Posts by vtcodger

Codeberg beset by AI bots that now bypass Anubis tarpit

Re: While Anubis is a good concept

Scruples? of course he AI dudes are familiar with them. Some sort of ground pork and maple syrup concoction popular in Philadelphia -- Right?

Reckon you can put a nuclear reactor on the Moon?

Challenging?

Putting a nuclear reactor on the moon seems well within the scope of current technology. Making a 100KW reactor work on the moon once it gets there seems a bit more challenging. We're talking a heat engine here. Where is the cool side going to dump the excess heat? Space? I'll take a pretty big radiator to dump 100KW to space I should think. And the radiator would need a sun shield? It'll be interesting to see what, if anything, they come up with.

DARPA’s Cylon raider autonomous fighter jet advances to next phase

Human pilots

I imagine human fighter pilots will be around for quite some time, albeit fewer of them as one assumes that over time more and more missions can be trusted to unmanned craft. Depending on the future of 100% reliable control links, it's also possible that even some of the missions requiring human control might be executed using unmanned remotely controlled craft. Human pilot, but he or she is sitting at a console in an undisclosed location.

Who made the demo list for Trump's fast-track nuclear reactor scheme?

How do you measure a year in a life

Seriously, I doubt they'll build anything in one year other than maybe a mockup and perhaps some test jigs. We're talking nuclear here. The real reactor probably needs some specialized parts made from exotic materials. That likely means long lead times. And they probably can't order the parts until the design is locked in.

Re: New definition of Road Hazard

And you'll be able to find it easily at night. Just look for that eerie yellow-green glow from the carcass.

Re: These designs....

Now, if plant operators have the safety culture of the Rickover NNPP we'd in good shape.

Yes, you're right. And some of them might be. But really, you have to know that if the world is paved with small nuclear reactors, most will be run by bean counters and MBAs. And those guys will no doubt blow the damn things up with dreary regularity.

Fantasy World

Why 6 weeks to build. As long as we're in an Ayn Randian fantasy world, why not six days (and on the seventh the builders can rest)? Or six hours using only parts from the local hardware store and a bit of Uranium or Thorium prepurchased from a chemical supply company.

Forget Foxconn the iPhone factory. AI’s made it a server-slinger first and foremost

Marketing to English Translation

Marketing speak:

"“In the long run, while tariffs will pose certain challenges, they also provide us with opportunities to accelerate the optimization of our layout for the global supply chain,” she said. “As we expand into new markets and serve a wider range of customers, I believe this presents a challenge and also creates long-term development opportunities. Overall, we are confident that we can transform this challenge into a competitive advantage.” ®"

English Translation:

If the idiot Americans want to build an iron curtain around their country, we'll just sell our chips to everyone else.

Alexa hits snooze on basic functions as alarms and timers KO'd in UK outage

Re: one man's ewaste is another man's ewaste.

Sure, you have an alarm clock. But can you talk to it and get a reasonable response. What's that? You talk to it, but it never responds.

Hmmm. Alexa users seem to be in the same boat today.

Perhaps you are ahead of your time.

Datacenter diplomacy: Australia commits to help Vanuatu build bit barns

Re: Grifter's going to grift while his islands sink

Downvoted because sea level rise in the 20th century is estimated to have been around 20cm (8 inches) and there is no reason to believe it has accelerated much if at all in the 21st. (You can check that by going to https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=8518750 See a frightening trend there? There isn't one. By all means, check other us tidal gauges (hint, The Presidio tidal gauge in San Francisco has the second longest US record. But be aware that you want long term records because there are definitely short term (e.g. decadal) variations in sea level at any given location. And remember that older tidal gauges were primarily intended to tell cargo ships how much water was under their keel. It's likely that some of the records include effects of repairs or even moving the recording site around the harbor possibly to locations with different local tectonics

That doesn't mean that rising sea levels won't be a problem for some over a very long time span -- centuries. But ironically probably not for Pacific Islanders. Why not? Because tropical reef corals make limestone from CO2 and Calcium molecules in the tropical oceans. And they do it at impressive rates. Tropical atolls seem to have managed to keep up with 120 meters (400 feet) of sea level rise during the continental ice sheet melt 20000 years ago to 10000 years ago. That's six times the 20th Century rate. Where will the problems be? Probably places built on fill that is compacting(many of the world's port facilities), places where fluids (petroleum, fresh water) are being pumped from under the harbor, places where the Earth is sinking due to natural tectonic forces.

