Posts by Tessier-Ashpool

Brit AI boffins making bank with £560K average pay packet at Anthropic

Make hay while the sun shines. The AI won’t be paying for any engineers when it’s clever enough to write itself.

Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

Virus, anyone?

Has any bright dev used it to create a fiendishly invasive virus?

It's trivially easy to poison LLMs into spitting out gibberish, says Anthropic

Garbage In Garbage Out

As more and more AI-generated content appears on the interwebby thing, I can see an existential crisis as it starts feeding its own crap into its training data.

Brits warned as illegal robo-callers with offshored call centers fined half a million

Re: Another insignificant punishment

Yup, it’s going to send scammers crazy. When a robot voice asks them to state their name and purpose for the call, they will most likely head for the hills.

OK great, UK is building loads of AI datacenters. How are we going to power that?

Re: Hmm

Batteries. They are going to be a big thing. Some houses are already using them to store electricity produced when demand is low.

Solar on a rooftop is, of course, not the whole answer, but every kilowatt produced is less gas burned to power the grid. The direction of travel is clear: less gas is used in UK power stations every year.

China's EV champ BYD reveals super-fast charging that leaves Tesla eating dust

A wild stab in the dark here, but I imagine they have rugged circuit breakers fitted.

SLAP, Apple, and FLOP: Safari, Chrome at risk of data theft on iPhone, Mac, iPad Silicon

Re: Difference in response compared to Spectre

Apple (well. Foxconn) is back in the server business. But only for internal use. They currently use M2-based servers for Apple Intelligence. Shortly to be upgraded to M4 systems.

EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

Range: My EV can do a few hundred miles in warm weather, and about 260 in cold months. It's much more than I need in a typical week.

Recharge time: Overnight when I'm sleeping, usually. On a long trip, a half-hour break after a couple of hundred miles is exactly what I need.

Recharge points: Not nearly enough ultra rapid points. Yet.

NASA wants ideas on how to haul injured moonwalkers

Jet Pack

We all need one.

Unbreakable Voyager space probes close in on a 50 year mission

Re: Good parts, fantastic engineering and excellent engineers

It's amazing. Do those things not have capacitors that dry out?

41-million-digit prime crunched by datacenter GPUs

Re: Is this any more useful than "AI", or more amusing cat videos?

The minute that ET visits Earth with a repeat proof of Fermat’s last theorem will surely be the day that mathematicians must concede discovery rather than creation.

Intel lets go of 2,000 staff at Oregon R&D site, offices in Texas, Arizona, California

Re: Cutting R&D

Great for short term managerial bonuses, though.

Smart TVs are spying on everyone

Re: old time ads

Hofmeister - follow the bear

Google brings better bricking to Androids, to curtail crims

Re: What could go wrong?

Depends on how good the biometrics are. You can fool the face detection of some cheap devices with a passport photograph. You can’t do that kind of thing with FaceID on an iPhone.

Black horse down: Lloyds online banking services go dark

App working

But I just noticed that beneath the prancing horse logo at the bottom of the home page, it says "All caught up"

What's all that about? Is the horse snagged on some barbed wire?

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

Re: Range is not the issue!

Actually, no. I get stupidly low rates for any electricity from 23.30 - 05.30 (7p per kWh), so that's when greedy items like the washing machine and tumble drier go on. And daytime rate is a pretty average 24p per kWh.

China currently has 440 Gigawatts of installed wind power capacity. They are investing in renewables more than the rest of the world put together. Coal power stations are a stop gap. You must look at things in the round.

Re: Several factors come to mind...

Why would anyone buy a new car of any type? Most car purchases are secondhand.

Re: Range is not the issue!

It's very cheap here in the UK, too. My weekly charge normally costs me in the region of £3 because I charge it when I'm sleeping.

Re: the average journey

The price of public EV chargers isn't a big deal for me, because most of my EV miles are powered by my home charger, at a very friendly cost of a fiver for 300 miles. For long journeys away from home, I don't mind paying a bit more, in the same way that I don't mind paying for a hotel room.

However, if you are reliant on public charging, a new EV probably isn't the thing for you at this juncture. It's a bit mad that public chargers attract VAT at 20%, whereas a home charger at much cheaper charging rates attracts VAT at 5%.

It's costing a huge amount of money to build out the ultra rapid charging points. Those costs have to be repaid. Over time, the cost of public charging should drop when the infrastructure has been paid for.

Re: not a solution for all

That's why it's a decades long project. ICE cars will be around for a long time after 2030. Most people buy secondhand anyway.

