Posts by Andy 73

FCA mulls listing rules after Hauser blames 'Brexit idiocy' for Arm's New York IPO

Re: What is the only way to take advantage of Brexit ?

Re-entering Europe will not 'fix' Brexit, but make things significantly worse.

We'd not return under remotely the same terms, and politically it would further damage our reputation as an independent voice within the G7/G20 to make it explicit that we are dependent on the largess of Europe to survive.

Not only that, but it's a particularly daft fantasy that, even as a member, the other European financial hubs aren't actively competing with London. Throughout our membership there were moves to 'even out' the power spread between London, Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam - and not one single one of those changes was to the benefit of London. As a 'failed leaver', and given the changes across Europe since we left, it's pretty clear that we would not return with our existing competitive advantages intact.

Sadly, our political leaders have been forced by the continued idiocy from 'sore leavers' to do as little as possible about Brexit - keeping the whole country in limbo is perhaps the weakest decision they could make.

Worth also pointing out..

... we're arguing over a company that was sold to Softbank, a Japanese corporation, that has since had a disaster in China and attempted to sell the company outright to Nvidia, an American Multinational.

The point for worrying about how British it should be passed a few years ago.

Tech stocks don't list in the UK..

.. or Europe either by first choice. The US has been the first choice for years (hence the reference to 2008 - quite a while before Brexit)

As usual, the same people who complain about the lazy assumptions made over Brexit go on to make lazy assumptions over financial regulation and the global investment environment.

Make the wrong diagnosis, and you end up picking the wrong treatment.

Our government and financial institutions are singularly unable to adjust their behaviour, captured by lobby groups and vested corporate interests that have absolutely no interest in tech companies and their associated risks. To be fair, the rest of Europe is little better - there is a real reason that Amazon, Google, Facebook, Oracle, NVIDIA, Apple, AMD... (it's a long list) are all American companies.

But we're not about to have a sensible conversation here, because someone said the B word and that completely overrides any real insight whilst everyone argues over whether it was good or bad, or bad, or worse. Deckchairs, Titanic...

Eric Idle tells infosec world to always look on the bright side of life

Re: Tilting at Quixotic Windmills Springs to Mind.

Worth remembering the Pythons managed to make enemies of the entire Catholic Church.

US watchdog grounds SpaceX Starship after that explosion

Re: Good thinking that man

Cannot build a flame trench because the site is at sea level? I think the Danish want to have a word with you.

I don't get why people are so keen to defend unnecessary and unforced mistakes.

Re: They may call it a success...

This is very dubious stuff..

If you have steel reinforced concrete damaged to the point that the reinforcement is exposed, it is structurally compromised. Not something you can just put a patch over.

From the video of the car being smashed by debris, most of the launch site has been pelted with concrete and other projectiles. Every single building and facility will have to be inspected and repaired.

As the launch demonstrated, failures amongst the Raptors were enough to ultimately doom the flight. Statistically, the number of failed engines seems consistent with their reliability reports, and that number of failures is too high to trust the platform as a reliable launch vehicle. This is a serious problem for any craft, even more so for a 'reusable' vehicle. It seems madness to test engine reliability en-masse when they already knew that individually the failure rate was too high. Yet, despite a decade of engine development they've not got to the required level. It would be lovely to think that they'll just tweak the design and it'll magically work, but there's no evidence that this is going to happen in the one month Elon has promised.

And the point of all this is that SpaceX are developing on Elon's timescales, without infinite financial resources. They have some really smart people working for them, but one of the laws of physics is that money can run out. After this test flight, which may have set back their plans by a significant time, the risk of financial rather than technical failure is much higher.

They may call it a success...

... but it's suggested that SpaceX desperately needs to get Starlink V2 up into space to become operationally solvent, and that's not going to happen until they have Starship working - which in turn depends on a functioning launch site and reliable engines.

They've destroyed their launch site, and demonstrated that the engines are not reliable at this late stage of development.

That makes it fairly unlikely we'll see Starlink V2 going up any time soon (not this year), which leaves SpaceX surviving purely off government subsidies. How long they can do that is an interesting question.

In the mean time, the promise of lower mass to orbit costs do not seem to have been realised.

