* Posts by Andy 73

779 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jul 2009

Larry Ellison a major contributor to Blair Institute vaccine database plan

Andy 73 Silver badge

Given that

Blair is reportedly a significant advisor to both the Labour party and some elements of the current government, his influence on current political choices should not be underestimated.

The Blair Institute is the nearest the UK has to an American style 'Policy Unit' - it employs more than 800 people worldwide, with offices in London, New York, San Francisco, Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Accra and it's own conference. These guys have impressively high salaries and impressive contact lists (like Ellison), so their advice carries a great deal of weight, despite being largely unknown by the public.

MIT boffins build battery alternative out of cement, carbon black, water

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Re: Context is king

In the UK, it's still centigrade. Additionally since this is a measure of change rather than absolute temperature, only the units are needed.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Context is king

For sure - but missing the point. 45 cubic meters of concrete is an incredibly inefficient way to store a relatively small 10kWh, especially given the current demonstrator is a few grammes of the stuff, and there is no obvious way to integrate a complicated 45 cubic meter electrical component into a sensible structural element.

There are simpler, cheaper, and massively smaller ways to store energy than this - yet the reporting doesn't put it in context, and we get breathless repetition of the PR that this is somehow game changing.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Context is king

From memory (may be wrong!) 1kWh of energy will heat a cubic meter of water very roughly 1 degree (centigrade, sorry Americans).

So if all you need is heat, you could replace 45 cubic meters of concrete (that is actually a lot of concrete) with 1 IBC (1000 litre water container) and heat it up by just 10 degrees above ambient. Add in a Stirling engine to get electricity out, and even with a fair amount of inefficiency you can store a good chunk of energy in a small, cheap space.

So.. um... I don't think this is terribly useful. In common with a lot of MIT (and a number of other high profile Universities) engineering Press Releases, the headline is *way* more exciting than the actual work being done. If you could extract energy out of their self-promotion you would probably get a better result.

School for semiconductors? Arm tries to address chip talent shortages

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Re: Everything is software

Docker on the Pi.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Everything is software

It's slightly ironic that the big ARM success story in education, the Raspberry Pi, rather abstracts the hardware problem and turns everything into software.

Someone was recently telling me how the first step on any Pi project they undertake is to install Docker..

Equally most universities in the UK talk a lot about high level design, but treat actually manufacturing the parts as someone else's problem. The few who do undertake chip design will send the work to a fab overseas and wait for the thing to be mailed back to them...

What does Twitter's new logo really represent?

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Financially smart

Yes - to date he has made a whole bunch of financial bets, often convincing other large investors and governments to support them, and has in the process built very large and (it seems) profitable businesses. That takes a combination of talent and charisma that many startup founders would kill to have.

Now, whether those gambles turn out to be exactly that - gambles, and whether it turns out that there was more luck than judgement in the successes he's had, we've yet to see. But many people have lost a lot of money betting against Tesla, and many people have tried to recreate those successes without achieving anything.

There's a lot of evidence the guy is technically clueless, and when he's tried to start businesses based on his own ideas (Hyperloop) they've been far less sucessful. Most of the criticisms of him and his behaviour are very well founded in established facts (or in some cases, carefully buried stories). There's also very clear documentary evidence that most of the real innovation has been delayed by years and/or has never been actually delivered. From solar panels, through to habitats on Mars, via Hyperloop and self driving cars, only the lawers can decide whether his claims have just been over optimisitic or willfully fraudlent - but they have certainly been demonstrably wrong.

That doesn't take away from the fact that he's managed to get billions of dollars invested into doing stuff that many people just weren't prepared to do. Financially smart, for sure. The rest... well...

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Let's hope it stops the hate comments

I for one would be happy to tell Musk what I think of him to his face. He's an insecure bully, who fakes technical knowledge but compensates by throwing money at people who are much smarter than he is. The companies that he has bought into that are sucessful appear to be successful because they don't let him interfere with the core development work as much as he'd clearly like to. He's an incredible negotiator, financially smart and brilliant at marketing, but the public image of technical genius is largely hype.

