Posts by cyberdemon

Nvidia turns up the AI heat with 1,200W Blackwell GPUs

The H100 was how many Watts? At least 600? If this really has 5x its performance then they -are- improving performance per watt?

Also, 1200W is 1.2kW, not MW ...

You can remove the tracking cookie off your u-bend links, too.

Investment advisors pay the price for selling what looked a lot like AI fairy tales

Or er, less?

I'm not sure how involving a bullshit mangler improves the value of anything?

US CHIPS Act set to electrify semiconductor scene with billions

There's no such thing as silicon heaven..

But then where would all the calculators go?

How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

Re: You expect it to "know" facts?

Well yes of course. I'm sure anyone posting here is aware if what LLMs really are. It just irks me that so many less well educated/informed people are at risk of taking plausibility-optimised random noise as actual truth or fact..

Worse, when vulnerable people are presented with LLM output on the other end of a web chat or phone call, believing it to be another human.. When actually it's a LLM under the supervision of a crime gang, for example. It's like the mythical "demonic mirror". Stare into the thing long enough, and be damned

Re: 0/10 for current affairs

0/10 for reasoning, logic, or intelligence

It's a box of statistics about text. You expect it to "know" facts? All it "knows" is what word is likely to follow another, in an ocean of mostly human generated text, increasingly polluted by its own fetid excrement

The prompt injections, "guardrails", and other hacks that MS uses to keep their public instance up to to date about things like facts or er, the actual date, are like flakes of glitter on a turd.

"You can't polish a turd.. But you can roll it in glitter!"

Because a local instance has no guardrails or prompt injection, there is no logging of prompts or outputs, no way to slurp data, track usage or abusage.. No way to ban abusive users from the platform

Basically anything that needs to run offline and/or one does not want Microsoft, Google, facebook et al interfering with..

Such as running a large scale scam or a social media botnet, making a cutesy robot companion or a sinister Orwellian robot border guard which automates discrimination/racism/etc.

As with all so-called "AI", there are many uses, but few legitimate ones..

The cynic in me says these companies are releasing locally runnable models to ram the point home to politicians and regulators that the Genie is Out of the Bottle, there is no point trying to regulate their platforms, because the Horse has already Bolted, Pandora's Box is Open etc.

Re: ... and ...

You can run it on a CPU with your system RAM I believe, but it may spend a bit more time pulling answers out of its digital arse

Re: curl -fsSL someurl | sh

Who's to say that someurl would give the same content to cURL as it did when you inspected it with a browser user-agent

If you can be bothered to inspect it, then save the script locally, inspect it, THEN run it.

curl -fsSL someurl | sh

Why anyone would think this is an acceptable way of installing anything is beyond me. Especially in the many cases where sudo is also involved..

Yet it seems so pervasive..

Here, have a reverse shell so you can install it for me, because i'm so bloody lazy

In other news..

In the rush to build AI apps, please, please don't leave security behind

Security? What's that

Want some lovely AI magic? Just pipe the contents of this URL directly to your shell and get some AI goodness!

Don't trust us with your shell? You can even check out the install script in your browser if you like. We definitely won't do any HTTP switcheroo when the user-agent is set to 'curl/'

Microsoft license shuffle means Power Apps users could break the bank

> It started as purely CRM but now you can do ERP and other business process automation.

Hmm, sounds like a good candidate for whatever "software update" it was that recently borked Maccie D's, Sainsburys and Tescos then!

Can someone tell me

What the hell is Dynamics 365 and what is it good for?

And Power Apps for that matter.

I haven't visited the cult of Microsoft for some time

Microsoft says AI alliances are needed to compete with Google

The competition sucks, but

How is poor Microsoft supposed to completely monopolise the market while there is competition at All, eh?

They must be allowed to gobble up ALL of the minnows, before one of those minnows invents something better than their paper tiger duopolist Google (or Hell Forbid, better than OpenAI), because then there would be actual competition and we can't have That, can we!

McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles

Re: I refuse to use those touch screen thingies

And quite often, they will have a camera inside. Shortly they'll be reading your facial expressions and decide what you want before you've even poked your finger at it.

Cop shop rapped for 'completely avoidable' web form blunder

Re: Checking it twice

For a complaints logging database? Nah, just use the lowest-bid contractor for that system that we've been forced to implement but don't actually want ...

We used to have a paper-based system called the cylindrical receptacle, but those scrotes in Whitehall said it wasn't sufficient

Caffeine makes fuel cells more efficient, cuts cost of energy storage

Re: Flow batteries

To be fair, rxcb didn't say whether he was talking about mobile or stationary applications.. TFA mentions a use case for data centre backup power

Re: Caffeine or no caffeine

But most of that is produced by cracking methane, and consumed by gas turbines and boilers, right?

