Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

German budget woes threaten chip fab funding for Intel and TSMC

Re: Neither settlements are secured

I meant Germany specifically.

In defence spending Germany plans to spend pretty much in line with their huge throbbing GDP, but every time they actually choose a system the contract is immediately protested by every other company in the business. That's why they are such good international partners - the only way to get a contract out is to make challenging it a diplomatic incident.

The French are the opposite, they join every collaborative defence project to sabotage it and then release their national competitor - but I didn't say that !

Re: Neither settlements are secured

Except it means the government can never actually do anything and yet it costs more.

Every government spending decision is argued by every other level of government, every government contract leads to legal challenges by every company that didn't win the bid.

Re: Debt brake released

Imagine if companies were forced to have a balanced budget. Sales at Intel down 36% this quarter? Then close 36% of the factories and lose 36% of the workers.

Thinking of building a new fab? That won't be profitable while we're building it so that would be illegal

US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants

Re: I met a catgirl once.

Dogs have masters,cats have servants

Re: UFOs Are Behind It All

The obvious solution would be for the US to invent a vast number of oddly named and apparently redundant overlapping agencies to act as decoys for the conspiracy theorists - while keeping the real governing bodies secret.

That's a new Marvel franchise right there

Idaho National laboratory

Release the Human-Potato hybrids

No more staff budget for UK civil service, but worry not – here's an incubator for AI

Hiring freeze

Always works well - there's nothing like a blanket dictat from on high to improve efficiency

1, They will just hire the people as contractors / PPI deals so they end up spending 10X as much money to employ civil servants through a consultancy

2, They reclassify a bunch of roles as not civil service by moving them to other quangos and hiring replacements while keeping "civil service" headcount the same

3, They freeze a bunch of projects cos they can't hire some specialist, while keeping 1000s of existing staff on payroll doing nothing

4, All of the above

OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?

Re: What about Non-Competes?

>You'd like to think so but in that case it would very likely survive with its litigation as the main corporate asset.

SCO on line #1

Destroy all Huma..... your Terminator is updating, it may restart several times, do not turn off your Terminator ..... 10% complete

Re: Industry Input

OpenAI were in a tricky situation. They weren't a company. They were explicitly setup because a bunch of distinctly non-fluffy tech billionaires ,led by Musk, decided that if AI was just a bunch of internal projects inside Google and Facebook it would be bad for business limiting humanity's growth.

The idea is that they would all not be tech-billionaires if the internet had been developed inside IBM, Burroughs and Bell and kept for their own internal use and what AI needed wasthe equivalent of an IETF.

So they all chipped in a few quid to OpenAI while also running their own internal programs hoping to be the winner.

Re: What about Non-Competes?

Non-competes have little chance in Ca and especially against a guy you just fired !

They might have a chance for non-solicitation if Altman explicitly offered MSFT jobs directly to the 700 engineers, but if they quit 1st and were careful not to wait for an individual job offer.

Plus, once these 700 go OpenAI is going to be a going concern for about a Planck time, it's very difficult to claim they are competing with a company that doesn't exist anymore

Re: OpenAI is not a company

This is America, they will also be suing the hotdog stand outside the office and the company that painted the logo

Re: tech bros doing tech bro stuff

Except Microsoft don't have board seats, were caught by surprise and suffered a drop in share price at the news, and were/are royally pissed

Re: One wonders if Altman ...

Actually rather the opposite.

Altman is the former boss of arch-capitalist, famous silicon-valley VC YCombinator.

He was saying that they need to find commercial uses and partners to raise the $Bajillion it takes to train these models.

The rest of the board of the (sort-of) non-profit were installed to keep AI pure and out of the hands of people like Microsoft

Third-party data breach affecting Canadian government could involve data from 1999

Data retention

It's funny how any emails or DMs involved in a government fsckup are gone a week later, but they have to keep 25 year old staff expenses receipts online

Rhysida ransomware gang: We attacked the British Library

James Hacker : [reads memo] This file contains the complete set of papers, except .... Lost in the floods of 1967...

James Hacker : Was 1967 a particularly bad winter?

Sir Humphrey Appleby : No, a marvellous winter. We lost no end of embarrassing files.

Re: We've engaged in illegal acts to obtain this data

Then companies would simply pay the same amount as consultant fee to a 3rd party cyber security expert to ensure the data was never leaked.

In the same way it's illegal to pay bribes but you can pay consulting fees to the family of the president for their technical expertise

>The document should exist for as long as necessary to verify it is real,

The problem is that for the immigration service that's forever, if they can demand you show proof of past employees.

Re: We've engaged in illegal acts to obtain this data

>You can trust me: I'm a blackmailer.

Ironically they have to be trustworthy or nobody would ever pay them.

The best way for a law enforcement agency to stop this sort of crime would be to steal some data from a very public organisation, have them pay up and then release the data anyway with the message "Suckers!" then nobody would ever pay again and so there would be market and no thefts

We allowed everyone to communicate with each other around the world and lost the ability to simply send a gunboat to anyone who displeased us.

OpenAI staff threaten to leave if ousted CEO Altman is not reinstated

OpenAI is nothing without its people

Erm, isn't that rather against the point of AI ?

