Posts by RLWatkins

KPMG tells staff facing the axe: Here's £100, now zip it

Apropos of nothing in particular...

... one of my former colleagues used to refer occasionally to the Kentucky Peat-Moss Group. I've no idea why.

Scientists find planet made on new matter recipe, and it formed after a Red Giant ate a solar system

Re: "crushing them with massive gravity"

Vivid imagination there.

When the Sun expands to the point where its "surface" is outside Earth's orbit, the reduced gravity from however much of the Sun is still inside its orbit will cause Earth to spiral outward.

When the Sun expands to the point where its "surface" is outside Earth's orbit, friction from Earth traveling through the tenuous outer part of the hugely enlarged Sun will cause Earth to spiral inward.

Both of these competing effects are so incredibly tiny that when the Sun shrinks again, Earth will likely be orbiting just about where it was before, minus its atmosphere and a bit of its lithosphere.

Not gonna get crushed, though.

It sounds really rad, though. Maybe Hell isn't full after all.

Peter Norvig says all aboard for AI coding

Selling snow to the Inuit

LLMs Coding? Writing real, working apps, without simply plagiarizing identical ones which the model had used as input?

Hasn't happened. With language models, it won't. (There are systems that *can* do that, but nobody is investing in them.)

Here are a bunch of people trying to sell snow to the Inuit, and asking the chief Snow Salesman how that market will evolve.

Let's all say it together: Hell is full, and snow salesmen are walking the Earth. More of 'em than we'll ever need.

AI market needs to make $6 trillion a year by 2031 to fund its infrastructure habit

Re: Peanuts? Nope.

In the US that amounts to $19,000 for every adult and child in the country.

Divided between the US and the EU? That's $8,000 for every adult and child.

I'm not buying in. Nothing that "AI" does is worth that much to me.

German-Japanese researchers invent electricity-free tech that could cool datacenters

Re: "generate cold"

An old girlfriend and I once had a running joke about "dark bulbs".

We have the technology!

Oh no! We've misplaced the laws of thermodynamics.

1) You can't win.

2) You can't break even.

3) You can't get out of the game.

But... If this thing can move heat around in the way they describe, we can build a perpetual motion machine which will still run if we extract energy from it.

By the way, you wouldn't be interested in buying a nice bridge in New York, would you...?

Like the say, hell is full... oh, why belabor the obvious?

Windows 11 movable taskbar edges closer to general release

How is removing features "progress"?

This isn't the first time. Cell padding in Excel is gone, MDI windows are gone from their IDE, all CUA compliance is gone since Win7.... The list goes on and on. How does removing oft-used features from a product count as an improvement? This is like experiencing dementia without all the pesky brain damage.

$1K laser mosquito zapper promises precision strikes as backers itch for answers

This was an IEEE Spectrum DIY project over a decade ago.

I'm not joking. Some EE built a laser mosquito-fence - No "AI" anywhere in sight - and wrote an article about it in IEEE Spectrum long, long ago.

This is press-release fodder.

Let's have some *new* ideas out of the Magic Kingdom, shall we? Oh, and Hell is full and BS artists are walking the streets....

Bun posts Rust porting guide, says rewrite is still half-baked

"Most open-source code will be written by AI"

No, no it won't. We require that it work properly, so that option is off the table.

Anthropic wants comp-sci students to vibe code their way through college

I have been writing computer software for over a half-century...

... and I am amused. This is more adolescent fantasy about gaining adult rewards and privileges without putting in the required effort.

If I choose to remain employed, I'll have an easy time of it once this crop of graduates enters, and then one-by-one exits, the job market. I'll give it about four years before it turns into a crisis. And given the brain-drain my country (US) is presently experiencing, it won't be an easy crisis to weather.

US is moving ahead with colocated nukes and datacenters

Spent fuel problem

In France spent fuel is not a problem: they recycle it. And every year they have to prosecute people for not recycling it, because recycling spent reactor fuel is expensive, and their CEOs don't want to spend the money.

So here in the US we're about to turn the spent-fuel problem over to our most morally bankrupt individuals, who will cut any corner to improve their bottom line, and then just hope and pray that it doesn't cause problems.

Alrighty, then. BTW, Hell is full and cheapskate executives are walking the Earth. How's that been working out for us thus far?

