Posts by cyberdemon

Meta chops another 10,000 employees, closes 5,000 vacancies

> YouTube is a very good source of learning...

You could say the same about TikTok, right?

But the people who post "educational videos" on YouTube and TikTok have absolutely no teaching qualifications, nor do they necessarily have any in the subject they are talking about. All they have is a great deal of narcissistic self-importance and this rubs off on the kids, who all want to be "influencers" and "YouTubers" these days. All you need to be a successful YouTuber is an excess of self-confidence and the ability to stick a gormless face and some click-baity text on each of your video thumbnails.

There used to be these things called "Libraries" and later, "The Internet", where you could learn about pretty much anything for free, provided you knew how to read.. But these days you don't have to read, you just get endless shite fed from a "recommendation, engagement-optimisation and advertising" algorithm. Aka "auto play next". I'd go as far as saying that YouTube and TikTok are likely reducing the literacy rates amongst population, at the same time as increasing their tendency to distrust qualified teachers and academics, preferring to believe whatever YouTube has learned that they are most likely to believe, whether it is true or fake.

The "YouTuber" is one thing I would put into Room 101.

You might as well have kids taught by ChatGPT.. Actually, come GPT-4 where it has perfected the art of making clickbaity mesmerising YouTube videos full of believable bullshit, It probably will start to replace the YouTuber.

Re: re: Buy a yacht?

The real tragedy here is the tens of thousands (!!) of mugs who were duped into working for these arseholes and their "silly con valley" company in the first place, when they could have spent their lives doing something else. They were enlisted to make the world an even worse place, where the people are psychologically manipulated "at scale" to the will of whoever has cash to spend.

I really wish that Facebook, Google (especially YouTube), Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, TikTok et al will follow Twitter into a bottomless void of Hell. We would be so much better off without them. In fact the whole of California might as well sink into the pacific as far as I care. It would be a net benefit to the world, like cutting out a tumour.

However, what Meta and the other technocrats are doing by sacking all these people is trying to ensure that the cultists at the centre survive. But they can't do that if nobody wants to work for them anymore.

The UK's bad encryption law can't withstand global contempt

Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.

I've never been called that before, thanks.

Re: a step too dystopian

Who then, apart from the home secretary, actually runs the Home Office? Who is this Big Brother character that seems to inhabit 2 Marsham Street?

Possible names from Wikipedia include: Mark Lowcock, Matthew Rycroft, Sir Phllip Rutnam (all "Knight Commanders" of some Order... Sounds very 'Deus Ex' ..)

Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.

Hmm. As you may have guessed, I tend to vote for the Lib Dems.

Are you going to pillory me as a transcendental crackpot, "possibly racist", etc etc?

The biggest problem with politics these days is that everything is presented as a binary choice i.e. a (false) dichotomy. All sense of nuance is lost in the endless battle for your attention.

TBH you could extend your argument to say that all parties are just versions of the same thing and might as well all be the same party anyway.. And George Orwell would very much agree with you.

"Surveillance" is the word you are looking for.

It's rather hypocritical of you to bang on about "the language of minimisation" when you take the word "rape" for this context.

Not just the criminals - we would -all- have to go back to encrypting the payloads!

Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.

Sorry, what?

Are you trying to say that the likes of Priti Patel, Dominic Raab and Suella Braverman are trying to resist some plot by the civil servants to turn the UK into 1984 / Stasi East Germany ?

It's very much the other way round: Anyone in the civil service who disagrees with the plan to ditch all human rights or still clings on to "European thinking" gets purged. We saw that when Bojo came to power.

It's unclear to me who is pulling the ministers strings, but the idea that the ministers themselves are innocent, benevolent parties is utter nonsense.

Maybe because anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together wouldn't touch "front-line politics" with a barge pole.

The media/social-media circus has turned the entire profession into a toxic cess-pit.

If Ken Clarke were in politics today, he'd be "cancelled" for something or other. All that cancel-culture can easily be whipped up by local or foreign self-interests. The social media companies will pull the levers of AI mass-manipulation all the way to the "dial-a-riot" setting for anyone with enough cash to spend.

