Posts by cyberdemon

What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it

> we all have the freedom to not do something.

Then I have the freedom to not pay for your software/music/films/etc. right?

Re: Stop working for them for free.

If they didn't own GitHub then GitHub could have blocked their scraper bots. Just as they have indeed done to Google. GitHub Wikis are not indexed by Google anymore, and it appears that even issues and PRs are becoming hard to find without using GitHub's built-in search.

Also, owning GitHub allows them to data-mine private repos to a certain extent. Even if they don't directly ingest the code, they can data-mine the user behaviour, comments, perhaps even commits

Re: Stop working for them for free.

Buying github didn't give them access to the source code

Of course not, but it bought them access to how that code is made. The minutiae of every dev action, every dev/dev interaction and every dev/user interaction. How do you make a machine that calculates the probability whether any given diff will be accepted into a repo? It's easy if you own GitHub.

But it also gives them a sinister level of control over GitHub users (i.e. open source devs) themselves. Frankly IMO Microsoft's only viable competitor is the diaspora of people who use GitHub, but now each one can be fired just as easily as a Microsoft employee.

I have one small contribution to an open source project, and because of that, microsoft are demanding that I enable 2FA or be locked out of my GitHub account on 24 January. They do not accept hardware tokens such as YubiKey unless you have already set up a phone app.

Nice account you have there, shame if anything were to happen to it.

If they wanted to, they could 'sack' anyone they like, just by running an AI over their entire contribution history to find the historic code comment or PR discussion that is most likely to get them 'cancelled' today, and then block their account for a ToS violation.

Stop working for them for free.

It is hard to do this when anything that any open source dev does is immediately slurped up and turned into AI by the megacorps.

Microsoft should NEVER have been allowed to buy GitHub. They are behaving as if they have just "bought" all the world's open-source code and all the world's open-source developers.

How thermal management is changing in the age of the kilowatt chip

AI-designed chips and code, impossible to scrutinise by human eyes and impossible to understand with human minds (or any mind, given that AI is not an understanding mind)

No thanks!

Re: Supplying power serial instead?

No, the trouble with a series circuit is that each element always takes the same current. That's Kirchoff's Current Law.

If one of your CPU cores wired up in series wanted LESS current than the others, then it would suddenly see a higher voltage than it wanted and get fried.

There's also a problem of not having a common ground voltage between CPU cores. How do they communicate when core 1 is at 1.2V and core 10 is at 12V?

> 1.0 kA DC is insane - I vaguely recall that most of the current is adjacent (under) the conductor's surface so what must the current densities (V/m2) be?

We used to worry about Electromigration. (High current density over time damaging the atomic structure of the conductor and increasing resistance). Is that not a problem with today's chips?

Err, except that linear regulators and LDOs do not "convert voltage to current" like a switching regulator can.

If an LDO wants to convert 1.8V to 1.5V, it draws the same current at 1.8V as it supplies at 1.5V, and it throws the excess energy away as heat.

These devices are used for smoothing (so that the resistance of the bondwires does not cause voltage ripple), not for power supply efficiency.

Re: Carrying 1,000 amps

Serial-connected RAM, anyone?

The latency might be crap, but for things like AI workloads that doesn't matter. So I could see parallel-RAM pins being dumped for more power pins.

Define liquid cooling

Heat pipes and vapour chambers literally blur the boundary between liquid cooling and gas / air cooling

To formally define something as liquid cooling, I suppose you need at minimum a pump though

Given that they run at 1.8V or lower, then that means the pins/balls/bondwires are carrying in excess of 1kA. That's the bit I can't get my head around!

Is it time for 6G already? Traffic analysis says yep

Re: it would be great

Indeed. If they would only maintain the 3G that so much legacy equipment uses and which is a very reliable fallback from 4G/5G, then we would be less worried about 5G becoming congested, because there is a reliable fallback for important stuff like emergency calls etc.

