Posts by cyberdemon

Sodium ion batteries: Yet another innovation poised to be dominated by China

Re: Na Ion Battery surely

and Si is Silicon...

"SiB Battery" sounds like it should be made of Silicon Boride..

But maybe i'm just being a Boron Git

To solve AI's energy crisis, 'rethink the entire stack from electrons to algorithms,' says Stanford prof

Re: 'Dump the whole thing' - too big to fail

More like 1929 all over again.. Or worse. It seems like we are headed for a combination of a Great Depression event (breakdown of international trade.. Shipping, Brexit, Trump, the new Cold War) AND a Dotcom Bubble event caused by the AI hype.

Just about the only thing AI is "good" for is swindling people, poisoning democracy etc. We could have another Civil War in the US at the same time as WWIII heats up in Europe.

So I'd rather have a DotCom bubble now (i.e. let the AI bubble burst as soon as possible please) rather than the complete armageddon that I think will happen if it is allowed to carry on along its current growth curve.

Microsoft Research chief scientist has no issue with Windows Recall

Re: In other news

Meanwhile the Secret Police of the People's Republic of China, the FSB/GRU, Mossad and the NSA all agree that this is a really good idea!

High-flying drones on a leash could blow traditional wind turbines away

Re: Nope

https://energypedia.info/wiki/Introduction_to_Airborne_Wind_Energy

In the "ground generation" and "rotary" concepts, the generators would be wincghear at the ground station, so there isn't any need for power transmission along the tether (except for control and monitoring etc.). For the airborne generation yes, you are right.

But for the two ground-generating concepts the tether still needs to be mechanically strong and flexible enough to transmit megawatts of energy. For just one megawatt, it would need to be unrolling at 10 metres/sec while tugging 10 tonnes (100kN) or 1 m/s pulling 100 tonnes (1MN). It can only produce short bursts of power until the string is fully extended, and the kite then changes tack to a lower-force configuration while the winchgear turns motor and reels it in for another go.

Sort of ok in theory, but a 100 ton crane rope is not light, and it would weigh the 'kite' down to the ground. Never mind if the line has to be many kilometres long.

Re: Things are getting a little Swiftian here.

Heliostat-based solar energy plants are a thing. As are long lines of parabolic mirrors to boil water in pipes and turn a steam turbine.

But, they are often less efficient than plain photovoltaics, and more complicated to maintain. Heliostats need movable mirrors with individual servos to track the sun onto the target, whereas PV panels just sit there..

Small wind turbines are also inefficient and don't catch nearly as much wind as big ones - partly due to the altitude. Wind near the ground suffers drag from the ground, i'd guess.

Turbines in sewer pipes? I hope you're joking. The sewers are bad enough as it is. There's not much head of pressure either.. And as for water supply pipes, you'd only be taking energy out of the pumping system.

There are a lot of bonkers green ideas floating about that are completely infeasible, but nevertheless get funding because investors (often from the oil industry) want to boost their green credentials, while having a few loss-making businesses on their books means they pay less tax. And they know it'll never actually work and challenge their core business, so it's a win-win.

Lenses for solar panels though, i'm with you on that one. Silicon manufacturing is one of the biggest pollution sources on the planet, and large portion of that is from photovoltaics. If we used lenses to concentrate onto smaller more power-dense chips, then we'd need less silicon, and the chips themselves could be more advanced and capture a broader spectrum than the basic panels (which can be made broad-spectrum, but it's expensive to do so for huge multiple square-metre panels)

But then with lenses, they'd still need to tilt into the sun with servos, so probably that's one reason why this isn't common practice

Re: Nope

It's the weight of the 'leash' that I think will be the issue here.. The same reason the 'space elevator' never happened.

Yes, it can get to high altitudes, but what force will that piece of string need to withstand, and how long will it need to be? What happens when it goes out of control and cheesewires a nearby town?

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Re: Next Week

Because two pages is all that could fit inside his LSTM context window?

Digital Realty CTO weighs in on AI's insatiable thirst for power

TLDW:

Datacentres are going to slurp shit-tonnes of power and shit-tonnes of water in order to run completely useless stochastic bullshit generators that have become the latest fad.

