Posts by cyberdemon

Some smart meters won't be smart at all once 2/3G networks mothballed

Re: So, smart meter joy is continuing

Yes so basically if you don't buy into the EV/PV subsidy game, then there is zero reason to want a smart meter ...

Re: So, smart meter joy is continuing

I think what is coming is "limit pricing" whereby your smart meter switches you off when the price goes above what you have set as your limit..

People tend to forget that ALL smart meters have a remotely operable contactor that can be used to disconnect you for a variety of reasons.. E.g. you have been switched to prepayment mode (with no need for a warrant), or there is a load-shedding event i.e. if the grid frequency (nationally) or voltage (locally) are too low due to excess demand / shortage of supply, and you are deemed to be an "optional" customer, or there has been a cyberattack and Putin switched you off..

I'll stick to my old fashioned electromechanical meter, thanks

Re: newer != better

And it's not as if there haven't been improvements in the efficiency of manual reading..

The customer (or the meter reader if an attendance is deemed necessary) simply snaps a picture of the meter and uploads it to be processed automatically.

A very simple Computer Vision problem solved decades ago, is one of the few sorts of things which modern "AI" is pretty good at.

Stability AI decimates staff just weeks after CEO's exit

... And nothing of value was lost

The post is required, and must contain letters.

ASML ships another high NA EUV lithography machine to mystery client

Hmm, who has enough money to buy that

Couldn't be NVDA, could it? Quite possible they are wanting their own fab independent of TSMC for er, geopolitical resilience reasons?

Tesla asks shareholders to reinstate Musk's voided $56B pay package

> He's been using Tesla as his own private piggy bank

So, it sounds like he should be following Sam Bankman-Fried into federal jail.. Go directly to jail, do not collect £200 $56000000000

Blackstone wants to plug hyperscale datacenter into former Britishvolt battery site

Re: New VM instance type.

Genuine question, how do VM hypervisors allocate, schedule and prioritise GPU resources? Since a 750MW bitbarn sounds like it will involve a lot of "AI" crap ..

At best, I suppose when the wind stops blowing, your GPU app could be unloaded and replaced by someone else's GPU app, but if someone else was offering to pay more than you, then the GPU would already be running their app and not yours, regardless of the power source. The bit barn won't want to have idle silicon -ever-, since it is so expensive.

> For a massive improvement even after a meltdown ... I suggest siting it in Cumbernauld

Isn't that where HMRC has its headquarters?

China scientists talk of powering hypersonic weapon with cheap Nvidia chip

Hmm I wonder why it is so difficult, for us in the West to get hold of these modules, assembled in er, China, from components made in Taiwan, eh?

Embargo or no embargo, China holds all the cards.. Even without Taiwan, China is in a much better position to fabricate this sort of thing than the US/Europe (never mind miserable old Blighty with its new-found Sovereignty)

.. I'll be in my bunker

Google location tracking deal could be derailed by politics

I thought it was a manufacturer of mixed-signal microcontrollers and power electronics, named after a tree

US senator wants to put the brakes on Chinese EVs

Popcorn icon needed

With the main "American" EV manufacturer, Tesla, facing "disastrous" sales and decimating its workforce is the world finally waking up to the issue of EVs being unsustainable hype?

In the UK, for even half of vehicles to be electrified, even if we had the generation and transmission capacity, we would need to dig up every street and lay new underground cables- at a time when we don't have enough civil engineering workers to maintain leaking gas pipes, water pipes and sewers ...

How to coax ChatGPT into making better predictions: Get it to tell tales from the future

Extrapolation from three data points ..

Summer Olympics in Paris (2024) => Russia starts Global Thermonuclear War?

Only an AI could be so stupid.. But when decisions are made by Automated Ignorance, we get to reap the rewards of its madness

We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners

Re: Colo[u]r laser

And, they are refillable!

They still have capacity-counter chips, but they are resettable (just an i2c EEPROM i believe).. in most cases (at least with Brother) the printer itself has a function for this..

Re: This feels like an own goal...

If that were the case, we'd be queuing up to buy software and IT services from Fujitsu, jewelry from Gerald Ratner, etc.

Not all publicity is good publicity, especially if you're inherently shit

Adobe will fork over cash for clips to train text-to-video AI

Genie already out of the bottle

I applaud them for trying, but..

Here, Adobe, buy my huge library of labeled clips that definitely are my own copyright and definitely weren't generated by your competitors' products using plagiarized material

Also, they would have to pay an unfathomable fortune to get anywhere even approaching on a log-scale the amount of data that Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, TikTok et al have already stolen been granted an unconditional license to use by their data-cows platform-users

Maybe this is being built on top of a foundation model from someone else, which would make more sense, but would not quite be the same moral high-ground PR position that they are hoping for

Fancy building a replacement for Post Office's disastrous Horizon system?

