Posts by cyberdemon

How to improve Chinese TV? Better censorship, says top tellie-maker

Re: Telescreens

The part where Orwell was wrong in his prescience is about the size of the telescreens - They would not be on the wall, but in your pocket.

Reddit gets a call from Nokia about patent infringement ahead of going public

Re: Greetings from "Nokialand"

@perkele That sucks. You'll need one or five of these.

Cheers for the N900 btw! Best phone ever (except for that one flaw that limited its lifespan and things like the USB connector and SIM holder started coming loose from the PCB - an issue with early lead-free wave-soldering I guess?). Cheers for Maemo the debian-based mobile OS that made it what it was. (Shame when Intel and deadrat joined the party and poisoned it with their bastard Meego)

I loved that phone, from 2009-2015. Last phone ever to have a native Linux OS, X11, apps in .deb format and a C++ compiler on-device. Made a great SSH terminal with its slide-out keyboard and high-res screen. There was even an open-source WhatsApp client for it at the time called Yappari.

Now all we have is a choice of crapple or slurpzilla.

Nokia could be pulling a Microsoft

Well, Microsoft already "embraced, extended and almost extinguished" Nokia by installing execs, crashing the company and buying half of it at a fire-sale price, so i'm not surprised

Re: 2 years may not be long enough

2 years may be a little too far the other way, but 25 years is far too long for a patent.

If all software patents were to be reduced to 10 years, it would solve a lot of problems. The tech development cycle has accelerated since the patent system was conceived (and frankly the whole system is broken) so I would welcome a gradual reduction in patent life until eventually lawyers and corporate-spies reach a new equilibrium.

Judge demands social media sites prove they didn't help radicalize mass shooter

IANAL

Meta, Reddit, Twitch's company Amazon, YouTube owner Alphabet, plus Discord and 4Chan (where is TikTok?)

But it seems to me the only ones in this group with a defence are Discord and 4Chan i.e. the ones acting as "plain-old messageboards" without promoting content to er, "like-minded users"?

Reg needs a popcorn icon. Or maybe dry-roasted peanuts.

Virgin Media sets up 'smart poles' next to cabinets to boost mobile network capacity

Re: What's more important, your network or the rat that pissed on the cable?

I once worked in traffic controllers, and I heard stories of street cabinets being left loose or open, only for some drunk to have a slash inside..

A urine stream is full of electrolytes.. 240VAC up the wazzer - Drunk or not, that's not something he'll forget in a hurry!

Re: For contrast

Surely RCDs / (GFIs for the Yanks) (as mentioned by @PRR below) are mandatory in such a scenario?

I would hardly consider somebody's yacht supply to be "critical infrastructure" worthy of prioritising reliability over safety ..

Re: "digital electricity" technology

All that says to me is "spurious-trip hazard".

Safety vs reliability: In reliability engineering, there is no such thing as "fail safe" - only fail.

Monitoring for minute changes in power-line impedance only introduces a new EM-induced failure mode. Never mind a solar flare, you'll be down the next time the arc-welding shop next door starts their shift.

What's more important, your network or the rat that pissed on the cable?

Re: Danger of Death

And give the idiot behind the switch a bloody great fright / singed eyebrows to teach him never to do that again!

Re: "digital electricity" technology

I did, but only after inhaling my coffee

Danger of Death

I once heard a story from an old electrical contractor about when he was called to some mansion in the scottish highlands that had its own 11kV substation. He says he had isolated the supply and locked the switchroom to work on the busbars (i guess probably he was on the 400V side) but hadn't reckoned on the janitor having a key, ignoring the sign saying Do Not Operate, and throwing it back on to make his tea.

The contractor was up a ladder with his hands on two different busbars at the time, but survived to tell the tale because apparently he was thrown clear like timmy from Jurassic Park..

Moral of the story: Always lock out with your OWN padlock

Could have been a tall tale of course, but nonetheless instructive

On the other end of the scale, I also knew an electrical engineer who said she wouldn't touch a 12V car battery, "cos its the current that kills you". I didn't argue - never a good idea with that one.

