Posts by Justthefacts

UK sinks to fifth in ESA funding league behind Spain

Re: Ok

The Tories just can’t make up their mind

On the one hand, they want her to resign for saying there is a black hole when the OBR says there isn’t…..

On the other hand, they want her to resign because they claim there’s a huge black hole which she is hiding.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/12/02/the-hidden-13tn-debt-bomb-in-the-budget/

Which is it? Is there a black hole or isn’t there?

Seems fairly obvious to me. The OBR has their model predictions, which are better than guessing, and honest, but still at a practical level its accuracy record is piss-poor. The Chancellor, being democratic oversight, has not just the power but the *responsibility* to add extra margin if she thinks that is wise, to accommodate the huge uncertainty of world and domestic events.

Now, whether the actual outcome will be higher than the model, neither you nor I have a clue. It’s a judgement call. Which is why we have democracy rather than an unelected bureaucracy of experts like some other countries. It doesnt make the OBR stupid, but if you think the models are remotely accurate you haven’t been paying attention. Predicting the future is hard.

For example, the March 2022 forecast for cumulative GDP growth over the next two years, under-predicted the out-turn by 5.5%. Read that again. Yes that’s correct, I got it from the OBR’s own (honest and professional) self-assessment report. They were nearly 3% growth pessimistic per year, *over a period that has included a war in Europe*.

https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/Forecast-evaluation-report-July-2025.pdf

Read the OBR’s own report. You will learn a lot.

Next time you read a report from “leading economists” that eg Brexit or any other world event will decrease or increase GDP by 0.5% per year, take a deep breath and re-read the OBR’s own data on how ridiculously uncertain economic forecasts really are.

Researchers get inside the mind of bots, find out what texts they trained on

Re: Why not try Finnegans Wake

Right, well I’m afraid that didn’t take long to figure out what’s going on, and I absolutely stand by my original statement, although with fractional nuance.

ChatGPT also knows the first line of Finnegans Wake, verbatim.

But if you ask it the second line, it claims that it can’t, because copyright issues. But it can *paraphrase*. And what it paraphrases with…..is wrong. Completely wrong, wrong subject and no words in common. The suggested second line does indeed reflect themes and plot of Finnegans Wake, but ChatGPT does not know what the second line of Finnegans Wake actually is, even in outline. Or the third line. Or the last line, it absolutely does not have a clue what the text is.

Famously, the last line is cyclical with the first line. ChatGPT knows this, can explain the link, can do a thematic analysis of the final monologue. But it does not actually know any of the words in it. ChatGPT knows famous facts about Wake, but it simply does not know the text, apart from the famous first line.

In short, ChatGPT knows the Wikipedia article on Finnegans Wake. It may also have memorised a statistical average of blogs and essays about Wake, that I haven’t yet figured out, and am continuing to play with it. Now, you may have an opinion that storing (a compressed form of) Wikipedia without attributions is itself copyright violation. I haven’t thought that through yet. But one thing I am absolutely certain of, is that ChatGPT has not memorised any significant portion at all of the actual text of Finnegans Wake. Even though it is public domain and one of the most famous books in the English language (which nobody has read). Far less has ChatGPT memorised the text any of the much larger corpus of English literature.

And I’ve even got more direct confirmation of that: if you ask it the most common word in Wake, it says “the”. It can even give you the top three most common words. But if you ask it for the tenth most common word *it does not know*. It is not counting words in the text. And it says “I can’t find a reliable source for that information”. It literally does a web search in front of your eyes, posts a publically available link to a word-frequency analysis essay, and then tries to parse the document in that link. This is really clear.

You called out a different LLM. I can’t and won’t do a systematic study to see which of the LLMs might have actually memorised more. Maybe you can find another one. But to be honest, this is like perpetual motion machines. There are really good fundamental information-theoretic reasons to believe that a 7B parameter model is not storing the compressed text of a 70T corpus as a small part of its storage. I’ve debunked one perpetual motion machine, I’m not going to debunk all of them separately.

This is a thing that just is not true. It cannot be true. And it is not.

Re: Does the chatbot know the entire text of a particular book

No, that’s a completely different issue. I suggest you actually read the article you linked.

The reason why what Anthropic did was ruled piracy, is not that they reproduced copyrighted books which they had legally bought. The court did not rule that reproducing from LLM-training is not fair use. The case you linked to is that Anthropic bulk-downloaded *pirated copies* in the first place. That’s just no different to any individual or organisation downloading and reading pirated copies, whether they produce anything from them or not. That is illegal, correct, I don’t think anybody argues that.

The real main issue is whether you can use the stuff that you have read *legally*, to train. So long as you do not output segments which are long enough to be recognisable, and constitute a creative output.

Having said that, somebody else is showing that some models actually do so (over and above the unconvincing children’s book example). So I’ll look at that.

Re: Why not try Finnegans Wake ..

Now that, indeed, is Very Interesting, thank you. I’m going to try a few things out.

I should have tried it myself, it’s a simple experiment and worth so much more than the researchers whole Harry Potter study.

The next question is “how is it doing this”, because the entire global corpus of literature cannot be encoded in a mere few gig of parameters. So ClippyAI is acting as a front end to Ollama, which is a fully local LLM, and zero internet access? ie this is not agentic LLM scraping external content dynamically?

Re: Does the chatbot know the entire text of a particular book

Right.

