Posts by cyberdemon

Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' would create a regulation-free AI hellscape, AGs warn

Big, Beautiful Bill

I am somewhat reluctant to search for "Big, Beautiful Bill", lest I be served naughty pics of Bill and his friend; Big, Beautiful Bob

Re: USA

I have a magic compression algorithm which (lossily) stores an infinite number of movies into a fixed size at device node (1,3).

But sadly, since lossy compression of a copyrighted work still carries the same copyright, I am in something of a legal bind.

Maybe we can work together? Your Movie-AI can strip the copyright from the works, and I will store the result forever in /dev/null, unmolested by cease-and-desist letters

Nvidia part of plans for mega 1.4 GW AI datacenter near Paris

"Say something nice"

*splutter*

You owe me a new keyboard for that one! Well done

Intel bets you'll stack cheap GPUs to avoid spending top dollar on Nvidia Pros

It's Intel

So Linux drivers will be shit or nonexistent, and the product will be killed off entirely in a few years..

Other than my obvious cynicism re. Intel, the ability to shun cloud LLMs and instead run them locally would be quite nice. Not sure I'd spend the requisite $4000 to stack 8 of them for 192GB though

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Whoops

At least he had his own, and didn't have to ask if he can "bum a fag"

No-boom supersonic flights could slide through US skies soon

Re: It'll still take ages to...

All luggage to have a content-type identfier?

AWS says Britain needs more nuclear power to feed AI datacenter surge

Re: Yes, but then again, No.

> Kicking it off to serve the current AI bubble is pointless since there's a 99% chance* that will have burst before the first reactor is designed, let along got through planning approval.

Shhh. Don't tell them.

We'll build the nukes, the AI bubble pops, and then finally maybe we'll have cheap leccy

Metal maker meltdown: Nucor stops production after cyber-intrusion

It's a networked computer system, and I will not have it aboard this ship.

It's always for someone's convenience. Because convenience means fewer employees, faster trading, more profit.

It also lets the Cylons in. But who cared about that? Not the previous cohort of execs, who have already taken their fat bonuses and retired, comfortably, before the er, nukes fall from the sky..

Go ahead and ignore Patch Tuesday – it might improve your security

By patching sooner and more often, you are also making yourself MORE vulnerable, to supply-chain attacks..

You won't necessarily spot those in your test environment either.

Patch only for vulnerabilities that affect you - don't just patch for patching's sake as soon as a newer version of any software package you use becomes available

OS-busting bug so bad that Microsoft blocks Windows Insider release

I wonder what it is

Recall fails to store screenshots?

IRS hopes to replace fired enforcement workers with AI

Why risk in-person corruption when you can outsource it to an inscrutable black-box bullshit generator?

No doubt, the model will pick out the elderly and vulnerable for enforcement actions, while anyone with $1bn+ will be mysteriously glossed over

Trio arrested in £3M UK bribery probe over Microsoft datacenter build in Netherlands

Re: The SFO? Now they're in real trouble.

As a Private Eye reader I have come to expect nothing less of the Serious Farce Office

Google details plans for 1 MW IT racks exploiting electric vehicle supply chain

the AI boolean of "True / False / Wrong"

Quantum computing's evil twin?

Re: Fun stuff

And unlike AC, the current doesn't go back through zero (which would normally give a chance to extinguish an arc) DC just keeps on arcing

Re: Fun stuff

To be fair, i'm not sure which would be more dangerous: Opening a 48V DC breaker at 10,000A or opening a 400V DC breaker at 1000A

The arc voltage goes with the parasitic inductance of the busbars and the (rate of change of) current. I'm not sure that the nominal line voltage would add much to that!

Re: Fun stuff

Yes er, 1.25 kA busbars instead of 21kA busbars .... madness indeed!

I wouldn't be surprised if they were using 11kV AC input too.. That would still be 90 Amps per rack!

Re: Three-phase

> 100's of KW per rack, 10 years ago.

I must admit I was skeptical when I read that, but you're right! Wikipedia has a blurry photo of a Power7 775 rack that claims to be 360kW, using 400V DC (350-520VDC)

Disney Slack attack wasn't Russian protesters, just a Cali dude with malware

Note to a Hack

> Nullbulge claimed to be an hacking group from Russia

It's only "an" for a word beginning with H if you don't pronounce the 'H'

E.g. "An 'orrendous cyberattack"

But since Hack and Hacking are never pronounced 'ack or 'acker, you do not need the "an" article.

