Posts by cyberdemon

AI superintelligence is a Silicon Valley fantasy, Ai2 researcher says

> Or given the state of ram price increases, provide them a stockpile of wafers they can sell to the highest bidder for a tidy profit.

Yeah, that fits, with the whole Taiwan thing ...

A bit like stockpiling gold, art, and faberge eggs before WWII

Re: I keep saying this but...

> the largely shared view that people, 700 years ago, believed the Earth to be flat have been proven totally wrong by current historical research.

Please do be a good citizen and provide a link that supports your somewhat dubious offtopic assertion? And no, YouTube does not count.

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What is being sold as so-called AI is little more than an average of observed human (and increasingly non-human) interactions/observations.

If you ask it a well-defined, specific question, it will give a slightly different answer each time. (not good, if you wanted a computer). And for an open-ended, creative question it will give still different, but eerily similar answers. (not good, if you wanted an artist)

There is no reasoning, no logic, no original thought and indeed, no ghostly soul. It is a dark mirror that absorbs and imitates the 'soul' of whomever has the misadventure of interacting with it.

Throwing more power at it, stacking more layers, is not going to change the fact that it is simply a pile of statistics ABOUT life, and not actual life.

But for those who simply need a fast army of idiots who don't ask moral questions, it's great...

Running a scam house? ChatGPT won't rat you out. Want to hook teenagers on mindless short-form crap videos? Sora won't get bored. Want to launch hack+ransom attacks against healthcare and charities? Claude doesn't care. Want to swing an election in a foreign country? Grok is here to help. Want to analyse all citizens to find out who is unhappy with this? Gemini won't question why. Want to control armed robots to exterminate them all? Peter Thiel is working on that.

Google fixes super-secret 8th Chrome 0-day

What about Chromium and derivatives?

Er, so presumably the same thing affects the open-source Chromium and its derivatives (MS Edge etc)? but Google are keeping it under-wraps.. So does that mean Chromium et al are unable to patch it?

Space-power startup claims it can beam energy to solar farms

Re: But...why?

Er, and beaming 100GW from a definitely-entirely-safe-and-peaceful Space Laser is so much more feasible??

I'm far from a solar+storage cheerleader (I do have panels on a flat roof, but not a battery) but this company just sounds like a fake-science pitch to give clueless, drugged-to-the-eyeballs HNW investors a greed-orgasm as they dream about a) selling overnight sunlight to solar farms (which actually they don't need - they need undercloud sunlight, which this doesn't solve) and/or b) holding the world to ransom with a Bond Villain / Dr Evil style superweapon

Re: Daft question?

We both got downvoted though..

Someone has shares in orbital lasers?

Daft question?

Why lasers? Couldn't they use an array of precisely actuated mirrors?

Surely cheaper than the cost of solar panels bigger than a ground-based solar farm in space, plus Gigawatts of laser, and the inefficiency/losses of both..

Or maybe they are looking for something more weaponisable ...

Electric cars no more likely to flatten you than the noisy ones, study finds

Re: Vehicle weight?

Agreed - watching an electric 4WD SUV cross an intersection with full torque from stopped, to dangerously dash between traffic on the main road, makes you immediately realise why there are so many potholes in that spot. The traction control might avoid ejecting the tarmac directly into the windscreen of the car behind, but it still breaks off with the force of acceleration of the massive EV.

Diversion to power datacenters earns Boom Supersonic a ticket to revive fast air transport

Re: Boom vs aeroderivative vs industrial turbines

"High bypass turbofan" doesn't even make sense when you are talking about a generator...

Obviously, you would omit (or remove, in the case of an engine from a scrapped 747) the turbofan part and attach an alternator shaft instead..

Re: I'll take things that didn't happen

> but I can imagine that a turbine originating from a supersonic jet application would score highly on the power density front

I.e. the one thing that a land-based power generator doesn't need?

What they DO need is efficiency, which as others have already pointed out, is something that Open-Cycle Gas Turbines such as this one struggle with.

TLDR: Failed Tech Bro runs out of cash, calls his mate with an excuse to defraud some more investors

AI mania to swell datacenter capex to $1.6T by 2030 – if the bubble doesn't pop first

Except that they get to go short before everyone else...

