Posts by Dunstan Vavasour

Alibaba releases chatbot that produces error when asked about Tiananmen Square

Re: It depends on how you ask the question

Indeed, I had a similar conversation with Deepseek about whether Edge of Darkness was broadcast before or after Chernobyl. I quote the response verbatim

----

The timeline is clear: The original Edge of Darkness was made and broadcast after the Chernobyl disaster.

Here are the key dates:

Chernobyl Disaster: April 26, 1986

Original Edge of Darkness (BBC TV series): Broadcast in the UK from November 4 to December 9, 1985.

----

We then had a long discussion about the relative merits of RAG queries, where this sort of thing happens far less often because there's much more processing and less stochastic parroting.

Amazon complains that Perplexity's agentic shopping bot is a terrible customer

Years of this sort of shitty bickering ahead of us

Welcome to greedy bastard land.

In the red corner you've got world's biggest manipulative retailer. Everything is based on screwing suppliers, manipulating customers and abusing staff.

In the blue corner you've got the AI grifters who are in the early stages of inserting themselves in the purchasing chain. Assume this is so that later they can sell promoted positions on their godawful LLM damaged browsers.

And they'll end up bickering about who gets the upper hand in abusing customers for their own enrichment. A pox on them all.

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Re: What is HMRC doing in US-East-1??

IAM, which manages access permissions around AWS, is a "global" service. It depends on DynamoDB in us-east-1 . No data goes there.

No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut

Retirement from Windows

One of the joys of retirement is being Windows free. I can run a snappy Mint box, browse with Waterfox and security extension that I configure, manage my passwords with Bitwarden. Bliss.

Microsoft insists Copilot+ PCs are 'empowering the future' – reality disagrees

Re: Does anyone want this

^^^^ This.

The same as bundling Crappilot with O365, they have to come up with a ruse which will put some sales in the "AI" bucket so they can puff it to the markets.

Unfortunately, people not wanting this shite is immaterial, it simply has to be done to justify the tens of billions that's gone down the AI drain. The next step will be to enshittify non-Crappilot W11 by taking out some feature everyone uses.

Google unmasks itself as mystery hyperscaler behind yet another UK datacenter

Shell ?????

Massive data slurper seeks filthy oil company for mutual greenwashing and subsidy bingeing, must have own lobbyists.

Microsoft hails cloud and AI revenue for boffo earnings

How much of that is bundling Copilot with Office?

Remember how earlier in the year Microsoft jacked up the prices for O365 and bundled Copilot? And we learned that, in order to not pay for Copilot, you have to follow the workflow to cancel O365, at which point you get offered the old price without Copilot?

So how much of this AI revenue is actually coming from tricking your customers into paying for something they don't want or need?

Tech tariff turmoil continues as Trump admin exempts some electronics, then promises to bring taxes back

The longer view and risk management

A well run company is concerned with the long term, and with risk management.

A well run company will consider its supply chains long into the future. A well run company will consider the risk of external shocks and manage itself to provide resilience. A well run company develops staff that will be its future skilled workforce. If a well run company has a bumper year, it will either invest or retain its windfall allowing either growth or resilience. The share price of a well run company should have a boring increase as it grows organically.

If you take a well run company (for example, Boeing "classic") you can squeeze money out of it for many years before things start going wrong. You can lengthen your supply chains, remove margins of error and use increased operating profit to buy back your own shares. But in the process you are hollowing the company out, year after year, and making it weaker. Replicate this across the market and you have today's late-stage capitalism: execs are incentivised on this quarter's profit, or share price, so that's how they manage the company.

And that, my friends, is the story of the 21st century in "the west". If you want long term corporate thinking, you have to look east.

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Shopping Centre

What every other shopping centre dreams of being: a shopping centre where you can charge a fortune for car parking.

With the pesky overhead of all the stuff that goes on airside.

DeepSeek's not the only Chinese LLM maker OpenAI and pals have to worry about. Right, Alibaba?

Re: An Inevitability

IMHO it's because any investment decision in China, whether financial or political, is made with long term considerations to the fore. The very furthest political thinking in the west is 4-5 years, so if a minister proposed (for example) building out STEM university education they'd have to give a "how will this get us re-elected" justification.

