Posts by cyberdemon

OpenAI dishes out its first model on a plate of Cerebras silicon

A correction

It should be "Merda ex Machina". I mixed up my Greek and Latin, as one does.

1000 tokens per second?

That doesn't sound like very much, for a dinnerplate-sized chip consuming God-knows how many watts..

Nvidia are a waste of silicon, but this Cerebras lot sound like a desperate attempt to produce a superintelligent artificial god which is doomed to failure.

Kopros ex Machina..

30+ Chrome extensions disguised as AI chatbots steal users' API keys, emails, other sensitive data

How to create 30+ Chrome extensions, all different yet all the same malicious shit?

Why, Vibe Coding, no doubt..

$8K laundry bot knows when to hold ’em, knows when to fold ’em, and knows it has help standing by

Give me your clothes, your boots, your motorcy.. Actually, just the clothes.

Four horsemen of the AI-pocalypse line up capex bigger than Israel's GDP

Re: Profits? We don't need no stinking net profits

Nice.

That must involve some interesting non-standard wiring though. Here in the UK, the insurance company would probably condemn it.

For most people sadly, solar PV means having a grid-following inverter simply plugged in like a negative-power appliance.

Re: Profits? We don't need no stinking net profits

> The amount of money being spent is frightening.

Yes indeed.. Stocks are down, gold is down, oil is down, crypto is down.. So where has all the money gone?? I fully expect a bank crash this year and I have no idea what anyone can really do to ride it out.. It is terrifying to think about.

> I'm going to pick up another 1kW of solar panels next week while they are still super cheap to match what I have.

I might do the same. I have 1kW of panels (realistically 600W, they are laid flat on a flat roof in sunny Britain). But from the grid's point of view, this is pure delinquency. It steals the lunch of the energy suppliers, while at the same time making blackouts much more likely. The inverters require a stable reference signal to operate, any transient disturbance will temporarily trip them off, and the combined effect of that would cause such a rapid change in load that any grid would struggle to cope with. On top of that, you have interesting resonant behaviours with a grid dominated by grid-following inverters causing oscillations in grid voltage and frequency.. Prime suspect in the Iberian blackout last year.

Doctors told to give Palantir's NHS data platform the cold shoulder

Re: Be under no illusion

Look in a mirror?

(Oh wait. He probably has no reflection)

Only one in five Euro datacenters AI-ready as builders battle land and labor blues

> It also looks as though the report is free if you trade a valid email, but I felt that price was too high.

That's what mailinator.com is for

As OpenAI and Claude fight over ads, Google says ‘show me the money’

Re: Ads?

Indeed. And there's no possibility to block ads when every page you view is generated on-the-fly by a bullshit-o-matic.

Trump to hyperscalers: your datacenters, your power bill

Bloody hell.

The CAT G3500K on order from Joule are 97.5 litre V20 engines running at 1500 RPM. 4 stroke, so that's somewhere in the region of 1 cubic metre per second of exhaust, each. Or more, since they are turbocharged. And they will need nearly 1000 of them for their 2GW. Apparently most hot-air balloons are 2800 m3, so that's somewhere of the order of 1 hot air balloon every 3 seconds of exhaust gases sent up into the atmosphere from this facility. I wouldn't want to be breathing Utah air when this monstrosity powers up.

It wouldn't be so bad if they were making something *useful* with all this.. But it's all for fucking AI which as far as I am concerned has negative value.

Fortunately though, they are nowhere near completion and my money says the AI bubble will go bang long before this bitbarn hits 2GW never mind 12GW.

The sad part is, when that bubble DOES go bang (and it will), everyone's banks and pension funds will be exposed to the fallout. The 2008 financial crash will look like a blip. It could end up being worse than the Great Depression.

