Posts by JRStern

Official abuse of state security has always been bad, now it's horrifying

dark gothic manoeuvers

For the UK to be casting such spitballs at the US at this point is beyond absurd.

Shame on Reg for printing such woke jokes.

Trump can't quickly or easily kill the CHIPS Act, but he can fire the workers funded by it

Re: CHIPS Act is $280 billion

The CHIPS Act, despite the name, is not just for building fabs. If "building fabs" was all it took, there would be a lot more countries making chips

It was motivated 10000% by companies running fabs in the US.

Anything else in it is pork barrel or corruption.

CHIPS Act is $280 billion

About $37b goes to companies with fabs.

The rest is boondoggle and slush fund.

Actually the amount going to Intel and others is unclear, not clear if that's just the cash and much more comes in tax credits and loans, or not, or if the additional is counted in the $280b, or what.

Microsoft shows off novel quantum chip that can scale to 'a million qubits'. So far: Eight

bubbles

I'm forever blowing bubbles

Pretty bubbles in the air

They fly so high

Nearly reach the sky

Then like my dreams they fade and die

Fortune's always hiding

I've looked ev'rywhere

I'm forever blowing bubbles

Pretty bubbles in the air

A big AI build has ‘stalled’ and won’t happen this year as funds and GPUs prove elusive

Avalanche by Xmas

Waddaya bet none of these five is ever completed.

Feds want devs to stop coding 'unforgivable' buffer overflow vulnerabilities

Microsoft?!

They have so many 20-30 year old dialogs built into major products, what do you want, they should clean them all up? They've probably lost the source code to most of them, LOL.

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

I don't know why and I don't know why I don't know why

So there.

Call it Windows 42 and I'll be first in line, maybe.

Ireland's AI minister has never used ChatGPT but swears she'll learn fast

ChatGPT is just like talking to a leprechaun

There, now she's fully up to date.

You probably have more CIO experience than the incoming White House CIO

Sounds OK-ish to me

CIO for the White House? Just keep Trump's phone charged. Actually it looks like he delegates some of that now. Job complete.

New guy seem to have some qualifications, give me a break.

I applied for a job a few years back, what was it - "Chief Data Officer". I'd never been a CDO, but hey. Made it through a first round but not a second. Thought I'd made a good presentation. Then I looked at the outgoing guy's CV. Nothing. Nada. So I was overqualified. Not for the first time. SMH. Now I'll bet ChatGPT could write me a really great CDO resume. That's how you do it.

Or mostly be someone's buddy.

DeepSeek means companies need to consider AI investment more carefully

But Chinese startup shakeup doesn't herald 'drastic drop' in need for infrastructure buildout, say analysts

But Chinese startup shakeup does herald 'drastic drop' in need for infrastructure buildout, says me.

They showed that by going beneath CUDA they could so some purely mechanical tuning and run 10x faster and/or cheaper.

Almost like NVidia was purposely providing support only for very inefficient operation.

Nah, now why would they do that?

there is no "historically" for AI, other than flame out and failure.

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Very nice coverage, thanks

So I have to run this on a graphics card? LOL.

Not my phone?

Not my NPU AI PC?

Harrumph. I'll just leave it in the cloud for now, why not.

I gave the online version a whirl on Friday and it did quite well but the responses looked a whole lot like ChatGPT, so that I thought it was just fronting for it. Now I hear that it's also largely trained with actual ChatGPT responses. Just how they map the prompts and responses must be curious in itself.

And this $6m price, was that just for the power for training? I'm confused what hardware they're saying is involved, and whether the cost of hardware is supposed to be included or excluded from the number.

Now we wait for the stock market to open on Monday ...

AI chatbot startup founder, lawyer wife accused of ripping off investors in $60M fraud

Which is worse?

Stealing $60m

or spending $500b on new AI data centers?

Microsoft eggheads say AI can never be made secure – after testing Redmond's own products

What are they even talking about?

Is that a security risk, that it might show a secretary as female?

