Posts by Ropewash

SpaceX rocket set for unintentional Moon landing – well, a piece of it anyway

Re: "seven times the speed of sound"

Is that the standard unit for furries who play Fortnite?

Trump to UK: Stop taxing our big beautiful tech corps or face tariff tsunami

Re: Maybe

Perhaps tossing his.. ring.. into the fires of Mt.Doom would be more gainful.

Musk bets Tesla's AI future on Intel node that isn't finished yet

The naming scheme has got to go..

Giga factory, Terafab. It's getting out of hand.

Let's assume a small factory occupies a half-acre of land with a modest building. A kilofactory would be 500 acres, which is a pretty big plant. A megafactory is basically be putting a roof over the city of Shenzhen.

Therefore, a gigafactory would be 1000 Shenzhen cities, or about 20% of the entire US landmass.

This 'terafab' would obviously be a bit silly at around 4 times the surface area of the planet Earth.

I meant to do that! AI vendors shrug off responsibility for vulns

Wizard of Claudez. Close on 90 years old and still unmasking the man behind the curtain.

Microsoft announces product it doesn't want anyone to buy

All I heard there was..

..the old software wasn't built around sending us all your 'telemetry' so please stop using it.

Suits won't quit AI spending, even if they can't prove it's working

Re: 'strategic enabler for enterprise‑wide transformation'

Fairly certain it translates roughly to;

"We're stitching various other companies onto our own like a ghastly human centipede, except we're also going to make it a circle".

Why not both?

Microsoft's Copilot strategy is just more user abuse from Redmond, says Mozilla

Re: Typical modus operandi of the AI industry and MS in general

Go back further. Embedding IE6 features so deeply into XP that they could argue in court that removing it would break the system.

Two different attackers poisoned popular open source tools - and showed us the future of supply chain compromise

Re: Wrong.

"Seemingly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

Boeing filed 'seemingly legitimate' self-certifications

Deere oh Deere: Tractor repair row heads for $99M settlement

Re: Its fucking stupid

because a larger risk is dissatisfied customers noticing your tractors are re-badged Mahindra equipment and deciding to go straight to the source.

They thought they were downloading Claude Code source. They got a nasty dose of malware instead

Re: Pro tip

but Grok told me Grok was accurate, and also that 12 was the correct age for bikini modelling. (that latter bit is actually somewhat backed up by a walk past the retail fashion shops during summer)

Even Microsoft knows Copilot shouldn't be trusted with anything important

Re: Can't be trusted with anything important?

"Why use it if it's going to be inaccurate?"

As someone who uses precision measuring tools all day in my trade, I am inclined to agree. I have no use for a set of micrometers that decide what their measurements will be based on predictive averaging of all the measurements other people have taken with other micrometers.

Free Software Foundation calls for free-range LLMs rather than factory-farmed AI

if there's open source code in there..

..there's a non-zero chance there may be some closed source code as well. Quick, someone contact SCO.

Age verification isn't sage verification when it's inside operating systems

Re: Forget age verification for operating systems, but bring in clue verification for politicians.

Many of them will easily pass a physical age verification of 97 given the current state of the gerontocracy.

Mental age is trickier, but I'd say 8 and rapidly regressing.

Microsoft veteran Rajesh Jha prepares to retire, triggers yet another reorg

Re: MS Works!

I also recall running into Works in a similar timeframe. Unfortunately it was as the software that couldn't output a file compatible with Word without all the formatting disappearing.

Not quite as rose-tinted my nostalgia for the program.

Oracle and OpenAI's Texas Stargate datacenter expansion reportedly on the skids

Re: Gigawatts

Perhaps people get confused by the usage of GW and think it means anything other than giga-wishes. That is a standard unit of prayer representing how much is required to make people believe in any of this make-believe bullshit.

Bundle of human neurons hooked to silicon learns to stumble through Doom

Internet pedantry commencing;

1 - Doom wasn't truly 3D. There was a Z axis, but it wasn't utilized as an input, nor was it able to allow overlapping floors on a map.