None of that is ideological. I don't care about his politics, or his wealth - but I do follow the news closely, because the large tech companies that include Musk's are directly impacting the world around us - it's natural to follow both the positive and negative aspects of those changes, and the behaviour of the people behind them. In the case of 'X', this also gives us some interesting ideas about what he plans to do with the company in future.

Tesla's Dojo supercomputer is a billion-dollar bet to make AI better at driving than humans

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Did his Muskiness..

...really just claim that if they throw enough data at a neural net, it will magically generalise????

Really???

Weird radio pulses could be coming from new type of stellar object

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After fifty years..

After fifty years of decoding the painfully slow - 1 bit every 22 minutes - message, they finally understood the signal:

"Come and dine at Joe's Galactic Burgers - the finest Xyugn meat in the Universe!"

Tesla to license Full Self-Driving stack to other automakers, says Musk

Andy 73 Silver badge

Collapse of the Tesla dream

As the earnings reveal Tesla's margins reverting to the industry mean, the fact that the company that was once going to replace legacy automakers with a fleet of robotaxis is now planning to flog them their noddy lane assist software says it all.

Retail investors may not be quite ready to understand what's happening, but every sign is that Tesla is actually 'just' a car manufacturer, and one that only effectively has one volume model at that. When your PE multiple is over 70, a margin in the teens (and dropping) is not a good indicator. Though of course the 'experts' on YouTube have been spending the last week hyping the stock to the sky...

..and if you're a mainstream manufacturer that has witnessed the stream of errors, system failures, inexplicable bugs and failure to respond from Twitter under Musk's leadership, or has read the widely shared online stories of disastrous engineering practises behind the Tesla software stack, why on earth would you trust your reputation with an FSD license? For now, the reputation Tesla has is clearly worth something to the brands that were caught napping, so I can understand them wanting (a little) to look like they're involved, but if they're serious about competition, they should be putting a large gap between themselves and any of the technology coming out of Tesla.

First of Tesla's 'bulletproof' Cybertrucks clunks off production line

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As a statement vehicle...

... being associated with Musk is now a serious handicap.

With the Model X, S and 3/Y people were essentially able to say "I'm saving the planet" whilst replacing their daily (ish) driver. These days, anyone buying the Cybertruck is having to say they think Musk's continued nutty alt-right chaos is normal behaviour. That's a pretty hard sell.

Clearly the Cybertruck isn't saving the planet, and your average plumber/farmer is not about to be posing next to a city boy's idea of what real men drive.

That seems to reduce the market to Musk fans and people who still go to see Marvel movies. There are certainly enough to take the initial order, but beyond that... a truck that is going to date the moment it's on the streets, will cost a fortune to run and pisses off just about every other group is not what I'd be relying on to grow the company.

Meanwhile, the 3/Y is beginning to look dated and is missing a refresh, just when all of the competition are beginning to release second and even third-gen alternatives. No-one has really managed to bet against Musk yet, but this really is hard to swallow as a good move.

Post-Brexit tariffs on cross EU-UK electrical vehicle imports still going ahead

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Re: Fuck business

Everything. And then we vote them out.

Good, isn't it?

Brits negotiating draft deal to rejoin EU's $100B blockbuster science programme

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Re: Never forget that the original had the emphasis on "my"

You'll note how little engagement an analysis like this will get.

It's much easier to complain loudly that Brexit was because of thick Brexiteers than to actually have a grown up discussions about what a united Europe really looks like and the inherent challenges such a construct faces. Anyone dealing with tax accounting across the continent will know that these are really non-trivial problems and - regardless of your political leanings - the current state of Europe is not (and cannot be) a fixed constant.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: we'll have to commit to join the Euro

To be picky, I'd suggest they are also fuckwit politicians, but have the benefit of enormous momentum in the Eurozone so the problems with their policies take longer to emerge.