Dumping your own doomed customers for profit, cementing their doom.. Surviving the crash by being the one to instigate it. 2026 sounds like a good time for it, as we are likely to see a er.. sharp fall in chip production in 2027 anyway.

And nobody in power seems to care about insider trading, market manipulation or anticompetitive practices any more, so maybe they'd get away with it.

The biggest losers will be us ordinary folks though, because the coke-snorting bankers who run the pension funds will be the ones still buying into the crash

Microsoft reports 7.8-rated zero day, plus 56 more in December Patch Tuesday

Re: Ohhh No

So.. Yet another root-privilege escalation bug, this time in Microsoft's cloud shitware, combined with umpteen RCEs, and a faulty updater that downloads malware, and a signature checker that can be fooled into not checking the signature.. (El Reg hack: It might be useful if you could inform/reassure Notepad++ users how to update Notepad++ without downloading malware)

Isn't Windows life wonderful!

As humanoid robots enter the mainstream, security pros flag the risk of botnets on legs

Re: Have we learned nothing from sci-fi films and TV shows?

I think many of them actually *want* to create a dystopia.

Their reasoning is probably along the lines of "the tech now exists to create a dystopia, therefore dystopia is inevatibly coming, and it's better (for me) if I become MechaHitler before someone else does"

Publishers say no to AI scrapers, block bots at server level

Entire Internet held to ransom..

So, Google has merged its search crawler with its AI crawler, so that any website that doesn't want to be slurped by Gemini gets delisted from the Internet...

All the other tech twats will do the same. Unless someone either wins an Antitrust suit, or er, nukes the San Andreas fault and sinks south-western California into the Pacific. Where's Lex Luthor when you need him?

But what I don't understand is, why anyone would use an AI browser that ingests every webpage they view, then chews it up and spits out a slop version

Palantir wants to set the juice loose with new AI power initiative

@IGotOut thanks for that..

Using pseudo-religious rhetoric to justify themselves becoming artificial "gods" via AI surveillance? It's straight out of Deus Ex.

The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now, we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.

(as a game released in 2000, Deus Ex is something like 1984 is to literature. Most would treat it as a dystopian, cautionary tale; but some seem hell-bent on emulating it for their own absolute power. It was based on a mashup of conspiracy theories from 90s usenet groups, but seems to have been frighteningly prescient. I never played through the sequels, they seem rubbish compared to the original)

Er, yeah.

It's like spending the entire energy output of the Industrial Revolution (and suffering its environmental.. drawbacks) for the sake of er, content-free slop, automated fraud, nonconsensual porn, and a big-brother global surveillance super-state exactly of the kind that Thiel says he wants to "prevent" ...

According to Peter Thiel, opponents of AI are "Legionnaires of the Antichrist"...

That sounds like an example of "Accusation in a Mirror" i.e. "Accuse your enemy of that of which you are guilty" to me!

The weakness of the strategy is that it reveals the perpetrator's intentions, perhaps before it can be carried out.

i.e. perhaps Thiel's actual intention is to deliberately bring about an AI-pocalypse

OpenAI turns the screws on chatbots to get them to confess mischief

I think even the term "inferencing" is misleading, since it implies that there is some kind of logical reasoning or deduction going on when there isn't.

They should really be called "guessing machines"; whether that be guessing who's face is on a CCTV camera, guessing what code might fit a problem, or guessing which tokens come next in a sequence.

Tweaking the system prompt is not going to solve anything. Fundamentally, an average of "wot humans do" in various situations, cannot be deemed intelligent. And no, adding noise doesn't help.

London grid crunch delays new housing amid datacenter boom

Re: Frack off

The other thing I forgot to mention there btw (and couldn't edit due to a Reg service interruption), is the shortage of electricity distribution. There is a global shortage of "Grain Oriented Electrical Steel" as well as copper, which are the basic materials of grid transformers, and one major reason why new electrical infrastructure is so difficult and expensive to build right now.

Datacentres are directly contributing to this shortage, because they require their own substations, even if they have on-site generation.

Datacentres are being given priority for critical infrastructure that is in shortage, leading to a shortage of housing and an increase in overall bills, as "network costs" begin to dominate our electricity prices, not just the daft markets I mentioned in my above post.

