm struggling to understand how this is only news now, and how abjectly ineffective the Senate appears to be.

Elon Musk's X revenues in the UK crashed in 2023, down 66%

Andy 73 Silver badge

Funny

It's funny how some people confuse "freedom of speech" with "privilege of speech"... Musk bought the privilege to speak, and the privilege to decide who can and can't speak on his platform.

Luckily for all of us, it's really exposed (a) how vacuous most of his speech is, and (b) how fickle and narcissistic he is when it comes to other people's speech.

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

Andy 73 Silver badge

Dear Elmo and Dorsal

We'll delete all IP law the moment you fully release (not BS 'open source' that isn't) all code and training data for FSD, Optimus, SpaceX and all other companies you currently work for.

As it is, the whole tech-bro excitement over AI is that it's reassuringly expensive (in the West at least) to train a big ole' model - which guarantees the billionaires can monopolise the source of production. Give the robber-barons all of your free IP and they'll grant you permission (for a small monthly fee) to use some of their services in return.

The answer sadly appears to be to poison the well, salt the ground and man the barricades. It all sounds horribly revolutionary, but the alternative currently being thrust on us by these social incompetents is seriously broken. AI can certainly be useful, and can be trained fairly to benefit all of us as tools - but this is not what they're offering, despite the nonsense promises they make to governments, journalists and credulous investors.

Downward DOGE: Elon Musk keeps revising cost-trimming goals in a familiar pattern

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Not all about cost

"Expose corruption"?? I think you meant to spell "Excuse".

Musk has largely targeted government departments that oversee his own companies, making DOGE look more corrupt than the government it's meant to be 'fixing'. Re-read the section in the article about data and you'll understand this isn't about reducing corruption, but about being in control of it.

Satellite phone tech coming to your mobe this year – but who pays for it?

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: This is What'll Happen

Perhaps...

What we might see is that they roll it out, barely anyone uses it... and then they pretty much cease any maintenance of ground based networks. After all, why keep up the expensive hardware on the ground when you've got expensive hardware in the sky? Then all the ground networks start to be flakey, and people will naturally migrate to the more expensive - more reliable - satellite system.

And then instead of three or four operators and a lot of redundancy, we end up with one or two operators and a network almost wholly owned by a foreign nation we can't trust in times of conflict. (I know, that last bit sounds so unrealistic...).

Governments cling to private cloud despite inexorable public cloud adoption

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Controversial opinion

I know of one £400 million project (that failed) that was essentially tendered on the basis of which provider could make the puffed up Directors feel most important.

We all know the deal - Oracle, SAP, Capita or whoever send round a team of unusually leather-tanned guys in very expensive suits, and they tell senior management how they are in the same league as all the big guys. Senior management then agree the deal and leave little details like architectural decisions and actual implementation to be decided at a later date - having accidentally dictated that the company must use the most inappropriate and expensive platform possible. With added consultants sprinkled on top.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Controversial opinion

Private cloud is absolutely fine for some work loads - and can be significantly cheaper.

Public cloud costs can easily spill out of control - you're paying for convenience and features. Given a lot of work has gone into automating build and deploy, many services and functions can be put into private cloud without compromising on ease of use or robustness of service.

Unless you have a global scale project (hint: most local councils and indeed many government departments don't), there is not much justification for tying yourself to an expensive service that is designed for global scale projects.

The value here is ensuring your architectural decisions are made by an engineer and not by the sales person for a cloud provider.

On the issue of AI copyright, Blair Institute favors tech bros over Cool Britannia

Andy 73 Silver badge

The Blair Institute

The Blair Institute should not be underestimated. It's one of the largest and best funded 'think tanks' in Europe, with extensive funding from Saudi Arabia and global corporates - and has the direct ear of both Labour and Conservative governments. With a staff of hundreds, and offices worldwide, this group is deeply influential in policy decisions in a range of countries and of course specifically the UK.

It should come as no surprise given the above, that it favours a 'corporatist' world view, where homogeneity and ubiquity is key, and both corporate and government bodies have full access to you and your data.

UK government told to get a grip on £23B tech spend

Andy 73 Silver badge

Geopolitics

Given the current geopolitical climate, we could at least do with looking at the ownership of the companies involved in government IT projects, and the lobbying that goes into government policy.

Committees like this are heavily biased by their internal makeup, and who comes to advise them. Neither are particularly independent - you simply don't have a voice in government unless you have a position in a relevant body (with it's associated commercial and political links).