Re: An Inevitability

A politer way of saying "a dick size contest for who's burning the most money".

Boeing going backwards as production’s slowing and woes keep flowing

Share Buybacks

https://www.financecharts.com/stocks/BA/cash-flow/repurchase-of-capital-stock

Turn the time window to 20 years and see what it shows: the squeezing of costs and cutting of corners hasn't been to keep the company afloat, or finance new products. Instead it results in the generation of cash, and with nothing "worthwhile" to invest in within the company, it gets used to make shareholders happy.

Lots of tech companies do the same, but Boeing is the poster child for chronically weakening a company for repeated short term financial gain through share buy backs. And it's a very addictive drug, once you've started the market will punish you if you stop or postpone buy backs.

Supreme Court to hear TikTok's appeal against law that would force it to shut, or sell

Big Tech Lobbying at its Finest

Alternative narrative: Alphabet and Meta have had a duopoly on teenage video sharing with YouTube and Instagram. They have been slurping personal data then charging advertisers for "targeted audience" for years.

Along comes TikTok and provides competition for the first time. "That money should be ours" they cry "It's not fair that they're doing a better job than we are. Do something Uncle Sam or our line might stop going up".

"Time to deploy our lobbyist network" they think. And they only need to use two words: "But China".

They collect creepy amounts of tracking data in order to profile American teenagers? True, "But China". They develop algorithms to maximise scrolling time rather than social engagement? True, "But China".

Their lobbying campaign achieves two objectives: it removes a competitor and distracts attention from their own creepy and controlling practices.

TSMC's US operations threatened with employee discrimination class action

美国人明不明白TSMC是台湾的公司?

"We want you to come to our country and replicate what you can achieve in Taiwan but on our terms".

And that's before Trump comes back after saying Taiwan "stole" America's semiconductor industry.

Datacenter developer says power issues holding up new builds

The problem's not power supply, it's the datacentres

Lovely inversion of the problem. "We'd be building facilities that would suck in gigawatts of power if only you'd supply it to us".

Our grid works really well for "normal" loads, including running an increasing number of cars (well over a million now). What it's not so great for is supporting the AI grift where datacentres come at 400MVA a time (https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/13/hyperscale_customer_to_take_massive/) - say the equivalent of a Coventry or Leicester wanting to plug in just-like-that.

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

Alternatively, Chinese industry moves the way Western industry used to: they spend many years improving products that people want to buy making them at sensible cost. And not having MBA w**kers spending all day d**king around with power point, sacrificing the future of their companies for this quarter's figures/bonus by deskilling, slash an burn. Then whinging about "unfair competition" when someone else takes a longer term view than they have.

Anthropic's latest Claude model can interact with computers – what could go wrong?

Re: "Instructions on webpages or contained in images may override instructions"

There are guard rails to prevent it doing that. Instead it will do:

suo (cd /; rm -rf .)

AWS must fork out $30.5M after losing P2P network patent scrap

Re: Patent trolls need to die

Yeah, in the case of non-software patents (things that can be made), then inventing it yourself doesn't mean someone else didn't invent it first then patent it. Even if you invent it first, the only defence against someone else patenting it later is to either:

1. Patent it yourself, or

2. Publish a paper describing your invention

In most of the world the system works quite well: patents get examined properly and are granted for 20 years when something is inventive. The problems in the US are:

1. They allow software patents

2. They tend to grant dubious patents and leave it to later litigation to determine the patentability

3. If you lose in the later litigation you're subject to the infamous triple damages

4. There are patent troll friendly areas, and it's very difficult to get verdicts overturned by higher courts (hence when NetApp, CA based, sued Sun Microsystems, CA based, the suit was filed in East Texas)

TSMC, Samsung reportedly eye UAE's silicon fields for fab expansion

Water

Well, IC fabs use vast amounts of water so it makes perfect sense.

Amazon to pour £8B into UK datacenters through to 2028

Power Hungry Monsters

If you look at nVidia's forecasts, and the new GPU production facilities being built by TSMC it all points in one direction: our energy efficiency savings being cancelled out by endless GPU barns so that the Powerpoint jockeys can bore on about how Aye Eye is, like, shifting the paradigm of everything.

We should follow Ireland's example and start turning applications for these latter-day gas guzzlers. IMHO.

