Posts by cyberdemon

Microsoft is checking everyone's bags for unsupported Office installs

> Is there anything creepier than religious zealots, really?

Yes: Corporate Zealots

Nvidia RTX 4090: So hot they're melting power cables

Don't blame IBM.

Can I blame Intel, then?

Re: Not surprised

Have you ever played "Quake RTX"? It's rubbish! And at today's energy prices, with a 4090, you'll need to put 50p in your electricity meter every half an hour as if you were playing an arcade game! Tell that to John Carmack

Re: Thanks for pointiong out those XA90 connectors, seen em on drones.

Right. And you'd never see a building installation using separately-insulated narrow-gauge wires with low-current connectors in parallel to connect something like an electric cooker or shower.

But "Computer Standards" were written by IBM in the 1980s, and they obviously had some sort of deal going with Molex. They never thought anything would draw more than 1A through the 12V wire (probably only needed for erasing the EEPROM and maybe spinning a disk platter).

(at that time they didn't have "point-of-load" switching regulators on the motherboard itself, so they were more worried about the current on the 5V and 3.3V wires, which are barely used these days)

But for a PC to be "ATX Compatible" it has to use those shitty crimped Molex connectors that were designed in the days before CNC machining was a thing, and only take wire up to 16AWG or so.

Re: Not surprised

Nor am I surprised either..

600W at 12V is.. 50A. And any fule no: Ohm's law says resistive heating goes with the square of current. If you double the current with the same number of pins & same gauge wire, then you quadruple the power (heat) loss in those pins/wires. If you double the current and double the number of pins/wires, then you still double the heat.

Nvidia have doubled their power consumption, but the supply voltage standard is still 12V, so they are doubling the current. But they certainly haven't quadrupled the number of pins. So it's not surprising that they are getting hotter.

On the face of it, those Molex pins are supposed to be rated to 10A - so 12 of them (6 pairs of + and -) naiively ought to be rated to 60A. But in practice if you put multiple pins in parallel then the slightest bit of dust/grease/oxidation can cause most of the current to go through a few pins. Especially since they don't seem to be gold plated.

Plus you have a bundle of cable attached that is, under that kind of load, as much of a heat source as a heat sink..

Maybe they should switch to XT90 connectors for GPUs. That and/or increase the voltage standard.

Or on the other hand we could always, er, stop wrecking the planet and wasting silicon with all this "AI"/VR/Blockchain bollocks and go back to simpler days when GPUs only needed to draw a few thousand polygons at 30fps to run a perfectly good fun 3D video game, and that was all we ever used them for.

<ducks half-empty bottle of amphetamine-loaded whisky thrown by some resident investment banker>

Mine's the one with the Quake II logo

OpenAI's ChatGPT is a morally corrupting influence

Re: I bet chatGPT could be modified to give you a bibliography on any answer that it produces.

Maybe, but it's not simple to do that actually. Every input that ChatGPT ever parsed will have affected its weights slightly.

The best it could give you is to list a few of the inputs most statistically similar to its response. But that might take a lot of extra effort to do even that.

@LionelB

>> It's not even useful as a computer, because it doesn't spit out facts

> Wait... you thought that's what computers do?

Computers spit out deterministic answers after performing calculations on their input data. They will always produce the same answer for the same input data and the same "question"/formula. This could be a database query, for example. If I ask MySQL to give me the rows of the database matching my query, then it is a "fact" that those rows exist in the database. If I ask the same of ChatGPT, then it is a mere statistical likelihood that rows such as these might have existed in some database, once upon a time in fairyland.

The key here is determinism. ChatGPT's answers are based on randomness, and its output modifies its input. It does not give the same answer for the same question. It cannot reliably produce a factual output, even if its answers are sometimes, even usually, correct. Whereas computers running deterministic programs can be relied upon to produce facts, as long as their input data is correct of course.

> Like a student essay, then.

No, because a student can answer questions about his/her essay and will have learnt something from the act of writing it and answering the questions, which was the only point of the essay. If you gave ChatGPT an essay that it wrote, it will have no awareness that it ever produced that output, and can merely pretend to answer your question.

> Chat GPT (in my experience) stubbornly refuses to introspect or discuss itself.

Because (news flash) ChatGPT is NOT self-aware. Not even when it eventually does incorporate all of its past outputs into its input will it ever be self-aware. It is not alive. There is a hell of a lot more that a real organism does to make it alive than the language model that ChatGPT uses.

