Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

SQL king Larry Ellison becomes sequel sultan with controlling interest in Paramount Global

Re: To boldly go....

O'Brien, get the Defiant the hell hell out of here!

Sisko, Star Fleet Gamma Quadrant is only licensed for three warp cores and this battle is already using five! Are you willing to pay the price for a sixth core...

Star Trek is boldly going nowhere. It's confined to a Paramount+ subscription that's a lot of money for a lot of TV junk.

FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them

Coming soon

How about the customer return window not closing until all advertised future features are delivered. That would be a deserved punch to the jaw for a lot electronics manufacturers, especially Sony, Panasonic, and Tesla.

White House’s new fix for cyber job gaps: Serve the nation in infosec

Cyberjanitor

I can't help thinking that the government's new strategy is to continue using the cheapest labor for software but then giving it to a "cyber" team to clean it up. It will be a high stress job where you're digging through mountains of gibberish architecture while the boss keeps asking why it takes so long to fix one little vulnerability. On top of that, process will demand that you fix exactly one bug at a time. No 'rm -rf' and rewrite.

Green Berets storm building after compromising its Wi-Fi

Re: What now - Security system's WIFI ???

This works great if you have somebody on the inside planting vulnerabilities in internal tools. These tools may have strong ACLs but minimal code reviews.

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

Don't forget what the product is

You want a loyal AI girlfriend, a best buddy chatbot, tech support that will pretend to listen to customers while protecting the corporate image, something that answers stupid questions, something that does your work for you?

Aren't we using AI because humans don't want to do these things? Simulated intelligence is the way to go.

Microsoft mistake blows up admins' inboxes with fake malware alerts

Re: M$=spam

Thanks, MS, for forwarding all of these phishing e-mails from a known criminal gang. If only there was some indicator that they might be counterfeit.

X-MS-Exchange-Authentication-Results: spf=fail (sender IP is 38.107.232.119)

smtp.helo=tkgm.gov.tr; dkim=none (message not signed)

header.d=none;dmarc=fail action=none

header.from=DistrictElderlyCitizens.onmicrosoft.com;

Telegram founder and CEO arrested in France

Re: "It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform."

Postal services and commercial airlines do take action when they're told that specific individuals are committing crimes. Even public roads are patrolled to stop drugs, slaves, and weapons transport. Big tech companies are the only organizations claiming that they can offer any services they want and not be at all responsible for their chronic abuse.

HMD Skyline: The repairable Android that lets you go dumb in a smart way

Re: No headphone socket

The ASUS phones still have a headphone jack. Sadly, there are build quality problems with the ROG Phone 8 and the perfect ROG Phone 7 is hard to find.

Buying a PC for local AI? These are the specs that actually matter

If the "70 billion parameter" LLM is llama3.1:70b, it runs fine on 128GB of DDR5 RAM without a GPU. Not fast, but fine. It can reply faster than you can search the Internet.

I managed to get llama3.1:405b running with 128GB plus a sacrificial Gen5 NVMe stick for swap. It takes it two days to complete a response so it's not at all usable. DDR5 motherboards for "desktop" computers require unbuffered memory that currently maxes out at 192 GB. Apple's M2 chips hit the same 192GB limit even if you have the wealth for more. Only a "server" motherboard taking buffered DDR5 can reach the 256GB needed. The two types of DDR5 are not interchangeable, of course.

All of this compute power doesn't even cover training LLMs or pre-loading them with a lot of context. That $$$$$$ is not in my range even if it was a hobby.

Chrome dumped support for Ubuntu 18.04 – but it'll be back

Re: Just use Firefox

I have problems with Firefox and all of its forks stalling and hanging. It doesn't matter if it's Android or Ubuntu. A page will partially render then it stops for several seconds or forever.

The de-Googled Chromiums are better, but it seems that de-Googling is becoming too difficult of a task these days. Lots of good forks have died off.

LG Electronics aims to become a datacenter cooling player, with aircon and immersion tech

No warranty fix for you

LG might have a problem selling cooling equipment if anyone operating the datacenter has purchased an LG refrigerator in the past few years. Sure, it's different hardware, but people are going to hold a grudge when they're scammed $2000.

Also, better read the box that the datacenter cooling equipment comes in: LG says angry owners can't sue, company points to cardboard box

Shein, Temu escalate epic e-commerce squabble

Hopefully the lawsuit is short

The lawyers aren't looking good after a few days. One caught fire and two are stuck walking into a wall like a broken NPC.

