Posts by diodesign 3532 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011
Be as that may, SEV is a selling point for AMD and Intel (or the equiv thereof). It's for paranoid-leaning corporations that don't trust or can't trust their hypervisor / cloud provider's internal security.
Orgs like banks, governments, and healthcare providers that want to put sensitive info on other people's computers, basically.
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To clear everything up: That $5.5M figure is from DeepSeek saying it took the equivalent of 2.78M Nvidia H800 GPU hours to train V3. DeepSeek then multiplied that number by $2/hour to estimate that it would have cost less than $6M to train V3 in the cloud.
But DeepSeek trained V3 and R1 on its own GPUs plus other expenditures so the true cost was not disclosed by the lab. Just the equiv cloud bill.
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I sometimes think the meaning of life is realizing there is so very rarely any grand hidden plot or secret conspiracy steering whole populations, across the political spectrum.
Yes, administrations and organizations can and do have overall goals and programs for achieving those. They are mostly public. The CCP makes no secret its censorship and authoritarianism, for instance.
But this idea that there's super smart scheming people (usually business people) secretly cooking up plots to overhaul the world -- globalists, etc -- is wishful thinking, in a way. There isn't anywhere near the level of intelligence, competence, and orchestration going on. There are no Bond villains with uber-contrived plans.
Everyone is winging it. Sometimes, interests align and patterns form -- or patterns are perceived.
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I've been in plenty of Waymos. They work surprisingly well. When you do millions of miles – well over 22 million rider-only miles by now – some anomalies will happen.
They are still way ahead of human drivers in terms of safety IMHO. I personally cannot wait for private Waymos. The concept of operating a car using your limbs and senses will be hopefully and thankfully considered barbaric in future.
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If there's one thing we don't do is freak out about model releases. We do in fact have a piece coming out soon not only about DeepSeek but how to run it locally to try it out.
Edit: It's now here :)
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Yeah, sometimes we write about bugs simply because they are interesting - something to learn from, some element of schadenfreude. We do skip over a lot of inconsequential flaws and try to focus on the ones that matter.
This is one of those interesting rather than scary bugs, as the article is at pains to point out.
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Yeah once the initial excitement is over, we're toying with the idea of a daily Trump column that just updates over the day and soaks up the day's Trump-related news.
ISTR the last time he was in power he had this uncanny desire to be in the news every day, like every day in the US was an episode of the Apprentice. If that carries on for the next 4 years, we'll make sure the homepage isn't swamped by him and his co-president.
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I think you need to look at the timeline. The article's argument - which we can make clearer - is that Microsoft didn't set out to sabotage OS/2 to benefit Windows. Why would it bother in the first place?
As you entered the 1990s and Windows 3.x was looking like a goer, then yes, there is court-submitted evidence that appears to show Microsoft wanted to push its Win OS. By that point, Microsoft and IBM had pretty much broken up, which we all know about.
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Mentioning where a kernel developer works, submitting patches as part of their job, and causing an issue, isn't for clicks, it's reporting on reality IMO. You might not think it's a fairly big deal; we do.
I think this quote from an AMD person sums it up:
"I just love it how this went in without a single x86 maintainer ack, it broke a bunch of things and then it is still there instead of getting reverted. Let's not do this again please."
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For legal reasons we're not going to have an open comment thread on a criminal case that's going to trial in England. There are contempt and libel laws in play.
If the accused are convicted, comments will be open. If people discuss the trial here, we'll have to moderate that away, too. And I don't like heavy handed moderation.
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If Elon was an independent expert in optimizing US government organizations not to the unfair detriment of those relying on said organizations, then that would be awesome.
But he's not. The conflict of interest, as we've alluded to, is weapons grade in strength. Color us super skeptical that the guy who has openly bitched about being regulated by the FAA, FCC, NHTSA, FDA, SEC, etc, is going to be solely thinking in a selfless public-spirited manner about efficiency and democracy.