And... well, if we're going to throw billions at people for services, it would be slightly advantageous if those billions stayed within our national ecosystem.

Even better if we could reduce those costs, but if no-one involved is actually impacted by the choices made, then the choices will continue to be poor.

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

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Econ 101

The point of being zero rated on export is to allow other countries to impose their own sales tax so everything essentially works out. This involves minimal cooperation and avoids trade wars and 'tit-for-tat' tariffs and arguments. Sales taxes are essentially a local means for a nation's government to raise income an moderate particular activities.

Trump's insane reasoning appears to be that every other country on the planet must move to accommodate American exceptionalism. Essentially he wants to dictate every nation's trade terms, and to do so exclusively to his benefit.

If he was serious about this, he'd insist that each state in America abandon its local sales tax and let the Federal Government exclusively decide these things. Obviously that's not happening because he is not a serious man.

Musk's xAI swallows Musk's X in ego-friendly, all-stock deal

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: They are private companies

> while they could sue if they thought he was pulling a fast one to screw them they probably won't think it is worth it.

There have been quite a few attempts by shareholders to make Musk accountable - the Solar City deal was extensively litigated - but if he appeared to be immune to litigation before, recent events in America appear to make him completely untouchable. Anyone invested in those companies is along for the ride now regardless of their own expectations.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: If it quacks like investor fraud...

Retail investors make up approximately $350 billion of Tesla's current market cap - and the vast majority of those have invested because they believe Musk is going to do something amazing at some point in the future. The fact that he's failed to keep their initial market lead, is being out-competed by China, has lost key engineering talent in the company and has failed to deliver FSD despite promising it for a decade is irrelevant.

Currently sites are full of people who are convinced there will be a new, super low cost model, a functioning Robotaxi, a working Optimus all appearing later this year. That's despite the evidence that he can't make margin on a low cost model, FSD is still not consistent enough to provide Robotaxi services (he's not even using it in the Hyperloop!), Optimus is waaaay behind Boston Dynamics and Unitree, and other "world changing" projects like the new Roadster, Cybertruck and Tesla Semi all being DOA.

This has become an article of faith, and it takes a lot for a true believer to accept they were wrong. That could be enough to keep money in Tesla to find time to discover that next breakthrough - but it's notable that all of Musk's big successes have come from buying into a highly talented teams' new idea, not from developing something in house under his direction. The teams that set up the roadmap to the Model 3 and things like the Falcon 9 project have all since left. The FSD team has been replaced at least a couple of times. Optimus appears to be a student project, and the grand X turnaround has turned into a half-baked attempt at keeping the lights on... it's not looking good.

I fully expect the stock price to remain in a fantasy bracket for most of this year. If it collapses, it will be sudden and deep.

Andy 73 Silver badge

If it quacks like investor fraud...

He did the same with Solar City - and made the same claims, which have been proven to be false.

This is a way of repackaging his debt and severe losses, and any sensible shareholders (and capable board members) would be screaming to the rafters right now.

The timing strongly suggests that Musk is preparing for trouble very soon - he's heavily leveraged, and the forthcoming numbers on Tesla are likely to see his (paper) wealth take a serious hit. The only thing keeping him afloat right now is the certainty of billion dollar contracts from the government through SpaceX.

Palantir suggests 'common operating system' for UK govt data

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: He's not entirely wrong.

Completely agree.

The correct response from the committee should be "Thank you for your nice idea, Mr Thiel. Now go away and we'll do it ourselves."

I can confidently guarantee that is precisely not the response that has been given.

Andy 73 Silver badge

He's not entirely wrong.

My view of Palantir couldn't get much lower, but in some respect he's got a point which may well be lost in the criticism of... well, everything to do with Palantir.

If the enquiry is about learning lessons, rather than just identifying scapegoats, then is there a lesson to be learned from the lack of 'joined up thinking' within government? I was tangentially close to the technological response to the pandemic (MedTech offering potential solutions), and it was pretty clear that health and civil organisation in the UK is a fractured patchwork of systems and information that cannot be meaningfully queried, combined or tested.

There will be another pandemic. What do we have in place to identify, track and respond to it?

Chimera Linux ghosts RISC-V because there's no time for sluggish hardware

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Yup

> RISC-V started when Arm was already mature, but the rate of progress is as fast or faster.