So you think that if the LLM ingests the first line of 1984 “ It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen”, and a dozen other dystopian novels.

And when prompted to write a dystopian novel itself, it “decides” = “highest correlation”, that it should begin by destabilising common assumptions, and repurposing words. It outputs the text “It was another sweltering Christmas Day, and the blackbirds overhead were calling the Faithful to Prayer”.

Are you claiming that this is a violation of intellectual property, because in some sense it reproduces the overall effect? Factually, the law disagrees, that is not copyright violation, there is no copyright on “meaning, patterns and relationships”. If you are wondering why fan-fiction “sequels” sometimes gets caught up, it’s because character-names are copyright-protected.

Feel absolutely free to write a Harry Potter style book, as long as you don’t use names like Harry Potter or Hogwarts in it. Feel free to write a James Bond action spy thriller, as long as the hero is not named James Bond. There are thousands of them.

More importantly from your point of view, I simply don’t think you have a leg to stand on either philosophically or ethically, sorry.

Forgive me if I have mis-characterised your position. But “I’ve based my book on the way you wrote yours” just is not copyright, nor should it be, and that doesn’t change whether it is an LLM, human fan-fiction or whatever.

Re: Why not try Finnegans Wake ..

Yes, that is pretty much what I would expect the output to be.

LLMs do not have the capacity to store text word-for-word, they do not store facts, they store answer-shaped text associations. Everybody knows this. In fact, that is exactly people’s main complaint; and yet they seem unable to generalise this knowledge when it comes to the subject of “storing copyrighted text”.

If you ask Gemini about Finnegans Wake, it will probably come up with “a stream of consciousness” that looks like what Joyce would have written, on a broad swathe of what he might have written them about, according to a plot-summary based on his Wikipedia entry. But not the words that he did in fact write. That’s a category error.

It might reproduce a couple of short “famous quotes” from the “weighted average” of a hundred essays on the subject. But again, not any individual essay, because it does not memorise individual essays.

I haven’t tried. But if in fact it does manage to produce large-scale quotations of F’ing Wake, that would be evidence that would change my mind. Change my mind!

Stating the bleedin’ obvious again, on a techie website: A 200GB model has *not* allocated a significant fraction of its storage space to storing the exact text of the 70TB corpus of written books.

Because the Shannon bound, and Kolmogorov complexity are things . Facepalm

Does it never occur to people that the reason why these researchers-with-a-point-to-prove select Harry Potter, is that the text is just super-predictable?

Why not try Finnegans Wake, *a book which genuinely did enter public domain a decade ago*. It’s a famous and iconic text. Go on, reproduce sections from *that*, and I’ll be interested.

Re: False Assumptions

Exactly correct.

Most people do not understand text copyright law, and just have vague Feelz based on what they heard in the media about how music copyright works.

Text copyright is an entirely different body of law to music and performance copyright. In fact, the word “copyright” is just reused but they are two entirely different concepts. Music and performance copyright is based on *similarity*. It’s a correct claim if you can prove the source and target are identical however you got there.

Text copyright is based on causative chain, length and distinctiveness, and creative step.

Leading the witness by the hand, asking again and for plausible continuations, and then locking in each sentence once they have guessed correctly with a gotcha, this is the opposite of what could possibly considered a text copyright breach.

Whereas, for example, a picture or music is exactly the opposite. If the AI photo *looks exactly like* an iconic image, or a musical phrase sounds exactly the same, that is a copyright breach. As long as it is big enough and recognisable enough, you don’t even have to *suggest* that the AI ingested the original, let alone prove it. It is copyright breach because the two items are recognisably the same, period.

It’s just a completely different ballgame.

And most “training” material from organisations, particularly universities, is just 100% wrong about this area. They don’t understand it, and they’ve promoted the misinformation as a folk memory. Like it or not, there’s two totally different sorts of copyright.

Project Kuiper becomes Amazon Leo as satellite network trickles into orbit

Re: Launch licence deadline?

That’s a great idea. Not only does a rudderless NASA not want the pointless Starliner, Boeing clearly don’t want to do it any more either. Win all round.

Re: Launch licence deadline?

Yeah, but “late” is when you have a plan. Kuiper don’t even appear to have a plan any more, as they have no practical launch options declared. If they are going to launch on Falcon9, they should say so, but that is not the plan of record.

Both ULA Vulcan and Blue Origin are still 2 years away from volume launch, at best. Ariane 6 has made it clear that they will prioritise EU governmental, and already canned one Kuiper launch. Since Ariane is 2 years behind, maybe Kuiper will get *one* Ariane launch per year for the foreseeable future (2026, 2027, 2028). Anything Kuiper put up today, will already have de-orbited by the time they have put up 5 or 6 launches let alone 38. I don’t fancy standing up in front of the FCC with that.

I think they are going to be told to wind their neck in, and present a more realistic de-scoped Phase 1, relying on no more than 5-6 launches. This might actually be the best thing for them.

Taiwan gets chippy about US request it shifts manufacturing

Re: Pretend I am a Martian.

Always put things in human terms, as if this were a project you were going to implement for yourown financial gain, it often becomes clearer.

So: “Being a doctor is a high-salary occupation. Money (for training) aside, what prevents me from opening a doctors surgery?”