A tool for the devil, perhaps

At best, it's a tool for swindling and duping humans en-masse. It can easily fool the public by automating scams, propaganda, and marketing. It can dupe idiots (even those idiots who are supposed to be clever, like that Google plonker) into believing that it is sentient, and clearly it can swindle investors out of Billions. (which may seem like a positive outcome, until those billionaires sack half their staff after having spent their cash believing that this thing can replace programmers and engineers..)

It may well seem at first like a better "search" than Google, but that is thanks in part to Google becoming steadily worse, as it chokes on more and more auto-generated shite.

Unlike Google though, ChatGPT is unable to reveal its sources. And it is likely to "get worse" much faster than Google did, as it pollutes its own input (and Google's).

It could be that search engines like Google will be doomed by this crap-generator. But if Google is doomed by a flood of fake information, then so are we all.

Of course it isn't consistent about anything, you idiots

It is literally a random number generator, in a high-dimensional search space, statistically weighted to output stuff that looks vaguely like text scraped from the internet

Obviously it doesn't have an opinion. It doesn't have a brain!

It's not even useful as a computer, because it doesn't spit out facts, it spits out anything that is likely to appear in its input, be it fact or fiction

At best, It's like some kind of eyeglass for gazing at the collective navel of humanity, while humanity festers and destroys itself

Microsoft axes 10,000, already breaking bad news to staff

Sacking 10,000 staff while splurging beelions on OpenAI..

That thing can write code!? Then what do we employ all You Lot for?

Can't wait for the next Patch Tuesday produced entirely by CoPilot's "Fix Bugs" wand

Microsoft and community release scripts to help mitigate Defender mess

Re: Microsoft are C%&$S!

Some of us don't like Microsoft OR Google, you know.

And no, we aren't Apple users.

Royal Mail, cops probe 'cyber incident' that's knackered international mail

Not just a jealous USPS?

No, I'm sure UPS was to blame.

Flaming USB battery halts flight from Taiwan to Singapore

Re: Fireproof safe?

That would have to be a very big, very heavy safe given the current trend of having non-removable batteries in laptops..

Plus any fire would be made worse if all the batteries on the plane were kept in the same place. It would have to be a hell of a safe to store 200 odd Dell/HP/MacBooks/etc in such a way that they are not damaged during turbulence, and that the safe could er, safely withstand all 200 of them going up in flames, releasing a lot of toxic gas that has to be handled..

For those passengers that are "fine", they might not be so happy about having inhaled small quantities of HF gas, which is one of the products of a lithium battery fire. This gas turns into hydroflouric acid on contact with water, such as mucous membranes etc. Not a nice substance. If it were a larger amount from everyone's devices combined, the fumes would probably be fatal in an aircraft cabin, unless the fire safe also had some kind of air filtration system.

The fuel cost of just having the safes on board would probably run into thousands of gallons per plane per year..

Government tech spending in England more than doubles in five years

Re: IR35

More like: Now that Brexit has put OJEU out of the way, all that tax payer money is ripe for spending on mates' consultancies.

Virgin Orbit doesn't

Re: @werdsmith

Actually my guess would be an oxygen leak - between 1:57 and 2:00 while the telemetry is still working, you can see the oxygen steadily going down much faster than the fuel. Probably it had a fire onboard at that point and plopped into the ocean a few minutes later. The altitude does descend steadily from there as you say, with the rest of the telemetry lost, so it's not clear if that might just be coming from a filter at the ground station with the actual craft long since exploded, or if it's genuine altitude data from a plummeting craft. I'll wait for the write-up :)

@werdsmith

Can you post a link to the bit where you think it went wrong?

I can't find where "the telemetry showed it hadn’t reached orbital velocity, the altitude went down rapidly and it decelerated." except for the moment when the telemetry suddenly goes off the scale and then to zero within the space of a few seconds. As far as I can tell, it could've been shot down by that Russian ship that recently deployed to the Atlantic. With the number of YouTube idiots posting "We're actually nuking Russia" I guess I couldn't blame them..

So far as I can tell, it is all accelerating and gaining altitude right up until the 1:57 mark

It steadily gets to 8004 mph top speed, then the telemetry craps out and it all goes to pot. I don't see any earlier indications of failure than that, except for Grant Shapps and Richard Branson.