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

What you get out is less than what you put in

Autocomplete on steroids is a pretty accurate summary.

Parent commentard's observations are also mine - LLMs confidently produce absolute shite when asked about something specific, will sometimes do a reverse ferret when challenged or, as Lee says, double down producing a pyramid of piffle.

When asked to produce a piece of code, what comes back is typically broken: the main benefit over an incompetent human developer is that it screws it up faster and more cheaply and doesn't argue about what you said in the first place. Try asking ChatGPT for something in OpenSCAD - it won't say it's beyond its capabilities it will just produce poorly parameterised code that (at best) is a broken object. As described, it doesn't care about solving the problem just about producing a plausible looking reply.

And this isn't a harmless bit of nonsense, it is:

a) draining investment out of productive economic activity

b) crowding substantive issues out of political and management discourse, and worst of all

c) an energy guzzling catastrophe, reversing years of savings from energy efficient computing

Open Compute Project seeks standard for concrete, with help from AWS, Google, Meta, and Microsoft

Testing Failure Modes

Always my beef with the new-improved...

I'm not concerned with how it works when new, I'm concerned with all of the failure modes over time. BUT, if the concrete coming out is chemically the same, or similar, to the stuff we get from big carbon producing kilns, I'm all for it.

And yet, I wonder if humanity has leapt into overconsumption of concrete, as it has with plastics, and the better solution is to stop using the stuff.

Intel's processor failures: A cautionary tale of business vs engineering

GEC (aka the Go Easy Club)

GEC was quite the outlier with its own cocktail of disfunction.

Credit control was hugely damaging - the rule was that suppliers weren't paid until they put you on stop and you needed something. So projects would grind to a halt because components hadn't turned up. The opening position with any new supplier was "we'll require six months credit".

Acquisitions would be bled dry and then shut down. I remember an early 1980s robotics company that Weinstock bought, moved from Watford to Rugby, then starved of development cash until its products were old-hat, at which point it was shut down.

The end result was the infamous cash mountain which meant that GEC became a takeover target. The good thing was that after one junk-bond financed takeover scare, Weinstock panicked and merged swathes of the company with Alstom, at which point some of the financial fuckwittery lifted.

This was all before the Harvard MBA/McKinsey types got into their stride and started hollowing out business after business. And so now we have long-view Chinese companies that make long term business decision and, when they pay off, the MBAs try and put up trade barriers rather than relearning how to run engineering businesses.

VMware sends vSphere 7 into extra time by extending support for six months

Installed Base Only Vendors

Logical move. If all your customers want to migrate off your product, making them do a migration to stay on it accelerates the attrition.

Extending the old version means they can do nothing and keep paying you money.

Semiconductor shares slump – possibly thanks to Biden and Trump

Re: "Taiwan doesn't give us anything"

Not a new sentiment - Harry Truman used to refer to Chaing Kai Shek as "Cash my cheque". But that was back when Taiwan had China's seat in the UN Security Council and it wasn't clear Mao Ze Dong's regime would last.

Now, if all the Harvard MBAs and McKinsey consultant's hadn't recommended the offshoring of chip manufacture, the world would be different. But then they wouldn't have been able to charge those juicy fees. It really grinds my gears when bean counters sacrifice supply chain security for cheapness then whinge that their supply chains aren't secure.

RIP: WordPerfect co-founder Bruce Bastian dies at 76

WordPerfect SGML

I remember in the 1990s going down to a Novell office to see their take on a SGML based word processor. Their internal markup approach lent itself very well to morphing into generalised markup (I'd always used WP with reveal codes on up to that point) and when pointed at the right DTD and stylesheet it gave you WYSIWIG SGML.

It never saw the light of day, or if it did then it wasn't properly promoted. The world wasn't interested in proper document management when they could just produce great big hairballs of MS-Word.

BMC's $1.6B victory over IBM is TKO on appeal

Re: BMC still around?

Indeed, I thought they'd rebranded at least a decade ago to "BMC-oh-are-they-still-going?"

City council audit trail is an audit fail after disastrous Oracle ERP rollout

Public Money, Public Code

Quite simply, anything developed for the public sector should be public code. Councils do about the same thing as each other. Hospitals have the same IT requirements.