As you said, he's a bit of a twat, he's a pure capitalist, and foremost a salesman. That's fine on his own turf. It's a free country. But why on Earth would you put that kind of single-minded person in charge of deciding the future of the very checks and balances put in place to stop people like him running roughshod over all of us?
I'm not even being politically biased here. Just think about it logically.
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Sure, if you find value in the comments rather than the articles, then you're still enjoying the site and we're all winning. We can't please all the people all the time.
Our readership is up year on year again so I'm happy that we're net bringing more people to El Reg's tech journalism. Our biggest stories this year weren't even about Musk or election politics.
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"I think a few moved to San Fran and shared office space with the Twitter that was, which may have influenced them. Or it's just going Californian. Never go full Californian. The Cali bubble may not be representative of the real world, or reality in general."
We've never shared office space with Twitter. We did share a floor one time with Imgur, one of the smaller but still decently sized social media sites, so that's about as close as it gets.
Out of the US editorial team (ie, not sales and ops), 3 of us are in California and one recently moved to another state (and one earlier this year left the team to re-enter academia, good for them). I personally like California for lots of reasons - the climate; the mix of sun, sea, and snow; the smart people; the city and forest life - but its politics is not one of them. As an immigrant, I can't and don't even vote.
The rest of the US team lives across the country, and we have people all over the world. Our politics is a mix (eg, we don't all agree on nuclear power, we don't all agree on gun ownership) and that's fine but overall, for the publication, we're just anti-dumb. Sorry if we think your favorite person is bad for everyone.
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I know you have this image in your head of us, but if you were to say watch our Kettle episodes, you'll see we're the opposite of that. You don't know our personal politics; as we've always said, we're just anti-dumb. Sorry if we think your favorite person is a fool.
Also, only two of us in the editorial team are in SF. The rest of our US journalists (and US sales and ops) are spread out across the country.
But anyway, the point here is that Elon's very publicly benefiting and benefited from the US government, he's now topped the US donor list, our readers have an interest in him, he's in tech, he owns a big social network, he's giving advice on how the US government should be run in exchange for that support for Donald, so we think it merits coverage.
If it was Zuck or Benioff or Schmidt or Ellison or Bezos, or any other big name in tech, topping the donor list, we would report it. It happens to be Elon this time. I don't see the harm in letting people know. We can't list every political donor (we'll try to keep track of the list, I wanted to list more but time was a factor, we'll make more of other donors later).
In fact, Trump's government is pretty much going to be run by billionaires and folks on their way to that level of wealth. So we'll focus on that in future, too.
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Yeah, it's UK-ism. Being made redundant is being let go, laid off, no longer needed or working. We'll make that clearer.
And no, we don't use AI to write. This is all human, as you can see.
(And I hope this demonstrates why we try to use US spellings and terminology. Americans and other non-UK folks likely don't get Britishisms but British people can get Americanisms at least, I think due to the differential in level of cultural exposure. As we scale up to more and more readers around the world, using UK terms confuses more and more people.)
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Yeah, on the basis that a trademark was infringed by the fake sites. It's kinda tenuous as it seems to be a Linux Foundation mark that's affected, and MSFT helps bankroll the foundation. Thus Microsoft gets be involved.
But at least some bad sites got closed down. MS routinely does this, using trademark law to take over fraudulent sites with a court order.
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Hey - it's because Qualys focused on Ubuntu Server as it has the tool by default, and it's a widely used flavor. Yes, needrestart is present in other distros but not necessarily installed. It's not on my El Reg office Debian Linux workstation.
Still, we've tweaked the piece to appeal more to everyone who has the thing installed, by default or by choice.
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FWIW the issue with the NRC is true, and happened in 2022, though the upstart is getting along at least a little better with the government lately.
That said, as much as we like nuclear power, we are maintaining a healthy skepticism of this SMR project, and in future coverage about Oklo, we'll include some more history of the startup. I've added the above links to the piece.
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