2 - A mouse was not used for game input, so the brain not knowing of the device wouldn't matter.

3 - Unrelated to the article, but given it can play Doom can it also map a non-soundblaster16 card in a way that the game can output to it?

Memory scalpers hunt scarce DRAM with bot blitz

Re: OK they are bastards, but

Just casually tossing the S-slur around like that.

OpenClaw, but in containers: Meet NanoClaw

Cohen and his brother Lazer working on 'future tech'..

So Jewish space lasers it is.

Harvard boffins finally crack the mystery of squeaky sneakers

Re: Applications?

Reminds me of an old pickup truck I owned in my youth. Rusty rotor cut right through the pad, the backing plate and into the piston surface. I'd grown so used to the noise that I didn't bother to check until it went from squawking to crunching. Many hours of dirt-backlot repairs later a lesson was learned.

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

Re: Venn diagram of those MAGA and online trolls is pretty much just a circle though.

So just under half a regular circle? It's x diameter.

No pi for you.

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

At this point..

They should just set aside the clumsy foreplay and drop everyone straight into clippy at boot time.

"I see you're trying to use your computer, would you like some help with that?"

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

Some would say the lathe was just bouncing across the floor because I'd forgotten to balance the 4jaw with a large offset workpiece, but I maintain it is sentient and was making a spirited bid for freedom.

Amazon's vibe-coding tool Kiro reportedly vibed too hard and brought down AWS

a nod to Douglas Adams other work

When comparing programming a computer to teaching a particularly dull-witted pupil, the response given was iirc "I didn't realize we had a shortage"

DEF CON bans three Epstein-linked men from future events

Re: Bill Gates, too?

You had me right up until the second sentence.

Bill Gates wouldn't be an upright person if you bolted his spine to a wall.

Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

Re: "The session just burns through my token quota."

The enshitification will continue until monetization improves.

How AI could eat itself: Competitors can probe models to steal their secrets and clone them

Re: So AI people think stealing is fine

Yep. It was all fun and games taking the artists and authors out behind the woodshed for profit, but reverse engineering their mechanical turk is blasphemy.

If Microsoft made a car... what would it be?

AMC Pacer

With copilot added by taping a touchscreen to the dash.

Trump to hyperscalers: your datacenters, your power bill

It's a tool for very quickly removing the scales from fish. Not to be confused with high-per-scale which is either something to do with climbing or cocaine, I don't remember which.

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

As a teen I would definitely

have put little "do not" stickers on the STOP signs around town if there was a non-zero chance they would have worked.

Luckily that was the 80's and LLM was just a law degree, or brand of expensive clothing, I don't recall.

Systemd daddy quits Microsoft to prove Linux can be trusted

Re: From available evidence below...

Especially when all those wheels are every geometric shape other than round and there's now 7 of them on you car instead of 4.

Pulseaudio was the canary in the coalmine.

If you're one of the 16,000 Amazon employees getting laid off, read this

Re: Universal Basic Income

I would suggest reading Parkinson's Law.

It explains the reasons for what you are seeing quite well.

How an experienced developer teamed up with Claude to create Elo programming language

Re: Reflections on Trusting Trust

A quote that remains just as true for ELIZAs current descendants as it was back then.

Just because they've built an n-dimensional ELIZA doesn't mean it's not subject to the same fundamental limitations.

Windows 11 shutdown bug forces Microsoft into out-of-band damage control

Re: Times like this

Interesting. I've no MS account on my win10 machines and only use limited accounts. I did notice one of those rigs tried to turn copilot back on despite my previous efforts to eliminate it completely. However neither has exhibited any other ill effects. Might have dodged a bullet there.

Ready for a newbie-friendly Linux? Mint team officially releases v 22.3, 'Zena'

re-install

"If you're on Mint 20.. you might want to re-install"

Or don't. It's not like it will cease to function just because it's a bit old.

AI industry insiders launch site to poison the data that feeds them

Re: Ummm...maybe Terminator is a real threat

Guess they don't have enough pics of teens taking their kit off for their liking.