Well: you absolutely can try, but….,,in the best case it will take you ten years, during which time you will have zero or low income, even in the best case. The failure rate during training is very high. The majority who try, don’t make it, they’re not smart enough or they don’t work enough hours until midnight, or both. Today, you have no evidence of skill or talent. You might be in the top 1%, nobody knows, but the cold hard facts are that you are 99% likely to be in the 99%. You’re in a moderately well-paid job today. Not amazing, but you’re going to have to give that all up to take a spin on the wheel to be a doctor. If it doesn’t turn out for you, coming back in 10myears time you will be 10 years out of the industry, and your current job will not be open for you. You’ll be serving customers at B&Q.

All of that applies pretty much word for word, as to “should we, or should we not, spend $500bn of our taxpayers money to have a 10% chance of staying in business against TSMC”.

SpaceX bulks up Starlink Direct to Cell with $17B EchoStar spectrum deal

Re: Too much money for too little spectrum

Considered directly as an investment for ROI, I agree. But it does have defensive aspects.

Eg Kuiper constellation *in theory* is married to an organisation with near infinitely-deep pockets. Amazon can afford to buy anything, which gives them a competitive advantage in scaleout. By taking a one-time opportunity to buy a beachfront property, just 2-3 years before their likely competitor could consider spending money on spectrum, SpaceX may knock another nail into Kuiper.

At worst, Kuiper or some other NTN hopeful is *successful*. Then, they become prepared to pay more for that spectrum than SpaceX paid. It might be a no-lose investment.

Or SpaceX might have just paid too much for it, difficult to tell.

Europe Putin the blame on Russia after GPS jamming disrupts president’s plane

#1 “Galileo offers meter-level accuracy for public users and centimeter-level accuracy for commercial services. Its dual-frequency signals reduce errors caused by atmospheric interference, making it more precise than GPS in many scenarios”

GPS is dual-frequency too, but that’s not the point. The point is that more modern receivers have other methods for ionospheric correction. *Both* GPS and Galileo achieve 10cm accuracy absolute, because the smart bits are in the receivers (not the naive version you will read in any university textbook).

#2 Nationalist bullshit.

#3 “Galileo’s modern signal structure performs better in dense urban environments”

The Galileo signal structure “upgrades” are a load of university professor crap. In theory it makes a difference. In practice, precisely in dense urban environments, an advanced receiver blind-detects and de-convolves it all out anyway. This was originally discussed and designed thirty years ago, when getting even four or five RAKE fingers in a reasonable CPU power budget was ridiculously challenging, and the Galileo signal structure would definitely have been better. Today, we have x1000 processing power on the receiver, this really is a non-issue, the signal upgrades make zero difference. The only thing that really matters is the total satellite signal transmission power.

#4 Emergency Servicss. Cospas Sarsat provides this service already, as does Inmarsat GMDSS. And have you seen the actual spec on reliability and timeliness for Galileo beacon detection? By the time you wait for Galileo you’ll be dead.

#5 OSNMA. Sounds cool. Sounds blockchain-ish, Win Win Win.

Seriously, have you asked any banks if they want to use this? The EU asked them ten years ago, and they universally said Fuck Off, only less politely.

#6 Is True.

Re: Galileo

It was in a Commission newsletter last year, about how wonderful Galileo is, that all aircraft chartered by Commission have been fitted with Galileo units.

Now, if Ursula has been using off-balance-sheet planes for official business, that would be an even *bigger* story……

Re: Galileo

Well, I was on the engineering team that implemented part of the Galileo infrastructure. And I was in the room, lobbied for the contracts, and personally signed some of those contracts, when my company “the largest aerospace company in Europe” persuaded the EU that it really needed an independent sovereign version of the US GPS system. And then we proceeded to lose that contract to OHB. I rather fancy that trumps your “I read this on Wikipedia”.

I assure you that having a higher anti jam capability than GPS, was a major part of why the EU believed they wanted this in the first place. And we echoed that back to them, precisely, because that’s what they wanted to hear.

As to “the main reason for Galileo is to be independent of the 'Selective Availibility" of GPS”. It has certainly been a selling point to those not technically involved, that Galileo is independent of GPS SA. Unfortunately, there are two separate technical reasons that if the USA *did* actually turn on SA again, it would similarly degrade Galileo accuracy exactly pro rata. The simplest to explain, is that Galileo is on the same frequency, and shares the US GPS *ground* atomic timing as its single-point-of-truth. If the USA turned on SA, we can assume that they would also stop sharing their UTC timing, so any Galileo secondary timing atomic clock gradually drifts off within the ground infrastructure. This event has actually occurred once, due to a component failure a couple years back, which incorrectly did not have a redundant backup, leading to a week-long Galileo outage. So it’s not theoretical. The mechanism to prevent that drift ultimately traces back to receiving the GPS signal identically on two continents. Selective Availability being turned on, would spanner Galileo timing accuracy, exactly as much as GPS accuracy.

I’m so sorry that you have been fed propaganda. But this is a technical forum, you should have had the wit to check your system understanding before blurting out the first wrong thing that came into your head.

Galileo

Remember, Ursula’s plane was fitted with the best Galileo terminal that EU money can buy.

This is the outcome of€25bn of EU taxpayers spent on Galileo (so far), which according to them was largely spent on special EU technology to make it more difficult to jam. Which was all nonsense of course, all silly Ursula did was take the US GPS spec from forty years ago, and wind it forward by twenty years. Now she wants to spend more money, to make it only five years behind US GPS. And of course, current GPS is exactly as vulnerable as it physics says it is, which is “quite vulnerable”. What a waste of money.

