Posts by cyberdemon

Security is hard because it has to be right all the time? Yeah, like everything else

Re: I disagree - a reliability incident is temporary, a security incident is permanent

I guess the difference between security and reliability is that reliability assumes that your enemies are wear, the environment, the laws of physics, unpredictable users, and statistics. So if it works under extended test conditions or 'fuzzing' then it's fine. Whereas security assumes that any mistake, however small, will eventually be discovered and exploited by Nicolas Cage, Stephen Seagull, or Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson

Rivian decimates staff to put a brake on spending

Re: The end of electric vehicles

You can't easily recycle graphene into graphene, unfortunately. You can recycle it into low-purity amorphous carbon black, but that's not very valuable. Graphene is produced by separating single layers of graphite, and graphite has to be mined. Sure, synthetic graphite/graphene is possible, but it is much more expensive than mining it. China recently banned exports of graphite, because it is a key mineral in the manufacture of batteries, for which they want to protect their dominance.

Aluminium has a lower electrochemical potential than Lithium i.e. it produces less than half the voltage per cell. Not a show-stopper, but it makes it harder to be the front-runner in a competitive market. Power density will be lower, so fast charging is certainly not going to be vastly improved as you claim. Even if they tolerate high temperatures under fast-charging conditions, that just means that fast charging is going to be inefficient.

Re: When somebody runs a red light and hits your car,

I think you are underestimating just how tightly-integrated EVs are. Take a look at the various teardown videos on the u-bend of EV motors. Motor and power electronics are usually packaged in the same cast aluminium housing, due to cooling, cabling reduction and EMC requirements. Usually the differential is part of this single package, too. Often you can't even access the motor phase wires without opening the shell and breaking the gasket on the motor's cooling loop. The drive unit is a single monolithic component with 400V DC supply, CAN bus, coolant in/out, and output shafts for a pair of wheels.

I would expect that converting an ICE car (with a nice spacious engine bay and open transmission) would be much easier than de-bricking a bricked EV by trying to replace the motor control board. You'd need to replace the entire driveshaft/differential/motor/controller module, and get something that can fit into the same tightly packed space as the original. No use going to a scrapyard, because the electronic components will be keyed to the original serial number etc.

The Siemens kits that you describe will be for "standard" induction or PMSM (with a feedback sensor) only. I doubt they would drive SynRM or the wacky Tesla IPM-SynRM motors, but I could be wrong. Nevertheless, I would challenge anyone to be able to rip out the drive electronics of an EV and jack onto the motor phases and be able to drive it.

It's hard to believe that those in power don't know all of this

So, one can only assume that the plan is to phase out the concept of ordinary citizens having their own transportation.

The way to reduce congestion apparently, is not to build roads, but take the riff-raff off of them.

In the "good old days", only the landed gentry could afford their own horse and carriage, let alone a motor-car. For the rest of them, there's the omnibus.

Re: When somebody runs a red light and hits your car,

Yep. Even a "connected car" with a nobbled ECU, you can still get a third-party replacement ECU and get it going again. One hell of a faff, but I know people who have done it.

Good luck making an after-market EV inverter and BMS that fits more than one make/model. Controlling a 400V traction motor is not like driving a hobby brushless motor. Especially if it's something like a Synchronous Reluctance motor.

The battery too will have potentially hundreds of microcontrollers inside, all running secure firmware, that aren't going to talk to anything non OEM-approved

Some Intel Core chips keep crashing, game devs complain

Re: Not surprising

Not just critical calculations. If the CPU is prone to taking two plus two and getting five, even if very very rarely, then it's bad news.

Where's my pointer? Oh, it's at array index 101 with element size 16, so that's offset <bzzt> 2128 .. oops, wrong data.

Bad if it happens in your application. Worse if it occurs inside a system call, to a filesystem or block device driver, say.

Judge slaps down law firm using ChatGPT to justify six-figure trial fee

Re: "relying on ChatGPT to do anything related to their jobs could be a bad idea"

Their mistake, as I'm sure others in the dubious profession will be noting, was to admit to using the bullshit-machine.

Are you ready to back up your AI chatbot's promises? You'd better be

It would set a precedent, for the few weeks it would take to be overturned by a higher court, shirley

AI comes for jobs at studio of American filmmaker Tyler Perry

Re: Never heard of him

No, I don't watch Channel 5 (or any of their other channels) they always were a bit shit

Apparently I'm not missing much

Never heard of him

But I assume he must be the sort that makes mashups of tired old tropes and never does anything innovative, since he has bet the farm on a machine which can do only that

China breakthrough promises optical discs that store hundreds of terabytes

I seem to remember Microsoft tried something similar

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-silica/

I'm not sure that they were terribly successful.. Is this vastly different?

