Posts by cyberdemon 3170 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
Now there's a blast from the past..
I started using Fluxbox 23 years ago (and stopped when I ditched it for KDE a year later), which means I've known it and Linux-land well over half my life..
Amazed that it's still in "active" development.. But it hasn't changed much in that time by the looks of it, unlike me!
Because investors and politicians don't know the difference between a Megaflop and a Yottaflop (and FLOPs as a measure becomes meaningless when some idiot decides that 4 bits can be a floating point number)
That, and because the tech twits have tacitly admitted that Moore's law is dead. nvidia is making ever denser racks with faster interconnects, but the fundamental compute efficiency has plateaued.
So the fundamental bottleneck of AI compute has now become "how much power can you feed and cool it with". It's far more important than hectares of land use, because while they do use a lot of land, the power is the most expensive commodity that they are using.. If land were a problem, they would stack more than two floors - except they generally don't, because 10kA busbars are expensive and transformers are heavy.
> It causes them to second guess and scrutinize their answers more.
Does it, though?
Most LLMs operate a single pass. By specifying "you are an idiot", you are simply navigating to a more noisy area of the model, which is perhaps less over-fitted. It's not as if these things have any logic by which to introspectively "scrutinise" themselves.
> Allowed? By whom?
By the banks, investors, bondholders. If they won't lend him the money then he can't do it. He doesn't have enough funny-money to do it purely out of his own pocket.
And the FCC apparently have some power to stop him.
And there are locals already suing him for the pollution to the town nearby his so-called spaceport (in the Panorama that I linked). If he were to increase that pollution a thousand fold with this project, then it wouldn't just be the locals suing him, it'd be the state.
> Yes, nutty though he is, it's quite true that we should be expanding out into space.
Putting a million large sattelites into low earth orbit is not "expanding into space". It actively prevents that with a cloud of space-junk in orbit.. Ten years ago he said he was going to Mars, then he revised that to the Moon, now it seems he's just taking a big dump on the front porch.
One Million Megawatts. That's a million satellites with solar arrays a square kilometer each.
If he is allowed to try (and inevitably fail) this flagrantly infeasible idea, then yes it matters. This is a very resource-intensive, pollution-intensive, and obviously capital-intensive folly. In order to try (and fail) he would have to borrow from the same banks that I would rather like to be able to borrow a house from, or invest my pension with.
Frankly, it is time that "The PayPal Mafia" and the other tech twats were put in the stocks for the people to throw rotten eggs at
Otherwise, we are looking at a financial crash to make the Great Depression look like a blip
According to the latest Private Eye (No. 1671, p12, "Shites of the Round Table"), the NHS Palantir deal was brokered by.. one Peter Mandelson, via his lobbying firm Global Counsel, which was paid by Palantir for access to the Department of Health and Social Care.
Reg readers may also remember Mandy as the author of the Digital Economy Bill aka Mandybill, now the Digital Economy Act.
I wonder if had Mandy not made the amendments lobbied for by Google et al, the bulk data-slurping by the tech companies for training their shit-o-matic models would have been more difficult legally.
> The point isn’t to be cheaper it’s to try and avoid NIMBYism while being feasible.
You owe me a new keyboard.
What part of "relocating gigawatts of compute capacity to sun-synchronous orbit" is remotely, never mind objectively "feasible"?
It fights fundamental physics on at least three fronts:
1. The mass of equipment required to go to orbit. How much does the equipment inside a datacentre weigh? Including coolant, 10kA copper busbars, etc. How much does it weigh when it needs a passive black-body radiator to cool it? What is the (terran) energy/pollution cost of hauling all that shit up to orbit?
2. Cooling. As alluded to above, there is no air cooling and no evaporative water cooling in spaace. Chips burn up not much past 125C/400K. That doesn't radiate much. Sure, the backsides of space solar panels don't overheat, but that's because they have a huge surface area for free. How do you transport the heat from a tiny 1kW chip out to a 10 sq.m surface, while minimising weight?
3. Power. A Gigawatt is a fucking huge number. The sun's power in space is only 30% more than it is on Earth, so even in spaace, you'd need a huge area of panels to provide that sort of power
Then there's ionising radiation, comms, cost, pollution, geopolitics (defensibility against missile attack), and other "minor" issues.
Feasible, it is not. And "NIMBYism" is the least of their worries for building on Earth. This is desperation from the tech bros; distraction from an obviously faltering bubble.
