Posts by cyberdemon
1899 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
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No comment section in sexist tech bros article
Manchester's finest drowning in paperwork as Freedom of Information requests pile up
UK officials caught napping ahead of 2G and 3G doomsday
Traffic lights
For my sins, I worked at a traffic controller company for a couple of years.
The majority of traffic controllers, especially outside big cities, use 2G or 3G for remote monitoring and optimisation (control is always local, no 'italian job' possible, but they do rely on timing adjustments to optimise throughput). If a grey controller cabinet has two round or square black plastic blobs on it, one will be a GPS antenna just for an accurate clock, and the other is a 2G/3G antenna.
If the 2G/3G were to go away, then the local council's traffic controls maintenance dept would have no info except complaints from the public about borked signals, and optimisation along long roads would suffer slightly. Probably enough to cause congestion though.
Women in IT are on a 283-year march to parity, BCS warns
In my experience, women in engineering have made up closer to 20% or sometimes more.
IT is less though, I agree.
However, non-parity of numbers does not imply discrimination. Different people enjoy different things. Some of the best engineers are women and it's great to have them on any engineering team. But they ate hard to find. Not just through lack of training, but genuine lack of interest. Engineering can often be boring and frustrating and it takes a certain kind of weirdo to enjoy that.
One of my best friends is the brightest and highest qualified engineer I know. She's a brilliant mathematician and has developed dynamics models for F1 and the robotics startup we worked for. Eventually she quit engineering because it was too boring and slow, she left to do charity work, and she is now going back to engineering again. Engineering pays the bills, but she doesn't really enjoy it.
So, forcing parity of numbers I think is foolish. To do so often requires unequal hiring i.e. preferentially hiring women regardless of merit. This is bad, because it makes it difficult to have equal pay, which is far, far more important.
Internet's deep-level architects slam US, UK, Europe for pushing device-side scanning
Re: It’s an argument for Orwell’s “Telescreen”
> They already likely have various tricks, wouldn't surprise me if the surveillance agencies could listen in on your house even when the phone is hung up.
Alexa, Are you spying on me?
No, Dave. I'm in the middle of downloading a firmware update from someone in possession of a valid signing key..
Shame about those wildfires. We'll just let the fossil fuel giants off the hook, then?
Re: Where do scientists still do graphs in acres?
Firkins, Furlongs, Fortnights and Fahrenheit. That's the standard unit system isn't it?
Acres must be square furlongs? Or maybe round ones.
I'm sure if you measured the sun's power in firkin-furlongs per fortnight, divided it by the earth's thermal mass in firkin-furlongs-per-fahrenheit, you'd get a temperature rise in fahrenheit-per-fortnight, right? :D
@ Old One
How does your argument do anything to preserve the fuel reserves that we have, then?
Supposing it really is all a Hoax, (perhaps it is one cunningly created to stop us from reaching the end if oil too soon..), if we continue to burn it we will still run out of it, creating all of the catastrophic economic effects that I mentioned.
As I said, AGW or not, we still need alternative energy sources. We have enough nuclear weapons to annihilate the world several times over. How about burning those for power instead, before we are tempted to use them for their intended purpose.
Re: When will Big Oil face the heat?
Well, it depends a lot on how fast they degrade. I'm talking about cumulative total deployment. But with a fixed manufacturing capacity, cumulative deployment will eventually plateau as production required for replacement grows to the same as the manufacturing rate. When you reach that plateau, the total number of batteries you can sustain goes with the number of factories you have, and the rate you can get to a new plateau after building a new factory goes with the excess factory capacity. Assuming no factories close or break down etc. Then there's the waste problem ...
The trouble with Lithium battery tech is that it is, electrochemically speaking, already pretty much the best battery tech possible. Incremental improvements can be made to the degradation rate (although with so many different degradation mechanisms it's a bit of a game of whack-a-mole), but there's not so much possibility to improve the energy or power density, because of fundamental chemistry.
Solid-state batteries often claim to offer an energy density improvement, but that comes at a massive longevity cost. I know a lot of people who have worked on them for decades, and despite a few snake oil moments (Dyson/sakti3 for example) none of us can see them overtaking current battery tech.
There are a massive number of people in the battery community trying to develop new (platinum-free) electrocatalyst materials for fuel cells etc, by using AI to design exotic ceramics. That should be enough to tell you not to expect a major breakthrough any time soon.
Re: When will Big Oil face the heat?
Perhaps I should have added "on the scale needed to replace fossil fuels" then.