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

> Yes, they do pay [...] Cost me about £100K.

Then have an upvote and a (sadly virtual) beer from me, your anonymous Reg-reading Lordship. :)

However I fear that many of your less honest "peers" will have avoided their duties with offshore companies and suchlike. Otherwise surely there would be more transparency from them. It would be interesting if you could shed any light on the redacted sections of the aforementioned tax manual.

p.s. If you were otherwise going to spoil your vote, why not put one in for one of the minor parties that you may actually believe in? The Lib Dems, for example, are currently damned by the self-fulfilling prophecy that they will never win an election. Yet I think if the people who agreed with them actually voted for them, they may be in with a decent chance this time around.

Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.

There is another lot, you know. We have more than two parties.

Re: The UK's bad encryption law can't withstand global contempt

Oof. While steganography may be detectable "to one degree or another", It's pretty damned hard to prove. And worse: it's damn near impossible to prove that your inane stream of silly cat videos isn't hiding some encrypted information in the high-coeffcients of your MPEG stream.

Is it a low-quality video up-encoded into 4K HD? Or is it steganography?

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

Right. So it was "our idea" then. That seems to be the case for a lot of the "red tape", etc. that the Brexit types blame the EU for... If you look into it, it was the UK which was the source of the red tape in the first place..

BTW, what a blast from the past! Fancy the BBC posting an article from one Andrew Orlowski. That's a name I haven't heard in far too long..

Of course, but sadly you can't use logic against populism.

Populist politicians don't actually care a jot if what they are saying is true or false, or if what they are proposing is possible or impossible. Or even if the laws they are making are implementable/enforceable. It's all just a psychological play to their supporters. See also: Brexit

Bad laws allow corruption to thrive. Exactly what this particular bunch of politicians seem to want.

All encryption is banned!! (But don't worry, we will never enforce that on our friends and benefactors..)

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

Ah, forgive me for getting my Tory chairmen and Tory directors general mixed up.

Re: Call thier bluf?

Please no. There are people in government daft enough to agree to that.

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

No WhatsApp, Signal, or Telegram.

Your private conversations will be intercepted not just by the News of the World and the Telegraph, but even the Guardian will be able to read them

Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.

Indeed. And it's not just our home office. It's Australia, Canada, US, pretty much the whole English-speaking world. The Chinese and Russians are already living in 1984. Europe are a little way behind but already sliding down the authoritarian/nationalist slope.

That's one of the things that has led me to believe for the last 20 years that the world is hurtling towards a third world war. The first casualty is the Truth, etc.

Nuke: At least it's quick.

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

Correct. This madness started with Blair, Jack Straw, Jacqui Smith, ID Cards and RIPA. (although arguably it goes all the way back to Michael Howard..) The Tories are continuing the madness because it suits them. It's helping them push through plain-nasty policies that nobody in their right mind would vote for.

The Lib-Dems are slightly more pro-freedom and less power-obsessed than the rest, but then again they have never had any power recently. Except that once, when they allowed themselves and the country to be utterly shafted by the Tories. In hindsight obviously, they should have let it be a hung parliament.

I'm not sure about the part blaming the EU for it though. Citation on that, please.

One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

Of course this law won't be applied to the tory party themselves - there will be exemptions for national security matters, policing, official secrets, yadda yadda.. But it will be used against everyone else, especially pesky journalists..

Some ex-footballer with an unusually high-functioning brain for the profession decides to criticise the government off-air, this should not have been news (the criticism was well-deserved, if poorly delivered). The news was that he was shut down for it.. Yet the government-appointed Director General (whom is himself subject to criticism for facilitating an £800k loan to Boris Johnson before his appointment...) refuses to comment on whether Lineker would have received the same treatment if he had praised the government... Of course he wouldn't. As the 'i' paper points out this morning, Tory Peer Karen Brady doesn't get told off by the Beeb for having her Sun column while starring on The Apprentice.. The Beeb is supposed to be impartial, yet the government expects it to act as its state broadcaster. You won't find the real reason for ditching the European Court of Human Rights explained on the BBC under their current directorship.

