Posts by Andy 73

British Army's drone degree program set to take flight

First kill it, then flog the horse

The UK Government went to great lengths to kill the nascent drone industry - against all advice from suppliers and users - over the last ten years.

Knee jerk reactions to media, a complete failure to seriously engage with companies working in the sector, regulatory ping-pong and years of uncertainty have killed off early adopters and innovators, and ensured that companies struggling to exist have fallen behind developments in the rest of the world.

We were asked (hello Baroness Sugg and others) and gave clear answers that could have delivered skills and technology that are suddenly proving vital. The advice was roundly ignored, as the decisions appeared to have been made before the consultation provided a thin veneer of democracy.

And as the Western world suddenly needs drone technology from trusted nations, and sees incredible advancements in Ukraine - the UK is left spending risible sums of money on training after the fact - training that will almost certainly involve using other nation's products and support to deliver a second-hand experience. That's before we look at the loss of opportunity in the commercial and retail sectors.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy goes wobbly on AI bubble possibility

Re: Rot economy not denied by enshittifier-in-chief

Important to remember that politicians are usually about 18 months behind techies in the hype cycle.

Just as the tech works is beginning to talk openly about a bubble, they're getting excited about this exciting upcoming AI tech.

Open source's new mission: Rebuild a continent's tech stack

And round and round we go...

Repeat after me: clever is not the same as useful.

This is the problem Cambridge has faced for decades - yes there are lots of clever people and lots of smart solutions, but none of that makes a great business. And the key here is that providing this stuff to institutions - whether they're European, American, the UK or anywhere else in the world - is a business, not a technical exercise.

The EU can attempt to regulate this into existence, but so long as there are no service providers with call desks, support sites, 24/7 callout, migration tools, consultants for integration and all the other bells and whistles, there is no reason to move away from platforms that have all of those things. Sure, some council or university might have a vague desire to 'decolonise' it's software, but when it comes to signing a purchase order, the usual suspects win every time because they have the salesman who can promise all of the bells and whistles that aren't software (or even hardware).

I'd argue the way to make this stuff happen is to address the impediments to business, not mandate software. If a new tool can be made and sold across the continent, without additional barriers at every border, without regulatory burdens designed for global corporations yet applied to one-man businesses, without complicated tax and reporting requirements that change with each new country, then there is reason to adopt or write software that can be sold. Innovation comes when there is a customer, and for now America provides the single easiest customer base on the planet, with the least state intervention and least punitive financial environment, so that's where innovation goes.

And the same applies to the UK, that *still* fails to address the business environment that would allow local innovation to flourish.

Open source is a tool, not a end goal in it's own right. We want people to be able to use those tools to achieve goals, not for the sake of using the right tool.

Maker fight! SparkFun cuts ties with Adafruit in harassment dispute

Soap opera

I've read the article twice, followed some of the threads on a number of forums and... still don't know what's going on.

Both companies are small-ish and very dependent on the passionate support of a niche hobbyist community. I've got every sympathy for them as I also sell kits (in a much smaller capacity) and know how precarious things are, and how challenging it is to be heard. Their dependency on each other appears to be a consequence of the difficulty in building sustainable businesses with a small customer base of very opinionated and demanding techies. No-one buys electronic project kits to impress their neighbours.

It seems that the Adafruit team are working hard to put their side of the argument out there, which doesn't speak to innocence or guilt, but does leave me somewhat confused. Neither company seems very well able to deal with criticism or challenges to their deeply held beliefs.

Before buying from either of them in future, I'll be looking carefully for alternatives that aren't likely to drag me into someone else's argument.

UK urged to unplug from US tech giants as digital sovereignty fears grow

Re: Not enough

Sure, the atmosphere has been more convivial, but that doesn't mean we were doing the right thing by handing everything over to our very nice friends.

The turn in politics has made everyone nervous, but the problems have been embedding themselves for years - like the heart attack victim blaming the attempt to run a marathon and not the three decades of eating cake beforehand.