Nvidia, Eli Lilly just say yes to making drugs together, using Vera Rubin GPUs

Hopefully the hallucinations produce hallucinogens

I've long since grown tired of the ones us youngsters used to buy from the local hippies.

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Re: "all this is old news"

2008? Panasonic 42" ips screen. Dumb as dirt and still going strong. The thing has lasted longer than my refrigerator.

I've zero need for a smart TV, and while a resolution better than 1080 would be nice, it's not required, and ips still looks good enough for my eyesight so buying any new kit is not something I have on the budget.

Starlink to lower orbits of thousands of satellites over safety concerns

Re: Musk

People tend to forget that last bit. Same way they forget that a female nipple is just a food dispenser for infants. We're a very odd species to abstract away our own biology to this extreme.

(Also, blending fabrics is a crime under biblical law. We're already born in sin, no need to compound it.)

How Microsoft gave customers what they wanted: An audience with Bill Gates

Re: Unavailable

Going to have to alter an old saying a bit,

You either die a villain or live long enough to become a pederast.

Nvidia DMs TSMC: Please sir can I have some more? The Chinese are starved for H200s

I wonder what % they'd want for weapons grade plutonium sales..

"Nvidia agreed to cut Uncle Sam in on 25 percent of the revenues."

Those aren't bribes sir, they're kickbacks. Just a bit of harmless backscratching is all.

Imagine there's no AI. It's easy if you try

Re: That's not survival. It is an unnecessary nightmare.

Obsolescence is the end goal. They've learned from cellphones that if you glue the battery in well enough nobody will bother replacing it, this is the natural evolution of that line of thought.

Next stop will be container based housing, where you can enjoy the dubious benefit of being able to quickly swap out your entire home when the faucet leaks.

'PromptQuest' is the worst game of 2025. You play it when trying to make chatbots work

Re: No pseudo-thinkers here, mate

You make the most valid point about 'AI' right there. It cannot learn therefore it cannot be intelligent in any way. A Xerox copier is just as capable of producing imitations of the things fed to it, it could even modify the content in pseudo-random ways if the toner was on it's way out, but you'd be hard pressed to label the thing as 'intelligent'.

Before any glimmer of intellect can be attributed to these things, there needs to first be a 'living' model that constantly adjusts it's data and weights according to interactions. Training a new model every time there's new data is not only wasteful, it's pointless.

Stop the slop by disabling AI features in Chrome

Re: DuckDuckGo

The core concept is not wrong there. There are billions of humans on Earth. There are very few actual people.

I personally am just one of the tiny, and infinitely replaceable, cogs that make up the background noise of humanity. It's quote comfortable once you know where you stand.

Starlink satellite fails, polluting orbit with debris and falling toward Earth

In the case of breaking distance there's no testing required.

All they did was change the gap at which the software switches off and pretends it was never there from 5m to 10m. <!--sarcasm>

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

Re: snapflatimages

Remember when Windows 3.11 programs used to come bundled with their own versions of system files to ensure they'd run correctly?

Who knew it was the future of Linux.

DOE recruits cloud, chip, and AI giants for Trump's Genesis Mission

I shall remain cautiously optimistic..

..hoping that by 'AI' they do not mean LLM but rather more dedicated machine learning tools.

I cannot see how a glorified Eliza will unearth anything that didn't already exist when it's model was trained. (Hallucinations excluded)

Tired of sky-high memory prices? Buckle up, we're in this for the long haul

Hopefully it hits e-bay or bankruptcy auction before heading out to the landfill. The dot-com crash was a goldmine and I'm optimistic the ai crash will be similar.

After all, that hardware isn't suddenly useless just because the company that bought it can't pay their bills.

IBM unleashes CUGA, an open-source AI agent that actually completes more than half its tasks

62% is acceptable

So it's an automated bureaucrat.

Porsche panic in Russia as pricey status symbols forget how to car

and that is why I'm glad..

..that when I last had my vehicle serviced, despite being a 2025 model, the report very specifically noted that they had to update the system manually because remote networking of any sort is not enabled.

Which is exactly what I had requested when buying it.