Posts by Jimmy2Cows

Snowflake jumps on agentic AI train with Anthropic tie-up

Yes "compliance" and "90% accurate" don't really go together.

China's reusable rocket makes it to orbit but fails to stick the landing

Re: Short memories

It's Rocket Engineering. And that's hard.

Rocket Science is relatively easy in comparison.

MAGA cognoscenti warn feds away from shielding AI infringers

But is it fair use?

Surely it's about where you draw the line.

Using it for training LLMs might be considered fair use, because the LLM owner isn't publishing anything, and at that point is't getting any commercial gain from what's been ingested. The training period is a money pit, not a profit generator.

I'd say that argument totally evaporates once the owner starts selling access to the LLM. At that point, anything it spits out that comprises copyrighted material is clearly happening for financial gain, and they should be smacked down hard for it, like anyone else would be.

UK digital ID plan gets a price tag at last – £1.8B

I'm complaining about people who are too lazy to work, have never worked, made lift choices that put themselves in their situation, yet expect taxpayer handouts.

Don't really care about the super-rich since they tend to not be the ones claiming benefits.

Make it simple. You want benefits, do some work first. Don't just drop out of school and expect the state to cover your arse.

If the benefits bill is genuinely unsustainable, as we're being told it is by all sides, tie entitlement to how long a person has worked. Things can't continue as they are.

Absolutely go after them too, but remember that wealthy individuals usually already pay a huge amount of tax. Do you think going after the ones who don't will really move the needle much?

Besides this isn't a debate about whether people who live off trust funds are worthless layabouts (arguably some are, some are not, I don't know any so can't assess either way). This is a debate about bringing down the benefits bill for the taxpayer. Maligning people who don't claim benefits is irrelevant.

How about, instead of attacking the genuinely disabled and making their lives even harder than they are already, how about they go after the much larger component of welfare which is all the people who've never worked because they know they can get benefits for doing bugger all. That'll save many 10s of billions overnight, but the government is too spineless to make it happen.

Such benefits should be a privilege for those who've paid into the system, to support them if things go wrong.

Never worked and not disabled? No benefits for you.

Made poor life choices and now you can't get a job you want? Tough shit. You were warned about your poor life choices at school. If you went. If you didn't, well, there you are with another poor life choice that the rest of us shouldn't have to suffer for.

Don't want to a job that's "beneath you" like care? Too bad. Care sector is crying out for workers and they'll provide all the training needed. You basically just need to turn up (yes ok and pass the background checks, which might be hard for some, but again... poor life choices). My wife spent years working as a carer so I know how tough it can be, but it's still work. They should pay better, because it is really a profession that needs skills (interpersonal, understanding of regs, safety, first aid etc.). Not an unskilled profession at all.

TSMC lawsuit claims former exec is probably leaking secrets to Intel

Re: A few doubts

Does seem quite a stretch to believe he has detailed technical knowledge of the kind that would somehow get Intel up to TSMC standards.

It's also not a stretch to believe that as a counsel to chaiman / CEO on corporate strategy matters, he might need to know what various R&D teams are up to and thereby understand how their efforts could feed into those strategic choices. Saying "he wasn't a tech guy so had no reason to talk to anyone in R&D" is naive at best, deliberate misdirection and falsehood at worst.

One-fifth of the jobs at your company could disappear as AI automation takes off

Re: 10 to 19 percent service enshittification

I'd say you're being generous, and vastly underestimating the ensuing enshitification.

SC25 gets heavy with mega power and cooling solutions

Re: Groan…

Shame it's not 1.21 gigawatts (sorry, err... Jiggawatts) and then it could disappear back in time up its own fundament.

San Jose's 'warrantless' license plate queries land cops in court

Re: ANPR's are a tool and can be a very useful one.

The lawsuit isn't objecting to the tool itself. It's not complaining about valid uses of ALPR.