110K domains targeted in 'sophisticated' AWS cloud extortion campaign

What stupid server is it that has configuration and content in the same directory?

Plane tracker app FlightAware admits user data exposed for years

Re: SSN?

They're not supposed to have it or ask for it unless it's needed for government ID (income, taxes, etc.).

Ubuntu 24.04.1 will be late, but fresher kernels are coming

People keep buying new hardware and software.

Gartner mages: Payback from office AI expected in around two years

Re: So are these 2 “Real” years…

Nuclear fusion years. Battery breakthrough years. Self-driving car years. Humanoid robots in your house years...

Google's ex-CEO U-turns after saying staff 'going home early' killed winning

Ego

Google is an ego driven company. People starting new "moonshot" or "re-architecture" projects are the heroes. Anyone working on bugs, refactoring, and usability is a nobody. Any design not infinitely horizontally scalable is forbidden, even if it never needs it. It's an attitude throughout the entire Google culture that hinders project completion and maintenance. It's heartbreaking to have your successful startup acquired then left it to rot once the bragging and congratulations are done.

People going home early? Yes, when all your projects are blocked by apathy or dueling egos.

Google is a monopoly. The fix isn't obvious

Indirect control

Google has long ago learned to indirectly control products. Android is a lot of Linux and open source. Google's iron grip comes from Play Store and pressure on phone manufacturers. It's how Google destroyed numerous features that were making cellphones powerful general computing devices rather than the Google-tethered dumb terminals they dreamed of. Chrome uses the Microsoft playbook of embrace, extend, extinguish.

I'm not convinced Google has a strong monopoly. I think they could lose Search, Android, Maps, Play Store, and Chrome in the blink of an eye. They shit they dump on customers has reached saturation.

Google brings more Gemini AI features to Android, saves the best for Pixel 9

Re: Anakin Padme 4 Panel Meme

The Google approach to solving latency is to watch you non-stop. Your context is already server-side when you ask a question.

Anakin Padme 4 Panel Meme

This new Tensor G4 chip is built for AI.

So all the AI processing is local and not recorded for evil uses by Google, right?

Right?

Is Lenovo a blind spot in US anti-China security measures?

Thoughts from under a tinfoil hat

They could only be OK with the US because they're secretly assisting US intelligence agencies. How could China allow that to happen? They're secretly assisting Chinese intelligence agencies.

Biden tries to cut through fog of confusion caused by deliberately deceptive customer service tricks

A bit dated

The more modern scam is to say that you shouldn't return a defectively designed product because a fix will be sent out soon with a software update or a free user-replaceable part.

Spoiler alert: The fix never arrives.

US elections have never been more secure, says CISA chief

So, they were never as secure in the past?

<ducks, runs for cover>

Under-fire Elon Musk urged to get a grip on X and reality – or resign

Civil war is coming

It will be the Musk fanatics vs investors wanting their money back.

Both will probably lose and I'm OK with that. I dumped all my TSLA shares back at the 'pedo guy' incident. There have been countless warnings, each louder and louder, that Musk is going to lose everything because his grip on reality is gone.

Dell starts new round of layoffs while it looks to 'unlock modern AI'

Re: Stock options

You have a limited time, usually 30 days, to purchase vested incentive options or lose them. These are stocks that you can optionally buy at the price of when they were originally awarded to you. Non-vested incentive options are lost unless you negotiated accelerated vesting in your contract. If the options are recent, there's a risk that you're purchasing stock for more than it's worth. After all, you wouldn't be part of a mass layoff if the company had a profitable outlook.

A vested grant of options (company buys them) and other cash bonuses are yours the moment they vest. It would be time to chat with some government agencies if they messed with that.

Need to move 1.2 exabytes across the world every day? Just Effingo

And... it's gone

1.2 EB sounds like a seriously big-budget amount of money. Would you trust Google to not cancel the project as soon as they're done collecting interesting data?

Punkt MC02: As private, and pricey, as a Swiss bank account

Someone else's private cloud

aphy.io seems to be hosted on not-impressively-secure Hetzner. The MX record is mx01.aphy.app on Flow Swiss AG, so there's some hope that the phone doesn't actually use aphy.io.

The best private cloud is my own. If I wanted a very secure phone, the first requirement would be no OS dependencies on a 3rd party cloud.

Second patient receives the Neuralink implant

Re: Talking to a tree

That's pretty much any form of tech support too. It doesn't matter whether it's AI or humans on the other end. Any customer issue being resolved in under an hour means there's a wasteful over-provisioning of support resources.