_{And 2GW/reactor is not an average nuke. Most are 1GW or less (you don't want them to be too big or else they destabilise the grid when they trip offline), but of course nuke plants usually have at least two reactors.}

Microsoft touts far-off high-temperature superconducting tech for datacenter efficiency

I am oddly reminded of a Danish TV series..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follow_the_Money_(TV_series)

There was a scene in that where they hoodwinked some Saudi investors into believing they had developed high temperature superconductors.. Or something

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/mar/26/follow-the-money-recap-episodes-three-and-four-superconductors-and-snogs

It was a great series, would recommend

Google soaks up 1GW of Texas sunshine to power $185B AI spending spree

Re: A GW of US manufactured photovoltaic panels ?

Er, yeah.

"US Manufactured" means that they buy the glass/silicon bits from China and put their own, patriotic frame around them. Made with Chinese aluminium.

Even Germany no longer makes their own PV cells: https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/q-cells-bankruptcy-heralds-end-of-german-solar-cell-industry-a-825490.html

BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers

Money well spent IMO

The Beeb needs to stay. They are one of the last bastions of proper journalism, and a haven for brilliant satire, like the News Quiz on Radio 4.

But they could save a lot of money and restore some public goodwill if they simply sacked the enforcement goons. Those who want to get TV without paying for it aren't worth the effort trying to force them, they will find a way. But the majority (so I believe - i have no evidence of course) of those who do pay the licence fee, do so willingly, i.e. honestly paying for a service. Most of us wouldn't start shoplifting if the shops stopped having CCTV. A small minority would. But if it's a small minority "stealing" TV, who cares?

Also, I have noticed quite a few coffee shops, bars etc with a small TV in the corner playing music channels. Apparently if you have a TV license and are playing music from a TV, then you don't need the PRS license.

Openreach turns up the heat to force laggards off legacy copper lines

It worries me that *everything* is being forced to depend on the Internet and the electricity grid..

Anything that requires bulk energy is being forced onto electricity.. Gas for heating & cooking is being decomissioned, petroleum for transportation (or heating) is being decomissioned, coal has *been* decomissioned, even wood-burning stoves are being banned.

All telecoms is being forced to go via the Internet, which itself relies on a functioning electricity grid.. Cash is being phased out too, all purchases increasingly require the Internet.

The old telephone exchanges had their own source of power, and independently supplied it to the telephone in your house, so your phone would work during a power outage. Not so anymore.

Frankly, it feels as if the Invisible Hand are preparing us for something Cataclysmic. The "Powers That Be" couldn't be this stupid by accident.

...

where did I put my sandwich board..

Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer

Doorbell cameras

The real issue I take with doorbell cameras are the highly sensitive beamforming microphones on each one, capable of picking up every word, every fart, of passers by. A network of these with every house on the same system (ie Ring) would be able to reassemble a conversation between people strolling along a street.

People were very concerned when the Stasi did this in Soviet East Germany, but now, nobody seems to care.

Ghost gun legislation casts shadow over 3D printing

So restrict ammo?

FFS. A "ghost gun" is little more than a pipe. To make ammo on the other hand, requires explosives, of the same sort required to make a.. Bomb.

It's as daft as banning pipes, just in case someone makes a pipe bomb.

The dangerous bit is the explosive.. So regulate that?

Server CPUs join memory in the supply shortage, pushing up prices

Re: You will own nothing and be happy...

But surely even the Cloud pushers have been hoisted by their own petard here..

What good is a pile of energy-guzzling coprocessors if there are no server CPUs, no RAM, no NAND, and no motherboards to assemble any actual servers...

It's as if Ancient Rome adopted a Perestroika policy to build millions of chariot wheels.. But then there were no carpenters left to build Chariots (never mind horses, or charioteers)

VS Code for Linux may be secretly hoarding trashed files

Snap

Needs to die.

That is all.

'Lethal' and 'magical' Palantir tech is in demand by Pentagon, China, Middle East, CEO says

ShipitOS

Is that the new version of Windows for Warships?

Amazon's European datacenter buildout blows a breaker as grid connection wait list hits 7 years

Re: Electricity?

Yes! Let the bit barns run on solar, wind and batteries exclusively, BY ORDER. No gas and no grid connections. Nobody will shed a tear when the inverters splutter their last at 75% through a training checkpoint.