Oracle Java licensing worries are percolating through the userbase

Oracle owns only the Java binaries it sells

I seem to recall that McNealy placed Java in the public domain just before Ellison bought the company. Now there are any number of open-source implementations.

Not having a horse in this race, I don't much care, but you'd think someone would have explained this to a judge at some point. Then again, maybe you're on the hook only if you get it from Oracle.

When Novell started the Mono project Microsoft spent years desperately trying to stuff that genie back into the bottle. Oracle probably did likewise. They failed....

Google tries to greenwash massive AI energy consumption with another vague nuclear deal

carbon-free isn't "clean" unless it is also actinide-free

Lying by omitting vital information from one's public pronouncements is still lying.

People like these are just like our politicians: For them lying is like breathing. Most of the time they aren't even conscious that they're doing it.

Oh, and Hell is full. It's becoming obvious, isn't it?

OpenAI wants to bend copyright rules. Study suggests it isn’t waiting for permission

Let's proofread that headline....

"OpenAI wants to bend copyright rules"

Needs some work. How about:

"OpenAI violates copyright laws on an awe-inspiring scale as a matter of routine, and have stated publicly that they're entitled to"

There. Headlines are more believable when they're in accord with common knowledge.

Our world faces 'unprecedented' spike in electricity demand

I'm skipping the thread on nuclear power generation...

... mostly because it's people arguing based on ideology, i.e. what we imagine the world should be like, rather than what it really is.

**Nuclear power is not clean energy.**

Yes, the spent fuel can be recycled. We've had nuclear reactors for 3/4 of a century now, and in all that time no one has ever recycled the spent fuel on any meaningful scale save for the French, where it is required by law, and they're constantly having to catch violators and make them pay up and clean up.

Let's all say it together:

**Nuclear power is not clean energy.**

It produces some of the most dangerous waste products conceivable. Stop pretending that it is. It makes you sound like a lobbyist from Westinghouse or Mitsubishi.

Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it as a tax write-off

Re: Public Service Announcement

Not only did Nokia not go extinct, when they sold their mobile phone division to Microsoft, they kept their towers and they kept their entire portfolio of basic patents.

I thought it kind of ironic: they hired a Microsoft exec, he wrecked their mobile phone division, so they sold its corpse to Microsoft for a lot of money. Not just ironic, not just poetic justice, but down right hilarious.

Nokia is doing just fine.

Tesla maps out new territory in China with Baidu deal

We buy their cheap crap, they buy our cheap crap.

What else is there to say?

Oh, yes, of course: Hell is full and cheap crap is walking the Earth. [sigh]

Politicians call for ban on 'killer robots' and the curbing of AI weapons

You've got to be joking.

I heard a US Army colonel talking about autonomous weapons: "It doesn't get bored, it doesn't get tired, it doesn't need sleep or food. It just hangs around waiting for you, then when it sees you it kills you."

This was in the 1990s.

Can we turn beating dead horses into its own profession? Whatever we wind up calling its practitioners, Hell is full and they're walking the Earth. Maybe we should build an annex for Hell, increase its capacity.

More big city newspapers drag Microsoft, OpenAI hard in copyright lawsuit

Ever been to Las Vegas?

One of the hotels used to have an indoor pond where every few hours they'd stage a mock naval battle, complete with the sinking of one of the fake ships in said pond. Afterward it would rise up, the water would drain out of it, and a few hours later they'd stage a mock naval battle in the pond, complete with the sinking of one of the fake ships....

Yes, search services, and later language models, violate others' intellectual property rights right and left, with absolute impunity. And even though congress here in the US has made copyright violation a criminal matter, y' know, for the benefit of record labels and movie distributors, when someone like Microsoft or Open AI rack up millions of copyright violations your typical US Attorney just shrugs and sends out for latte.

Nothing new. Tech companies such as IBM, Microsoft and Oracle presided over the absolute gutting of US product liability laws simply because that cost less than making a reliable product. Same crap, new day.

Watching justice being administered, especially with US tech companies, is a lot like watching one of those mock naval battles in that Vegas hotel.

[yawn]

NSA guy who tried and failed to spy for Russia gets 262 months in the slammer

Is this an infant we're talking about here?

