Posts by Jimmy2Cows

DEF CON bans Meta-style 'pervert glasses'

Re: Ah great

Who's the dick who downvoted this?

EU appears to find datacenter emissions easier to offset than lobbyists

Re: Lobbyists

Lobbying should be outlawed as the bribery that it is.

Or politicians should grow a spine and some integrity, remind the lobbyists who has been elected to lead, and tell them to do one.

Por que no los dos?

Oh who am I kidding.

NASA tests AI medic for astronauts too far from Earth to call a doctor

Wrong name

Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant

Should be Crew Medical Officer Digital Expert

Feeling like shit in space? I don't want no assistant! I want an expert! Get me a CMO-DE, dammit.

Companies are not looking before they're leaping into the AI playpen

Re: 83% of pioneers have had AI incidents

We've taken to calling it the slot machine. Sometimes you'll win, sometimes you'll lose. You never know in advance how it'll go. And you certainly never know how much it will cost to find out. Didn't matter when it was unmetered subscription. Pull that lever until it pays out; it's not costing you any more to keep playing. But now the token bills roll in regardless of the outcome. Remind me who's really winning here.

Ordering a trip back to 2009, with a side of nostalgia

A time when Windows 7 was Microsoft's latest and greatest

It still is their greatest. Windows 11 can only dream of what might have been.

[Flame on!]

Blue Origin's New Glenn makes a crater-sized dent in Artemis plans

indeed what the collective carbon footprint of Bezos and Space Karen is?

Infinitesimal compared to global emissions, is what it is.

Experts pour cold borscht on Farage's Russian hack claim

Re: Putin: who me?

Way to miss the point. Plenty believe they could/would do it. We're just waiting for dodgy Nige to present some evidence for his bold claims. You do know what they say about bold claims, don't you?

Without evidence, this just comes across as desperate deflection of all the corruption allegations.

Scotland Yard can keep using live facial recognition on people in London, say judges

the identifications potentially prevented many more sex attacks against vulnerable children

Ah yes, won't somebody please think of the children. The classic refrain whenever they want to do something the public opposes.

And either they prevented attacks or they didn't. There's no "potentially". That's just more weasel words desperately trying to justify something intensely unpopular.

Goodbye, Lunar Gateway: NASA ditches Moon station for Moon base

shift from "bespoke, infrequent missions to a repeatable, modular approach"

Call me an awkward naysayer who won't be a team player if you like, but this seems... unlikely... given they've only gotten SLS off the ground once, and have failed several times to repeat that.

So, what? Is Issacson gonna pull a modular reusable launch system out of his arse?

Price tag seems to be lo-balling it...

$10B for phase one, and I read somewhere else they're allocating $20B for all this over 7 years.

Given ISS took $150B to build, launch, and operate, and that's only in Earth orbit not landed on the moon, this seems way too cheap.

AI-pilled Arm CEO teases mystery products that will turn it into a money machine

Rene Haas

CEO's name is very befitting... Hype as a service.

Hotpatching goes default in Windows Autopatch whether you like it or not

Re: The compressed timescale

Don't forget this one... MS desperately needing to get a commercial return on AI investments, so forcing Even More CoPilot down everyone's throat, additional subscription requirements, ever more ingenius ways to make it reallly hard to opt out of subscription services.

Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after USB keys fail to decrypt them

Re: 30% seems a large enough number to me to rule out abandoning physical cash.

Yeah, even if 99% of people didn't use cash 99% of the time, I expect the majority of them would want to be able to use cash as a fallback when (not if) some tech in the payment chain fails. As it does from time to time even under benign conditions.

UK to demand social platforms take down abusive intimate images within 48 hours

Not sure what you're smoking, but there's no resistance here to taking stuff down. There is, however, resistance to having "IMMEDIATELY" applied in a legal context. Context where large companies will get away with skirting the boundaries, but a small outfit will be hauled over the coals if they're a nanosecond too slow.

Define the term. Is it the very instant an infringing post goes up? 5 minutes after posting? 10 minutes? 20? Careful now, because only the first one qualifies as "immediate" by every accepted definition of the word.

48 hours is far too long for a global org, but 5 minutes is far too short for a one-man-band forum that possibly falls under OSA scope because they don't properly define "small".

Re: A few well publicised cases would stop this in its tracks.

Nice idea in principle, but the sort of people that post these things aren't known for having filters, impulse control, or thinking it through.

Certainly fine the hell out of them, but it won't stop other stupid people doing what stupid people do.

Claude Code's prying AIs read off-limits secret files

Re: Devil's Advocate

Then it should have said "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" rather than effectively just ignoring the previous instruction.

