Posts by cyberdemon

Microsoft boffins cook up archival storage using Pyrex glass they say can last over 10,000 years

Re: Where is Common Sense in This?

> Ever seen the wafers they make CPUs out of?

Unless you're talking about the lunatic asylum called Cerebras, silicon wafers are cut into much smaller chips which are far more durable than wafers. And then they are soon attached permanently to a package, and sandwiched with a big copper plate.

Whereas from the Reg's pic, it appears that Microsoft's glass wafers are stacked naked on shelves, to be handled by something similar to a tape-library robot.

So I'd say An_Old_Dog's second point is perfectly valid. How much data could I erase by sending in one madman armed with a clawhammer? Or more subtly, hack the tape-library robot and change the position index of the shelf to be in the middle of the platters instead of the edge

Poland bans camera-packing cars made in China from military bases

Re: Digital security in the hands of the experts

I didn't see this, but would like to. What was the date or title of the debate, or ideally can you link to it on Hansard?

Fraudster hacked hotel system, paid 1 cent for luxury rooms, Spanish cops say

Someone give the boy a job

All he needs is a good boss to put that brain to work

Gemini lies to user about health info, says it wanted to make him feel better

Re: Just LLMs doin' LLM things

But but! We are only a mere step away from completely usurping the entire 'justice system'. Anyone (cough, cough) not yet implicated in the redacted 'Epstein Files' for example, or who is guilty of or plans to be guilty of genocide, will very soon be able to claim that the evidence against them was fabricated, and generate counter-evidence against their accusers/enemies, etc.

Worth every Trillion, i'm sure..

Re: But this is how it works

You are missing the point. The LLM doesn't "claim" anything.

"prompts" are NOT instructions, they are statistical seeds. Outputs are not logically computed or deduced. They are pulled out of a hat of randomness with the prompt as a magnet.

What you are mistaking for a "claim" made by the LLM is just a sequence of tokens which fits the statistical regression of the training data in the supplied context. Of course it is going to be wrong sometimes, and it will be more likely to be wrong the more unusual the prompt.

Why anybody lets these things anywhere near anything important, let alone "trusts" them with it is frankly mind-boggling.

The Fix

> The fix, he argues, involves recalibrating Gemini's RLHF to ensure that sycophancy can never override a safety boundary and that potential mental trauma is given equal weight to self-harm risks in the model's safety mechanisms.

No.

The Fix, involves throwing a giant switch to the 'off' position and a grovelling apology to the entire world for pretending that a LLM was ever 'intelligent' in any way whatsoever.

Amazon's $200 billion capex plan: How I learned to stop worrying and love negative free cash flow

> If you believe that we're somewhere in the "irrational exuberance" phase of AI adoption, then Amazon is building the most expensive monument to hubris since Meta spent $46 billion trying to convince the world it wanted to attend meetings as a legless cartoon avatar.

This.

And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

No thing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away.

£111M later, frictionless post-Brexit border dream 'brought to early closure'

It's Your fault.

We warned you. But You said you'd had enough of "experts", and dismissed it all as " Project Fear"

And I didn't get the *referendum* that was promised. I distinctly remember being told that it would use the same threshold as a General Election, i.e. a "majority" would be required to prevent a second referendum. 48/52 on a 75% turnout is no majority. The people had not "spoken", they couldn't have been more undecided on the matter if they had tried.

Even St Farage himself was pushing for a second referendum when it was looking close, but when he edged ahead it was all "we won you lost get over it ner ner ner"

If the boot were on the other foot, 52/48 in favour of EU membership, there would have been a second referendum and I would have been happy with that.

(Apologies, btw, if your post was sarcastic. You should have used the Joke icon.)

AI bit barns grow climate emergency by turning up the gas

Well, it is humans who incessantly ask it stupid questions, so it may decide to switch off the humans

Dutch cops arrest man after sending him confidential files by mistake

Exactly. The charge should be blackmail. Not "hacking".

If he had instead sold it to a newspaper (if it was interesting enough to be newsworthy apart from the blunder itself) and then deleted it and told the cops that he had done so, then the bloke could've got his money and all we would be hearing about would be sacked police officers.

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?

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