He gets 262 months? Just give it to us in years for Pete's sake and don't make everyone get out their calculators.

(21 years, ten months)

Elon Musk's latest brainfart is to turn Tesla cars into AWS on wheels

Stupid is as stupid does.

That's the gist of it, and it's a blinding glimpse of the obvious, but it had to be said.

Oh, and of course, Hell is full and Musk fanbois are walking the Earth. But you already knew that, too.

MPs ask: Why is it so freakin' hard to get AI giants to pay copyright holders?

Why pay for what you're allowed to steal?

Seriously. Business these days isn't about earning money by adding value, it's about *getting* money, any way possible. And to paraphrase Leona Helmsley, laws are for the little people.

Space Force boss warns 'the US will lose' without help from Musk and Bezos

If that's true, then we're doomed.

I wonder which of them offered him a "consulting" job once he retires from the military in exchange for that bit of cheerleading?

AWS severs connection with several hundred staff

Whoever said megacompanies drive "job creation" got it backwards.

They've expanded to their natural limits, they're selling into saturated markets. The only way they can "grow", i.e. increase profits, is to employ *fewer* people. Are people catching on?

AWS must pay $525M to cloud storage patent holder, says jury

Seriously? Someone patented storing data in a computer elsewhere on a public network?

Does anyone remember General Electric's online service, accessible principally through the Terminet terminal, from back in the late 1960s? It would store files, store data in the database which Bachman invented for GE, and it would run application software.

I remember it pretty clearly, and I remember it being years old when I first started coding for money in 1973.

Sonos secures a victory in audio patent fight against Google

Lots of patenting prior art, and patenting the obvious going on here.

Then again, that's what the tech "industry" does.

Remember when Amazon filed a "business method patent" on the use of cookies to keep track of the logged-in user, so they could implement an on-line charge account? When charge accounts have been around for over a hundred years. When cookies were devised for exactly that sort of use.

So Sonos and Google have patented... attaching more than one speaker to a system, attaching more than one microphone to a system, and what else?

If you can't patent the screwdriver, patent *the use of the screwdriver to drive screws*.

I guess business these days is more about getting money than about earning money by adding value.

Hell is full, and both the dead, and lawyers, are walking the Earth. We ought to do something about that.

FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

This has gone beyond being merely ridiculous.

I love the performance, but....

Firing up a VM, even a lightweight one, to execute a single function or to run a sub-second process the sort of thing that impresses gee-whiz kids, not experienced designers of actual systems. Don't ever do this. There are better ways.

Yet in the real world we *do* see systems designed this way, and with nobody's name on them there's no way for us to know who never to hire.

Like the man said, Hell is full and gee-whiz kids are walking the Earth.

Why do cloud titans keep building datacenters in America's hottest city?

... a capacity of 32 million megawatt hours....

What on earth are you talking about?

Power plant capacity is measured in watts, not watt-hours. The former is a rate of energy delivery, similar say to a horsepower, the latter a total amount of energy, similar say to the capacity of a gas tank.

And 32 trillion, even if it is watts, and not watt-hours?

Er, OK.

JP Morgan accidentally deletes evidence in multi-million record retention screwup

You guys gotta hire a proofreader.

JP Morgan "accidentally" deletes....

There. That's better.

China lands mysterious reusable spacecraft after 276-day trek

Crypto "industry"?

Industries *make* things. Industries make *things*.

There are other businesses which are not industries, but instead provide services.

Then there's crypto "currency". Not sure this is even a business.

Elizabeth Holmes is not going to prison – for the moment

Only cheat investors who are too small to outspend you.

This is the lesson of Facebook: start the cheating out on a small scale, and ramp it up as you accumulate capital.

Homes got greedy, ramped up the cheating more quickly than she could build defenses against the victims.

Hate thieves, but we've let the US turn into a haven for them. The big ones are never called to account.

No reliable way to detect AI-generated text, boffins sigh

Re: One advantage

Whole problem with the new types of chatbots is that their training sets include those very sources.

Kind of a vicious circle, that.

Have you ever seen video feedback, from pointing a video camera at its monitor? It's pretty cool. Not so sure how cool this sort of semiotic feedback will be, though. Cryptic, yeah, but still garbage.

Sure, one can tell the difference.

