Posts by Andy 73

China's homebrew Bluetooth alternative is on the march as Beijing pushes universal remotes

Re: So... Bluetooth...

It would be a shame if you didn't use your brain...

A more direct explanation is that, given the heavy handed restrictions on technology exports into China the CCP is naturally doing all it can to encourage local ecosystems to spring up and reduce dependence on increasingly unsympathetic foreign nations. Initiatives like this are a pretty clear way to drive local industry and skill sets.

That doesn't mean criticisms of the CCP aren't very valid, but the explanation is likely far more mundane than dystopian dreams mass surveillance through remote controls.

So... Bluetooth...

Bluetooth has taken over twenty five years to go from a naked land grab to a standard that clunkily provides so many options to ensure that none quite work together. More charitably it was conceived long before our hyper-online electronic environment, but historic excuses shouldn't prevent better alternatives from arriving on the scene.

It should be a mild embarrassment that it's the CCP that is most likely to deliver a working rival, and more of an embarrassment that the knee jerk reaction is to assume spying (I suppose mildly less xenophobic than some of the alternatives). It will be interesting to see if this penetrates western markets.

The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

You're going to be heavily down voted - the audience on this site will think nothing of finding an appropriate OS image, jumping through a bunch of configuration hoops and putting up with the general hassle of SD cards - but it's fair to say the Pi does not provide an educational environment.

It provides an utterly generic (and mildly obtuse) Linux environment on which you can do things which may (or may not) be educational, but that is very much down to the person assuming the role of teacher, and not the device itself.

Re: BBC Micro..

That's very much a post-hoc justification - you don't design ubiquity, you just hope your product is more popular than all of the others who are trying to grow in the market.

And as for the OS install - if your goal is to replace a Windows setup, most schools have found low cost tablets to be much more effective and (relatively) harder to break. Again, the confusing and inconsistent landscape for OS images in the early days of the Pi suggest that an educational environment was not the priority that some people imagine.

Ubiquity in other markets (especially the hobby and tinkerer market) has made the Pi an easier choice in education - but I note that our kids have gone all the way through primary and secondary education in Cambridge without once touching a Pi. They may be used in Code clubs and other groups where experienced techies are happy to build up an appropriate platform, but many schools go for other options when it comes to computing for pupils.

BBC Micro..

The Pi as a "BBC Micro for today" is one of those weird myths that is perpetuated despite all evidence to the contrary. The Pi was designed first and foremost as low cost accessible hardware, with the software environment left largely to the user and a challenge in most educational environments. In early days, you were on your own until ubiquity encouraged a slew of "get started with the Pi" kits that provided sd cards, cables, keyboards and cases to make sense of that bare board.

In contrast the BBC was expensive and prioritised quality and a complete environment over convenience. From the start it was possible (and encouraged) to put together a standard configuration that gave you an entirely predictable software and hardware environment on which you could learn. Equally, you might argue that the BBC was designed to make the hardware *more* accessible than the Pi - busses and interfaces proliferated, allowing the base hardware to be hacked, altered and upgraded. In contrast the Pi gives you a (very well) curated set of standard external interfaces around a tightly integrated and largely immutable core.

None of those differences are bad - they're a natural consequence of the evolution of the computing ecosystem - but they also reflect different goals for the projects. I'd argue the Pi is no more educational than any other SBC (and there are a lot), and the Pi Foundation have not done as much as they might have to address that use case. Indeed, it wasn't until the 400 that they addressed the challenges facing many classrooms of having a simple 'plug and go' option that helped with setup and cable management.

The PI is incredibly useful, and a huge achievement in establishing a ecosystem that many educators, developers and experimenters have grown to rely on, but it's achieved that through ubiquity rather than some sort of embodied 'educational design'. In that respect, the Arduino project is arguably better at presenting a user with a environment in which they can learn about both hardware and programming with a low cost device.

Tesla sued over alleged Autopilot fail in yet another fatal accident

Sue the shills...