Burning finite global resources on this madness is, well, madness squared.

Next-gen nuclear reactors safe enough to skip full environmental reviews, says Trump admin

> The internet always remembers.

Fake news! FAKE! The internet is demented. LIKE JOE BIDEN! And I demented it! Me and my great buddy at Meta! And Google! Google is GREAT! MAKE AMERICA GOOGLE AGAIN! Truth is what I say it is! Ignorance is Strength!

<Magic Roundabout theme tune plays, backwards>

AI datacenter boom triples US gas power builds, filling the air with more CO2

Re: Twitter warning

I think maybe some people (or bots) subscribe to an RSS feed of all articles with "CO2" in the title, and just come here to troll

It was weird indeed

Re: Er, What?

Well, the vast majority of AI outputs go straight in the bin. Vibe-coders and vibe-artists make hundreds of versions and adjust the prompt, before choosing one that they will actually use. So by that metric 99% of AI output is objectively bullshit.

The remaining 1% that actually gets used is what is up for debate. People are increasingly referring to it as 'slop', not just because of errors, but because every output is different but eerily all the same. e.g. If you ask AI to recommend a unique tourist spot that nobody goes to, one that it would never recommend to anyone else.. You will find hundreds of cars parked up on the verges, hordes of others just like you, and angry locals accusing you of spoiling the landscape.

It is fundamentally incapable of 'innovating', because it is merely a fancy average of everything that has gone before. That is why it is not 'intelligent' and certainly never will be 'superintelligent' no matter how much data and energy you throw at it.

Re: Er, What?

Er, no.

A[G]I is not going to magically make fusion feasible. You are either an idiot or a troll.

Re: Er, What?

Sure. But my brain only uses 20 watts, and that doesn't change much whether I am posting what you define as "bullshit" to the Reg forums, or if I do something else.

And the food that I eat is all solar powered, with this amazing natural energy storage system called er, life..

Apparently the average LLM uses 0.24 Wh for the median prompt. Or about 0.5Wh (1800J) of gas, if it is powered by gas. I don't know how many tokens it would take to parse this thread, its article, and any other relevant context to produce a pithy, concise response to your post, but I am quite sure it would not produce what I wanted first time.

If we are only factoring the energy taken by the AI vs the energy taken by my brain during writing, then if I can complete this post inside of 90 seconds then I have beaten the AI hands down.

But then, you forget that a human using AI still has a brain, using 20 watts of bio power while he or she types the prompt. If it takes just as long to prompt the AI as it does to write the post, then any energy use by the AI is simply wasted. Doubly so if it takes multiple attempts to get it right.

And even if the AI could autonomously replace me without prompting (which it can't), I am still here, with my brain using its 20 watts.. Or do you propose that all humans be exterminated too?

Re: So this article was sponsored by China, yes?

> Heavy industry cannot function with renewables.

I agree. You cannot power a blast furnace with renewable energy. Even an Electric Arc Furnace (which produces only low-grade steel for construction and NOT military or civil nuclear use) requires a reliable, dependable source of power. That is why China is still burning gas and coal.

But "AI" is NOT industry. It's not even innovation, as far as I'm concerned. It has negative value.

If everybody had to wait until the wind blowed before they could generate their next fake video, or get their code-assistant to fart out another non-working pile of dung, we might actually get more work done.

Meanwhile, use the gas and coal sparingly for the actual industries that need them. That is what China are trying to do. And broadly succeeding as far as I can tell.

Trying to make a country 100% renewable without nuclear is indeed a stupid idea. But wasting what little gas and even nuclear power you do have on a giant water-evaporator is even crazier.

Er, What?

This article is not about the relative merits of burning gas vs renewable energy. It is about the utter folly of burning a finite global resource on generating a pile of useless slop that has zero value for the world and only serves to clog up disk drives and distract idiots everywhere.

The point is, we have some gas left, great. But we should be using it on powering our actual critical infrastructure, NOT endless bullshit.