SMH

GM parks claims that driver location data was given to insurers, pushing up premiums

Does the web site let you disable the self-destruct command?

What about disabling the vehicle if you miss a payment?

Blue Origin reaches orbit with New Glenn, fumbles first-stage recovery

Congrats to orbit

I'm a bit baffled that Musk's big fat Starship hasn't managed orbit yet.

Too many other systems to develop first, I get that, but ... I mean, given that Mars is the putative target, a mere Earth orbit would seem trivial.

Catching things with chopsticks, I dunno man, seems to be focusing on the wrong things.

Single source is almost never optimal

The cheapest most reliable solution would obviously to have a government owned central design bureau make the rocket

Nope. A little competition keeps both sides sharp and honest.

A little diversity works in R&D, too.

Intel’s datacenter architecture boss and Xeon lead jumps to Qualcomm

Did someone say "Itanium"?

It also records a long career that opened with work on the first Itanium processor and eventually saw him rise to lead engineer for more chips in that odd family

How was he still at Intel afterwards?

No wonder they've been in such trouble.

Nvidia snaps back at Biden's 'innovation-killing' AI chip export restrictions

I don't know if I should laugh or cry

Maybe I'd better ask ChatGPT.

New Outlook marches onto Windows 10 for what little time it has left

Outlook hazy, try again later

Magic Outlook 8-Ball

Intel debuts laptop silicon that doesn't qualify for Microsoft's 'Copilot+ PC' badge

I Want Cool

Maybe they should extend the line downwards, slower base, slower max, lower TDP.

1Ghz base, 4Ghz max, 10-40TDP.

Maybe build it on 28nm, LOL, though that would limit the cache.

Wonder if they could or how close they could come.

And how cheap it could be.

Even at $200/mo, Altman admits ChatGPT Pro struggles to turn a profit

So tell us already, how much is enough?

How far off are things?

Would $300/month turn it around?

$2,000 a month?

More?

Is more use a sign of great results or terrible results so people keep trying to get something useful?

Does it do better pr0n?

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Re: Basic will rise again!

--

I wonder how much of 'basic is 'orrible' was down to the differences between dialects, rather than the language itself?

--

Indeed.

I actually wrote a fairly massive amount of code on HP Basic for the HP3000 circa 1980, longest variable name was A1$.

SMH

Those were the days.

Re: Basic will rise again!

+1 for Data General!

though not particularly for that version of Basic

DG worked on a couple of much improved versions, but I think none was ever released ...

Re: English is one of the easiest human languages

Thanks. Enjoyed that. But the French can't even count to a hundred without invoking Roman numerals or something.

I just happened to trip across some YouTube video the other day that listed all the features English doesn't have, for better or worse, than other world languages.

People, huh.

Basic will rise again!

Hey, so Basic. IBM released the BC compiler, I think it was, I may still have the box up in a closet, circa 1985 to compile many/most GWBasic programs, and I made a good gig from it, speeding up execution by about 100x, on that speed demon 4.7 mhz PC.

Quickbasic came out somewhat later, interactive editing and compile-speed execution. Not bad.

And then Visual Basic, that Microsoft bought from what's his name (Alan Cooper?), was only the best app development product Microsoft ever had - for Win apps. They could bring it back today, though it would have to be retargeted for web apps as well. They should certainly have kept it running in parallel with the insipid dotnet Visual Basic, whatever the exact name is, or was. But Microsoft had made some blunders in non-standard "object" features and they just washed their hands of it.

You could easily extend it to use statistical, math, and AI packages like people do with Python, but keep simpler syntax.

In fact I shall predict: Basic will rise again!

Re: pot?

There was a time, circa 1975, when the "files" thing was considered an issue.

The first versions of Microsoft's NT operating system, and the infamous and never released NT 5.0, was going to, I dunno, do away with them, or something.

And watch for this idea to come around again, it kind of has, with "data lakes" and such instead of data bases.

But I agree with you, files are a good idea not a bad idea.

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Yes, Google is destroying their own search

I've had a variety of fairly innocuous questions that it just could not or would not handle, gave me nothing but bad answers.

