Posts by Andy 73

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

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'

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Re: Exactly as we all predicted

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Trump tells Musk to 'go get' Starliner astronauts

Re: And here we go..

It's a company who's founder engineers did great things - the Falcon 9 - and then left.

Whether it's doing great things or being dragged into bad decisions by a boss who veers between hyper-obsession and complete distraction is another question.

But sure, look at the pretty rocket.

And here we go..

The people vigorously defending SpaceX as criticisms of Musk have mounted should really understand that a complete lack of accountability have led us to the point where flat out lies are normalised.

Allowing "the vision" to override reasonable analysis of the business practises, government manipulation and practical progress towards stated goals leads us to the point where it all looks just a little bit corrupt.

Why does the UK keep getting beaten up by IT suppliers?

On the whole, people with MSCE certificates don't have control over billion pound budgets, even if they think they do.

Re: "on Digital Government in Estonia."

Yup, they're a special case, and the Soviet influence runs deep, but they also show that properly online government services can work extremely well, and appear to demonstrate a knock on benefit to industry.

And why not treat some of the required transformation in the UK as 'greenfield'? Stop trying to merge existing, inefficient systems that have a dependency on resource heavy departments with software that has to dance around manual processes. Analyse what is actually being delivered rather than how the current staff deliver it. Build replacement parts in a modular fashion (even if the interfaces at the edge remain messy and manual) and then give people the chance to switch over if it benefits them. It doesn't have to be a big bang changeover, but it does have to be a commitment to genuine change rather than patching a broken system.

As for ID cards - they are not required for the UK to go digital, and we've got a good history of preventing them being introduced. That doesn't make the other lessons from countries that have successfully gone digital from being valuable.

"In 2023, the PAC found that the number of digital, data, and technology professionals in the UK civil service amounts to around 4.5 percent of the workforce, "less than half the number it needs when compared to an equivalent industry average of between 8 percent and 12 percent."

For a lot of government functions these days, the technology is the service. Gathering, processing and acting on data from the population of the UK and millions of business is the bedrock of government activity. I'd expect the percentage of the workforce dedicated to technology and data processing to be significantly higher than the industry average, and then double that again to catch up with years of mismanagement.

But that low percentage probably also hides that technology is seen as a minor service function, and that nearly all of the senior management are Oxbridge humanities graduates. No names, but I've seen the results of this in organisations where the leadership is determined that they understand the technology after reading a few vague architecture documents (and to be clear, they are smart guys, of course they can read) - to the point where they can confidently make completely wrong decisions about technology and strategy. At that level, decisions are seen as "management", not "engineering", so people with no real experience of technology at scale try to do management at scale and.... large invoices all round!

For those that are interested, it's well worth reading up on Digital Government in Estonia. You can set up a business there online from anywhere in the world, get married online and basically perform most government functions electronically - and it's no coincidence they have the highest number of tech unicorns in Europe.

UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project

Re: And in future years?

It's a lazy defense to throw trolling accusations around, but there you go.

What I got from your ramblings (your word) was that you have (deliberately or otherwise) confused correlation and causation.

Obviously you see this as a political issue, and I put up the objection that the moment we go down that path, we stop trying to solve the actual problem and distract ourselves endlessly with trying to select the right person/political group/economic theory for the job.

And it's ridiculous to blame an economic theory - of any kind - for this mess, when nearly all economic theories, including neoliberalism, would decry the extraordinary waste of resources on display. None of your "results of neoliberalism" are required or optimal behaviours for neoliberal theory. All of them can however be linked back to a series of governments led by ministers with extremely short term views, little industry experience and a fear of public opinion - and advised by a civil service with extremely poor institutional knowledge of large scale project planning.

Re: ****ing hell

Private companies can be as inefficient as they like. We can choose to use them and accept their prices and inefficiencies, or go elsewhere. The same can't be said of our local council.

And it's worth noting that many thousands of companies have standardised their accounting and billing practices enough to use off the shelf software like Xero, and will happily migrate to other platforms if something usefully better comes along.

Re: And in future years?

Nothing in Neoliberalism suggests that councils should **** money up the wall on poorly conceived and even worse implemented projects, or that they should continue to pursue those projects until they have racked up debts beyond any the council is capable of maintaining.

Nor does neoliberalism suggest that the answer to an insane and unnecessary debt is to sell off assets at random.

So yes, economics in the western world are approximately neoliberal (except when they aren't), but that neither describes the action of this council, nor does it mean that anything going wrong is "because neoliberalism".