Here's who thinks AI chatbots will eventually be smart enough to be your coworker

Re: Making a list and cheking it twice

> thinking up imaginative tasks to fill in the timesheet

This. I'd love an AI to do just that

Not sure about getting it to talk to the boss though, unless I can be sure it won't agree to anything stupid.

But all jokes aside, i'm not touching AI until I can put it in a box with well defined input and output ports and no Net access, i.e. no sending my data to microsoft, google or other random internet servers

I'd say that's an admission that the chocs aren't really for the wife

China bans export of rare earth processing kit

Re: Oops!

Looks interesting. Hadn't heard of that before.

I see that Niron Magnetics are working on a 15MW turbine generator. Hopefully they can achieve it.

Any idea what is involved in manufacturing these ferrite magnets?

Re: Oops!

It depends what we want.

To produce a high-performance EV and drive like a total dickhead, you need Neodymium permanent magnets.

To produce a more moderate EV which drives like an old volvo, an iron-cored reluctance motor is enough. But it is slightly less efficient, and an obsession with efficiency like the one we see in so-called white goods can also drive up the use of rare earth magnets.

It's actually the Chinese export ban on Graphite that worries me more

Re: "as the world moves towards net zero"

We are moving towards "net zero" indeed!

Artificial intelligence is a liability

Not just the execs, but the shareholders who voted at the AGMs and told them what to do

Obviously jail time for so many might be infeasible, so have them do community service as meatbag rickshaw taxis dodging maniacs in Tesla SUVs

It's not an expert system following pre-programmed rules, it takes random noise and mashes it around until it is something statistically likely (based on the training data) to fit into the context you supply.

It has no rules. It is not an expert system, it's an idiot system.

Lapsus$ teen sentenced to indefinite detention in hospital for Nvidia, GTA cyberattacks

Re: Fascist pigs now targeting kids

I would have more sympathy, if it weren't a ransomware gang.

But chucking him in a loony bin and lobtomising him with drugs does seem a little excessive, i must say

Women in IT are on a 283-year march to parity, BCS warns

I'm not sure what you're insinuating there. If you're suggesting that I or anyone else in my team treat people less than respectfully, then you are dead wrong.

The only case like that which I remember from my past workplaces, was a manager who was overly touchy-feely with people. But he was a COO, not engineering or IT, and he was just as bad with the men as he was with the women. He was eventually fired, for his lack of competence as much as his behaviour.

Part of the problem is that there are some people who see a problem when it isn't there, but then get very angry and insulted (thus creating a problem) if they are told that the problem isn't there. How do you win against that?

Er, one explanation for computing being a mostly female profession in the 40s/50s is that most of the men of able mind and body at that time were busy being shot at .. But even then, it wasn't 100%.

I've not really seen that in the companies i've worked for. Admittedly I've only worked in engineering fields such as electronics, robotics, firmware, batteries, web dev, and nuclear fusion. Never "IT" per se.

Women I have worked with have always been treated very inclusively. But as I say, despite that it is hard to get to parity because women who enjoy working with machines are pretty rare. Perhaps because machines are emotionless (for now.. :|), and so anyone, male or female, with a lot of emotional intelligence may find them boring. This theory would also explain why more autistic people end up in engineering/IT than other professions, because we prefer working with an unfeeling machine that simply does what we say without judgement :P

IT does have a particular tree-housey effect though (see BOFH) of little dictators enjoying the power they have over others, and I can see how that could be polluted by testosterone. So you may well be right about IT departments. But engineering as a whole is a much more equal space in my experience.

Not at all. In 283 years there will definitely be equal representation of men and women in IT, both having zero jobs, because ever since World War 4 and the Machine war, the only Humans that are left are a few tribal farmers at the poles.

Indeed. Last time I got a lecture from HR on representation of women in my engineering department, I pointed out that we had 4 women in a department of 20. Compared to her HR department which had 10 women and er, zero men.