I'd expect it to be faster - must of the work done to get ARM to where it is today is widely known and shared, and low cost open source tools for this sort of low level design are freely available.

But, being pedantic over dates or arguing that it's going faster doesn't change the basic statement that RISCV is not performant in this sector - and will not be for a few years at best. Even that prediction is assuming that ARM does nothing and there are no further advancements in the established mainstream CPU manufacturers.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Yup

I got a bunch of downvotes in a previous news item comment section for saying exactly this - RISCV is not performant. Interesting, sure, but not yet a solution in this space.

Euro techies call for sovereign fund to escape Uncle Sam's digital death grip

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Picking winners

It's not just about government spend. Notice that there is massively higher private investment in R&D in the US - so it's not just a function of Government commitment, but the investment environment.

The big point that is made again and again is that in the US the R&D spend is across a very broad range of targets, not a few chosen technologies and sectors. This willingness to accept risk and try 'untried' ideas, particularly at the very early stage, is what makes a difference. The challenge is to get the best 'bang for our buck', not just to have a larger number, and again and again the European model is to tighten control over what is invested in, and to only fund later in the growth stage - which means fewer 'happy accidents'.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Meanwhile in the UK

... the absolutely deafening silence from our Government should be a source of national shame.

Note that this isn't an argument for membership of the EU. Unless our own Government is capable of putting together a coherent plan, membership or not is completely, utterly irrelevant. In fact, until we can kick our political leaders into some form of shape, capable of independent thought and rational analysis, it would be deeply foolish to fall into the arms of any geopolitical group that allowed us to avoid putting our house in order.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Tough.

I don't think people realise that market control through regulation is the same as market control through tariffs.

Sure, a little makes sense. Too much and you're in Trump territory, however well meaning it may be.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Picking winners

False logic - doing a silly thing for very good reasons doesn't justify doing that silly thing a second time... nor make it any less silly.

Yes, there are pressing reasons to want to increase independence from unpredictable trading partners and allies - however, picking winners has been very well tested, and the EU itself has produced a number of studies that are very clear that it's a poor strategy. Those same studies point out that the reason the US has massive dominance of the tech sector is that it has an entirely different approach that delivers consistently better results than the EU (and UK's) attempts at fostering innovation and investment.

This is one of those areas where people are going to get confused between political and technocratic issues, and particularly when the American way is looking deeply unattractive are going to make decisions on an emotional rather than evidence-based level. That's not to say we need to replicate the BS, but that we do need to grow up and face the fact that doing the same thing that produced bad results twice is not exactly a smart move.

Google's Chrome divorce still on the cards as Trump's DoJ plays hardball

Andy 73 Silver badge
Joke

Leopards eating faces

..that is all..

SpaceX's 'Days Since Starship Exploded' counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Bodge job

If the leaks are the symptom of a structural problem (harmonic resonances), then the switch to Raptor 3 will also be a bodge.

Do you DARE? Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing sovereignty

Andy 73 Silver badge

As I understand it..

From what I've understood about RISCV, it's the 2025 equivalent of the 74 series logic chips that were widely used in the 70's - in that it's a building block for a system. It's just that our idea of a building block has moved up a few levels of complexity from individual gates to units of computation.

The problem with RISCV (again, as I understand it) is that the architecture does not solve, or recreate the performance solutions found over decades of development of established architectures. You can plug in a RISCV core and it will interface with common components in a predictable way, and run much the same software as another RISCV core - but from what I've seen of commercial offerings, it will be significantly slower (perhaps orders of magnitude slower) than existing, cheap-as-chips(!) architectures.

So projects like this appear to be at a severe disadvantage... spending very significant sums to try and compete with freely available commercial devices, and hoping in n-years' time that you can narrow the performance gap from an already handicapped position. If you cannot then make it on a sufficiently modern process node within the region, any pretence at technological independence is pretty much pointless. That makes it more of a political gesture, and brings into question whether picking just a handful of companies to deliver the project is really doing much to seed innovation or independence in the wider sector.

So... hummm..

As an aside, the acronym reminds me that the Gorillaz track 'DARE' was claimed to be originally written as "There" by Albarn, but when they got Shaun Ryder in to sing, they couldn't get him to pronounce it as anything other than "Dare". Still, every project should have an anthem

UK must give more to ESA to get benefits of space industry boom, says Brian Cox

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Um....

I never suggested doing things on our own - simply looking to support the entire community rather than committing to a single group. We do this in many industries, particularly automotive, so why not space? If we have something to offer, we should offer it.. and to everyone.