I think you've missed the OP's point.. Of course it won't do anything for/on behalf of anybody.. It's just an LLM. But as an LLM given a "customer service" context, it will pretend to provide services that it cannot provide, and will pretend to take actions which it cannot take, because it is parroting data that it or its base model was trained on..
This has been a common problem with bank chatbots, where they assure the user that some service has been completed, and in fact nothing of the sort has happened.
So, someone could indeed be convinced by a chatbot that they have sent the relevant data to HMRC, and then the HMRC's "real computer", having not actually been updated with said data, proceeds to fine the person for not filing the information.
The amount of energy and money wasted on these bullshit generators, in the middle beginning of an energy crisis is just obscene..
We have finite gas, and finite electricity generation/transmission/distribution capacity. We should use what we have on building houses and keeping them warm, not spaffing our energy supplies on layers and layers of unsustainable slop
"It'll create jobs!" ... Bollocks will it. Datacentres are pretty much devoid of all life.
Spend the money on humans, save the energy
Not only does it turn every frame into slop, but DLSS doesn't always reflect the geometry of underlying 3D models, so the enemy is often not exactly where he appears to be
I don't really understand the utility of it either.. If you have a GPU fast enough to run DLSS, then it is fast enough to render at your monitor's resolution and FPS
Everything else is saccahrine eye-candy that game-devs can't control (and will go out of fashion quickly), emulsifying game artwork so that it all looks like AI slop, because it is literally passed through a sloppification filter.
Apart from the technical absurdity.. We are now living in a world where people can be in trouble with their local governments for which webstreams they watch / listen to
Anyone could have told them this would happen
And didn't they cancel offshore access to BBC sounds?
A steaming, stinking, macroharddr bag of shit
(dear El Reg: Where's the 'musk_horns' icon?)
> Qatar, which accounts for one-third of the world’s supply of helium according to the Canada Energy Regulator, has seen its exports come under strain.
Well that's interesting.. I heard in 2022 that Ukraine was the world's #1 supplier of (high purity) Helium, producing 90%? of that used in EUV/XUV lithography machines by the likes of ASML for the production of high-end chips from nvidia et al.
The data-theft followed by fire at ASML was fishy enough, then the Ukraine war effectively prevented them from building new chip-fab machines for a while.. sent my spidey-senses tingling, so to speak.
Is Qatar the new #1 supplier after Ukraine? If so, is it really pure chance that this industry is threatened by a new war?
I mean probably it's just about Oil, as usual.. But it still strikes me as odd to hear about Helium again
Having had some not-insignificant experience with back-of-rack "LRU" backplane power connectors (Harting, ODU, ITT Canon DPX) I would be very wary of something that claims to supply 800V DC @ 100A (80kW) in an auto-mating connector. Especially if the backplane interface also contains coolant flow/return self-sealing connectors. It only takes a small amount of dirt, oxidation or a single incorrect mating to cause permanent damage, which at those voltages and currents could turn into an unexpected plasma torch.
As for self-sealing coolant connectors: I quote a wisened old scouse engineer who told me: "Self-seals don't."
Absolutely
And then there's the issue of DC circuit breakers
If you've ever wondered why DC circuit breakers are much bigger and more expensive than ones for AC at the same voltage, current & power rating, here's a nice little demonstration:
https://youtu.be/Zez2r1RPpWY
The explanation: AC forces the current to go back through zero regularly, which gives an opportunity to extinguish an arc. Whereas DC can just continue arcing. That's why HV DC is scary stuff.
Throw water in the mix and you can get explosive gases too! How wonderful
Sounds a lot like DCOP / D-BUS.
DCOP was better in my experience, but that might just be because it had a better CLI ;)
But of course, I'll be turning off any API access designed for LLM agents thanks very much, as I have zero intention of using any AI agents now or in the future.
Why the hell anyone would provide local shell / API access to a black box idiot-machine, generally running on "someone else's computer", is beyond me
No.
No it would not.
At least Trump will be gone in 2 years, or sooner if the Grim Reaper comes knocking. And he will lose his stranglehold on the legislature in November at the midterms.
I'm sure you were joking, but obviously putting an LLM directly in charge of the world would certainly be far, far worse. Frankly my worry is that an LLM is already indirectly in charge i.e. Trump and his cronies have AI Psychosis, and he says whatever it puts on his teleprompter.
