Posts by diodesign

Evidence for Moon caves emerges as humans hunt for hospitable hideaway under lunar surface

Not the mother, the breadcrumbs

If you follow the link, it's about the breadcrumb aspect, not the parenting.

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Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project

Why reference

To give those upset by it closure.

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Honey, I shrunk the LLM! A beginner's guide to quantization – and testing it

Good question

The guardrails can be primitive text filters, at the input and output stage.

But we suspect for big production APIs, there is perhaps an adversarial stage that is trained on classifying bad input / output, and then filtering the input / output stages.

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SpaceX's Falcon anomaly could have serious implications for the space industry

Fair points

Hi -- those are good observations. The point we wanted to make is that, in our opinion, SpaceX needs to reassure everyone that there isn't a deep-rooted systemic problem that will potentially affect all future launches, and that this is a one-off that can be identified and corrected.

Happy to make that clearer.

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CISA broke into a US federal agency, and no one noticed for a full 5 months

Re: CVE-nnnn : some systems may be vulnerable to divine intervention

Hi -- oops! Thanks been fixed. Thanks for letting us know.

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'Gay furry hackers' say they've disbanded after raiding Project 2025's Heritage Foundation

Er...

If you think any of our coverage of SiegedSec is sympathetic to them, you need to look again but not through a lens of some persecution complex.

There's a reason we call people like them miscreants – and this article and others have covered SiegedSec's previous intrusions. Chill out.

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New Outlook set for GA despite missing some key features

Corrections

Ah, cool - I just replied to the person who wrote in. Thanks again.

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Oops!

Yeah, just an accidental production error on our side. Someone hit the wrong button while tweaking the sentence in the edit. It's fixed now.

Drop corrections@ if you spot something like this so we can fix it up right away, please. Cheers,

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Xen Project in a pickle as colo provider housing test platform closes

'Testing a hypervisor inside another hypervisor'

Yeah, we know, we know. We just forgot to think it through, sadly. Although nested virtualization is a thing, you're right, that's not an accurate test.

Mea culpa. Now that we've read the documentation, we've tweaked the piece to better explain that the testing system involves a pool of bare metal equipment that can't be virtualized and easily migrated. If you spot something wrong like this, don't forget to drop [e-mail] a note and we'll do our best to fix things up.

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You had a year to patch this Veeam flaw – and now it's going to hurt some more

Re: kind of confused

FWIW the Group-IB report does take a few reads to understand, and we've tried making our summary of it more clear. It does start with the abuse of the Fortinet VPN to gain RDP access to the failover. And then it all falls down.

But to get into the backup servers, the CVE was exploited, and that has credential stores that are useful for other parts of the network. Yes, the network is compromised with or without the CVE exploited. The Veeam bug just seems to make the ransomware deployment easier. AIUI.

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VMware license changes mean bare metal can make a comeback through 'devirtualization', says Gartner

Link added

It's google-able but we've directly linked to it now.

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So much for green Google ... Emissions up 48% since 2019

You may have misread

We haven't changed the text - the only mention of efficiencies is specifically this part: "generating more efficient routes for automobiles."

There wasn't any chunk of the story talking about changes in overall efficiency of Google's DC estate.

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Of course

You're not missing anything. Emissions are going up, making the goal of net zero harder, tho Google reckons the increases will be offset by greater efficiencies driven by AI. As the report states:

"As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute"

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Despite OS shields up, half of America opts for third-party antivirus – just in case

"security code baked in"

Yeah, we found a better way of writing that. It's been tweaked.

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Brace for new complications in big tech takedowns after Supreme Court upended regulatory rules

Re: It's actually good.

I get that in theory ensuring rules are set by elected lawmakers and adjudicated by judges is a fair thing.

But in practicality, can the court system really handle the load? Can watchdogs really afford to enforce rules if they're just going to be challenged in court every time? Can we expect lawmakers to pass detailed and technically correct legislation all the time? Isn't deferring to scientists and experts a fair thing, too, with parameters set by Congress?

Bear in mind the Supremes got nitrous oxide confused with nitrogen oxides in their separate Ohio v EPA ruling :( Baking those kinds of mistakes into law could have quite disastrous effects.

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Microsoft CEO of AI: Your online content is 'freeware' fodder for training models

Re: Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it

It's like Microsoft took the i made this meme and absorbed it as SOP.