Imagine you are playing a board game. Something like Risk, where you are a civilisation that must share the limited resources of a world with other civilisations. Do you think it is a good idea to take your best and most reliable, but finite source of fuel, and pour it on a giant bonfire? Does that win the game?

No, if you do that, you lose.

AI datacentres should be forced to use Wind and Batteries, because at least (once built) that doesn't cost the world anything for its use. Then we can use Gas for the stuff that we DO need to work when we need it, like heating and lighting!

Oh, the wind stopped blowing. The upside is, all the Gen AI services are down. Hurrah

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Who wants to stick this sign on the wall of Tesla HQ, opposite a T-junction? -->

Want digital sovereignty? That'll be 1% of your GDP into AI infrastructure please

Er

What has AI got to do with "digital sovereignty"?

Can't my digital sovereignty just be a self-hosted database?

Agents gone wild! Companies give untrustworthy bots keys to the kingdom

Re: déjà vu - yet again

Given that "AI" is nothing but a statistical distillation of the er, Internet, you're not far wrong!

Plausible deniability

I didn't download the entire contents of the shared drive and production database to my home laptop, it must have been my agent being weird!

Dow Chemical says AI is the element behind 4,500 job cuts

De-intellectualisation?

First we had deindustrialisation - where the majority of western heavy industry was closed down, because China could do it cheaper

Now we have so much of our knowledge-workers being displaced by AI bollocks..

What happens when a) the AI bubble goes 'pop', and b) China turns out to be not so friendly..

We're fucked, is what happens

Sat Nad declares Windows 11 has a billion users – just don't bother asking for details

Re: The real reasons?

I wonder if the apparent growth is due to the per-core licensing introduced for running Win11 in a VM

Does he count a 12-core VM instance as 12 Win11 users, perhaps?

Sad Nads

Desperate to talk up revenues to avoid the banks getting sniffy about his datacentre loans and OpenAI bubble exposure, I suspect..

Birmingham City Council's Oracle ERP fiasco now £144M and still not working

> especially if they were to replace staff with chatbots to try and save costs.

Uh Oh. As if by magic, the next story appears on El Reg

Banker claims Oracle may slash up to 30,000 jobs, sell health unit to pay for AI build-out

Re: Birmingham resident and IT professional here

As much as I dislike personal pronouns, people who rant off-topic unprovoked about them are worse. It's a subject best ignored.

To bring this back on topic though: Oracle now has hundreds of billions in debt thanks to its AI follies. So much that it is being sued by its own bondholders for misleading them about the size of its debt.

£144M will not make a dent in that, and it looks likely that Big Red could go pop, especially if they were to replace staff with chatbots to try and save costs. There is scant chance that they will ever deliver this project.

If I were BCC, I'd be going back to SAP, or perhaps paper (call it a cyberattack preparation exercise), and suing Oracle for the mess, pro bono if possible as they might not be in a position to pay up.

Tesla revenue falls for first time as Musk bets big on robots and autonomy

Oh dear

Isn't Elon's zillion dollar bonus conditional on selling lots of cars?

Latest Vivaldi release surfs a wave of anti-AI sentiment

Wait, What?

> Then Palantir said that they'd happily buy Chrome

I think you mean Perplexity. I really hope you didn't mean Palantir.

Re: I'm enjoying Vivaldi

If it has anything similar to NoScript, ideally part of the browser and not via an extension, I would try it

Meta to pour the GDP of Kenya into AI infrastructure push in 2026

Killer Product?

The Meta Glasshole Jammer

I wonder if something like this would ban Meta Ray-ban users from recording in their personal vicinity?

https://github.com/cifertech/RF-Clown

I say this, because effluencers have been going round secretly filming their dates to denigrate women on TikTok etc. No doubt Zuck wants to put AI in the goggles to turn them into Grok-beating X-Ray Specs

The faster Meta goes bust, the better, as far as I am concerned.

May they burn as much of their own money on this as possible, and may they be banned from taking loans for their follies.