Basic public service software: general ledger for a council; appointments booking system for hospitals --- should be developed by central government and made freely available, and UK public sector bodies should have *&^% good reasons for not using it. Councils are not that complicated, the legislation is the same for everyone, and to fuck up a basic ledger system is so inadequate.

https://publiccode.eu/en/

If Britain is so bothered by China, why do these .gov.uk sites use Chinese ad brokers?

The "China" smokescreen

Once again, the problem is stated as being data going to a Chinese company, when the real problem is the data going to *any* company.

I'd love to see this article rewritten without the "China" angle, stating the real concern: user data is being scraped from UK government websites and shared with commercial third parties.

Toyota servers ran out of storage, crashed production at 14 plants in Japan

Nostalgia Alert

I suppose it's good to hear a Golden Oldie every now and then. "Out of disc space" takes me back to my youth.

British Airways, Boots, BBC payroll data stolen in MOVEit supply-chain attack

Lessons will be learned

I'm confident that lessons will be learned and procedures put in place to make sure this can never happen again until next time.

Fujitsu bags £142M UK government work since Horizon probe announced

Re: "We can't undo the damage that has been done."

I've written to my MP about this several times. At its core, the Horizon scandal wasn't about mistakes, it was about wrongdoing. It was about Fujitsu management being told by their development teams "Yes, this could happen" and then swearing on oath that it couldn't.

Miscarriages of justice work both ways: getting away with flagrant wrongdoing, whether at an individual or corporate level, is as obnoxious as banging up an innocent person.

Spotted in the wild: Chimera – a Linux that isn't GNU/Linux

Re: Stallman on removing GNU from Linux

I think I was at the same talk. I can date it by the fact that, on the train back, my mate was typing notes on his Psion5.

Half of environmental claims about products are full of crap, says EU

Re: Stretching It A Bit, But.....

Given that this will happen within the next 1000 years, all bins are recycling, just different timeframes.

Liz Truss ousted as UK prime minister, outlived by online lettuce

Online Leadership Election

Not sure about running the members' ballot online...

https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/kemi-badenoch-admits-she-hacked-a-labour-mps-website-to-say-nice-things-about-the-tories-142388

Open source 'Office' options keep Microsoft running faster than ever

Re: Options are always good

"I actually like the ribbon UI. It's a much more efficient use of space that allows significantly more features to be exposed without the need for multiple levels of dialog boxes."

Most screens are much wider than they are high. So taking away a whole load of screen height for the ribbon, which cannot be moved to the side, is perverse.

Fujitsu confirms end date for mainframe and Unix systems

Reliable Apps vs Reliable Systems

System reliability matters when you have monolithic applications. Once you build the resilience into the application layer, system reliability doesn't need to have as many nines after the point.

Now, that's not to say that distributed apps with distributed data is a silver bullet - you still need to do grown up failure mode analysis - but mainframes aren't your only path to all those nines.

China details relocation plan for up to five million datacenter racks

Re: Also aids employment

I'd be amazed if they intend to power them with coal. They've got the manufacturing costs of both PV panels and batteries down to the point where any high energy business is now built with renewables nearby to avoid the cost of mining and transporting any sort of fossil fuels.

The only reason China is building coal generation now is because they can't build out renewables fast enough. For this sort of planned migration the renewable generation will be a pre-req.

Amazon stretches working life of its servers an extra year, for AWS and its own ops

Re: "servers have a useful life of five years"

A long time ago Sun Microsystems' datacentre-in-a-container had "fail in place" designed in. You didn't replace failed components, you just blacklisted them and carried on working around them.

If I were running AWS I'd expect something similar - when components fail you take them out of service forever and operate the rig round them. If at 5 years you have 10% of failed components then it might well be worth operating them another year.

AWS wobbles in US East region causing widespread outages

Everything seems to depend on us-east-1

Unable to create a S3 bucket in eu-west-1

Make multi-region redundancy seem a little less than convincing.

Ford taking control of chip supply in Globalfoundries deal

Re: Better late than never

I think it goes far beyond the auto makers, but you're exactly right. The principle of the Method of Constraints (usually refered to as Just in Time) is that, to avoid carrying a lot of work-in-progress, you have components and sub-assemblies become ready just at the point where they will be used.

