* Posts by GruntyMcPugh

1601 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Sep 2016

Elon Musk's brain-computer interface outfit Neuralink tests its tech on a human

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: sp -1

Well, clearly we are going to be able to interface with Prime, then have a fully immersive real world adventure by controlling an Optimus remotely. It will be a transforming experience: It'll be nearly as good as going outside for real.

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Some sources say 12 monkeys died after having Neuralink implants. Along with ~1500 other animals that have been experimented on.

Your choice though.

IBM talks up cost savings, including 'workforce rebalancing'

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: What does IBM do these days?

I worked for them until 2015, when I took Voluntary Redundancy. I had ten years under my belt at that point, after we were TUPEd to them in an outsourcing deal. So at that point, they did outsourcing, hosting, and still sold servers. They would project manage software development, and plan hardware installations, and entire lifecycle support. I think most of this stuff went to Kyndryl when they span that off.

Since then? No idea what core IBM does. I just know working in a medium sized organisation now, there's nothing we'd buy from them. Back in the day, there was an AS/400 here, but IBM don't sell any hardware we'd be interested in buying now. The rest, AI and all that, seems too vague, and a luxury or vanity purchase. We haven't got that sort of disposable budget.

Tesla goons will buy anything – including these $150 beers

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: How about the flame thrower?

The Flame thrower was a Boring Company product iirc. The same Boring company that was going to make bricks from the dirt it mined out of tunnels, sell them, and become financially self supporting. I understand the planned tunnel from Ontario International Airport they were supposed to dig never happened, as costs spiralled from $45M to ~$500M, at which point, they bailed. At least folks that ordered the weed burners got one.

FTC: Please stop falling for social media scams, you've given crooks at least $650M so far this year

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

That happened to a member of staff where I work, a member of staff's 'boss' emailed using gmail, asking for Apple gift cards. Real boss was online in our instant messenger app, minion failed to clarify with boss and got scammed. Why are bosses too busy to buy gift cards, but able to do whatever it is they need them for, whilst so busy,... why are they using gmail when they are online,... why not communicate fully through company channels?

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Seems people are still a bit naive. I saw a story recently that a gang in Nottingham were approaching young adults, and telling them about some Crypto investment that was a sure fire winner. They then asked for the mark's mobile phone, so they could add them to a social media group, and just walk off with the phone, at which point accomplices appear, and tell the mark to let it go.

I'm an ABC'er, Assume nothing, Believe nothing, Challenge everything, seems a lot of people skip these steps.

Twitter, aka X, tops charts for misinformation, EU official says

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Well, as long as the IPCC and their syncophants have accounts

If someone animated that, I'd watch it. There's some advert with Pandas doing Tai Chi, I wish that bit were longer, it would be some great ASMR relaxation material.

Elon Musk has beef with Bill Gates because he shorted Tesla stock, says biographer

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

And the thing is, if Gates had profited from the short, he'd probably have used the money for some philanthropical purpose eventually, whereas it's a rather tenuous claim that Tesla is leading the charge against climate change.

Morgan Stanley values Tesla's super-hyped supercomputer at up to $500B

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: always connected ?

Training on a supercomputer is fine, but can you perform logic simplification for AI? Quine McCluskey for neural nets, so they can be run on in car systems?

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Tesla

Yeah, surely if 'Dojo' cost ~£1Bn to develop, it adds maybe a few $Bn in value over it's lifetime, tops. Anyway, until Tesla start paying shareholders dividends, it's just a massive Ponzi scheme, and whoever is left holding stock when the music stops loses. 'Dojo; is just another monkey to crank the handle.

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: What if

Er, no. Musk might manage a stable of companies, but that doesn't mean it's legal to give companies in that circle preferential treatment. There's fiduciary responsibility to get the best deal if it's being offered for license or rental. If Musk owned all the companies outright, yeah, he could do that, but he has to answer to investors and shareholders.

OpenAI urges court to throw out authors' claims in AI copyright battle

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Yea, verily.

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Adversarial inputs, anyone?

Same, I've asked it for chapters of various novels and each time it's mentioned copyright, and suggested other sources if I want the whole thing. So the data might have been ingested, but it's not being reproduced, and the case may stand or fall on that.

Germany's wild boars still too radioactive to eat largely due to Cold War nuke tests

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Must be easy to hunt, though..

I wonder if the boar are radioactive enough that skewering them on a carbon moderator rod would make them cook themselves,... : -)

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

I was at 6th form. We gathered soil and water samples from various places around the school grounds into labelled containers, (old 35mm film canisters) marked where the samples were gathered on a map, went back to the Physics lab, tested them all with a Geiger counter and,... well,... were a little disappointed.