Microsoft chases Google with ChatGPT-powered Bing

Re: Fake searches

Maybe they should call it "Bong"

Bing, except the results are entirely imagined.. by nobody.

Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher

Re: > Happy to drive an EV but the price points need to come waaaay down.

> I believe the market pricing model is the same or very similar for most of Europe. It is nothing to do with free market capitalism but stupid govt regulation and protectionism.

Er, because there is no free-market capitalism in Europe?

What we needed was new nuclear. But in a post-privatisation age we found that it simply wasn't feasible. I agree that the over-regulation and FUD around nuclear didn't help either though. Plus I have my suspicions about vested interests in oil and gas deliberately spreading FUD about nuclear..

> Happy to drive an EV but the price points need to come waaaay down.

Not much chance of that, for a few reasons.

1. Not until we nationalise, or at least drastically rationalise the electricity markets... Currently, the way the electricity market works in the UK is utterly broken by free-market-capitalism gone-mad. There are about 15 different "markets" in the system, all designed as sticking-plasters to try to solve particular issues, because economists can only solve problems by inventing a new market, it seems.

2. Not until the price of electricity is decoupled from the price of gas... In the main "day ahead" and "half hour" markets, there is an auction system whereby electricity generators bid for a price per MWh, and they are asked by National Grid to spin up and start generating in the order of the price they bid, but everyone receives the same price as the most expensive generator that was needed per day / per half-hour. That's why the price of electricity is so inextricably linked to the price of gas. But the wind-farm operators don't want to change it, because they are making a bloody killing this way.

3. Not until we build more transmission capacity. Currently the 400kV transmission system is bottlenecked in a few places, such as the Scottish border. This means that even if there is a surplus of Wind power, we still have to switch on expensive CCGTs, OCGTs or Interconnector links to keep the lights on in London and the South East. That means expensive bills for us and trebles all round for the generators.

4. Not until we build more distribution capacity. The various substations and low-voltage cables that bring electricity to homes and businesses are the most inefficient part of the system, due to their low voltage (and associated I^2R losses), and are currently stretched to breaking point. The cable under your street typically carries 240V 400A, or 415V (3 phase 240V) 800A if you're lucky. An EV charger needs to charge at the very least at 10A (2kW, so 24h to reach 50kWh charge), but 40A if you want a 6 hour "fast-ish" charge. If everyone on the street had an EV, that 400A cable would be starting to overheat very quickly, especially if people are running heat pumps, showers, fan heaters, electric cookers etc. as well. One way to solve this would be to have US-style 11kV-230V transformers on every other telegraph pole, but that would probably be considered unsightly by the good townsfolk of Royal Tunbridge Wells, and so they will simply get into their spare petrol Porsche SUVs instead when the lights go off.

Oh yeah, and it also turns out that Lithium and Cobalt for Batteries, Copper for motors and busbars, and Neodymium for magnets, are all finite resources, so the price per EV doesn't have the same economy of scale as the economists thought it would. If anything, the more EVs there are, the more expensive they will get. Oops.

Techies try to bypass damaged UPS, send 380V into air traffic system

Actually, 19kW would be a very atypical electric shower. Mine is rated at half that, and takes 40A at 230V. A 19kW shower would need to be on 3-phase AC since it would be not-very-economical to run 80A cabling up the wall of a house..

9.5kW is enough to raise the temperature from 10C input to 40C output with the flow regulator almost fully open. At 19kW you'd be showering in 70C water.. Not quite deep-fried, but certainly parboiled.

It would also depend on how those 19kW were delivered. Your microwave oven takes 1.2kW from the wall to deliver 850W of heat into your food. So if I put you in a 19kW (output power) microwave, I'm sure you'd feel deep-fried within a few seconds.

19kW is also more than enough to run a commercial deep-fat-fryer of the sort you'd find in a chip shop.

So don't call people "Mr. Pants-on-Fire" without checking your own figures, Mr. GrumpenKraut. :)

Re: Don't worry, be wiring.

> Multimeters are not a good choice, ... (e.g. trying amps range to measure volts on a high energy circuit)

That's what we have Darwin Awards for.

Palantir's Covid-era UK health contract extended without competition

Perma-crisis

Hundreds of millions a year?? --- >

The trouble with this government is that Everything is being done on an emergency basis, which gives them Trump-style powers to get away with murder. The irony is that this huge expense will probably be used to justify the argument that the NHS needs to be privatised. At which point, the insurance companies will know exactly who to pay to run their risk calculations..