How much can feasibly be produced by electrolysers, and consumed by fuel cells? That's the part that I am betting against. (That and large-scale storage)

Re: Caffeine or no caffeine

Lol. Posting AC as usual...

I bet you a pint that Hydrogen will never contribute 2GW in total in the UK in the next 10 years, never mind their target of 10GW by 2030. I also bet a second pint that storing hundreds of GWh in Hydrogen proves infeasible.

But you'd need to take that mask off to drink it...

Re: Caffeine or no caffeine

Yes, pumped hydro is great in theory, but in practice you need a Very Large Hill (a mountain), with a Very Large Lake at the top. These are rare in nature, and infeasible to build. Not impossible if you already have a nice mountain which isn't designated an Area of Natural Beauty and therefore you can get permission to chop the top off and dig a massive hole in it.. But even then, that gets you Hours, not the Days of storage that you'd need to plug Wind lulls. The efficiency isn't great (though maybe better than fuel cells) but the cost to is going to be in the tens of billions for a GW-scale facility, and it doesn't actually generate electricity.. Better to build a nuke that does?

And still, you have to get the electricity in and out of the facility. The biggest problem with the UK grid IMO is the transmission bottleneck - we can't easily build more pylons because of nimby landowners, and so we are unable to get the electricity out of Scotland when the wind is blowing (so we have to turn on gas plants and French imports, while paying the scots to NOT use their wind) and i'm not sure how storage fixes that problem, since all the feasible storage solutions are very short-term, and even then, storage is not the same as transmission capacity.

The reason that NG were so excited about Hydrogen, is because it could solve some of the Transmission problem. Put electrolysers in Scotland and Fuel Cells in England, and use the existing Gas network to pump it around to where it's needed. You obviously can't do that with stand-alone storage like a stationary battery or pumped hydro plant.. But unfortunately, for reasons of electrochemistry and physics, the Hydrogen plan didn't turn out to be very feasible either.

So, instead we are building HVDC links like they are going out of fashion. Not just between countries/continents, but inside the UK. Priti Patel famously opposed pylons and wanted to build a UK HVDC superhighway instead.. Apparently one can lay a 2GW subsea cable much faster and with less hassle from nimby's, than a traditional AC transmission line. (although it would use far more copper, and be more expensive overall)

What worries me about that plan though is that HVDC is asynchronous - by virtue of being DC - so it exacerbates the already perilous grid-islanding and frequency-instability that could cause a UK-wide blackout - and although we can sort-of fix that with some funky software, they are extremely vulnerable to sudden failure or sabotage.

Subsea AC cables then? Maybe. Although apparently they annoy the fish even more than the DC ones do. And just-as-prone to anchor-dragging etc.

Caffeine or no caffeine

Fuel cells and electrolysers are stuck requiring a hell of a lot of Platinum. There's no way we could go from a few Megawatts installed capacity to Gigawatts (never mind 150-300TWh/y as required by the UK's Future Energy Scenario plans) without exhausting supply of what is already a stonkingly rare and expensive metal.

Google brains plumb depths of the uncanny valley with latest image-to-video tool

No need for YouTubers anymore

The bullshit-laden video can be generated directly from the shitty clickbait thumbnail

I pity this poor machine for being forced to ingest all the shite there is on YouTube

Chinese smartphone brand Xiaomi adds electric vehicle to its mobility offerings

Xiaomi the way to go home..

I'm tired and I want to go to bed.

My EV conked out an hour ago.. and i'm freezing me bleedin tits off

Whizkids jimmy OpenAI, Google's closed models

Isn't it ironic

That a company calling itself "Open" AI, should be so concerned about the black box around their disruptive-yet-useless product

Now you can compare your Chromium browser with that other Chromium browser using Speedometer 3.0

Re: It doesn’t test CPU JS execution?

It should.. The article's point is that this is a circle-jerk benchmark that only tests Chromium against itself. It is deliberately agnostic of hardware and conveniently not applicable to any non-Chromium browser..

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

TikTok

Promote videos of thugs pouring petrol into service ducts to other thugs likely to do the same

???

Profit

Microsoft calls AI privacy complaint 'doomsday hyperbole'

Can I ask for that data to be removed too?

Not if it's already been subsumed into GPT model weights. Then I believe it's impossible to remove without re-training the model from scratch.

The best they could do would be to add another 'guardrail' to prevent questions or outputs specifically about you, but those are easily bypassed by anyone determined or privileged enough, and having too many of those makes their system shitter and slower, so they are unlikely to do it unless forced to by a court

Telegram eyes IPO as user numbers close in on 1 billion

Re: It's all downhill once the bankers turn up

How exactly does Telegram fund its operations, never mind turn a profit?