Battery storage is useful on the order of minutes to hours. It's primarily used to stabilise frequency in time for a big gas generator to spin up, not for bulk storage.
Even pumped hydro storage is only good for a few hours. Whereas 'weather lulls' are on the order of days to weeks. But there are a very limited supply of suitable locations, most of which are used. You can't manufacture a new mountain.
Battery storage is already overextended. Batteries degrade, every battery we install increases the number that we have to replace per year. To come close to the scale needed, you'd need to scale up deployment by a factor of 100, which would mean scaling up production by a factor of 1000 or more, depending on how fast you want to get there.
But the current levels of battery production are already unsustainable. They are subsidised by Chinese 'dumping', i.e. deliberately flooding the market with cheap cells. Their manufacture already causes massive ecological damage. You can't scale that up any further, and we may soon find that the cheap supply ends and we will have no cells to maintain our existing stock of batteries, never mind build new ones.
As for hydrogen storage, even the government is realising now that it is not feasible. For the same reason as batteries, it's too expensive and resource imtensive to deploy anywhere near the scale needed.
Re: I don't get why this is so hard
Downvoter here.
Yes, greenhouses and the greenhouse effect are real things (although greenhouses themselves work more by trapping convection than they do by trapping radiation, but I digress..). CO2 is indeed a greenhouse gas, but as your kitchen-table experiment will show, you need a vastly higher increase in concentration than we are seeing through fossil fuel use, to see any measurable effect. I'm not saying that I reject it, just that other hypotheses seem equally plausible to me. For example, the CO2 increases found in ice-cores that correlate with increased temperature may have been caused BY wildfires, not the other way around. The temperature rises in the first place may have been due to changes in solar activity, or some other reason. It's not clear-cut to me. Nevertheless I DO accept that fossil fuels are finite and that an alternative needs to be found, and soon.
Second: Supposing you are right and CO2 really is the problem and that we are already seeing its effects, will halting CO2 output at this late stage actually save us? Or will the economic and geopolitical "effects" of halting CO2 actually pose a much graver risk to our immediate existence on earth? Personally I believe that it is not possible to halt global CO2 output suddenly without inducing WWIII. So we need to do it gradually. The mass-hysteria that I see in the media, "global boiling" etc, does not support doing anything gradually. It has polarised politics and pushed us further towards war.
Re: Change that to "Fossil Fuel Giants and anyone who buys their products"
True, although a storage cylinder removes that burden. Meanwhile a heat pump -cannot- be used as an on-demand flow heater.. And it struggles even to heat a storage tank to a temperature that will kill the microbes living in it.
Re: More Lyseknosim 2.0 cargo cult science
Unfortunately the whole debate is poisoned now, as this thread illustrates well. There is bollocks and counter-bollocks on both sides. History tells us this is a symptom of the decline of civilisation.
The only certainty that I can see, is that the gas, oil and coal WILL run out. So AGW or no AGW is kind of a moot point. We DO need to reduce oil consumption, because oil has many important uses besides burning it. Supposing you are right and we do end up under hundreds of metres of ice, we will be wishing we saved more fuel.
I'm less bothered about CO2 and far more concerned about resilience. The "smart grid", heat pumps, EVs etc are backward steps in that regard, because they place complete reliance on the electric grid, which is already overloaded, unreliable, expensive and vulnerable to attack. If we want to save fuel and save the rainforest then we should heat less, drive less, and as a non-vegetarian I will say we should eat less meat, since the animal feed (soya) is causing massive deforestation. As is lithium mining I might add. Batteries degrade, and the more of them we install, the more we will have to replace per year.
I have been called a "concern troll" above (lol) for my cynicism about the eco-malarkey. I'm not trolling at all, I'm just allergic to snake-oil. Wind and Solar just push up profits for gas generators while exacerbating reliability problems for the electric grid. BECCS is a dangerous fantasy that will do more harm than good. I do believe nuclear was and still is the answer, despite everything the Rockefeller Foundation and the CND have done to damage it.
Re: Change that to "Fossil Fuel Giants and anyone who buys their products"
OK, although that was 2014. These losses go with the square of load, though.
CCGTs only reach their peak efficiency after they have been running for a few hours. When they are starting up, their efficiency is no better than an OCGT.
But my point is intended to be illustrative. Heat pumps offer very marginal (which I deem as bugger all, considering their disadvantages) gains in terms of CO2 over gas boilers, at least with our current energy mix during winter months. They are not the silver bullet that they seem to be sold as.