Uncle Sam sues TikTok for 'extensive' data harvesting from millions of kids

You mean, "We're no longer breaking that law."

DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course

What kind of volunteers...

Someone needs to guide and validate the AI output. Experienced developers who know the old codebase probably wouldn't want anything to do with a big Rust translation initiative. That means work will be done by low-paid government staffing pools, Rust fanatics, and agents of hostile governments.

Good luck with this making things safer.

More than 83K certs from nearly 7K DigiCert customers must be swapped out now

Cracked?

I'm guessing it's 24 hours because the gangs that hang out on Cloudflare, AWS, and GCP have figured out how to take advantage of the bad certs.

I don't know how much it's worth, though. Everybody's favorite credit union, Patelco, has an anonymous certificate from Let's Encrypt. Obviously lots of people don't check certificate ownership. That's fine as long as you spelled the domain name perfectly, nobody has hijacked the site's DNS, the domain name doesn't have an overdue bill, ...

Tesla asks customers to stop being wet blankets about chargers

Re: If that helps

Tried and tested, but gasoline engines have a long list of crazy optimizations to make them only 40% efficient and moderately clean. Turbocharging, stratified injection, direct ignition, independent valve timing, multiple valve cam profiles, extremely precise fitting pistons to eliminate low RPM blow-by, dual O2 sensors, knock sensors, air-fuel tuning using crankshaft vibrations, exhaust gas recirculation, fume capture in charcoal canisters, 10 gear transmissions, exotic engine oil formulas, hybrid regen and boost systems, ...

The same level of R&D on battery tech will probably get us much farther into the future. Even the first generation of solid electrolyte batteries looks promising for reducing weight. All that's needed now is to get Murica off it's big angry truck addiction.

Car makers sold people's driving habits, location data for pennies, say US senators

Not at all upset over the loss of 3G in the US

The cellular comms light in my VW Golf R had been out for years.

US claims TikTok shipped personal data to China – very personal data

That word, "Constitution" again

Why does ByteDance keep talking about Constitutional rights? They're not a US citizen. In fact, the US government is wary of ByteDance because China likes to hunt down their citizens who are hiding in other countries after saying something that the Chinese government didn't like. Whether ByteDance approves of that or not, it's what their government does.

(I'm sure the US does the same thing, but the threshold for being wanted is different)

Meta claims ‘world’s largest' open AI model with Llama 3.1 405B debut

Re: Glacial

That size is doable. I ran LLM deepseek-coder-v2:236b on an AMD 7900x3d with 128GB RAM and a lot of swap to a fast m.2 stick. No GPU. It was tolerable at few tokens/second, but the passage of time gradually revealed that it was writing nonsense.

Musk deflects sluggish Tesla car sales with Optimus optimism

Everyone will want a humanoid robot

But not likely the ones programmed by Elon Musk.

Engineers fix ESA's Gaia observatory from 1.5M kilometers away

Re: Sending a crew to fix the spacecraft isn't possible

A once in is a lifetime job opportunity!

Google to kill off URL shortener once and for all

Re: Good riddance

Google was probably hoping they'd give insight into printed media ads, like QR codes and web pages. Like much of Google, neglect turned it into a popular spam & scam tool. I bet not even GMail would accept mail full of Google's shortened links.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

Re: The fault's with Microsoft

Crowdstrike runs on MacOS and Linux too. Malware can get by as nothing more than a userspace app suffering a supply chain attack. Even if the OS and the user are both perfect, corporate IT still has a checkbox to tick that everyone has protection.

It's IT's fault for not worrying more about the capabilities of data retention and malware detection software. These products can consume $4000 worth of every computer's performance or cause mass spontaneous data loss.

Sam Altman sues builder over $27M flooded, sewage-hit 'lemon' of a mega-mansion

If it's a lemon...

Go full lemon and full refund.

I live in Silicon Valley, land of 1940s homes with decades of bad remodeling by house flippers. Just one shoddy repair has a broad impact on the rest of the house. A cut beam can damage the roof, walls, and floor. Bad plumbing can attract insects, cause clogs, cause hidden rot, and damage the foundation. Bad electrical will destroy appliances and start fires. An entire house of these problems will never come to a time when the repairs are finished.

Here we go again. And again. Musk threatens to pull Twitter, SpaceX out of California

Read it again

The law prohibits schools from regulating something and the alternate facts world goes insane about more regulation.