Europe's energy policy is a complete disaster, and economically it's stuck between a rock and a hard place with the US and China. Investment in innovation is sclerotic and the Horizon program is not actually a substitute for economic development from technology. Then Greece, Italy and Poland demonstrate that Europe has severe embedded problems with economic migration.

The trouble is, most Brits' experience of Europe tends to be nice holidays and well funded conferences, so they don't see that the whole continent faces similar problems.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Wasn't that the whole point? Membership is a carrot and stick deal (or less emotively, a cost vs benefit), and some people didn't like the stick.

For those people, being able to make our own decisions about which benefits and which costs we wanted to commit to was the whole point, rather than agreeing to the whole package.

Of course, no-one is actually claiming that you could have only the benefits (even Brexiteers aren't that stupid), but it's not unreasonable to suggest that the alternative view (that you could only possibly get the benefits by accepting the full costs) is just as ridiculous.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Some balance?

He's got a point though. These forums definitely take a view about anything that might be percieved to be pro Brexit.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Citation please ?

Most people don't complain about Apple's terrible attitude to right to repair, so they are clearly happy not to repair their iPhones.

Is that how it works?

From cage fight to page fight: Twitter threatens to sue Meta after Threads app launch

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Surely..

Surely this is the perfect opportunity for Zuck to respond with a poop emoji?

UK's proposed alt.GDPR will turn Britain into a 'test lab' for data harvesting

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Re: Yet..

It's a bit of a parochial viewpoint isn't it? My family have lived and worked in Europe, India, Asia, North and South America - and never obsessed about citizenship or where their children (and grandchildren!) should live..

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Weird perspective

No, boring because some people are so deeply embedded with their viewpoint that they will not permit more moderate views to be entertained.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Yet..

Yet you're still here, despite your many posts in favour of the EU - why could that be?

Andy 73 Silver badge

Weird perspective

We are always making choices over who controls our rights - and despite the views of some moral absolutists, it's always a compromise.

It's completely false logic that somehow one set of beuracrats are magically benign, and another evil. These days they're largely all captured by lobbyists and vested interests. The largest poilitical driver for GDPR was about trying to reduce the commercial dominance of American companies, not handing more rights to citizens.

Whether we're in or out of the EU (boring subject), the discussion should be about both rights and the consequences and complexities of enforcement - not a silly pretence that an individual group "knows best".

Oh, great. Yet another tech billionaire thinks he can get microblogging right

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Funny

Believe it or not, if you sell a product online, you sometimes have to let customers know you exist.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Funny

Funny how tribalistic people are about their preferred social media platform. One of those Yes Minister irregular verbs: "I am expressing my opinion, you are ranting, they are a dribbling idiot".

For those of us who use Twitter for work, it has been a decent way to discover a pretty good community - though there's no doubt that Musk's behaviour has had a serious impact on the number of active users. If Zuck provides a good platform to reach out to like minded people, then great. For all that people whinge and moan about these services (your personal details aren't that precious, precious), they do actually help a lot of their users, from personal support between friends, to communities and businesses. Mastodon certainly isn't a better technical solution than Twitter, so a little more competition is welcome.

Deloitte wins deal worth up to £100M for UK border platform

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Re: I'm struggling...

The point here is it doesn't matter about the politics of Brexit - at least in this context - the decision to fix or improve the system as much as possible of is still the responsibility of the government.

Whether Brexit itself was a bad decision is irrelevant. It is their choice whether to make the situation worse or better. More than that, they have had ample warning and plenty of analysis from both sides of the Brexit argument that made it absolutely clear that improving our ability to trade was vital for long term economic health.

So the question has to be why it has taken so long to finally come up with such a poor proposal? And let's not pretend this is a problem unique to the current lot in power. No-one from the current intake of MPs has made any serious attempt at addressing a clearly important issue beyond the usual political point scoring. Right across the political spectrum this stuff is embedded in our establishment.

Andy 73 Silver badge

I'm struggling...