It's like suggesting that this failure is "because Caucasians".

Re: ****ing hell

"We can't do it because, as the government, we are incapable of getting the councils that we oversee and pay to deliver services to do what we want"

Being a technical issue that most voters don't fully understand (except in terms like "The evil <insert party> government is trying to force <insert opposition> council to <insert hyperbolic description of normal change>"), and given the fact that most MPs don't have any experience of managing change themselves... there is absolutely zero priority to sort the mess out.

I mean, what's a few billion between friends?

Re: And in future years?

Given this is a problem with councils across the country, trying to blame Tories and neoliberalism (really?!) risks missing the point that it's the unelected officers who are repeating this problem time and time again.

Regardless of who is in power, if incompetence leads to an insane bill and contractual obligation, then desperate measures will be taken - whether it's selling off the silver or increasing tax to unsustainable levels.

You can argue it's the colour of their rosettes that has caused the problem, but since none of the other rosette wearers demonstrate any understanding of IT, or offer a better practise to avoid these problems, it would be a mistake to think that we just have to vote for a different lot to fix things.

Getting the right diagnosis is key to saving the patient.

Re: ****ing hell

I read the article. Tried following some of the headline links. Broken link. Broken link. Broken link.

Making Government Digital doesn't seem to have any serious overlap with providing enterprise resources within government. Most of it seems to be about providing external access to council services. All very laudable, and yes a good problem to solve, but not the problem that is causing councils to spend insane amounts of money with Oracle.

I note also that this looks a lot like yet another talking shop where thousands of people all trying to do similar work get together to discuss best practises, rather than admitting that you don't need three thousand people to each re-invent the "when are my bins out" page for their specific council.

****ing hell

Every. Single. Time.

Lazy maths says that's 40 senior engineers working full time for ten years. What level of incompetence do you have to reach to spend that much money on what is essentially a fancy database?

If this stuff is needed for national infrastructure, and 317 councils in the UK are all spending stupid amounts to get Oracle (and others) to rehash mild variations of the same solution - why the **** isn't our government (a) bringing the skill in house and (b) providing standard, modular building blocks to encourage councils to follow consistent patterns of work?

We know Birmingham has spent ten times as much on a similar project. Assuming this fiasco is the "average cost" to a council of providing ERP systems, that's £12 billion being thrown at Oracle over time.

If you want to know where the black hole in our public finances is - it's between their ****ing ears.

Intel pitches modular PC designs to make repairs less painful

How many...

How many people actually read the article before rushing here to comment?

Yes, Framework are in this space. Yes PCs have been modular since day 1. However, the vast majority of laptops (which is the main thrust of the piece) are not modular and there is next to no ecosystem around that (bar the one high profile vendor). As I'm currently waiting on a replacement motherboard for a laptop, I'd be more than happy to see an industry move towards standardised replacement subsystems, particularly when the refresh cycle currently means that fixing a year old computer is stonewalled by a complete lack of spare parts ("but we can sell you this new model!").

Biz tax rises, inflation and high interest. Why fewer UK tech firms started in 2024

Re: Lots of waste, brainless ideas

I can strongly recommend the analysis by Sam Dumitriu on why Nuclear (and indeed any large infrastructure project in the UK) is so expensive.

In short, the UK is the most expensive place in the UK to build a power station. It costs around six times as much to build a like for like nuclear site as it does in South Korea - and typically takes two or three times as long. The same applies for many infrastructure projects. Lower Thames Crossing’s planning application alone cost more than twice as much as it cost Norway to actually build the world’s longest road tunnel. The planning application for that one is 63,000 pages long.

Note that fifteen years ago, Nick Clegg vetoed building a new station on the grounds that it would take too long to complete. This is the very definition of our bureaucracy issuing self-fulfilling prophesies.

We don't (and can't) build large scale infrastructure efficiently because over the last three decades our governments have decided that this is not something that we should foster and encourage.

Exhausted

I'm exhausted stating the ****ing obvious whenever this is discussed, and then seeing "the powers that be" head off in the opposite direction, convinced that they (with not one single year of business experience between them) know better than the people working in the industries they are manipulating.

Successive governments have coasted on the tails of global economic headwinds, happy that even though we're not keeping up, we've seen more or less improvements in the economy sufficient to keep people comfortably voting for them. Suddenly, when they can't rely on the global corporations to do the heavy lifting, we're facing the basic fact that no-one in government, opposition or the civil service knows how to (a) reduce costs (b) improve productivity or (c) plan for growth.