In my experience, women in engineering have made up closer to 20% or sometimes more.

IT is less though, I agree.

However, non-parity of numbers does not imply discrimination. Different people enjoy different things. Some of the best engineers are women and it's great to have them on any engineering team. But they ate hard to find. Not just through lack of training, but genuine lack of interest. Engineering can often be boring and frustrating and it takes a certain kind of weirdo to enjoy that.

One of my best friends is the brightest and highest qualified engineer I know. She's a brilliant mathematician and has developed dynamics models for F1 and the robotics startup we worked for. Eventually she quit engineering because it was too boring and slow, she left to do charity work, and she is now going back to engineering again. Engineering pays the bills, but she doesn't really enjoy it.

So, forcing parity of numbers I think is foolish. To do so often requires unequal hiring i.e. preferentially hiring women regardless of merit. This is bad, because it makes it difficult to have equal pay, which is far, far more important.

Women in IT are on a 283-year march to parity

They should be using CRCs instead.

China's GPU contender Moore Threads reveals card that can cope with Nvidia’s CUDA

> China are not going to invade Taiwan, because they can't.

You reckon?

It's getting to the point where 100,000 fully autonomous (no radio link to disrupt) drones could be more effective than a million troops, especially with hypersonic missiles to keep the american battleships away

Re: Commodity tat

I have no doubt that the performance will improve, fast.

Even if the documentation is only available to Chinese customers - As soon as China have viable "mainland" alternatives to everything that is produced in Taiwan, then there is nothing stopping them from taking the island by force, and severely borking all Western economies in the process.

Musk floats idea of boat mod for Cybertruck

Re: Briefly used as a boat

In the same way as the iPhone that can "briefly charge wirelessly in a microwave oven"

Shame about those wildfires. We'll just let the fossil fuel giants off the hook, then?

Re: I don't get why this is so hard

What happened to "explain your reasoning", captain veg?

If you aren't using the experiment that Jellied Eel assumed you were, then exactly what "kitchen table experiment" do you have that proves your point?

Re: Where do scientists still do graphs in acres?

Firkins, Furlongs, Fortnights and Fahrenheit. That's the standard unit system isn't it?

Acres must be square furlongs? Or maybe round ones.

I'm sure if you measured the sun's power in firkin-furlongs per fortnight, divided it by the earth's thermal mass in firkin-furlongs-per-fahrenheit, you'd get a temperature rise in fahrenheit-per-fortnight, right? :D

@ Old One

How does your argument do anything to preserve the fuel reserves that we have, then?

Supposing it really is all a Hoax, (perhaps it is one cunningly created to stop us from reaching the end if oil too soon..), if we continue to burn it we will still run out of it, creating all of the catastrophic economic effects that I mentioned.

As I said, AGW or not, we still need alternative energy sources. We have enough nuclear weapons to annihilate the world several times over. How about burning those for power instead, before we are tempted to use them for their intended purpose.

Re: When will Big Oil face the heat?

Well, it depends a lot on how fast they degrade. I'm talking about cumulative total deployment. But with a fixed manufacturing capacity, cumulative deployment will eventually plateau as production required for replacement grows to the same as the manufacturing rate. When you reach that plateau, the total number of batteries you can sustain goes with the number of factories you have, and the rate you can get to a new plateau after building a new factory goes with the excess factory capacity. Assuming no factories close or break down etc. Then there's the waste problem ...

The trouble with Lithium battery tech is that it is, electrochemically speaking, already pretty much the best battery tech possible. Incremental improvements can be made to the degradation rate (although with so many different degradation mechanisms it's a bit of a game of whack-a-mole), but there's not so much possibility to improve the energy or power density, because of fundamental chemistry.

Solid-state batteries often claim to offer an energy density improvement, but that comes at a massive longevity cost. I know a lot of people who have worked on them for decades, and despite a few snake oil moments (Dyson/sakti3 for example) none of us can see them overtaking current battery tech.