..to comment on this without swearing.

If you want evidence that our government is either incapable or unwilling to lift a finger to improve things under Brexit, this is it. To launch a three year (we know it will be five) project SEVEN YEARS after the decision was made is astonishing.

And the thing here is that ignoring all of the stupid politics around Brexit, there is a clear and obvious case for us to digitise our borders and make them as efficient as possible - we're an island nation that trades globally, why on earth would we accept making that any more difficult than is absolutely necessary? If there was a convenient time and excuse for putting some serious effort into it, it was five years ago.. and yet here we are..

The icing on the cake is repeating the usual big government mistakes - do it as one huge project, managed by a consultancy that lobbies the government hard for influence and has no track record of delivering projects like this to spec, on time or on budget (pick 0 out of 3). Set a deadline that is conveniently after the next general election and then retire early for drinks. What could possibly go right?

Artificial General Intelligence remains a distant dream despite LLM boom

Andy 73 Silver badge

Inverse correlation..

There is an interesting inverse correlation playing out at the moment.

As the number of experts in AI increases, the number of experts in cryptocurrencies and NFTs decreases...

It's almost like...

Inclusive Naming Initiative limps towards release of dangerous digital dictionary

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Sounds typical

I wonder if they might want to add "B Ark" on their list?

(5 internet points for those who get the reference)

Andy 73 Silver badge

Ironically...

Ironically, the tier 1 list doesn't appear to contain the phrase I wish to use... starts with an F and ends in off.

Giving words more power than they require is just a way to insert your own ridiculous cultural associations into other people's discourse. Great for getting funding and attention, but not actually delivering anything useful. Words can and do have more than one meaning, and as grown adults we should be capable of understanding which is appropriate and elevating that use, not censoring our thoughts.

I'd suggest the word most strongly associated with Colonialism is... Colonialism. We should start by banning that one and see how we get on from there. I look forward to their updated report.

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

Andy 73 Silver badge

Wow

The one thing I come away from this thinking is:

"Man, I wish I had this guy's PR agency"

Seriously, tech guy can't turn on his own lights has become an international news story. I get that this raises questions about blah, blah, blah, but nonsense like this goes on every day and we mainly shrug our shoulders and carry on buying into monthly subscriptions for someone else to remotely sell our own stuff back to us. Music, video, door bells, light switches, email and if the techbros have their way, our cars and everything else in our lives.

The ZX81 finally gets the keyboard it deserves

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Well deserved

The Z80 has an IN instruction that puts an address on the address bus, and reads the data bus, so you can do

LD BC, 0FEFF <- 16 bit adddress

IN A, (C)

that puts A7 low, so the set of keys on the A7 line can each (potentially) pull their output low. A set of diodes and a buffer is all you need to read the keys - pennies for the whole arrangement. The keyboard had 8 'rows' of 5 keys. A side effect is that you can pull all 8 address lines low and test for *any* key being pressed.

I've recently designed a new Z80 machine (MicroBeast) that uses this same technique, but with nicer tactile switches to make the keyboard a bit more pleasant to type on. The horrified looks from the (twenty years younger) engineers I explained the circuit to were worth it.

Andy 73 Silver badge

How times have changed..

... the keycap set for this keyboard costing nearly as much as the original kit for the whole machine did.

Of course the point regularly missed about the ZX81, Spectrum and other 80's computers was not that the electronics were especially clever (many built on previous designs originating in the 70's), but that industrial design took a sudden leap as people figured out how to get a £1000 computer to cost only £79 pounds. Stuff like the ULA, membrane / dead flesh keyboard and sharing 1K of ram between CPU and display was of course wildly restrictive, but enough to launch tens of thousands of careers.

UK government proposes legislation to regulate umbrella companies

Andy 73 Silver badge

Ho hum

"This sticking plaster is wholly inadequate!"

"That's OK, I've got a larger sticking plaster to stick over it!"

(12 months later)

"What do you mean, gangrene?"

