Posts by The Man Who Fell To Earth

California governor vetoes bill requiring human drivers in robo trucks

Just remember folks

It's not armed robbery if the truck you hijack & rob does not have a human driver.

'Small monthly payment' only thing that stands between X and bot chaos, says Musk

Sure

If Musk really believes that, then the "small monthly fee" only needs to be $1 or less. But as Musk has lost $20B already on Twitter X, it's doubtful this is anything other than just another lame excuse.

GitHub alienates developers by force feeding them AI recommendations

Re: Marketing Mentality

Don't worry, they'll "lose" all the negative comments and then point to the overwhelmingly positive response.

Elon Musk has beef with Bill Gates because he shorted Tesla stock, says biographer

Re: Shorting Tesla

Agreed. Tesla has a PE Ratio of almost 80, vs Ford's of about 12, GM's of about 5, Mecedes's about 5, BMW about 6. If you properly price Tesla as a car company, the proper value for it's stock is about $17 per share, not $274. Even if you want to delude yourself into thinking it should be more like Ford, you'd still only be at about $30. Gates made the right call but got caught in a short squeeze.

Shorting Tesla

Shorting Tesla on the scale of Gates purchase doesn't hurt Tesla. The risk for the person doing the shorting is that they get stuck in a short squeeze, which Gates did which is why he lost $1.5B. Had Tesla stock dropped in price & Gates sold, Gates holdings would not have materially driven the stock price lower & so it's effect would be in the noise. Both of these men know all of that. What this really tells you is Musk (surprise! surprise!) simply doesn't like viewpoints not aligned with his own.

Microsoft: China stole secret key that unlocked US govt email from crash debug dump

What?

You mean we have an existance proof that backdoor keys don't always stay put and aren't only for use by good guys?

Why securing East-West network traffic is so important – and how it can be done

Re: bad example

Yes, the Target breach was big news at the time. It also raised the question of why Target was storing 100M customers credit card numbers & details from its cash register transactions at all, much less without any encryption.

Tesla knew Autopilot weakness killed a driver – and didn't fix it, engineers claim

Re: Risk tolerance

"...lane keeping and adaptive cruise control is essentially what it is - worked very well."

As it does on my 2018 Subaru Impreza. It even yaks at me if I take my hands off the wheel for more than about 30 seconds and let it drive itself down the Interstate. But Subaru does not sucker charge me $10k for it.

Google reportedly designing chatbots to do all sorts of jobs – including life coach

Re: Countdown until

Most "life coaches" I've met were all a bunch of losers. But I guess Google has them beat in their race to the bottom by creating "life coaches" that have never even been alive.

Western Digital sued over claims of data-trashing SanDisk, My Passport SSDs

Too small

I have had excellent experience over many PC's and many years with Samsung SSD's. The issue with them now however, is they only make M.2 SSD's up to 2TB. If you want a 4TB Samsung SSD, you're stuck with a 2.5" SATA drive. The last few laptops I've upgraded to 4TB M.2 NVMe SSD's, I had to use Corsair MP600 PRO's & WD_BLACK 4TB SN850X's.

FTX crypto-clown Sam Bankman-Fried couldn't even do house arrest. Now he's in jail

Who knew?

That psychopath watching could be so entertaining.

TV and film extras fear generative AI will copy their faces and bodies to take their jobs

Why bother?

Just generate the extras from scratch. They are in the background anyway.

Deutsche Bahn stands to lose €400M if it has to do Huawei with Chinese kit

Re: What rock have you been living under?

Which is why you snipe as "anonymous "?

What rock have you been living under?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/29/us/politics/china-malware-us-military-bases-taiwan.html

https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/01/us_military_cybersecurity/

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

Re: Y oh Y

In the US, we call this logo change "Putting lipstick on a pig."

Producers allegedly sought rights to replicate extras using AI, forever, for just $200

Re: "address concerns of being replaced by AI"

Look on the bright side - we'll see more fake maps in movies besides the CCP ones.

Why scan?

When you can already generate entire people? As extras, they are in the background anyway.

Microsoft's 10,000 job cuts didn't quite do the trick

Re: "The next few years...

