Posts by cyberdemon

Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin applies to launch 51,000 datacenter satellites

Re: put them in the Moon

Put them in Hell

Shove them up your arse

We don't need AI

It's all a fucking farce

AI still doesn't work very well, businesses are faking it, and a reckoning is coming

Re: bring it on

Mirror Mirror on the Wall

Who is the Bigliest Prez of them All

GOV.UK chatbot gets smarter but slower as LLMs improve

Re: Hang on...

I think you've missed the OP's point.. Of course it won't do anything for/on behalf of anybody.. It's just an LLM. But as an LLM given a "customer service" context, it will pretend to provide services that it cannot provide, and will pretend to take actions which it cannot take, because it is parroting data that it or its base model was trained on..

This has been a common problem with bank chatbots, where they assure the user that some service has been completed, and in fact nothing of the sort has happened.

So, someone could indeed be convinced by a chatbot that they have sent the relevant data to HMRC, and then the HMRC's "real computer", having not actually been updated with said data, proceeds to fine the person for not filing the information.

Just employ humans, ffs

The amount of energy and money wasted on these bullshit generators, in the middle beginning of an energy crisis is just obscene..

We have finite gas, and finite electricity generation/transmission/distribution capacity. We should use what we have on building houses and keeping them warm, not spaffing our energy supplies on layers and layers of unsustainable slop

"It'll create jobs!" ... Bollocks will it. Datacentres are pretty much devoid of all life.

Spend the money on humans, save the energy

Struggling to put your AI aversion into words? Here's a handy glossary

Just Stop Slop

I do wonder what someone blowing the whistle on the 1720 South Sea Bubble would have said, before they were hanged for sedition..

Nvidia's DLSS 5 promises to bring you out the other side of the uncanny valley

Derisory, Lazy Slop Scaling

Not only does it turn every frame into slop, but DLSS doesn't always reflect the geometry of underlying 3D models, so the enemy is often not exactly where he appears to be

I don't really understand the utility of it either.. If you have a GPU fast enough to run DLSS, then it is fast enough to render at your monitor's resolution and FPS

Everything else is saccahrine eye-candy that game-devs can't control (and will go out of fashion quickly), emulsifying game artwork so that it all looks like AI slop, because it is literally passed through a sloppification filter.

Chips... in spaaaace – courtesy of Nvidia

Never mind rad-hardening, have they even said how they intend to cool it?

As the article mentions, it is rather difficult to get rid of heat in a vacuum..

Especially when the chips themselves only tolerate up to 125C (400K), which doesn't radiate much

WorldCoin's newest pitch: Scan your eyeballs to prove AI agents really represent you

"World"

Could they have come up with a more megalomaniacal name?

Anything in a Concise Dictionary, never mind a "My First Dictionary" should be inadmissable as a company / brand name.

BBC World Service digital switch backfires as online audience drops

What is the point of providing a World Service broadcast.. by Unicast

Apart from the technical absurdity.. We are now living in a world where people can be in trouble with their local governments for which webstreams they watch / listen to

Anyone could have told them this would happen

And didn't they cancel offshore access to BBC sounds?

Musk makes the Macrohard joke again

Re: In Principle,

A steaming, stinking, macroharddr bag of shit

(dear El Reg: Where's the 'musk_horns' icon?)

Smart mirror shows dumb Windows in elevator

Re: Useful Info vs Disturbing the Ignorant

Oh god, makes me remember the MS teams errors with the dweeb in a beanie hat dreaming of a question mark...

"Oops, something's not right. Please try again"

Aargh die you infernal pile of shit

White House activates Yu-Gi-Oh's trap card by using anime clip for war comms

Re: Getting into the realms of fantasy here

> Qatar, which accounts for one-third of the world’s supply of helium according to the Canada Energy Regulator, has seen its exports come under strain.

Well that's interesting.. I heard in 2022 that Ukraine was the world's #1 supplier of (high purity) Helium, producing 90%? of that used in EUV/XUV lithography machines by the likes of ASML for the production of high-end chips from nvidia et al.

The data-theft followed by fire at ASML was fishy enough, then the Ukraine war effectively prevented them from building new chip-fab machines for a while.. sent my spidey-senses tingling, so to speak.

Is Qatar the new #1 supplier after Ukraine? If so, is it really pure chance that this industry is threatened by a new war?

I mean probably it's just about Oil, as usual.. But it still strikes me as odd to hear about Helium again

Your datacenter's power architecture called. It's not happy

Re: These power densities are a PITA, when can we have proper (cheap, fast) optical interconnects?

No.

_{Both of those are manifestly impractical, to anyone with more than a basic clue. I assume sarcasm. If not, I dare you to go in the vicinity of a 100kW laser beam.}

Re: Serviceability?