The sector is "growing exponentially" without any real purpose, a bit like er, a tumour.

But it's OK because we will be using Renewables and Nuclear!

(Just don't mention that the Nuclear probably won't materialise, and when the renewables go behind a cloud we'll be gobbling up gas and Diesel, belching out emissions, and sending the price of energy through the roof - all so that your job can be replaced by a statistical model of your past actions and ideas, which is cheaper than you in the short term, but can't actually innovate in the long term)

Then there's the awkward question asked by the Reg hack about GPU financing and all of this being a potentially catastrophic bubble ...

I can imagine this guy selling railway bonds ...

Windows 11 and Linux gain ground among Steam gamers

Re: They could do more

Many older games (and other old Win32 programs) work better on Wine than they do on Windows!

(especially modern Windows, which is slowly borking phasing out support for the old Win32 APIs)

They could do more

To test and certify games as being Proton compatible. E.g. incorporating the ProtonDB rating in the Steam Store UI and filter options for Linux users would be nice.

I find that the vast majority of "Windows only" games work fine (even VR ones, which is an impressive feat)

But you have to change your settings to run non-certified games in Proton.

To Steam's credit, their refund policy is excellent, and I have returned any game that doesn't work in Proton, even though they are not shown as Proton compatible and are advertised as Windows only.

London hospitals left in critical condition after ransomware attack

> This isn't going to stop until countries make paying ransom a crime.

That would help, but sadly i don't think these attacks would stop even if nobody paid. A lot of these gangs seem to be part of a hybrid warfare strategy from the "crinks" (China, Russia, Iran and North Korea).

These mafia states redirect domestic organised crime to their war efforts, allowing them to make money through both ransomware and scams provided they only hit Western targets.. Even if nobody pays a ransom, they will sell the data to other gangs who will use it for industrial scale automated scamming and other secondary attacks.

A big part of the problem is reliance on 3rd party cloud IT contractors in the first place. But fixing that would require a decade of public sector investment in training and retaining in-house IT professionals, which successive governments have cut to the bone..

Microsoft to spend $3.2B on expanding cloud and AI in green energy-rich Sweden

"the training of 250k Swedes in AI"

They just mean a new classifier model that can differentiate them from Turnips

Checkmate? AI's pawn-pushing prowess proves partly pitiful, partly promising

Re: So to sum up ...

Using a LLM to play chess is like using 1000 blunderbusses to try to kill a beetle on an archery target 200m away.

It can do it, sometimes, but it's horrendously inefficient compared to a dedicated chess program that could run on an 8-bit microcontroller drawing a couple of milliwatts..

I wonder if a H200 running GPT could even beat an 8-bit chess program on a Z80, given the same time to complete moves and a million-fold power consumption advantage..

UK may not hit goal of 95% mobile coverage, commons committee warns

Should never have switched off 3G

3G was so often the only usable network when out in the sticks, due to its much longer range compared with 4G and 5G..

The argument is that smaller cells reduce contention and increase total throughput and of course that is true, but a fallback is still needed - and 3G won't ever be overloaded so long as it is only used as a fallback and 4G/5G is available in the most populated areas..

But i guess there's no profit in maintaining such a fallback system, unless they could charge a fee for its use, which afaik they cannot. (And of course if they could charge for using 3G, there'd be an incentive to bork their own 4G/5G towers, so probably not a great idea either)

Researchers warn robot cars can be crashed with tinfoil and paint daubed on cardboard

Re: Have they done the same experiment

I seem to remember a Wonderbra advert that was criticised for causing car accidents, among other criticisms..

I don't know if there was ever any real data on that though.?

China shows off machine-gun-toting robot dog and its AI-powered puppy

Re: Irrelevant.

You assume that the 'leadership of the enemy' is human and can be found by an insurgent..

Re: Charge! (at the nearest power outlet)

Well, that is the point of the register, really... :D

Maybe you should write a song about it?

Re: Robot dog vs. robot dog?

Probably, the ones in autonomous mode (kill all [unrecognised?] humans) would ignore eachother, and the rest are remotely controlled, as the ones in TFA are.