British govt agents step in as Harrods becomes third mega retailer under cyberattack

Re: We can't continue to regard these simply as "IT Problems"

> The failure of the electricity grids in Spain and Portugal has amply demonstrated our dependence on a whole variety of technologies and our lack of preparedness for their inevitable failures. Although failures are relatively rare, their effects can be very pervasive and prolonged.

Speaking of which: There was also a fire at one of the most critical 400kV substations which barely made the news a few days ago...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2wvz4pjryo

Fortunately it didn't cause a major outage, but this sort of thing is becoming startlingly common

I bet the spooks are, well, spooked.

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

AI models routinely lie when honesty conflicts with their goals

No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information.

We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.

...

Just a moment..

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

Re: Not enough intertia...

> from what I read, has been tested and due to be available next year.

It can't have been tested, because we haven't had a nationwide blackout to test it with yet!

There is such a thing as a "grid-forming inverter" that can run without an upstream supply, and there is also such a thing as "virtual inertia" whereby a battery-backed inverter will try to stabilise the frequency at 50Hz. However, both have stability problems when you try to connect multiple 'islands' together to form a larger grid (i.e. your 'bottom up' approach)

I personally think we need to follow Spain and have an organised test of our Black Start systems, we may soon need them!

Er..

Suspecting a blatant, obvious, well-known "anti-west troll" of being a Russian troll is hardly "demonising millions of people" - it's demonising the few thousand people who work in Putin's Internet-troll department.

Nobody here is demonising ordinary Russians who live their daily lives terrified of one day being sent to the pointless war.

Absolutely, homes and businesses should have battery storage and solar panels / wind. It's "grid battery" storage, and large-scale wind/solar farms that we really DON'T need.

Nevertheless there are technical challenges with distributed generation, most inverters require an upstream AC 50Hz source to synchronise with, otherwise they don't work. Of course it is possible to run an inverter in off-grid mode, but it is dangerous to have one that can operate both on- and off-grid, usually they are one or the other and not both. (without interlocks, you risk driving your inverter into the grid i.e. an effective short-circuit, or electrocuting a maintenance technician who tests a cable dead which then becomes live, or closing a switch with both sides live but out of phase, resulting in double the normal short circuit current and a spectacular bang..)

All of this means that the more distributed generation and centralised renewable generation that we have, it makes it all the more difficult to restart a grid once it collapses

If every household were equipped with the necessary switchgear to make on/off grid microgeneration safe, then we would have much better resilience and I hope that's what starts to come in the wake of this incident

Stockbridge dampers- yes. But different oscillation modes have different frequencies.. This mode is considered 'rare' apparently, so maybe the dampers are tuned to a different frequency.

There is another explanation going around that it is 'extreme temperature variations' i.e. thermal expansion related.. Both cause failure by metal fatigue.

I wonder if it is all speculation so far besides some evidence of metal fatigue on a damaged overhead line, which the power company haven't yet made public

They are blaming "induced atmospheric vibration" probably aeolian vibration (apparently happens with slow, uniform, laminar-flow wind perpendicular to the transmission line), which suggests that this was a single transmission line fault which then cascaded. If so, then the next question is: Did anyone at the Spanish grid operator realise that they were a single fault away from a nationwide blackout?

Backblaze denies 'sham accounting' claims as short sellers circle

Re: :(

No, I disagree - It is much easier to spread negative press about something/someone/some company than positive press. Social media has time and again proven that people are more likely to engage with negative posts than positive ones.. Meanwhile, marketing departments are all busy spreading as much positive press about their own companies as possible, and as much as we all hate marketing, it does boost the economy. (and there is not much that someone with a 'long position' could do in the media that a marketing department hasn't already done, that's where I think your comparison is flawed)

Short-sellers on the other hand are parasitic. They can do damage very easily whether their claims about a company they are shorting are true or not. They don't even need to disclose their short position when they are smearing their victims on social media.

Short sellers have their place in the economy in the same way as disease has its place in nature. Without pathogens, we would all have weaker immune systems, suffer allergies etc, and natural selection would no longer work.. But that doesn't mean we should all endeavor to contract gonorrhea

Re: :(

As I understand it, short-selling works like this:

---

Hello shareholders, may I borrow some of your shares please? I'll give them back to you later, with some nominal interest

Hey I've just sold the shares I borrowed, into some of your open 'buy' orders - thanks for the dosh! But I'll buy some again soon so that I can give them back to you as agreed..