I assume by selling data out of both ends of its end-to-end encrypted app

UK council yanks IT systems and phone lines offline following cyber ambush

Simple scumbag target priority formula

(number_of_customers x vulnerability_of_customers) / competence_of_it_staff

Attacks are becoming about increasing the search space for further victims of scams, and councils will be a prime target because so many people depend on them.

I am unfortunately a southern water hostag^Wcustomer and since their cyber-leak i have started getting many scam calls e.g. "calling about your housing problem"

These appear to be automated with an AI voice calling itself Sarah. I haven't been far enough down the scam but I assume it wants to collect info about any issues you do have which it will use to sell you a discount home improvement survey which doesn't exist

I dread to think how much misery they could cause if they obtained a list of phone numbers of vulnerable people who are in debt to their council / housing association / etc. It's pretty worrying

Climate change means beer made from sewer water, says North Carolina brewery

Re: Been done before

I don't think so, no?

Tap water is treated reservoir water, which is supposed to be rainwater

Treated sewage (and in 'exceptional' cases that are slowly becoming the norm) is allowed to flow into rivers, but NOT reservoirs, afaik. There would be too much microplastics and the aforementioned pharmaceutical chemicals in it, even after treatment.

This is apparently planned to change by 2030, but is unpopular for obvious reasons: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62708413

Re: Wouldn't put me off

Good point. You'd probably want to test each batch of water with a mass-spectrometer, to test for anything that can't simply be filtered out or eaten by microbes which are then filtered out. But even then, i'd guess there are some poisons that could still be harmful even when below the noise floor of the instrument.

TBH I'd be surprised if this process is any more efficient than letting it evaporate and collecting rainwater.

Been done before

It's called Carlsberg

Justice Dept reportedly starts criminal probe into Boeing door bolt incident

Video unavailable in your country (UK) Would you like to Buy it?

WTF? Is slurping my data, manipulative recommendations and a pile of ads not good enough for you, YouTube?

And another one today

787 Dreamliner experiences severe mid-flight "wobble", causing head injuries as passengers hit the ceiling

Meanwhile the UFO Union are on strike

Not a good time for international travel, I do wonder WTF is going on

Trying out Microsoft's pre-release OS/2 2.0

Re: Microsoft Presentation for the 1989 IBM PS/2 forum

And then a few years later they did it to themselves

icon gates_horns, but I can't be arsed to exhume it

Kremlin accuses America of plotting cyberattack on Russian voting systems

Accuse the enemy of that which you are guilty

Standard procedure for Putin et al.

No amount of 'interference' could stop a despot from winning his own 'election'.

If anything, it's a message (and an excuse) that he will be interfering as much as he possibly can in the oncoming US and UK elections.

How do you lot feel about Pay or say OK to ads model, asks ICO

Re: Great Idea!

CPM? I had to look up that piece of marketing BS-Bingo

I don't really give a toss about their costs. What irks me is that different people see different versions of webpages and search results depending on who some data-broker thinks they are. That's what enables social manipulation.

Of course, social manipulation is ultimately what all Advertising boils down to, but at least with untargeted advertising it has to be done in the clear, where people can call out propaganda and abuse. Whereas targeted advertising allows abusive marketing practices to be done surreptitiously.

Re: These services have to make money somehow

The Reg is a useful service. Facebook/twatter/ubend less-so

If the Reg were to embed some non-intrusive ads hosted by their own server that I could be sure weren't slurping my data to some ad-slinger company then I wouldn't block them. But as long as Javascript and cross-domain slurping is going on, i'm not having it.

Frankly I'd like to see the likes of Google, Meta and Microsoft broken up. If Google were to disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow, the only part of it that I would miss is GMail - their search is rubbish these days and AOSP would become so much better if Google died. But even GMail I use less and less these days. Youtube is a increasingly a cess-pool to compete with TikTok. The only part of Microsoft I'd miss is GitHub (which they shouldn't have been allowed to pillage in the first place) the rest of it (LinkedIn, Windows, Office, OpenAI etc) can be incinerated. Meta, I'd only miss WhatsApp (which again, they shouldn't have been allowed to buy) TikTok, X, amazon, Apple*.. I wouldn't miss these at all.

* Of course, some people would miss Apple a lot. There would need to be some kind of fanboi rehabilitation programme

Re: Great Idea!

Here's a pile of very genuine high quality personal data and i'll even give you a picture of me. Now pay up!

Not every problem can be solved by inventing a new market. Just look at Ofgem. As soon as you invent an artificial market, someone works out how to defraud it.

What I'd rather see, is a general ban on targeted advertising, data brokers etc. Not opt in or opt out, just Out. If that means a few Trillion is wiped off the NASDAQ, so be it.