Re: "digital electricity" technology

Pretty sure 48V DC can kill too, if you have thin skin and wet hands... Always keep one hand behind your back

I wouldn't want to touch 100V DC, however BS7671:2028 (IET wiring regs 18th ed) says in 414.1.1 (iii) limitation of voltage to 50V AC or 120V DC for SELV/PELV. I would guess this lower than expected limit for AC is because of the capacitance of the epidermis, which is not an issue for DC. I have had a few capacitively-coupled shocks and it stings a bit, but not as bad as being burned by a real shock.

Re: "digital electricity" technology

It says it's "touch safe" so I expect it would be 48VDC. 100V at a push.

A 5G radio for a "small cell" shouldn't need much power, right? 100W or so ought to be sufficient? 350V might be needed for a repeater in a 1000km submarine cable, but not for a few metres between a cabinet and a telegraph pole

Nearly choked on my coffee when I read "'digital electricity' allows power to be transmitted on a fibre optic cable" though! The marketing wonks at Vermin Media are either stoned or have been replaced by AI

AI researchers have started reviewing their peers using AI assistance

Embarassing? Elsevier are beyond shame

They have been publishing fake journals to try to inflate their worth since the year 2000. Scum-sucking parasites the lot of them

Beijing-backed cyberspies attacked 70+ orgs across 23 countries

Re: That's OK

Never mind budgets, security education seems to have been defenestrated in favour of "trust us, it's easy, install this, do this"

IT died when they let the riff-raff in, without a basic education in what a computer is or does or can do

Manglement thinks the solution is to buy a package from someone like DarkTrace .. which is like paying a cowboy builder to plaster over the cracks

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

Re: curl -fsSL someurl | sh

Last time I had one of these I did exactly that and got very annoyed, and built from source. But you're right, of course. Doing so defeats the object of an easy install, but an easy install is highly insecure.

Running in a VM is not a bad approach for most things, but for GPU stuff, there'll be a performance hit if it works at all.

Unless you have a separate GPU dedicated to one particular VM via an IOMMU?

Re: curl -fsSL someurl | sh

If it were a binary EXE installer (it isn't, it's a text script) then saving it before running it would at least give your AntiVirus a chance to spot something dodgy. But executing a shell directly from a HTTP response is just stupid, and users need to be made to understand just how stupid it is. Yet perversely, this method of installation seems to be gaining ground with a lot of commercial software for Linux.

Re: JARGON

Hear hear. I find that very annoying, too, when I don't know a piece of jargon.

But, what rock have you been hiding under? And can I join you? I wish to avoid all technological and political developments of the next decade.

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..

Nvidia: Why write code when you can string together a couple chat bots?

Re: This will solve all our problems

The worst that can happen is that the AI vomits verbatim the contents of one of Oracle or SAP's codebases from a private GitHub repo!

(With a bit of luck, they are still on VCS or Visual SourceSafe, and/or they have lost the code entirely)

"It is very likely that you assemble a team of AI"

And what you'll end up with, is a fully end-to-end AI-built software product, with all the delightful quality of Wonka's Chocolate Experience!

Voltron Data revs up hyper-speed analytics, leaves Snowflake in the dust

Also, what kind of database query returns a 100TB result??

To me, that just says you are doing your query wrong

"only 6 TB of GPU memory."

What kind of GPU comes with 6TB memory?

Swift enters safe mode over gyro issue while NASA preps patch to shake it off

Hot or cold spares?

Are all three normally spinning, or is one of them left cold?

If all three are spinning then they probably wear out at a similar rate.. A bit like disks in a sodding RAID where Sod's Law dictates that N+1 will fail on the same day where N is the level of redundancy

Atos says Airbus flew off, no longer interested in infosec and big data biz

My heart bleeds

For those poor Atos shareholders

.. who might be thinking "Why couldn't they have bought us anyway at a heavily inflated price before we bail out, let them run the company down, and worst-case we send a stooge to jail.. But no, they had to do their bloody due diligence"

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

Halve a watermelon

Perhaps he wanted to buy the 'experience' of halving a watermelon

Here is your 'Halve a watermelon' ticket, sir. That'll be five pounds.

India celebrates rapid adoption of its internet of livestock

Don't give the next Home Secretary any ideas

Or (s)he'll be buying this for all of us lot.

Moo

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?

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..