Chinese company claims it's built batteries so dense they can power electric airplanes

Re: Those are rookie numbers

Swappable batteries can add a huge amount of weight, complexity and safety issues to a plane. Suddenly you've got to have some sort of structural element in the battery pack, and another in the plane, connectors that can reliable attach and detach, and some guarantee that they don't do the latter at the wrong time, and a whole load of additional mechanical and electronic systems to deal with robust swapping in unpredictable environments.

There's no "simply" about it - as demonstrated by the almost complete absence of swappable lithium batteries in cars.

Pling!

That exclamation mark two thirds into the article completely threw me. What is this unbounded excitement?

Re: Those are rookie numbers

Though, with Uranium, you only get the energy once...

Is it time to tip open source developers? Here's one way to do it

The problem here is...

..the assumption that if it is not supported, software will "go away".

Firstly, people tend not to mourn the absence of something they never had. We put up with what is available and hope someone else will solve the missing problem. Very occasionally, a company will use that missing piece to gain a competitive advantage. Usually though, we just work around what isn't there..

Secondly, experience shows that enough developers write software to solve a personal itch before figuring out how to support it, that we can collectively rely on that software being built, and rebuilt, and evolved and extended long after the original developer has long given up on any idea of reward. No-one is in a position to withhold software to force corporates to pay up, because almost immediately someone else will come a long to solve the problem.

That means there is virtually no bargaining power for open source developers, and corporates feel virtually no debt to them, since "the software would be developed anyway". Systems for rewarding open source developers need to address that issue first - some sense of value in "free" software - before worrying about mechanisms for payment.

Arguably this goes beyond corporations using open source to general value applied to software - we expect apps and online services to be free, and resent paying. Payment is usually hidden behind a layer of obfuscation - whether it's ad supported services or premium subscriptions.

UK seeks light-touch AI legislation as industry leaders call for LLM pause

Hmmm

A number of people, many of whom are invested in the industry, see unspecified dangers and want everyone else to stop for a bit? I'm convinced.

LLMs are going to be both more disruptive and a lot less disruptive than people are predicting. Rather like Y2K it turns out computers - on the whole - don't have as much effect on the physical world as people in the industry would like to believe. On the other hand, yes, we're going to see some real uses for the technology that will - on the whole - disrupt companies already in this space.

Welcome to Muskville: Where the workers never leave

Re: I have some sympathy for the idea..

That's missing the point entirely.

In this modern day of internet and global banking, you are no more forced to live and work within five miles of your birth than you are forced to labour in the fields as a child.

"The great American dream of home ownership" appears to have died a death on the altar of astronomically expensive cities - and just as in anywhere else in the world, you go there to work and save your pennies to buy a house somewhere else, whether it's a retirement home in Florida or somewhere quiet on the West coast.

It's idiocy to suggest people move to a company town with the plan of owning and retiring there. If you want to do that, go work for someone else and accept that your house might cost a bit more, your commute might be a bit longer, your salary might be a bit lower and so on. People already make exactly that choice when they decide whether to work for one of the big tech firms in San Francisco, or financial firms in New York etc. Try asking your landlord there to give you 30 days to find rent...

Comparing it to a penitentiary is to fall for the usual hysteria - I know of no penitentiary that has optional attendance, pays you extra to be there and actively sets out to attract inmates with the quality of the experience. And that last bit is what every company has to compete to do - make it appealing to go work for them, whether it's through bean-bag and foosball tables, or nice housing away from a city sprawl.

And again, I'll make the point that you have a choice. Usually that would be based on the reality of what is being offered. In Musk's case, I'd have very low faith in the implementation and be reading the small print very carefully, but that doesn't mean a company town has to be a bad concept in the modern era.

I have some sympathy for the idea..

..but as with most Musk enterprises, it's the execution that causes problems.

Company towns could be quite a good deal - remember you don't *have* to work there, and rather like living in the big cities, you move there to work and will likely move on later. That confuses people who live in traditional suburbia where you lay down roots and expect to have various commutes as you change jobs.

It's worth pointing out that Bourneville, the model village built by the Cadbury family is still regarded as a huge improvement in living conditions for workers, and in some ways still exceeds the quality of modern housing estates. Similarly Billund, the town that has grown up around Lego's headquarters (which otherwise would have to be characterised as being the arse end of nowhere), is a remarkably nice place.