Recline of the machines: Terminator felled by dodgy battery

Re: Digital something something

Digital Differential Analyser. Also known as Bresenhams line algorithm.

Linus Torvalds: Stop making an issue out of AI slop in kernel docs – you're not changing anybody's mind

Re: I do use them to help me code tho, and opus 4.5 is smarter than any dev I've ever worked with.

Funny, I find most devs I've ever worked with way smarter than any LLM.

If you need an LLM help you code, how can you know how "smart" it is? And therein's part of the problem. LLMs aren't "smart" at all. They're probablistic character generators that sometimes get it right-enough to just about function, and at other times get it wildly wrong.

Ultimate camouflage tech mimics octopus in scientific first

Re: carats

MORE CARROTS THAN ANYONE IN HISTORY! No ones ever done this many carrots before. Our carrots will be the FIRST and GREATEST. MAGA!!!

Re: Clever, but...

Pitch it to Trump. He's all about covering stuff in gold. Though he'd probably complain that it's only a thin layer. Not good enough. Only the biggliest, MOST THICKEST, BEST gold layers for DJT.

New carbon capture tech could save us from datacenter doom

Re: Wrong premise

I appreciate it's bad form to reply to my own post, but it reminded me of a local problem.

Our council is putting in cycle routes everywhere, in the vain hope that more people will cycle instead of drive. Never mind the myriad reasons why this won't work, but here's the kicker...

They have cut down all the large, long-established trees along the route to do it. Dozens of trees, gone.

Hardly a good look for what is ostensibly about reducing pollution.

Meanwhile traffic has been heavily disrupted all around the area, causing vastly increased congestion and the associated pollution that goes with it. Excess wear on the surrounding roads. How much additional pollution has this exercise generated, that will never be negated by these cycle routes once they eventually finish them? Never mind reversing the pollution, which the trees would have helped with. All this extra pollution won't even be offset.

Again, bad optics for what they say is the goal.

They're doing it all over the city and these routes have maybe one or two cyclists per hour at best, in the summer. Rest of the year it's maybe a handul of people per day. In winter, forget it. Millions of taxpayer pounds wasted.

Re: Wrong premise

The best, cheapest, and fastest way to carbon capture is trees.

Plant. A lot. More. Trees.

Grow, manage, harvest, repeat. Pretty simple.

That's it. Also gives us a useable byproduct for construction. But that's a practical and pragmatic solution that doesn't create any climate-emergency fear factor.

All these technological solutions are scientifically interesting a great for our overall knowledge advancement, but they are all dancing at the edges and cannot make any realistic dent.

We is solid form so essential?

Liquid form could be piped/transported away to some centralised processing facility to bulk-recover and recycle the CO2. Solid form seems to imply recovery in-place is needed, which seems way, way less efficient.

Or is solid form more effective at capture? I guess the aforementioned functionalised beads could be a decent middle ground. Still transportable.

Smartphones face a memory cost crunch – and buyers aren't in the mood

Re: At Last! A Silver Lining!

And that's if it even compiles...

Re: programmers to be interested in recognising/writing efficient code

Most are, at least among those I've ever met or worked with. We don't set out to make bloated shite. What we need is to be given time to actually do it, rather than ridiculous deadlines to get shit out the door as fast as possible. Misunderstandings about "agile" and desperation to be first out the door with something shiny all work against doing a properly good job.

US freezes $42B trade pact with UK over digital tax row

Re: Well, let's hope the UK negotiating team are up to the job.

Come on now, behave. We all know they're not up to it.

From Georgia to Essex, AI datacenters are testing public goodwill

Re: keeping dirty coal-fired plants online.

Well... it's what 49.8% of 64.1% of eligible voters voted for... i.e. only around 1/3rd of the voters.

Denmark takes a Viking swing at VPN-enabled piracy

the speaker is lying or the speaker has no idea what they're talking about

Por que no los dos?

Activist groups urge Congress to pause US datacenter buildouts

Re: nuclear -- the better way

Except they (DCs) need all that juicy power now not in 10+ years it takes build one nuclear power plant, never mind a fleet. Which means gas and coal are king for the foreseeable future.

Funny how there's funding, incentives, tax breaks etc. and all the environmental concerns are overlooked when a DC wants power, but when the plebs need it just to keep the lights on and be able cook, clean, shower, heat their homes, charge their EVs when they want to (not when the power company says they can a.k.a "load shifting") there's no money available and the government torpedoes any suggestion of building more gas and coal power stations to meet the basic needs of the population.

Porsche panic in Russia as pricey status symbols forget how to car

Re: ...or should that be Brava!, or Punto!, or Multipla! ....?

Oh God no! Never a Multipla! Don't know WTF the Fiat board was smoking when they approved that design, but it must have been damn strong.

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.