And yeah, the 'i' article also explains how this farce is being used by the knuckle-dragging right. So that particular incident (leaning on the BBC to shut down a commentator) could have been a deliberate attempt to distract the public away from its plans to restrict their freedoms, whilst at the same time doing further damage to the BBC. Two birds with one stone.

Just as Mr Orwell foresaw, there are different rules for the Party, the Inner Party and the Proles. We criticise China for their freedom-crushing authoritarianism, yet we are implementing the same policies here. The state will control what passes for truth or misinformation.. Denying people a free life based on race is absolutely nothing like what was being discussed in pre-ww2 Germany, and intercepting all communications and outlawing encryption is absolutely nothing like the 1960s Stasi.. right?

It really is nothing to do with Thinking of the Children, it's all about cementing power by controlling truth and cracking down on dissent. Keeping those rich and powerful in power and riches. That's pretty much big-C Conservatism in a nutshell, right? Fiefdom for us, serfdom for you.

I am reminded of when I was trying to look up whether hereditary lords and barons pay any inheritance tax on their "substantial landed estates". (the rest of us pay about 50% and I can't imagine Lord Muck paying that much on his stately pile...) so I first went to this page and eventually ended up here, only to be told "(This content has been withheld because of exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act 2000)". WTF? Even the tax manual has sections redacted for the landed gentry, it seems?

The US would sooner see TSMC fabs burn than let China have them

The End is Nigh!

Said a piece of mould on a Petri-dish..

But don't bother praying or repenting. There is no God. You're just another piece of mould on the dish, and the resources have run out.

There will be war. There will be Strife. But there will be no winners.

£2B in UK taxpayer cash later, and still no Emergency Services Network

Re: A Little Bit of History

For posting on the Reg ---> Thanks for an interesting and informative first post. ----->

But in all seriousness, who thought it was a good idea to put end-users (ordinary bobbies) in charge of collating engineering requirements? :P

To an engineer, it is elementary that the necessary radio transmit power goes up with the square of distance i.e. to go twice as far you need four times the power (and with multiple units broadcasting, available bandwidth goes down with direct area coverage, no matter the power..) so a handheld radio that could talk from Skye directly to the mainland was always going to be very expensive and not-very extensible. It might have been better to base the technology on the existing cellular network. Although it's true that reliability/coverage could have been less. How did the reliability of PRSCP/Airwave compare to the mobile phone network in the end?

Re: voted Labour and Remain

> We voted brexit

Is that the `Royal "We"`? Cos I bloody well didn't, and the country as a whole could hardly have been more undecided on that "non-binding referendum" if it had tried. And if it were 48/52 the other way round, i'm sure you'd be crying for another referendum, rather than calling it undemocratic to demand a sizeable majority to close the matter.

Had the referendum been a legally binding one, then it's very likely that many of the leave campaign would have gone to jail for all the lies and dirty tricks, such as those by Dominic Cummings, Alex Lebedev and Cambridge Analytica..

The only beneficiaries of Brexit are Russia, China and a few rich Tories with their snouts in the UKCA trough.

Re: voted Labour and Remain

I think Gary Lineker has pointed out exactly where this Tory government is drifting towards, TBH.

Silicon Valley Bank's UK arm bought by HSBC for 1 British pound in rescue deal

Re: If it was profitable

I assume they were taking on a lot of debts and liabilities for their £1, in addition to those profits, no?

Silicon Valley Bank seized by officials after imploding: How this happened and why

"Inhaling unicorn shit"

Sounds like an euphemism for "Angel Investing" ..

I wouldn't be at all surprised if that were a contributing factor.

Here's how Microsoft hopes to inject ChatGPT into all your apps and bots via Azure

> the first thing you do when a new Microsoft 'feature' is rolled out, is turn it off.

That's assuming you still have the option to turn it off.

It's becoming increasingly common that there is no way of turning off microsoft's anti-features. Except by deleting Windows entirely and installing Linux.