Given modern insanity around housing prices, clogged commuter routes, ridiculous transport costs and broken communities, there is something to be said of working in a town where much of the community shares a common interest, where commuting is reduced or eliminated and housing can be designed for the sort of family or homeowner that you are. It could be a way to break the painful hyper-focus of large cities that, particularly in America, are leaving rural areas drained of life.

But... yeah.. Musk. Must be pretty high on the list of "people I'd never want as my landlord".

If Tesla Investor Day was about exciting investors then boy did it fail

Musk's great promises falling flat

It's been his party trick from day one - promise a world changing mission that people can invest in, emotionally and financially - then build something far less world changing than the grand claims implied.

Solar panels imported from China, a niche premium car brand, robots that are frankly embarrassing and a city on Mars that doesn't survive a moment's serious analysis.

Even if you believe he's serious about those goals, the failure to translate an early lead in car manufacture to a range of cars (Tesla essentially has one model that it sells in any numbers, the 3/Y), the failure to reduce the high cost, the steady erosion of the lofty margins, the disaster that is FSD (we're on version 4 of the hardware) and the rapid improvements from the 'dinosaur' mainstream manufacturers all mean that the run road for Tesla is a lot shorter than it was five years ago.

Good job he's not focussed on a half-baked social media platform when he's got so much to do...

Outage-hit Twitter muddies violent speech policy

Re: I am curious

Perhaps you're misunderstanding how most people use Twitter. It does actually work well (when it's working) as a way for communities to interact and share information, for people to share projects and products they're working on, for educators to publish articles and so on.

Unlike the old town square where the villagers you lived next to were very unlikely to share your niche interests, we now live in a world where we can choose the communities we interact with. In that respect, being "on Twitter" is no different from posting on The Register's forums. If you find that hard to grasp, I suggest you stop using the internet.

Humans strike back at Go-playing AI systems

Re: The program will learn

Not necessarily. The computer isn't capable of "infinite learning" - if you train a model to be stronger in one area, it will tend to be weaker in others and may even develop other flaws.

One of the fallacies of this form of learning, perpetuated by Tesla and a few other companies, is that if you throw enough data at it, it will eventually learn to handle all situations - in other words it will generalise. We have not seen this in practise. The observed behaviour is that these models approach a maxima asymptotically, requiring more and more data to get closer. But that maxima is more like a parrot getting really good at mimicking words and phrases - it still doesn't understand what it is reproducing.

It's possible we can produce a very good AI Go player - computers have the advantage of being able to analyse and remember extremely large numbers of permutations, but that's still not generalised AI.

Microsoft's new AI BingBot berates users and can't get its facts straight

Arguably..

Arguably, giving people something that is the "internet personified" may ultimately be a social good - learning that the internet is unreliable, capricious, repetitive and often downright wrong may be a good lesson for many users.

Tesla's self-driving code may ignore stop signs, act unsafe. Patch coming ... soon

Recall is right..

The existing software is to be removed, replaced, recalled - that Telsa is choosing to simply promise an (as yet) undefined new version that will magically solve what Musk has been failing to deliver for ten years now does not change the fact that the current software must be taken off the cars as it appears to be unsafe. That is a recall by any other name.

It'll be interesting to see what the response is if Musk simply releases a new version of the same software that (like every previous release) merely makes incremental changes rather than fundamentally solving the problems that 'Full' self driving actually has.

As a defense "no-one has died" seems to be a depressingly low bar.

Musk says he ain't going anywhere as Twitter CEO until at least late 2023

Re: Time frame not included

Musk takes over Twitter - Musk fans: "At last, the place will be full of free speech! Millions will sign up!"

Musk breaks Twitter - Musk fans: "Masterful move, we always wanted it closed down!"

UK prepares to go it alone on post-Brexit science plan

Re: The Horizon replacement money ...

This corner of the comments section brought to you by the poster who sees, and I quote: "...resident far-right trolls..."

Whatever happened to the people in the middle, eh?

Re: The Horizon replacement money ...

Could be that since it's now 13 years since Labour lost power, there are an increasing number of techies who are to young to remember that the opposition are just as bad as the current lot in power.

As the old song goes: "It doesn't matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in"

Re: Not quite

Sadly you will be downvoted because it's easier to believe that Horizon exists in a completely isolated bubble than accept it's being used as a political football.

As with all things EU and Brexit related, public statements are less about the reality of the ongoing negotiations and more about how the respective parties want the negotiations to be perceived. Both sides essentially want to say "our choice is the best for the public", when their choice inevitably has costs and consequences. The "toys out of the pram" announcements are often more negotiating tactics than deep political beliefs.