Probably could have avoided 9,998 or 9,999 of those cuts & saved more money with just one or two well-placed cuts at the top.

Post-Brexit tariffs on cross EU-UK electrical vehicle imports still going ahead

Reality

According to the US Department of Transportation, the average age of autos on US roads is about 12 years. That's the average. People don't get rid of perfectly good cars due to marketing nor rebates. That's why any claims about the fleet changing to EV's in half a dozen years or so are gibberish.

https://www.bts.gov/content/average-age-automobiles-and-trucks-operation-united-states

From cage fight to page fight: Twitter threatens to sue Meta after Threads app launch

Twitter's biggest Trade Secret

Is that it has no IP. It's basically a text messaging platform my kid could write in an afternoon, and scale it on AWS the next day.

Crook who stole $23m+ in YouTube song royalties gets five years behind bars

Re: Ill-Gotten Payoffs vs Prison Time

"There's no mention in the story of any of it being clawed back or of how much was left to claw back after the obligatory "lavish lifestyle"."

That's why I only rent my lavish mansions to criminals I've introduced to crime, and only have a "criminal lair" rental business.

Oh, great. Yet another tech billionaire thinks he can get microblogging right

Microblogging

This is a solution looking for a problem. If magically all Twitter-like services stopped working permanently, it would have no negative effect on human civilization.

Ariane 5 to take final flight, leaving Europe without its own heavy-lift rocket

Re: But wait! There's more...

As was pointed out in the article, SpaceX launches basically the same number of rockets per year as Ariane 5's launched in the programs lifetime. In this day and age, to design more of the same is just an inefficient jobs program, not real technology development. All the arguments that try to spin trickledown benefits apply to reusable rockets as well, except for the more efficient resource utilization. Downvote me all you want, just illustrates that popularity has nothing to do with right.

Re: But wait! There's more...

It's amazing that any non-reusable launch vehicle is even on the table these days. But if you are a government doll launcher, I guess jobs are more important than efficient use of taxpayers money.

H-1B fraud consultancies grow, with application abuse openly discussed online

Re: abuse harms those who play by the rules

I have been working in high tech for almost 40 years. I have only come across one time when H1B visa hiring was truely due to a lack of qualified applicants. The field was Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs) in the early '90's. The US produced maybe 2 PhD's a year in that field at that time. I hired a bunch of Russians to fill the void. Every other place, including my present employer, uses H1B visas to hire at below market wages folks who are of low risk of leaving.

Report reveals US Space Force unprepared to counter orbital threats

Re: Elon to the rescue!

The real reason his lardness wants to go to space is it's the only way he can lose weight.

Mark Zuckerberg would kick Elon Musk's ass, experts say

Re: So who would win?

At a minimum, the Twitter and Facebook domains should be rendered unresolvable the week of the match. Just so these two can concentrate on their upcoming match. They can afford the revenue loss.

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

Tell me again why Amazon should care what a doorbell on your own property says any more than the phone company should care what its subsribers talk to each other about over their phones?

Out with the old, in with the new – Accenture declares AI is 'mature and delivers value'

Re: Nice one.

AI hallucinated accounting. (AIHA) What can be wrong with that?

File Explorer gets facelift in latest Windows 11 build

Thank God!

More reasons to never sign into Microsoft and only use local accounts.

Metaverse? Apple thinks $3,500 AR ski goggles are the betterverse

Since "A" is for "Apple"

We really can call these Glasshole wearers, Assholes.

WTF is solid state active cooling? We’ve just seen it working on a mini PC

Re: inspired by methods used to cool the leading edges of jet engine components

Good thing the insides of PC's are so clean so no dust can clog it up.

Reminds me of the Pixtronix shutter display of 15 years ago. https://www.technologyreview.com/2010/06/22/202550/startup-aims-for-perfect-pixels/

AI, extinction, nuclear war, pandemics ... That's expert open letter bingo

Re: Yawn.

"Past performance is no guarantee of future results" isn't limited to mutual funds.

The fact that humanity has not used nukes, for example, since WWII, is no assurance they won't get used in the future. Especially as they proliferate and become subject to weaker controls.