Not political, or anything. The political stuff is much, much worse, has been for years, can't find the home pages for people in headline news, if they're conservative.

I've been a modest Google fan even as they've self-destructed over the last few years.

Nothing lasts forever.

And of course Gemini was so woke it choked.

With Gelsinger gone, to fab or not to fab is the $7B question

capex

Gelsinger lost track of the total capex budgets.

Gelsinger put too many things on the table at once.

Gelsinger couldn't fix Intel culture overnight, maybe the biggest challenge of all.

At this point it comes down to the 18a process, if they can get that to production yield by July 2025 Intel survives.

Else, I dunno.

I think they want to keep the domestic fabs. They may need to get more gubmint money to make it work. More this year, more every year.

AND let's see how the US fabs from TSMC and Samsung work out - they may have many of the same problems working to yield and cost in the USofA.

Claims of 'open' AIs are often open lies, research argues

The galaxy is open

All of outer space is open, that doesn't make you its master.

This is kind of why I've never been into open source. I've done vendor development, big fat apps, systems level stuff. Then I've gone out in the field and seen what happens when users have access to source. ROFLMAO. OK, sometimes good stuff happens, but it's very rare.

But when it comes to these big LLMs there are just oodles of obscure, unsettled stuff, and I'll just betcha all the good stuff is still proprietary, the open stuff is a decade behind.

And unless you have access to 1000 GPU cluster or better and unlimited time on it, you're likely shut out of any significant progress. All that "scale, scale, scale" jive from OpenAI, right?

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

Loco Pit

Put CoPilot in the Loco Pit.

Cost of Gelsinger's ambition proves too much for Intel

Pretty good summary

Pretty bad situation.

Will we ever find out the real story?

I mean, shouldn't stockholders get to hear it?

Microsoft Fabric promises transactions, analytics on one database service

Piffle

Yes you can do this stuff but it does not perform and it takes triple the space.

That's fine when your database is 10 megabytes or even 100 megabytes but not when it's one terabyte or 10 terabytes.

Run your Azure bill up to Neptune.

Linus Torvalds declares war on the passive voice

Brevity is the soul of wit

>'This fixes a NULL pointer dereference in ..'

Or go telegraphic and just write:

"fixes null pointer dereference in ..."

Could be "fixes" or "fixed". Even using caps seems prolix unless talking about something actually case-sensitive.

Concise, telegraphic writing usually starts as active voice or is more like active voice.

Microsoft veteran ditches Team Tabs, blaming storage trauma of yesteryear

proportional fonts for code, there we go!

Should be neither

With dev studio and fancy modern tools an indent should be an INDENT which can then be rendered, if need be, by your choice of spaces or tabs.

Or just write an AI program, or maybe ChatGPT can do this now, that will figure it out and pretty-print your code for you after the fact, fix up any tab/space cornfusion.

Quantum computing dreamers face stock market reality check

There is no generalized quantum computing

Maybe someone can make it do analog computing faster than a component-based analog computer would work, quantum annealing probably qualifies, but no quantum computer will ever break your digital encryption code.

You're right not to rush into running AMD, Intel's new manycore monster CPUs

Risk, interesting, but there's more

That "risk" factor is very interesting, needs some further treatment.

On the RAM question I think that's off, RAM should be about constant per-app wherever it runs.

And failover, in my experience, is less than magical, and recovery from failover worse than the original fail.

Certainly these are meant for clouds. And I strongly question whether they gain or lose performance for individual apps. I hope everyone has the sense to go slowly and carefully on these.

And I'm way out of touch for licensing issues, which were a major pain, Microsoft doing only per-core licensing last I looked into it, almost ten years ago, whether they're idle or not. SHOULD offer volume discount, if not just per-processor flat charge to small users, big users get flat pricing anyway.

I've spent a lot of time on performance and scalability issues, it's great to have more cores to use for peak loads, if you can afford to have them sit idle 50% or 90% or 99% of the time. But most people don't even try such fancy stuff, they just hope paying for cores is the last thing they have to think about. Nope, doesn't work that way.