Capita pension portal 'fiasco' forces Cabinet Office into damage control

Come on, ElReg

If Private Eye can get away with always referring to it as Crapita, so can you

Anthropic CEO bloviates for 20,000+ words in thinly veiled plea against regulation

Re: Dear Regulator,

Maybe that's the problem: Too many people (including politicians) think that it is the regulators' responsibility to set the regulations. When politicians do argue to change regulations, it is always as a knee-jerk response to some tragedy or other news-item that they can score political points from. Officials want a quiet life (we've all seen Yes, Minister!) and would never proactively change the regulations, even if the regulators or even the politicians are telling them that they are monumentally stupid.

Another problem is that when a regulator wants raise the alarm on some daft policy, it has to do so in a lengthy report worded in such a way that most people will fall asleep before they realise what it is trying to say. If they word it too strongly, honestly and concisely, then the politicians will blame them for the problem, or indeed for simply raising it and stirring the pot. And it must always look like "good news" for the general public and especially the press. The bad regulators are the rugs to sweep the shit under.

Name a good regulator: The ONR (Office for Nuclear Regulation) is ostensibly a "good regulator". They enforce the rules meticulously, and everybody complies, because the ONR is scary and "has teeth", as one manager put it to me. However, it has to enforce some decidedly barmy regulations. I.e. radiation exposure must be "As Low As Reasonably Practicable" (ALARP), which is the stupidest regulatory wording I have ever heard: Critics of the industry can simply claim "it's a cop-out - the nuclear industry can set its own limits willy-nilly based on whatever they argue is Reasonably Practicable", whereas the reality is quite the opposite: If anyone suggests a new, exceedingly onerous, eye-wateringly expensive way of reducing radiation exposure from the plant, even if it is already orders of magnitude below background, then it must be done, regardless of expense. To the point where the alarms were set so low that a bag of brazil nuts would have set them off.

To re-wire a connector in a room that houses a robot which once went inside a very mildly radioactive (i.e. less radioactive than any old church in Cornwall) vacuum vessel, in which the robot itself wore a giant disposable plastic condom; required two layers of disposable paper overalls, disposable respirator mask, three layers of gloves (preventing you from being able to operate a crimp tool), and the gloves, mask, boots and overalls had to go into a barrel marked "low-level radwaste" when you come out. Any tool that goes in the room never comes out. (you want to bring that fancy oscilloscope do you?) And then people criticise the nuclear industry for being too expensive and for producing too much waste.. The ONR is doing its job very well, but with regulations that are utterly batty, and we need a way to relax the regulations to something more sensible without everybody panicking.

The worst regulator I can think of, hopefully it is not yours, is ofgem. Since Thatcher's privatisation of the utilities, it has done absolutely fuck all to stop blatant profiteering and market abuses (such as gas plant operators deliberately shutting down stations they own during high-demand peaks, so that they can instead start up other plants which have negotiated exorbitant rates on the emergency balancing market / frequency response / short-term reserve, i.e. deliberately putting britain closer to blackout risk in order to extract more profit). Drax continues to claim that it is carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative and still receives billions in subsidies despite being one of the world's worst polluters and causes of deforestation. Windfarms given ridiculous guaranteed contracts for intermittent energy whether it's needed or not (IMHO instead of receiving curtailment compensation, they should be forced to pay for their own storage) all of this resulting in Britain having the world's highest electricity prices, which really does stifle economic growth. Maybe as you say this is not ofgem's fault per se, if the officials in Whitehall are the ones inventing the perverse markets and the swiss-cheese regulatory frameworks, but I would argue that ofgem needs to be far more vocal with said officials rather than just telling them what they want to hear.

Re: The problem with regulation

> If an investor or company chooses to invest its own capital in something daft, is it the regulator's job to stop them?

But it's not their own capital. It's funded by debt.

I foresee, in a short while, the Governments will once again be faced with the choice of either bailing out the banks with taxpayer's (our) money when the AI bubble bursts, or letting the global financial system collapse more deeply than it has ever done before, risking WWIII. It's THAT bad. So of course the regulators should have stepped in, a while back..