The 'lacking scale to do projects' argument falls apart in an age when private companies are very successfully challenging national programmes for technical leadership.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Um....

Don't collaborate with this external group because you're at the mercy of changes in policies.... collaborate with this other external group and be at the mercy of their changes in policies instead.

It might be an idea to be the Taiwan/Switzerland (pick a neutral country metaphor of your choice) of Space technology - do stuff that everyone needs rather than trying to pick a club to belong to.

Cox is thankfully very open about his Europhile politics, which should certainly be part of the debate, but let's not make policy based on "100 reasons why we should be part of Europe". Current geopolitical tensions suggest that picking sides might have serious long term consequences that we might be better off avoiding.

Wozniak: I didn't reduce chip count for manufacturing. I wanted to prove I was clever

Andy 73 Silver badge

We don't need world changing...

Woz didn't set out to change the world, he set out to improve it.

Unfortunately the mega corporations are only interested in world changing stuff... Improving our everyday lives? Less so...

Trump administration threatens tariffs for any nation that dares to tax Big Tech

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Irrelevant for the UK

I don't know how many times I have to say this - the EU is not going to save us. This is about our internal economic management, not trade deals, or picking the right bully in the playground to hide behind.

We have to address how we run our country. Not fantasise that someone else will fix it for us.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Irrelevant for the UK

> We’re especially vulnerable now we’ve left the EU bloc.

That's a dangerous misunderstanding of the problem. This shift started over forty years ago. We were EU members for decades whilst we transferred delivery of key services to American companies. And the EU's current attempts at control through regulation is actually deepening the grip large (American) corporates have on everything from online services to physical product distribution. They are as clueless about the problem as our government is.

Let's try and avoid big conspiracy theory stuff here - this is not "selling the NHS" territory, it's a question of how investment and financial services are driven by a government that often isn't around for the long term consequences to become obvious. Just as long term failure to invest in our energy infrastructure leads to crisis points where any 'fix' is going to cost hundreds of billions, long term failure to invest and steer our economic infrastructure has left us dependent on businesses that did make the investment and are now more than happy to take their dues. This isn't an evil master plan, it's just plain old mismanagement by politicians who are often out of their depth.

Fixing this isn't about regulating and taxing companies, it's about building the infrastructure we're lacking - and no UK political party is willing or able to articulate the problem or commit to the cost for fear of losing voters who just want things cheap and easy. We should not be looking to some remote organisation to save us (that's what got us into this situation in the first place), we should be fixing the problem ourselves.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Irrelevant for the UK

For lots of historic reasons (and some truly terrible decisions by governments of both colours), this Anglophone country is completely unable to separate itself from Big Tech. Trump can threaten what he likes and whilst there will be mutterings, we'll continue to dig our hole deeper.

The majority of payments online and on the high street are through Visa and Mastercard, or processed by PayPal or Stripe. Most schools and government institutions run on Microsoft Office, and a large proportion of companies run on Google, Amazon or Microsoft servers. For large online companies (not that we have many), up to a third of their annual expenditure can be for placement in Google or Bing search results. Our cities are gutted by AirBNB, taxis are replaced by Uber and we call our parents on Apple or Android.

Our Post Office is struggling, since Amazon, DHL, FedEx and UPS have aggressively targeted the market and now dominate home and business deliveries, as well as international shipping. Small shops are struggling, since everyone buys from Amazon, Etsy and Ebay. And we're buying things we saw on Netflix, Disney, Prime, Hulu or AppleTV.

Approximately 25% of all online expenditure already goes straight to America, and small businesses can find it impossible in this 'cashless society' to even sell potatoes at the local farmer's market without 10% of the sale going immediately to payment processors in the USA. To many IT people who've never directly sold a thing in their lives, there may already be an awareness of how deeply tech has become entwined, but few understand that this translates to something like two or three thousand pounds additional costs to each and every household, every year. The cost of living crisis is (in part) down to the cost of this invisible infrastructure.

Our government wouldn't think of risking all that infrastructure becoming even more expensive, so they'll remain supine - and will continue to chase shiny new idiocies like AI (also dominated by Silicon Valley) rather than fixing the basic problem that America already taxes each and every one of us every single day of our lives.