A working Turing Machine hits Lego Ideas

Tape is unbounded, not "infinite"

Common mistake.

At some theoretical, philosophical level it makes a difference.

Of course any tape or capacity for any physical machine is not infinite.

Also using a register is a bit of a cheat but makes things muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch easier to implement AND RUN, and really nothing conceptual is lost but a bit of purity. It is informative to see just how painful it is without a register, ... or two.

Cloudflare beats patent troll so badly it basically gives up

Just Wow

>"In the end, Sable agreed to pay Cloudflare $225,000,

>grant Cloudflare a royalty-free license to its entire patent portfolio,

>and to dedicate its patents to the public, ensuring that Sable can

>never again assert them against another company," said Terrell and Nemeroff.

>The Register called Sable’s listed phone number, and it is no longer in service.

>The company's website is unresponsive and an attorney for the firm did not

>immediately respond to a request for comment.

Well, that's pretty darned amazing, I've never heard of such a thing.

Their legal team should win some kind of prize.

But it isn't clear where this comes from, did Cloudflare counter-sue? Was this a verdict or a settlement? Were there more undisclosed terms?

A quick search doesn't find any answers to these questions, either.

Re: Well done Cloudflare!

>The biggest problem here is the fact that the USA allows patents on software.

That's how the patent office stood for twenty years, and it worked poorly too.

Re: It depends on your definition

Outstanding point, thanks.

Fresh court filing accuses Oracle of creating 'maze' of options 'hidden' in 'contract'

Oracle has always been occult

That's been the style of the software itself since forever, a million parameters and thousands that NEED to be set or nothing works.

That's been the number one difference between Oracle and SQL Server since about forever.

Now, if you are truly the master of your domain, you can often do some really great things with those million parameters - and even SQL Server has a *few* that can do some magic, but most people never even learn that they're there.

IOW Oracle has always been a giant fiberglass foiling catamaran! I'm not surprised their contract reads the same way.

Data harvesting superapp admits it struggled to wield data – until it built an LLM

Bit soup

So data hording doesn't return a lot of value without some discipline, analysis and effort.

Huh

US Army orders next-gen robot mule to haul a literal ton of gear

Big, small, what

Picture doesn't give a good reference for actual size, it seems rather large for something limited to 1000 pounds, but then it's kind of Version 1.0-ish, too.

Might want some larger and smaller.

There is also the idea that making a soldier carry 100 pounds under exigent circumstances sounds like seriously bad planning to begin with.

Get a luggage cart, a shopping cart, a little red wagon, something.

Wheels, y'know.

Carry not much more than 20-30 pounds in a backpack.

And get better shoes, if that's a problem.

SMH

Re: Seems unnecessarily complex and expensive

You raise an interesting point, Don Quixote had Sancho Panza, knights in general could have squires and assistants, all freely and with respect.

But a machine might still be a valued member of the team.

Scientists demonstrate X-rays as a way to zap asteroids out of Earth's path

Twelve millimeter asteroid jokes ...

And 20 megajoules is about 10% of a Tesla battery charge.

Microsoft on a roll for terrible rebranding with Windows App

Information Everywhere, redux

>The Windows App also requires a work or school account before it will start up, confirming that this is not aimed at consumers.

Huh? I mean of course, goes without saying, doesn't it?

If I understand what this App is all about, it sounds like a good thing.

Will this be the new standard way to access Azure, instead of a browser?

LinkedIn started harvesting people's posts for training AI without asking for opt-in

LinkedIn bleh

I hope they use all my old messages from before they kicked me off because the Stanford Internet Observatory thought I was insulting Fauci too much, or whatever caused it, since they never told me but that was almost certainly it, even if every word I said was true they didn't like it.

California governor goes on AI law signing spree, but demurs on the big one

Babylon Bee says

https://babylonbee.com/news/furious-gavin-newsom-bans-ai-images-after-getting-tricked-into-thinking-pic-of-trump-as-a-mer-man-was-real