Re: Not enough

...and before anyone gets too excited blaming recent events and world leaders, it should be pointed out that this has been the state since the eighties when we relaxed the rules about corporate ownership, and handed over most of our computer industry to America.

Not enough

This needs to be more than a wish for open source technology. This needs to be a presumption in favour of domestic suppliers, physical infrastructure and home-grown solutions.

Europe has been following these policies for decades - particularly when it comes to foreign ownership of companies - and are at least resisting the heavy lobbying and commercial pressures of US influence. We cannot claim to be so resilient.

The UK doesn't have a meaningful industrial strategy in this area, and has watched as chips, cars, drones, manufacturing, robots and many other areas where we could excel have been 'offshored' to America, China and now India. Without a serious change, we're essentially in a state of managed (or unmanaged!) decline.

Imagine there's no AI. It's easy if you try

Re: Hmmm...

That doesn't really make anything cheaper though. It means sites have to be redesigned, highly customised sites being deeply challenging, and additional provision has to be made in content.

Adding more work is not "cheaper"... it's more work.

Hmmm...

Structural batteries - as others have pointed out, the value of generic batteries is that you can swap them cheaply. Cars might seem like a tempting use-case, but we're in the situation where in ten years' time you're seeking a replacement battery that was designed for a specific variant of a specific year of a specific model of a car sold only in a specific territory. Good luck with that.

Accessibility - how on earth does adding more complexity to online services become cheaper? This, like GDPR, is a burden that falls unfairly on small businesses, community services and new entrants to the market. It becomes a convenient cudgel to beat competitors over the head with and protects the incumbents. Launching community sites has already become unreasonably complex and expensive, and this is just adding to the burden.

Cyber-security mesh - sounds an awful lot like a buzzword for sparkling consultation. AKA making it up as we go along. Without some concrete interoperability coming along between different security products and services (good luck with that), this is just giving a name for a lot of expensive hand wiring?

Nuclear power - this actually looks like it might happen, simply for the fact that a lot of over-zealous regulation (see accessibility above) and some heavy lobbying kept nuclear technologies under developed and under invested for nearly half a century. Advances in the rest of the industry, and in materials and engineering technology in general suggest we can build "something that works" cheaper, smaller, safer and just get on with providing the stable base load that renewables are carefully ignoring.

Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech

Re: The UK is in the dark.

Something to note: operating a sovereign server warehouse need not be a government job, so much as encouraged by taxation, procurement rules and all the other levers available to government - just as Europe is proposing.

We could in fact go further and make commitments in government to local suppliers, with some protection against foreign ownership. Knowing that there is a market of over three hundred local authorities all looking for similar infrastructure would be quite encouraging for suppliers if it weren't for the fact that they currently know that the usual global suppliers who heavily lobby our government will be given the red carpet treatment.

The UK is in the dark.

We struggle to build large scale IT infrastructure projects even when the American hyperscaler 'experts' are deeply involved, so the idea of building a coherent national IT policy is beyond impossible.

Both political parties and civil service understand only procurement - where do we spend the least money - not consequence. And ironically the definition of 'least money' is only in the context of the prices offered by a handful of suppliers who would never knowingly undercharge.These are the problems of an old-school Oxbridge humanities education dominating a political class that suffers no reputational damage from committing to gilded slop.

Elon Musk's Grokipedia launches, filled to the brim with plagiarism and AI slop

Special kind of snowflake...

You have to be a special kind of snowflake to respond to an encyclopaedia that occasionally hurts your feelings by putting up an encyclopaedia that systematically plagiarises the hurty feelings version, but edits out the bits that make you feel bad.

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

Re: Time for some maths...

Oh... and this also gives us a base estimate of the productivity gains if we were to roll out AI to every single worker in the UK: about £3 billion.

That's it. Completely turn your entire workforce on its head, make thousands redundant and introduce inaccuracy and uncertainty into every document and process... and you can increase productivity by about £3 billion.

Or 0.1% of GDP.