We should be clear that Horizon is part of the 'carrot and stick' of the membership programme. Unfortunately, your (and shortly, my) downvotes come from people who only see the carrot.

Subsidies? All UK chip industry needs is tax, rule tweaks, claims rightwing thinktank

Re: Good grief

I'd suggest that they're proposing measures that this government is failing to implement, not proposing "do as little as possible". When AZ specifically raised the issue of high taxation, suggesting tax incentives is anathema to the current lot.

If you want to get political, we're witnessing a deep division within the Tory party - between a low tax, small state side (that, yes, does owe a lot to Thatcher), and the 'wet socialist' policies embodied by Sunak in a (very poor) attempt to occupy the ground Labour want to be in. Reports like this are very much part of the battle.

You can of course argue that Sunak's policies are the best direction (really?), on the basis that the banks essentially pulled the rug on any significant economic reform after the financial excesses of Covid. Most of the Tory party are in fear after Truss' disastrous showing, and the party as a whole is paralysed.

You point out that these are things that should be done anyway - that's the whole point, that they should be *but they aren't*. Your argument seems to veer between suggesting that the report wants to "do nothing", that it wants to do inherently bad things (because Truss) and that it want to do things that should be done but simply aren't. Which is it?

Of course this is no longer a discussion about how to best support the chip and technology industry in the UK - it's just a political debate over who should be in charge. I'm willing to bet that since everyone wants to focus on who's steering the ship, we'll continue to ignore the course that is being taken, and the UK chip industry will go precisely nowhere.

Re: Good grief

Sure - due diligence can be done by saying, in one line "a report by the right leaning think-tank known to favour low tax solutions" - that's literally all that is needed, not chapter and verse about who founded the organisation three decades ago.

As for trojan horses, are you really suggesting a sound economic strategy should be discredited because maybe the current lot will balls it up? I'm reasonably confident that they're not going to be in charge much longer, so perhaps - just perhaps - debating what policies we think the next lot should pursue would be a good idea.

I've not yet experienced a government (of any flavour) that hasn't messed up plans and taken every opportunity to service their personal needs over those of the country. That's pretty much a given, so it makes sense to consider the overall approach being taken and look at concrete evidence for possible success. Without failure, assuming a policy is good or bad because of the political leaning of the originator is guaranteed to lead to bad decisions.

Re: Good grief

Oh bless.

If we're going to ad. hom. away anything that doesn't fit our political leanings, I guess we should stop pretending this is a technology site.

On the report - are you going to claim that subsidies are a strategy the UK should be pursuing, or should we go over the disastrous history of the Siemens plant in Tyneside? Or perhaps discuss how the Germans, having offered subsidies to attract chip manufacturers, are now seeing demands for ever expanding support before a single brick is laid?

Meanwhile the AstraZeneca move to Ireland has been specifically attributed to high taxation in the UK.

It is completely irrelevant whether these people like Liz Truss, were founded by Thatcher or are personal friends with Putin - are the suggested policies (ones the UK is singluarly failing to pursue) worth campaigning for? I'd suggest that they are, and that the alternative (throw money at a selected set of 'winners') has demonstrably and consistently failed to improve technological leadership in the UK in the past. I can only assume that some contributors here are completely unaware of well documented historical precedents in the car industry, besides the evidence of the UK tech sector itself.

Good grief

So here is a report that you tell us is welcomed by people in the industry, and that (quite accurately) points out that we're not in a position to play subsidy races - and yet The Register devotes the first third of the article to political conspiracy theories about the people who produced it?

If there are factual inaccuracies, or ideas that people who actually work in the industry suggest are bad, perhaps The Register could report on those rather than objecting to the fact that a political think tank was founded by someone who died ten years ago?

GitHub claims source code search engine is a game changer

They should share the code for that..

..if only there was a place to do it.

Musk, Tesla win securities fraud battle over that 'funding secured' tweet

Retail traders have become dominant in the last few years thanks to almost guaranteed stock returns making even the most ignorant gamblers look like Warren Buffet (take a look, if you dare, at the YouTube channels offering financial advice).