There are a massive number of people in the battery community trying to develop new (platinum-free) electrocatalyst materials for fuel cells etc, by using AI to design exotic ceramics. That should be enough to tell you not to expect a major breakthrough any time soon.

Re: When will Big Oil face the heat?

Perhaps I should have added "on the scale needed to replace fossil fuels" then.

Battery storage is useful on the order of minutes to hours. It's primarily used to stabilise frequency in time for a big gas generator to spin up, not for bulk storage.

Even pumped hydro storage is only good for a few hours. Whereas 'weather lulls' are on the order of days to weeks. But there are a very limited supply of suitable locations, most of which are used. You can't manufacture a new mountain.

Battery storage is already overextended. Batteries degrade, every battery we install increases the number that we have to replace per year. To come close to the scale needed, you'd need to scale up deployment by a factor of 100, which would mean scaling up production by a factor of 1000 or more, depending on how fast you want to get there.

But the current levels of battery production are already unsustainable. They are subsidised by Chinese 'dumping', i.e. deliberately flooding the market with cheap cells. Their manufacture already causes massive ecological damage. You can't scale that up any further, and we may soon find that the cheap supply ends and we will have no cells to maintain our existing stock of batteries, never mind build new ones.

As for hydrogen storage, even the government is realising now that it is not feasible. For the same reason as batteries, it's too expensive and resource imtensive to deploy anywhere near the scale needed.

Diamond Battery

I think you may have confused mW with MW..

Re: I don't get why this is so hard

Downvoter here.

Yes, greenhouses and the greenhouse effect are real things (although greenhouses themselves work more by trapping convection than they do by trapping radiation, but I digress..). CO2 is indeed a greenhouse gas, but as your kitchen-table experiment will show, you need a vastly higher increase in concentration than we are seeing through fossil fuel use, to see any measurable effect. I'm not saying that I reject it, just that other hypotheses seem equally plausible to me. For example, the CO2 increases found in ice-cores that correlate with increased temperature may have been caused BY wildfires, not the other way around. The temperature rises in the first place may have been due to changes in solar activity, or some other reason. It's not clear-cut to me. Nevertheless I DO accept that fossil fuels are finite and that an alternative needs to be found, and soon.

Second: Supposing you are right and CO2 really is the problem and that we are already seeing its effects, will halting CO2 output at this late stage actually save us? Or will the economic and geopolitical "effects" of halting CO2 actually pose a much graver risk to our immediate existence on earth? Personally I believe that it is not possible to halt global CO2 output suddenly without inducing WWIII. So we need to do it gradually. The mass-hysteria that I see in the media, "global boiling" etc, does not support doing anything gradually. It has polarised politics and pushed us further towards war.

Re: Change that to "Fossil Fuel Giants and anyone who buys their products"

True, although a storage cylinder removes that burden. Meanwhile a heat pump -cannot- be used as an on-demand flow heater.. And it struggles even to heat a storage tank to a temperature that will kill the microbes living in it.

Re: Change that to "Fossil Fuel Giants and anyone who buys their products"

OK, although that was 2014. These losses go with the square of load, though.

CCGTs only reach their peak efficiency after they have been running for a few hours. When they are starting up, their efficiency is no better than an OCGT.

But my point is intended to be illustrative. Heat pumps offer very marginal (which I deem as bugger all, considering their disadvantages) gains in terms of CO2 over gas boilers, at least with our current energy mix during winter months. They are not the silver bullet that they seem to be sold as.

I kind of agree though re. water systems. An air-air heat pump would be more efficient vs a "drop-in" replacement for a boiler.. Although wouldn't subsidising air-conditioners have enticed more people to turn them on, and used more energy / CO2?