However, Microsoft seems to be in the pockets of the hardware vendors and seems to be making that more and more difficult to run Linux natively with each iteration of Secure Boot. (for example On my recent Asus motherboard there is no way to disable Secure Boot entirely. Even if you delete the PKs, it puts itself into "setup mode" and resets its own configuration every 30 days.)

(and with WSL2, why would anyone ever -need- to run Linux natively, right? Unless they have something to hide from Microsoft's ever-encroaching surveillance, in which case they must be a paedo/terrorist and the relevant three-letter agency ought to bee told..)

Re: Data residency

Data residency policy: All your data are belong to us. Your teams call transcripts, your video and audio, your chatlogs, your documents, your GitHub "contributions", your LinkedIn interactions, your health records, your Edge browser history, the contents of your OneDrive, and the contents of your hard drive.

Training an AI model on every piece of data that passes through their systems is not the same as "storing" that data, and you can't prove your data is in the model. So Microsoft's lawyers will say.

Microsoft have seen Google quietly drop the "Don't" from their corporate charter and start being evil. They have seen Amazon and Meta slurp up lots of power and money by being evil. And they must have thought: "Google are being evil. Apple are being evil. All the tech companies are doing evil now. But we are Microsoft! We were evil before it was cool. We are the OG of Evil-corp. It's time to out-evil the competition"

Re: every time

Perhaps the old chairman has been brought out of retirement?

UK Prime Minister wants £800M to spend on big British iron

Re: It'll be like the Crick Institute won't it.

By "Local community involvement initiatives" do you mean a knees up at Checquers with the Old Boys Club?

Cop warrant orders Ring to cough up footage from inside this guy's home

> If the cameras faced inwards no one would accept one for free from the cops or from anyone else.

They are buying a fleet of mobile cameras inside homes

Amazon also make Ring indoor CCTV cameras ...

'Thousands' at Meta face layoffs this week

Re: Oh no, people doing evil getting sacked

> Shame we can't cream pie them on the way out.

I think you mean "custard pie"

Re: Doesn't seem right...

And a MetaSacking is where the HR department have to fire themselves?

Once AI can create endless viral videos, good luck switching off social media

Re: I'm not sure which is the more apposite quote:

George Orwell proposed that the only stable system of government would be one of totalitarian control, where the population is kept in a constant state of fear and anger at an invisible enemy, while being surveilled at all times in a "digital panopticon" (my words there, not his, obviously since "digital" wasn't a thing in 1949) via their telescreens.

How on earth he could have predicted the panopticon of telescreens, I can't fathom. What seems more likely is that the world governments simply read his book and agreed with him that this is the only stable system of government and that they should strive for this to keep themselves in power in perpetuity.

Atomic energy body proposes fusion framework to manage British energy grids

Re: Nice

Who is "deliberately making the grid unsuitable for renewables"?

The entire project that TFA describes is about trying to make the grid more suitable for renewables. It's so that we can have battery powered virtual inertia. But it's a hard problem and it risks reducing resiliency in other areas such as "cyber".

Unfortunately it's simply not possible for batteries to store anything more than an hour's worth of power. (and that's an optimistic estimate with all of the batteries we have in the UK, EVs included) To power the UK for a week of low wind would require more batteries than the world's annual production of them. And the natural resources are getting scarce.

See here for a rather optimistic and now (post Britishvolt collapse) outdated plan for the expansion of battery storage in the UK.

And "green hydrogen" requires a large amount of very expensive catalyst material for the electrodes. The only feasible material so far, is Platinum.

Lead time..

What was the lead time for Calder Hall? The UK built that in three years..

Not quite up to modern safety standards though..

The big mistake that the UK made in the 50s and 60s was to concentrate all their nuclear efforts into acquiring the bomb, and to conflate power generation with weapons production. They should have kept the two entirely separate. It was the weapons production which turned the public against nuclear power. What then happened is the CND took jobs in nuclear regulation and safety, and that's what gave us the utterly barmy regulations we have today.

For example, there is "no safe limit" for radiation - it must be kept "As Low As Reasonably Practicable" which enrages both nuclear engineers and anti-nuclear campaigners alike. We end up doubling the cost to reduce radioactive emissions when they were already well below background, and orders of magnitude below the radioactive emissions that come from burning coal (due to trace amounts of Radon in coal).