US government snaps up 10% of Intel for $8.9B

Do *you* think that 10% stake is a passive investment holding, a stake reward for providing working capital?

Do you think *Trump* intends it as a passive investment? Or do you think, just maybe, Trump views it as a controlling interest?

If the management dare to disagree with something he tells them to do, either related to their core business of making profits by selling chips, or *not* related to that, do you think he will

a) Jump around and shout a lot on phone calls to the board, as any activist 10% shareholder is entitled to do

b) Threaten to have the CEO and the board arrested or deported?

Go on, if you really aren’t sure if this is expropriation by a dictator, let’s hear you expand your claim that this is “just a 10% stake” more fully, with reference to “voting rights at the shareholder meeting”

US tariff terrors prompt Nokia profit drop, TI inventory binge

Re: Will the EU cave in, also known as 'Doing a Carney'

I agree that you can’t make a deal with Trump. But it would be better just to ignore Trump entirely.

Tariffs are a tax on your own consumers. People have been pointing this out to Trump for six months. Then why would be it different the other way round?

How are you “punishing” the USA? You think higher EU tariffs will make Europeans buy fewer Dodge Rams? Europeans mostly don’t want that crap anyway, and those who do….are entitled to their opinion. It’s not up to us to stop them, and their neighbours will point and laugh, so that’s punishment enough.

Musk is messing with the Cosmic Dawn. Will alien hunters save the day for all mankind?

Re: Geofencing

Unfortunately, the issue seems to be more complex than that (link paper at bottom). There’s several different sources and types of emission from Starlink, each of which needs to be thought about separately.

First, one type of unintended emission comes from propulsion manoeuvres. You can’t just not do station-keeping in the region (at least, I don’t think so). This should have been considered during ion thruster design, but company and domain siloing is a problem in these big megacorps. I worked on a (classic large GEO mission) spacecraft, where some prawn failed to consider that putting the ion thrusters right next to the antenna was not a smart move, and for extra credit the Alfven frequency sat in the middle of the comms band. Fortunately we found that weeks before launch, and it was re-designed to fix, with unpleasant delays and lots of shouting.

Second, SKA-LOW is seeing not just Starlink but several different constellations, including NOAA. So it isn’t just the “move fast and break things” people. The difference, is that the other constellations are sparse enough that SKA can schedule around them; whereas Starlink is in-shot basically all the time. In other words, we don’t actually know that a radio-tech solution is feasible at all. Radio telescopes are just insanely sensitive, maybe you *can’t* filter or switch well enough. SKA are asking for a 20-30dB improvement, which is a lot. Then this would be an intrinsic flaw of dense constellations. Don’t know.

Third, a bunch of it seems to be TT&C (telemetry transponders) transmitting at low EIRP (few milliwatts) in their intended bands. And the authors say that Starlink is transmitting within regulatory limits. What ground control station (SAS) are these satellites transmitting to, which is within the horizon of the radio-telescopes quiet zone? SAS locations are all well-known and should beplanned. Somebody just failed to consider the Quiet zones during SAS location planning. That’s on the regulator….

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374382316_Detection_of_intended_and_unintended_emissions_from_Starlink_satellites_in_the_SKA-Low_frequency_range_at_the_SKA-Low_site_with_an_SKA-Low_station_analogue

Time for Britain's CMA to strike hard – or risk losing the cloud competition fight

Re: A potential Brexit Benefit

I think your first point is that your specific regulator does not in fact impose significant load. That may well be true. But you seem to have taken the *overall* goal of reduction as targeted at your org. If its implemented blanket reduction, thats crap, but it doesn’t mean the overall govt request is wrong. And as I said, I don’t regard a 1.3% imposed load *in itself* as unjustifiably large, or shouldnt be reduced. There should be an honest impact analysis.

The worst argument ever, and a very common one, is “Something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done”. If you’re doing “something” but it’s not effective then yes stop doing it. It’s simply not true that doing something is better than nothing.

“Well, you might care to de-personalise your attack.”

Apologies that it came across that way. I should have better said: “It is shocking to discover that a basic part of standard regulator process, and govt process of instructing the regulator, does not include both an estimate of imposed load, effective targets for that load, and ongoing monitoring of that load”.

Ok

Cyberstalker downvote script test @1.18am

Re: A potential Brexit Benefit

“480,000 FTE of private sector do NOTHING but fill in forms for regulators. Like 'em or loathe 'em, how credible do you think that is?”

I’ll suggest at least this data-point: it just so happens we’re having some building work done. It’s moderately complex in admin terms (planning permission, building control and other items), but more to the point it’s not our day-job so we’re contracting that bit out, to be sure it’s done correctly. Price is flat-rate 8% on the actual building works cost, which might or might not be on the high side, but it’s not so far off industry norms. That literally covers *only* private-sector admin to Councils, none of the building works or organisation.

So there you are, the answer is “for the constructio industry, about 8% of the private sector workforce is engaged in form-filling for the government”.

Now, there isn’t necessarily anything wrong in that. Grenfell Tower, for example, could have done with a lot more regulatory oversight.

Similarly, schools spend weeks preparing for an Ofsted visit. GP surgeries, hospitals and care homes spend huge amounts of their time documenting, and preparing for Care Quality Commission. And the food industry. And railways. While only maybe a quarter of the economy is heavily regulated, that which is might well spend 10% of its total time on “regulatory admin” or more.