However, it should be noted that Tesla has hugely benefitted from the clueless hoards putting their pandemic support cheques into stocks, and Musk clearly knows that this is a group of people he can manipulate to support his business. The purchase of Twitter could be seen as a manifestation of that - who needs a PR department when millions of people hang on your every Tweet?

"The fault is with the people" is nonsense of course. We imprison frauds because they take money from people who aren't well enough informed to identify the fraud taking place. It is not their fault for having imperfect knowledge (though yes, there are some truly stupid and gullible people out there), but those who take advantage should be stopped if possible and punished where necessary.

China unveils massive blockchain cluster running homebrew tech

Re: Small question...

That's rather the point - a blockchain transaction does a whole host of things that is almost completely irrelevant if you're running a centralised "source of truth" as seems to be the case here.

LMAX is a fully certified financial exchange handling millions of pounds worth of trading. It has to be trusted, is audited and is now a decade old technology. If the goal is to record local government activity as transactions, it sounds like a very comparable set of requirements. That's not to say there aren't probably a load of different wrinkles, but the point remains - centralised sources of truth do not need to perform the computationally expensive, hard to co-ordinate actions that blockchain solutions mandate.

Re: Small question...

Indeed.

Whilst 240 million transactions a second do present serious engineering problems, a heavily hardware optimised, massively provisioned and centralised blockchain server appears to be almost precisely the hardest way to solve them.

By comparison, the LMAX Disruptor (written in that painfully slow language, Java) handles 6 million transactions a second on a single thread of a standard general purpose CPU. If the Chinese numbers are to be believed, that's nearly two and a half thousand times more efficient than the deeply customised hardware they're throwing at the problem.

Wind, solar power outstrip fossil fuel generation for EU

Re: Black is white and white is black

Read what I asked again:

"how is it we see solar and wind at an all time high, yet the diagnosis is that it's fossil fuels that are causing energy insecurity?"

I asked about energy insecurity, not prices. Prices are a consequence of not having planned for energy security, and instead farming out a dependency on fossil fuels to a neighbour conveniently outside of the block.

It was the choice of the EU (and Germany in particular) to pretend that everything within the block was renewable (no more *domestic* fuel production, dropping nuclear in favour of renewables) when in fact they had gambled the security of their energy supply in order to virtue signal to their voters. They (and Putin) knew full well that it meant that Europe had become hugely dependent on Russia and that the actual proportion of renewables was much lower in the overall industrial supply chain than focussing purely on electricity generation implies.

Black is white and white is black

"skyrocketing electricity prices and energy insecurity" - how is it we see solar and wind at an all time high, yet the diagnosis is that it's fossil fuels that are causing energy insecurity?

As others have noted, the energy policies of the EU are quite deliberately cynical - farming out the inconvenient stuff and putting energy supplies at maximum risk due to poor planning and thin margins of error. That this winter has been so mild has been a blessing for countries on the edge of serious failure, Of course the UK is doing little better.

That we continue to have a lobby who present the energy policies we face as black and white choices between 'good' energy sources and the work of the devil rather than a mix and a compromise that should be made in order to protect the most vulnerable citizens is a continued source of depression. Nice for the middle class bourgeoisie to be able to find a moral absolute to campaign for, but not so nice for people worrying about paying their bills and keeping themselves warm.

FOSS could be an unintended victim of EU crusade to make software more secure

Re: If...

You missed my point completely. I'm saying the EU should provide this service for free.

If it saves the population of the EU money (290 billion) - which would otherwise increase GDP (and hence tax into the system), why aren't the EU committing to spend a tiny fraction of that increase themselves to fix the problem?

No cost at all to users of FOSS software - a free service provided by the EU that (according to their own figures) returns an order of magnitude more to the region than it costs to supply.

Note that making this a regulated activity absolutely guarantees the end users will pay for it through one route or another as companies directly claw back the cost of meeting regulatory burden.

If...

If the EU genuinely believes that it would cost €29 billion (just 0.2% of EU GDP) to save €290 billion, why on earth is it spending time on regulation?

Why doesn't it set up a task force to upgrade the cybersecurity of FOSS (a public good) and other software - since it would clearly (a) cost a fraction of it's budget and (b) benefit every single EU citizen?

Oh dear: "doesn't stop innovation" is about the lowest possible bar you could set - let me guess the tone of the rest of the article.

This opinion piece goes out of its way to make clear it doesn't like "libertarians" (hey, I guessed right!).. and then goes on to make exactly the argument that many such people make: that over regulation, and the unintended consequences of regulation can be disruptive, costly and deeply invasive.