Time for some maths...

OK, so we can look at the claimed time saved, equate that to 'saving' two employees per 100 (per. the response earlier), and multiply that up to the full staff count of Lloyds to estimate they could downsize their workforce of 65,000 people by a little over one thousand. A total 'finger in the air' guess is that this could "save" £55 million a year (est. average salary at Lloyds of £55,000, which is probably high), at the cost of the department that has to implement and service the Ai tools, and the subscription costs of those tools.

If every single remaining employee at Lloyds gets a pro subscription to OpenAI, then the cost to save £55 million is... £153 million. Oh dear.

So, OpenAPI would perhaps at best get about £40 million from a large client like Lloyds. If you multiply that out to cover the whole UK white collar workforce (est. 25 million), we could 'save' around £10 billion (average white collar wage in the UK is half what I've estimated at Lloyds), at a cost of £7 billion. All very vague numbers, but it gives us an order of magnitude.

So the total revenue OpenAI might get, if we rolled this out to every single white collar job in the UK, is maybe £7 billion. Every single white collar job. That's revenue, not earnings - someone else can do the maths to work out how much it costs them to service that many users.

We can perhaps draw two conclusions from this:

1) OpenAI are screwed.

2) Re-organising your workforce and processes to avoid 46 minutes 'busy time' each day (maybe cut down on a meeting or two? simplify that email? or just don't send it?) would be far more efficient.

Tech industry grad hiring crashes 46% as bots do junior work

Re: Disguised recession

I'm frustrated with the Brexit narrative - not because it wasn't a huge economic and social event, but because nearly ten years later politicians on both sides are still excusing extremely poor economic planning with "because Brexit". The dollar-pound exchange rate has been on a steady decline since the 70's, the university system since the 90's (and even more so in this modern online age), UK tech leadership since the 80's... in the grand scheme, Brexit was just a bump on a long downward slope.

Yes, the spectre of global economic decline is hanging over us, and yes, we're living with the consequences of bad political decisions and economic stagnation, but that really doesn't mean that we should continue to make bad political decisions, or swallow narratives that excuse continued decline "because AI", or "because America" or "because Brexit". All of those positions are about blaming some external factor for our continued inaction.

This comes down to our industrial policies and economic goals. We're not passive subjects of AI, or any other tech fad, and we shouldn't accept narratives that encourage those beliefs. The same applies to our economic choices - but most big changes are unpalatable, so our government (all parties) are more than happy to tell us that their hands are tied.

Disguised recession

The cynical part of me suspects that *some* companies are currently in financial distress, and that the claim "we're moving everything over to AI" is largely a smokescreen to cover the fact they can't afford to recruit, or even maintain their current workforce. The cost of doing business and of employing productive workers has rocketed over the last five years and weary business owners are watching the budget predictions and expecting worse to come.

So IT departments are being asked to do without, or cut back - and senior management are more than happy to say they can cover the work load with AI that they haven't seriously tried beyond conversations with ChatGPT(*). This is like laying off half of your department and telling the other half they'll have to pick up the slack.

(*) The conversation goes like this:

CEO: "Hey chatgtp, can you run a multi-million pound company?"

ChatGPT: "Sure, I can help you with that. Do you want a five point plan to follow?"

CEO: "Yes, but can you say it in the voice of a hot Italian woman?"

UK slaps 'strategic market status' on Google, unlocking power to pry open search

Re: Of course..

Um... you're making my point for me. Google has been abusing it's market dominance for decades now, and all the regulation and tutting in the world has made precisely zero difference, has it? Not in the UK and not in Europe. No-one is denying their abuse here, though I am pointing out that the proposed remedy is not very effective.