Even when we do have the raw materials, we have NIMBY anti-pylon landowners confounding infrastructure builds, insisting on infeasible and expensive underground cables (which are fundamentally inefficient due to the capacitive leakage of HV AC cables over long distances)

The sooner the AI bubble bursts, the sooner we can have affordable electricity and housing again. Keeping the bubble going via Fracking is a terrible idea.

Frack off

It's not the fracking ban that's the problem.. It's wasting energy on giant water-evaporators that produce little to no to negative actual value.. And it's the perverse system of electricity markets and subsidies that reward shyster operators at our expense. Setting the price for all generators as that of the highest bidder. Subsidising wind farms for excess generation in the wrong place at a time when we don't need it (they should be paid only for producing what power is needed - encouraging them to invest in building their own storage, NOT collecting curtailment subsidies). Frequency-response markets designed to stabilise the grid but which actually create a mechanism for dishonest companies to be rewarded by destabilising it.. Subsidising Drax for being the worst polluter in the UK. etc. etc..

Crocs get the Xbox treatment with sole-crushing price of $80

Seriously?

I assumed this was a joke article with an AI-generated image...

But no, apparently this is real.. And it doesn't even function as a controller

Well done for the "sole-crushing" headline though. Made me groan.

HSBC spies $207B crater in OpenAI's expansion goals

> So with 88% of the world population over 15 as subscribers, a 10% price hike, advertising, licensing and assuming their costs stay the same, OpenAI might just about break even.

So assuming they could annihilate all competition and force every single human on the planet to pay for a CrapGPT subscription from cradle to grave, how long would it take them to pay their existing debt??

I really wonder wtf their investors and lenders are smoking

(And of course, their costs would NOT stay the same - they'd need a lot more chips and a lot more 'leccy for starters.. Unless the population just pay the subscription in spite of hours-late answers or 503 errors)

Praise Amazon for raising this service from the dead

"Praise Amazon for raising this service from the dead"

Just stop NOW with the clickbait headlines. You could have said "Praise Amazon for raising CodeCommit from the dead" instead of "this service" and saved those of us who couldn't care a jot the trouble of clicking on it to find out which effing service.

DragonFire laser to be fitted to Royal Navy ships after acing drone-zapping trials

In other news..

https://interestingengineering.com/military/china-makes-one-second-capacitor-tech

https://defenceagenda.com/chinas-ly%E2%80%911-laser/

Re: pew pew pew

Well, "Q-switched" pulse lasers will (not just due to heating at the target, but along the length of the beam, so I understand. Given enough energy it would sound like a thunderclap).

But what sound do high-power continuous beam lasers make? Enquiring minds need to know

Re: pew pew pew

Anyone else remember Earth 2150?

Re: power cost

Presumably, the £10 includes the maintenance required after every 100 or so "shots", i.e. replacing the front glass if it has been fired after a seagull has crapped on it.

Re: Field trials?

> Power supply and cooling can be limiting for land based laser defence systems. The article mentions 50kW so you need a generator that will provide that, and a fair bit of it will land up as waste heat that you need to get rid of.

News from 2028: Google, Meta and Microsoft datacentres to get rooftop LDEWs to deter fleshy meatsacks from attempting to turn off the AI

UK minister ducks cost questions on nationwide digital ID scheme

> Anybody know when the next predicted apocalypse is? I've had enough.

This Christmas, apparently!

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: Mea culpa !

I feel bad for the spinning disks in your (and Peanut's) mail servers

Desktop and server drives were not designed to be lugged about when running!

Also, pretty sure the UPS is not meant to run without an Earth connection. It's (probably) still safe from an electrocution point of view, but it is unable to suppress any RFI from its MOSFET bridge

Re: Those were the innocent days...

There's always `kexec`, if you really want to replace a running kernel without interrupting your uptime..

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Re: "I grew up playing Snake on a Nokia phone!"

Or rather infiltrated, sabotaged, bought at fire-sale price after setting the fire, and then killed ...

I can never forgive them for killing Maemo. Nokia's debian-based OS for the N900, before ex-MS exec Elop came in as the new CEO and immediately killed it, because his real employer were trying to push the abomination that was Windows Phone.

Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats

The Italians have a word for this:

Dilettante

Someone who knows a little about a lot, and at the extreme end, believes themselves to be an expert in anything/everything.

These people (or bots) can sometimes accelerate a project in its early stages, but the further the project progresses, the more their suggestions serve only to derail it.