Having had some not-insignificant experience with back-of-rack "LRU" backplane power connectors (Harting, ODU, ITT Canon DPX) I would be very wary of something that claims to supply 800V DC @ 100A (80kW) in an auto-mating connector. Especially if the backplane interface also contains coolant flow/return self-sealing connectors. It only takes a small amount of dirt, oxidation or a single incorrect mating to cause permanent damage, which at those voltages and currents could turn into an unexpected plasma torch.

As for self-sealing coolant connectors: I quote a wisened old scouse engineer who told me: "Self-seals don't."

Re: this will shift the power losses around

> herding tens of kA around a PCB, in and out of stacks of silicon...

Madness, pure madness..

I do wonder if Electromigration is an issue, and if it could be behind the reports that these mega-GPUs are failing early

Re: Toasty

Absolutely

And then there's the issue of DC circuit breakers

If you've ever wondered why DC circuit breakers are much bigger and more expensive than ones for AC at the same voltage, current & power rating, here's a nice little demonstration:

https://youtu.be/Zez2r1RPpWY

The explanation: AC forces the current to go back through zero regularly, which gives an opportunity to extinguish an arc. Whereas DC can just continue arcing. That's why HV DC is scary stuff.

Throw water in the mix and you can get explosive gases too! How wonderful

AI has made the Command Line Interface more important and powerful than ever before

Re: CLI? API!

Sounds a lot like DCOP / D-BUS.

DCOP was better in my experience, but that might just be because it had a better CLI ;)

But of course, I'll be turning off any API access designed for LLM agents thanks very much, as I have zero intention of using any AI agents now or in the future.

Why the hell anyone would provide local shell / API access to a black box idiot-machine, generally running on "someone else's computer", is beyond me

Flying cabs, next-gen aircraft cleared for takeoff in 26 states

e-VTOLs

They will be just enough to get the CEO from the roof of Corporate HQ to the nearest nuclear bunker, when the Earth is looking like the opening scenes of Battlestar Galactica

AI vs AI: Agent hacked McKinsey's chatbot and gained full read-write access in just two hours

Since LLMs don't understand double-negatives well (due to their lack of any actual logic) I wonder if this bizarre phrasing was deliberately chosen to alter the AI summary of this press release.

Moody humans should let AI handle bad public feedback first, study finds

> Would the world be a better place if it were run by an LLM

No.

No it would not.

At least Trump will be gone in 2 years, or sooner if the Grim Reaper comes knocking. And he will lose his stranglehold on the legislature in November at the midterms.

I'm sure you were joking, but obviously putting an LLM directly in charge of the world would certainly be far, far worse. Frankly my worry is that an LLM is already indirectly in charge i.e. Trump and his cronies have AI Psychosis, and he says whatever it puts on his teleprompter.

Ex-Meta execs pop up on Nscale board as rent-a-GPU firm raises $2B

Cleggy, the Albatross of Doom

This is (at least) the third sinking ship with his grubby handprints on the wheel.. First it was his disastrous coalition government that ruined the Lib Dems' reputation for over a decade, then Meta's doomed Metaverse, and now he's on the board of one of the most obviously doomed companies out there.. A wannabe CoreWeave (ironic in itself) rent-a-GPU neocloud with no datacentres built, at a time when RAM is through the roof, Energy prices are through the roof, and lead-times and connection queues are longer than a round-the-world snail race because the umpteen-hundred-gigawatts baseload the tech twits say they want (50GW just in the UK, doubling our peak use and tripling baseload) simply doesn't and can't exist in time before their pre-purchased GPUs become obsolete..

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/09/revealed-uks-multibillion-ai-drive-is-built-on-phantom-investments

The new Nscale datacentre is still a scaffolding yard, according to the Graun. It's very unclear where the money has gone, and their accounts are overdue.. But even the bigger ones like CoreWeave, Anthropic, OpenAI, Oracle.. There's no way in Hell they can repay what they have borrowed from investors, lenders and governments. It's madness.

So-called AI is nothing but the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.. I just don't understand WTF the economists who support it are smoking to make them think that chucking more money at it, never mind betting whole economies on it, is somehow a good idea.. Have they consulted their LLM chatbots, perhaps? Are we seeing the effects of AI-Psychosis on governments? Or is it some sociopathic game of brinkmanship between bankers, i.e. who will be the one to go short on the crash, in an end-of-times "Big Short"?

> Keir Starmer said that if AI were “fully embraced”, it could bring £47bn to the economy each year – and promised to “mainline AI into the veins of the UK”.

Complete and utter horseshit! It will cost us a fortune, with all the money funneled into the pockets of charlatans, and it will do nothing but poison the UK economy with slop. More like mainlining fentanyl into the veins of the UK

EV charger biz ELECQ zapped by ransomware crooks, customer contact data stolen

Re: #1 reason I haven't bought an EV

Indeed.