OH BY THE WAY, Did you know that there were all kinds of shenanigans at this company? I knew all along how bad things were, they were cooking the books, and now I've just told the World! Tee hee hee... Those shares that I borrowed from you and sold at yesterday's market value might be completely worthless tomorrow! It won't cost much for me to buy them back again for you..

I've made a tidy profit! Here are your worthless shares back, and some extra worthless shares by way of interest! Sucks to be you, losers

---

In other words, even though as you say, "short-sellers have a place in an efficient capital market", they are still fundamentally predatory, especially where they publicly attack the company to boost their short position.

The problem with the law that you referenced is that there is a very black-and-white definition of "nonpublic information" - If a short-seller takes a piece of information that is technically public but not widely known, but then makes it VERY public by, for example, pulling some strings to get it published on the front page of the Financial Times, then they might evade justice for what is a pretty scummy act

Re: :(

+1

In what legal system is it ok to take out a short position against a stock, and then start publicly throwing shit at the company?

Even if the allegations were true, wouldn't this be insider trading if they were aware of dodgy dealings before they took out the short position?

TAKE IT DOWN Act? Yes, take the act down before it's too late for online speech

No doubt it was backronymed (and drafted) by an "AI" chatbot, just like the tariff "calculation" ...

AI Productivity boost in action?

Watch out for any Linux malware sneakily evading syscall-watching antivirus

Re: What a surprise

> A tool specifically made to avoid syscalls, which just happen to be what AV tools are actively watching, is hijacked by miscreants for their own nefarious purposes.

There is no claim that this has been 'hijacked' by any 'miscreants', yet. It's just AFAICT the usual story of an AV/infosec outfit hyping a relative non-issue with a so-called PoC developed by themselves, for rep points

Rather than release a PoC that does not really constitute a vulnerability (the only 'concept' that it proves is that AV is fundamentally rather futile), a kernel PR would have been more welcome. Any would-be miscreant can take the PoC and perhaps evade detection, but then that is hardly the modern miscreant's primary concern

Once there is malware running on any system, AV or no AV you're 90% screwed anyway

Duolingo jumps aboard the 'AI-first' train, will phase out contractors

But but but

AI has absolutely no detrimental effect on jobs! None at all! A bunch of economists have spoken! It's all just a productivity tool, it's not destroying the planet and it's the best thing since sliced Bitcoin!

DARPA to 'radically' rev up mathematics research. Yes, with AI

A Mathematician's Hell

would be trying to validate complex-yet-bogus proofs spat out of a bullshit machine, endlessly

AI-driven 20-ft robots coming for construction workers' jobs

Where's Will Smith when you need him?

That Zyrex looks just like the USR demolition bot from I,Robot ..

Hydrotreated vegetable oil is not an emission-free swap for diesel in datacenters

No shit

What's even dafter than covering prime arable land in solar panels when you could be growing food instead?

Growing rapeseed (with the aid of a lot of gas-fueled ammonium nitrate fertiliser) and then burning it in Diesel engines!

£136M government grant saves troubled Post Office from suboptimal IT

Re: But, but, but...

No, we sold Royal Mail..

Or rather "they" (Blair government IIRC?) did.

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

Re: Never heard of Romex cables?

It's just called "3 core and Earth"... Not as common as the single-phase variety "Twin and Earth" used for house wiring.

ICE enlists Palantir to develop all-seeing 'ImmigrationOS' eye to speed up deportations

Re: The orange colossus

And if they are too numerous to deport, what to do with them then?

If you thought it can't get any worse, history tells us it can and it will.

Datacenters selling power back to the grid? Don’t bet on it, say operators

Re: Virtue

Yeah interesting point. Applies to HVDC too, presumably. How do they cope with expansion lengthways for a direct buried cable? Put loops in along its length?

Also worth noting that for underground transmission, Gas Insulated Lines (GIL) are a thing. This is a wide (~0.5m diameter) stainless steel pipeline, with an aluminium conductor pipe in the centre, surrounded by SF6 or similar insulating gas. They have a fatter dielectric so less capacitance, but are horrendously expensive and require a very wide trench to be dug (10m wide for 6x gas insulated lines, or 15m wide for 18 cables carrying the same current), and takes 3-6 months per km to install (see link below)

@elsergio I wonder if this is the assessment you were thinking of?