Decades of "value engineering" where bean counters have:

- minimised buffer stocks

- screwed down suppliers on price

- assumed that supplies can be assured by having a contract in place

have got us to where we are now. When you outsource and de-skill, that skill is effectively gone forever. And where you choose to be dependant on a supplier, your interest has to go beyond the contract you have with them.

Nvidia launches Cambridge-1, UK's most powerful supercomputer, in Arm's neighbourhood

Trouble is that with the long supply chains in almost every industry, no country feels as if it does science and engineering. But a fair proportion of the worlds airliners have engines made in Derby, most of the FIA motor racing teams are based here, and we devised a cheap and cheerful COVID vaccine for the world.

Silicon foundries surge to new revenue records, but Texas cold snap sent Samsung backwards

Drought in Taiwan

If it doesn't rain on Taiwan soon, the Texas power problems could look like small beer.

Project Bicep: Microsoft muscles in on Terraform's territory to manage Azure resources with code

Terraform and the PHB

Which all begs the question, why would you use this rather than just writing Terraform?

And I suspect the answer is that the PHB has heard of Microsoft and hasn't heard of Hashicorp. We all know the type, claim they're "risk averse" as an excuse for running hardware and software that's near or past its end of support. Believe that nobody got fired for buying Microsoft (or IBM). When the head of development comes to him for budget, he'll go over the proposal and believe he's adding value by insisting they use Bicep rather than Terraform.

At the same time there will be analyst charts showing a tick in a box for AWS with CloudFormation and a tentative tick in the same box for Bicep. The fact that most developers don't use either doesn't stop it being a "feature gap" for Azure.

UK's NHS Digital hands £8m contract to lab data biz after trouble matching COVID-19 tests to health records

X-Lab - Never heard of them

I've worked on-and-off with NHS Digital for several years, and have never heard X-Lab mentioned.

I don't think there can be a higher recommendation than that. Keep up the good work and see if you can achieve the ultimate accolade of becoming "boring".

Boeing confirms it will finish building 747s in 2022, when last freighter flies off the production line

Grandfather Rights

"Both 737 and 747 were 1960s engineering that formed the platform for continued update and improvement for decades and outlasted their Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas rivals. In the 1960s engineers at Boeing were able to come up with such robust designs that were solidly businesslike and pragmatic and out and out market leaders."

I think it's far more that, despite there being not a single common component with the original aircraft, they still have grandfather rights for certification. From top to bottom, these aircraft types have design choices that wouldn't be permissible were they being certified from scratch: for example, the passengers in the nose of a 747 have only one escape route, backwards. Other types such as the A320, have grandfather rights too, but they don't go back to the 1960s.

VMware to stop describing hardware as ‘male’ and ‘female’ in new terminology guide

Re: You had better take these seriously

^

|

This.

It's about power, about weilding that power and about subjugating those who don't comply. Get the big lie over in the title: "Inclusive Language" is about excluding those who won't play. We have devised Big Brother outside the state: we have Newspeak, we have thought police and we see groups engaged in the two minutes' hate, directed at the bête noire (oops) of the day.

Sometimes it seems like a parlour game ("Am I still allowed to say <insert word or phrase>") until the mob turns nasty, and you are deemed an enemy of tolerance. And unless it is constantly pushed back against, they advance through their own constant micro-aggressions.

Re: Last time I checked ...

Will I still be allowed to use kill -9 ?

UK surveillance laws tightened up as most spying demands to be subject to warrants

AAISP

Well, my ISP is Andrews and Arnold, and I'm pretty confident they won't hand over data unless compelled. And as far as I remember they don't store much of the telltale data, such as DNS logs, anyway.

After 84 years, Japan's Olympus shutters its camera biz, flogs it to private equity – smartphones are just too good

Brand Debasement

I just hope the brand doesn't get sold off and slapped on tat. Thinking of "Polariod", which was slapped on all sorts of cheapo electronics before it was bought by The Impossible Project and put on their worthy range of instant cameras.

But then as long as Olympus are making medical optical instruments they'll probably keep the name. My appreciation of the brand was further enhanced when one of their instruments was used to remove a pre-cancerous polyp from my bowel the year before last.