Note that this isn't a left or right-wing issue. Nor is it anti-American or especially patriotic. It's just recognising that we've screwed up our economy by allowing key parts of our infrastructure to become a taxable commodity, with the tax being taken largely by Silicon Valley. We are experiencing corporate capture on a national scale.

HP Inc to build future products atop grave of flopped 'AI pin'

Andy 73 Silver badge

Humane

Humane was a classic example of Silicon Valley hubris, with the usual fawning journalists heralding the second coming for tech, and praising the standard issue "ex Apple engineers" for their genius.

Right up until it launched.

It was the usual AI slop we come to expect from anyone remotely associated with Altman, poorly implemented by a bunch of techbros who were already ignoring any feedback long before the first reviews came in.

HP might be desperate for a 'edge', but the sooner this brain dead, half-assed tech culture crap is put out of our misery the better.

The tech world can build better, but not whilst these morons are sucking the oxygen out of the room.

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

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: @Andy 73

So by your own admission, you have absolutely no idea how he handled the fall-out, but you're certain that he didn't make an arse of himself doing so?

I've got some sympathy for the arguments you sometimes get yourself into on here, but honestly, you need to start with a few facts on this one before wading in defending him.

So, stop going on about all the other people who you're certain are worse than Elmo. We're not talking about them. We're addressing how he handled a basic bit of public engagement. I'll give you a clue: he handled it badly.

Crashing around going "oh, but, but the easily offended.." doesn't help here. I'm not easily offended. But I do know someone cocking things up when I see it.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: @Andy 73

I'm not asking for some performative act from him, I'm asking that someone in such a position of responsibility show even the slightest flicker of self-awareness and the ability to manage the world around them.

His response to the attention was chaotic and incompetent. Call me silly, but I don't want chaotic and incompetent people making life-affecting choices over millions of people. Something as 'small' as a hand gesture turned him into a snivelling weasel. What happens when something serious happens that he has to take responsibility for?

It's possible to give a robust, adult response to that event (which I'm sure you'd like to see) without looking dangerously like a wet liberal or a frat-boy who's been caught out. He failed the test. The one thing worse than looking like a Nazi is looking like an incompetent Nazi.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Ah, don't pay any attention to what we're doing, because we're doing it for the best reasons - it's all anti corruption you see? We've no evidence of corruption, but trust us bro. The fact that two of the agencies that were shut down were investigating Musk for fraudulent activities is pure co-incidence, and it obviously makes sense that you'll get less corruption if the people investigating corruption are removed...

As for the Nazi salute - when you're done arguing semantics, ask yourself this - how did Elon react when challenged? Did he (like any sane person) apologise and acknowledge that it was inappropriate? Or did he deny, obfuscate and make poor-taste jokes? Whether or not he's an apartheid-raised right wing Nazi sympathiser (he is), he's still unfit to represent any civilized organisation and clearly incapable of not acting like a petulant child. You might find that endearing in a narcissistic billionaire hiding his corrupt and amoral behaviour, but I find it a tad off-putting.

Creators demand tech giants fess up and pay for all that AI training data

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: False perceptions by 'creators

Oh do fuck off.

This is the sort of self-centred word salad produced by over educated (and under intelligent) tech guys - and can be summarised by the typical offer: "If you let me use your work, I can pay you in exposure". Artists have been receiving vacuous offers like this since forever, and so far the answer has always been the same. (See first line of comment).

No, reputation and attribution are not fair reward for the time and effort put into a creative act - and nor should they be. You've taken someone with one skill (making art) and required that they magically possess a second skill (self-promotion) and a third skill (policing the internet) and a fourth, especially magical skill (convincing people that something they can take for free should receive reward - trust me, this is not as easy as it sounds). It does not matter if you think mere electrons are worthless, and therefore any works are worthless - creative acts of any value whatsoever require effort, and if we value creative acts rather than AI slop, we as a society need to organise ourselves in a way that the effort can be made.

Or in other words, if we want artists (yes, we do), we should feed them, clothe them, put a roof over their heads and ensure they can continue creating. That means that we find a way to make abstract creative acts (whether physical paintings, or digital illustrations) receive reward. That, in turn does not need a magical new business model that as yet has not been proven to work - it needs existing concepts of ownership to be carefully revised to continue protection for artists.

And if you want to understand how badly the concept of patronage works in the internet age, go and take a look at the hundreds of excellent indie game studios currently closing because it turns out that offering free-to-play or free-to-try games does not bring the rewards they though they would. Successful patronage turns out to be a (admittedly very noisy) outlier in this day and age. Everyone else gets peanuts.

