Posts by iron

Virgin Atlantic is piloting an OpenAI agent in to help with the 'customer journey'

Optimising for an LLM

Is not the same thing as optimising your website for human customers.

You might as well be optimising for dogs.

Assassin's Creed maker faces GDPR complaint for forcing single-player gamers online

It would be nice if Mr Söderberg wasn't lying to sensationalise his point.

Any game I play that has online data collection also has a switch to turn it off, and I use it. So no, when I play my data is not collected and analysed.

(assuming the game company abides by the switch, obviously, but that is not what he said)

FAA closes investigations into Blue Origin landing fail, Starship Flight 7 explosion

Didn't ULA have problems relighting BE-4 engines as well? This is starting to sound like a design flaw.

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

Follow the money

NASA currently pays SpaceX about $1.5 billion per year for crew & cargo services to the ISS. Musk clearly thinks any ad-hoc Starship based or third-party commercial replacement will make him more.

Boom's XB-1 jet nails supersonic flight for first time

> Concorde did indeed require billions of dollars in government funding

No it didn't. It required £1.5 – 2.1 billion in Pounds Sterling and Francs, no smelly dollars involved.

Stargate, smargate. We're spending $60B+ on AI this year, Meta's Zuckerberg boasts

Re: The Big Tech problem - solved!

> Oracle - they don't seem to be playing the AI game

Lesurie Suit Larry is literally part of the 500 beeelion dollar OpenAI & Softbank deal mentioned in the article.

Oracle are touting their cloud as the best for AI.

They are very much rolling the dice and moving the top hat round the AI board.

Is it really the plan to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal? It's been a weird week

Re: The unipolar world is officially dead

A bully picking on someone smaller than them because they can't cut it with the big boys.

OpenAI plans to ring in the New Year with a for-profit push

Lying liars continue to lie

OpenAI is not open and there is no intelligence in their products.

Is Sam Alt-Man even real?

Axiom Space shuffles space station assembly sequence – to get it standalone sooner

Correction - Russia has committed to the ISS until 2030

"Russia, however, has yet to formally commit to keeping the station going past 2028."

In fact Russia committed to manning the ISS until 2030 earlier this week.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/12/russian-space-chief-says-country-will-fly-on-space-station-until-2030/

(Ars space reporting is excellent although somewhat SpaceX biased.)

Rocks from Chinese Moon mission suggest Luna's history needs revision

"Remember: we do these things not because they are easy, but because they funnel dollars to lots of congressional districts."

More like the truth.

The Automattic vs WP Engine WordPress wars are getting really annoying

WP Engine already contribute dev time on Wordpress, Mullenweg's problem is they don't contribute to his personal wealth.

And nor should anyone else at this point. I cancelled my Pocket Casts (an Automattttic product) back in September when it became clear to me as an open source developer that Mullenweg is a blight on the industry.

Both KDE and GNOME to offer official distros

Re: KDE FTW

Oh noes three different web browsers!!!111!!

What are you smoking Liam? I can name more than three web browsers off the top of my head for Linux, Windows or Android. Obviously not iOS because whatever they're called they're all really Safari.

Hell I used more than three different browsers on Unix back in the 90s.

I can only assume that this article is intended to provoke an argument.

WordPress's Automattic openly tracks websites bailing from rival WP Engine

Re: WTF?

More like proof he's always been an egotistical wanker.

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

Re: Which language do you think is used to implement all those memory-safe languages?

No they aren't.

.NET has been written in C# for some years now.

Prior to that Delphi was written in Delphi from the start. (mentioned becuse it had the same creator as C#)

And Go is written in Go.

One-year countdown to 'biggest Ctrl-Alt-Delete in history' as Windows 10 approaches end of support

Hardware is not the issue

My 5 year old self-built Ryzen 7 system can handle Windows 11 but is still on Windows 10 despite MS nagging me to "uprade" every so often.

My work laptop has Windows 11 and.... I don't like it.

I don't like the barely functional Start Menu.

I don't like pinned icons being in the center of the screen.

I really, really don't like the retarded new context menu in Windows Explorer that breaks my workflow hundreds of times a day. (or did till I worked out how to disable that PoS)

I don't like or want Copilot or any other LLM based features.

I don't like using my work laptop because it has Win 11 on it.

There is nothing about Windows 11 that I do like and my Steam Deck keeps whispering that maybe I don't need Windows at all.

This should worry MS more that it seems to given I'm a software engineer who has worked with Windows and MS platforms for almost 30 years.