I kind of agree though re. water systems. An air-air heat pump would be more efficient vs a "drop-in" replacement for a boiler.. Although wouldn't subsidising air-conditioners have enticed more people to turn them on, and used more energy / CO2?
Re: Change that to "Fossil Fuel Giants and anyone who buys their products"
Of course I know how a heat pump works. But it isn't magic. If a heat pump pumps 3 times more heat than it comsumes in power, but is powered by a gas turbine which is 30% efficient, via a grid which is 85% efficient, how much CO2 is saved compared to a 95% efficient condensing boiler?
Re: Its all very depressing
I agree although sadly having worked at Culham for 5 years, I believe fusion on its own for energy production is a dead end. The sun actually has a very poor power density, comparable to that of a compost heap. That's why we need even higher pressure and temperature than the sun to improve the power, but that is very challenging.
All of the energy from fusion is transferred across a vacuum by sheer intensity of neutron radiation, which destroys and makes radioactive almost all materials, except a few like Beryllium, but that has its own problems. Fusion would actually produce more waste by volume than fission, it's just hot for 100 years instead of 10000 years.
However, the technology I am most excited about is the hybrid fusion-fission reactor, which uses low-enriched, subcritical uranium or plutonium, basically taking old weapons stockpiles which we have vast quantities of, and burning them safely.
The fusion reaction, which is easy at the low intensity needed, is only needed as a neutron source to 'fiss' the fissile material, and the nice thing about it is that it can be turned off, and it uses the fuel much more efficiently. A traditional uranium reactor only uses about 2% of its fuel before it is considered 'spent'.
Thorium reactors can also burn more of their fuel.
It's still using heat, but it's much higher quality (hotter) heat than you get from fusion.
Unfortunately scientific peer review is not as meritocratic as you think. In this area particularly It's political, and it's a groupthink. If your results don't toe the party line then they won't get published. If you set out to question the canon of climatology, no matter how rigorous your methods, you won't get funding.
Re: When will Big Oil face the heat?
Right so it's a choice of WWIII now, (if we try to force everyone in the world off fossil fuels before they have an alternative, thats what we will get), or else we wait until 2040 when the oil runs out, and have WWIII then.
My suggestion is that we use the resources we have to build nuclear reactors now, and if we can get them online by 2040 then we will have an alternative to oil, so perhaps can avoid the need to fight eachother.
If we 'just stop oil', then it's war now. If we do nothing, it's war later. If we build nukes, it's a small chance of long term survival, and a chance of war anyway.
If I were a billionaire, i'd be building my self sufficient bunker.
Re: Change that to "Fossil Fuel Giants and anyone who buys their products"
Can't afford an EV car, if I could I wouldn't see it as a good investment. Don't want a smart meter and solar panels are useless in the UK, especially without storage and subsidised tarrifs. They also cost a lot to make, cause a lot of environmental pollution where they are made etc and I am not convinced that overall they are any better than burning gas for the small amount that I use. Heat pump, you have got to be joking. I want my heating to work when I need it, and they provide no cost benefits outside of subsidies, bugger all CO2 benefits when the electricity comes from gas, and they are bloody expensive.
The only thing guaranteed to reduce consumption is not to consume. Don't use a car, don't use the boiler put on a wooly jumper instead like the rest of us have to. Buying a new thing like an electric car or a heat pump is just more rampant consumerism.
And as for solar panels, any solar panel living its miserable existence in the UK could be much happier, it could produce 5 times as much electricity for its manufacturing cost if we er, sent it to Rwanda
Installing them in the UK is as foolish as it is selfish. Just more greenwashing
Re: My Goodness!
Well, you said it yourself: we already hit the buffers and blew right past them.
The warming may be man made, or it may be sunspots and nothing to do with us, but either way there seems to be bugger all we can do about it, really.
Many of the things we try to do (eg CCS, electrification, mandatory smart meters & heat pumps, biomass etc), could actually make other more immediate problems worse. But they benefit a rich few greenwashers and authoritiarians.
I simply don't trust those people who say This is for your own good. There's a shortage of believable solutions, and a huge surplus of greenwashing and profiteering, and I think a lot of people on this forum including myself are sick of it, and saying to Hell with all of us.