Honestly, an estimate that 1.3% of the workforce is doing this, neither surprises me and is probably on the low side.

None of this is necessarily waste. It all depends whether it’s producing Safety or Safety Theatre. Grenfell still happened. Our Care Homes are horrible places despite the CQC.

What is a bit shocking though, is that you as a regulator are entirely clueless about the size of the imposed load. That’s a horror story.

Starlink says SpaceX targeting 2026 for launch of Starship-ready terabit satellites

Re: Intersatellite Links?

“Fish” (cruiseliners, oligarch mega-yachts, cargo vessels, offshore oil and gas ) have been a highly lucrative market sufficient to keep one of the world’s biggest satcomms operators in business for several decades - Inmarsat

Re: Intersatellite Links?

I don’t disagree, but you missed my point. Geo and Leo are two different ends of the tradeoff.

Geo is better, if your costs per launched bandwidth are so high that you can only ever hope to have a few tens of thousands of customers who afford that. Then you spend $2bn on three Geos, and focus on serving the high value customers. This is what we have been doing forever. This is what *I* was doing couple decades ago, I was a key responsible engineer and then manager on a Geo system.

However, if your launch costs drop sufficiently, that the demand at the indicated price becomes several million customers, your goal changes. Now you just want to maximise capacity, and you’re prepared to spend much more on the constellation, because the revenue is higher. You’re right that 90% of the earths area is economically sub-optimal, but again the business logic changes. Now, you launch at a scale that gives you sufficient capacity/customer value that your business case still closes on the 10% area which is high-value. And all the *other 90%* is basically free money. Every $100 your customers give you in low value places, is $100 straight in your pocket.

They are just very different markets / business-cases, so obviously they are different technical solutions.

Re: Intersatellite Links?

There’s nothing preventing LEO doing beamforming like a classic GEO, other than preconceptions.

These LEOs are big beasts by comparison with the minnows of the past (800kg+), and could fit phased array if wanted. From 500km up, it would be easy to stomp down 20km diameter beams, if it were advantageous to do so.

This isn’t the real difference between LEO and GEO. The real difference is power budget - you are coming from a position that “15kW total transmission power should be enough for anyone”, which is true if you have customer bases in the thousands or tens of thousands.

If you have millions of customers, you want to transmit with 6000x 1kW…..

Fundamentally, when the economics is high-cost, geo is optimal because you’ll never have enough customers who can afford it, and [three] Geo satellites is enough. When your price point drops, you want a scalable way to increase total transmission power as high as needed for the number of customers.

Other considerations about size, weight and cost of the ground terminal were also key drivers until ten years ago, but tech is now overcoming them.

We simply couldn’t have built Starlink ground terminals at a consumer price point until ten years ago, they cost $15k-$50k each as recently as 2010, because of mechanical tracking mounts.

Europe's exascale dreams inch closer as SiPearl finally tapes out Rhea1 chip

Re: Rhea1

“This chip”…..isn’t a chip. It’s vapourware at this point. It has *taped out*, which basically means it’s good-to-go for a first trial production test.

But it’s not going to *work* on its first spin, because no ASIC of this complexity does. A good batting average for a highly skilled team with 20 years experience, any of NVidia, AMD or Intel, would be second or third spin correct,…for a chip that they’ve already made several similar ones before.

For SiPearl to get fully functional silicon back on their second spin, let alone their first, would be like throwing several double-sixes in a row. It is theoretically possible. But in practice, it’s not going to happen.

They’ll put out a press release, declare it a “success”, and immediately start spending the next billion on Rhea2, without using a single chip in production projects.

UK puts out tender for space robot to de-orbit satellites

Astroscale would be a reasonable bidder.

But it will be Clearspace.

Financial 'stretch' for UK to join Europe's Starlink rival, says minister

Re: Long Brexit.

11 out of 27 countries currently suspended Schengen…..

Re: Long Brexit.

Having been in the space industry, and worked for the relevant companies (and still got the contacts at senior level), I can assure you that

A) IRIS2 is a really shit program, a total waste of money, of little or no use technically even if it were free

B) Its already 8 years behind, despite being kicked off just earlier this year. Officially it was going to be in service by 2030. Unofficially, internal estimates are that *if there is no further slip*, the absolute earliest in-service date is 2038. And thats not for actual users, thats the beta-test.

C) Theres a high likelihood it will be cancelled anyway, although not before frittering away the best part of €5bn on little more than PowerPoints. The problem is, that all the best contracts are due to go to France. And neither Germany nor Italy nor Spain see why they should pay for whats basically a French system.

Chip designers latest casualties in US-China trade war

Chinese costs aren’t randomly lower, for stuff like chips. That’s an EU delusion that somehow the Asia Pacific bad men are undercutting you on cheap labour and cheap raw materials.

TSMC Taiwan costs are lower than EU and USA *because* their yields are higher, *because* their industrial quality process and approach is better.

Labour costs are not a major part of chip fab cost. Labour is a major part of chip fab construction- and if you ask Morris Chang why USA foundries are intrinsically expensive, as many have done, he will freely tell you that US construction labour force is poorly skilled, uncooperative and entitled, very slow unproductive per hour, poor quality (high amounts of rework). You can dismiss his view if you like, but he does have the overview of having done both countries, founded and run the most successful fab on the planet,and trained and worked in USA (MIT and Stanford)

You can’t economically make chips at 50% yield and make it up in volume,you just can’t. And China isn’t stupid enough to try, nor weak enough to need to. It will trade its way to success.