> It contributed in a material way to helping the NHS respond to covid

Er, did it? I hear this a lot, but really can anyone tell me: In what "material way" did Palantir help the vaccine rollout, which couldn't have been achieved with a simpler, cheaper, less all-encroaching system? Or indeed whatever system the NHS had before?

According to Palantir's "We're trustworthy, trust us." blog, "Healthcare organisations, for instance, have used our software to tackle challenges like efficiently allocating PPE supplies when thousands of hospitals across the country have radically different and constantly changing levels of supply and demand for each item of PPE."

Well, that went bloody brilliantly then, didn't it!

How long until the PNC is up for renewal and Palantir get control of the police computer systems as well, I wonder?

If you read their second boring blog post "purpose-based access controls", it sounds as if there is no fundamental separation of data, and that anyone could be granted access to absolutely anything and everything, provided they have the proper 'clearance'. This could potentially mean that ministers could alter the police files on inconvenient persons "Russia/Iran/China style", in a future even-more-dystopic Britain.

Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants

Re: Opaque

> Radioactive metals from neutron activation are a problem, though, as are materials like Co60

Yup. But we'll all be saved by FUSION! .. Oh, wait.

If you were to do this analysis on a fusion reactor such as Iter or Demo then you'd find that the L&ILW, (and even the short-lived HLW such as Co60) produced by Fusion designs is a couple orders of magnitude above fission reactors, SMRs included. Yet we all seem to think that Fusion is some miracle of clean energy.. If you ask me, Fusion (and the anti-fission lobby) is likely to be funded by Big Oil, because they know that Fusion will never be practical and it helps keep people biased against fission, which DOES work and could actually make Oil obsolete.

Really, what's needed is for humanity to just drop all this FUD about radioactivity and learn to love the glow, or at least learn what orders of magnitude mean.. We can't be worrying about milli-bequerels of Co60 potentially seeping into groundwater* when some small bald russian cretin has dropped a Zetabequerel somewhere in the world

* (yes, apparently Sellafield actually worry about levels equivalent to a single photon being emitted every 16 minutes.. it's ridiculous)

ChatGPT has mastered the confidence trick, and that's a terrible look for AI

> This cat is not getting back in the bag.

Honestly, I think the most likely scenario is that World War III will reset all of humanity to the dark ages, and soon.

At this stage of Human History we are running out of food and energy, and our culture and politics is being poisoned on an industrial scale to the point where nobody knows what to believe anymore. And all of it only seems to be accelerating, thanks to so-called AI.

I'm serious: I think WWIII must be just around the corner. I'd be surprised if we all last until 2024. Where did I put my sandwich board..

Stack Overflow bans ChatGPT as 'substantially harmful' for coding issues

Feedback loop

I think the main problem with allowing stochastically-generated content online, especially in places like Stack Overflow, is that the statistical machine that generates this drivel in the first place is built by scraping the web, especially places like StackOverflow.

The current incarnation of The Internet is (for the most part) human generated, but when there is a large amount of so-called AI generated content around, it will start to pollute its own input and make even more meta-nonsense.

Creator of spec for melting RTX 4090 cables urges Nvidia, others to 'ensure user safety'

Re: I'm sure the marketing people didn't like that idea.

This is why we shouldn't let marketing make technical decisions.

If I want to run a RTX 4090 I'd need a new PSU anyway. Also, it's not beyond the Wit of Engineers to design a 3.3V POL regulator that can accept 10V-50V wide input range and therefore keep compatibility with older PSUs (although you'd want a different connector with a series diode or two to prevent people trying to put 48V into a 12V card.. and you can always have an ID pin that handshakes to the PSU before enabling the 48V, like how USB does it). Mostly the POL design is the same, with higher voltage rated front-end caps and MOSFETs. A few $ more BoM cost for nVidia on their $1000 card..

Maybe if you calculated how much *energy* was lost in the cables and how much extra *copper* is required to run at 12V, and told them that they were therefore killing the planet, they might change their minds.. Actually a "95% ErP rating" shouldn't be given to a PSU if it burns tens of watts in the output cabling.

Why 12V? USB managed to ditch 5V

If you wanted to design a power connection standard to carry more power, the sensible answer is to boost up the voltage, not the current..