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

Re: What the hell?

At least 24 people missed your joke icon ...

Re: Grant Shapps was on board..

Yes, Prime Minister series 1 ep1 "The Grand Design" is pretty close. Sadly no longer on iPlayer though

Re: What the hell?

Micro-cracks in Titanium?

Someone should've told Stockton Rush

Grant Shapps was on board..

What does this button do??

It er, launches the missile sir.

Wow, can I press it?

No sir.

.. But i'm the Minister! I must be allowed to press the button!

Er yes, minister, <AWOoGA! LAUNCH INITIATED> .... but there's a procedure to follow, we haven't armed the rocket motors yet.. It would just ...

<Whoosh ... Plop>

DoorDash coughs up a few bucks after California accuses it of spreading around customer info

Lawyer's fees

Approximately $375,000

Everyone else gets, er ...

Cyberattack downs pharmacies across America

In the olden days

We didn't have "pharmacists"

We had "chemists" who would dispense whatever medicines the customer wished to purchase.

Without needing to consult any cloud-based or otherwise computer system to find out what they were "entitled" to ask for.

How long until Palantir gets "hacked"

Oh never mind, they are selling the data to world+dog already

Nokia brainwave turns cell towers into cash cows with backup batteries

Re: Doesn't sound right

Possibly this system doesn't export energy per se, but any powerful (in terms of MW, not MWh) backup battery -could- play the Balancing Mechanism / Capacity Market by disconnecting and dropping to UPS/diesel whenever paid to do so by the grid operator.

But they don't have to actually do anything in order to get paid, they just have to have a large enough installation that National Grid et al will pay them annually for the privelege of being able to tell them to disconnect X megawatts, thus letting themselves tell the government and the people that they are improving grid resilience etc.

It could well be that they are inflating the figures by claiming to be able to disconnect a megawatt or so, even though the actual equipment uses a variable amount of power and may only be using a few kilowatts at any given time ... That particular market doesn't seem to care about the actual energy saved, but is just an auction for people to sell "capacity" which they never intend to use.

The trouble with the "smart grid" though IMO, is that it makes cyber warfare all the more possible.

Prompt engineering is a task best left to AI models

Re: "I certainly would never have come up with anything like that by hand"

I'd be very surprised if it has *only* been trained on your internal documentation. Unless there really is so much of it that it competes with the entire internet in terms of english language examples.

No, more likely, it has been re-trained via transfer learning, so your documentation is just fed as an additional input to modify its existing weights.

If so it could still exhibit many of the the same biases as the public instance, and could still spew gibberish from the Internet instead of gibberish from your documentation.

Re: "I certainly would never have come up with anything like that by hand"

> Given that the LLM understands absolutely nothing but merely assembles a string of tokens based on probabilities inherent in its training, the resulting biases inevitably emerge in its output

I wish more people could understand the above. So many idiots seem to think that AI is some kind of magic, or worse, actually intelligent.

But, it just outputs anything that might plausibly occur in its input data, based on the supplied context. It is incapable of reasoning or inventing anything novel, it just spews a mangled mish-mash of what went before.

It is impossible to examine the reasoning behind an "AI" decision, because there is no reasoning. It's damned lies, statistics, and logistical regression.

Among the first people to be replaced by AI are the so-called Prompt Engineers

To all those who work in the bullshit-generation business: Get a real job.

The bullshit machine doesn't need your help to generate bullshit anymore.

Americans wake to widespread AT&T cellular outages

Please do not call 911 simply to test your phone line

The outage will finish shortly. We are simply testing our systems.

Sincerely,

Your Friendly CCP Senior Electronic Warfare Officer

ChatGPT starts spouting nonsense in 'unexpected responses' shocker

Re: why would anybody fork out good money for such hardware

The kamikaze ones are dumb and expensive in the long run. An AI targeting system is relatively expensive, so why would you put it on something that explodes?