Professors of chip design……

What the open-sourcies fail to realise, is what an academic actually *is*. A professor needs to know enough to lead a *graduate student* to write a PhD thesis. They’re first-line managers of 23yr olds. That’s all. In fields like this, academics only know the basics. They’re needed, don’t get me wrong, in just the same way that nursery-school teachers are needed to teach children to count.

PhD is entry table-stakes to start work at companies like that. You make the coffee, and re-learn how it’s *actually* done by people with thirty uears more industrial experience than you.

Even in the USA, a full professor makes $150k. In a company like Cadence, if you’re even *competent* plodder you make $300k in five years. Somebody actually driving the innovation at mid-career is making double that, and more senior tech people well over a million.

The general rules for modern ASICs are *not* the same as FPGAs. It’s a whole different ballgame.

How long did it take you to close timing and P&R an FPGA - a few days for one person? Using tools that came free with the FPGA.

Would you be surprised to learn that the answer for a modern SOC *given the Verilog source* to get to a mask handoff, takes a team of 200 specialists 6-9 months, costing $200M+. In tools terms, the team will be using licenses ranging in price from $50k per seat per year, up to $2.3M per seat per year for one of them. The Design Rule Checker alone may be validating 10k+ rules on a 3nm-class process.

What it took you to do the job in the 1990s is not in the same class as 2025. That’s *exactly* what I mean when I say that Cadence and Synopsys are 20 years ahead. You are quoting the 1990s job, and free tools exist for that. But the complexity and sophistication of what needs to be done, has been exponential.

As a general rule, you’re right. That applies to rocketry, TVs, lithography, and business processes. Much of innovation is researching a dozen plausible good directions, most of which turn out to have their own issues. Once everybody knows not only that which idea works, but exactly how good it is when working properly, and has a 3x return on investment if you develop it, progress by others is usually quick.

It does *not* apply to the statement “various algorithms and heuristics exist which can combine physical synthesis, place-and-route algorithms, detailed transistor models from silicon vendor, parametric IP models, IR droop modelling; to produce outputs which consume less than one-third the power of the naive version; and which have a 95% yield on vendor process rather than 70% yield”.

This tells you *nothing* about what those algorithms and heuristics might be.

Then you very much read what you thought I was going to say, rather than what I actually said. Nowhere did I say that China was only good for copying.

Most of my business is in the Asia Pacific region, I speak Mandarin, have a lot of respect for both Chinese engineering, and way of doing business.

What I *said* was that in the field of silicon EDA software, Cadence and Synopsys have spent their time and money solving hard problems, are now being rewarded for having done so. They are decades ahead. You can’t just catch up with the magic wand of waving a million graduates at the same hard problems from cold. They’ll have to work the solutions out the long way, like Cadence and Synopsys did.

China has many talented and clever people. And of course “never” is a long time.

But what I’ve told you, is that the best of MIT and CalTech, are currently 20 years innovation behind Cadence etc. One of the reasons for that, of course, is that when bright young PhDs and mid-careers at MIT come up with potential good new ideas, worth investigating Cadence offer them million-dollar joining bonuses, along with million-dollar salaries. And that’s the same whether they live in China or USA.

Chinese companies will take 15-20 years to catch up.

Plus there are other strategic issues to navigate. Like getting tight-coupling with TSMC libraries and design rules, which are their IPx. You can’t just sit with your head down, tap furiously on the keyboard, and magically expect to close these gaps.

No they won’t.

Chip EDA software is some of the most clever and IP-intensive software on the planet. And by IP, I don’t mean “people know what it does, but you aren’t allowed to copy it”, this is classic “trade-secret: it’s just better than anything you have, how it does what it does is unknowable, but it just is”. This is not at all like software compilers.

Open-source equivalents exist, written by professors with 30 years experience in the field for their students. The output of those are chips which are many times more power-consuming and silicon area than the proprietary versions.

Chip EDA software is the un-sung equivalent of ASML photolith, and is *far* more strategic and harder to catch up to.

EU Chips Act heading for failure, time for Chips Act 2.0

Re: Wrong idea?

Why are EU and MAGA both so *obsessed* with what the automotive industry wants? It’s a lousy industry.

The average is more like 1500 chips; 3000 is for a super-luxury fully-loaded with options that almost nobody has. The average price of those chips is about 50 cents each, the bulk is sensors and motor controllers, the *top end* of those 1500 is a bunch of €1.50 microcontrollers. So the total price is *maybe* €1000 of chips….which are selling at 10% margin. We’re arguing about €100 of value. Not even €100 per year, it’s €100 over the 15-year lifetime of the vehicle.

You want to swing your entire industrial economy around €8 per *household* per year. *Toothbrushes* have a higher Average Revenue Per User. Look it up.

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

Well, no, that is clearly not the underlying cause. That may have been the *trigger* certainly. But their real problem is having a cascading-fault mode at system level.

White House confirms 245% tariff on some Chinese imports not a typo

Re: What would you do?

This is just a weird Republican talking-point, entirely free of truthiness. Since you want to focus on low-cost drugs, ie generics (why? because it suits your argument, and ignores the higher value ones where the EU and US are dominant?)