AMD aims latest processors at AI whether you need it or not

And on the same day intel release the Core Ultra 200 series with a massive 13 TOPS!

I don't care about any of that but great way to shoot yourself in the foot again Intel.

159 Automattic staff take severance offer and walk out over WP Engine feud

Pocket Casts

Damn this twat owns Pocket Casts? Time to find a new podcast app, I don't want to fund his bullshit.

OpenAI reportedly considering for-profit plans, but what would that be good for?

Altman's "few thousand days" prediction

One thousand days is approximately 2.7 years. A "few" means three, or thereabouts. Three thousand days is roughly 8.2 years.

Or in other words Mr AltMan is telling us AI is 5 - 10 years away. Just like the flying car, cold fusion and many other science fiction pipe dreams.

I was surprised he was so honest in that essay.

Starlink-branded hardware reportedly found amid wreckage of downed Russian drone

Re: What usage ?

> the idea that someone would go to the trouble of putting something into space for it to be "semi-disposable" demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of where the costs are in an orbital launch

In the 50s & 60s both the USA and USSR used spy satellites which contained film that needed to be recovered and processede, making them very much disposable.

I think you lack a fundamental understanding of the willingness to pay any costs at a time of war, even a Cold War.

US may exempt latest chip fabs from eco red-tape, but power is still a trip

Your household electronics are designed to work over a range of voltages, frequencies, noise and general crap that comes out of the socket. Your supply is not the 110V / 220V / 240V at 50 / 60 Hz that you think it is. PSUs are good enough for your HiFi and computer but the DC they produce still contains ripple, noise and other artifacts.

When you need 18-angstrom accurcy that is just not going to cut it.

Re: but the laws of physics still apply

Alternatively Astralia would be a good location since they already repealed the laws of mathematics so the laws of physics should be maleable just by changing the maths behind them.

Campaigners claim 'Privacy Preserving Attribution' in Firefox does the opposite

Re: So how does one turn it off?

Settings, Privacy + scroll down a bit to the Web Site Advertising Preferences section, on Windows at least.

Easily discoverable in the most obvious place imo.

I had already turned it off when the feature launched.

Begun, the open source AI wars have

Re: MOOT.....interesting word....look it up!!

> Do they not realise that training data "IS REQUIRED for actually USING an AI system"?

So how much training data did you need to download in order to use GhatGPT?

I see no signs of intelligence in an LLM but even I know you don't need the training data to use an LLM.

EU OKs $1.9B aid for Intel Polish plant, assuming x86 giant doesn't end up cutting it

So to construct a $4.6 billion assembly and testing facility Intel requires government aid of $6.47 billion?

That does not sound like a good deal for Poland to me. GREAT deal for Intel though.

Dow-ward spiral: Intel share price drop could see it delisted from blue-chip index

Re: So it's delisted ?

> The rest of the world is interested in its products.

Badly manufactured products with degrading performance even when run at stock settings.

Starliner's not-so-grand finale is a thump in the desert next week

Re: It's more than hoses

Those 63 years include less than 400 flights. At the equivalent point in automotive transport we had a man walking in front with a red flag.

We're still toddlers when it comes to spaceflight.

Re: NASA wastes so much money

NASA is wasting no money on this contract. Commercial Crew is a fixed price contract. Every delay, extra test flight and cost for rework comes out of Boeing's pocket, not NASAs.

Boeing has lost over a billion dollars on Starliner and they are set to lose more.

Blue Origin sets October 13 for first New Glenn EscaPADE to Mars

> We are ramping our production efforts up across the board and look forward to even more flights next year."

Even more flights than the ZERO flights to space Jeff's BO has managed so far? Say it isn't so. How can you manage more than no flights at all?

Jeff's BO, making Boeing look successful at space. (At least they have sent a capsule to space - getting it back is a problem but it went, unlike Jeff's BO.)

The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it's not pretty

> Googling the question "How much has Google invested in AI?" that same AI, now baked into the search engine, reports that "In April 2024, Google CEO Demis Hassabis...

Acually it doesn't. It shows a Bloomberg article that says Deep Mind CEO Demis Hassabis said those things.

NASA will fly Boeing Starliner crew home with SpaceX, Calamity Capsule deemed too risky

This decision was made on Saturday.

So unless they have a time machine the markets were reacting to nothing.

Ok, maybe the good news that the bad news would be delivered on a Saturday so no-one noticed.

Boeing can't complete the contract

The problem now is that Boeing will be unable to complete their Commercial Crew contract.