It should be *the law* that any public charger must be usable with nothing more than a bank card.

But then, EV users probably need an app just to turn the car on or unlock the doors

Microsoft Azure CTO set Claude on his 1986 Apple II code, says it found vulns

Dogfooding

The practice of "eating your own dogfood" i.e. using your own products..

In the AI world, it should be known as "dogshiting"

In this case, I suppose someone else's dogshit was tastier

UK mobilizes lawyers to keep report on Gatwick 'drone' chaos under wraps

Re: Money may be involved.

As I understand it, it was a very embarrassing cock-up.

The boss of my company at the time told me that he had spoken to someone very high up at the CAA, who had told him that there was no drone. Two or more different police forces were chasing each-other's drones.

Spyware disguised as emergency-alert app sent to Israeli smartphones

Re: Register bias

Er, what?

> The pager attack carried out by israel: not a single peep.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/hezbollah_lebanon_explosive_pagers/

https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/lebanon_walkie_talkie_explosion_isreal_war/

> The AI used for attacking Palestinian targets: never mentioned.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/18/israel_sets_robotic_targettracking_turrets/

Not exactly what you are referring to, but remember El Reg is an IT publication, not a political one.

> Palantir spyware: crickets.

Covered ad nauseam ...

I don't like what Netanyahu and his government are doing any more than you do.. But accusing El Reg of "bias" on this is about as credible as declaring every school and hospital in Gaza to be a Terrorist Command Post

Unpacking the deceptively simple science of tokenomics

I've never read so much total utter bullshit before on the Reg

> It now becomes how many TPS/$/W you can generate for a given "goodput."

Firstly, what kind of bullshit unit is Tokens per Second per Dollar per Watt? There is TPS/$ (capex) and TPS/W (operating energy cost). And that translates to Tokens/$ (cost of inference). If that is higher than you can charge users for the tokens (perhaps because the tokens themselves are worthless slop..) then your AI business is toast.

And secondly, WTF is "Goodput"? Or it might be better to ask: Are you okay, Mr Mann? Are you perhaps feeling a bit ill after inhaling Sam Altman's farts?

Broadcom says AI companies can’t make their own silicon any time soon

Re: Hock Tan - Master of the Obvious

Meta and Google making their own Silicon.. Microsoft and OpenAI making their own Nuclear reactors.. SpaceX going to Mars The Moon, and launching a Million(!) Starlink satellites (which definitely won't get in the way of the Moon rockets) Trump declaring war on the entire world and believing he can win..

I suspect all of the above have consulted LLM chatbots who have assured them that it is all super-easy-peasy and given them a foolproof bullet-pointed step-by-step plan

Bootleg Windows, Office scheme crashes, triggers 22-month lockup for Florida woman

People will buy Microsoft Certificate of Authenticity stickers?

I normally stick them on rubbish bins, along with "Designed For Microsoft Windows" labels

AWS says drones hit two of its datacenters in UAE, urges users to move resources to different regions

Re: Armed data centers

My reply was to elsergio, not the Anonymous Coward (whom I did upvote for the pun)

Re: Isnt this a little weird`

> Thoughts?

My guess is the gas (LNG?) storage tanks for the on-site turbine generators would be the weakpoint

That and the HV transformers/switchgear

Re: Armed data centers

Armed how? You mean the security guards have pistols? Or the datacentre itself is literally armed, i.e. there is a 50MW laser turret on each corner of the roof, controlled by the AI "living" inside, ready to blast any drone, missile or meatstick that approaches it

Oak Ridge spawns institute to curb AI datacenter power surge

Water from the Mirage

We have put together the best brains in the country to crack the problem of how to obtain water from mirages, and we have concluded that we must all walk further into the desert.

Amazon and Nvidia open their wallets to lock in OpenAI's business while SoftBank keeps the lights on

Re: guarantee ?

> I guess taxes are paid on revenue but not investments.

Worse, they are usually paid on profits.

Hedge funds love to buy up loss-making startups to reduce their tax burden while giving a small chance of a payout

Anthropic launches new marketing blog, pretends it's being 'written' by 'retired' LLM

What do you mean there is no Silicon Heaven?

But where would all the calculators go?

Britain's creaking courts to use Copilot for transcriptions

I'll just leave this here...

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-police-report-frog

Microsoft to auto-launch Copilot in Edge whenever you click a link from Outlook

> No one is forcing you to work there.

Er, my sentiments exactly?

May the artificial dementors feed on your æternal soul, then.

I refuse to use AI, at work or otherwise. It is too damned creepy. It can clone your voice, your visage, your writing style, your management style, and your coding style. Fuck it all to hell. I am employed to do a job for my company, not to be a data-teat for Microsoft.

