Posts by wiggers

Elon Musk merges xAI into SpaceX to spread universal consciousness via a sentient sun

Orbiting AIs

Straight out of Neuromancer by William Gibson.

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

Re: "all this is old news"

I got the biggest OLED computer monitor I could find and it's plugged into an ancient Freesat box. I've got an old Chromecast video adaptor with which I'm currently experimenting also.

Newly launched civil service pension portal from Capita is crapita, users report

Re: Other providers

I find it bewildering that these systems appear to be written from scratch for each organisation. Surely there must be solutions available off the shelf for running a large pension scheme? Or are they created in such a way as to be completely unique to each customer?

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

5. Helicopters

The dry mass is 70t but if you stripped out the rocket motors, cargo doors, etc, You could get it down to under 60t. Then you'd just need three Mil Mi-26 each with 20t capacity. I'm sure some drone squadron software could be used to synchronise the flight of the helis. No?

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

The "golden rule," is to "never use the output without checking it." - so the 46 minutes is lost to checking CoPilot's homework?

Could of course just get rid of a whole tier of middle management whose entire function appears to be preparing reports for other managers to read. Could just get one AI to write the reports and another to read them. No need for endless pointless meeting either.

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

"This is an architecture that no NASA administrator that I'm aware of would have selected had they had the choice."

Means it'll probably work and at a considerably lower cost.

Vodafone keels over, cutting off millions of mobile and broadband customers

Re: They unannounced most/all of their BGP routes.

I was using Cloudflare WARP at the time and it briefly flagged up a MITM attack before pulling the plug.

Brits sitting on £1.6B gold mine of Windows 10 junk as support ends

"stir in the respective current values of precious metals"

There doesn't appear to be any mention the processing costs to extract these minerals.

Explain digital ID or watch it fizzle out, UK PM Starmer told

"Medical professionals have already raised questions about the project."

So basically this is a vote-winning policy that hasn't actually been worked out with those who have to implement it.

UK Post Office names public inquiry as risk to £410 million Horizon replacement project

How about...

...just commission a system that actually works, verifiably, without waiting for the inquiry that tells you the last one didn't work?

70-knot winds so far blamed for yacht disaster that killed Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch

Re: Predictive Modeling???

Yes, I've experienced katabatic winds that come from nowhere and you only just have time to get the sails down once you spot the flattened water. Once we were tied up in a marina and heeling over quite alarmingly when a gust caught us. As someone else said, if it was at anchor it must have been a significant shift in wind direction for it to have caught the boat abeam.

Sustainability still not a high priority for datacenter industry

Claims...

Having been on many construction projects in my career from the late 1970s, the one of the biggest source of claims for delays is the weather. Nothing new there, just that they can add weight to their claims by citing "climate change".

OK, Google: Are you killing Assistant and replacing it with Gemini?

I've never used Assistant and this doesn't encourage me to start!

Europe's largest council kept auditors in the dark on Oracle rollout fiasco for 10 months

To err is human...

To really cock things up takes a computer.

Stick with paper-based systems. Simpler and cheaper, never needs replacing. (Apart from the pencils.)

Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up

Re: This is great news but...

The rule of thumb is 1kW per household, so someone has simply misplaced the decimal point. Should be 300,000 homes.

Re: This is great news but...

300MW divided by 3.1millon is 96W per home. Just about enough to run the TV. Tough if you want to boil a kettle...

Odds of city-killer asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting Earth creep upward

DOGE avoidance strategy...

Smacks of desperation, trying to justify their existence in the face of a major government efficiency drive.

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

"Avoid meetings with time-wasting morons"

I think this is from The Dilbert Principle.

I worked in a group of softies all working on different projects for different internal and external customers, either individually or pairs. We had a weekly team "progress meeting" in which few could actually discuss any detail, there was no comparison with any planned programme of activities, and no reference to the previous week's minutes. Basically, two hours listening to other people talking of things that were of no relevance to anyone else whatsoever. Occasionally the manager had some announcement that affected us all, usually a new HR initiative that was designed to distract us even further from doing our jobs.

The whole thing could have been done by email in a fraction of the time.

Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price

Tosh.

Complete and utter tosh.

Parker Solar Probe set for blisteringly hot date with the Sun on Christmas Eve

METRES not METERS.

The workplace has become a surveillance state

People used to believe...

... in an omniscient deity to keep them from straying and shirking their work, reinforced by weekly sermons. Now it is The Man and the State that watch you continually.

A new city springs from the rainforest to become Indonesia's tech hub

Is that Sim City?

Or designed in Cities Skylines?

Microsoft decides it's a good time for bad UI to die

Default User is Administrator

I find one of the biggest bugbears trying to support friends and family is that the default user account is administrator. SO all kind of things get installed and settings changed without a thought. If a password had to be entered every time a potentially serious change is made it might concentrate the mind. Several friends simply have one account, administrator, called "User" with no password at all!

UK's 'electricity superhighway' gets green light just in time for AI to gobble it all up

That'll definitely reduce our 'leccy bills.

Tesla Berlin gigafactory goes dark after alleged eco-sabotage

Surely there wouldn't be a single point of failure to take out a whole plant and town?

London's famous BT Tower will become a hotel after £275M sale

"the 177 meter (581 ft) high structure"

Meters measure things (electricity, pressure, etc).