Just remember though that search is pretty much dead these days - Google is providing Email, shared workspaces, online storage, advertising, analytics, AI, cloud office applications, streaming, datacentres and cloud platforms. Each of which has viable alternatives that don't have to be 'global' to be legitimate marketplace offerings. In fact, if you can be bothered, Europe conveniently provides a list of independent domestic service providers that public organisations (and private individuals) can use in preference to American companies. Where is the equivalent for the UK? Why are UK public entities routinely using overseas providers? Where are the tax breaks and special deals for UK startups to get a foothold? Why are all our government advisors employed by American companies?

We've demonstrated quite effectively that when it comes to carrot and stick, using the stick only gets us nowhere. So why on earth people insist on "more stick" is utterly beyond me.

Re: Of course..

Downvotes with no comments. Trump fans? Starmer fans? Google fans? Only f... no maybe not.

Re: Really?

It's a typo. They spelt 'extracts' wrong.

Of course..

Because obviously encouraging innovative home grown competition and alternatives is way beyond the concept of this government, so attempting to control the output of a global leader that regards the UK as a rounding error on its balance sheet is an easier choice.

This has the same intellectual depth (possibly less) as Trump sticking tariffs on things he doesn't like (and penguins).

Our political class are clueless in technology and equally clueless in business.

It's trivially easy to poison LLMs into spitting out gibberish, says Anthropic

Re: Believe IT or believe IT not, You Aint Seen Nothing Yet.*

So it turns out amanfrommars1 has been pre-emptively poisoning AI datasets by posting random screeds to The Register for decades... the trigger word 'amanfrommars1' appears in far more than 250 documents. Now to see what it does to the output from ChatGPT...

UK splurges £4.4M on drones, e-planes, and other flights of fancy

Wait, what?

This'll be the same government (I know, not the same party) that enthusiastically strangled commercial drone development over the last decade by insisting on a programme of continuous changes and additions to licensing requirements? The same CAA that puts out regular consultations that are apparently all ignored because they were going to do something else anyway?

Sneezing a microscopic budget at a few trials is not going to undo the environment that has essentially killed drone technology in the UK and handed it to China and the USA.

Trump threatens extra tariffs, tech export bans, for any nation that dares to regulate Big Tech

Re: Yes please call the orange pedo's bluff

Examples only. Consider Mastercard, Stripe, Visa - The vast majority of online and in person payments go through American companies (see the recent issues over censorship of online platforms by the payment networks).

And the point here is not what the politically engaged do, it's what the majority of people in the UK do. "We" spend twice as much on Amazon as the annual government budget for housing and community amenities.As individuals, we can protest as much as we like, it doesn't significantly shift our dependency on America, particularly in public services.

Re: Yes please call the orange pedo's bluff

Matching another country's tariffs is not a punishment, it''s self harm. Trump is smacking himself in the face with tariffs, and the sensible response is to let him, not mimic him.

As it is, the UK is utterly dependent on American tech - from Google through to AMD, via Oracle and Microsoft (and Palantir if you're really lucky). We have almost no home-grown alternatives, and most of our public infrastructure depends on America to function, and most of our commercial online services. So we're not going to do a thing (regardless of the colour of the government).

Trump doesn't need to threaten us at all. Now go and buy something distracting from Amazon, pay with PayPal and watch Netflix, sucker.

The UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety

Re: Seems to let right wing propaganda thought though

I'm fully aware of the origin of the idea. Remember that most MPs are clueless on these matters and rely on the civil service and advisors/lobbyists/activist groups to tell them how to vote.

As it is, Labour have more than embraced the idea, and are doing all they can to defend it even when the problems have been clearly pointed out.

Re: Calling it censorship is partisan bullshit

Hold on, are you suggesting that accidental censorship doesn't exist because they were trying to do something entirely different?

If I shoot myself in the foot, it's not an act of stupidity if I was trying to shoot that duck over there?

It doesn't matter what they are trying to do if the consequences are serious and wide ranging. This is the "just think of the children" argument writ large. No matter how big the moral panic may be, we still need to consider the consequences of our response.

We could go on to argue about the definition of porn, and whether anything related to adult sexuality is automatically harmful - but that's a much more complex discussion that requires more nuance than can be squeezed into a technical forum. The headline point is that allowing external activist groups to make decisions about what we can and cannot view *is* censorship, no matter how well meaning the stated intent is.

