Posts by cyberdemon

Big AI's content problem: Take the work, keep the money

Rules for thee, but not for me

If I were to pirate petabytes of other peoples work, "lossily compress" it through statistical regression into a blob that allows people to extract near indistinguishable likenesses of any of the works that I had pirated, I would be off to jail.

Aaron Swartz (RIP) was prosecuted to death for "stealing" open-access and public-domain works. So how do the tech barons get away with stealing _everything_?

Because they have made themselves so big that even central banks are worried about their collapse.

Uncle Sam coughs up $1.9B for grid upgrades as datacenters hit a power wall

Re: Not Again!

Very interesting (and horrifying) podcast about AI's financing and its effect on the US/global economy here:

https://castbox.fm/episode/The-Hidden-Recession-Beneath-The-AI-Bubble-w-Paul-Kedrosky-id6019928-id1001910738?country=gb

Not only are taxpayers paying for pointless infrastructure to support the doomed AI buildout (and delaying/preventing far more meritworthy projects from getting grid connections) but the Trillion-dollar AI debt market is now so big that it is affecting the treasury-bond market, pushing up interest rates on government debt.

History really does repeat itself in 100 year cycles it seems, and we are heading for the next Great Depression at flank speed.

Re: ..Reconductoring...

well, possibly it includes re-insulatoring too, if that helps!

I notice some transmission towers pylons round my way have gone from having fat glass/ceramic insulators to long slender ones on some circuits. I assume/hope the newer ones have a higher voltage rating, perhaps with a view to go from 400kV to 800kV or so in the future.

Great news for Schnieder Electric and ABB!

I will note that 'reconductoring' existing transmission lines with HTLS (High Temperature, Low Sag) conductors increases electric current capacity but is rather inefficient compared to increasing voltage or building additional routes.

But nevertheless welcome. I wonder how much of it will get built though, with AI datacentres and wars gobbling up all of the available HV transformers and the Copper and "Grain Oriented Electrical Steel" needed to build them!

> The program, which spans 31 specific projects in 26 states, is part of the department’s Speed to Power through Accelerated Reconductoring and other Key Advanced Transmission Technology Upgrades (SPARK) initiative

I think that paranthesis is in the wrong place.. Oh wait, no, it's a selective acronym.. (slackronym?)

Microsoft cells out, crams multiple values into Excel boxes

Re: Standards

Trying to bork compatibility with LibreOffice perhaps?

UK wants more homes heated by waste heat from datacenters

Re: A couple of questions

Really? Electricity is cheaper per kJ than gas in oz?

For us poor old poms it's about 3 times the price..

There must be some contorted taxes/subsidies involved in that, otherwise you wouldn't have any gas fired power stations..

My worry with all-encroaching electrification though is that it reduces resilience, i.e. it both makes a blackout more likely and makes the consequences of a blackout much more severe

Re: Tha's only one side of the equation

I assume Pete is being sarcastic about generating electricity from waste heat. The "hot" coolant from a datacentre is only about 60 degrees C, if that. Running the chips too hot would reduce their lifespan, which would cost the slop-sloppers billions.

Also, the datacentres wouldn't want to send their primary circuit coolant off-site as it could come back contaminated. So there would need to be additional heat-exchangers which further reduce the temperature flowing to houses, and the lower the temperature the higher the flow and bigger insulted pipes needed to make it useful.

The minimum water temperature for useful heating is 40C (a domestic gas boiler will go up to 85C), so this doesn't sound like a very sensible idea to me. I suspect the houses would need their own heat pumps to boost the temperature, as seen in "sewage source heat pumps".. an apt comparison really.

Plus as we saw this summer, UK houses are starting to need cooling as much as they need heating. Datacentres cause heat-islands that made the summer even more unbearable.

It just sounds like a fig-leaf to pretend that the a datacentre could be of some use to its neighbours, and any datacentre district heating project that does go ahead will be a total failure that makes everyone suffer.

The more Americans hear about datacenters, the less they like them

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

Well, unlike nuclear waste disposal sites, AI datacentres don't need to exist anywhere at all.