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

Re: Peace In

I know there is a word for people who cannot conjure up imagery (aphantasia) or sounds (anauralia) in their mind, but my state of mind is different to that. I can easily visualise things and replay an entire Beethoven concerto in my mind if I wish. What's missing, though, is any kind of inner voice that talks to me.

You may be right! My mind is a peaceful place most of the time. When I hear of people and their inner voices, I would be terrified if something like that happened to me. That's not to say I can't feel agitated - I certainly can. But there's no inner voice to discuss my agitation with me!

For many years, I believed this was the way that everyone thinks, and only found out late in life that inner voices are real things for the great majority of people. You just can't tell by looking at someone.

When I was a child, I read a comic that had a strip called The Numskulls. Little people would run around inside someone's head pulling levers to make the person do things. To my way of thinking, that's not a million miles from having something inside my head talking at me!

Indeed. Intelligence is more than language. My cat is quite bright, and he doesn't verbalise anything at all beyond the occasional miaow.

As for human thinking, I'm one of the small percentage of humans who doesn't have an inner voice. Bear with me if that sounds implausible to you. Most people do have a voice chattering away in their head, so I'm told. But I don't have one. When I tell people this, they often demand to know how on Earth I can think.

I don't need words to think. My thought processes are more akin to parallel processing. Words and symbols are useful for me if I want to serialise or disseminate information going in and out of my head. But I definitely don't need them to think.

SETI boldly looks beyond the Milky Way in latest alien hunt

There are no galactic civilisations

I find it rather quaint to imagine that there are creatures zipping around in space and living the sort of humdrum lives we live on the Earth.

No. That's not going to happen. When a civilisation hits a technological explosion, it's like hitting a brick wall. Millions of years of evolution and then BANG. After that, the dominant life on the planet will be AI. The machines will happily live using little power. Biological sentient creatures will die off, a result of their messing about with the environment. The AIs will spend a few thousand years tidying up the mess left behind by the biologicals.

And they won't be flying around in spaceships. When you have an IQ of 10,000, you basically know all there is to know and can work everything out from first principles.

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Not to mention using a hardware interrupt to flip video modes part way through a screen refresh so they could render coloured graphics at the bottom of the screen. Clever stuff.

Re: Water under the bridge

FORTH had to be the maddest language I ever worked with.

With everything being pushed and popped on and off the stack all the time, it was pretty easy to develop flaky code. Many years ago I devised a comms protocol in FORTH for some realtime process control instrumentation. After a week it would fall over with a stack overflow, as a main control loop occasionally failed to pop an item off the stack. Oops. Much headaches and burning of EPROMS to get a fix out.

Re: Two significant characters?

I just checked on Wikipedia.

"Variable names are only significant to 2 characters; thus the variable names VARIABLE1, VARIABLE2, and VA all refer to the same variable."

Deary me. Those were the days.

Two significant characters?

I heard a nasty story that Commodore Basic only distinguished the first two characters in variable names. Does anyone know if that is correct?

Body of IT tycoon Mike Lynch recovered after superyacht sinks

What was the bayesian probability of that happening?

God, if he exists, did plenty of messing about in the latter years of the life of Lynch.

Juice probe scores epic fuel save after snapping selfies with Earth and Moon

Re: Gravity?

Gravity assist involves the exchange of momentum. Wikipedia has a nice page about it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist

In particular, the animation showing the effect of gravity assist from two different reference frames.

Adobe exec likened hidden cloud subscription exit fees to 'heroin', says FTC

Re: Affinity

...and no subscription involved.

AI models face collapse if they overdose on their own output

Re: Prediction

Pop Will Eat Itself has been around since 1986.

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

Re: Dave Plummer has a different take on this

Maybe their drivers do have automated tests, but it still has to be deployed at the end of the day. If there's an esoteric problem in the deployment process, things could go awry.

I imagine heads are banging together in Crowdstrike wondering how they can/should stagger their updates and have better eyes on the results, so that failures are less catastrophic. Doubtless the updated servers were expected to continue sending telemetry back home. Why didn't something detect the absence of signals to stop the update in its tracks?

Mars is slam-dunked by hundreds of basketball-sized meteorites every year

Tens of kilometres per second, perhaps. AFAIK there is no solid body in the solar system that travels at hundreds of kilometres per second with respect to Mars. A few comets get beyond 50km/s, by dint of making close approaches to the Sun, where the gravitational field is at a maximum.

How Europe can force Apple to support competition

Re: I for one look forward to an apple free europe

It’s on hold until 2025, that’s all.

Re: Apple's browser rule

You can take my MacBook out of my cold dead hands.

Apple finally adds RCS support after years of mixed messages

To be fair, the new calculator app seems to have an excellent equation editor.