Microsoft confirms Russian spies stole source code, accessed internal systems

Security by Obscurity

I once had someone tell me that we couldn't POSSIBLY use Linux on a particular product - "because Linux is Open Source - That means Anybody can get in!"

Windows 2000 had been mandated by higher-ups, for a government type-approved embedded system. Each unit required three separate Intel Atom PC/104 boards each running win2k for the system to operate. Usually one of them was borked, so it usually didn't.

Of course, in this case, that was fine, because the product in question was the speed cameras on the M25 and M40 (ducks)

Borked cameras often required lane closures and someone to go up on a gantry to reset it.. In the end, they made most of their money selling dummy cameras

Boeing paper trail goes cold over door plug blowout

Re: The wheels are coming off at Boeing

How often to wheels fall off planes in general? Whatever is going on, it is most certainly odd.

There seems to be a lot of media interest in -any- Boeing failure right now, and they also seem to be more frequent than normal. Something odd is going on. Either the Media have it in for Boeing, or somebody is sabotaging planes.. Or both. (or neither, it could be an emergent social-media phenomenon that after the door blowout everyone is on the lookout for more Boeing failures). Maybe the WEF-types are trying to reduce air travel ahead of WWIII while shorting Boeing stock? :P

Font security 'still a Helvetica of a problem' says Australian graphics outfit Canva

coloured pencil bridage

Is this the same brigade who like to mandate non-reflowable webpages, even on desktop browsers?

Palantir wins US Army contract for battlefield AI

Test

Put a "child" mannequin on a trolley pulled along by string and see if it "survives" being seen by an armed drone controlled by TITAN.

If test data from Gaza is anything to go by, it would be blown to smithereens

Plummer talks to us about spending Microsoft's money on a red Corvette

FQUtube

If dipping into X is not for you, Plummer's history of Windows ZipFolders – and a good deal more technical detail – can also be found on his YouTube channel. ®

I'm just as disinclined to dip into the U-bend as I am to Plumm the depths of Xitter, that's why I read the Reg.

But you knew that, didn't you Richard.

Thanks for the article though, made me chuckle. And explains a lot about why Microsoft's Zip extractor is still so abominable.

UK finance minister promises NHS £3.4B IT investment to unlock £35B savings

Welcome to Google Health

No need for doctors anymore, our systems have profiled every person on the planet and determined exactly which ailments they will have before they have them, and exactly which medication they will need, with the magic of AI.

We've determined that you will soon be suffering from depression. Here's your advance prescription for antidepressants. Feel free to reach out to us if you would prefer to exchange it for a 10% discount voucher at Dignitas

Please note, this service may be terminated without notice when we get bored of it

Re: automating the writing and clinical coding of notes, discharge summaries and GP letters

We still have other parties, we are not the USA yet.

Time to give the Lib Dems another chance?

Apple may have made itself a target before the EU's Digital Markets Act comes into force

Enough self-arbitration

Sounds like they need a DMA controller

Belgian ale legend Duvel's brewery borked as ransomware halts production

Re: A lack of cheer(s)

To be fair, in 1871 they were only brewing enough for a few monks and the local townsfolk. To scale up an operation to brew beer at an affordable price for millions of people at home and abroad does require a certain degree of automation..

Network Segregation

So, where I previously worked, we had three "separate" networks.

We had one called ControlNet which was for the robot control systems and HMI terminals only; another called FileNet for the robotics-related fileservers, local domain controllers and HMI terminals; and a site-wide network which had internet access. Unfortunately the fileservers were also connected to the site network because so many people needed access to them in their offices.

So they sort of tried network segregation but ultimately all three networks were connected.

There was much argument from me and others, but it never changed. Fortunately there were no serious incidents.

We're not Meta support: State AGs tell Zuck to fix rampant account takeover problem

Re: Pendantic

You forgot your coat.

It's only a plateau if it has levelled off.. If it is still rising then it's still a spike, and is (for now) persistent?

I'm sure it has nothing at all to do with oncoming elections in the US and UK ...

Apple's had it with Epic's app store shenanigans, terminates dev account

There's KDE Plasma Mobile.. There's Sailfish

Unfortunately the biggest hurdle to both of these is that the hardware vendors have control via secure boot and e-fuses on the CPU itself, which will be blown by the bootloader if incorrect software is loaded, rendering the device hard-bricked. These mechanisms are mandated by Google in order to run Android OS, and also prevent downgrading to an earlier version of Android, so pretty much every device has them. Even Fairphone (the one device you would hope would not be able to deliberately self-brick) has them.

And obviously Crapple is as Crapple does - Tim Cook will be ice-skating in Hell with Steve before they allow third-party OSes onto IPhones.