Just look up a company called Ziyan UAS (unmanned autonomous systems) for a feel of what the current state of the art looks like. E.g. Blowfish A3. Autonomous swarming machine-gunning and antipersonnel bomb dropping drones. (downwards air-bursting shrapnel bombs) Why would anyone need that unless they were attacking a crowd of terrified civilians? (yes, apparently the blowfish was used in a massacre in kiwirok, Indonesia occupied Papua)

Also a lot of western arms companies making six-wheeled diesel-electric unmanned autonomous tanks.. But these are too expensive to be used by despots.. We hope

Re: Just as far away as before

> Call me cynical if you like, but why would anybody fork out good money for such hardware when Mark I humans produced by unskilled labour have been doing that very effectively for centuries?

"Mark I humans" get PTSD and even sometimes defect, when ask to do unspeakably evil things like massacre innocent children.. Machines have no such compunction.

Call ME cynical, but I would argue that there will come a point where the cost to build such machines will be far less than the cost to train and feed a human, and the machine is much more reliable.

We may already have reached that point. It is trivial to use AI to classify and track humans, it is trivial to use a bunch of servos to aim and fire a gun at a target, and to use less ammunition than a human machine-gunner would use to kill the same number of targets.

Re: Just as far away as before

> We have had the brains with LLM. Now for the br[awn?].

Sooner than you think. Automated genocide-machines with guns that automatically hunt and shoot at whoever are classified as the wrong sort of human, have been worryingly feasible for several years now.

Cuddly "terminators" with moral compunction, they will not be.

Neuralink patient masters mind-mouse maneuvers – if Musk is to be believed

Pathetic creature of meat and bone

I can barely imagine the horror of a machine that automatically grabs your head, drills a hole in it, and squodges some electrodes inside..

Evokes images of the Cortex Reaver from System Shock

Vietnam to collect biometrics - even DNA - for new ID cards

Re: Coming to a govt building near you

Deep fakes at the level of detail you describe, are only possible for rich people and party members.

Us proles are the real target of the biometrics push

Superapp Gojek fine-tunes each new error message for a week. What? Why?

Error cartoons

Usually in Corporate Memphis style. Epitomised by MS Teams and the idiot in the beanie hat with a thought bubble containing a question mark. Oops. Something went wrong! We're working on it!

No you fucking aren't, you contemptuous pile of absolute utter SHITE! Just tell me what the damned error is. Why are you refusing to work this time. I could not care less for a picture of a cute puppy trying to electrocute itself.

Oxide reimagines private cloud as... a 2,500-pound blade server?

Yee haw Jimminy Crickets That's what we here call a Wild Leg!

This website is best read aloud in a redneck cowboy accent

UK Cabinet Office hits pause on £9M Microsoft deal

@sad_loser

> I work in government

I can see how that might have inspired your choice of handle

Re: Move

Very Droll, Sir Humphrey!

Why are the only options data-slurping cloud ones?

Capgemini could migrate them to LibreOffice for much less!

Google open sources file-identifying Magika AI for malware hunters and others

Next week's news

How to defeat Magika by using generative AI to create a random-looking comment block that causes your malware.sh.jpg to be misclassified by Magika as an actual JPEG.

Cutting kids off from the dark web – the solution can only ever be social

Re: The law is not everything

And -especially in the case of teenagers- banning it only makes them want it more. Streisand Effect etc.

Pentagon launches nuke-spotting satellites amid Russian space bomb rumors

If trump had won last time, we might not look forward to anything anymore. WWIII might have proceeded on schedule.

Kriegsminister gibt nicht mehr..

Worried about the impending demise of Windows 10? Google wants you to give ChromeOS Flex a try

Re: Chrome appears to be more or less Andriod

Presumably, Wine would only work on an x86 Chromebook?

Or is there some x86 emulation going on?

In pursuit of artificial general intelligence, Meta adds Broadcom boss Hock Tan to its board

Re: Oops ... another misstep on the way to nowhere good and great

> hid massive trading losses and falsified its revenues to inflate its stock price and conceal its debt. The company collapsed in 2001

Sounds like exactly what Zuck needs!

Re: Not the way to General AI

> It's like an explorer going to a car manufacturer to get a bigger, better, faster, shinier offroad vehicle, while meanwhile not knowing where to go explore.

Or rather, the thing they are looking for is on a different planet, if it exists at all!

(But, the big shiny beast that he buys will allow him to ingest and digest even more of our data, giving him even more power and control over our lives. And I expect that is what he (or at least his board) is really after anyway..)

IT body proposes that AI pros get leashed and licensed to uphold ethics

I read that as IT body proposes AI pros get lashes..

Call the moderatrix again.. This sounds like a good idea!

