Posts by cyberdemon 3466 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
Or indeed, their infamous 60Hz/50Hz split.. That undoubtedly means their grid(s) is/are significantly less reliable than ours
I personally think that the UK grid has been rather too reliable - that is to say we have become complacent in expecting a 100% service.
In Cuba they suffer blackouts everyday.. I'm sure Havana airport would not have closed for a simple lack of power, because they are procedurally well used to it by now..
I think that a full scale test of our "Black Start" plan would be very useful for the UK (though no doubt costly) but I fear it may be too late to organise such a thing in today's geopolitical chaos
Not one of the downvoters you refer to, but I think the arguments are:
The site DOES have more than one point of connection to the grid, but there is a major (grid) bottleneck at North Hyde - this is the DNO (SSEN)'s problem and NGET's problem.
Heathrow itself -should- have had sufficient backup power, but apparently did not. (the grid should be expected to go off sometimes.. it last did so in 2019 iirc)
And even if Heathrow did have more backup power, the blackout was quite widespread, and while they might have been able to land a few planes, they might still have had to divert others due to wider chaos..
It's not so much a Heathrow problem really so much as a UK problem IMHO - decades of privatised utilities have meant a chronic lack of investment, and with the London grid load going through the roof due to datacentres, EVs and the like, the old 1950s supergrid transformers (the one that failed this morning might be 70 years old) can no longer cope, and need replacing right at a time when HV grid transformers worldwide are many times more expensive, and harder to get hold of than ever before, with lead-times stretching to 3 years
Hmm. Where'd you get that info?
From pictures i've seen, there is indeed a charred shunt reactor, but it's nowhere near as blasted as the transformer, which looks as if it either exploded (e.g. due to overtemperature oil, which becomes less insulating as it heats up and can arc inside, leading to a very fast runaway) or was blown up. (The transformer is completely gutted, with smoke billowing from where the HV bushings used to be, and the cooling radiator is a twisted and mangled pile of scrap, I can't fathom how that could be caused by a neighbouring shunt reactor)
E.g. this footage https://xcancel.com/Turbinetraveler/status/1903017531020837229#m
The three smouldering posts are what used to be the 275kV bushings on the transformer, and the grey 'bin' to the left is, i believe, a reactor (aka inductor). The blackened wreck at the back/top of the image is (/was) the cooling radiator
It's possible that it was sabotage and someone put something nasty e.g. carbon into the oil, or it's possible that it simply failed violently due to old age and poor maintenance. We may never be told which it was
Maybe someone blew it up with a drone, but Shirley that would have shown up on one of LHR's radars...?
I am hearing that T2 had recently 'switched' its backup power from Diesel to a Biomass CHP. I'm not sure how true that is (ie whether or not they still had diesels on standby in addition to the CHP plant) and I take anything Richard Tice says with a bucket of salt to drown out the bad taste his words leave.. But when it comes to the merits of Biomass, we do agree.
If that was the only backup, and was connected via the same substation, it would be very silly indeed.
It might also be that the generator(s) are not synchronous i.e. they run at frequencies other than 50Hz for efficiency, rectify to DC to combine with solar/batteries, and use inverters that do not function without an upstream 50Hz reference
Such generators are supplementary and NOT backup - a true backup needs to be able to support the entire load with no outside connection
Also worth noting that there are also reports that the "substation's backup generator failed" which might be a separate incident not related to the airport, but would have meant that there was no power to operate the switchgear to fail over to the second supergrid transformer. It may transpire that this was deliberately shut down and isolated to enable the firefighters to use ladders and hoses on HV bushings, which is not a good idea if they can be energised from a remote control panel
Fair point (and I didn't downvote you either btw), but is 2ms really such a big problem?
Maybe for certain things like high-frequency trading (which is of dubious economical merit in my view) but certainly it's not going to be an issue for AI workloads for example since the compute step takes a lot longer than 2ms..
Oh, it's definitely easier to move data than power..
Optical fibres don't have 'resistance' in the same way electrical conductors do.. It's not as if one has to inject photons at 400keV just to get them efficiently from one end to the other!
But for electrons, yes we do have to do that
This is a BIG substation. It's a national grid transmission station so it's going to be at least 132kV if not 275. There was a minor spike in UK grid frequency at 7am this morning which may have been due to the sudden drop in overall load due to this event.
Datacentres probably stayed on with gas/diesel backup.. I drove past what could only have been a datacentre in Didcot a few weeks ago.. Anonymous warehouse with four huge gas turbine units on the side, i'd guess at least 50MW each
The question really is what caused this failure. NG substations have a ton of protection systems to make sure this can't happen from simple overload, so either those protections failed (unlikely but possible) or foul play i.e. sabotage.
This is going to cost a fortune in airline disaster insurance just for starters, so no doubt Mad Vlad Putin is laughing his head off, whether his goons were involved or not
And no doubt, "Feynman" will be a 1MW rack..
Given that these cards plug in to 48V busbars, that's 20kA needed on the busbar for 1MW, or 12.5kA for 600kW...
Surely you're joking, indeed, Mr. Feynman!
Each rack of "GPUs" will need half a dozen racks of power supplies at that rate! And cables the girth of firehoses.. Just mental.
Phones don't do a lot of telephoning anymore..
You are right that GPUs have become "coprocessors" ever since the Tesla line of compute cards without video outputs, but they still call themselves GPUs to distinguish themselves from competitors calling themselves NPUs, which usually have a fraction of the compute power and lack their own high bandwidth memory
> The people voted for this and now they are getting it. Be it good or bad, this is what was chosen
Do you deny that propaganda is a thing? Or do you believe that consent manipulated via targeted false information is valid consent?