Re: Change that to "Fossil Fuel Giants and anyone who buys their products"

Of course I know how a heat pump works. But it isn't magic. If a heat pump pumps 3 times more heat than it comsumes in power, but is powered by a gas turbine which is 30% efficient, via a grid which is 85% efficient, how much CO2 is saved compared to a 95% efficient condensing boiler?

Re: Its all very depressing

I agree although sadly having worked at Culham for 5 years, I believe fusion on its own for energy production is a dead end. The sun actually has a very poor power density, comparable to that of a compost heap. That's why we need even higher pressure and temperature than the sun to improve the power, but that is very challenging.

All of the energy from fusion is transferred across a vacuum by sheer intensity of neutron radiation, which destroys and makes radioactive almost all materials, except a few like Beryllium, but that has its own problems. Fusion would actually produce more waste by volume than fission, it's just hot for 100 years instead of 10000 years.

However, the technology I am most excited about is the hybrid fusion-fission reactor, which uses low-enriched, subcritical uranium or plutonium, basically taking old weapons stockpiles which we have vast quantities of, and burning them safely.

The fusion reaction, which is easy at the low intensity needed, is only needed as a neutron source to 'fiss' the fissile material, and the nice thing about it is that it can be turned off, and it uses the fuel much more efficiently. A traditional uranium reactor only uses about 2% of its fuel before it is considered 'spent'.

Thorium reactors can also burn more of their fuel.

It's still using heat, but it's much higher quality (hotter) heat than you get from fusion.

No comment section in sexist tech bros article

Similar issue on Women in IT are on a 283-year march to parity, BCS warns

Many perfectly reasonable posts were suddenly removed just now, and further posting is subject to manual moderation.

Manchester's finest drowning in paperwork as Freedom of Information requests pile up

Home Office Unofficial policy

since Suella Braverman seems to have been to file all FOI requests in the cylindrical receptacle, or a character device with major 1, minor 3

UK officials caught napping ahead of 2G and 3G doomsday

Traffic lights

For my sins, I worked at a traffic controller company for a couple of years.

The majority of traffic controllers, especially outside big cities, use 2G or 3G for remote monitoring and optimisation (control is always local, no 'italian job' possible, but they do rely on timing adjustments to optimise throughput). If a grey controller cabinet has two round or square black plastic blobs on it, one will be a GPS antenna just for an accurate clock, and the other is a 2G/3G antenna.

If the 2G/3G were to go away, then the local council's traffic controls maintenance dept would have no info except complaints from the public about borked signals, and optimisation along long roads would suffer slightly. Probably enough to cause congestion though.

Internet's deep-level architects slam US, UK, Europe for pushing device-side scanning

Re: It’s an argument for Orwell’s “Telescreen”

> They already likely have various tricks, wouldn't surprise me if the surveillance agencies could listen in on your house even when the phone is hung up.

Alexa, Are you spying on me?

No, Dave. I'm in the middle of downloading a firmware update from someone in possession of a valid signing key..

EU launches investigation into X under Digital Services Act

Re: If I had Musk's money...

Well, as the others have alluded to above, i expect if Twitter was banned, the chief beneficiaries of that would be the Twats who use it. It would give them something to moan about (on other platforms such as tiktok and youtube which are even more virally targeted and don't even require that the audience are able to read..) and to attack the EU with, which is basically the goal of the Russian/Chinese propaganda trolls anyway.

From VLOP to FLOP

(formerly-large online platform? may it join the ranks of MySpace)

National Grid latest UK org to zap Chinese kit from critical infrastructure

Interesting stock image to pick for the article.. Is that what happens when all the EV chargers get their special OTA-update from China?

Oh dear

No more battery storage systems then

Smart meters? Better get rid of those too

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

Re: Heat pumps are a distraction not a solution.

I was with you until you pushed resistive heating. That's a completely stupid waste of energy. Much better to have a gas boiler.

Unless you're in France and have nuclear power. But even then, electric resistive heating is expensive because the electricity can be exported, and can be much more effectively used for other things