Starliner flies on an Atlas V. Atlas V has been replaced by Vulcan. Boeing has purchased six Atlas V rockets for its six contracted missions to the ISS but there are no more Atlas V rockets available to fly another test or certification flight. Putting Starliner on a Vulcan roket would require modifications to the capsule which would need more test and certification flights and the rocket would need to be human rated, which it is not.

Boeing will not successfully complete all six contracted missions unless NASA certify Starliner without another test flight.

NASA pushes decision on bringing crew back in Starliner to the end of August

Re: Get Suited

If this were NASA transportation, sure. But it isn't.

Starliner is owned and operated by Boeing, Dragon is owned and operated by SpaceX. Even the launch pads are leased by their respective companies from NASA or Space Force, depending on the pad.

NASA merely provide the human cargo.

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

Re: Who, me?

You're being anti red people, you racist.

(I think you mean rogue engineer.)

Game dev accuses Intel of selling ‘defective’ Raptor Lake CPUs

Re: Can't help feeling

The enthusiast mobos with no power limits are a red herring, these issues also affect Supermicro servers using W-series chipsets with very conservative settings.

Beijing wants more outfits like Temu teeming around the world

What's a Temu?

Never heard of it.

FTX's $24B tax bill written down to just $200M

Re: Got to hand it to the IRS

What anonymous finance? Crypto is not anonymous, it is all published publicly on a blockchain. It is the very opposite of anonymous.

Windows 11 tries to escape Windows 10's shadow with AI muscle

Re: For what stats are worth...

My desktop has met the hardware requirements for Win11 since day 1. If you have a PC built in the last 5 years they should not be an impediment.

I have used Win11 on work laptops and don't like it. It improves nothing and gets in the way more than Win10 even after tweaking various settings. Add to that the only feature that interested me - Android apps - was US only and is (has?) now been removed then what would be the point?

My SteamDeck is showing me I don't need Windows for games. The writing may be on the wall for MS and I've used every version of Windows since 2.0.

Boeing's Starliner finds yet another way to not reach space

Starliner?

More like bin liner.

Twitter 'supersharers' of fake news tend to be older Republican women

Re: Oh Auntie

I don't. My only surviving Aunt is in her late 90s and doesn't read the news.

Evidence mounts that Venus has multiple active volcanoes

> NASA tries to find the budget

Stop paying Boeing and maybe ye can be going (to Venus).

OpenAI tells employees it won't claw back their vested equity

Rogue HR Employee

So those clauses in their contracts were added by a rogue HR employee?

It makes a change from all those rogue engineers who steal our private data without Google's knowledge.

US corporations really need to do a better job weeding out these rogue employees during recruitment.

'Little weirdo' shoulder surfer teaches UK cabinet minister a lesson in cybersecurity

> more popular members of the Conservative party, such as Kemi Badenoch and Penny Mordaunt

Who?

Mind you I've never heard of this Tory plonker either.

Reddit goes AI agnostic, signs data training deal with OpenAI

Re: Reddit ChatBOT™

ChatGPT has allegedly been trained on 4chan, it can't get any worse from Reddit.

Dublin debauchery derails Portal to NYC in six days flat

Re: 6 whole DAYS? For shame, Dublin.

Some enterprising ned would just steal it to watch the footie on.

The end is nigh for Windows 10 21H2

> users with hardware that meets Microsoft's demands have likely already made the jump to Windows 11

Hardware meets the Win 11 requirements.

Win 11 does not meet my requirements.

A functioning clock that includes seconds when I click on it rather than displaying a notifications panel (why?) would be nice for a start.

Tesla layoff circus runs into fourth week with another round of cuts

> this time engineers are caught up in the mix.

Surely the "entire Supercharger team" included at least one electrical engineer and maybe a few civil engineers? Or did they design and build a charging network out of nothing but incense & whale song?

Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it as a tax write-off

Re: the same is true with modern smartphones

My S22 lasts 3 days on a charge, with use.

My network provider keeps telling me I can have a replacement battery for free and I keep telling them I don't need it.

Watchdog reveals lingering Google Privacy Sandbox worries

Dear Google, I dropped 3rd party cookies in the 90s. It isn't hard or time consuming, just install a decent browser like Firefox and disable them. :D

Oracle changes its tune with HQ move to Music City

Re: We want to be a part of a community where our people want to live

If you'd bothered to read the third paragraph you'd know they're moving from Texas, not California, and wouldn't look so stupid.

Or maybe you still would.

Google fires 28 staff after sit-in protest against Israeli cloud deal ends in arrests

Re: > punishing people for their political beliefs

I'd fire you for your incorrect English.