I'd recommend the IPCCs Assessment Reports sea level sections. They seem to be quite good for the most part. But they are information dense and are unlikely to give you the sort of quick, easy answers the media, politicians, and the public in general favor. Here's a link to AR6 (the latest) https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-9/ If you want to tackle it.

Back to the Stone Age

Do data centers on a bunch of volcanic rocks 2500km from Australia make any economic sense? Bear in mind that the islands,being volcanic,have little or no fossil fuel resources. Electricity for those Islanders that have access mostly comes from imported diesel. What percentage of the population has power?According to the internet, about 33%.

Nothing against Vanuatu. Might be a tropical paradise for all I know. But it seems an odd place to locate data centers.

Desktop-as-a-service now often cheaper to run than laptops - even after thin client costs

Re: It'll be cheap until it doesn't work

Similar experience here. School in a small rural town. Service provider, the district offices in a larger town about 7 miles of ancient telephone system distant. It turns out that due to the fragmented nature of US telecoms, messages from the school to the service provider went to the SP's town and kept right on going. To Burlington, VT then Boston then to New York then back to Burlington, to the SP's town and finally to the SP. Replies took the same route in reverse. Lots of latency. And a router poorly configured somewhere along the way helped out by black-holing large message packets. Result: Novell worked mostly. As did some other stuff. A bit lethargic at times. Citrix,not so much.

Re: "Cost is a big reason for the shift"

Well, if the Gartner Guy is right, and likely he is this time, using virtual desktops will save many companies money. But the security and reliability issues ... Wow. And then there's that "The first fix is free, once you're hooked, the price goes up" thing.

Perplexity takes a shine to Chrome, offers Google $34.5 billion

Re: Ahhh modern economics

By a curious coincidence, I was pricing tulip bulbs on Amazon a couple of hours ago. They're mostly going for over a dollar a bulb this year. If memory serves that's a bit more than last year. Looks to me like a better long term investment than, for example, Tesla TSLA which closed today at 339.38 giving it a price earnings ratio of around 200. By way of comparison, the long term average PE ratio of the S&P500 is around 15. Perhaps a bit of irrational exuberance there.

Re: Ahhh modern economics

Money laundering schemes? Closer to Ponzi schemes I should think. It appears to me that most of the "money" sloshing around in big tech is in the form of IOUs of dubious quality. It seems to me entirely too likely that the motto of the 2020s will turn out to be "Think Big, Fail Big"

Re: Ahhh modern economics

Hey man. This is the era of AI, blockchain and cryptocurrency. Profits are so ... like ... nineteenth century.

Suetopia: Generative AI is a lawsuit waiting to happen to your business

Re: And then there is patent infringement

So humans infringe copyright constantly.

True enough. But in the US at least, most of that usage is covered by the (legal) doctrine of Fair Use. See https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/. One does wonder if fair use doesn't apply to AI agents as well as us humans. One also wonders if those "If we screw up and you get sued, it's your problem not ours" clauses in T&Cs are legally binding. Especially if one paid the provider to provide the infringing material.

Hanging up: AOL to pull the plug on its dial-up service after 36 years

Modems

As a result of a multitude of bad experiences with modems (and, to a lesser extent, DSL) in rural locations in Vermont. I ended up writing some articles for the Compuserve Hardware forum. Two in particular seem appropriate to this discussion http://donaldkenney.x10.mx/GLOSSARY/LINEPROB.HTM and http://donaldkenney.x10.mx/GLOSSARY/BLACKHOL.HTM

My feeling at the time? I reckoned that, all things considered, it was something of a miracle that modems worked at all with the US telephone system

AI coding tools crash on launch, could reboot better in future

An Omission

You left out securely which is much harder than reliably.