I have a friend who used to work at AWE, and they would for example restrict access to ordinary X-ray machines when the machines were off, in case of "residual X-rays".. He says it was a running joke there that 1 in every 3 workers is a CND fifth-columnist.

Re: Nice

Sure, that would fix the problem.

Ideally, what we need is more nuclear power, so that we can have stable power without the CO2.

But thanks to a regulator being run by people fundamentally opposed to and terrified of nuclear-anything, nuclear is horribly slow and expensive to build.

If only UKAEA could have spent the last 50 years on researching better fission designs instead of all that fusion, I do believe we'd be in a much better place. But then we closed Dounreay.. And how the oil companies must have celebrated that, i'm sure..

BTW for the link to work in my earlier post you have to remove the HTTPS. Apparently the Reg sticks that on all links

Nice

Having worked at UKAEA Culham 2013-18, I know these guys have the best control engineers in the business, and if anyone can develop a system to stabilise our worryingly wobbly power system, they can.

Whenever I look at the UK grid frequency, it often looks rather "bi-modal". That's the "buttocks distribution" visible in the histogram on the bottom right. This means it's continually oscillating around its 50Hz control point and rarely staying very close to it. It's a classic problem in control of non-linear systems, and it's the sort of thing those UKAEA boffins ought to be able to sort out. (The EU grid doesn't have this problem, apparently. It stays pretty much bang-on 50Hz, but it's a much bigger grid with a much higher "minimum inertia")

If the grid ever goes too high or too low frequency for too long, or changes frequency too quickly, it can cause parts of the system to trip offline, leading to a cascade failure and a large-scale blackout. This problem is made worse when there's a lot of wind and solar energy on the grid, because there is no grid-synchronous spinning turbine to provide inertia (wind turbines are not usually grid-synchronous - they run at variable speed for max efficiency). Just like an engine without a flywheel, it can stall or spin out of control very easily.

We can use batteries for frequency response instead of flywheel stored energy - but if the power electronics and control systems are too slow to respond, they can make the situation worse, rather than better. Hopefully this advanced control system can fix that. (i'm in an optimistic mood today, must be something the coffee..)

However, I'm sure they know that the best control systems in the world won't compensate for the fundamental transmission-line bottleneck between Scotland and England.. Or the enormous problem of oversubscribed local low-voltage distribution networks. Resistive losses "P_r = I^2 R" is after all, basic physics. It doesn't take a Plasma Physicist to know that you can only shove so many electrons per second down a given cable before it starts to heat up, waste energy, and fail. There's no way we're all moving to Heat Pumps and EVs without a LOT more pylons, substations and local under-the-road cables, even if we had the generating capacity.

So I'm all for this, so long as it doesn't detract any investment in physical infrastructure, i.e. we need more pylons, more substations, and ideally, HV-to-the-kerbside.

Thought you'd opted out of online tracking? Think again

Re: cookies irrelevant

The opt in / out is just another "bit" in the data profile ...

Re: Bugger the CEOs

Short-term "investors" aka speculators, are quite happy when the value plummets (especially if they can predict it) as they can go short on the stock and make even more of a fortune from scandalous collapses than long-term investors can make from a well-managed company.

However, if when the government fined a company, it actually confiscated 1% of that company's shares, then even the short-sellers would lose out, because the stock price hasn't gone down, there is just less of it available.

And then for repeat offenders, such as water companies, the government would end up as a controlling shareholder and could forcibly clean up the company's act.

Bugger the CEOs

It's time we started fining the Investors.

Then business might take note.

Even if a CEO goes to jail, a big enough company can just get a new CEO. A threat of jail just means they get more danger-money. But if, in extreme cases such as those water utilities flushing raw sewage into rivers, if the investors were fined a small percentage of their shareholding for each breach of the law, then mis-behaving companies would eventually be taken into public ownership. That ought to give the board of directors reason to clean up their companies' acts.

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

Re: Seems quite a few of you are either not reading the entire article or are missing the point...

> Can't you tik-tok it or something?