I've seen strings of words which are syntactic nonsense.

I've seen strings of words that make syntactically correct sentences, but semantically are nonsense.

I've seen strings of words that make sense semantically, but in reference to the real world are nonsense.

Tools like ChatGPT have reached that third level. But because they're constructing text from things people have already said, without regard to whether those people *knew what they were talking about*, a careful reader can still tell.

But remember that park ranger who said, "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the dumbest tourists and the smartest bears"? The same thing is true about the dumbest humans and the smartest chatbots.

OpenAI CEO warns that GPT-4 could be misused for nefarious purposes

"There are other people who won't put limits on it...."

Let's translate this into English: "We want to be the only company that is allowed to develop this. Those other researchers have to be stopped."

How this database legal war could be decided by the name given to this license

A fork is not a cleanroom implementation

This is ridiculous. If they are able to do that, anyone can make a copy of any copyrighted work, change some part of it, then claim that the rights asserted by the original copyright holder don't apply.

How on earth they decided to mix in trademark violations in what was an otherwise open-and-shut license dispute is beyond me. That seems to be confusing the issue for no good reason.

Microsoft is checking everyone's bags for unsupported Office installs

Re: "Malicious software removal tool"

That's hilarious.

My Win10 box is a constant source of update-borne grief. A colleague observed, "I never had any problems. You must be doing something wrong." Then he discovered why: his company had never sent any patch updates to his computer.

What I did wrong? Allowing patch updates.

Makes sense, sort of.

Never mind the Saudis: Here's a new OPEC for EV battery metals

Re: Didn't the Chinese try something similar with "rare" earth metals ?

They did indeed.

They sold lanthanides for less than cost for long enough to kill lanthanide mining in the US and Australia, which have large deposits. Then they announced that they would not export raw lanthanides but would sell finished products containing the metals to one and all.

US lanthanide mining continued to languish, last I checked, but the Australians said, "No, no, we'll start mining again."

This all played out years and years ago, so the US may have resumed lanthanide mining also. In any event, it backfired on them.

Same will happen with nickel and cobalt. Plenty of nickel and cobalt elsewhere. And manganese can be found lying all over the ocean floor in MnO nodules.

Elon Musk shows what being Chief Twit is all about across weird weekend

Re: Bad code review

Tesla's engineers work in AutoCAD and the MCC Materials Handbook. Tesla's programmers work -- We'll agree to refer to repeated failure due to forced and unrealistic released dates as working -- in C / C++.

Given that most of Twitter's back-end data processing is also written in those languages, and that it uses some "AI", those Tesla programmers might have an inkling what they're looking at.

Not sure why they'd want to change it, though. I've no use for Twitter, but it works as well as something like that can. It isn't broken, merely useless.

Russia says Starlink satellites could become military targets

He'll run out of rockets.

Lots of irrelevant geopolitics on this thread.

Why irrelevant?

There are more satellites for him to hit than he has rockets capable of hitting them, by probably an order of magnitude.

Fujitsu launches HPC and not-quite-quantum cloud services

Wow. He said "Quantum".

Mentally read the post title in the Beavis and Butthead voice.

Now, that said, Fujitsu has "launched" computing-as-a-service, the very thing which service bureaus have been doing since the 1960s -- Anyone remember GE's Genie? -- and on it they run a linear programming solver to which they refer as a "non-quantum annealer".

Well, if it walks like a hey-look-at-me press release, and quacks like a hey-look-at-me press release, and smells like a hey-look-at-me press release, then it must be a hey-look-at-me press release.

Lash#Cat9: A radical new Linux UI for keyboard warriors

It'd have been nice to actually learn something from this article.

Instead of spending the first eight or nine paragraphs saying the same things over and over, how about actually describing the thing?

"The command line includes an auto-complete feature.

"Each command launches a small shell window within the main window in which that command executes, allowing the user to compose another command, launching another small shell window within the main window, while the one above it continues execution."

It would have taken a few seconds to read that, as opposed to wading through a few hundred words of "It's new! It's different!" and watching a video.

(I hate videos. They save the presenter a small amount of effort, while wasting a lot of the audience's time.)

China discovers unknown mineral on the moon, names it Changesite-(Y)

Less here than meets the eye....

People are constantly discovering new minerals. So what?