Re: Everybody hates everything

That's not true - I like forests. They are the one Carbon Capture and Storage tech that actually works! And I like the good kind of modern infrastructure. I'd be more than happy to have a pylon or a railway line in my back garden.

But I DO hate that we are wasting all of our resources on this thing that is worth nothing! If anything it is worth less than nothing. Even if AI had no environmental cost, it would still be worth less than nothing, because of the abundance of bad use-cases and the shortage of actual good ones.

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

CCGTs still have "cooling towers". They just have gert big fans in them now, which makes them physically MUCH smaller, and with less visible vapour - I guess because the vapour exits at higher temperature, and you only see it when it is condensing. I saw them on a school trip to Didcot Power Station in 2003. The plant manager told us they were -less- efficient than the old convection ones, but he was probably talking about energy, rather than water.

They may be a -little- more water efficient (the latent heat of evaporation is the same, so i'm not sure if they are), but the stat referenced by the guardian came from something called the Ends Report (which is paywalled, I can't check it). Per the Graun: Analysis by the Ends Report revealed 47bn kilolitres (kl) of water was extracted from the environment in England in 2023. Electricity generation took 26bn kl, public water supply took 9.2bn kl and agriculture took 2bn kl.

I.e. currently over 50% of water abstraction apparently goes on power generation - five times as much as is used by the public water supply. If AI wants to add 50GW say of baseload to our overloaded grid (baseload about 25GW currently), that would mean more than doubling the amount of CCGTs (or building ten times as many Nuclear plants as we have) meaning something like another 50bn kilolitres (aka tonnes) of water use per year, pretty much doubling the country's water use.

BTW, Did you mean to add something at the end of your post? It ended with a colon.

Yes, green self-sufficiency would be great, but it can't support baseload (i.e. 24/7 load) because long-duration storage past a few hours is infeasible at Gigawatt scales. The best LDES technology we have is pumped hydro, but unless you are prepared to cut the top off Ben Nevis to build a giant lake in the sky, it's not going to happen. And to do all that just for the sake of AI slop would be a travesty. We're better off without it.

Re: Everybody hates data centers and AI...

> ... till they want advice on taxes, how-to-do-something, the latest health care question, what to watch on TV, and .... whatever.

All of this can be had from this magical new technology called.. the Internet, you know.

The obvious problems with using LLMs to do the above, are that the outputs are a) often false, easily manipulated by untrustworthy interested parties, and completely inscrutable. b) LLMs are not intelligent, are not sentient and do not have personalities. So if you ever get a recommendation from an LLM for what TV show to watch, where to go on holiday, or (god help us) what stock to invest in, you know that given the same context, it has told everyone else the same thing. So for travel queries you end up being one of thousands of bewildered idiots descending on the same remote beauty spot at the same time, and for stocks it promotes speculative boom-bust cycles which wreck companies and the economy.

It's about as useful as Meth or Fentanyl. It might feel good at first and your dealer has given you a great bargain, but it is absolutely certain to ruin your life and the society you live in.

Re: Corporate Media Propaganda Strikes Again

I'm really tired of hearing the arguments above from increasingly desperate AI boosters..

There IS one common media mistake that irks me though - that is to conflate all Datacentres with AI datacentres. There is nothing wrong with a datacentre that powers ordinary Internet services like El Reg. A datacentre running thousands if not tens of thousands of sites like this one would only need a couple of Megawatts at most. Whereas the behemoth SuperSlopSheds need Gigawatts - i.e. every time an AI datacentre is cancelled, it's a nuclear power plant's worth of load that we don't have to support.

AI datacentres and AI itself are IMHO universally bad. It's not true that closed-loop cooled datacentres use no water, because so much water is used for power generation. In the UK, over half of water extracted from rivers and aquifers goes to the cooling towers of power stations - mostly CCGTs - where it evaporates - and 90% of which subsequently falls into the sea. SuperSlop-mongers say they want to add double or more of our peak Winter electricity demand. It's just gobsmackingly stupid. We don't have enough gas, and we don't have enough water.