Andy 73 Silver badge

I already stole your car, what's the point of going to court about it? Brrrrmmm....

Why UK Online Safety Act may not be safe for bloggers

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Exactly as we all predicted

I'd suggest, Politician's Hammer: I studied law, everything looks like a nail.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Exactly as we all predicted

A government apparently overrun by legal advisors and lawfare opportunists puts in place legislation that opens the door to legal advisors and lawfare opportunists.. what a surprise. Particularly ironic as we watch America self-immolate through misuse of their overly enthusiastic legal system.

Dear Rachel Reeves - you want to know why we're not all magically growing the economy for you? It's stuff like this.

Uber CEO warns robotaxis can't find a fast route to commercial viability

Andy 73 Silver badge

At what point...

...does this whole scam unravel?

Autonomous vehicles are very much in the same line as all of the other tech industry's recent 'breakthrough ideas' - an attempt by corporations to insert themselves between the consumer and the thing they want to do, to minimal (or even negative) benefit to the consumer and usually an additional cost.

And it's so important to them to force themselves into that position that they will promise the earth just to get there. Remember the idea that Robotaxis would make their owners tens of thousands of dollars a year? Not only was that blatant economic illiteracy, but it was purely being dangled in front of people to get them to hand over their assets for the benefit of yet another corporation.

Palantir designed to 'power the West to its obvious innate superiority,' says CEO

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Whatever you say Alex, you're the master race

I'm fascinated by the thumbs down. Are people really upset that someone thinks they're not a good match for a company? Or are you defending the honour of Palantir?

If you are, take a good look at yourself. These guys are not the owners of some special secret sauce, they're a consultancy that - in common with many in this corner of the industry - rely heavily on mythologising their abilities to sell very big and expensive solutions to large corporate and government bodies. This shouldn't be news, or particularly upsetting to observe, unless you've got a deeply fragile ego.

Now, you could be offended if you work there and I suggest that Palantir is home to a lot of arrogant, self-aggrandising grifters with poor social skills and a sense of entitlement you could power a steam-train with, or that the justifications that they're somehow saviours of the free world are the sort of nonsensical bullshit you can only come up with when you've earned an unreasonably large amount and need something to give your life meaning in the absence of religion or really hard drugs.

But honestly, I don't think anyone in Palantir would care in the slightest what some nobody on the internet thinks about them and would probably agree that yes, I'm not a good match for the company.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Whatever you say Alex, you're the master race

Pleased to say I was offered an interview with them something like ten years ago. Took one look at the bullshit they were demanding before I even spoke to a human and decided that I didn't want to be anywhere near them. Nothing I've heard or seen about them since has changed that view.

Tesla's numbers disappoint again ... and the crowd goes wild ... again

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Sigh.

"We have safety standards"

I refer you to the issue of Teslas locking their occupants inside to burn to death in the event of a crash. What exact safety standard is that?

And as for liability laws, I think you need to take a long hard look at the cases that Tesla has settled out of court, precisely to avoid admitting liability.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Sigh.

We are seeing regular occurrences of people burning to death in their Tesla's - arguably a serious safety flaw when crashes lock the passengers inside the vehicle. Yet nothing is being done. And this is the guy who is going to deliver autonomous driving?

The admission that penetration of FSD is poor amongst the most enthusiastic early adopters on this planet is astonishing - note that suddenly he's not claiming this will be the reason for the company being valuable and has shifted to Optimus instead.

The stuff on Optimus is Trump level lies. Go and watch Boston Dynamic's videos. They are streets ahead on agility, function, robustness and actually delivering machines to customers. Then watch Unitree and a number of other competitors. Cheaper, faster, further advanced. More importantly, few of these companies are pretending that their robots will be watering your plants for you any time soon.

On AI in general, the recent DeepSeek announcement should have woken investors up to the basic fact that AI is not a defensive moat - once it is established how software can achieve a particular goal, other companies can and will replicate that functionality and improve on it. China in particular is being incredibly aggressive in this area, and it is China that has led the value destruction of Tesla as a vehicle manufacturer (remember when Musk claimed he was the greatest expert in manufacturing in the world?).

No rational analysis of the company can value it as it currently stands. But right now we don't live in rational times. If there is a correction, it is going to be painful - especially to the retail investors who currently have over $600 billion invested in promises of jam tomorrow.

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