<ancient> hardware.

That wouldn't have been an ICL 2966 running VME/B, would it?

Won't Somebody think of the Stakeholders?

I'm sure there are various big cheeses at POL who would argue that they couldn't POSSIBLY use an off-the-shelf EPOS system, and the idea of trusting SPMs to run it themselves would make them choke on their Chivas Regal.

No no no, it has to be a big centralised bespoke system, ideally one where we can fiddle the books remotely and fit people up for Fraud if we don't like them but can't fire them..

With a bit of luck though, some of those Cheeses will be rooted out by the Inquiry and sent to jail. One can only hope.

GenAI will be bigger than the cloud or the internet, Amazon CEO hopes

Gen AI ... so much opportunity to make our customer's lives better and easier

s/customers/shareholders/ ?

But seriously, does Mr Jassy know what Generative AI even is or does? The only use for it on Amazon's platform is by fake Chinese sellers to make up nonsense names and bullshit products with fake reviews.. If he really thinks that is going to make anyone's life easier, then I don't know what he is smoking, but i'll pass on it, thanks.

Maybe by "customers" he doesn't actually mean people who BUY from the platform (for those are simply mugs..) but, he means the ones who advertise and sell from it?

Digital Realty ditches diesel for salad dressing in US to cut datacenter emissions

Re: Is lifespan considered?

If long-term storage was the basic issue, then they could be using LPG instead? But maybe not, if what they have installed are Diesel engines?

Actually - even Diesel engines can be made to run on LPG

Re: Does HVO really reduce emissions ?

I suspect that one reason why this might make "business sense" is because of the wonky Biomass carbon-accounting rules that mean tree-burners (and food-burners) can attribute their emissions to the country(/state?) who supplied the fuel.. So there may also be an incentive there to use imported oil instead of producing it locally..

Burning food in a food shortage

Yay, because it's green.

Not that i'm a fan of Diesel-powered datacentres, but what is the efficiency of shoving veg oil into a diesel genset compared with solar + electrochemical storage?

The most efficient crops are (IIRC) 2%-5% efficient at creating fuel, and then you have to burn it in a Diesel engine that is itself 20-30% efficient, so overall solar efficiency in the 1% range, and it is taking away land from food crops, using up nutrients in said land (or requiring energy-intensive and polluting fertiliser). And there is a risk that someone will start using imported Palm Oil if they can't grow enough rapeseed.

Put them next to nuke plants? Great. But Biomass/Biofuels are and always have been a load of greenwash.

Irish power crunch could be prompting AWS to ration compute resources

One thing I find puzzling

Is that I am told the UK's electricity demand has apparently dropped significantly in recent years.

But with the advent of EVs, Heat Pumps, Electric Arc Furnaces, increased train electrification, increasing population and now AI bit-barns, I would have expected it to have grown significantly.

So, what is going on? It can't just be lightbulbs.. I suppose a lot of heavy industry has closed down, people with electric heating have moved to gas, and maybe we are drinking less tea? And the transition to EVs HPs and EAFs hasn't really kicked in yet.

Hailo's latest AI chip shows up integrated NPUs and sips power like fine wine

Meh

Given that this is only 10-20% of what even a low-end laptop GPU can do, and as JessicaRabbit mentions, uses the system RAM via DMA and so chokes out any other memory-intensive tasks, so it's not terribly impressive.

I'm sure it will be used by the likes of Dell and Lenovo to flog "AI PCs" though.

On the upside, at least system RAM is usually upgradeable to well beyond the 16GB provided by high-end laptop and midrange desktop GPUs though, so it may cope with larger models than could run on your GPU, even if it is slower

Rust rustles up fix for 10/10 critical command injection bug on Windows in std lib

Argh

It's 2024, who the hell is still using Batch files?

On the occasions when I am forced to use Windows, the first thing I do is install a proper shell, be it Cygwin or MinGW, WSL or a VM

It's time that CMD.exe and Command.COM are retired for good, along with the rest of MS-DOS that still persists in Windows, shirley

Arm CEO warns AI's power appetite could devour 25% of US electricity by 2030

Re: peak humanity

What weather?

This kind of weather?

I fear apocalypse more from the political climate than the climate climate (although the latter exacerbates the former)

Notepad++ dev slams Google-clogging notepad.plus 'parasite'

Re: Meh

I respectfully suggest Kate

Yes, you can use it on Windows, if you must

US insurers use drone photos to deny home insurance policies

Re: As usual, it's cover for taking advantage of old people

Heaven forbid, you have Solar Panels..