I also vehemently disagree that they make the grid more resilient. If anything, they do the opposite. A large grid-powered datacentre can suddenly trip over to onsite backup power for very little reason - e.g. when the input voltage or frequency goes out of accepted bounds. If a 1GW monster AI datacentre does this, it can cause a cascade failure taking down the grid for potentially hundreds of miles around. For example, if the grid was experiencing a "modest" over-voltage condition (as seen in Spain a while back, before their nationwide blackout) then an AI datacentre could trip to backup, shedding 1GW of load from the grid and further compounding the over-voltage condition, which could cause other datacentres in the area to trip, leading to a cascade effect.

As for "AI skeptics and Datacentre NIMBYS are puppets of Chinese state propaganda", this is the most desperate piece of AI booster counterfactual I have ever heard. I've never seen any of this supposed propaganda, and the case against AI doesn't need any help from the Chinese.

London neocloud Nscale takes its $1B loss to Wall Street

Re: Parasite

Good grief. I can't think of anything more stupid than 'routing' my work to whichever LLM is cheapest on some f**ing 'spot market'!

You do realise that using a LLM for coding means sending your codebase and any other files that your IDE can access, (which may include credentials etc) to a potentially untrusted third party server, then downloading some slop code from that third party and most likely running it.

It should be called OpenRooter! I can scarcely believe anyone sane would go near it with a barge pole.

Re: Parasite

Agree, up to the second half of your last sentence..

> The hope for the neoclouds is that demand outstrips supply allowing them to increase prices, which we have seen to some extent over the last 18 months.

Where is this 'demand' that you refer to coming from? Who actually wants to pay to use so-called AI, especially at these new higher prices?

I get that lots of people use it (often unwillingly, like me when I do a google search), but most are either paying nothing (or heavily subsidised loss pricing) like first time customers of a drug dealer, but who is actually paying full price?

Ransomware gangs, scam houses, perverts, terrorists, demagogues and totalitarian regimes may want it (which are all 'bad' use cases, you will note, that should not be counted in any honest company's 'demand' reporting) and perhaps the odd C-suite exec who is still deluded by its sycophancy and believes he can sack 90% of his staff and still have a company may want it (but if the company fails, then it's as bad as the other use cases) but the vast majority of us don't want it and will be very happy when it goes the way of the Hindenburg.

I have spoken to schoolteachers who absolutely hate it, but have been told from "on high" that they must use it, even when the kids are told that they absolutely cannot use it. It's absolute poison and I have no idea why it is being foisted upon us all. The only valid explanations are works of sci-fi dystopian horror.

Re: Parasite

The thing is, as far as I am aware, they are not just buying the GPUs, they are buying the energy to run them. I.e. with each 1kW GPU they buy, they are on the hook for 8MWh/year, which at least in the UK would cost about £1000/year, per kW.

So it's not a simple "buy this expensive thing and rent it out, like a bank" It's more like buying a leaky bucket and having to keep it topped up. As more datacentres come online just as people lose interest in AI, the rents will have to come down, while energy costs are going up. It isn't just risky, it's stupid.

Thoughts return to forbidden RAM upgrades as Raspberry Pi OS gets fresh lick of paint

I stand corrected, then..

But why, per the article, do you need to desolder the SoC?

TFA > it means desoldering the Pi's ball-grid-array system-on-a-chip and the RAM underneath

> Place new memory chip on the board.

But the memory chip isn't on the board, it's on the CPU chip, underneath.

The chances of doing this after watching a YouTube, without cooking one or both of the chips, is slim to none

> Easier to _do_ I guess?

This exactly. Easy to do, but hard to redo as you will no longer have the pre-placed solder balls. BGA _soldering_ is perfectly feasible, but BGA _rework_ is very difficult. For a BGA on the underside of another BGA, I can't imagine the success rate being very high even for an expert with all the right tools.

> You need to be both skilled and determined to even try – it means desoldering the Pi's ball-grid-array system-on-a-chip and the RAM underneath, and then resoldering it. This is not trivial stuff.

Er, No Shit..

Is there anyone here who would attempt this? I've done a fair bit of tiny SMT soldering and I certainly wouldn't..