Sort out the mess that is IR-35 (and it is a mess), *then* you can start talking about regulating the rest of the industry.

Metaverse? Apple thinks $3,500 AR ski goggles are the betterverse

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Most commentators are missing

.. the way Apple are positioning this. It's not a consumer VR headset, and it's not an AR 'platform' in the expected sense. Apple's demo shows almost no complex 3D, no monsters dancing on desks, no VR games.

Instead, the demos mainly present 2D displays positioned around the user. As such, it looks like this is intended as a display technology - to sit alongside the Mac Pro and 5K monitors. All the hardcore technology is there to present a useable virtual display, not deeply interactive 3D. In that respect, the price looks more appropriate. If you're a video producer switching between laptops and cinema screens, this begins to make sense.

Whether it will sell is another question, but Apple appear to be avoiding the Hololens problem of needing a killer app, and the Meta problem of trying to magic up an entire paradigm shift. It's not being sold as a lifestyle product, so much as a productivity tool.

Anyone expecting it to be a Meta killer, or to sell in millions, to replace your iPhone, or there to be earth shaking VR games is missing the point. The demo even had the user checking their watch for notifications...

Yaccarino takes wheel at Twitter early as advertising woes become public

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Is revenue the biggest problem?

His bold mission statement was that he would grow the platform and its revenue.

A 59% loss in advertising suggests he has completely failed to do the former. The draconian cost cutting can only be viewed as a successful move it if doesn't have long term impact on the functioning of the company. So far various features have failed or been removed, the site suffers from reliability problems, and we've not seen any of the "rapid innovation" Musk told us he could deliver with his highly motivated teams and skilled management.

So even the cost cutting can hardly be regarded as a success.

What the investors think is anyone's guess. They might want to prompt an ownership change sooner, before what remaining value is further eroded.

His current antics fighting the gender wars suggest that Musk is completely incapable of avoiding offense, and the slow decline of the rest of the platform suggest he's not the great tech leader we were promised. Given that all of the other companies he purchased came with highly skilled senior management who delivered the actual innovation, this should perhaps not come as a surprise.

Windows XP's adventures in the afterlife shows copyright's copywrongs

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Hmmm..

> You will never fix *anything* if you put off trying

No, of course not - but a 'fix' like this, which would be a major change to the current system, would almost certainly prevent any further (and more effective) changes being delivered. The corporates would (quite justifiably) say "But we made these huge concessions, we don't need to do any more!".

My instinct is that a real change has to come from the sides, changing how we think about the use of copyright and patent material, how we encourage innovation and creativity, who is in a position to create and benefit from their work, and how we as a society interact with all of that. Copyright and patents are both poor fits for software, so rather than bodging them to be less poor, we should be looking at other legal frameworks that can be developed. Copyleft is certainly one (but not the only one) of those alternatives that should be 'built up'.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Hmmm..

20 years feels instinctively too short - I regularly come across tools and utilities that are bumping up against that timeframe and wouldn't begrudge the developers ownership when they're serving a community, however small.

People then bring up Disney - but really, I'm ok with the Mouse House keeping hold of their rodent. If you've got something to say about a mouse doing funny things, you're not really going to be dooming civilization if you're forced to use *gasp* your own representation of a tiny mammal. Are we genuinely benefitting from endless riffs on Sherlock Holmes, or would we be better off with a new detective? It's a bit of a stretch to say that re-use is always beneficial in that sense.

This is of course a devil's advocate argument, but one I'm tempted to use when the 'anti-copyright' crowd descend looking like nothing more than a set of vultures looking to pick apart someone else's bones. Much of that behaviour benefits no-one, and we seem to loose the sense of value in someone's hard work. "Why can't I just have it for free?"

There is an argument that all copyright should be for a shorter term - which would be a seismic change in the direction of legislation in the US. There's also an argument around the poor alignment of the Patent system with anyone but the large corporates who - like Disney - dominate the lobbyist landscape and set the legal agenda.