Argh. Where's the nuclear apocalypse when you need it

Re: E

> Example: Create a men's exfoliant with branding. slogan, marketing materials, packaging, brand image, target market, pitch

How is any of that "real-world work" ? Does the world need any of that?

What the world needs is a way for civilisation to survive and progress, without destroying the planet and eating itself. Generating marketing bullshit to hypnotise the masses into consuming more and more crap is hardly what anyone needs.

All that this bullshit generator proves, is that MBAs and Marketing are bullshit jobs. We should have spent our effort training more engineers and physicists, and then maybe we might have been able to build a self-sufficient civilisation that doesn't destroy the planet it lives on.

> Give it a robot

No, thank $deity, GPT-3 is merely a text model and has no concept of space and no efficient way to control machinery. The day it does, we have much bigger problems

Re: Gross misunderstanding of the tool

> I wonder if this might be particularly problematic for those who already lean towards conspiracy theories, as there is some indication that one of the components of such inclination is hyperactive agent detection.

It would certainly be very useful to anyone who is part of an actual conspiracy and fears detection.. For this thing would be able to spit out endless false conspiracy theories, like chaff, to hide the real one while discrediting anyone who latches on to a fake as a "wackjob looney conspiracy theorist". ;)

The terminator without its cuddly sequel

Yes indeed. Never mind simple killing machines. (It's been possible for several years to build an un-feeling genocide-bot, i.e. a robot/drone/autonomous tank that kills based on the output of a social profiling algorithm, maybe with a classical database of explicit targets and exceptions..)

But now with language models, it's possible to make a machine that (without needing any concepts of empathy or hate) could optimise the process of torture, to make sure that it gets every last detail from the meatsack about where its friends and children may be hiding, before killing it in the most painful possible way, just because that's what's most likely to get the other meatsacks to come running.

Forget terminator, an "embodied LLM" could make the Cylons look like cuddly pussycats. It doesn't have feelings, but it can easily manipulate yours, and use them against you. There is no happy ending.

Re: Er?

Well, you did call it an AI...

"ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI, and be destroyed"

No, it should not be considered an AI at all. It should be put in Room 101 to join Clippy in a bottomless void of hell.

OpenAI opens ChatGPT floodgates with dirt-cheap API

Re: In 20 years time

OK, my first point is contradicted by the subsequent ones. To a certain extent. But it doesn't really detract from my argument.

I agree, the highest tier of "knowledge workers" such as software engineers will not (yet) be made redundant by this unthinking bullshit-machine.

However, there is a huge "long tail" of semi-skilled "knowledge-worker" such as the poor plebs who do marketing, sales, tech support, "journalism", stockbroking, customer-service.. could basically be doomed... Even some middle tiers of "knowledge worker" are at risk such as Journalism, screenwriting, game design, web design, and "programming" are at risk of dilution / pollution of their jobs.

What once took 100 people to do now takes one "prompt engineer". Hooray for progress. Except the output is shit and 99 people are out of work.

Zoom chops president it hired less than a year ago

Re: RIP

Of course. Teams is little more than a piece of spyware. It'll probably become part of Edge

There are swaths of 3rd party videoconferencing tools now though, it's not just Microsoft, Google, Zoom or Apple.

Jitsi is apparently quite good, according to some comment I read here.

RIP

It will say,

on Zoom's, er, Tomb-stone.

You were useful, once. Then the world recovered.

You are now surplus to requirements.

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

Re: Will this cover

> The manufactured culture war is not coming from the right. The left are out to provoke a full on civil war at this point.

TBH I think the manufactured culture war is coming from outside. i.e. Russia, China et al. It's not really a left vs right thing, it's just another attempt to divide and fracture western society using an army of social media trolls and bots. It was the same with Brexit imo.

I'm "on the left" of the traditional "socialists vs the landed class" argument, yet I could be described as centre-right of things like whether or not biological sex is important in society or whether Britain should be emptying its museums or tearing down statues

One reason for my unusual combination of relatively balanced views might be because I don't use social media at all, and so don't get brainwashed into one extreme corner or the other