It is objecting to the more than 200,000 warrentless searches of the database behind that tool. Without access safegaurds, it's ripe for misuse and abuse like searches for personal reasons, stalking, political or racially biased fishing trips.

Windows 11 26H1 is coming ... for new processors only

Re: I suppose it could be worse

"Microsoft today announced that they've stopped work on Windows 11 version 26H1 because they watched the news and just didn't see any point in continuing."

And that is worse how? Even if the world ends, at least we won't have an even shitter version of Windows forced on us.

Re: it wasn't like QC stood for much at Microsoft anyway.

Time for some more fitting alternatives... I'll kick off with these:

Quite Crap

Quietly Careless

Quality Crippled

Quickly Crashes

UK military looking for tactical comms, systems suppliers in deal worth up to £9.6B

Re: Grok sent me this msg from the future ..

Grok seems a tad combative.

But Grok is as entitled to its opinion as you or I.

Assuming it can give the same opinion to the same query in two different prompt sessions, that is. If not, it doesn't have an "opinion" and is just making stuff up on the spot, based on internet statistics for gluing various words together in some context.

Re: Grok sent me this msg from the future ..

Riiiiight... that's in no way a steaming pile of vaguely plausible-sounding word salad. No siree.

Senate bill would require companies to report AI layoffs as job cuts reach 20-year high in October

Re: Why trust companies to self-report?

Because that's closer to actually doing something about the problem, rather than just looking like they're doing something about the problem...?

Colt gets greenlight for £2.5bn London datacenter splurge

Retro-fitting district heating?

Isn't that hideously disruptive and expensive?

Usually best to build the infrastructure for district heating, then build the district on top of it.

This is just green-washed virtue signalling, trying to appear to be doing something for the "greater good", while really they'll brown-out the locals when grid demand gets too high.

Re: Recovery

Bingo.

We can barely generate enough power to keep the lights on, certainly not enough to for everyone to have an electric car and an electric heat pump, and charge/use them when they like. Hence brain-farts like requiring EVs to support battery-to-grid, and paying people to delay their normal routines until off-peak times, for when the grid can't keep up.

Yet somehow they can find another 97MW for a data centre, in a population- and infrastructure-dense part of the country that will make building the thing way more complex and slower than necessary. And this is just one DC, with several more in the pipe.

Re: give our hard working representatives some time off

That's alright, they don't need any more time off. They're clearly not "working people" under the government's own salary-based definition of what a working person is, which means they must already have plenty of time off.

Wonder if Reeves has twigged yet that she's just described herself, the PM, the entire government, all MPs in fact, as a bunch of non-working freeloaders. As own-goals go, it's pretty spectacular.

Gorge on Microsoft Store apps with 16-at-once installer

Not simultaneous installations

They're clearly sequential downloads and installs, which the word "Queued" in the multi-install screenshot makes immediately obvious to anyone but the most deluded MS apologists.

China's CR450 bullet train clocks 453 km/h in pre-service tests

Re: Impressive. But should you?

Neither is a plane crash, yet we still use air travel and statistically it's a very safe way to travel. Of course air travel has lots of regulations that (in theory, looking at you Boeing) make it this safe.

It's all just a risk/benefit analysis. Ultra-high-speed rail would need similar safety precautions to minimise risk. Whether or not that happens is a different question.

If you can't use AI then it's bye bye, Accenture tells staff

Re: “Consultancy says machine learning advice is making bank“

Nah. "Making bank" = Americanism for "enabling them to make a lot of money".

Why would they start caring now?

Breathe easy: Apple Watch can read your oxygen levels again

Re: not presenting the blood oxygen measurement on the Watch

Came here to say eaxctly the same thing. Suspect Masimo's patent is one of those "on a mobile device" derivations that no sane patent office would actually grant, and that Masimo made the mistake of making the claim too specific - i.e. just on the wearable - rather than keeping it to the vague "on a mobile device" that somehow seems to qualify mundane shit as patent-worthy unique invention.