Musk's latest X-periments: No more headlines, old posts vanish, block gets banned

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge
Pint

'Xcreeted' you made my day. And I'm totally stealing that. It's the weekend, have a beer on me ->

Start rummaging: Atari's new 2600+ console supports vintage cartridges

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: No shipping

I started as a Saturday lad at Woolworths in '83, and we sold, sorry, stocked the Atari 2600, but we sold far more Commodore Vic-20s and '64s, Amigas, etc. The Coleco and Vectrex were better selling games consoles at that point.

IBM sells off cloud business – yes, we mean Weather.com

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: I see Apple mostly ditched them a while ago - and predictions improved

I've never used Weather.com, so I just went and had a look. It fails to find my UK postcode, and offers me instead the weather report for Charing Cross, which is over 100 miles away.

Oh, it's worse than that. It fails to find any city name I type in and defaults to Charing Cross. $2Bn huh?

Computer graphics pioneer John Warnock dies at 82

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: In 80pt bold please :)

"The Cuckoo's Egg", that was a good read. I started working as a Computer Operator in 1990 and a colleague lent me that book. I'll check out some of the other titles you mentioned, maybe it will rekindle my love of computing. It all seemed to exciting and new back then.

IBM shows off its sense of humor in not-so-funny letter leak

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Well, IBM probably bill extra for delivering service with a smile.

LG's $1,000 TV-in-a-briefcase is unlikely to travel much further than the garden

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

and with that spare change you could get a portable power station like a Jackery, £200 gets 240WH capacity, so we still have some change for a cooler and some beer.

Lost voices, ignored words: Apple's speech recognition needs urgent reform

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

We've had a couple of funnies with Teams telephony sending transcripts for missed calls. One user reported a potentially abusive message to us from 'Mistress Spanky', when the message was from Mrs Stransky. and another from 'ADP Foreign Security' which turned out to be 'ADT Fire and Security'. So we've now got a small worry that transcripts of meetings contain howlers, and people in meetings might be seen to be agreeing with them, and whether this could be a subject access request / FOIA embarrassment.

Bank of Ireland outage sees customers queue for 'free' cash – or maybe any cash

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: It's a bank, of course it's not free money

Many years ago, I got an extra fiver (yeah that long ago, when you could withdraw £5) I asked for £10, and between two of the £5 notes, was a folded fiver, I guess it somehow didn't get counted, I presume they detect the edges. But then I wondered if it was even accounted for going into the machine if they used the same method. So I stopped worrying, and went to the pub.

Former DEC employees to rally against stagnant pensions post-HP

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

OK, I think you answered my question, I couldn't understand why the pension hadn't increased in value, but if like you say, it's not an investment fund, it's just a pot of cash, I get it. My IBM pension has increased in value since I left 8 years ago, so I was missing something, cheers.

You're not seeing double – yet another UK copshop is confessing to a data leak

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Captain paranoid

Vexatious requests, oh dear, I work in local Govt, and luckily, some of our more vexatious citizens haven't realised FOIA means we have to respond, and instead just send emails to Councillors and the City Mayor. Most of our FOIA requests are salespeople fishing for information 'how much have you spent on Y in the last year' etc. The vexatious letters to the Mayor tend to be stuff like 'Do you shield people from the harmful effects of 5G in public libraries' etc.

Cumbrian Police accidentally publish all officers' details online

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Oh, the irony.

If you're Russian to the Moon, expect traffic: Moscow's Putin a lander into orbit

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

No Russian Rover? Do the KGB not hire dwarves any more: -)

Cops cuff pregnant woman for carjacking after facial recog gets it wrong, again

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: "especially in the met"

Back in the 80s, my sister worked for Lincs Police doing admin, and one of the jobs was processing job applications. 'One for the Met' was an in joke about candidates who had failed badly.

Couple admit they laundered $4B in stolen Bitcoins after Bitfinex super-heist

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

2,000 transactions? One wonders if they'd planned a bit more, and stolen a lot less, whether they could have got away with it.

China floats strict screentime limits and content crimps for kids

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: It'll be interesting

Indeed, my initial thought was I spent most weekends with my best mate when I was a teen, so if we'd had a two hour limit, we'd have pooled resources, and spent two hours streaming or whatever on one device, then two hours on the other. Just like we used to pool resources when we were 17 year olds and we each rented a VHS then settled down for a sword and sorcery cheese fest many Saturday nights.

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: "parents everywhere might just welcome the Communist approach"

Yeah, two hours for 17 year olds? It took us that long to type a game into my mates BASIC compiler. Yes, type, he had a Sharp MZ80K, games on tape were like Unicorn poo.