The USB-IF managed to get this right, so why couldn't PCI-SIG? If I can have 48V on a USB-C cable delivering 235W at 5A, why can't I have it inside my PC, delivering 600W at 13A? (which would only require a single 6-pin connector at most)

Or if we must stick with 12V @ 50A, why keep the crummy Molex multi-pin crimp connectors instead of moving to something like XT90? (probably, because PCI-SIG has a deal with Molex)

I think PCI-SIG feels the need to cover its ass here, because it knows this is it's fault for being a) a dinosaur unwilling to move on from 1970s IBM standards, and b) a parasitic entity that receives millions of dollars in subscription fees from the IT industry and does no work for it. (unless cocktails and canapes on a luxury yacht count as work)

But NVidia are idiots too, of course. I'd guess their employees probably wrote the spec anyway and sent it to PCI-SIG for ratification.

UK cuts China from Sizewell nuclear project, takes joint stake

Re: Local generation - sorry but this is argument is flawed from an electrical standpoint

You are correct that 7-10% of electricity, (often more like 15%), is lost in the grid before it arrives at the consumer's meter.

However, the vast majority of this is lost in the low-voltage local distribution network (where the currents are much higher to carry a given power).

The cable under the street carries about 400 Amps at 230V, and the losses depend *only* on the current, and go up with the square of current (P = I^2 R). So if you try to pull 800A through that cable, the losses will go up by a factor of four. Think about that next time you notice the lights dim slightly when you switch on your 40A (9.5kW) electric shower or your shiny new heat-pump.

The high-voltage transmission network runs at 400kV. Ours is a bit outdated, it's possible to run AC pylons at 750kV or more. The higher the voltage, the more you save in copper to transmit the same power over the same distance. China has some 2MV overground HVDC links.

Very little is lost (2-4%) in the transmission system. Whereas 5-15% is lost in distribution (between large sub-stations and consumers, with smaller sub-stations in between). So siting generators locally actually wouldn't help that much in terms of losses. It may even be worse: e.g. If you use a medium-voltage (33kV) link from the power station to the town, instead of putting a 400kV substation in the middle of the town. These days we can put 400kV cables underground too, so you wouldn't even need to have pylons.

UK bans Chinese CCTV cameras on 'sensitive' government sites

PS: coaxial cameras are still a thing.

Yes actually! HD-SDI CCTV cameras are amazing, I don't know why so few companies sell them!

You have zero latency, zero compression artefacts (until you compress the video yourself, on your own server that is), and the full resolution of an IP camera.. No crappy ONVIF "non-specification" mess to deal with. Standard RS-485 for PTZ, etc. And of course, no worry about security implications!

What else could you want from a camera?

HP Inc to lay off up to 6,000 staff, cut costs by $1.4 billion

Re: RE: whole system is made to benefit a few

But of course! Bags of time for the execs involved to bail themselves out with fat bonuses and claim that they "saved the company" a ton of money. They might even get to quit the country and save themselves from the economic shitstorm that would follow from all the other execs in all the other companies having the same idea! (that is, if they can find somewhere to live that won't be affected by a global economic crash potentially followed by WWIII... Antarctica, perhaps?)

Locked out of Horizon Europe, UK commits half a billion to post-Brexit research

Re: "the UK remains open to association"

Indeed - bit it still irks me when people say "we" voted to leave. I certainly didn't. And the country as a whole could hardly have been more undecided on the subject if it had tried.

48/52 was well within the margin of swing that could be exerted by a foreign *cough* russian *cough* propaganda campaign and some slick marketing funded by *cough* russians *cough* tory donors.

You couldn't elect a government on such a flimsy majority, so how come we have made such a grave decision on our country's future on barely a 4% margin? I would have expected a majority of 60% to call it a done deal either way and rule out a second referendum, but instead we get this "we won you lost get over it" bollocks. It's because the winners are invariably the already-wealthy and powerful few, that they are able to manipulate the rules in their favour. Certainly if it had been 52/48 then they would have been screaming for a second referendum.

UK's National Health Service will roll existing Palantir work into patient data platform

This eliminates the risk of data exfiltration..

See icon.

Air-gapped, my foot.

I run an air-gapped network at home - between my laptop and my wi-fi router.