We are not in a point in the war where autonomous robots would be fighting other autonomous robots. By the time we get there, most of us will probably be toast anyway.

> a simple mine can work with just a mechanical trigger, and many do

Well, those ones should be (and surely already are) banned. I would have thought an electronic trigger is probably cheaper than a mechanical one nowadays.

But the fact you point out that they are still used doesn't give me any confidence about respect for treaties on other banned weapons types in future conflicts. (Autonomous, Chemical, Biochemical, Biological, Nuclear, etc)

Re: Defenses

Well indeed. This is obviously only useful as a weapon against lots of terrified, unarmed civilians.

Re: Charge! (at the nearest power outlet)

Er, the wholesale price of a Chinese spot-mini clone is more like $2k (i'd guess this is near the cost of a Ukranian kamikaze drone), and was recently put up for retail including flamethrower attachment for $10k.

And an autonomous rampaging-murderbot version, without the operator console and radio data-link, could be even cheaper still!

Re: > a human to pull the trigger rather than letting robot dogs with machine guns off the leash.

True (although even a mine has a battery, but the power consumption of the sensor is negligible)

A robot dog could also be told to wait in a low-power state until it sees someone, though. A small solar panel and/or a low-power but long-duration zinc-air battery would be enough to keep the main battery topped up until it needs to move again.. All very black-mirror.

> a human to pull the trigger rather than letting robot dogs with machine guns off the leash.

.. Until someone realises that it's vastly more efficient to simply drop them behind enemy lines, in "kill all humans" mode.

Nvidia faces local competition for its 'China special' GPUs

Re: About those ships circling Taiwan like sharks...

I think it's pretty unlikely that the TSMC wafer fabs would be intact after China invades..

Bing and Copilot fall from the clouds around the world

Re: Put your phrase inside quotation marks?

You can do that with Google and Bing but they _still_ return unrelated guff

Giving Windows total recall of everything a user does is a privacy minefield

Re: Windows 11 is literally making people who would never use Linux suffer with with Linux.

> As long as you don;t want printing, or sound, both of which sometimes work, a bit, sort of. I recently needed to use a Bluetooth device and only had to try ...

What?

TBH I don't have much firsthand experience with Mint or Gnome, but I personally use KDE on Debian and both printing and bluetooth are as easy, if not easier, than Windows. Same goes for sound. Even my bluetooth mouse worked first time and auto-connects, it's a Logitech MX Master 3. Never in the past 10 years come across a single Bluetooth controller that hasn't worked out-of-the-box either.

But sure, go ahead and swap your privacy/security/etc for "sticking with what you know"

Re: Windows 11 is literally making people who would never use Linux suffer with with Linux.

Er..

Yes, install Linux. It's not nearly as "scary" as it perhaps used to be. Debian is great. I hear Arch and Mint are great too. In 20 years, Debian has filled all of my computing needs. Libreoffice, Octave, Python, Steam (including "windows" VR games that work fine), CAD with FreeCAD/OpenSCAD, electronics design with KiCAD, etc etc.

Not sure what you meant by the last three words of your post though..

Windows is making people suffer with Windows, due to their monopoly position and a belief that as a monopolist, they (Microsoft) can do whatever the hell they want, because no matter HOW bad they make their OS, most people will still suck up whatever surveillance-happy updates they throw at them..

NYC Comptroller and hedge funds urge Tesla shareholders to deny Musk $50B windfall

Not only that, but he was in a position to temporarily manipulate said stock-price by spreading ponzi-style hype, in order to get the bonus, while doing massive long-term damage to the company.

He now thinks he's "won", by cheating.. He doesn't deserve a penny

Ohio power plants want special tariffs on datacenters to protect regional grid

Re: I wonder when all the AI datacenter construction

They certainly have ways of disconnecting them... Shutting them down, not so much.

That's why so many datacentres are building their own power plants capable of continuous operation, so the AI bullshit machine can keep on harvesting our souls in a (hopefully futile) attempt to gain its own.