This is (at least) the third sinking ship with his grubby handprints on the wheel.. First it was his disastrous coalition government that ruined the Lib Dems' reputation for over a decade, then Meta's doomed Metaverse, and now he's on the board of one of the most obviously doomed companies out there.. A wannabe CoreWeave (ironic in itself) rent-a-GPU neocloud with no datacentres built, at a time when RAM is through the roof, Energy prices are through the roof, and lead-times and connection queues are longer than a round-the-world snail race because the umpteen-hundred-gigawatts baseload the tech twits say they want (50GW just in the UK, doubling our peak use and tripling baseload) simply doesn't and can't exist in time before their pre-purchased GPUs become obsolete..
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/09/revealed-uks-multibillion-ai-drive-is-built-on-phantom-investments
The new Nscale datacentre is still a scaffolding yard, according to the Graun. It's very unclear where the money has gone, and their accounts are overdue.. But even the bigger ones like CoreWeave, Anthropic, OpenAI, Oracle.. There's no way in Hell they can repay what they have borrowed from investors, lenders and governments. It's madness.
So-called AI is nothing but the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.. I just don't understand WTF the economists who support it are smoking to make them think that chucking more money at it, never mind betting whole economies on it, is somehow a good idea.. Have they consulted their LLM chatbots, perhaps? Are we seeing the effects of AI-Psychosis on governments? Or is it some sociopathic game of brinkmanship between bankers, i.e. who will be the one to go short on the crash, in an end-of-times "Big Short"?
> Keir Starmer said that if AI were “fully embraced”, it could bring £47bn to the economy each year – and promised to “mainline AI into the veins of the UK”.
Complete and utter horseshit! It will cost us a fortune, with all the money funneled into the pockets of charlatans, and it will do nothing but poison the UK economy with slop. More like mainlining fentanyl into the veins of the UK
Er, what?
> The pager attack carried out by israel: not a single peep.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/hezbollah_lebanon_explosive_pagers/
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/lebanon_walkie_talkie_explosion_isreal_war/
> The AI used for attacking Palestinian targets: never mentioned.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/18/israel_sets_robotic_targettracking_turrets/
Not exactly what you are referring to, but remember El Reg is an IT publication, not a political one.
> Palantir spyware: crickets.
Covered ad nauseam ...
I don't like what Netanyahu and his government are doing any more than you do.. But accusing El Reg of "bias" on this is about as credible as declaring every school and hospital in Gaza to be a Terrorist Command Post
> It now becomes how many TPS/$/W you can generate for a given "goodput."
Firstly, what kind of bullshit unit is Tokens per Second per Dollar per Watt? There is TPS/$ (capex) and TPS/W (operating energy cost). And that translates to Tokens/$ (cost of inference). If that is higher than you can charge users for the tokens (perhaps because the tokens themselves are worthless slop..) then your AI business is toast.
And secondly, WTF is "Goodput"? Or it might be better to ask: Are you okay, Mr Mann? Are you perhaps feeling a bit ill after inhaling Sam Altman's farts?
Meta and Google making their own Silicon.. Microsoft and OpenAI making their own Nuclear reactors.. SpaceX going to Mars The Moon, and launching a Million(!) Starlink satellites (which definitely won't get in the way of the Moon rockets) Trump declaring war on the entire world and believing he can win..
I suspect all of the above have consulted LLM chatbots who have assured them that it is all super-easy-peasy and given them a foolproof bullet-pointed step-by-step plan
May the artificial dementors feed on your æternal soul, then.
I refuse to use AI, at work or otherwise. It is too damned creepy. It can clone your voice, your visage, your writing style, your management style, and your coding style. Fuck it all to hell. I am employed to do a job for my company, not to be a data-teat for Microsoft.
And I assume you have seen the automatic integration with LinkedIn inside Office and Teams? Everything you do with a Microsoft product at work or at home is tied to your identity, whether you are logged in to LinkedIn/GitHub or not.
Surprising number of downvotes for that one..
What I meant was: If I personally were in the situation where my employer was forcing me to use MS sodding Edge, and I was being forced to use its shitty AI antifeatures such as the one in the article, (either because MS won't let anyone turn them off, or because the Boss/BOFH has disabled the setting via Group Policy), then I would be voicing my complaints to the Boss. Should those complaints go unheeded, then I would be updating my CV, perhaps printing a copy on the printer by the HR office, and checking my prospects with the nearest recruitment agent.
Sure I understand that finding a new employer who doesn't force Microsoft AI crapware onto its staff may be nontrivial, but the longer people simply tolerate this shit just because it's "company policy", the longer the boss will go on deluding himself that "It's great and everyone loves it".