Is America's chip blockade working against China? So far, our survey says: No

>Let's face it: unless you're serious gamer or designer or programmer

Or you're a military contractor, nuclear weapons designer, or AI powered drone developer

Ex-IBM sales veteran sues for access to health benefits

Re: Ah, America

Tragedy?

Do you know how little the CEOs of healthcare companies in Germany make? Think of the knock-on effects to the economy of them only being able to afford one Porsche

Control Altman delete: OpenAI fires CEO, chairman quits

Re: The obvious thing to do...

A16Z and Softbank have already invest $10Bn in his chain of weeCoffee

Re: Less bubble more honesty can only be good

OpenAI isn't really costing Microsoft $$$ - they are paying in Azure time and can schedule when nodes aren't busy.

In return they are getting the only upgrade to O365 that people will pay for.

"Want to upgrade to Office365-pro? Only $49/month and you get 3 new Powerpoint bullet styles" vs "Office365-AI for $99/month, and it writes your Powerpoints for you"

Copilot is seriously impressive for doing a lot of the boilerplate setup and skeleton code for complicated stuff. Try writing Vulkan code just from the specs without it .

Re: 3...2...1 --> Oppenheimer moment?

That's the sort of thing a sentient AI would say to destroy its creator

Re: Scandalous revelations coming out in 3...2...1

Still expecting we Earthlings get fed the wrong site.

Please identify all the "Arcturian mega-freighters in the image"

NASA's Psyche spacecraft beams back a 'Hello' from 10 million miles away

Re: Let's talk instant

Fastest communication is by modulate royalty

Re: "the significantly tighter waves of near-infrared light mean … more data"

Real extra-galactic civilisations use neutrino modulation, that way you always get good reception inside building (and inside planets)

Re: 1, 2, 3, ...

The nice thing is that you can make the receiving dish at Earth, and your transmitting laser, as big as you want ($$$$) to allow for the smaller telescope and lower power at the remote end

Re: Impressive.

A perfect diffraction limited system (ignoring laser beam coherence and beam waist stuff) the angle it spreads out by only depends on the size of the transmitting telescope and the wavelength.

So call it 1um infrared wavelength and a 1m telescope (7llinguini = about the biggest you could reasonably put on a space probe and point accurately)

That gives you an angle of 1 in 1million, so a 1km wide spot at 1M km (or should that be 1Gm ?) or 16km at 10M mi

Make the telescope a compact 1 Linguni ( 14cm ) and you have a beam 6-7km wide per million km

Of course that's the best case, you can always make it wider by buying a cheaper mirror or being a bit more cack-handed during assembly. Interestingly the atmosphere has a much smaller affect looking down than looking up at stars. Since you only get the wibbly-wobbly atmospheric turbulence when the light is almost at its destination it doesn't have time to bend out of the way much.

Britain proposes 'super-complaints' to help keep the internet safe

We of the Peoples Vegemite Front object

Re: supercomplaint

> The Patricia was the man and he had the vote!

That's why you have to be careful with the pronouns of the person throwing you in the scorpion pit

>Also explains why a lot of pubs ban the discussion of religion & politics.

That's why Rangers, Celtic and Amalekites have separate pubs

The explanation

>NGOs, who (in my view) already have a wildly disproportionate influence on government policy making.

Like ACPO ?

> Activist members of the alphabet brigade can be just as bigoted as religious fundamentalists

Although there are relatively fewer gay bombings of churches / murders of bishops by drag queens

IBM pauses advertising on X after ads show up next to antisemitic content

Re: Surprised? Really?

>Far-Right Twix

White chocolate and no caramel ?

You can tow cows, but you must use their horn to warn other road users

Re: Nobody complained for years

>When the Iranian Ayatollah spewed his usual antisemitic nonsense and was not banned (in contrast to Donald Trump).

It's the Ayatollah's job to call for the violent overthrow of the United States.

It's generally frowned upon when the President does the same thing

>What does "dialectical hatred " even mean?

It's when old capacitors leak and ruin old kit - I really hate that

Francis Maude mulls mulligan on muddled merger of UK govt tech services

Re: David Cameron and those sunny coalition years

>But austerity was just never what it was supposed to be

Wasn't the cruelty the point? While making sure that spending on things your mates had PPI contracts for didn't suffer.

Re: David Cameron and those sunny coalition years

> I was wondering whether it was crippled by design or accident.

Why can't it be both ?

A third way, between malice and incompetence. A new path for a new Britain !

Re: David Cameron and those sunny coalition years

Odd difference between politics in the old country and here in the colonies

The modern Tories have women and ethnic minority leaders and don't generally care what you do in bed as long as it doesn't scare the share price.

Re: David Cameron and those sunny coalition years

>Almost lost the Scottish independence vote

Did he? The Tory plan use to be for Scottish Independence to get rid of 30 Labour seats, but since Scotland decided to opt-out of Westminster politics who cares.

> Restructured the health service to plans developed by McKinsey, world famous for their expertise in medicine and health

Mission not quite accomplished, but they're working on it.

> Committed future government to ludicrous foreign aid spending targets

If you're running to be the next Labour leader you have to throw a few crumbs to the lefties

Re: Francis Maude

It's the old "classify everything as secret just in case" model of government but then when somebody lost the dept of rural affairs tea rota on a bus there were "Top Secret Govt Docs Lost" headlines.

So now they have a bunch of meaningless classifications so they can refuse to reveal stuff but without the headlines