Thus allowing Apple to do an obvious workaround to a dumb patent that should never have been granted in the first place.

NASA boss calls for nuclear reactor on the Moon

Re: what happens when

Might want to tone down the hyperbole. Exactly how much nuclear material do you expect will be there? The moon is huge (compared to a reactor), and still orbiting just fine, still tugging our tides just fine, despite billions of years getting repreatedly whacked by meteors that would make an exploding nuclear reactor seem like a firecracker.

[Icon for what won't happen. And even if it did, it won't cause the problem you feverishly imagine.]

Australia bans kids from signing up for YouTube accounts, angering Google

Going by the downvotes, we seem to have couple of Google shills lurking within these hallow'd pages.

Japan discovers object out beyond Pluto that rewrites the Planet 9 theory

Re: Japan discovers object out beyond Pluto that rewrites the Planet 9 theory

Oh, here we go...

(Though FWIW I too consider Pluto a planet. Maybe because for the majoirty of my life it was always considered a planet by everyone. Flame on!)

Britain's billion-pound F-35s not quite ready for, well, anything

Re: Alternatives

Capture that carbon!

Former Google DeepMind engineer behind Simular says other AI agents are doing it wrong

Usually this happens in an industry we call an API-deficient industry

In that case, why don't they build a fucking API for it? Improving productivity can't be that important to them if they can't or won't do what's been possible for the last 40+ years.

Far more cost-effective and reliable than a $500/month/user AI.

Musk's antics and distractions are backfiring as Tesla's car business stalls

Re: Tragedy

Why are these global conspiracy theory nutjobs almost always ACs? Almost like they're signalling their secret shame...

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren't AI at all

Re: Money where your mouth is

How do we know it isn't already? I has all the hallmarks of spouting made-up garbage.

Amazon's Ring can now use AI to 'learn the routines of your residence'

"We do not log the descriptions generated from Video Descriptions"

I call bullshit. They must log something. How else will the AI "learn the routines of your residence"?

Microsoft is about to retire default outbound access for VMs in Azure

Re: The future of technology in a nutshell.

Isn't this MS current business model? We break stuff at random, you pay us more for the privilege of continuing to use us.

Re: more nerd shit

And so you're here on El Reg because...? This is literally a site about nerd shit.

UK govt dept website that campaigns against encryption hijacked to advertise ... payday loans

Re: LOL I love it

That many!?! Now that's what I call impressive outreach.

Brain activity much lower when using AI chatbots, MIT boffins find

Re: "and also the headgear coloration of the Pope"

Something about the Pope's preferred religion, but the details escape me. Oh well, I must need to spend more time using AI. That will help me forget entirely.

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Re: Well, OK, technically he/she/it is correct.

As any fule kno, that's the best kind of correct :)

Re: 250kW, 320kW chargers

While there are some expensive EVs that can charge at that rate, finding a public charger that says it will deliver that rate can be a challenge.

Finding a public charger that actually delivers at that rate is even harder. You might get that rate if you're the only one charging at that location, and if the grid is able to deliver that much at the time.

Most times in many places, that nameplate rate has been proven to be shared across however many cars are charging at that location. What Car published an article in the last few months about exactly this.

So, the cars might be ready, if you can afford one, but as usual the UK's infrastructure is lagging badly behind. Government should have made sure that there is sufficient charging capacity and convenience available before kicking off the aggressive EV mandates.

Why is China deep in US networks? 'They're preparing for war,' HR McMaster tells lawmakers

Re: Crazy numbers

Sounds more like Numberwang.

Next week's SpaceX Starship test still needs FAA authorization

Call me jeuvenile but this appealed to my inner child. Musk publicly letting rip, combined with the pathetic frailty of a Cybertruck. What the hell; it's Friday afternoon and I'm bored.

Microsoft updates the Windows 11 Start Menu

Re: Gee ... Dear God in Heaven !!!