The cost arguments themselves are pretty ridiculous - clearly the numbers the EU has plucked out of the air are nonsense - costs €29 billion (that's a €40 tax on every man, woman and child in Europe) to save €290 billion (is Cyberfraud really costing every one of us €400?). Is this per year? But if we take them at face value, then those pesky libertarians will point out that maybe this is a solved problem - with each company needing to spend €1 to save €10, why do we need incentives? Most companies already pay for public liability insurance, so it's already baked into the system, with not only compensation but also paths to address problems in place, ready to activate without the need for a secondary channel of regulation.

Of course, there are so many problems to consider besides the plight of FOSS developers - consider the burden on small businesses that will certainly not be excluded from such regulation, but will suddenly have to bring in yet more overpaid consultants to 'advise' them on compliance. Small businesses make up a huge proportion of working individuals in Europe, and generate about 50% of our GDP - and for whom an audit/consultation/regulatory fee would amount to a significant proportion of their turnover. That 'paltry' €29 billion cost would not be evenly distributed, despite the likelihood that small businesses contribute a much smaller portion of the cybersecurity harm (mom and pop websites vs. online marketplaces - which do you think has the most risky data?).

So um... well done, you've realised regulation can be a problem, even if only through a very odd lens. There's hope for you yet.

(I won't wait for the downvotes!)

Watch Rocket Lab lift off from US for first time, put radio-sniffing sats into orbit

Re: Little competition

Surely the competition is more concerned with $ per kg than absolute gross weight?

Of course there are a few things we want up in space that weigh 22 tonnes (it's the weight of a decent sized tracked JCB, for reference), but a lot more that weigh significantly less...

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Fascinating history

(Tongue in cheek)

It certainly makes sense to use a rational standard where things are going to be interchanged, but honestly the people frothing over the use of a pint as a measurement make no sense to me.

At no point do I need to know exactly how much my pint weighs (or its volume), so long as I know it's consistent - I have never once needed to order 1.35 pints of beer, and the smallest 'useable' fraction is a half. It functions quite reasonably as a unit of food delivery, so getting mightily offended by it not being defined by a number conveniently ending in a series of zeroes seems a bit of a waste of drinking time.

We happily accept a year being 365.25-ish days, a month being 30-ish days and so on because they conveniently divide a concept we hold - mildly obtuse units of measurement can be useful when they keep numbers within a particular range we are comfortable imagining.

Activision prevails as court tosses 'frat house' culture lawsuit

Re: Remember kids...

Actually, yes, on the whole it does - but if other people are more tolerant of poor behaviour (*cough* Elon Musk *cough*) that doesn't mean poor behaviour isn't punished, or that good behaviour is rewarded. In aggregate, publicly traded companies tend to follow public sentiment.

It's student-level politics to claim that individual examples of idiocy debunk an entire strategy. We could do the same when pointing to excesses within regulated industries, but that doesn't show that regulation is bad any more than the free market is bad.

Third-party Twitter apps stopped dead with no explanation from El Musko

Re: who pays for the API

With any social media, the value is in the reach - the more users you have, and the more active they are, the more revenue they generate.

Providing lots of ways for people to feed content into your system, and consume it is generally beneficial to your service.

You're also saving money by not having to develop, support and invent new tools to interact with the core system.

The relatively small loss of a small number of dedicated users not being fed adverts is usually offset by giving them tools that encourage them to engage with the rest of the community. Their posts, likes and other interactions will drive many other users to spend more time on the site.

Re: Mars Ahoy

"Dome Nine - you have not been consuming your required minimum number of Musk-Bisks. Oxygen will be limited until you meet the corporation's expectations. Peace, citizens of Mars. Virtue rises with the sun."

More pre-Musk Twitter 1.0 execs leave the building

Re: And yet...

The trouble is, Musk's clear idea is the sort of simplistic stuff a first year student would come up with - bang two big concepts together and call it a vision. Granted, it is his party trick, but you need more than that to give users a reason to pick a new online service amongst a sea of competitors. Facebook has already been down this path and not come out well.

In addition, if your plan is to launch a financial service, it's probably not a good idea to wind up regulators with non payment shenanigans, or to leave your users nervous of your every move.

Re: And yet...