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TeamViewer says Russia broke into its corp IT network

Re: Heart attack material

On a personal level, some of my extended family use TeamViewer to remote-fix PC problems, saving a multi-hour trip and back in person to relatives.

I'm sure the Russians aren't interested in my in-laws' emails but still, it's sub-optimal.

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Elon Musk to destroy the International Space Station – with NASA's approval, for a fee

Re: Language

I dunno if you've noticed around here but we tend to bend the language to breaking point, and we kinda enjoy it. It's fun to test the limits and play with writing. Yes, there are rules to follow. Apostrophes, plurals, commas, and so on.

But you're talking about a publication that writes about bonkers boffins, naughty Norks, and enormo electronics slingers. Masses and deorbit are par for the course.

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Apple crippled watchOS to corner heart-tracking market, doctors say

Hmmm...

FWIW to clear up any confusion: AliveCor's Apple smartwatch app used the continuous heart-rate data from the Watch to identify potential signs of danger, and would tell the wearer they should take a test with proper ECG equipment to be sure (for the reasons you give).

And AliveCor primarily sold FDA-approved ECG monitoring devices, including an FDA-approved Watch wristband that did just that. So it's not like AliveCor was trying to do full ECG with just the Watch's built-in senor. Without the continuous feed, it couldn't even properly warn wearers of potential danger, and had to pull its app, hence the antitrust suit, or so it says.

The watchOS changes, as far as AliveCor is concerned, caused the biz to offer less to the market.

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FCC wants telcos to carrier unlock cellphones 60 days after activation

It might be that simple

As it's 60 days after _activation_. When the phone connects to its cellular network for the first time. Whether carriers would be OK with that is another matter, but right now, it's from activation.

The proposed rule, according to the FCC, is specifically "requiring all mobile wireless service providers to unlock mobile phones 60 days after the device is activated with the provider."

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Want to save the planet from AI? Chuck in an FPGA and ditch the matrix

Re: French art prior

As others have pointed out, the optimization described in this latest paper does separate it from prior research. I've added a note to the article about it.

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Supreme Court won't stop Biden leaning on social media giants to tackle disinfo

Re: Misinformation == non state sanctioned propaganda /s

I think you might be being snarky here but on a serious note - the article does repeatedly and through-out include the caveat that this is misinformation as defined by the US government, which is an important distinction.

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Bake an LLM with custom prompts into your app? Sure! Here's how to get started

w-ttf

That's so gross, I love it.

(Also out of scope of the article but hey, nice project)

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Julian Assange to go free in guilty plea deal with US

Embassy

Kinda - to avoid questioning over an allegation he denied - and ultimately he thought that would land him in the States on intelligence-related charges.

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NASA ought to pay up after space debris punched a hole in my roof, homeowner says

FYI

From the legal team's statement:

"Additionally, the Oteros’ homeowner’s insurance carrier submitted a simultaneous claim for the damages to the property that it had subrogated."

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GPU-accelerated VMs on Proxmox, XCP-ng? Here's what you need to know

Re: A little shrill

Hi -- glad you enjoyed the piece. Genuinely curious so that we can improve our writing: What did you think was shrill?

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Meta warns bit flips, other hardware faults cause AI errors

Re: I'm a bit out of touch with the hardware design

Meta's talking about "undetected" hardware faults, so presumably errors that the hardware didn't catch or alert software to.

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Re: Sounds a lot!

OpenAI's CEO claimed in Feb that his super-lab's models output about 100 billion words per day, which is 1.2M words per second.

Let's say a typical response is on average 500 words. That's 2,400 requests a second. You're looking at about 10 bit flips a second, assuming one output run is one "inference," by Meta's numbers. Does seem a little high, based on that guesswork, tho that's the number quoted.

It's frustrating that Meta has issued a bunch of research on SDCs but presumably the lawyers and PR prevent the release of hard numbers on the number of bit flips its datacenters experience per unit of time. Other than the negative press it might generate ('Facebook gets it wrong X times a minute!!') it also partially reveals how many servers or how much compute resource Meta has, and hyperscalers hate revealing that info.

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Car dealer software bigshot CDK pulls systems offline twice amid 'cyber incident'

U wot m8

It's a cyber-attack in the US against US dealerships, so yes, we're going to reference June 19th, a public holiday in the US [triv]

Also, we will quote Reddit where relevant: If that's where dealers are discussing things, we'll link to it.

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Amtrak confirms crooks are breaking into accounts using creds swiped from other DBs

Re: Worlds largest?