Perhaps the great legal might of America should be turned away from the (inexplicably) highest funded company in the nation and towards the army of shills who have been posting "This time, Autopilot can do everything!" videos and articles every time Tesla releases a minor version increment of their software.

There is a great deal of money to be made lying on behalf of Elmo - maybe it would be a good idea to give those people a dose of reality?

Bluesky too opaque about user figures for Euro watchdogs

Really?

If I'm a business below a certain size I do not have to report on VAT. If I'm going to London I do not have to take a passport. If I'm shopping in Tesco, I do not have to show a proof of my identity. If I'm driving a personal vehicle, I do not have to have a speed limiter.

There are lots of situations where the state quite rightly decides that it cannot justify intruding into our lives, and that doing so would be ineffective, unreasonably expensive and harmful to productive society. That doesn't mean there are no barriers or no exceptions, just that with some sane analysis there is a point where further intrusion benefits no-one. Indeed, there is a point where intrusion is potentially extremely problematic.

In the case of a hairdresser taking your public email address, the potential harm of them sharing that with someone is absolutely negligible in the current environment and does not justify putting global barriers up against free public services. The complete lack of proportionality, or even acknowledgement that there are a range of different concerns and outcomes shows who socially damaged this debate has become. At this point there is no difference between the loons on the right who want to start trade wars, and the loons on the left who want state involvement at every level of our lives.

Please re-read my post. I didn't say BlueSky specifically were innovating - I said this regulation being poorly applied harms innovation and many other small businesses.

Strawman argument. No-one is arguing in favour of hate speech.

And please stop making stuff up. I said "Twitter is regulated" - you firstly claim this is not true ("..know what you're talking about") and then demonstrate that Twitter is in fact subject to EU regulation. Clearly you're trolling at this point.

I'm pointing out that the fact that the EU is unable to differentiate between a hairdresser in Orlando and a Social Media platform with half a billion users is a sign of extremely poor legislation. The fact that they're running with it suggests that the ambiguity is completely deliberate - i.e. they intend this to be poor legislation.

I'm also pointing out that this deliberately poor legislation (a) does not actually protect users (despite the "think of the children" nonsense about hate speech - this regulation does control speech on BlueSky) and (b) harms consumers by pandering to large corporate interests.

You've refuted none of those points, but instead reached for insults and distraction. I'm very surprised you don't have a Twitter account already.

> they need to be regulated otherwise they turn into the kind of cesspit that X is.

Uh? Twitter is regulated. Twitter is a cesspit. Your logic does not stand up to the slightest inspection.

And to be clear here - I couldn't give a monkeys about BlueSky. What I do care about is the EU running roughshod over small businesses and innovators to the cost of their own residents, all in the name of some sort of "safety" that is not in fact being offered. The same applies to China's attempt to control the internet, and indeed America's own protectionist and political manipulation. None of the proposed measures are actually for your benefit, however they may dress them up.

Indeed, the laws of unintended consequences weigh heavily here - these measures only benefit the bad actors (the cesspits you despise).

So by your logic a hairdresser in Orlando that offers free color(sic) consultations online is also required to selectively block EU residents by some magic criteria that you haven't chosen to share, or be required to comply with EU regulations. They advertise as much as BlueSky does, they offer their service to people within the EU as much as BlueSky does - so clearly the EU should be regulating them.

Note that Threads collects an entirely different set of information about its users, and relies on the might of Facebook for identity, verification and compliance purposes. You are completely falling for the corporate lobbyist nonsense if you think one of Zuckerberg's projects is on a level ground with BlueSky.

And your point about X being banned in China - yes, China blocked X. Not the other way around. If they don't want a service to affect their citizens (or residents), it is their choice, and theirs to enact. I welcome the EU trying to go down that particular path, if only to see which sycophants follow them.

BlueSky, like tens of thousands of other online services and companies did not "decide to offer a service to 45 million EU residents". They put something online, mainly to compete with another US based service in a way that the EU should be positively encouraging. As yet their daily users resident in the EU are probably still below the daily users of Twitter who live in China (despite the ban) - so people sabre rattling just to show how important they are deserve to be roundly criticised.