They've ignored the SMEs that make up more than half of the economy (who can't lobby constantly for perks), and now we're beginning to see the consequences.

Meanwhile, we get idiot commentators that believe if only we chose the right party, everything would be magically fixed. Here's the headline news: they're all useless.

Google DeepMind CEO says 2025's the year we start popping pills AI helped invent

Re: Hassabis

I suggest you re-read the article, which is specifically about likely advances in AI this year, and not about the existing deep learning work that they got the Nobel Prize for.

Given the amount of money being thrown at this and other problems (and indeed, the wider field of AI), it would be extraordinary not to improve the state of the art for a lot of mathematical analysis tasks. On that front, AI as a whole is improving our technological toolkit. Continued funding at the current levels however depend on some significant breakthroughs that are - as Hassabis himself states - theoretical at best at present.

We shall see what comes next..

Hassabis

Hassabis has been hyping technologies that would deliver breakthroughs for decades now - he was originally a games developer promising artificial intelligence would deliver realistic interactions with computer generated characters in the game. That didn't happen.

Now we're being told "maybe soon" this latest set of damp future visions will come to pass... I'm not holding my breath.

UK aims to fix government IT with help from AI Humphrey

Re: For context

I am of course ineligible for the role, since I do this stuff professionally every day of my life, and therefore would run the risk of accidentally fixing things if involved in the fiasco. They will exclusively hire from the queue of baying idiots currently polishing their CVs on LinkedIn.

The only thing I'm allowed to be president of is my dog's food bowl.

For context

HMRC employs 61,186 people full time. So 100,000 calls equates to a little over one and a half calls they need to deal with on average per employee each day.

God forbid they actually pick up a phone.

I can hear a million consultants up and down the land editing their CVs to add "Government AI Expert" to the list of non-jobs they charge four-figure-per-day fees for.

It's pretty easy to predict what will happen. There will be long consultations during which everyone tries to remember, and then obfuscate what it is they actually do in their job that they need a computer for. Then there will be long consultations during which consultants argue over the most overblown (sorry, reassuringly expensive) system they can fit to the task. This will, without fail, be a "enterprise framework" of some sort from one of the major vendors - that will need such extensive customisation that (in man hour terms) they might as well have started from scratch with standard (and much cheaper) tools. They will then commit to a multi-year long programme of implementing the proposed system, during which there will be at least four department re-organisations, and the scope of the required system will be re-written at least twice. As a consequence, the original estimate and price will be blown out of the water as large chunks of the system are deemed to be unsuitable for the job, and therefore re-written from scratch (after another consultation). Then they'll try to install it, discover all of the things they failed to discover in the original spec, and start from scratch again.

And because they went with a (almost certainly foreign owned) enterprise vendor over which they have no control, the whole process will have required foreign travel, consultants with meaningless certification (and exorbitant fees), and eventually calling in experts from the vendor itself at even higher cost.

Then some civil servant who still doesn't fully understand what an AI is will write a report.

This was a triumph

I'm making a note here: huge success

It's hard to overstate my satisfaction

SpaceX resets ‘Days Since Starship Exploded’ counter to zero

Re: Looking to the Future -- The Limits of "Move Fast and Break Things"

NASA isn't necessarily an argument against "Get it right the first time" - it's an argument against government procurement and bureaucratic creep. The same could be said of Boeing.

You could look at some of the other 'new entrants', that are having to iterate less and get it right earlier, to see that move fast and break things doesn't have to be the only option.

Indeed, New Glen may still be the first in the race for Artemis...

Fans will gush, haters will hate...

How you interpret this outcome is going to depend heavily on your enthusiasm for SpaceX and what you feel about Musk.

From an engineering perspective, yes you could call it a "not failure", but this begs two questions that are (like it or not) closely tied to Musk's approach to project management.

1). If we're still at the stage of significant redesigns between test flights, how close are we to a final design? 3 flights? 23 flights? This really matters.

2). Do we have a more accurate view than "it landed" v's "it blew up" for reliability - because even six successful landings in a row doesn't count for **** if each one was one loose component/litres of fuel away from disaster. Iteration is not the same as proving reliability at this stage of a product's design cycle.

Both of these speak to Musk's approach of rapid, public iteration, and very poor grasp of safe delivery. On his cars, Autopilot is now on it's 13'th major iteration and after ten years of "nearly there" is still not generally safe for autonomous control, with Tesla actively obscuring safety statistics. You can very fairly argue that SpaceX is not Tesla - but just as with Tesla, the rocket company has gone from a not especially controversial first design created by industry leaders who've since left the company, to a revolutionary new design that is testing quite a few engineering limits.