It's not the only solution. What's wrong with a simple keyword search? They're just desperate to get payback on their AI investments and this is one more thing to needlessly shoehorn AI into. AI is not essential here, it's simply sn obvious follow-the-money decision.

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

1 trillion tonnes of CO2

Replanting a large chunk (i.e. a trillion) of the roughly 3 trillion trees humanity has felled will remove about that much CO2 from the atmosphere, reduce local and possibly global temperatures (greenery has a local cooling effect), filter more pollutants from the air (trees act as air natural filters), and even increase oxygenation slighty (increased photosynthesis), for far less cost and on about the same time scale as building a load of nuclear reactors.

I am very pro-nuclear, but if your goal is removal of existing CO2, there are far easier and cheaper ways to do it. Of course we aren't allowed to consider simple and cheap solutions. We can only consider solutions that force massive lifestyle changes on the entire planet, at eyewatering cost.

Re: Going nuclear

Corporal Hicks said that, not Ripley.

Amazon touts Vulcan – its first robot with a sense of 'touch'

"Sir! You appear to be leaking coolant at an alarming rate! Would you like me to apply some hot sealant...?"

HMRC's Making Tax Digital scheme also made tax more expensive – by £300M

Re: Small business VAT

Surely the point is that it used to cost nothing at all to do it via a web form. Now there is a cost borne by the tax payer filing the submission. Doesn't matter that cost can be relatively small. There was no cost before. They made things worse, not better.

I doubt it's saving HMRC anything, since the input from all these different providers will still have to be processed. If that's automated, what was wrong with just automating the old web form? HMRC still has to maintain the automation itself.

AI models routinely lie when honesty conflicts with their goals

Re: Conflicts of interest

You're right about the conflict. But making it deliberately unreliable is a design feature? That makes zero business sense.

AI training license will allow LLM builders to pay for content they consume

Re: Sceptical

Well, I think there's this thing called "copyright" that you might have heard of... but it's a relatively new concept so perhaps you haven't.

It's supposed to protect content producers from being ripped off. All the AI companies are conveniently ignoring it because they're backed by companies worth billions and have armies of lawyers.They are ripping off everything left, right and centre. Far more than any so-called "piracy" could ever hope to do. But, most individual publishers are too small to fight it.

As for why a non-profit would want to do this? Surely it just means they charge a fee for their services but it all goes into the directors' pockets and there's no profits to distribute to shareholders. Aren't ther also tax breaks for non-profits? Why wouldn't they want to do that? Plus it sounds nicer to most people. Not some greedy publicly-traded corporate entity in cahoots with some unseen business interest.

IBM dragged down by DOGE contract cancellation roulette

Re: What comes around....

Except the C-suite dorks at IBM won't suffer for it. They'll just dump the pain on a couple thousand fired workers and it's trebles all 'round.

As ChatGPT scores B- in engineering, professors scramble to update courses

Re: Less than perfect

Like it or not, when putting something into a computer one expects it to give a correct answer. A calculator wouldn't be any use if it gave a wrong answer that seemed convincing, but you then had to check the result by some other method. AI is no different, and since AI is being pushed heavily as the answer to everything, that answer damn well better be correct every time. Anything less is of limited to no use, depending on your situation. And certainly not worth the cost and hype currently expended.

Meta debuts its first 'mixture of experts' models from the Llama 4 herd

Re: Leans left - from a US perspective.

Meta is just desperately kissing Trump's rump and stay on his good side. They've never cared about the quality of their output. For the rest of the world this means sifting through even more steaming piles of right-wing garbage and alternative truths.

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

Re: Please explain

Maybe if US companies hadn't greedily offshored all their production capabilities in pursuit of ever-increasing profit and meeting arbitrary Wall Street expectations on continuous growth, the US wouldn't be facing a trade deficit in the first place.

Capitalist values are an underlying cause i.e. they did it to themselves, and now Trump is bitching about it like it's everyone else's fault. The cows are coming home to roost, and all the dominoes are falling like a house of cards.