BlueSky is not "offering" a service in any commercial sense. It does not advertise within the EU. It does not promote to the EU. If has no financial presence, no adverts and (probably most importantly) no government lobbyists. EU citizens are going out of their way to use it rather than the officially sanctioned and regulated alternative(s).

Since it's pretty much impossible to meaningfully block an internet service, that means that, for instance, China could reasonably demand to have regulatory control over censorship on Twitter.

In the cold light of day, it's not a convenient black-and-white issue. But some people appear to want to pretend it is.

And let's be clear. At the size of the BlueSky team, demanding a complex regionally firewalled regulatory control over EU citizens' data would essentially kill the project.

This is an odd situation. Users are not obliged to use the service. They do not need to provide any personally identifiable information to use it. What they post is entirely under their control, and is then made universally available - this is the design of the service. Yet the actions of EU citizens is then a reason for the EU to have regulatory control over a foreign service? If an EU citizen got food poisoning whilst visiting America, should the EU have regulatory control over American restaurants? (I know, daft argument, but you get the point)

Of course it's entirely within the EU's remit to regulate as they see fit, including banning remote services and the availability of products to citizens. But the bare logic of why they should have regulatory control over an entirely optional service is.. odd if you think about it.

Re: @Andy 73

I know CJ is a controversial figure around here, but I'd be interested to know why he's received downvotes for his statement? What exactly is false or so objectionable about his comment?

"More regulation benefits the big guy by blocking challengers." - this is very often demonstrably true. Corporations like Amazon regard regulatory compliance as a cost of doing business that often amounts to a rounding error on their balance sheets, whereas a new company selling similar products may well not be able to afford a trained compliance officer and the necessary regulatory submission. The new GPSR rules, due to come into effect in December are causing a lot of concern for small tech and hobby electronics companies trying to sell into the bloc.

Lest we forget - BlueSky is run by an incredibly small team. Just 20 employees. Comparatively, Twitter employs an estimated 1,300 people.

Hopefully compliance won't be an issue with the BlueSky team, though I'm sure they're having to fight a lot of fires at the moment..

Unfortunately, the EU does itself no favours when it talks about competition and safety, but then appears to put barriers in the way of new entrants, to the favour of large corporate interests that skirt their rules. It seems easier to bully the new guy than make the old fraud behave themselves.

Musk, Bezos need just 90 minutes to match your lifetime carbon footprint, says Oxfam

It's the other eight billion you need to worry about...

Oxfam loves to produce nice click-baity reports, but let's be clear that even Musk's excess is dwarfed by the global use of resources. We could have him taken out and shot and it would make not the slightest difference to global warming.

It's nice to have bogeymen to point at and blame for all the world's ills, but it's the difficult stuff like dealing with energy poverty in the developing nations and the geo-political complications of China that will ultimately make a difference. In those terms, Musk and Bezos are neither the root of the problem, nor do they particularly offer any solution.

That said, it would be interesting to do a carbon analysis of Amazon, which has (possibly?) reduced the per-item-mile delivery footprint of individual purchased items massively over the historical cost which involved people driving into town to do their shopping. Of course, for the general population the response to that saving is to buy more stuff, not sit back and benefit from the savings. Should we be blaming Bezos for that?

Mature node chip output to surge 6% in 2025

Re: I'll be quite happy..

You'd be surprised how long discrete stuff held out - a lot of the industry is quite conservative, particularly when delivering to a standard - and the five cent RISCV chip is a relatively recent invention.

Students on the other hand can't wait to stick a Pi in everything.

Re: I'll be quite happy..

Who's suggesting keeping infrastructure on old electronics? We're not maintaining Spitfires and steam trains for defense and passenger services, are we?

There's value in keeping this stuff running for historic record and education - and contrary to some beliefs, old electronics don't "just keep working".

There's also some value in maintaining at least some basic capability, and not going down paths of dependency. Watching engineers put full Linux distributions into a simple light switch not only suggests we've lost some basic skills, but also that we're going to be faced with a lot of obsolescent e-waste in our not too distant future.