Buuutt... just setting the term of copyright to a short value alone really doesn't seem like a proper answer so much as a response to a system that is clearly broken on many levels.

Starlink bags US defense contract to keep war-torn Ukraine connected

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: No good deed goes unpunished

Well observed - a bit of proper investigative reporting would be welcome here, since there have been multiple allegations that Musk has not, as first claimed, provided a free service but essentially used Ukraine as either a way to offload old Starlink equipment at massively inflated prices or to (once again) find a way to extract government money.

Certainly, any claim that this has been an entirely altruistic exercise doesn't seem to hold much water. Ultimately this appears to be a business deal, not a charity.

EU tells Twitter 'you can run but you can't hide' from disinformation policy

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Re: Erm

It's not news that the slightest hint that you don't violently oppose Brexit will get you downvoted into oblivion on here.

Which is the key problem with a lot of disinformation policies - they quickly become policies that dampen down any voices that might be saying something a bit uncomfortable. As with some of the regulars on here giving codejunky a hard time for his posts, we rapidly get to the point that people with a difficult political view have all of their views discounted or actively opposed.

When only the bland, inoffensive middle managers can get past the judgemental hoards, we get ... well the current leaders of all of the UK political parties.

We create our own hell.

On the bright side, solar investment finally set to surpass oil spending

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: So, what is the solution?

Solar and wind are absolutely *part* of the solution, but saying we've solved the problem by having some small island in Europe piddling money on solar and wind is to completely and utterly misunderstand what the problem actually is. The UK currently produces less CO2 than we did in the 1880's, but is doing so at the cost of delaying infrastructure investment. Meanwhile the rest of the world, particularly China and the developing nations are heading sharply in the other direction as they work to reach the living standards we enjoy.

For all the idiocy from the fossil fuel lobby, the renewable lobby is doing us all a disservice by pretending that the path to true sustainability is simply a question of sticking up more windmills. The current massive inflation spike, driven in no small part by the energy insecurity highlighted by the Ukraine war should make it very clear that we have not "solved" renewable energy. Both Germany and the UK have been hailed as leading the charge to renewables, and both nations saw just how dependent we are on fossil fuels when Russia began it's campaign. Worse still, no-one seems prepared to acknowledge that the *only* reason solar and wind investment has exceeded oil is because the war has (hopefully temporarily) skewed the economics so heavily that renewables look cheap in the short term. That is not actually a thing to celebrate.

Here's the problem: domestic transport and energy usage is the easy part. National infrastructure, construction, industry and commercial transport are the hard parts - and these are the ones that actually dominate the global energy landscape. We don't have good solutions for them (particularly industry, storage and construction), and until we do we will continue to see China building coal-fired power stations, global energy usage rocketing ever skyward, and the geopolitical fallout of energy insecurity causing continued conflict. Being able to drive to Waitrose in your solar powered Tesla is no doubt very reassuring, but very much a first-world privilege built on very shaky foundations.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Hmmm..

Nearly all of these 'solutions' involve governments directing where money is spent. When solar gets cheaper, they direct their money there. But that doesn't mean they're investing in energy security, or investing wisely - they're just avoiding the costly expenditure of robust infrastructure.

As for the UK not investing in solar... you do live here don't you?

Virgin Galactic flies final test before opening for business

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I thought..

Virgin Galactic came before Virgin Orbit?

Sci-fi author 'writes' 97 AI-generated tales in nine months

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We are surrounded by morons..

A very early adopter who gets into this technology before the rush therefore has relatively exclusive access to a tool that anyone will soon be able to use.

So the fact that he's managed to scrape just $2000 from 9 months of immense 'productivity' tells us all we need to know about the chance that ChatGPT is going to disrupt the creative industries.

It's like suggesting the people who produce supermarket muzak are going to take Taylor Swift's job.