OpenAI agents ‘infiltrated Australian government website’

Re: SI

Which is why I am hoping that the name SuperSlop sticks

Artificial intelligence must have a new name, says politician who likes renaming bodies of water

Re: SI

SuperSlop

SS for short

EU datacenter green scorecard finally escapes Brussels

Re: Regulation

Sadly, I am inclined to agree...

Mandating "efficiency standards" benefits nobody except perhaps chip vendors, because nobody is addressing the Cthulhu in the room, that AISuperSlop's output value is negative.

... Yes, I am serious, it's output value has negative utility. Making it more efficient just allows the infernal contraption to go on for longer before it runs out of fuel and dies.

It poisons the arts and sciences with shitty slop replacing thoughtful human effort. It's a black mirror through which we gaze at a distorted view of our civilisational navel.

In IT, it is orders of magnitude more useful for an attacker than a defender. It's a statistical blunderbuss that only has to be right once, vs one that has to be right always. In engineering, it cannot be trusted to produce more than a toy. The only people for whom it is useful are those who wish to smash everything and sow chaos.

It has a poisonous effect on public discourse, flooding us with scams and slopaganda from far right parties. It poisons the minds of the young and the old, contributing to school shootings, suicides, and all kinds of dangerous, tragic delusions and nihilism, as well as more broad and insidious effects such as kids believing that there is no point in learning anything anymore cos AI will do it all..

It nearly started WWIII through shitty misclassification and humans who blithely follow anything it says without checking.

It's straining our energy systems and draining our aquifers. It can't run on renewables and even with "closed loop" cooling, contributes to desertification, because half our water is used for electricity generation, and it wants to triple electricity consumption.

AI's economics make no sense whatsoever, yet it is being pushed into everything, like it or not.

The technocrats would like us to worship their Faustian Frankenstein abominations as artificial Gods, when if anything on earth is a Harbinger of Hell, AI is it... My prediction, unfortunately, is that there will be a war that upends societies and constitutions. Our leaders are becoming increasingly demented and jingoistic, which increases thevrisk of a conflagration. China has promised to invade invade Taiwan next year, which produces ~90% of the world's CPUs and GPUs. Taiwan would sabotage their fabs and set the industry back a decade, a few may briefly get rich but the banks will fail as their loans and stocks are wiped out, causing the war to spread into WWIII, then most of us will starve as the globalised economy collapses, and the rest will be hunted by AI-driven slaughterbots. The datacentres that still exist will spend most of their time processing the billions of camera feeds that exist on the planet, turning society into George Orwell's 1984 and deciding who dies next.

But all of this is worth it for something that might CURE CANCER ... (or spit out instructions to manufacture the next pandemic...) or SOLVE LONELINESS (by providing a simulacrum of a sycophantic, dangerous psychopath to anyone who presents as vulnerable) ... right?

Basically: Yes, it could wipe out civilisation, and No, it isn't intelligent and doesn't need to be. It just amplifies our own insanity at every level of society.

I wasn't planning a rant but it ended up as another rant... Sorry!

American datacenters might be getting dirtier, but at least they'll be efficient

Re: Unit of work

That would be "tokens per second" per Watt, or Joules per Token.

But a more complex model with more parameters and layers will consume more Joules per Token. That doesn't necessarily make it less efficient if the bullshit"work" it generates is more "valuable" than that of the simpler model.

Although IMHO the efficiency of AI is incalculable, i.e. it is always NaN, because working out its cost/value involves a division by zero..

Compsci grads facing recession-like job prospects thanks to AI

Re: Old jokes revisited

Maybe i was too harsh just now, but the 'joke' is no joke.

In the tech bro's vision of the future, apparently, a robot asks "do you want fries with that" and all of the other characters cannot afford fries, never mind a burger, and the robot is later decommissioned because nobody is buying fries anymore..

Re: Take a STEM degree they said. You'll be fine they said.

I am hoping to maximise my future post-bubble employment prospects by minimising my exposure to AI and thereby AI's exposure to me as far as possible, i.e. no chatbots, no coding 'assistants', no 'smart' speakers etc.