Re: Seems to let right wing propaganda thought though

The key point here is that the Labour government - largely advised by big American corporates - genuinely believes there's a big red button marked "protect the children" that they can push.

The unintended consequences (strangely beneficial to big American corporates and UK gambling companies) are invisible to them because that would involve questioning what they've been led to believe.

Java 25 puts 32-bit x86 out to pasture, adds 17 shiny new features

Re: Write once, run everywhere was not true then, and is even less so now.

Hmmm.... that sounds like a communication problem, since the JVM runtime is really pretty clear on compatibility between versions. It's also significantly cleaner than Windows runtimes when it comes to self-contained installations that don't interfere with other versions on the same machine.

Personal experience has been that software written in ten year old versions of Java will run in the latest VM with minimal changes. Indeed, Android has been a remarkable success for supporting old code on a vast range of hardware and across different versions of the runtime.

Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that

How we have fallen

We had a very successful No2ID campaign that encouraged the previous Labour government to abandon attempts at mass surveillance.

Noting that this isn't specifically a Labour bill (but very, very much supported by the current government), it's depressing that the "just think of the children" crowd have succesfully short-circuited any rational discussion of a pretty disastrous and nonsensical policy.

Tom Lehrer: Satirist, mathematician, inventor of the Jello shot

Re: Set the standard

Note that he handed over his copyrights in his 80's (? I think). I'm not for a moment suggesting that creatives shouldn't earn a living and own their work.

However, libraries of music being sold for millions as assets that exist beyond a creators lifetime are, on the whole, benefitting no-one but the corporate leeches that contribute absolutely nothing to the creative scene.

Set the standard

Given most of his work will have only been contemporary for other ninety year olds, it's perhaps not surprising he's less well known these days.

However, his music was foundational for satire and critical of the establishment - and also written for Sesame Street. So even if you're not aware of his tunes, or they seem somewhat old fashioned, they lay the ground for what was to come.

It's just a shame his completely altruistic gift of copyright free music and lyrics did not also set a standard for modern musicians to be guided by.

Elon outs $16.5B Samsung chip deal Tesla asked to keep secret

We do seem to have reached the state where the share price is that much purely because that's what the people who invested want it to be worth.

Despite the apocalyptic company reports, there's no reason for it to drop until some other external force comes along that requires people to actually think about what their investments are worth, such as a recession or market crash. It's a good job America isn't currently being run by a mercurial, innumerate, narcissistic felon who holds grudges..... oh.

So....

The hardware that was meant to be ready for "full self driving"/"true autonomy" (the real thing, not the marketing name) is at least two generations away from being available. Unless I'm mistaking the meaning of strategic importance?

Seems to me we're stuck in the "we just need to build it bigger to make it work" loop common to all the other AI startups that are struggling to deliver robust generalisable real world functionality.

Google AI Overviews are killing the web, Pew study shows (again)

Re: "Killing the web"

You're missing the point. Google makes money from redirects to high value websites. They want to keep you searching until you're convinced to buy something expensive. The moment you leave search, their chance of making money from you is reduced. So AI overviews are perfect for keeping people on the search page. That's the point.

They absolutely don't want you clicking through to a review of an expensive phone.. they want you to read a summary of the features hoovered up from that review and "AI washed" to be original content, before you then go straight to the store (that actually pays significant sums to be on the search page).

Selling your digital soul to use Bluesky's DMs isn't just a bad idea, it's the law*

Furious

Between this and the recent news that payment networks are being used by Evangelical groups to remove games from Steam, it's pretty clear we've handed permission to be on the internet to people who are outside of our national control, and have no interest in the quality or type of service we are given.

Indeed, they're actively working to ensure that what we see is decided by them.