And how do the "customers" get their reports? Dot-matrix fan-fold? Or do they pay extra to bring in their 4TB NVMe thumb-drive and download the lot so they can de-anonymise it at their leisure ?

To say that this "eliminates the risk of data exfiltration" is just nonsense.. "Minimises" is even doubtful. "Reduces" would be the honest description.

Even the AWE can't operate a truly air-gapped network, so I'm told.

iFixit stabs batteries – for science – so you don't have to

Re: Energy doesn't HAVE to go somewhere.

There are "designs" for endless safe clean energy from a glass of water, aka the miracle of Cold Fusion. And if you go on YouTube, or as I prefer to call it, U-Bend, you will find hundreds of "designs" for perpetual motion machines, zero-point energy devices, and the like. The snag of course is that they are just there for clickbait and none of them work.

Solid-state batteries are only marginally more feasible than cold fusion. They sometimes 'work', for the purposes of swindling some clueless investors out of a big pile of cash, but they don't work in real life. They have piss-poor power density, extreme manufacturing challenges, and non-existent longevity.

Usually the fundamental problem is the lithium needs to be made near atomically flat with a PVD machine, but when it dissolves and plates back again, it doesn't plate flat and the electrode separates from its solid electrolyte. The available power and energy plummet with each charge, especially if it's a fast charge.

The main reason why solid state batteries are slightly safer, is because their power density is MUCH lower i.e. they have a high internal resistance. So you're not really comparing apples with apples if you compare the safety of a lipo battery that can be charged in an hour, with a solid state battery that is damaged beyond repair if you charge it more quickly than 10 hours..

There's really no such thing as a high power density, high energy density, scalable energy store that is also safe. Storing high energy reagents in the same place.. There's a word for that: a bomb.

Version 252 of systemd, as expected, locks down the Linux boot process

Re: we can dream

> Why do you feel that MS will use it's old EEE tricks today?

These days, Microsoft is into Surveillance Capitalism just as much as Google, Amazon, Facebook (sorry "meta") et al.

Windows and Office (not to mention LinkedIn, GitHub and Azure) bring them vast amounts of data on everyone. Windows has ads right in the start menu these days, and even without the ad money I'm sure there is a queue of 'data brokers' who would pay for access to that trove.

Microsoft "love Linux" just so long as it's running in the nice white-box-environment that is WSL. But they seem determined (via Secure Boot, UEFI, and other, more insidious ways) to make it as difficult as possible for the general public to run Linux natively on their computers. Why? Because they would evade their surveillance by doing so.

Microsoft love things like Snap, Flatpak, Docker, Electron etc precisely because they break that UNIX/GNU philosophy of avoiding bloat by having small, auditable programs which each do one task and all rely on eachother - moving towards the Windows-style philosophy of "here's an installer, it's a 700MB EXE, just run it, don't worry it's from a 'trusted source', see here's a nice certificate of authenticity for you.." (note how Microsoft loves to tell people who to trust..)

Since their purchase of GitHub, they also seem to be treating Open Source devs as their own unpaid employees, hoovering up all their efforts into one enormous AI-driven deniable-plagiarism machine.

With Web Apps and Electron Apps, it's a Black Box for you and a White Box for Microsoft.

You should try to estimate how much value you get from your Dynamics 365, versus how much value It gets out of You.

Re: we can dream

Wow, amazed at the downvotes for Steve.

SystemD breaks the UNIX philosophy and tries to do too many things at once. It works well though for personal computers (not servers). And its developer, I fear, has (or at least, will) become a Microsoft stooge, and I fully expect Microsoft to try to poison the open source community as much as it possibly can. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, etc. :(

But we should remember that it is the enemy who spreads division and hate. To hell with all that.

Debian is still great. So is Devuan, but Devuan is after all, ~95% Debian. It would be 5% of nothing without Debian, and I have a huge amount of respect for the Debian devs who have maintained the upstream packages for, almost-literally: everything.

I am writing this post on a laptop, and of course that runs Debian (and SystemD). And it runs pretty well. If it were a server, though, it would be running Devuan.

UK government set to extract hospital data to Palantir system without patient consent

Your MP

See icon

:(

Re: We serfs do not have a voice

Seems like we've bought a shedload of sub-standard PPE-graduates..

The world was promised 'cloud magic'. So much for that fairy tale

As the old adage goes

It's just Somebody Else's Computer.

(and Somebody Else's Data Mine...)