TSMC scores $11.6B funding infusion for Arizona fabs, now plans for third plant

> Nevermind .. the first two plants are facing delays and costs are rising – build, build build!

Where have I heard that before..

A bit like Nuclear Power, Chip Fabrication is one of those industries where suddenly the politicians realise they need it and desperately throw money at it, when the country has long lost the expertise and culture required to build it..

Engine cover flies from Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 during takeoff

Re: Is it Just Me??

My suspicion is that some powerful people went short on Boeing at the time of the door blowout, and they have friends in the media to help their position further.

Change Healthcare faces second ransomware dilemma weeks after ALPHV attack

Let that be a lesson

The worst thing you can possibly do is pay the scum

Paying a ransom (unless authorised as part of a credible police sting) needs to be a criminal offence

Lambda borrows half a billion bucks to grow its GPU cloud

Re: UK altnet sector, which is another dubiously solvent bubble

I assume by altnet sector you mean alternative networks i.e. small, fast ISPs with FTTP for very little money?

I often wonder how my ISP toob can make any money at all on its offering of 900Mbps symmetric speeds, for £25/month, and a promise of no mid-contract price rises

Re: Vampire Kangaroo

But next time post non-amp links please

I personally find Brave's auto non-ampify feature very refreshing

Other browsers/extensions are available

Microsoft warns that China is using AI to stir the pot ahead of US election

Re: Why?

It's not that they are supporting one or other party. My theory is that they would want all western votes to have a 50/50 outcome. Maximum division, hung parliaments that can't make a decision, potential for civil war.

So they stir up vitriol as much as they can, track voting intentions, and tweak the signals very carefully for the perfect non-result, with as many frothing maniacs on both sides as possible.

Simple divide and conquer. Democracy is doomed in a world controlled by TikTok.

World's second-largest eyeglass lens-maker blinded by infosec incident

You don't mean this particular optometrist, do you?

(tbh, not sure if that was a genuine error on the part of the van driver or a piece of guerrilla marketing.. by a firm of optometrists that apparently spends more on marketing than it does on optometrists)

Microsoft slammed for lax security that led to China's cyber-raid on Exchange Online

Communism and Capitalism don't mix

The Open Source community (which I love) is based on fundamentally Communist ideals - everyone works for the good of everyone, and if literally everyone did that then there would be little need for money and everybody would be happy.

But then it only takes someone to come along and say "Ooo, free stuff, people working for free, I can exploit that to my own end." to disrupt the whole ideal. Basically this is why there are so few good open-source Android/iOS apps for example, because the Android/iOS systems are so heavily monetised that as soon as anyone releases a good open source app, someone is immediately coming along to clone it and release it as their own paid and/or data-slurping app.

Microsoft is the mother of all open-source exploiters, buying GitHub and using it to build a code-plagiarising bullshit machine, stealing every commit and comment any open source dev has ever made, and using them to both put future programmers out of work and simultaneously pollute the entire ecosystem with autogenerated shite, because managers who want a quick buck would rather use autogenerated shite full of security holes but which "seems to work", than pay actual engineers to do stuff properly.

But a secondary effect of that is that the entire open source community is demoralised, anything we contribute is going to be appropriated by some dickheads who want to make money and then blame us when it all goes wrong..

Frankly I hope that when WWIII kicks off, the ultra-wideband fibres will all be chopped and we all have to go back to 56k dialup speeds. Messageboards like The Register will work perfectly fine, but "social" media, data-slurping, AI, ransomware etc would become that much harder again...

Uber Eats to rid itself of pesky human drivers with food delivery by robo Waymo

Re: Stuck in traffic

I wonder if the plan is to eventually replace the Waymo with either a starship "mothership" or a Yamaha Motodroid..

I also wonder if it would be simpler to install a system of pneumatic delivery tubes under each city, so that the meatbags never have to leave their pods

.. Although that solution is less flexible if the meatbags one day decide to come out, and need to be forcibly returned or neutralised

Re: Layer 8

Wish I could downvote your downvoter..

"Layer 8" is the layer above the Application layer, i.e. the pathetic meatsack.

Software engineer helped put Sam Bankman-Fried behind bars, say prosecutors

Re: FTX investigation poem

- E.J. Thribb, 17½ Satoshis

Microsoft warns deepfake election subversion is disturbingly easy

Upvoted Paul, although I disagree that "The problem is not AI fakes," - the problem is not just AI fakes.

It's a product of two very serious problems. And, I don't think simply fining, boycotting or otherwise de-monetising social media platforms would solve it. There are major vested interests behind this. I.e. hostile states.