As with Autopilot, enthusiasts for engineering process and visionary ideas will be delighted to see the show - and will dismiss any criticism as "haters". The more cynical will be asking whether (having clearly missed the 2026 NASA Artemis schedule) SpaceX is realistically going to be providing commercial service this decade with Starship.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Shafted three ways...

So now in the UK:

If you want to go online and be treated like an adult you must hand over your credit card (don't worry it will be safe).

If you want to provide online services to your community, you must have legal advice and multi-million pound insurance cover.

If you share anything online, it may be taken and reproduced by any interested party with no respect to copyright whatsoever.

Yeah, it's going great, isn't it?

It's not just Big Tech: The UK's Online Safety Act applies across the board

Re: Something tells me...

Why should it be left or right wing, when both lots of short term grifters are advised by the same civil service? There is a reason why some of the (admittedly more reactionary) critics of government refer to them as 'the blob'.

Re: Something tells me...

Government has been almost completely captured by the global corporations, who long ago realized that almost all regulation was to their benefit. The rest of the harm has been done by bureaucrats who only want to expand their department.

Re: Just another example...

I think you're unwilling to accept the answers that have been given. This legislation applies right down to a village run website, which will never have sufficient traffic or 'value' (in your miserable monetary sense) to justify or pay for someone doing a few days worth of legally consequential work.

And the obligation is so severe and vaguely worded that it is like asking your local village store to provide complete supply chain tracking for anything they sell, or face a multi million pound fine.

Most of your argument is the usual 'think of the children' nonsense, relying on the fallacy that no amount of busy work is too much if there is some vague threat that it might tangentially prevent.

Tesla, Musk double down on $56B payday appeal

Re: Doesn't make sense

Eventually... sure.

But before then he, and most of the board and senior management will have extracted enough wealth to live extremely comfortable for the rest of their lives.

The smarter amongst them may also leave the company early enough to blame any eventual downfall on the people who replaced them, before moving on to the next company in the queue.

Re: Doesn't make sense

Nearly 50% of all investment in Tesla is retail - i.e. individuals. Most of them do so because they believe in Musk.

He may be bringing the company down (and failing to deliver on his many promises), but it is his vision that has brought in the majority of that investment. Without it, Tesla would be just another car company - and valued as such.

The board don't want Musk to go because it would tank the stock. Sales might increase, but not anywhere remotely near enough to justify the current stock price.

Tesla may not develop a new consumer car going forward - it's all AI, robotaxi and other unproven business ideas - but that is fine because so long as the investors believe in jam tomorrow it doesn't matter that the car side of the company has essentially ground to a halt.

UK digital markets watchdog expects to launch investigations within the month using new powers

Re: So it's the same b.s. as in Europe then...

Indeed.

Unfortunately, the powers that be are so heavily lobbied, and the enforcement agencies so wedded to bureaucracy that it never occurs to them that building an environment where potential competitors can grow (the carrot part of carrot and stick) might be a good idea.

Instead, the stick is threatened for everybody and the global corporations with vast legal departments carry on exactly as they always did.

..and the powers that be declare in the Sunday Papers "See, we're doing something about the online menace!"

SpaceX will try satellite deployment on next Starship test

Re: The climb down starts here..

Your desire to protect Musk from any sort of criticism is noted.

Re: The climb down starts here..

From what I understand, SpaceX have been awarded a range of additional projects since the 2021 announcement (totalling billions), and have certainly received some of the milestone payments. However, both NASA and SpaceX are being extremely coy over the precise structure and value of the milestones, and remarkably little information is available online.

That does not mean SpaceX has failed to deliver a single milestone in the four years since the contract was awarded, or that they have not been paid for some or all of the work done to validate Starship as HLS ready. It would be ridiculous to claim otherwise. Furthermore, SpaceX's involvement in this and many other NASA projects is great validation for bringing in external financing - that Musk has made clear has been needed.

If Artemis III is cancelled, it would hurt SpaceX - but not nearly as much as being forced to admit they are not going to be capable of the mission within any required timeframe. The promise of Jam tomorrow is always there with Musk's companies.

The climb down starts here..

There have been plenty of criticisms that the architecture of the moon mission that was dictated by Starship's design (e.g. insane numbers of launches to fuel up the transfer rocket) was impossible for SpaceX to deliver.