(That said, it's notable how badly the current scripts working their way through film and television companies are being received - humans don't seem to be doing much better at producing meaningful work right now)

UK government prays that size doesn't matter as it chips in £1B for semiconductor sector

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Semiconductor/Microelectronics Pronouncements

Again, if a project delivered by engineers is over time and over budget, it's not good enough to blame the muggles for not understanding our brilliance. It is our failure to communicate, and willingness to go along with poor implementation that leads to this consistent failure. "The project manager made me do it" isn't good enough.

One of the largest, most successful projects I have ever been involved in (billion dollar unicorn from what started as five people in a shed) was on time and on budget. It is possible. And, for all their faults, we have big corporates who've demonstrated it's possible to scale out and run a profitable business based on high quality engineering.

Yet, particularly in the UK we seem to have a mindset that consistently rips defeat from the jaws of victory. It's pretty depressing that there seems to be "something in the water" that makes us miserable at large collaborative projects. Maybe we should accept that this is something we're doing wrong, rather than trying to blame everyone else.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: "Not in a position to compete against countries like Taiwan..."

The point is not the size of the GDP, but the size of the existing specialist industry and talent. TSMC accounts for something like 70% of the world's semiconductor output. It has a market cap that's approximately TEN times the amount Biden is proposing to invest. It employs over 65,000 people - and it's just one of a set of companies based in Taiwan.

When TSMC alone is capable of spending more on development and infrastructure in a single year than the whole of Europe - yes, we're not in a position to compete with them.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Semiconductor/Microelectronics Pronouncements

You missed out back-seat drivers.

It's notable that amongst the engineering community in the UK at the moment, there are apparently millions of people who can tell you exactly how wrong you're doing it, but very few who can articulate a coherent strategy to make it better. Just saying "you should spend more", or "of course it will make money/solve world hunger" doesn't cut the mustard.

There's a reason arts/humanities grads are the ones who end up making the policies - they can articulate a plan and sell it to other people. That's the same reason they're usually the ones who end up running the company whilst even the senior engineers earn less than half their salary. It's all very well having deep knowledge of your specialist subject area (and being able to quickly pick up adjacent fields) - but we see time and time again that this tends to be orthogonal to knowing how to run a business/organisation or country at the sort of level needed to instigate real change.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Surely one of these things is not the same as the other?

Biden is planning $50+bn on fabs, we're planning $1+bn on design and research.

Since both Europe and America are committing to buying the expensive things that struggle to turn a profit (Fabs), we do not need to spend money on the expensive things that struggle to turn a profit.

This, on the whole is a good thing.

If you adjust for size of population, the US is promising to fund about 8x what we are - but it's not on equivalent things. We're still not spending enough right across the board on science and research, but it's a bit misleading to just compare the budgets. Ours is still not enough, and I doubt it would ever reach a value that satisfies the science and engineering communities, but we should be aware of what it is we're asking for here.

The other battle is on where the money *is* spent - the UK Innovate quango really seems to get far too little scrutiny, though that appears to reflect the complete disregard for the sciences from both Government and civil service.

Dyson moans about state of UK science and tech, forgets to suck up his own mess

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Re: Reporting just as bad as ever in El' Reg...

That's a remarkable logical fallacy. Horizon is a very, very long way from being the only way to support science, technology and innovation.

Hence my original point "Why are we not investing in science and technology?" is an entirely different question from "Why are we not in Horizon?".

It's typical of the Europhile thinking that the only way to invest is to hand money over to a committee in Brussels to allocate as they wish. Such a deep blindspot indeed, that we get articles like this one that equate a single science program (that has been in place whilst Europe has fallen behind in semiconductors, AI, battery technology, solar, EVs... it's quite a long list) with "investing in technology".

But as ever, some people are so determined that their politically favoured answer is the only acceptable reply, that they will shout down anyone daring to suggest that this government should actually live up to it's promises and invest directly. For all his faults, Dyson has put his money where his mouth is when it comes to investing in skills training, research centres and design and development. He's also taken risks with products - which is something notably absent from most of the institutional 'innovation' programmes that only want to support science after you've got a proven working product.