I shall remain unique in my personality and talents, so that in future I will be as valuable as one of those rare books that er, got their spines sliced off to train AI..

Re: Old jokes revisited

Take a running jump.

KDE turns 30 and someone's brought an AI-native desktop proposal

Re: "A desktop that loves you back has to know you"

> This is very much not what this vulture wants from a desktop computer.

This is very much not what this commentard and longtime KDE user wants, either!

I hope they don't spend a penny of their donation money on this slop-mania, but knowing KDE, I can at least trust it would be an optional feature and not enabled by default.

Virginia governor wakes up to fact datacenters have become political cancer

Slop Sheds

Too late to edit the above, but the borked link for Slop Sheds is: https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2026/09/15/202622/

(I removed a #anchor but didn't realise the trailing slash was important..)

Great to see democracy in action

But sadly just a little late as the disease has metastasised across the world, e.g. datacentres being granted blanket "nationally significant infrastructure project" status in the UK, regardless whether they are a bank's modest 1MW datacentre or a 1000MW "Slop Shed"

They have even been granted generous tax breaks via inland freeports.

And some of our politicians are working directly with the worst of the AI death cult.

Meanwhile AI continues to poison Education (through cheating, automated grading, and despondency amongst kids about what's the point of learning anything at all); poison Democracy (through targeted disinformation), poison Industry (see Microsoft's woeful state where it can't fix its software because AI found a bug but AI can't fix the bug without creating a new bug, and they have already sacked most of their staff), it poisons the Arts, the Sciences, Society as a whole (e.g. by fake companionship, automated romance fraud), it poisons the Economy (due to the Trillions of dollars of debt that will never be repaid, and the knock on effects to government, commercial and individual borrowing costs as the banks and pension funds desperately try to claw back their wasted money), it destroys Freedom (through its eminent use cases for surveillance and oppression) and it wrecks both our Energy system and the Environment, through its flagrant, profligate waste of resources.

All for the faint promise that it will someday™ Cure Cancer (bollocks) or Solve Climate Change (utter fucking pigswill), while, if anything, being more likely to cause the next great cataclysm i.e. War (if some state us stupid enough to use it to automate their strategic defence - see Wargames) or Pestilence (if some nutcase uses it to design the next pandemic) or Famine (if we run out of oil because we burnt it all on AI slop, or if the crops fail due to climate warming or water shortage) or Death (when we become so dependent on it, that when it dies, so do we).

I'm no luddite- I have spent half a lifetime in tech and I believe I know a good technology when I see one, but so-called AI is not one. Quite the opposite.

It's a death cult, a Faustian pact for a few to get rich, in what they believe are the "end times".

AI does nothing but suck dry the 'souls' of those who 'use' it (they are the ones who are used) and even of tjose who don't use it (this post is being scraped by AI right now), in the same way as it sucks energy and moves water from fresh rivers and aquifers to the salty ocean.

I've said all this before, but if any technology could ever be called the work of the Devil, AI really is it.

Former Labour deputy Tom Watson joins Palantir as £330M NHS deal nears break point

Re: JFC...

Not a downvoter.. But i don't think the civil service have much power to stop MPs engaging in sleaze anymore.. Remember Boris and his Henry VIII powers, his wilful breaking of international law "In a very specific and limited way", and his earlier "Interpretation Bill.." All designed to put MPs and especially the Executive, above the law.

"Take back control" actually meant "Hand control to the Executive" rather than to the country, or "To Hell with rules and safeguards, laws are for plebs. Let's pave the way for a future dictatorship where we the political class can do what we like and get stinking rich doing it, while the rest of the country suffers" and that's exactly what is playing out.

I'm not a Labour voter, I usually vote Lib Dem, but my -hope- is that Mr Burnham brings some integrity to the Labour party and may reverse some of the damage that Boris did, if it's not too late. Time will tell..

Re: JFC...

Just wait for the Reform-grade sleaze..

Re: Usual path to riches for politicians and senior civil servants

> Next will be the totally unrelated awarding of plump contracts to the new employers at taxpayers' expense

That is already well underway..