An Opinion

Let me start off by saying that I think AI probably will have a huge impact on the world. Eventually. Decades from now.

However I strongly suspect that it is one of those problems like (safe) fully autonomous driving in an arbitrary setting or scaling hydrogen fusion back from city busting to power plant dimensions that is, while probably doable, going to take MUCH longer to mature than most people think.

Case to point. IBM's Watson. Billions of dollars invested. Scored a truly impressive performance on a TV trivia game where occasional spectacular blunders are only mildly punished. But after Jeopardy it has had trouble finding gainful employment. IBM Watson has few users. Numbers? A hundred odd worldwide. 32 in the US. Hardly world shaking.

There is a persuasive case that Watson has been a very expensive liability for IBM. Billions lost. See https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/ibm-watson-health-failure-artificial-intelligence.html

What does that say about AI? Very likely something along the lines of "Best fasten you seat belts folks. It's going to be a bumpy ride." (And yes, that's a misquote of Bette Davis in All About Eve ""Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night".)

Re: Natural vs. programming language

English does have a few problems. For example, it does not distinguish between inclusive and exclusive or. It also lacks a convention for evaluation phrases like A and B or C. Is that A and (B or C)? Or is it (A and B) or C? And, unlike some other natural languages it is a bit hazy about negation. The average American English speaker will interpret "Isn't the door open" as equivalent to "Is the door open?" and will respond "Yes" if it's open or "No" if it's closed.

There may be some other problems. Those are just the ones I'm aware of.

Meet President Willian H. Brusen from the great state of Onegon

Job Security

Please explain to me again. Exactly whose job is this remarkable shambles supposed to be threatening?

GitHub CEO: Future devs will not code, they will manage AI

Re: Can't wait to be a former developer

I knew you were going to say that

Well, OK. But you aren't a machine, right? .... Right?

Re: Can't wait to be a former developer

Big assumption there that it eventually passes the tests.

Even bigger assumption -- almost universally overlooked -- Someone can tell the AI exactly what needs to be done. Writing code is hard, but is sometimes done well. Specifying exactly what needs to be done is harder and in my experience is almost always done poorly. Even if your AI agent can grind out working code my guess is that most of the time that code won't do what you really want done,

What would be needed for the future tech CEOs envision would be AC -- Artificial Clairvoyance. I expect it might be a while before that is claimed, Much less delivered.

Re: If future devs "will not code"...

You're holding it wrong.

You're supposed to sit on the weights and lift the forklift. Twenty or more reps. Daily.

Don't believe me? Just as your favorite AI agent.

Air Force buying two Tesla Cybertrucks so it can learn to destroy them

Less than list

Understand the comment. And there's some truth in it. But in this case, they are hiring a contractor to buy the vehicles, and apparently haven't put much in the way of restriction on how they are procured. If it's a fixed price contract, I would guess the trucks delivered will be well used and a bit banged up.

Trump teases ‘approximately’ 100 percent tariff for imported semiconductors

Sounds Like A Plan

I disagree - I'm pretty sure they will not fulfil any of the pledges

Most likely, some will, some won't.

One possible strategy. Announce a zillion dollar investment in (a) US plant(s). Send a few lawyers and suits off to talk to various states about incentives to build there. That'll take about a year. Maybe 18 months. Then announce you're going to build in West Virginia or whatever and are looking for a suitable location. Another year to 18 months. Buy some land conditional on approval of permits to build. Put together an outrageous plan and submit it. Permits denied. 3.5 years have passed, By then, the Great Leap Backward has floundered. Trump is out of office. The US economy is collapsing thanks to Trump's antics. You walk away. It'll cost you a bit, but not a lot. ISTR that Foxconn did something along that line in Wisconsin a few years ago -- perhaps not as cynically. but same result.

And if somehow, Trump doesn't crash the US economy, you can always submit a rational plan and build the damn plant if it makes business sense.

Meta used Flo menstruation app data to sell ads, jury finds

Heresy

Are you suggesting that the only thing marketeers are good at is selling the need for marketeers?