This was pointed out to the Government throughout the passage of this cretinous legislation, along with the myriad other harms it causes and potential risk to people online - and of course was roundly ignored because our MPs are universally beholden to corporate lobbyists and well funded activist groups. It is their job to protect us from nonsense like this, not hand over our rights and safety to organisations who have none of those concerns.

Kawasaki and Foxconn build robot nursing assistant to tackle hospital scutwork

Re: It's Quicker by Tube

Installing a tube system into a set of hospital buildings that are constantly changing, being rebuilt, and are a combination of legacy 70's concrete and portacabins is hard - very hard. And those systems are expensive too, to keep running. Then once you've built one, two years down the line they move the relevant department into a different building and it's all completely redundant.

Robots - or people - are necessary to provide flexibility.

Tesla Robotaxi videos show Elon's way behind Waymo

Re: Gosh

You've been fooled by "the vision". Providing a taxi service is nothing to do with reducing accident rates. It *might* do it as an incidental side effect, but it probably won't. If the mission was about reducing accident rates, then the solution would be public transport or improving local neighbourhoods, not filling the roads with millions more cars with incomplete and unreliable software.

And "the vision" doesn't actually excuse that last bit - optimists saying that "the software will get better" miss the key point that we don't know that it will. Even if it does, we don't know how safe it can become (hint: it's currently less safe than drivers in the general case, more safe in selected environments), and the software doesn't actually address the issue of congestion, insane levels of energy being expended per mile travel, use of resources and overall safety environment of our streets. The vision is a smoke screen. The guy is selling you back your own car for a subscription fee. That's it. He's not saving the planet.

As for "driving is dumb" - welcome to philosophy. Most human activity in isolation is dumb. A lot of it will kill you. Juicy burgers with lashings of cheese? Kill you. Flying? Definitely kills you. Sitting for days on end at a desk commenting on forums? Yup, kills you (go get some exercise). Mining. Farming. Building houses. All well known sources of death. And yet we still do them.

Strange, that, isn't it?

Re: Gosh

Of course, criticism of a service that is clearly behind the competition will be dismissed by the faithful.

"They don't see what we see. They're in an echo chamber, aren't they guys?"

Beyond the challenges of the software and limitations of the hardware, it'll be interesting to see how these services evolve and how their economics work at scale - if they work at all.

Supremes uphold Texas law that forces age-check before viewing adult material

The big concern..

The big concern here is probably that phrase "sexual material harmful to minors". In many societies, we might agree that seeing two people making love is not inherently harmful to minors (though it might be uncomfortable). We see films all the time where (gasp!) sex has happened. The fun legal game is deciding where the line is between loving signs of affection and porn.

And the issue with the legislation is that, beyond issues of privacy, defining this phrase gives well funded groups a convenient tool to severely restrict access to sites and content they don't like. Advice on sexual health? Information on sexuality and gender? Commentary on issues of body autonomy? We can kill those.

Sure, it's not actual censorship. Of course you can still access that information. But the reality for people asking those sorts of questions is that the phrase "now please enter your credit card" is pretty much going to kill curiosity stone dead. For techies, VPNs are a sort of answer, but again, it's a pretty effective barrier to someone tentatively exploring such issues.

And besides restricting information and advice on difficult subjects, this also has a chilling effect on the provision of such content. If two thirds of your viewers "go away", that's a revenue stream that dries up. Strangely, in its place the traditional view of sex (as endorsed by Andrew Tate) is still viewed as completely acceptable. What did the president say? "Grab them by the credit card"?

The AIpocalypse is here for websites as search referrals plunge

As predicted

Google needs to grow, and that pressure eventually leads it to try and replace the one thing it feeds on - the rest of the internet.

It's been pointed out repeatedly that Google has a policy of trying to prevent people from clicking out of search and into results, but then denied by the company and it's workers. They insist that search results are better than every (subtly not the same thing), and remain wilfully oblivious of the the serpent eating it's own tail.