They have their tentacles in the NHS, the police, now our energy system.. What's next? Schools? Water supplies? Courts?

Microsoft makes limited attempt to fix broken Excel paste

> Kudos to the team

Kudos to the handful of humans left, that is.

But condolences may be more appropriate, with MS apparently sacking off half or more of its technical staff and forcing those pitiful few who remain to fuck about with an infernal slop generator that (surprise surprise) finds it easy to break stuff, and almost impossible to fix stuff.

One imagines it's like trying to repair a bridge or build a skyscraper, when the only tools available are from a demolition contractor's yard.

London property manager breach may have exposed bank details and lockbox codes

Oh dear

What a shame

Won't someone think of the poor London landlords

The leaked data might even be seen by.. HMRC!

OpenAI's new sponsored agents are happy to chat about selling you things

Re: This is why we should all want a personal AI

> No it doesn't. If a model can do A now then it can still do A in 6 months.

True in some cases, but not in cases where it needs up to date information (e.g. my imbecile friend asking ChatGPT for bus timetables, it gave completely the wrong info). I know RAG is supposed to address this, but it doesn't always. Out-of-date models also fall over for more 'complex' knowledge on changing subjects e.g. the law. Even programming languages release new standards and deprecate old APIs.

Or imagine a major world event such as Covid - a model that had no knowledge of it would be less useful e.g. in writing marketing or whatever drivel people use LLMs for, even though it can still 'do' everything it could do before.

It's a language model, and language is constantly evolving.

Re: So, the question remains ...

And of course, there will be a few lucky investors who decide to divest before the crash, and fewer still who are powerful enough to control the timing of the crash, i.e. pump&dump. It's all a fucking scam and it's big enough now to cause a major economic depression when it does crash. Forget Enron, forget Lehman et al, it's becoming worse than that, i fear.

Re: This is why we should all want a personal AI

A third problem with "download the models before they become illegal" though, is that they quickly become obsolete as the world changes. They are after all just a statistical black mirror of selected texts and images from the Internet at the time when they were "trained". They aren't actually thinking or feeling. To do that would require at the very least updating their model weights on the fly with each prompt, which they don't do and would require orders of magnitude more energy than they even currently use.

So their usefulness diminishes over time. They depreciate, just like the Trillions of dollars of GPUs that the tech twerps have bought, and re-training them costs a bloody fortune and risks poisoning the models with their own pollution. Again I don't think the tech twits really considered that in their financial calculations..

Re: This is why we should all want a personal AI

As much as I really hate AI, I cautiously agree with you that local, open-weights, open-source AI could be useful, from the individual perspective if not the collective one. It's free from most of the stuff that makes AI creepy. Although even if it is both open-weights and open-source, you still don't know how the training data was selected, so I still wouldn't trust anything it says. It could be useful e.g. in a programming context, maybe (although I would prefer to do the thinking myself wherever possible. If I stop doing that then dementia is coming)

However there are still two problems: One is not really solvable as the cat is well out of the bag: That miscreants will use local AI to bypass the flimsy guardrails and the not-so-flimsy surveillance, and do bad things with it. It's a real problem, but I agree that the AI companies are abusing the panic to try to regulate away the competition.

The other problem is that local AI requires a very expensive high-VRAM GPU, or at the very least a lot of very expensive RAM, which is only expensive because of the AI bubble itself causing a shift in manufacturing towards HBM2 which is almost exclusively used by AI datacentres. That's not unsolvable but it will take time to build new fabs or reconfigure existing ones.

I think the dream of the AI companies is to usurp the entire Internet and turn themselves into some kind of Ministry of Truth (which is of course, responsible for Lies..) But they failed to consider the energy cost of replacing the Internet with generative AI, and I believe (and hope) that they will run out of money and fail because of that, if nothing else.

Re: So, the question remains ...

I think you may have mistyped "scammer".

The AI companies are Ponzi schemes for gullible and/or AI-induced psychosis affected venture capitalists.

Re: Here we go.