Baidu builds AI into cars so you can distract the kids with text-to-image tools

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

If the AI can keep answering 'Are we nearly there yet?' without getting testy, it's worth it. If it could clean up vomit and dropped sweets, it would be worth it's weight in gold.

White House: Losing Section 702 spy powers would be among 'worst intelligence failures of our time'

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Well, Elon want to copy WeChat, so everyone gives him all their data about everything. Do we think he'll keep that data private?

US Air Force burns more money on electric flying taxis

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: "almost 1,000 times quieter than a helicopter."

I saw a documentary on YouTube about a drone delivery service in Africa, where they use asymmetric propellers to change the tone of the drone, and it made the noise far less annoying. no idea if it's practical at this scale though.

AWS: IPv4 addresses cost too much, so you’re going to pay

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: IPv6-mostly?

I work in local Govt, and we are still IPv4. I have a friend who designs networks, and every now and again I ask him if he's deployed any IPv6 and it's been a 'no' so far. Checking a couple of academic institutions I've worked at, one still appears to be on the same class B as when they were allocated back in the day.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's pop artifact stash now heads to a museum

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Re: Kirk's Chair

There's documentary (I think it's on YouTube) about the Enterprise Shuttle prop, and it's a real eye opener about how poorly that was looked after.

Prices of gallium and germanium rise as China export controls loom

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Checkmate?

It was funny that Trump wanted Tim Apple to make his phones in America, while Trump Signature shirts were made in China.

On the record: Apple bags patent for iDevice to play LPs

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Had to have been filed 2021-04-01?

The only thing I miss about vinyl is gatefold sleeves. Oh, and maybe the quest you had to sometimes go on to find an album that wasn't stocked by the mainstream outlets (Woollies, WH Smith, Boots, etc).

A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor? Take a closer look

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Do you read 'The Independent' Science section by any chance? It's often re-purposed press release BS, without a shred of journalistic investigation or scepticism. Mind you 'Ars Technica' can be guilty of that, they promoted a story about a device that could pull moisture from the air and make water, supposedly without any energy input, and this was going to save the water starved world.

Tesla's Dojo supercomputer is a billion-dollar bet to make AI better at driving than humans

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: "But then, you get to, like, 10 million training examples, it becomes incredible"

...and can fit in a car. So they have a supercomputer that is an 'AI' and can drive. That's nice. How do they engineer that into something that is viable in a vehicle?

Apple seeks patent for devices with roll-up displays – iRoll?

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Fruit by the foot or fruit roll-ups

Oh yea, oh yea, I think they could.

Microsoft whips up unrest after revealing Azure AD name change

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Azure AD

ah, yes, marketing types playing silly buggers,... even once, down to be told what (custom, mind you) font we had to use for all communications. A font. I wonder if they could expense their recreational pharmaceuticals.

Another challenger to OpenAI? OK, we'll allow it

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: An overlooked aspect

Zembledorsky's Automatic Computing Machine Corporation International', ZACMCI? Which led me phonetically, to xACME, which I am surprised Musk hasn't used yet. Maybe we shouldn't give him ideas, he'll only run off and invent them.

Sarah Silverman, novelists sue OpenAI for scraping their books to train ChatGPT

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Copying then Analyzing is copying

I just asked chatGPT to summarise "The Bedwetter" by Sarah Silverman. It gave me six short paragraphs. The Wikipedia page is only a little shorter. It's dust jacket stuff, not approaching a spoiler, let alone a significant amount of the book.

Tech execs turn to drink and drugs as job losses mount

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Why does this sound...

'Three to seven alcoholic drinks' is a bit meaningless too. I had a bottle of chocolate stout at the weekend that was 'three units' of alcohol apparently. I then had a large gin that was probably a quad. Was that two drinks, or seven units? Well, both I guess.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Poor design in my opinion

Sorbothane? Doesn't that make you fart? Oh, that's Sorbitol. Mind you, HiFi snobbery is a load of stinky wind.

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Worth more in the wrapper

The corners down even look round.

Lamborghini's last remaining pure gas guzzlers are all spoken for

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Exactly. I test drove a hybrid last year, pulled onto some dual carriageway and thought "I'd better put my foot down and get up to 50", checked the speedo, and I was already doing 50. Without the theatre of the engine revs, I was a bit out of touch judging speed and acceleration. I reckon I'd have quickly got over that, but I guess some people just won't want to.

Oh, great. Yet another tech billionaire thinks he can get microblogging right

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: ... and Other info."

You don't have to answer honestly, and if there is an 'other' box, just answer 'Fish' for both.

The number’s up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111

GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

Re: Until we manage to screw up with orbital debris

Yup, which is why I always pick a different mobile service provider to my wife, so we have resilience in case one becomes unavailable. Plus I have a low cost SIM only plan for my tablet, and I can make calls from that too.