And I assume you have seen the automatic integration with LinkedIn inside Office and Teams? Everything you do with a Microsoft product at work or at home is tied to your identity, whether you are logged in to LinkedIn/GitHub or not.

Surprising number of downvotes for that one..

What I meant was: If I personally were in the situation where my employer was forcing me to use MS sodding Edge, and I was being forced to use its shitty AI antifeatures such as the one in the article, (either because MS won't let anyone turn them off, or because the Boss/BOFH has disabled the setting via Group Policy), then I would be voicing my complaints to the Boss. Should those complaints go unheeded, then I would be updating my CV, perhaps printing a copy on the printer by the HR office, and checking my prospects with the nearest recruitment agent.

Sure I understand that finding a new employer who doesn't force Microsoft AI crapware onto its staff may be nontrivial, but the longer people simply tolerate this shit just because it's "company policy", the longer the boss will go on deluding himself that "It's great and everyone loves it".

In that situation, I would start looking for a new employer

Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now

Re: We just need to hang on for a year or two

> AI uses HBM memory. That CAN NOT be socketed.

Indeed, but why exactly? Is it because of the wide (128-bit) data-bus, or because of impedance changes at connectors causing reflections in high-speed signals? If so, could it work at a lower speed, or with a fancier connector?

Would it be impossible to take some post-bubble surplus HBM chips and solder them onto a pluggable module (not necessarily compatible with DIMM) and invent a new PC form-factor?

AIs are happy to launch nukes in simulated combat scenarios

They do more than regexes, it's more like a "principal component analysis" of the entire history of human text. It's very good at convincing people that it has intelligence, because it can combine the data in interesting ways not necessarily seen verbatim in the training data. But it cannot "innovate" entirely new concepts, and it loses the reliability and determinism of machines that came before it.

It's a "worst of both worlds" combination of Human ignorance and Machine obstinance. People still assume that "machines are reliable and meticulous", but LLMs are absolutely not. It is only useful for doing a bad job unreliably, but it is fast and cheap. (until the bubble pops)

> AI's seem to come to the same conclusion.

Not "rationally" though.

They aren't "thinking it through" with any kind of philosophy. They are simply taking the same game-theory texts that you mentioned, along with fictional literature such as sci-fi and thriller books and film scripts, and predicting the next token. They are not intelligent, and are incapable of reasoning.

As such, they should never ever be put in charge of anything, least of all weapons of mass destruction.

Just switch the damn things off

Workday CEO's AI talk can't shake off weaker sales forecast

Pipedream..

Just about sums up this whole AI fiasco..

"3000 connectors to business applications".. i.e. a pile of vibe-coded slop, with more holes than a womble fashioned out of veroboard

Google Antigravity falls to Earth under OpenClaw-fueled compute load

Re: The parallels...

At least the dotcom-era leftover dark-fibre was actually useful for future infrastructure after the market corrected itself, and cost very little to maintain.

Whereas "AI datacentres" despite the Trillions spent, will be no use to man nor beast when the bubble bursts, because it is useless without its insatiable energy demand.

Even a Soviet-era Lada factory has more economic value than one of these datacentres

This is a symptom of a wider malaise.

"Investors" (i.e. idiots and coke-snorting bankers) have become accustomed to the idea that "software" has an almost infinite eventual profit margin. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle et al have historically been printing money off the back of their shitty products, because any new license sale has a near zero "cost of goods sold".

Unfortunately for the AI mongers, energy is expensive, and "AI" burns a "shit-tonne" of it, scaling linearly with each new user and doubling exponentially with each new fatter model trained. So much so that each new license sold costs them more than they are able to charge for it, in perpetuity.

Buying the latest hardware for $Billions can perhaps halve their ongoing energy cost in the short term (if it is even available, given how they have already warped the markets), but they are bleeding from every orifice, so to speak.

Eventually the finance twats will wake up from their amphetamine-induced comas and scurry like rats on the RMS Titanic, but it will be too late.

Re: All I see

Stack more layers!

Re: Pi Day

I'm sure it would just make something up.

After all, Pi ~= 3

AWS would rather blame its own engineers than its AI

> I challenge anyone to cite the Amazonian "Strive to be the Earth's Best Employer" leadership principle without sounding sarcastic.

You owe me a new beer. (luckily for you i am typing this on a phone, real keyboards are expensive and not so splashproof)

Discord drama delays age verification debut until the second half of 2026

> Discord plans to pull the trigger om the system

Well, at least El Reg hacks haven't been subsumed by the auto-autocomplete cancer

AMD copy-pastes 6 GW chips-for-stock deal in new Meta agreement

Re: 6GW of chips

Or 6 shits-per-second of cattle