Linux Lite 6.2: Latest release from distro with a misleading name

One question

Have you got rid of Snap?

^ this is the most bloated, retrograde feature of "the Linux desktop" that there ever was, IMO.

Twitter's most valuable users are ghosting the platform

Teddit

In the same vein as Nitter (Below) there is also a Reddit proxy called Teddit.

Replace reddit.com with teddit.net in the URL

(I know these things because my /e/os phone redirects them by default!)

Re: It’s toxic and it got nasty during the pandemic

Err, Mr. Eel, you are missing the point so much as to whack yourself in the face with the bat.

The OP's point was that people on twitter who can be "piqued" let's say, by a particular thing, are being deliberately 'piqued' by the algorithm to drive "engagement", so much so that even a completely unrelated-to-anything essentially private conversation will get piled on by warring partisans like flies on shit.

Whatever your thoughts are on COVID are irrelevant - we are discussing Twitter in this thread, NOT COVID. But even in the absence of a feed-optimisation algorithm, you have latched on to this trigger subject, and - consciously or not - attempted to divide the room.

This is the toxcicity of social media in a nutshell - it poisons all rational discussions to turn them into bipolar flame-wars, 'optimising' that poison to the point where Godwin's Law is invoked as fast as possible.

> I use it to follow people/services to keep up to date with topics, but I never post anything

For that, there's Nitter

It's a Twitter proxy that just fetches tweets with their API, while removing all of the tracking crap and bypassing the forced-login.

Just replace twitter.com with nitter.net in any URL

Logitech, that canary in PC coal mine, just fell off its perch

When I bought a "Logitech" C920 webcam in 2020 (100 quid!!), it came in the cheapest of cheap packaging, a tiny crumpled turquoise box with the new "logi" logo. I assumed I had been sold a fake and was about to send it back and complain to the online tat-mart, when I discovered that they really had rebranded that badly.

It's a reasonable webcam, but it autofocuses badly sometimes and it's hard to force it to try again (short of bashing it like an old TV set)

Shutterstock partners with OpenAI to sell AI-generated stock images using DALL-E

"AI" image generation does not threaten stock photo companies

In fact it's great, because they can sack a shedload of artists and photographers!

Whose entire past work was, without any consent, used to create the machine that replaced them

UK.gov finds billions in cash for big data contracts

Re: Excession Technologies

Also interesting that the CEO of Excession is also CEO for this lot:

General System Corporation

There's people on that board who are ex-Palantir, ex-Accenture, ex-AWS, ex-Microsoft..

Snouts in the surveillance capitalism trough!

Excession Technologies

A rather ominous name in that list.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/26/excession_sues_police_digital_service_surveillance_framework/

Re: "We will ensure that data can be leveraged"

> Well the government has a big black hole in public finances. I am sure that selling your & my data will help fill part of that.

Selling? If they are forking out another £2bn of public money for these contracts, then they are not selling anything, they are giving it away and then subsidising the profits!

Liz Truss ousted as UK prime minister, outlived by online lettuce

Re: Face like thunder

Probably most pissed off about the prospect being evicted from Chequers (by a lettuce, no less). She certainly seemed to spend more time there than in dingy No. 10 or indeed Parliament.

I'd vote that we turn Chequers into a lettuce farm managed by the national trust, open to the public and putting the land to good use growing lettuces for the nation instead of being a cushy Pile of laurels for the PM to sit on.

Ministers (and Prime Ministers) are supposed to SERVE the country, not pretend as if they own it!

Re: Free speech, duh

You forgot the pint, Mr. Niblick :)

Microsoft and Meta promise facehugger PCs piping cloud desktops into VR headsets

Re: I don't get it - FTFY

AR and VR have scope to slurp wide areas of our potential data profiles, in ways that haven't been monetized yet.

Just imagine, you could know what someone is thinking not just by tracking their cookies, click-throughs and mouse-movements - but every nod of their head, twitch of their pose, and glimmer in their eye! Imagine how much MONEY is to be made by closing a fast content-recommendation loop around such an immersive experience, manipulating people into buying more stuff, following our political sponsors, and selling the proles to the big employers, governments and insurance companies on a scale never seen before!

THAT is what Zuck & Co are having orgasms about (that and the second poll answer)

Cloud desktops? That means Zuck gets to see what's on your headset screen, remember. So stay away from the VR porn on the face-mounted telescreen.