So, short of chopping all the fibres and switching off the Internet for good, I think sadly AI deepfake propaganda distributed over the Internet is here to stay.

Microsoft Teams decouples from Office 365 suite globally

Price reductions?

Or just an extra mug's tax for all the plebs stuck with Teams entrenched into their organisations?

Too little, too late indeed.. I would prefer to see Borkzilla unbundled from itself. Split Office 355, Teams, LinkedIn, GitHub and Windows into separate companies.

Why Microsoft's Copilot will only kinda run locally on AI PCs for now

Locally..ish?

So, all of the privacy and lock-in implications of the cloud model, but we'll use YOUR electricity and YOUR hard-bought silicon?

Sounds great..

The Register meets the voice of Siri Down Under

Oh well

At least nobody will have to suffer this again...

.. Or any other voice acting gig

JetBrains keeps mum on 26 'security problems' fixed after Rapid7 spat

Re: JetBrains seems to have a history of being dicks

They -are- good, CLion is functionally the best IDE for embedded C/C++ IMO, same for PyCharm - I haven't used the others, but they do only seem to give half a Hoot about security.. For example, they host their own package index for some languages, and don't seem to give a toss about typosquatted packages or even nonsense packages with names like '~~~~~~~~'.

They also have some very powerful collaborative development features and a IDEA server that connects the IDE's backend on a remote/embedded host to your local GUI, but the security implications of that makes my teeth itch.

They also are VERY slow to respond to issues, some important but complex or low-priority to fix ones have had commenters post "happy 12th birthday to this YouTrack issue" images on the thread..

CEO of UK's National Grid warns of datacenters' thirst for power

Re: More energy needed?

Who needs to grow wood when you can just chop down forests in other countries, dry it out and make it into pellets at great energy cost, ship it over to the UK in diesel-powered boats, belch out CO2 and carcinogenic particulate smoke in the UK but attribute all the emissions to the country you just deforested, and collect billions in carbon-credit subsidies! Trebles all round!

Re: > A nice view of a burning planet is preferable to a few wind turbines in some peoples minds

If I was insecure or not wanting to engage as a peer, then I'd be posting as AC..

It's also not that I believe climate change isn't a problem, it's more that I find the idea of modern-day CO2 emissions being the primary cause questionable. There are plenty of other reasons for it to be happening. Methane, solar activity, etc etc. (see Jellied Eel posts ad-nauseam).

I also find that the prioritisation of reducing CO2 emissions above all other things has become something of a quasi-religious cult, a sort of cognitive dissonance. We are told that by releasing CO2 we will cause the world to go on fire, we will go to Hell. That stuff irks me.

I also worry that by betting the farm on renewables, net zero, carbon capture, smart grids etc, we are both weakening our economy (by spending on ultimately frivolous projects, unsustainable markets and subsidies) and weakening our resilience to a major crash. We all know that world wars start when large economies crash, and WWIII is looking perilously close.

Sorry for using a post-modern curse-word, but the trigger-phrase that made me use it was "burning planet". Obviously, the world is NOT on fire. But it will be when we have crashed the economy and start lobbing nuclear warheads at each other.

Re: off peak power

No women-hating. I just hate the idea of AI being used to replace actual doctors.

Instead of training doctors, we will be uploading all of our health info into the cloud, for a machine to diagnose us instead.

Not nice finding out after all that slurping, that your cancer was just a 'hallucination'

Re: More energy needed?

Presumably datacentres, like EVs, can be asked (or paid) to suspend their jobs (not shutdown completely, just SIGSTP on the training process) if the grid is at risk of crashing?

Not so easy for Heat Pumps though

The issue will be that the DC operators will say that any downtime however brief hurts their bottom line, so that payment better be worth it.. And then the outright corruption starts when DCs with nothing useful to do start charging the grid for suspending their non-operations.

> Climate 'science' just makes stuff up.

Clearly, the climate scientists feel threatened by AI's ability to make up utter nonsense in far greater volume than even they can.. So perhaps that would explain why AI Datacentres are the latest target of the green lobby!

AI hallucinates software packages and devs download them – even if potentially poisoned with malware

Re: the names these chatbots pull out of thin air are persistent

One possible explanation is nefarious SEO-optimised auto-generated webshites are now being used to poison AI models..

That, or GitHub really is ingesting private repos into CoPilot, and there could be an unlimited number of private repos full of malicious code designed to poison any AI model. These days it is possible to optimise that poisoning to cause model collapse.

The only way to win is not to play.

What Nvidia's Blackwell efficiency gains mean for DC operators

Re: Liquid cooled or not

Or in this case, doing apparently 5x more "work" for double the power..