I'll be quite happy..

...if they start making the Z80 again. (Joke... but.. still)

The Western electronics market is on the cusp of a huge change away from discrete electronics and towards microcontrollers in everything. It can already cost more to buy a chip with a small amount of discrete logic than a RISCV microcontroller. For manufacturers on wafer thin margins, there's probably more money to be made consulting on your developer tooling and support than churning out chips that were designed to "just work" back in the 70's. For fabs, I'm sure there's more money to be made moving to modern process nodes than keeping ancient machines running.

All of which does rather push us towards the bootstrap paradox, where we couldn't actually build a working computer from scratch any more. Certainly many new engineering students are being taught that there is a layer of magic that happens below C or Rust that they need only understand in the most vague and abstract way. Ones and zeros, apparently.

Ironically, in the UK we probably spend more money keeping old steam trains and Spitfires running, than old electronics.

Ford CEO admits he drives a Chinese electric vehicle and doesn't want to give it up

Re: :)

Rather like the sort of developer who responds to a bug report with "it works just fine for me".

Thanks. Thanks for nothing.

Musk claims Cybertruck has become profitable at last

A symptom..

I've come to see the Tesla stock price as a symptom of our weird post-information age.

It's high because there are so many believers who are actively ignoring all of the problems and poor performance of the company.

As an auto maker, it's in the doldrums - and this is even recognised in the pivot away from new cars towards the robotaxi. Yet there is faith that the thing they've promised for over a decade will magically actually arrive 'next year'.

Even stranger, purely on a stock returns level, investing in Tesla for the last four years has at best been a coin flip when there have been some much stronger alternative investments. Unless you're trading on the volatility, your money has gone pretty much nowhere...

Tesla's big reveal: Steering-wheel-free Robotaxi will charge wirelessly

Re: He's invented the bus!!!

Latecomer in terms of the industry, compared to the likes of Ford etc.

He's invented the bus!!!

Is there no beginning to his talents?

It's worth noting that the big achievements of both of the companies he's been involved with, the Model 3 and Falcon rockets, were both due to the hard work and insights of people who've since left those companies.

Since then, Elon has gone on a number of fantasy quests that have produced.. at best... suboptimal designs that have arrived late, massively overpriced, unreliable or not at all.

He's even managed to take the massive technical lead and trillion dollar valuation of Tesla and loose the leadership to latecomers like BYD. The whole reason he's pivoted to taxis is that the guy who claimed he knew more about manufacturing than anyone else on the planet cannot make the affordable car he promised while other companies apparently can.

Canon ships first nanoimprint chipmaking machine to R&D lab

Re: No touching

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

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

Do the maths..

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

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

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

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

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

Announced? Nothing to do with Starmer.

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

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

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

Re: The story goes..

One downvote... hi Elon.

The story goes..

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

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

Self motivated as usual.

Amazon CEO wants his staff back in the office full time

Re: Here we go

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

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

Re: Here we go

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

Is it so hard to grasp?

Re: Here we go

It's literally a Google away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Here we go

Not every, and not long term.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here we go

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

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

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

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

The case for handcrafted software in a mass-produced world

Testing times ahead...

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

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

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

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

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

That works out at...

£6,750 per employee.

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

Re: If you want the truth...

Agreed.

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

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

If you want the truth...

... probably best to give up now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let them eat cake

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

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

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

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

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

Re: They're using a flawed metric

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

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

The QL.. and other failures

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

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

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

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

Recreating other people's content

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

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

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

Woman uses AirTags to nab alleged parcel-pinching scum

Re: "police declined to pursue the matter"

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

Shein, Temu escalate epic e-commerce squabble

Re: "late-stage capitalism"

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

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

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

"late-stage capitalism"

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

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

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

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

Re: This...

Agreed.

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

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

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

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

Re: Eight years late

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

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

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

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

Re: Eight years late

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

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

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

So what exactly are you saying good riddance to?