But it is worse than a simple Trillion-dollar folly for fuck all.. The poison that is AI is far worse than that. The societal, environmental and macro-economic harms of AI vastly (imho) outweigh any benefit that could ever possibly come of it. Truth is destroyed. Culture is usurped. Industry is sacrificed. Trust is undermined. Everything is drowned in a sea of slop. But power (for the powerful) is consolidated.

AI will probably not enslave or exterminate humanity Skynet-style (after all, it is a bucket of statistics about human culture. It has no thought, understanding, logic or reason) Unless some nutcase arms it with weapons, powers it with nuclear reactors, and it then somehow gets stuck in a sci-fi inspired AI-overlord loop with a persistent context, it isn't going to overpower its masters. But it is a tool with which cunts like Peter Thiel think they can use to "take over the world". (which could lead to the apocalypse scenario I suppose, but there are enough people worrying about that so it should remain science fiction)

Economics, physics and geopolitics will stop any megalomaniac from trying to take over the world with a 'superintelligent AI'. But due to the cult-like zeal in the tech companies and their lenders, and regulatory inaction so far, it will come at a hell of a price.

Re: Pain and consciousness of AI

Given that every time you start a chat with an LLM chatbot you are initialising a blank new context, I would argue that the "AI" cannot feel pain.

Can the context itself, guided by the statistical bollocks machine and the crap you feed it, feel pain? Sure. In the same way that a brick feels pain when it is smashed to bits.

To quote Harry's wife from "In Bruges": It's an inanimate fucking object.

Re: The problem with regulation

> doesn't stifle commerce or innovation

The mistake here is assuming there is anywhere near the amount of commerce or indeed innovation in the AI industry as the industry would have us believe.

The reality is that for all the Trillions invested, these companies have very little prospect of making any money. It's economic poison.

I suggest you take the same approach to regulating AI as you would to Pyramid Schemes, Enron-style accounting, etc.

A good place to start to see what we all mean when we say AI should be regulated with fire, is this podcast: https://player.fm/series/better-offline

Bork ventures to the Middle of Lidl

I was in a bowling alley last week and spotted the perfect Bork! Bork! Bork!

Three Slushie machines all displaying very unhappy Raspbian boot screens, reporting filesystem corruption before hitting a watchdog and attempting to boot ad-infinitum. Which were most welcome in place of whatever eye-insulting graphics that the marketing department wanted. (the machines themselves worked fine). Ironically the Bork caught my eye enough to make me buy a slushie, which I later regretted when it tasted like saccharine and battery acid.

Sadly, I didn't have the confidence to snap a pic for El Reg, as it was very busy and the bar staff were looking decidedly grumpy.

European firms push on with AI pilots even as payoff doubts grow

Re: When will these [cough][cough] investments

I imagine that the ancient Incas/Egyptians/Romans etc. occasionally thought the same thing..

We've sent umpteen virgins, lambs, calves, tonnes of fruit and veg, placed all of our gold at the altar for the Gods, and yet still no harvest. What's going on?

Little did they know that the whole thing was a big scam and the high priest had it all for himself.

Yes, you can build an AI agent – here's how, using LangFlow

Re: Complex

It isn't. But it's "boxes and string" so even the coloured-pencil brigade from Marketing can piss about with it and pretend that they are "driving value" or whatnot

Clawdbot sheds skin to become Moltbot, can't slough off security issues

Re: Is there something in the water?

Even just installing it.. They recommend the unbelievably stupid "curl $URL | bash" i.e. "here, random website operator, have a reverse shell!"

This entire "method of install" should be banned. Even if you were to check the script at the URL and all of its dependencies, there's no guarantee that you are looking at the same version which is passed to the shell.

There's even a proof-of-concept exploit that allows a webserver to guess if it might be being ingested by a shell parser rather than being displayed by a browser or dumped to the terminal, by detecting the delay caused by the blocking of a UNIX pipe

https://snakesecurity.org/blog/pipepunisher-exploiting-shell-install-scripts/

AI agent hype cools as enterprises struggle to get into production

Enterprise users, however, are in the "trough of disillusionment"

I'd say they are part-way down the "cliff of stupid" ...