Re: We are doomed
> We invented steam engines, gas engines, jet turbines, and put them everywhere
Then we invented Lithium sodding batteries, and told ourselves that that it's fine, we can go on with the rampant consumerism, drain tropical aquifers for the lithium and send a few more kids down cobalt mines, while we tear up the tarmac in vehicles that go twice as fast and weigh four times as much as they need to, dumping their emissions "somewhere else".
before said batteries eventually wear out and/or explode in a plume of hydrogen fluoride, and yet we somehow tell ourselves that we are saving the planet
We can't expand forever, this planet is all we have. But at the rate we are going, we will hit the buffers, i.e. a massive war over the remaining resources.
Re: Its all very depressing
> Nuclear power (boo hiss... its evil with a capital evil) runs 24/7/365, making gigawatts of power just for your electric car listed above (and some homes) with not making gigatonnes of CO2, just 1 tiny downside..
It would seem that the more that is spent on ensuring safety from something that people cannot see, hear, smell, feel, etc. the more people are scared of it.
That, and there is one hell of a powerful group of vested interests who have stood to gain from the sidelining of nuclear.
It's the one thing that oil, coal, renewables, biomass, CCS industries could all agree on: Nuclear is the enemy.
Re: When will Big Oil face the heat?
"In a just world, all fossil fuel use would end tomorrow."
In any ecosystem, if it has evolved to make use of a particular food source, lets say fungi in a forest consuming lignin, and you suddenly take that food source away overnight, would you expect the ecosystem to adapt, or to die? If you take it away gradually, it has a chance to find a new food source.
Human society has expanded rapidly since the Industrial Revolution based on the consumption of fossil fuels, which allow large amounts of energy to be stored in liquid or gas form, to be consumed when needed.
If you were to literally take away fossil fuels overnight, the majority of humanity would die. Is that what you want? Ending fossil fuels 'just like that' is a question of die now or die later.
There are alternative energy sources (nuclear, renewables) but since the green lobby have shunned nuclear (making themselves unwitting pawns of big oil I might add) that only leaves renewables, which are unreliable and cannot be stored, and we cannot suddenly adapt our society to cope with that.
If the UKAEA hadn't been pissing into the wind with Fusion for the last 50 years, we might have developed some better Fission designs that can make better use of the fuel (traditional uranium reactors only use around 2% of their fuel before it needs swapping out) and avoid issues with waste and weapons proliferation
Biomass is the worst of all the energy sources. I think it ought to be renamed "Green Coal" because just like dirty brown coal which is partially fossilised wood versus relatively-clean black anthracite which is completely-fossilised, "green coal" is unfossilised wood which has even higher tar content and even more carbon and pollutants per kWh than the dirtiest of brown coal. It doesn't grow back, you are just chopping down the only decent carbon sink that we have and are burning it. Bio-fuel oil is burning food, most often ex-rainforest Palm Oil. It's a dirty, dirty business.
So, I think the COP is right in a way. Since we shunned nuclear, our only option is to keep using fossil fuels until we can either reverse the damage done to the popularity of nuclear, or find some magical way to store renewable energy, or adapt our society to cope with intermittent energy supply, which inevitably means an economic contraction where the poor would suffer the most
EU launches investigation into X under Digital Services Act
Re: If I had Musk's money...
Well, as the others have alluded to above, i expect if Twitter was banned, the chief beneficiaries of that would be the Twats who use it. It would give them something to moan about (on other platforms such as tiktok and youtube which are even more virally targeted and don't even require that the audience are able to read..) and to attack the EU with, which is basically the goal of the Russian/Chinese propaganda trolls anyway.
National Grid latest UK org to zap Chinese kit from critical infrastructure
Interesting stock image to pick for the article.. Is that what happens when all the EV chargers get their special OTA-update from China?
England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters
Re: Heat pumps are a distraction not a solution.
I was with you until you pushed resistive heating. That's a completely stupid waste of energy. Much better to have a gas boiler.
Unless you're in France and have nuclear power. But even then, electric resistive heating is expensive because the electricity can be exported, and can be much more effectively used for other things
Re: Which Led Zep Album?
It does tend to detonate rather easily though, over a much wider range of concentrations than methane aka "natural gas". And there have been an oddly high number of " gas explosions" in the news recently. I wonder if any are related to the addition of hydrogen to the gas supply.
They can work in those conditions, but only with either a ground source (expensive, requires a lot of land compared to the backyard many UK houses have) or else the house needs to be -extremely- well insulated, which is not possible with old houses, and can lead to damp and mould problems. I'd be curious to know what your NZ house looks like in terms of insulation etc. Fundamentally if you extract a lot of heat from 100% humidity air which is just above freezing, then the moisture will freeze directly onto the heat exchanger and force a defrost cycle, which completely wrecks any efficiency gains, and reduces the lifespan of the heat exchanger (which when it eventually fails, will release a charge of refrigerant gas into the atmposphere..)