This is ultimately unsustainable. People can't make creativity pay, but the companies that dominate the space can't make creativity 'cheap' enough to sustain their business models. In the short term, this is starving us of quality content, product innovation and new entertainment. In the long term - who knows? We'd hope something new, but whilst creators remain passive and dependent on the big players, all we can expect is continued decline.

Musk and Trump take slap fight public as bromance ends

Re: Jail time for Elon

Trump will maintain the fiction that DOGE saved billions, as it's a core tenet of his claim to be 'saving' the American economy.

Whatever Musk went in believing, the wilful destruction of various departments was very much the goal of the current Republican leadership.

European Commission: Make Europe Great Again... for startups

Re: Offering absolutely nothing..

"Any company wanting to sell in the EU needs to comply with all EU regulations."

Not the ones around employment, taxation, health and safety, working hours, fair hiring practises, environmental and waste management.... this isn't just the imposition of CE marking (which China has industrialised, while Europe treats it as a cash cow), but the whole state burden being placed on businesses regardless of their size and function.

Offering absolutely nothing..

With Trump attacking higher education, it's an open goal to suggest smart people come over here. And what do we have from our government... absolutely nothing.

Most of this announcement looks like hot air. "Reducing regulation" is an empty phrase when the business environment is fragmented (see the idiotic complexity of VAT across Europe), and the region actively introduces large regulatory frameworks that over-burden small businesses and dissuade innovation - see the last decade of rules around drones, data management, manufacturing and waste and all the rest.

It is infinitely easier to import a dodgy gadget from China than to actually make one in Europe to sell. Seriously, try it. It's not a focus of The Register, but the overhead on making a simple device and complying with all of the necessary sales, tax, safety, waste and security directives turns a two week job into a six month slog - and six months of an engineering team's time makes nearly any device economically unviable unless you happen to be Samsung. Not so much move fast and break things as please can you fill form 56B-II in triplicate?

Then add on the fact that local engineering has been crushed, and your 'made in Europe' project involves most of it being made in China (which has the expertise), and sourced from America (hello Digikey!) and Taiwan.

So, we can't afford to design, manufacture or sell here... what else? It turns out our Universities aren't connected to any technological manufacturing hubs (Silicon Valley, Taiwan, Singapore, China), so what they teach is the theory of how other people build things.

And as for finance, no-one in Europe wants to be seen backing a loser, so money is largely unavailable for early stage startups ("please prove you're wildly successful first"), and most of the innovation funds prefer projects with academic output that doesn't have to be judged by any commercial measure of success. Studies on smarter cities, academic work on theoretical improvements to other people's technology and tail wagging the dog work on projects to make the rest of the world's work a bit more environmentally friendly. All washed down with endless form-filling busywork so there's a long paper trail to show how deeply engaged the innovation centre is.

This applies both to Europe and the UK - which had gone so far down the European development route over the last few decades that Brexit has done nothing to change attitudes even if it's decimated budgets. We (the UK) have no serious representation for technology and engineering in government, apart from Nick F***ing Clegg, who wants to destroy copyright because an American company believes it deserves all of our intellectual property. If your most scientific representative is Nick Clegg, you are in serious trouble.

There is a way forward, but the corporate lobbying in the UK and Europe, a symbiotic (in the Alien face-hugger sense) dependency on American corporations in the UK and a general lack of drive across all of our public sectors means that innovation is driven overseas, or just drowned in apathy.

SpaceX resets 'Days Since Last Starship Explosion' counter to zero, again

Re: Oh Dear

A lot of people have bought into the "this is the only way to build a rocket" narrative. I'm not sure they're going to give up easily..

That said, a lot of people bought into "this is the only way to build underground tunnels" narrative - with international teams competing to build sleds for a transport system that never appeared.

And a lot of people bought into "this is the only way to make solar affordable" narrative - with panels that proved impossible to manufacture.

And a lot of people bought into "this is the most advanced truck in the world" narrative.

Now you could argue that Musk's actual motive for doing these things was often not the same as the narrative that people got emotionally invested in.