There are also conflicting accounts of how much money NASA has already given SpaceX for stages of the Starship programme related to Artemis - but the suggestion that billions have been paid.

Now, the Starship programme is fairly clearly behind where it needs to be to meet the Artemis project schedule, should we be surprised if Musk is conveniently supporting the one big orange guy who might do something when he says "We didn't want to go to the moon anyway"?

It would be massively beneficial to SpaceX not to have their heavily government subsidised organisation tested against the hard requirements of a government space mission. As demonstrated by this launches objectives, throwing up more Starlink satellites is a higher priority. Musk will continue to make excuses for not delivering ("they're holding me back with regulations!", "We decided not to make that product after all!", "The next version will blow your mind!"), and is sufficiently influential right now not to be challenged.

Even at $200/mo, Altman admits ChatGPT Pro struggles to turn a profit

Don't worry..

We might lose money on every sale, but we'll make it up in volume!

So far LLMs regurgitate a fractured version of what we already know... with added maths errors and hallucinations (or 'false facts'). I can't see how this can be used for any form of robust generation of new information (key word robust).

Sure, we can (inaccurately) summarise texts and dream up images of Sam Altman riding a unicorn, but... apart from the Labour party wanting to generate tone-deaf adverts, who is going to pay a premium rate for that?

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Hmmm... two different things..

Sure, line numbers, lack of files and folders and the immediacy of BASIC are advantageous for beginners.

But those same omissions are probably the root cause of the decline of BASIC - they make modular programs impossible. Even with BBC BASIC, the best you could hope for was one long, long screed of text that did everything. It stopped beginner programmers from moving to the important next step of programming: breaking down a problem into smaller units that could be solved once, stored and shared.

Hence the association of BASIC with a lack of structured thinking. There was no 'meta programming' (in the sense of organising a group of program units, libraries and input data), just a big blob of BASIC.

It is also true that Commodore BASIC was abysmal. Though we might argue that Tramiel was right in that no-one really bought their computer to write BASIC programs on by the mid eighties - so providing a perfunctory implementation probably met the required criteria even if it left a small number of kids feeling incapable of making their computer "do something". It's still the case that we could make much more welcoming 'beginner' languages and computers, but the budget is rarely there to do so.

US airspace closures, lack of answers deepen East Coast drone mystery

The Idiocracy takes flight

Honestly, those of us who sat through the Gatwick fiasco are rolling our eyes and sighing so hard you could power a wind turbine.

The astonishing thing is that while experienced investigators are pretty clear that the only thing being seen is manned aircraft (and the very occasional drone reacting to the news that there might be drones in the sky), the higher you go up through the various organisations the more hysterical the reporting becomes. It seems that anyone in a position of power has got there by leaving their brains on the doorstep.

Meanwhile, the FAA, who made a huge deal about how Remote ID was vital and the only technical solution to making our skies safe from drones are apparently unable to draw a single conclusion about what might be in the skies. Could it be that Remote ID is a ridiculous waste of time, money and bureaucratic energy?

The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

Re: BBC Micro..

From observation of our kids, I feel that to get to the point of "teaching programming" at the level where network stacks are even vaguely relevant, you need to first get them engaged with the basic concept of "I can give a device a sequence of instructions and it will do something I find interesting".

Both Scratch and Minecraft arguably fill that role far better than either presenting a student with a command line, or giving them a Micro:bit. Those later two options often seem to be far more interesting to grown adults than school age children. Indeed, a lot of discussion about getting kids involved in computers revolves around what grown adults think are fun activities rather than the context of a kid who often has access to a parent's tablet or phone and/or a game console.

The two biggest problems in an educational setting are providing devices that don't tax the teacher who often doesn't have a great deal of time for lesson planning and researching obscure computing problems, and providing a learning curve that engages at the earliest opportunity and then scales with the understanding of the student. As such, I don't think the Pi necessarily solves those problems in the classroom, and there are still advances to be made that might not look quite like any of the current "educational" hardware or software.

Re: BBC Micro..

Agreed, and kinda my point. The design intent was to be an inspirational computing device, but a lot of people misinterpret that quote as meaning the Pi is designed for education and use in schools ala BBC - which it's actually not especially suited to.

Again, none of this takes away from what Upton and Wilson were espousing, or the quality of the Pi as a very successful product - but it's not really an educational product. The idea that the Pi has "solved" this particular problem though means that any competitors face an uphill battle to gain attention.