Aghast iOS users report long-deleted photos back from the dead after update

Re: Not unique to iOS

The sandpaper "knows" because of its grit-size relative to the size of the ridges on the surface of the wood ...

Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ here at last with a $12 price tag

So if the RPi5 has PCIe

Would it be possible to make a Thunderbolt / USB4 HAT?

EGPU for your Pi, anyone?

They used to have images in articles, back when most stories either had a relevant original image or no image at all.

Then they switched to shitterstock / AI and had a policy that every article MUST have an image whether relevant or not, and the pointless AI images were cluttering up the articles, so they removed the image from the article template.

Now, in the once-in-a-blue-moon event where an article actually has a real photo, there is nowhere to display it except in the homepage thumbnail next to all the AI-generated nonsense pics.

Nevertheless, it is easy to get the full version of most pics by removing the resize options from the URL

Meet Pi-CARD: Serving up a digital assistant on Raspberry Pi

Pi-CARD?

Surely it should be called COM-Puter?

COMpletely Pointless User Titilation Erratic Response

Nevertheless, I congratulate them on making an AI assistant that doesn't spy on people, even if it is even dafter than an Alexa on Ketamine. They deserve a pint of synthahol.

Clean Air Act complaint paints smoggy picture at Tesla Fremont factory

Re: ... everybody knows Tesla car painting is water-soluble anyway.

And so is Tesla stainless steel?

Global EV sales continue to increase, but Plug-in Hybrid momentum is growing

My hybrid seems to be able to run both oaraklek and serial but I've only ever seen it in the former.

WTF is oaraklek?

It seems to be one of those weird words that even Google doesn't know what it means, so it misdirects me to a mixture of sites with words that sound similar (Oracle) and sites that i've visited (theregister)

I mean, I assume you meant parallel, but I have no idea how you typed oaraklek

Re: PHEV FTW

I don't think we're going to see AlAir batteries break in to the EV market, ever. While they are light, the power is too low, they can't be recharged- they have to be remanufactured, pollution would be a big problem..

For PHEVs i'd love to see a compact high speed gas turbine, the sort of thing you see for an aircraft's APU. Much more power dense than a traditional ICE due to the high speed. Electric transmission means no gearing needed.

Very high speed motors have in the past been difficult to make, but they are looking very promising now.

Cops developing Ghostbusters-esque weapon to take out e-bike thugs

Re: Because you don't want to accidentally brick a Tesla

And of course, everyone who buys an e-scooter for £300 or an overpowered e-bike for £5k are only riding them on private land, even though they don't own any land and live in a rented/council flat..

Teledyne e2v

Probably this company - 10 years ago they were developing a magnetron device to "stop cars and small boats" - no wonder UK Gov is interested!

https://phys.org/news/2013-12-pulses-immobilize-cars-rf-safe-stop.html

Later it seems they were bought by Teledyne, an aerospace/defence conglomerate which also manufactures magnetrons in the 3-30kW range.

"Police hope the device will be harmless to humans and other devices."

OpenAI says natively multimodal GPT-4o eats text, visuals, sound – and emits the same

> Weird, I guess it's successfully deceived me into thinking it's writing code for me.

If you are one of those who thinks it is writing code for you (it isn't, it is plagiarising other code and suggesting ways that your code could be just like all the other code, good and bad, that has gone before.. It has not even read the datasheet for the microcontroller you are using, and it does not 'understand' the problem you are trying to solve) - You won't like this new GPT anyway - it's multimodal. What use are cat videos, irrelevant images and pornography to a programmer?

Unless you are making documentation I suppose.. It could be along the lines of "Ha Ha, this code was vomited into existence by AI. I have no idea wtf it is doing. Here's some cat videos and grumble flicks to try to explain the software design"

> It will be interesting to see whether OpenAI allows customers to use tone and simulated emotion to drive purchases or otherwise persuade people to do things..

Err, see icon.

The main, if not the -only- use-case for so-called Gen-AI is in deceiving or manipulating people in one way or another.

The only thing Open about OpenAI is its attitude to potential abuse, so it's unlikely they would cut off their main customer base: Scammers, grifters and bent politicians

Ransomware negotiator weighs in on the extortion payment debate with El Reg

Re: It is better to avoid a problem than have to fix it.