Chromebook sales surged in Q2 thanks to Japanese schools

Hardware As A Service

I've worked in a school. It strikes me that giving Chromebooks to students will provide a steady market for replacement devices. Not only is there a steady flow of new students and graduation of those who have grown too big for the desks, but kids tend to be a bit careless at times. If kids can and do manage to forget their coats when the temperature is hovering around -10F (-23C) outside you can guess at what the MTBLD (Mean Time Before Loss or Destruction) for a Chromebook is likely to be.

Uncle Sam floats tracking tech to keep AI chips out of China

I want a fire-breathing pony capable of invisibility and flight.

OK. But if it runs away, how do you propose to find it?

And Next Year ...

Next year Congress will require that all cocaine molecules exported from Latin America be internet and GPS enabled and report their location to the FBI hourly.

Google agrees to pause AI workloads to protect the grid when power demand spikes

Meh

In the case of Google Search, the old non-AI search was pretty good, and I assume it still works as I don't always get an AI summary for search requests. So I reckon that shutting down AI every now and then won't affect search all that much. At least for me. And likely for most users. Of course I/we don't know how much resource the old search takes. The energy savings may not be all that great.

Florida jury throws huge fine at Tesla in Autopilot crash

Re: Haters

fraudulent stock pumping lies...

Indeed. I've long maintained that Musk's claims for his vehicles' capabilities are irresponsible and dishonest. They seem to go way beyond "puffery" -- e.g. "The Best Frozen Pizza In the Universe" which is permitted in American law. IMO they endanger both the occupants of his vehicles and innocent bystanders.

It's good to see a court hold his company responsible.

But as a test case, this really seems to suck.

Wasp nest at US nuclear site tests ten times over safe radiation limit

Re: Airborne defences enabled

Most likely the wasps were experimenting with some sort of nuclear weapon. And what better place to do so than a site where nuclear waste is readily available? Since the wasps seem to have abandoned their lab, we can assume that they have perfected whatever device they were developing and have moved on to production at a larger and more suitable facility. Doubtless all this will be made clear in the not too distant future.

NHS disability equipment provider on brink of collapse a year after cyberattack

Re: Perhaps not the cyberattack.

"Were they on the path to going bust anyway?"

That was my thought as I read the article. Sounds like their basic problem was that their operation was chronically(?) losing money thus leading to insolvency. The cyberattack was only an added aggravation? Seems to me that if they were even close to profitability the instinct of 98% of the managers in the world would be to blame the cyberknaves for all their problems and to promise to come back stronger than ever.

Bitter fight over 2020 Microsoft quantum paper both resolved and unresolved

Re: "15 separate controls that define where to look for Majoranas."

"Puzzled why anyone would put an Apple product and cheese inside a microwave oven ?"

I'm told that the glue Apple uses to fasten their non-user replaceable batteries into the cases adds an unusual and quite unique flavor to some microwaved delicacies. As for cheese. A day without microwaved cheese is like ... well ... ehr ... a day without microwaved cheese.

Zuck tries to justify AI splurge with talk of 'superintelligence' for all

Distancing oneself

Really now, don't you think the first thing a super-intelligent entity would do is get as far away from Facebook/Meta as possible?

Re: He's really trying...

"He's really trying... To destroy the planet isn't he ?"

Well, it was an ugly-ass planet anyway.*

* with due credit to O. J. Simpson

Alibaba admits Qwen3's hybrid-thinking mode was dumb

The road less travelled

"Prioritizing quality over convenience"

Where are the profits in that?

Datacenter lobby blows a fuse over EU efficiency proposals

Prelude to a Trainwreck

it's probably just that I'm getting old, but more and more it seems to me that I'm living in a distopian science-fantasy novel written by a master of dark humor.

First off we have the EU. A modern industrial society which came up short in the great geophysical fossil energy resource lottery. They currently need to import fossil fuels from places no one in their right mind really wants to import energy from. Russia, the Middle East, North Africa. None of them exactly reliable suppliers. Their response is to embrace the theory of a probably imaginary climate crisis and the improbable proposition that "green" sources -- primarily wind and solar -- can provide all the energy they need. There appears to be no way that is viable without economically acceptable long term -- months, years -- storage of massive amounts of energy. At this time, that long term storage does not exist. It may not for decades, or maybe centuries, or maybe never.