Airbnb sees AI as its ticket to become a sprawling Big Tech giant

Use AI to generate a bullshit press release about AI, to hopefully fool some gullible private equity funds to bail us out of the hole we're in ...

They made a net loss of 5 Billion, on 10 Billion revenue... How on earth have they managed to spend 15 Billion? They bought some magic beans from the bloke who "invented" a crap voice assistant?

Just because it got foisted on a billion crapple customers, most of whom didn't want it, never intentionally use it and only swear at it when they accidentally trigger it, doesn't make it revolutionary. And it certainty doesn't make this particular clown worth anything to AirBnB! They have done a Yahoo! on this one.

Southern Water cyberattack expected to hit hundreds of thousands of customers

Re: As a Southern Water customer*, When they said "Sorry we leaked your shit"...

> Believe it or not, sewage discharges were far more common before privatisation

You'll forgive me if i say no, i don't believe it, then :)

Do you have a source for that claim?

Re: As a Southern Water customer*, When they said "Sorry we leaked your shit"...

> I worked on investment programme management for one of the largest water companies for a good few years immediately after privatisation

Oh, so it's YOUR fault then?!

How come the water companies were allowed to take on loans, and spend the money on dividends and executive salaries, instead of on investment in infrastructure?

They could have built separate sewage and storm drains like they do in Europe. Population increase could have been *planned for*.

But given that they split a large public body into dozens of regional utility companies, joined-up thinking becomes impossible, and the policymaking work becomes inefficient as is has to be repeated in each region, and nobody is going to waste money building a storm drain if the neighbouring utility isn't bothering.

Ofwat is partially responsible for this farce, but that is what you get with a revolving door between a private sector and its regulator..

Re: As a Southern Water customer*, When they said "Sorry we leaked your shit"...

Public Ownership as an arms-length quango is different from being government run.

A public owned company is still encouraged to maximise profit, sometimes at the expense of well-run public service. See also: The Post Office

But even government departments can still be scandalously awful, I agree. E.g. the Home Office

Re: As a Southern Water customer*, When they said "Sorry we leaked your shit"...

> A house down the road from me was leaking water from the meter pit for about 4 months.

Which side of the meter was leaking?

Re: But of course it was the Thatcher monster

Well, of course there were other monsters around in the circus that was the Thatcher government.

One BBC Radio programme I listened to a while ago said that John Redwood was instrumental in privatising British Gas. He may have done the same for other utilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_privatisation_in_England_and_Wales

The Conservative government of the day had originally proposed water privatisation in 1984 and again in 1986, but strong public feeling against the proposals led to plans being shelved to prevent the issue influencing the 1987 general election.[15][16] Having won the election, the privatisation plan was "resurrected and implemented rapidly"

So it seems little has changed in UK politics. Always implement your most evil and unpopular plans immediately after an election.

As a Southern Water customer*, When they said "Sorry we leaked your shit"...

... I thought they meant it would be floating out to sea. Or polluting a nice chalk stream fishery, or washing up on a sandy beach somewhere.

Now i learn it's all over the bloody Internet too!

* not by choice, of course. As a Public Utility, they have a monopoly on the whole area that they serve. Having such a utility in private hands should never have been allowed. On which ex politician can I place the blame for that? One Margaret Thatcher i would assume

It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down

Re: THIS!!!

> I have to wait for my OpenSCAD model to render. I have to wait for my slicer to finish processing my STL and send it to the printer.

At least you have the luxury of being able to press F5 for a quick render, and get to preview the toolpath in the slicer!

I, of course, use OpenSCAD on the command line, and send the output directly to the printer, so I have to wait hours and waste lots of plastic if I get any geometry wrong.

I plan to waste additional time by dispensing with OpenSCAD entirely, instead typing G-code into the printer manually with a Teletype.

Tom Cruise to the rescue

Watched Mission Impossible 2 the other day. That's 2 hours of my life i'll never get back..

It's er, the one where a pharmaceutical company produces an artificial supervirus and the drug to cure it, by "splicing different viruses together"

Anyway, there was a scene where the company was forced to transfer an enormous amount of money (47 Million Dollars!) to some common/garden terrorists, but it took a comically long time, as if each dollar were being transferred individually.

Long enough for the saviour of scientology to come along and save the day, as he does..

At that speed, Elon Musk would need to wait several months for his pay packet to arrive

Korean eggheads crack Rhysida ransomware and release free decryptor tool

And sad news for anyone stupid enough to pay the scum

One for the south koreans. Geonbae!