If you told a population of uneducated, unhappy and downtrodden turkeys that Christmas is the greatest celebration of freedom for all turkeys and the solution to all their problems, they would vote for it.
The problem with that obviously is that it is a lie: they will all be slaughtered and served up for dinner, and if they knew that at the time then they would not have voted for it.
Uninformed/misinformed/manipulated democracy is NOT democracy, because "the people" are not really in charge, they are being misled.
Of course, it is impossible for everyone to be fully informed in a large country of millions of people, which is why democracy itself starts to break down in larger societies. It works well on smaller scales (which is why we usually delegate voting on most matters to a smaller number of representatives) but the system of political parties and whips subverts that. As does the total-connectedness that is the social media age..
And as for the age of AI-generated disinformation, God help us..
Goat: Baaalexa
Spy/scam device: Hello, what would you like to buy?
Cow: Moooooivees
Spy/scam device: Ok, signing you up to scamazon moovies, charging your card £30/month indefinitely. You ok with that?
Collie: Woof!
Spy/scam device: Order placed, thanks!
Horse: Naaaay!
Spy/scam device: Sorry I didn't understand that!
I will try that!
The worst ones are recipes. Almost always some shitty aggregator site if not completely AI-generated webshites..
Interestingly "beef wellington fuck" takes me fairly directly to Gordon Ramsay, so it sort of works..
More like the thirty tonnes of rubble that broke the camel's back..
Even behemoths like YouTube are beginning to struggle with the endless stream of generated shite.. Most of the time if I look for something on Google, after scrolling irritably past the AI summary, the first few results are usually AI-generated shitsites
What will that new experience be?
The experience of being bashed to tiny pieces with a sledgehammer? Or being fried with thousands of volts up every GPIO pin in a microwave? Or a bit of 'experiential tourism' to the nearest landfill?
If only Google hadn't locked down the bootloaders on their devilish devices, one could save some e-waste and give those poor devices the experience of running free software
Oh well, off to Silicon Hell you go
Maybe the microsmurfs are simply trolling their bosses, because they are bored and have nothing better to do than smoke pot and publish bullshit papers while the pointy-haired bosses try to decide whether to fire the whole company and replace it with "AI".
... Or maybe that has already happened and this is the result
Also what.. "Widely attributed to"???
Perplexity has clearly gone off its trolley if it thinks my one post this morning on the reg, making fun of Herr Poettering with a joke formed entirely in my own 'tiny mind' (and comparing him to a completely unrelated discussion no less), is "widely attributed" as something he actually said !
I think overuse of AI will someday be recognised in the same way as overuse of recreational drugs.. It might be fun for a while but it's really not good for you!
This argument reminds me a lot of the ravings of Lennart Poettering..
My way, though perhaps too convoluted for your tiny minds, is better by some metric of technical merit, therefore we shall do it my way, no matter how much pain, inconvenience and unintended consequences it causes for developers and users!
As you say, the rust-to-c bindings introduce lots of side channel problems, i.e. the potential for plain old-fashioned bugs, due to the increased complexity and lack of common API definition file, but we'll ignore all of that because memory safety is magical
Meanwhile the number of kernel developers who can mentally cope with the added complexity and heated arguments about it shrinks, and the project is weaker for it.
No, it was a facetious extrapolation of what these AI human verification apps ask you to do, i.e. touch your nose, make a numeral 7 with your arms, etc.
It's all pointless because as soon as there is data collected of people passing these tests, the bots will pass them too
A good friend of mine has the same thing to celebrate - because he's just been made redundant by the company we both worked for, which is imploding due to competition from China on one side, and international trade tariffs on the other.
And the idea of being asked to do yoga poses on webcam to prove one's humanity.. Sod that. Roll-on Armageddon. I can't be bothered to get a new job, i'll just wait for the apocalypse.
https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/03/03/shutterstock_tiktokb.jpg
That has to be the creepiest AI-generated article-image I have yet seen on the reg..
Having seen the way kids scroll zombie-like through TikTok, this ICO investigation is sorely welcome, along with deeper studies and some serious regulatory action.
I was at a pub yesterday and noticed a table with a frazzled-looking mother and two daughters aged i'd guess 11 and 9, both of whom were -constantly- scrolling through what could only have been TikTok.. They were completely transfixed on their phones, not even looking at eachother, never mind their parent.
The same app was once described to me as "visual Crack" by one of my colleagues, after he had tried it for a couple of weeks and ditched it
Thanks for the detailed explanation from yourself and Frank
So, given all of this, coupled with my (and many others) desire to be able to upgrade their RAM, is there a case for photonic RAM 'busses'?
Or do you think those chips will remain too expensive and impractical to replace the DIMM connector?
Without wishing to watch a video, how does non-socketed, soldered RAM improve performance in and of itself?
I understand that low-voltage (<1V?) RAM cannot easily run in a socket, due to reasons (thermoelectric? impedance mismatch reflections?) and that low voltage improves efficiency, but in terms of *performance* (including max installable GBs of RAM), surely socketed RAM still wins out?
(not one of your downvotes btw)
> Meanwhile, the application code itself is "owned by IB Solutions and licensed to NHS Supply Chain. IB Solutions are contracted to provide software development services." IB Solutions was an iSoft sister company which was sold to Capita in 2010.
No wonder this is a total shitshow if Crapita got its grubby hands on it!
"Owned and licensed" by Capita.. But "Maintenance"?, wtf is that? You mean to suggest spending MONEY on keeping this cash cow healthy? Fuck off, where's the nearest Sunseeker Yacht showroom, that's what Money is for