Metres are the SI unit of length.

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

The last time...

"In 2016, another missile, launched from HMS Vengeance, failed after telemetry problems..."

Word was that someone got the target coordinates wrong and it was heading for the wrong hemisphere.

Half of polled infosec pros say their degree was less than useful for real-world work

Re: It's pretty much the same for anything..m

Very true. I had to re-learn practically everything after graduating.

Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections

BOEING... or Boding?

used to stand for "Bits of Engine In Neighbours Garden". Now doors?

Expert sounds alarm bells over upcoming NHS data platform

Re: Interesting but irrelevant

As @worstall, formerly of this parish, pointed out on X the other day, the need is for the export/import *interface* of the EPRs to be defined to enable interoperability. Once that is done then aggregation can be implemented very simply.

Scientists mull Solar Radiation Management – a potential climate-change stop-gap

What could possibly go wrong...

Has no one read/watched Snowpiercer???

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

"Heat pumps and heat networks are the solution."

Solution to what problem exactly? And if the proposed solution doesn't fit a large proportion of use cases then what's the alternative? Government trying to pick winners in a non-existent race, no doubt to feather ministers' nests in future employment.

HP TV ads claim its printers are 'made to be less hated'

Re: You know it's bad when...

The first thing my support droid told me to do was open the dredded HP "Smart" app. It doesn't work on my machine, probably because I've got WARP VPN installed. Then I had to reinstall the drivers using the 320MB "EasyStart" wizard, which was anything but easy. Failed while trying to install a Network Driver, even though it's connected by USB.

Neither "Easy" nor "Smart".

HP Support

I'm in the middle of a marathon session with HP support (~8hrs total so far) trying to get A5 printing of an image working. Wasted 2hrs because the support droid didn't know what a self-extracting archive was nor what an inf file was for!

Euclid space 'scope's first color snaps pull back the curtain on cosmic mysteries

"Belief is no substitute for arithmetic"*

"Astronomers believe it could have only formed with the presence of dark matter."

That's not science. Scientists formulate hypotheses to form a logical argument to explain observations. Dark matter is not the only hypothesis, see also Quantized Inertia (QI).

* Henry Spencer

NASA celebrates 40 years of Discovery, the longest-serving Space Shuttle

Spaceship

...designed by a committee.

Ford, BMW, Honda to steer bidirectional EV charging standard

All your electrons are belong to us.

"which will in turn let the grid sap some stored EV battery juice at times of high demand (with permission), as well as management options that'll restrict EV charging to "grid-friendly" times of day."

Biden to bolster boondocks broadband with a billion bonus bucks (barely)

Meanwhile...

Elon is rolling out Starlink as quick as he can.

We need to be first on the Moon, uh, again, says NASA

Fifty years ago...

They had the technology for manned moon missions. They threw that away for a pantechnicon designed by a committee. Forgot to design a successor and ended up with no human capable space vehicles. Astonishing strategic failure.

UK government's semiconductor brain trust meets for the first time

If all else fails...

...form a new committee.

Clingy Virgin Media won't let us leave, customers complain

Switching to a non-cable area? Fugedaboudit...

I moved from a cabled area to a non-cabled area but Virgin Media's system didn't comprehend that such areas existed. Probably because they didn't provide a conventional service to this area either. Major battle ensued to switch to a different provider.

38 percent of tech job interviews offered exclusively to men: report

Businesses are there to make money for their owners. What does it matter who they chose to employ? Choose the people of whatever age, sex, racial background, etc who are best suited to the job, will provide the best return on their investment.

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

There's the English spelling and then there are mistakes.

EU lawmakers fear general purpose AI like ChatGPT has already outsmarted regulators

Who wants to talk to a computer anyway?

Digital Realty lines up hefty solar, wind projects for APAC datacenters

By how much...

will this policy "correct" or otherwise "fix" climate change? Please show working including cost/benefit analysis.

British industry calls for regulation of autonomous vehicles

Regulation = crystal ball gazing

Regulation is the attempt to predict all possible harms from a new technology or application thereof by those not necessarily qualified. Virtually impossible and restricts potential benefits.

Far better is the law of Tort. Have penalties for causing harm, to focus the minds of those developing the tech to design-in safety.

"First, do no harm."

Mozilla says 80 percent of Google Play's app safety labels are inaccurate

I use the DuckDuckGo browser that has an app tracker-blocker. Astonishing to see the number of tracking attempts. Santander's app is the worst, 10,000-20,000 in a day most days. When I've raised this with them they seem completely clueless, mutter something about essential cookies. One app, Eufy Clean, they didn't even know the app had trackers until I pointed it out to them!

Results are in for biggest 4-day work week trial ever: 92% sticking with it

Re: Well...

Yes, we used to have lengthy "team" meetings every week where we'd have to report what we were working on and what progress had been made. Problem was that the "team" were all working on completely unconnected projects and the "progress" was never compared with a programme nor even what was reported the previous week.

Well...

"Having a shorter work week apparently led to more efficient meetings"

Just cutting out time-wasting meetings probably saves at least a day a week! No drop in productivity.

BT in tests to beam down 5G coverage from the stratosphere

Re: Google Loon (but with wings?)

The commercial viability is really what is being tested. Hard to tell until they try it.