As technology has amplified the destructive potential of individuals, the threat increases as "improvements" in technology continue. 1000 years ago one individual could not go into a crowded church or school and slaughter tens of people in seconds. Not even 200 years ago. Today, in some places (looking at you, Texas) it's a weekly occurrence. It would not be a shock if in the future, some misuse of technology by individuals can allow them to wreak even more destruction. The only way to lower the probability of these technology improvements resulting in large-scale negative consequences is to try to restrict their usage in certain ways. Even that is pretty limited in that a lot of the large-scale systemic threats to humanity are unanticipated consequences (at the time those innovations when into large-scale use) to technology (CFC's creating the ozone hole, microplastics, pFOS, anthropomorphic climate change, etc.)

I forget who pointed it out first may years ago, but the biggest threat from AI may simply be loss of habitat for humans over time as AI takes resources for it's own use, like we've done to other species.

Rigorous dev courageously lied about exec's NSFW printouts – and survived long enough to quit with dignity

Never had good luck working for family owned businesses

“Nepotism is the lowest and least imaginative form of corruption.” - Daniel Alarcón

China bans Micron products after security review finds unspecified flaws

Re: 'security flaws'

Makes as much sense as China banning Fritos. Different chip, same relation to "Security".

Don't panic. Google offering scary .zip and .mov domains is not the end of the world

Re: pointless

We just block all email from these crap TLD's as so little is legitimate it's just the easiest thing to do.

.zip and .mov just got added to the block list.

How to tell an AI bot wrote that scammy-looking tax email: No spelling mistakes

Re: Another advantage of not being in the USA!

You have no clue.

Your Federal and State (& local) income taxes are deducted from your pay by your employer, and you get the net pay apparently the same as where you live. It's only if you have income from investments, gambling, have some type of business or other income ( e.g. you own rental property) or are self-employed that you have to write a check to the IRS, which technically you are supposed to do in the same quarter as you received the income.

No more feature updates for Windows 10 – current version is final

Re: Truly, certainly not

Openshell, for one.

Musk tried to wriggle out of Autopilot grilling by claiming past boasts may be deepfakes

All you need to know about Musk

As told by William Shatner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gy5P45hEN4

Is your AI hallucinating? Might be time to call in the red team

Irony

When an AI says it, it's hallucinating & must be fixed. When a nutjob politician says it, it's protected free speech and must be discussed.

Turns out people don't like it when they suspect a machine's talking to them

Or

Everyone knows that people who use AI as their primary text generator, rather than their own brain, are too lazy or stupid to think for themselves.

Feds seize $112m in cryptocurrency linked to 'pig-butchering' finance scams

It's called Pig Butchering for a reason

You can't con an honest person. And it's not pretty.

China aims to pair J-20 stealth fighter with 'loyal wingman' battle drone

Re: First to field

Calvary was shown to be obsolete in the early days of World War 1.

First to field

The first to field such a drone will be the country most willing to take risks, not necessarily the country with the most advanced AI. A lot of capable but inexpensive systems can overwhelm low numbers of hyper expensive higher capable systems.

This US national lab turned to AI to hunt rogue nukes

Re: "helped law enforcement home in on targets and speed up investigations"

Maybe FedEx? "When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight."

TikTok: Is this really a national security scare or is something else going on?

What's good for the goose...

Until China opens itself to foreign social media companies like Facebook, other countries should close themselves to Chinese social media companies. It's called reciprocity. That's before one gets to the invasive CCP issues.

Stanford sends 'hallucinating' Alpaca AI model out to pasture over safety, cost

Re: Not surprising

In the absence of any sort of guidance and mentoring, you could wind up with a politician.

FIFY

Student satellite demonstrates drag sail to de-orbit old hardware

Re: This should be mandatory

The problem with the fire door approach is it is power intensive. Which is usually not OK for spacecraft. However it would not take much additional code to have the Ardrino deploy the sail at a certain date if it's not been commanded to do so before that date, as a backup plan for a communication failure.

Amazon: Behold our antennas, which you cannot use just yet

Price?

Will this be cheaper than my $90/month Starlink subscription? That's what I want to know.

Meta winds down NFTs but will continue token efforts

Re: News just in:

Now if only they'd get that smart about that metaverse crap.