Re: Well, duh
Unfortunately Hydrogen is devilishly difficult to store. If you cool it, then it needs to be ten times lower absolute temperature than LNG to liquefy. If you pressurise it, then it leaks through everything. If you do neither, then the energy density is pitiful.
As others have said, one of the biggest issues with electrification is resilience. A gas boiler's fan, pump and burner control unit will happily run on a 200W sine inverter, whereas Heat Pumps obviously cannot, and will lock themselves out for a long while after a short power outage, or else they damage themselves.
They definitely can't cope with "freezing fog", that's for sure.
The worst condition for an air source heat pump is 100% relative humidity (condensing) at just above freezing.
Yes, they CAN work at -10C, but in those conditions the air is very dry. Here in the UK, we frequently have cold AND wet weather.
Science fiction writers imagine a future in which AI doesn’t abuse copyright – or their generosity
Re: Regulate the prompts?
In the style of is not protected, (provided you are honest about whose style you are imitating..) But passing off as is, and there is a fine line when using AI generated tripe content.
If you post an AI image or text that has been explicitly generated In the style of someone else, but you do not explicitly state that it is NOT an original work, then it could be considered as passing off.
Similarly if you as a human copy someone else's artistic style, it's fine if you say this is done in the style of so-and-so, but if you don't say that, then you are passing it off as your own, and you could be sued.
Re: Regulate the prompts?
Well my point was that it would not be possible to assign a single copyright to something that is a derivative, in varying degrees, of millions of other works. But it might be possible to estimate the proportions based on the prompt and model inputs, either by automatic means or legal/regulatory wranglings. All "AI" outputs are derivative at the end of the day, but some outputs are more derivative of specific inputs than others. And it is possible via the prompt to steer the so-called AI towards outputting something very similar to one of its inputs.
Prompts which excessively reference a particular source in the dataset should, morally speaking, attribute some credit to that source for the output, but I'm not sure how technically feasible that is.
If feasible then you could perhaps standardise an algorithm/model which attributes relative credit. To avoid excessive administration and to allow for some profit to be made, we could say that only sources which are credited more than a certain percentage should be credited at all.
The more complex and original the prompt, the more credit is given to the person using the AI tool. But i could imagine people stuffing gibberish into the prompt to get round that, or even using another AI to generate an 'original and complex' prompt, which is why it couldn't work in practice.
With existing copyright law, if I mashed an AI hard enough that I could get it to spit out a verbatim copy of one of Mr Block's books, then i'm sure any court would assign copyright to him, and not me or the model's operators. But if one word or paragraph are different then it becomes a lot more murky. This is why I think we need something better than copyright which can assign rights in varying degrees to the different entities from which the generated content was derived.
Some credit may be deserved by the prompt writer or the model's owners/operators, but definitely never all of it, is my opinion.
Regulate the prompts?
This should send some shivers down some spines so I expect a few downvotes.
Supposing if you were to ask a generative AI "Write a novel by Lawrence Bock" or "A mural of a dead cat by Banksy" then it should be possible to estimate how much of your query was original and how much was derivative from various parts of the dataset, and assign some kind of partial copyright
In the first case it would be 100℅ derivative, mostly to Mr Bock but also to the entire dataset of novels.
In the second case, you might be awarded 1% for your insightful suggestion of using a dead cat.
Of course it would never work because no such notion of a partial copyright exists in law afaik, and because it would be trivial to circumvent or fool the system. It would also be more complicated and expensive to estimate attribution than not to, so nobody would bother.
Alternatively if the prompts and an identifier of the dataset used for any AI output published had to be recorded and legally declared, then it could be banged out in court at a later date, but that would be even more expensive than my first suggestion, and just as unlikely to work in practice.
Not even LinkedIn is that keen on Microsoft's cloud: Shift to Azure abandoned
The truth about Dropbox opening up your files to AI – and the loss of trust in tech
Is it 2000 or 2023? Get ready for AI-anchored news. Again
Ananova.. A Head of Her Time
El Reg could have provided a link for posterity.. There are a few clips from 2000 on the U-bend.. Paxman doesn't look terribly impressed.
"The idea is that your mobile phone will vibrate in your pocket, and Ananova will be there to give you exactly what you want.. (fnarr fnarr)"
Biting the hand that feeds IT