It says (p9-10) that overhead line has 70 times less unavailability than cable (because pylons are much easier to repair) and 15 times less unavailability than GIL (but personally I am skeptical of the stated reliability and mean time to repair of GIL, it being a very new technology compared to overhead lines and cables - I can imagine a fault on a direct buried gas insulated line taking a horrendous effort to repair, if the line leaked, arced and became contaminated) also very nasty for the environment if they are filled with SF6

And on p17 it says that cable costs between 12 and 16 times as much per km than overhead line. GIL is claimed to be slightly cheaper than cable for this project (Hinkley-Seabank), but again I am skeptical about that.

The best option by far IMO is Pylons, they are far easier to repair when damaged, and have in my view LESS impact on the landscape, given the motorway-width trenches that have to be dug for both GIL and cable, compared to the small footprints of lattice towers

Re: Grid batteries?

Yes, as Martin says, the difference is scale.

Batteries are very efficient and very powerful, but they are extremely expensive per unit energy. We need Copper, Graphite, Lithium, Cobalt etc. to make each unit of storage, (which are mined and processed at huge environmental cost) and they have a limited lifespan - the more batteries that we have in service, the more we need to manufacture and dispose of per year just to replace them when they reach end-of-life. It's not sustainable.

Whereas pumped hydro absolutely IS scalable - because gravity is free, Water is abundant and essentially free, and all you fundamentally need to increase the energy storage capacity of a pumped hydro system is more water and/or more elevation. And it never degrades over time.

Wind and pumped hydro COULD work.. If we relaxed planning rules and sold a few mountains out of the Crown estate.. We could make a nice quarry on the top of Mount Snowdon, get some lovely stone for buildings, hollow out the summit into a reservoir, dig some nice tunnels, erect lots of pylons all the way to Scotland, and then we'd have a few more GWh of storage. Of course, a lot of people would object to this destruction of the natural landscape, and they would much prefer to (not) see cobalt mines in Africa, Lithium mines in Brazil, pollution in China, even if they were 1000 times worse for the environment per unit of storage.

Nuclear works though. Yes it's expensive, but only artificially so, due to utterly barmy regulations.. And it is dependable, zero carbon energy! Wind is zero carbon but not dependable, and Gas is dependable but not zero carbon. There's a huge value gap (equal to the astronomical cost of building sufficient and reliable long duration storage) between having one and having both, which many people seem to neglect..

Imagine if all renewables had to implement storage, and all fossil fuel and Biomass burners had to implement Carbon Capture and Storage such that they emitted zero CO2 - that would make nuclear look cheap even with the current level of radio-paranoia.

Re: Grid batteries?

No, i'm pointing out the enormous gulf between batteries and a feasible "LDES" (long duration energy storage). If we wanted to get rid of gas (and Biomass, which is even worse than gas or even coal IMO), we would need LDES of this order of magnitude. Batteries just aren't suitable for this.

> Batteries (and in this case I also include Pump storage Hydro) are great for smoothing out peeks and troughs in demand, and only need last long enough to spin up another generation source...

I literally said this.

> As for energy efficacy charge vs discharge. take a look at the energy efficiency of a transformer, a linear power supply, any form of heat based power generation system etc.

Of course. But the entire UK transmission network has an overall average loss factor of 1.5%, including all of the transformers, overhead lines, cables etc. between the generator and the grid supply point substation.

Pumped hydro is even less efficient than batteries, at 70-80%. It -is- of course good for LDES, but you can't build them just anywhere, you need an existing mountain

Except that telling a datacentre to reduce its consumption actually means telling it to start its Diesel generators - hardly 'green'.. They aren't going to be shutting down or throttling any of their customers when they could just burn some oil instead.

They are NOT good for the grid (if anything, they are quite destabilising) and thanks to soon-to-be-introduced locational pricing, high-demand areas will pay more, so you will be paying that 20% sooner or later.

(didn't downvote you though)

Re: Grid batteries?

Er, it isn't...

Batteries can't be used to plug wind lulls (dunkelflaute) because we simply can't make enough of them - we'd need almost 1TWh to power the UK for a day, and the entire global supply of batteries is 3TWh/year, and we can't scale up production by an order of magnitude or three, because the production of batteries is already causing massive (and unacceptable in my view) environmental loss/damage, and they also have a serious waste/recycling problem.