Anyway, the EU genuinely does need to be concerned about energy usage even if their motivation looks to be muddled.

Then we have the tech industry which has gleefully embraced the peculiar notion that you can take huge globs of information, misinformation, disinformation, satire, and outright lunacy, throw it into a digital blender and produce a high quality, salable product. They claim to be convinced that that product will enrich mankind. One suspects that they live in somewhat egocentric universes where mankind's wealth and their own personal accounts are inextricably mixed. What's good for Sam Altman etc al is good for humanity. They think they need bizarre amounts of energy to actualize their dreams. They may well be right -- at least about the need for energy. Enrichment of mankind? I have a few doubts.

And don't get me started on the growing tendency for democracies to elect truly rotten human beings to positions of power.

Reminds me a lot of the 1920s as described by Fredrick Lewis Allen in "Only Yesterday."

The boom years of the 1920s did not end well.

Tom Lehrer: Satirist, mathematician, inventor of the Jello shot

joy and sadness

I enjoyed Leher's music.

And I enjoyed your obituiary.

I'm sad that he's gone.

Orbital datacenters subject to launch stress, nasty space weather, and expensive house calls

Is it just me?

Am I the only one who wonders why the heck one would even want a data center in orbit even if all the rather daunting technical problems could be resolved.

I've given it a full 2 minutes of thought and I'll be damned if I can come up with even one plausible use case.

Re: To say nothing of ...

Latency ...

Indeed. If you put your data center in Low Earth orbit the latency isn't too bad. But the satellite is only visible from a given location for a few minutes every now and then. If you put the data center in geostationary orbit, it's always visible from the same roughly 40% of the Earth's surface. But the round trip latency is around 600ms.

First release candidate of systemd 258 is here

Re: What?

Actually Windows-95 wasn't all that bad -- After one installed about two dozen "Service Packs" (Service Pack=Massive collection of bug fixes). It was actually comprehensible to almost all users and could run for weeks without crashing. Of course it was really MSDOS 6.22 with a GUI shell. We have since devolved into the incomprehensible shambles that is Windows-11

Re: hold on there

So, we've moved on from "Do One Thing and Do it Well"

to

"Do everything and do it obtusely."

Is there any truth to the rumor that Systemd release 259 will include a spreadsheet and word processor?

Tesla bets on bot smoke screen as political and market realities bite

Re: To channel a particular commentard

Au contraire. Tesla looks to be an OK EV. Which is to say it's a rather expensive vehicle that takes rather a long time to fuel, works best for folks who have a place to charge it at home and live in mild climates. And it is overly computer dependent with an erratic sysop who has a rather loose attachment to reality and at times looks to be a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

Other than that, I suppose it's OK as long as you don't use its notoriously flakey collision avoidance system and drive it as you would any other car.

A vision of the Glorious Future

I'd suggest that the robots on 2125 probably will be ubiquitous. And very useful. But they likely won'i be humanoid. More likely a central chassis with sockets for appendages -- legs, arms, tentacles. And specialized tips for those appendages -- viewing, gripping, cutting, welding, etc, etc, etc... And many will swap appendages frequently as they work through a task -- observing, testing, analyzing, and finally performing the task and verifying the results. Y'know, that's WAY, WAY beyond anything we can do today. Or next year. Or the year after.

I suspect that the major near term use case for Optimus and its cousins might turn out to be modelling the latest styles in upscale clothing stores.

Google just spent $14 billion on servers in 91 days, plans even higher spending soon

Re: "Alphabet shares popped by a couple of percent in after-hours trading."

The stock price went up a bit, if that's what "the line" is in the king's English/

The price of progress?

All that money just to aggravate me with more varied mindless suggestions and weird assumptions. It's impressive. But is it really necessary?

One in six US workers pretends to use AI to please the bosses

Re: My company is pushing everyone to apply for a Copilot licence

"... was deemed a resounding success by management."

Has your company given any thought to replacing its managers with AI? Even with hallucinations,AI might produce comparable or better results. And at lower cost.