Astroboffins order most advanced spectrograph ever to sniff out alien life

Re: Of course

AKA Mostly Harmless.

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Re: There's no fun in scrum

I'd agree, if you just want to use the regular English definition of the word. Trouble is, the word is loaded these days, and de facto tied in with a particular methodology.

There's no fun in scrum

I'm out of the business now, safely retired. But I had 35 years of fun working mostly on my own. I got so much done without tedious project managers getting in the way.

However, in the latter stages of my career, I had to suffer the pain of agile and scrum. It was awful. A thorny problem would come along and I, as always, relished the thought of dreaming up an insightful elegant solution or approach. But, no, a directive on high would come to just bang something out every two weeks, fitting all the other tedious agile work around it. It made me so miserable, it was the final nail in the coffin for me.

Apple says if you want to ship your own iOS browser engine in EU, you need to be there

Re: I absolutely adored my Mac Classic.

If you’re an Apple fan who does movie reviews, you really have to slum it when taking movie screenshots. Basically, you have to use your iPhone to take a picture of the screen. Second rate.

Strong electric car sales expected for 2024, but charging grid needs work

Re: Also need to

Given that modern EV batteries are designed to last the lifetime of the vehicle, it's not a pressing concern. It will be big business, with lots of money to be made, in around a decade.

Re: while making registration and road tax for EVs cheaper

Road tax was historically cheaper (i.e. non-existent) for BEVs as an incentive for consumers to purchase BEVs, bearing in mind that they are expensive vehicles to buy. The incentive is being withdrawn in 2025.

The top five heaviest cars on the road are not EVs. Should they pay more road tax for road repairs? Roads are designed to carry buses, vans, lorries and all manner of heavy vehicles. Road damage is far from "commensurate", as there are many factors that contribute to poxy potholes on UK roads.

It is is very basic physics indeed if you imagine that a few hundred kilograms additional weight will contribute much to the state of our roads. If you are that worried, you can chip in to charity every time you carry a few passengers in your car.

Road repairs are paid through general taxation. Road tax (or Vehicle Excise Duty to give it its proper name) is not hypothecated, and has not been for many years. The VAT charged on a new BEV likely amounts to more than you will ever pay in road tax for an ICEV.

Ford pulls the plug on EV strategy as losses pile up

Hertz aren't dumping their EV fleet. Hertz EVs are mostly Teslas, which are expensive to buy and repair, and have significant depreciation. Hertz bought expensive and sell low. Rental companies sell their stock off after a few years, and the depreciation hit Hertz hard. "We are experiencing the consequence of a material price decline in Teslas and EVs more generally". They are flogging off about 40% of their Teslas, about 4.4% of their total vehicle fleet. Hertz are now focusing on buying cheaper EVs.

Amazon Ring sounds death knell for surveillance as a service

Amazon Ring Sounds Death

I read the headline as Amazon Ring Sounds Death. Which I have to agree with! The poxy sounder in the device sounds like one of those Christmas cards that plays a tune when you open it. Ghastly.

Apple's Vision Pro costs big bucks to buy and repair ... just don't mention the box design

Re: More homepod than ipod?

"And remember when some phones had lidar/radar in them to help? The market spoke, that didn't last long..."

Loads of iPhone and iPad models since 2020 feature LIDAR. You won't find it on Android devices. But then again, you won't find secure facial recognition on those devices either.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Re: Think of the Grid!

We import quite a bit of electricity. France will make up the shortfall with their extensive nuclear capability. Assuming, of course, our renewable program grinds to a halt. A lot of people have trouble with the notion that we're in a transition. It will take many years to fully switch over to EVs and get renewables into shape. That's why the targets are a long way in the future.

Adobe ditches $20B Figma takeover under pressure from monopoly cops

Pricey

Adobe subscribers - all 30 million of them - would have had to stump up at least $666 each to make this deal profitable for Adobe. A remarkably pertinent number.

Dump C++ and in Rust you should trust, Five Eyes agencies urge

Re: I must be a bit thick

I'm not surprised it goofed up. You were basically asking for trouble when you wrote code like that!

Re: Bull

I've written C# code that - despite my best and careful efforts - have occasional spasms when the garbage collector kicks in. Admittedly, my programming was a few years ago, but something else that often cropped up in C# was the obligatory nested using { } construct used to dispose of managed resources. Sometimes you have to do far from the obvious to dispose of managed resources correctly beyond wrapping them in using statements, involving temporary assignment of variables before disposal, and similar tricks. I'd hardly call any of that nonsense "safe". I often called it "yuk".