The number of users is immaterial, since the majority don't actually bring any money into the company. The big question is whether there has been an exodus of advertisers.

If the repetition of the same single advert time and time again in my feed is anything to go by, then they may be in trouble.

Whilst new features like view count prove some of the apocalyptic predictions wrong, these are not things that will either attract new users, or give existing users much reason to give the company money. Musk needs to show that he has an original idea for changing the business model. That may take a little longer.

Elon Musk's cost-cutting campaign at Twitter extended to not paying rent, claims landlord

Re: Twitter Still Free to Use ?

It wouldn't be saving Twitter though, would it? It would be saving Musk, who'd then have carte blanche to do whatever he wants with Twitter.

Those two things are not the same.

If...

As a landlord, if Musk believes he can just stop paying rent "because".. I'd tend to believe I can change the locks and turn of the power supply "because".

Crypto craziness craps out – and about time too

Blockchain next..

With the crypto bubble (slowly) collapsing, many pundits have retreated to blockchain technologies - "We never believed in Crypto, it was always about the underlying technology".

Can we take a moment to ask why an incredibly inefficient, slow to update and questionably secure distributed database might ever be chosen over known, mature and trusted solutions? People jump through hoops to wave blockchain over otherwise dull IT projects in order to hype them up and secure funding. Almost without exception the core concept could be replaced with a standard centralised database with no loss of functionality, significantly easier maintenance, better and more consistent performance guarantees and just as much security.

FTX CTO and Alameda Research CEO admit fraud, pair 'cooperating' with Feds

Re: Good... now keep going.

I'm going to reply to myself because I can't edit the post above. For accuracy, I should point out the typo - Ontario Teachers invested $100 million (with an m) not billion (with a b). Still a significant amount of other people's money being gambled.

Re: Good... now keep going.

Hmmm...

Pension fund Ontario Teachers was an investor (nearly $100 billion), alongside the usual big institutional names such as Blackrock, SoftBank, Sequoia, Tiger Global etc. etc.

It's not a case of "some VCs" - billions were put in by a wide range of investment funds that were essentially gambling with other people's money without the slightest bit of due diligence.

Good... now keep going.

The more serious concern is that many people who are trusted as investors and financial reporters saw much of this behaviour first hand. Not only did they fail to raise any alarm, many of them encouraged others or directly themselves invested in FTX. This isn't just money from 'crypto-bros' - it's every day pension funds, mortgages and savings.

Whilst it's good to see justice being served, some very serious questions should be asked of the news outlets that turned a blind eye to the excesses and very obvious lack of experience or skill of those at the core of FTX. There are allegations of generous donations from SBF that should be fully investigated.

In addition, the competency of "skilled investors" who saw frat-house behaviour from a group of inexperienced kids, yet were more than happy to give them astronomic amounts of money should be called into question.

As with some other very high profile "tech titans" it seems that too many influential people are too damn terrified to call out incompetence and fraud while the con-artists are "winning". No-one wants to be seen as making a bad call. So the grifters continue to get away with it for far too long.

Tesla driver blames full-self-driving software for eight-car Thanksgiving Day pile up

Re: Hmmmmmmm

In the middle of that comment there's the phrase "I'd rather see the outcome of the investigation"... yet it's surrounded by a long list of reasons why it's definitely the driver's fault.

It's reasonable for people to be interested in the root cause of this accident, because we're on the cusp of introducing a radically new technology to a vast number of drivers. Great claims have been made, and it's being used as a marketing tool for auto makers, so there are high expectations which may turn out to be false. Because accidents are relatively infrequent compared to the number of individual miles driven, it's very hard to determine statistics from individual events - so every event is going to be newsworthy until trustworthy statistics can be produced.

In short, whilst we should be cautious reaching early conclusions, we should not dismiss the possibility that this complex new technology introduces new risks to driving. We can certainly make claims that from a hardware point of view it can react faster, steer more accurately or whatever, but driving is not a purely mechanical process - as shown here, its a co-operative activity and still relies on the behaviours of humans to account for the limitations (both software and physical) of trying to make a few tons of metal move swiftly through a complex environment.

In fact, it would frankly be amazing if such a significant change in the way cars were controlled *didn't* change the risk profile. It may be more or less safe than a human driver, but we can be pretty sure that the type of accident a machine driven car gets involved in is likely to be different from a human driven one. We may need to pick our poison at some point.