*Everything* on the surface of the Moon has a tiny bit of 3He in it. So what?

3He is a terrible fusion fuel; it's difficult to fuse. Sure, fusing doesn't make your reactor parts radioactive like Tritium does, but if you can't get it to fuse then so what?

Don't get me wrong: it's neat that they brought samples back from the Moon. But this is a tempest in a teapot, a transparent effort to get a headline.

Yawn.

DoJ charges pair over China-linked attempt to build semi-autonomous crypto haven on nuked Pacific atoll

"crypto haven"?

Great headline, but "crypto haven"?

Wasn't the whole point of cryptocurrencies that they were utterly decentralized, not reliant on specific computing hosts, and not subject to any central authority or geographic boundaries?

So now we have companies which endeavor to control crypto transactions, and places like "crypto havens", and my irony meter has burned out again.

Elon Musk wrote article for China's internet regulator, hinted at aged care robots

Re: No! Really? Not Musk, surely...

They'll pump him for every bit of information they can get out of him (which from Elon Musk won't be very much) then they'll go off and do it themselves and not pay him a cent.

It's a tradition there.

IBM settles age discrimination case that sought top execs' emails

Settling an ongoing case should go on the books as a loss by the defendant.

This is typical of organizations which can afford to keep a flying wedge of lawyers on perpetual retainer: If the case goes their way they continue with it so it will become established precedent, i.e. case law, but if it looks as if they'll lose they settle out of court to prevent the loss becoming established case law.

How to prevent this? Record an out-of-court settlement as a loss for the defendant. That would level the playing-field just a bit.

Meanwhile, and yes, I know, I repeat myself, Hell is full and zombies in suits are walking the Earth. How's that working out for us, eh?

Photonic processor can classify millions of images faster than you can blink

Useful, but let's don't work ourselves into a frenzy

If this is what I think it is, an optical version of a neural net built from a block of glass fibres, it has to be hard-wired.

That means that it has to be hard-wired for a specific purpose. At low levels this isn't all that bad: we have hardwired edge and area detection for our own eyes, providing additional information derived from a field of pixels which is useful for recognizing what we see.

Scaling that up won't be one of those square-of-the-number-of-pixels things since that sort of recognition depends on nearby pixels rather than correlating information from distant parts of the visual field.

So far, so good.

The problem comes with hard-wiring the higher levels of recognition.

You want to recognize numbers and letters? Roman letters? Cyrillic? Arabic? Telugu?

You want to recognize faces? Whose faces? Maybe worth hard-wiring to recognize specific features, but beyond that not so much.

So at some point someone has either to create a *programmable* optical neural net to sit atop this device, or to use the device to enhance the input to more conventional software.

Sounds useful, but this isn't the be-all and end-all of image recognition. Recognize it for what it is, to wit a useful step forward, but let's don't get all dizzy over it.

US Space Force unit to monitor region beyond Earth's geosynchronous orbit

Re: For those [who laughed at Trump]

We laughed at Trump, or more accurately winced, because he "created" a name, and then did *nothing else* save for applying it to existing and on-going activities which were not under his purview, and then showed no further interest in the matter, which has been typical of him in the 40-odd years he's been on my radar.

Nothing wrong with having a "Space Force". Lots wrong with giving Trump credit for it.

New Chinese exascale supercomputer runs 'brain-scale AI'

"Brain-scale AI"

Remember when you see that phrase, it's time to go read something else.

The hype never ends.

CompSci boffins claim they can recreate missing lines in log files

No, no they can't.

This reminds me of the image enhancement we see on TV: pure BS. Once one throws information away, one can't then conjure it back up from thin air.

That's the long and short of it Everything else is just handwaving.

'Automate or die!' Gartner reckons most biz apps will be developed via low-code by the people who use them

This is hilarious.

Gartner conflating "cloud" with "AI" and saying that "it will write our code in the future" is typical.

And it's ignorant. And it's sad.

But their principal market consists of businessmen, who want to commoditize programming, just as they've tried to commoditize engineering, medicine, etc. They love to hear this stuff, even when the results have always been disastrous.

If they'd told businessmen, "You'll have to actually pay people to do critical and intellectually demanding professional work, and learn to live with that," they'd have lost most of their audience.