It would be a funny thing then if the outcome of the billions NASA has thrown into the Artemis programme, and private individuals have put into the dream of life on Mars turned out to be a delivery system for Starlink paid for by other people's money. I've heard that Musk is already talking down Artemis in favour of a much further away goal...

I'm making a note here, "Huge success".

Ex-Meta exec: Copyright consent obligation = end of AI biz

"Former British deputy PM and Meta apologist Sir Nick Clegg says that forcing AI companies to ask for the permission of copyright holders before using their content would destroy the AI industry overnight."

You could stop there, and we could all just reply "Good". End of story.

If, as Clegg suggests, the information that I have created and is mine by copyright is so valuable that without it these companies cannot retain their multi-billion dollar valuations (despite near zero revenue), then they should pay me for it. Or at the very least, I should have the right to decide what is done with my (valuable) property.

It really is that simple.

It's also worth noting there is a list going round online of the MPs who voted for Starmer's AI giveaway bill. With only a couple of exceptions, every single one of them is a Labour MP. Don't be fooled for a moment that your rights are being signed away by some single nefarious individual - the entire party is abandoning it's duty to the people it represents because some ex-NFT salesmen are telling them that this constitutes an economic policy.

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

Re: "Ordinary search has gone to the dogs."

"..when it stopped being ordinary search and began using AI"

I hate to tell you this, but it started quite some time before then, when Google started the strategy of becoming an 'information source' rather than a gateway to other sources. Think Google Flights, Google Weather, Google Maps, Google Finance... it's a very long list that has been growing for years. Remember Knol?

Long before AI came along, Google Search attempted to answer the question for you - in a deliberate attempt to keep you on the search page up until it could hand you over to a paying website. They actively tried to kill Wikipedia. They bless a select few travel resources. Small and independent websites, blogs and resources are almost completely absent from search results, and have been for years.

And the result is very, very clear. Those small and independent resource sites are dying out. If you want information on a product that is no longer sold, just hope like hell that some incredibly stubborn holdout is still paying hosting fees for a site that was written years ago and can only be found tangentially from Wikipedia or an obscure Reddit post.

Predictions

We all tend to hope for a big clear result - an undisputable sign. If things are going to go bad, can they please collapse in a big noisy bang rather than just... slowly... degrading into mush?

No-one really has a theory for a global information resource designed to route around censorship and allow anyone - just about anyone - to start publishing. Does it grow and get better? Does it become a civilizational resource? Does it fragment? Or does it degrade or collapse? We don't know if this virtual thing is like the Roman Empire, or the foundation of mathematics. Does it become unsustainable, or does it persist and evolve?

The observation is that our internet is currently an attention economy. Eyeballs are almost directly related to profit, and with that comes corporations, gatekeeping and manipulation. That's an environment absolutely ripe for the explosion of AI - but also one that will preserve and sustain it even if the results are demonstrably bad. There's no part of the attention economy that punishes "bad" attention.

So the current prediction is that we'll see a steady degradation of our public spaces and information sources. This may be exacerbated by the next generation of kids who are apathetic towards search and long form content. If Google's Veo3 can pump out a thirty second video 'explaining' how to tie their shoe-laces, they're fine with it (and indeed, most adults are). And the problem we have to face is not that we'll have to avoid AI in future, but that AI will be unavoidable - drowning out or corrupting verifiable facts and poisoning the entire public space. Not in a big bang with a single clear bad actor, but progressively as the whole food chain slowly absorbs the poison over time.

AI can't replace freelance coders yet, but that day is coming

Just a small point

I've worked for dozens of companies over the years, and faced a lot of coding tests from them.

In decades of work, for all of those companies, I did not once solve a problem that looked remotely like those coding tests. Not even slightly.

AI skills shortage more than doubles for UK tech leaders

Hmmmm..

"We want magic pixies to 10x our business"...

Followed by

"Why is no-one available who knows how to find magic pixies?"

Who knew there could be a shortage of snake oil?

Europe plots escape hatch from enshittification of search

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...