Light-weight solar-powered flying robots are coming

Re: Exposure!

Electrostatic air purifier hover bots? Some megacorp could spend millions on a plan like that. It doesn't matter if it works as long as they get government credit for offsetting air pollution.

If they use ultra-toxic CdTe solar film, another company can make money gathering them when they fall.

Is that motor made of graphene without any mention of it? Times have changed.

Yandex sells off Russian ops, remaining Euro-biz now Putin itself about as Nebius Group

All I know of Yandex is that they have competent people handling abuse complaints and they seem to know enough about what they're doing to survive longer than most online services. More of that in the world, please.

AMD predicts future AI PCs will run 30B parameter models at 100 tokens per second

Takes a while because ollama is on my server with only an ordinary CPU

$ ollama run llama3:70b

>>> Write a rambling commentary describing a very fast AI processing architecture. Use technical terms and sprinkle in all-caps words, but no asterisks markup formatting. The author is nerdy and uses a somewhat condescending tone.

So I've been working on this little project, right? And let me tell you, it's a GAME-CHANGER. I'm talking about an AI processing architecture that's so fast, it's almost like I've defied the laws of PHYSICS themselves. I mean, we're talking about a 10x improvement in processing

speeds over the current STATE-OF-THE-ART. Yeah, you heard me right, 10 TIMES FASTER.

It all starts with my proprietary MATRIX MULTIPLIER technology, which allows for PARALLEL PROCESSING on a massive scale. We're talking thousands of NODES working together in perfect harmony, like a finely tuned ORCHESTRA. And at the heart of it all is my custom-designed

GRAPHICS PROCESSING UNIT, capable of CRUNCHING NUMBERS at a rate of 10 PETA-FLOPS PER SECOND.

But wait, there's more! My architecture also incorporates ADVANCED NEURAL NETWORK COMPRESSION algorithms, allowing for REAL-TIME INFERENCING and REDUCED LATENCY. It's like the AI is READING YOUR MIND or something (just kidding, it's not that creepy... or is it?).

And don't even get me started on the MEMORY HIERARCHY. I've implemented a HYBRID STORAGE SYSTEM that combines the SPEED of OPTANE with the CAPACITY of 3D XPOINT. It's like having your cake and eating it too (but, you know, with flash storage).

Anyway, I'm sure all the OTHER GENIUSES out there will be green with envy when they hear about my latest creation. But let's be real, they're probably still stuck in the Stone Age of AI development. Oh well, I'll just have to wait for them to catch up...

With users mostly happy to keep older kit, Macs just ain't selling like they used to

Re: I buy Macs BECAUSE they last

Yes you can get Linux PCs to last a long time too, but I find it's not quite such an off-the-shelf deal

What? Most Linux boxes are literally boxes of off-the-shelf parts. Maybe you meant build-to-order? Shops do that too.

How long does a Linux box last? They're modular and components be incrementally upgraded forever. I'm sitting next to two of them that are a mix of parts spanning 2017 to 2024. The software is up-to-date forever. They're always as powerful as I need them without regularly dumping $10k on a comparable Mac.

The no upgrade gamble

The risks on the Apple gamble keep getting higher with the SoC architecture. You're at the "Buy" page and presented with different options for RAM and storage. Each increasing option adds $1000. If you select the correct option, you will have a highly performant computer for your work. If you select too high, it can be thousands of dollars wasted. If you select too low, all of the money is wasted.

Place your $4000 - $10000 bet or keep using your old computer?

Smartphone is already many folks' only computer – say hi to optional desktop mode in Android 15 beta

Nice idea, but it's Google

I'd love for cellphones to do double duty as a portable computer. They're up to 24GB RAM, 1TB storage, and have GPUs supporting 4K. The problem is that Google has screwed Android far too much for it to work.

Google's Storage Area Framework (aka kill storage that isn't Google Cloud) completely broke local storage except as a private cache. Google's solution to Google's own apps draining the battery while spying has broken multi-tasking. Apps-in-windows has been in development for over a decade and partially supported by so many apps that it's likely in shambles by now. The stranglehold on AOSP development via Play Store app rules prevents the kinds of innovations needed for any of this to work.

Android forks are appearing in China. If those spread it could enable a new surge of mobile innovation.

Privacy expert put away for 9 years after 'grotesque' cyberstalking campaign

Re: Why, oh why ?

And that candidate is encouraging creeps to feel good about themselves and the damage they do.