The generic drugs market is dominated by India, *not China*. Do I have a problem with that? No, I do not. Why should I, their quality-control and logistics in the volumes we are talking about is good, and so is their efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Why do you have a desperate need to avoid being “dependent” on “India” for packs of paracetamol wholesale at 16p/pack? There’s clearly no economic argument. Among other things, if these were made in Yorkshire, you’d be just as “dependent” on the factory in Yorkshire, and subject to the whims of unionised action, flooding of the Ribbledale Valley etc. What you are describing is just being dependent on less diversified supply-chain. There certainly have been supply-chain shortages of drugs, but that’s usually turned out that there’s only 1 or 2 factories globally for one process-step, which nobody really knew about, and which had a manufacturing glitch. And usually in the USA by the way.

Re: 14 reasons why Trump’s tariffs won’t bring manufacturing back

“import tariff was based at the cost of the product as the point it enters the country and not the price sold in the shops”

This is true, but it’s only half the story when it comes to price-setting. There’s a reason why typical retail markups are 2.2x, somewhat independent of price. To sell something that costs £1000 wholesale, you have to work a lot harder in getting customers, than if it cost £10 wholesale. You need more premium retail locations (higher rent), more effort shmoozing the customer (more and higher-trained sales staff), more marketing/advertising spend, and there’s just fewer customers who can or want to afford it. Very roughly, retail costs will scale with the wholesale price.

The end-customer price might not track perfectly with the tariff. But thinking that the tariff only affects the raw cost of goods, while the rest of the value-chain remains fixed, is just wrong. For a concrete example, USA uses about 7.4billion barrels of oil annually, worth $480bn = 1.8% of US GDP. And yet, doubling the price of a barrel of oil in 2022 caused an oil shock and 8-10% inflation.

Self-driving car maker Musk's DOGE rocks up at self-driving car watchdog, cuts staff

Re: Self-driving is a fallacy

Horses for courses. About 20% of the country is either too elderly to drive safely, or too disabled to do so (eg blind). Most of them live lives that are significantly constrained, to being nearly housebound. So to answer your question “how much is it worth” - maybe £5-10k per year? Whatever a taxi would cost you, if that were your only option.

EU lands 25% counter tariff punch on US, Trump pauses broad import levy hike – China excepted

Re: Trump blinked

So…..basically QE, “print dollars”? Yes, they can. This will tank the dollar exchange rate, so all US imports will become much more expensive.

There are half a dozen technical ways for the USA to cope with the fallout, but all of them end with the words “so all US imports will become much more expensive”.

Re: EU to charge citizens 25% extra tax on loads of stuff and pocket a stash of their cash.

“You’ve chopped off your arm, to show that you can win with one arm behind your back. So I’m going to chop my leg off, to show that I’m John Wick and can kill you with a fucking pencil”

You may well kill the other guy. But at the end of the day, you’ve still chopped off your own leg to prove a point. Legs take at least thirty years to regrow.

“decided to try and pick a fight with just the one bogyman for now: China.”

That, and he’s playing the classic bully game of “identify the victim and get everyone to pile in on them”

He’s hoping that everyone will agree that China is “taking advantage”, and raise tariffs on China too. Whereas the smart thing to do is the opposite - global free trade, while the US self-embargoes with tariffs.

EU: These are scary times – let's backdoor encryption!

Re: Ursula said it

Also, for clarity for the Wikipedia warriors: sigh, yes, nominally the back-and-forth includes so-called trilogue, which is Commission, Council of European Union, Parliament. This re-discusses and agrees amendments, in a series of meetings, and its majority vote among the three.

However, the actual meeting is this: the Commissioner is there with a large retinue of flunkies. The Council of Europe…*is allowed to be* a minister of a national govt, but I don’t think has ever been that, even once. In fact, it’s a representative of the *Presidency* of the Council of Ministers. Remember that, *Presidency*. The *Presidency* office is really a floating civil service all of itself; it is headed by a rotating head-of-state (every six months); but the people who actually staff it are (of course) full-time employees who are appointed by, and receive their salary cheques from, the Commission. Yes, the Polish PM can tell them overall priorities, but he isn’t really their boss, and anyway if the Commission doesn’t like them, it just waits until the next six-month Presidency for all-change. So, it’s majority voting where the Commission controls two out of three votes.

But….none of that matters anyway. Because the output of this big trilogue is….a set of minutes. The only requirement on Commission is that it produce an updated “file” (including proposed legislation). There’s no requirement that Commission modify the proposed legislation in the agreed direction. And it *does not*.

As I said, as somebody who has been part of the lobbying and decision process on significant parts of technical legislation, over many many years: neither I, nor anybody in the lobbying team has in fact ever *read* the trilogue minutes. Nor has Commission ever raised them with us. At all. They are simply ignored. The file gets re-submitted, with the mods *we* want, and goes round for a few goes, and gets mostly passed by Parliament, and if not, it comes back for another round of lobbying. The *trilogue* might as well go to the pub, for all the effect it has.

Re: Ursula said it

Right, so your claim is roughly: “These bits of legislation that appear to have passed into law despite being rejected by Parliament, are subtly modified on a technical level to meet Parliament’s concerns”

But you do admit, *as a europhile involved in the process*, that there have been *zero* examples of when Parliament successfully rejected legislation against the direct will of the Commission. Thank you. At last. The vast majority of europhiles have no contact or knowledge of how the business is actually done. They do not know this, and refuse to believe it when told. Thank you.