Yeah, America's rail network is the largest in the world of its kind. And Amtrak uses it. I've made sure that's clear in the piece.

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NTT uses scattered monitors to trick your brain into seeing 3D images

Rabbit to dolphin

How that happened falls under a section in the research titled:

You Are Not Expected to Understand This

So we didn't bother.

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Re: David Hockney

Probably!

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Almost

I think it's close but NTT's design uses scattered displays (as illustrated) whereas Bob's paper (there's a PDF of it floating around out there) describes an organized array of panels.

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Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy'

Sudo

Hey, we said "some black magic". Key word "some" – and black magic isn't pejorative. That's a nice way of saying it involves some internal bits of the OS that people generally don't go near.

If you know how that all works, great. But just as you're allowed an opinion about sudo, so are we.

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Startup Diraq taps GlobalFoundries to forge silicon-based quantum chips

"Did he actually say that?"

Yes, that's what he was quoted as saying.

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Support, don't micromanage, say researchers who find WFH intensified 'anxiety' in some

Re: link to actual report

Brilliant, thanks - we've added that link now.

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Oops

Yeah, we messed up there. The article has been revised to focus more on reality. Sorry about that; we will try harder next time.

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Molten lunar regolith heats up space colonization dreams

Re: Details.

Fair question. We've tightened up that sentence, too.

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Re: In other news:

Ah, the guy was referring to the low gravity, not zero, slip of the tongue. We've added a note.

And also removed the references to thermite. We did say the lunar regolith was thermite-like, emphasis on like, but that's not a great comparison. Apologies!

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Gates-backed nuclear plant breaks ground without guarantee it'll have fuel

British HALEU plant

Yeah, that's noted now in the piece. It's due to go online in the early 2030s.

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New York Times source code leaks online via 4chan

Re: “Source code” does not make 270GB

Ah, come on, give us some credit!

The words source code are in scare quotes ('source code') because that's how the leaker described it. In the article we call it internal data and assets. When you see 'source code', that's the claim: the article refers to what's actually been allegedly leaked.

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Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch cleared of all charges in US Autonomy fraud trial

Re: Federal acquittals are extremely rare

This is a really good point. Yes, vast majority of US DoJ cases are won by Uncle Sam.

Not just the trial, Lynch had to go through extradition too. And won. That speaks for itself. Just that damages case in England to go.

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More info coming

Yeah it's true and we've got a full story coming. We were in the process of writing two versions, one for guilty and one for not guilty, but the jury beat us to it. Edit: Now updated,.

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Chucking Trump etc off Twitter after Jan 6 provides key data for misinfo experiment

Impeached

Ah yeah, impeached not indicted. That's fixed. Doh!

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I'm leaving!!11!!1

Cool story.

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Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Re: There is so much wrong in this article

Hey, we're just reporting the study's conclusions.

It's totally fine to disagree with the study but if there's anything wrong with what we've asserted, specifically let us know: [e-mail] and we'll get right on it.

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Boeing's Starliner makes it into orbit at long last – with human crew aboard

'no mention if the humans were still alive'

Look, someone's got to be onboard to hold the door closed.

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Tape is so dead, 152.9 EB of LTO media shipped last year

Tweaked

Ah yeah, all good points. We tweaked that part of the article.

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Microsoft paid Tenable a bug bounty for an Azure flaw it says doesn't need a fix, just better documentation

Kinda

It's more nuanced than that as I understand it.

If you whitelist specific Azure services to allow them to access to your servers as you instruct, anyone using those Azure services also gets access.

Tenable argues Azure should prevent tenants from sending requests to other tenants via these services; Microsoft says you should put in your own levels of authentication and filtering to prevent cross-tenant access.

I believe in having competent IT staff who are aware of this, sure. I also personally believe in not handing footguns to IT staff.

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The definition of an AI PC is now even muddier, helping no-one – not even AIs

TOPS

TOPS is short for a trillion operations per second. In the context of AI, it'll be INT8 or signed byte precision. So 40 TOPS is 40 trillion operations a second using signed byte values. It's a measure of AI performance by systems.

You'll typically see manufacturers say their hardware can hit X TOPS of AI performance, and software and LLM makers say you'll need hardware capable of Y TOPS for this AI application to be useful. You as a user will want X to be greater than Y.

Eg, Microsoft claims a PC needs a minimum of 40 TOPS to run its Copilot+ suite.

I'll define a page for it and link to it.

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