Ignite awash with agents as Microsoft triples down on AI

> Some of the agents are undoubtedly useful and increase staff productivity.

Yes, if the operation is scamming old grannies out of their savings, you may be right.

Cloudflare broke itself – and a big chunk of the Internet – with a bad database query

"Hmm, taking a while to push.. Oh well, time for coffee"

* phones ring; alarms blare *

OMG, it's broken!

ChatGPT, fix it!

...ChatGPT?

Oh no!

Who, me?

Whups

-EFBIG

Datacenter fossil fuel habit 'not sustainable' as AI workloads soar

Re: Relax.

To be fair to the Beeb, it was quite a critical interview. And they already have one billionaire threatening to sue..

I'm glad they didn't let anyone call them "biased" this time..

Microsoft blanks out BSODs on public displays with new ‘Digital Signage mode’

Desperation

So they are covering up their borkage by turning off the display after a BSOD ....

Who would use Windows for digital signage anyway???

Never mind BSODs, i've seen plenty of digital signboards borked by a Windows Update nagscreen. Will they blank that out too?

Anthropic is at the heart of the latest billion-dollar circular AI investment bonanza

A bubble that blows itself

Thanks for that subhead

Here I am, imagining some sort of inverted, circular human centipede...

And i'm out of mind-bleach

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: Ruined Lunchtime

Or worse: Ycombinator

Re: Single point of failure

> Is it easy to switch back to routing requests directly to your service when Cloudflare is glitching or unavailable?

Well, El Reg was up and down synchronously with some other sites for an hour or two; but now seems it is consistently up, while the other sites are still down. So maybe they did exactly that?

Scientific computing is about to get a massive injection of AI

Re: So the scientists

Precise, perhaps, but clearly not very accurate.

Overconfidence is the new zero-day as teams stumble through cyber simulations

Re: security spending goes up

> I swear if the job comes up to do the IT for the Chinese embassy in london, I'll take it & if ever approached by a couple of guys called John with regulation haircuts asking me to do them a "patriotic favour" , I'll tell them openly to fuck off! And then put it online

I wouldn't touch a job like that with a barge pole, personally. I'd rather keep myself away from the "room 101" torture chamber.

Power: The answer to and source of all your AI datacenter problems

Re: Prioritise

No no no, you fool! Once they have connected all the multi-Gigawatt datacentres across the globe, the super-duper-intelligent AGI singularity will surely have been achieved! Because something that burns more energy than all life on earth must be more intelligent, right.

Then, the AGI will invent a new pathogen/bomb/terminator to destroy all humans, except for the squillionaire-class in their bunkers, and thus the world will be Reborn! Yeats has foretold it! And Girard has explained it!

Just like in Deus Ex, or James Bond, or 1984, etc etc.

They literally believe they are "righteous supervillains". Where's JC Denton when we need him?

Or, more hopefully: They are simply deluded; There will be nothing more than accelerated stupidity and waste to come out of all these interconnected AI superhubs, and good old economics will come along to burst their cult bubble sooner rather than later.

UK tribunal says reselling Microsoft licenses is A-OK

Re: Copyright?

So, Mr Nadella, about that slop-machine of yours. Would you like to pay copyright royalties on every text and image it has ingested over the last decade?

No? Thought not

Ransomed CTO falls on sword, refuses to pay extortion demand

Re: Bad things happen. And once they've happened, how you respond is important.

I commend the CTO's response, but nevertheless it sounds as if their system was a leaky "Bucket" of insecurity...

The manufacturer of buckets may be at least partially culpable for selling buckets which were leaky by default

Google apes Apple, swears cloud-based AI will keep your info private

Google, perhaps not the first name you'd associate with privacy

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"We will respect your privacy" from Google is about as credible as "We won't cut down any trees or emit any CO2" from Drax PLC

OpenAI’s viability called into question by reported inference spending with Microsoft

..Credibility?.. No, that wasn't it

UK asks cyberspies to probe whether Chinese buses can be switched off remotely

Re: Pelican is wilfully missing the point...

It's pretty simple to measure the internal resistance of the battery (which is all that matters for stop/start). Temporarily pause the charging circuit, measure voltage and current, correlate large increases in current with drops in voltage and divide voltage by current

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

2000 was the last "Good" version of Windows IMO

I made the switch to Linux shortly after that and never looked back