Onto your point: I used to work for Beelzebub on the other side of the fence as a, shall we say technical/management corporate guy regularly lobbying Commission. All I can say, having been involved in multiple re-drafts, is that at no point did either we or the Commissioners discuss the views of Parliament. We didn’t talk to MEPs, we didn’t read debate transcripts, we didn’t look at voting records or try to understand “changes needed for acceptance”. Nothing.

Nor did Commission represent to us that they were acting to address Parliament concerns. In their view, they were updating policy in line with whatever was internal or situational change had occurred. There was *certainly* no view that in any sense Commission had “got it wrong”’ or were being corrected. In all my dozens, probably hundreds of meetings, and hours prep-work with legal and management teams, re-drafts were simply another opportunity for us to re-angle and update our interests into the legislation.

And finally these “UK representatives” (by which I assume you mean UK govt). We talked to them. But you know, we’re in charge. We tell them what industry wants. We’re a major transnational for both UK, France and Germany. All the “national” representatives are basically reading from the same script we gave them, apart from where there are national site tensions internal to the company, and those definitely exist. I had louder “assertive exchange of views” with my opposite number in $Corporate Germany, than ever with the Commission.

I hope the view from Beelzebub clarifies matters on How Things Are Done.

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Re: Please explain

Honestly? I really wouldn’t “improve” that. A trade deficit is desirable for the USA. Importing stuff, means that the USA gets given goods from other countries, in return for US dollars *which the USA can print at its own discretion*. It’s free money. Tribute from the rest of the world, if you will, for privilege of dominating the world militarily and economically. A trade deficit means a strong dollar, which means you buy stuff from the rest of the world at prices in your own currency *far below* what they cost elsewhere. Equivalently, it means that your salaries are *twice* what they otherwise would be.

Your trade deficit is the main driver behind the dollar being a global reserve currency: you are printing USD (which costs your citizens nothing), and exporting the dollar bills. Those dollar bills are what the rest of the world uses as its transaction currency. No exported dollar bills = no reserve currency. Every year, you print $3trillion. What do you think your inflation would be, if that all that newly printed paper stayed inside US borders?

This is a problem you want to solve?

Congratulations, China is about to solve your “problem” for you. You will lose global influence and dominance, almost overnight. The dollar will crash to half its current level, if that. Your input prices will double.

Re: Econ 101

Import duties only encourage local production *under some very limited assumptions*. Mostly they *discourage local consumption*, substitution is the norm.

This should be obvious. Let’s say you like both oranges and kumquats. Oranges are grown locally, kumquats overseas. If you add tariffs, the price of kumquats will go up (local production must be more expensive, otherwise it would already be done locally). So you mostly stop eating kumquats, and only eat oranges.

Reality is more complex. In practice, tariffs have increased *because local politicians hated being dependent on imports*. A section of the population already “won’t eat that foreign muck”, and with the addition of tariffs it becomes a Big Patriotic Deal to not eat kumquats. It becomes clear that if you are seen eating a kumquat, you will lose your job. The tariffs become irrelevant, as nobody can eat them without getting the Orange Purity League on their tail.

But the net outcomes are: not many kumquats get eaten in the tariff country; people who prefer kumquats don’t get their favourite fruit; the exporter will drop their price by a small fraction of the tariff (10% of the 10%, maybe 1%) to stimulate global demand; any remaining secret-kumquat-eaters see a large price increase; the beneficiaries are kumquat-eaters in *third-party importer countries* who see their kumquat price go down by 1%

Re: Well, he was right about

The list of people who the right-wingers call hard-left is never-ending.

It’s doctors, nurses, lawyers, judges, accountants & management consultants (insufficient qualified non-hard-left forensic accountants to audit government!), airline pilots, the military generally, all civil servants.

Re: how tariffs work 101

Any exporter that drops their prices, is still only going to do it by a negligible fraction. Worked example:

I sell something for £100, on which I make 10% gross margin = £10 profit. Now the target country wants to charge 10% tariff. If the exporter absorbs that, they make *zero* profit, so they won’t do that.

However, it’s also true that if they stopped selling to that country, they’d lose X% of total sales, which they need to make up elsewhere. And the only way to do that is by dropping their price to buyers in other countries [WAIT! I don’t think that’s what Trump had in mind! Yeah, that’s right, Trump is an idiot, if the USA is worried about subsidising other countries, that’s exactly what he is about to do, the net beneficiary of any trade war is *buyers in third party countries*]. At 10% gross margin, the equilibrium selling price drops by 1-2%. 90% of the tariff impact is on the import side.

Now, I know what the MAGA / EU tariff crowd think (same people, different flag). “We’re a huge market of 400 million people, we’re your most important market, if we raise the tariffs then we’ve got you over a barrel, you’ll have to pay them”. No. The reason why that’s wrong, is that *if* that is the market dynamic, then the importer *already* has the exporter over a barrel. They’ve *already* got squeezed prices to the maximum possible, the market dynamic is already priced in. That’s how prices work, they sit at the point where the seller is prepared to walk away if the buyer pushes harder, because there’s insufficient profit. If the market dynamic is as described, then the gross margin won’t be 10%, it will be 2%. So if the exporter absorbed, they would be *losing 8% on every tonne they ship*, which they aren’t going to do.

And for those saying “Ah, but TSMC are selling at 40% gross margin”. Yes, they are. Because they can. It’s telling you that if the buyer, walked away from the table, TSMC can get only slightly less than 40% margin from their remaining market.