This. So-called AI is the enshittification of civilisation itself. And frankly, most of those website "live chats" are already "staffed" by bots anyway, so i'm not sure what this desperate press release by OpenSlop achieves, apart from telling investors that they have completely run out of ideas.

Fortunately, a JavaScript whitelist e.g. NoScript, blocks most if not all of this kind of shit. And the most intrusive of ads, too. I miss the days when ads on websites were a static image hyperlink. If I do encounter one of these rare, unobtrusive ads I will often click on it out of courtesy to the website owner.

But these days they are almost always JS based so they can be personalised, generated on the fly, track your mouse & where you scroll etc. Which means they don't work if their off-site JS domain is blocked by default. Oh dear what a shame.

That said, if you are using ChatGPT then you probably are stuck with the the adslop clippy bot popping up in your "conversations", as it may be on the same subdomain as the JS that runs the ChatGPT interface itself. But there's an easy solution to that: Don't use ChatGPT.

Nine-year-old runs up $118,000 bill on dad's corporate credit card advertising his Roblox YouTube channel

> After a few months of doing so, Mike asked his dad for some Robux, the in-game currency used by Roblox players to buy cosmetic items and access to game features. In what would prove to be the first of several dumb moves, Dave put it on his company card. The advertising professional apparently failed to realize that putting those card details into the account made them permanently accessible.

Nowhere in the article or the video (although i'm not playing it again to check) does it mention him ever using a personal card.. He went straight for the company card.

It would be nice if you could er, read the article, before accusing others of not reading the article!..

Well true, but I'm not sure why Mike's dad thought it appropriate to use his company card, rather than his own card, to set up Mike's ad campaign in the first place.

If he had used his own card, then maybe he could have negotiated a refund from either YouTube or his bank (i don't know if US credit cards have the same level of protection as UK ones do under the Consumer Credit Act) but at least he wouldn't have been potentially losing his job over it.. And would have hit a credit limit much earlier

America is building datacenters faster than the grid can power them

Re: Slop Sheds

> What these things actually are is a learning experience for venture capitalists. A very large number of profit-chasing simpletons are going to get very badly burned along with innumerable other people when this technology runs out of speculative spending.

Have they not learned from Ponzi's scheme, the Tulip bubble, the dotcom crash, 2008, and perhaps most poignantly, the South Sea bubble (where, as I have posted before: Speculators invested in a company promising to bring a practically infinite supply of "free" (enslaved) labour from Africa, but then after many firms employing skilled domestic labour had gone bust, it turned out that the unskilled labour wasn't very good, still needed feeding, and that the whole idea was a devilish abomination)

> Maybe the Fermi Paradox can be explained by this sort of speculative spending.

Slightly off-topic, but I think the Fermi paradox forgets that it's not just about the vastness of Space, but the vastness of Time, too.. We humans have only had the technology to broadcast our presence for the last couple hundred years. "Intelligent" life, depending on how you define it, has been here on this rock for about a million years, primordial life for a couple billion, and the universe itself tens of billions of years. If it took Human technology just 200 years to "mushroom" from the first telecommunications into something that can destroy all civilisation if not all life on the planet, then I'm not surprised that we haven't heard from aliens. There's a hundred in a billion chance of us being here at the right time to observe an alien civilisation, never mind the right place.

Slop Sheds

+1 for calling them Slop Sheds.

It's also important to distinguish AI datacentres (slop sheds) from ordinary datacentres. A large datacentre that powers something like AWS, Azure or thousands of websites only uses a few tens of megawatts. A datacentre running a bank's backend requires less than 1MW. These are real datacentres and should rightly be called "critical infrastructure".

Slop sheds, on the other hand, consume hundreds of megawatts, up to a couple gigawatts. And they don't (IMHO) produce anything of positive value.. Just negatives. And consume shedloads of resources.