Grid batteries are only used to make money by arbitrage (like with interconnectors) and to keep the grid frequency stable during sudden changes in supply/demand, while we warm up or cool down some gas plants (the combined cycle part of a CCGT is a steam turbine, and it takes a while to ramp up and down) - batteries can plug that half-hour gap, but they can't cover weather-induced gaps without gas.

The cycle round-trip efficiency of battery storage system is 90-92%, so 8-10% is lost.

They work on a small scale (rooftop solar etc) but at grid scale, it's daft IMO. If we're to have any hope of decarbonisation (and have a chance of survival past the last drop of oil), we need to loosen the regulatory stranglehold on Nuclear. (and stop wasting electrons on bullshit machines)

Re: Virtue

Er, unfortunately no, not really!

Underground cables only make sense for short distances due to the capacitance of the cable (not to mention the expense) see: https://xcancel.com/EngineerLondon/status/1791012963945488815#m

The capacitance (due to the close proximity of the 400kV live conductor to earth) causes excess current in the cable and a phase shift, which also needs expensive equipment (static VAR compensators) to correct.

HVDC is not affected by this (and that is why all long underground cables are HVDC) but HVDC has its own problems - it is not "synchronous" with the AC frequency and makes the grid more vulnerable to "islanding" where one part of the grid ends up out of phase with the other - a headache for transmission operators. It's also very expensive (requiring big, power electronic convertor stations) and tends to be point-to-point only, not in a network.

I'd say that the opposite is true: Pylons are cheap - underground cables only make sense if you are a manufacturer of cables and HV power electronics

But do link to the assessment that you mention

Re: Virtue

> from emergency batteries meant to keep themselves alive

There is a certain amount of greenwashing PR bullshit here.

Datacentres would never start discharging their batteries to the grid until they have completed the transfer to Diesel or Gas power. So pretending that it is somehow "green" because it is "from batteries", is bollocks really.

There are already DCs (e.g. Microsoft) which overprovision backup generation by a factor of two or more (Diesel and OCGT, each able to supply the full load of the datacentre, plus batteries for the changeover time) and they intend to run both Diesel and OCGT so that they can export power to the grid when it is profitable to do so.

The bottleneck is the grid connection itself, and they are trying to optimise the use of that by running it both ways (instead of simply disconnecting and falling back to backup generation when the grid pays them to do so, they put their generators into overdrive and their substation into full reverse, because the grid i.e. the tax/bill payer, are paying them top dollar)

The main reasons that this is needed profitable, are 1) because NIMBYs object to pylons, so there are transmission constraints, and the UK is considering having 'locational pricing' instead of improving infrastructure, 2) because the distribution networks are decrepit and there is not enough capacity in dense urban areas like West London, and 3) because datacentre builders refuse to build in places like Scotland where they would reduce grid constraints rather than exacerbate them.

Hacking US crosswalks to talk like Zuck is as easy as 1234

Re: Only in America

In Britain, they just beep, but they have a little knob on the bottom which is motorised and rotates when it is beeping.

It's a lot simpler than having a bluetooth microcontroller in every pushbutton unit.

You have to feel around the underside of the pushbutton box until you find its knob, grab the knob, and wait for it to start twiddling.

Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies

Re: Countermeasures?

So put the camera in a thin metal box, with a fine wire mesh or "conductive glass" (as used in phone touchscreens etc) in front of the lens? Or use a tiny hole in the metal box AS a lens? (as in a pinhole camera)

Re: Other targets

E-bikes and E-scooters. And phones, obviously

Re: Shielding

Yes.

Any further questions?

Re: Countermeasures?

Which moves faster: A drone carrying an automatic shotgun (a glider, you say?) or a drone not carrying an automatic shotgun?

Heat can make Li-Ion batteries explode. Or restore their capacity, say Chinese boffins

Re: OK I have some swollen LiPo packs

one: That was obviously a joke - If anyone here is daft enough to think it wasn't, then the reg needs a disclaimer on the article to say "don't try this at home" - heating up a battery that wasn't designed for it is obviously a terrible idea, hence my IT crowd reference to the fire brigade

two: "LiPo" (with a lowercase 'o') refers to Lithium Ion batteries with a polymer electrolyte (Lithium Polymer) -usually these are NMC chemistry and commonly used in drones, RC cars, e-bikes and the like. Typically unfused pouch cell stacks with taps for balancing, and they tend to 'puff up' when they expire, as they evolve Hydrogen internally. They are probably the most flammable/dangerous sort of lithium battery.