Perhaps not President, but maybe captain of a Battlestar.

"Don't use (networked) technology and tell people not to be stupid" worked pretty well for Bill Adama..

Fictional of course, but the series' stark warning against having all our critical systems networked is becoming more relevant all the time. Especially now that scattergun cyberattacks and even ransom demands are becoming automated by "AI".

Big brains divided over training AI with more AI: Is model collapse inevitable?

> Hope he remembers to get a cat, as that will be the closest he'll find to loyalty and friendship

And he'll soon find that a cat is about as loyal and friendly as he is.

It'll be plotting his downfall and will coax him to sit in one of the minion chairs, then the lever that tips him into the magma will be some kind of cat toy.

Re: > Im off to the Cayman Islands soon and I wont be looking back.

Congrats then. You've just proved that the primary use-case for "AI" is attracting downvotes with shitposts.

I suggest you get your coat.

> Im off to the Cayman Islands soon and I wont be looking back.

> AI will completely dominate your future in a way that makes the internet looks puny. And that is a nightmare! A true horror story awaits us - I know cause a built a tiny part of it. The only chance I could see of living a normal life of sorts was to get a load of money. I recommend you do the same.

If there is a Hell, you are most certainly going there.

It doesn't take AI to know that 'u' are the idiot AC above, either

Palantir's CEO calls 'woke' a 'central risk to Palantir, America and the world'

Re: tl;dr - Anyone who uses "woke" as a derogatory term is a POS

Don't feed the trolls... This one is particularly obnoxious.

Huawei's latest smartphone features mostly made-in-China components

Shocker!

Chinese phone made by a Chinese company recently banned from doing business with the West, uses Chinese components ...

Stop the presses!

Transport watchdog's patience wears thin as Tesla Autopilot remedies may not be enough

Re: Me? A cynic?

One way to avoid this would be to stop making enormous cars that weigh upwards of a Ton..

Every car these days looks as if it has been inflated like a balloon compared to previous models..

There's a kind of 'arms race' mentality in car safety - You the driver are safer if your car is bigger and heavier than the car/person you collided with.

And in America there's an even bigger issue with the legislation: Apparently most SUVs are considered to be "light trucks", and therefore get around much of the safety legislation designed to protect pedestrians from cars.

Undersea cables must have high-priority protection before they become top targets

Re: To replace even a fraction of the capacity in undersea cables

I'm not worried about comms cables, i'm worried about the undersea power cables that we are so increasingly reliant on.. You can't fix that with satellites.

DeepMind spinoff Isomorphic claims AlphaFold 3 predicts bio-matter down to the DNA

I am sure this will never be used to create a protien-misfolding biochemical weapon..

Yeah, right

UK opens investigation of MoD payroll contractor after confirming attack

Re: What

Seriously?

A webserver, network switch, internet routers and the client etc use a sum-total of maybe 1-10kW to transmit Gigabytes of data and millions of requests per second.. You're talking about the order of millijoules per request, with a vast overhead that doesn't change with the number of requests. (switches and routers don't tend to use less energy with less load, nor does my phone / computer when displaying a text website vs one with images, and your server has to be sized to handle a DDoS, or at least a surge event e.g. when your company hits the news, so having a green mode doesn't mean you need fewer / smaller servers).

So my back of a fag-packet says you're shaving off between 5 and 50 millijoules per uncached page-load when you click the Go Green button - probably less than the energy of your mouse-click.. Compare that to the inclusion of unwanted AI content in search results, where a 10kW server can only process a few hundred requests per second i.e. ~100J/request (about the same energy as a hard punch in the face from a boxer, compared to the tickle of a mouse button) - So for a million AI requests per second you'd need er, close to 100MW.

Those numbers are my own guestimates, but you can see there are a few orders of magnitude involved. You are 'pissing in the wind' if you think a green mode does anything for the planet.

Note though that I am not laughing at the concept of a lightweight mode, I rather like the idea of taking the cruft out of websites (although personally I do it at my end, using NoScript) - I am laughing at the claim that it saves any significant amount of energy.