They generate fake images and videos that nobody wants to see, but a few people want YOU to see (e.g. political prslopaganda that undermines democracy) they generate buggy code that twits like Slopya and Uncle Larry are destroying their own companies with.. They are utterly ruining education, with kids cheating on tests and coursework and wondering if it's even worth learning anything anymore.. And vulnerable people are literally going insane, talking to these hellish black mirrors. How is any of that worth spending Trillions and ruining the planet for?... They say it will "cure cancer", but it's more likely to spit out a genome for the next pandemic. Even government borrowing costs are going up because bankers are now so heavily invested in the AI bubble that they aren't buying Treasury bonds..

And, we just don't have the electricity available for them anyway! They are too expensive to be turned off when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing, so they can't be run on renewable energy. They use Gigawatts, so can't feasibly run on batteries (it takes a battery "gigafactory" approximately one year to manufacture 1GWh of batteries, a 1GW datacentre would need at least 10GWh to reliably run overnight on batteries - i.e. a single 1GW datacentre would need about as much batteries as the State of California)

And, per Ed Zitron Ad Nauseam, the AI companies themselves aren't making any money from it. They are losing money faster with every new damned datacentre, sorry - slop shed - that they build!

Truly, if any tech could be called The Work of the Devil, AI is it.

It just boggles my mind as to why our Lords and Masters still seem to think that any of it is a good idea, or good for the economy, or for humanity or good for Anything, really!

Microsoft account refuseniks have another way of installing Windows

Re: "the good bork fairy"

It might have been "trained" on their knowledge observed behaviour, but as an unintelligent bullshit generator, it can only endlessly rehash what has been done before.

Higher-enriched uranium for datacenters has DoE all aglow

Re: It all sounds a bit odd

I am being just a tiny bit cynical (moi?), but the stock market these days has apparently become a cross between Bitcoin and Polymarket.. I.e. -everyone- is a speculator, and there are none, or almost none, serious investors left. So there is a proliferation of get-rich-quick bullshit Ponzi schemes with little more than a Youtube video demonstrating their profitability.

Bullshit companies are sprouting like mushrooms - in part because Generative AI statistics has allowed any idiot to set up a legitimate-looking corporate webshite, complete with glossy investor packs, with no training or actual product development required..

There are lies, damned lies, statistics, and generative statistics..

Unspecified “proprietary separation techniques” are then used to enrich the metal

Is this what powers the Enron Egg?

Oracle celebrates banner quarter with another round of layoffs

Revenues up (in mark to market Enron style)

Profits (losses) in the toilet.

Everyone suffers - employees and customers alike.

Oracle are desperately trying to keep up the façade that their AI gamble is profitable, even if that means laying off half their staff.

But it's not. The bad ship Oracle is holed across multiple bulkheads.

Datacenter developers want your backyard. FAS says negotiate harder

No shit, sherlock

One local government interviewee noted: Interest in data centres has increased and an entire population hates it.

Maybe because AI adds nothing useful to society (cure cancer, my arse) and adds a steaming pile of negatives i.e. the destruction of democracy through targeted misinformation, evisceration of the arts and sciences to the point where kids these days don't think it's worth learning anything anymore; the impact on people whose images are manipulated, the enormous negative environmental impact ie burning the energy and water of an entire nuclear plant in each new mega datacentre, negative economic impact on the world to the point where governments can't sell bonds because all the rich twits are long on AI because they lost their minds to it's sycophantic seduction, plus the small (10%, apparently!) chance that it will somehow transcend from a statistical bullshit machine into an evil God of Death and kill us all, Forbin Project or Battlestar Galactica style. Or alternatively some sad idiot groomed by AI sycophancy is taught how to manufacture the next pandemic..

In all cases, the downsides of AI *vastly* outweigh the upsides, and it's only Morlocks pushing it at this point.

Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

Re: Windows is fine if it never connects to the net.

> For some reason some bios boot thing did not allow a live start.

You may have needed to disable Secure Boot or at least enable the Legacy Boot ROM in the Bios/UEFI...

Of course, this is intentional in the Microsoft/Intel alliance, all part of the Trusted Computing initiative to enshittify the PC experience. Sadly Linux only runs at all in Secure Boot mode with Microsoft's permission, i.e. a shim bootloader in GRUB is signed by Microsoft to enable it to boot in Secure Boot mode..

They are locking down personal computing one step at a time, sadly.