Posts by Persona

Anthropic says text watermarking scheme relies on inconsequential words

Re: Bullshit generator marks with more bullshit?

You can ask them to generate concise output, or even give a maximum wordcount.

Russian missile uses Nvidia AI chip to help target Ukraine

Re: Good news?

Do the UK's missiles use our own UK made chips or do we too use Nvidia ones, made in Taiwan?

Re: of course

It doesn't need government involvement. You could buy them in the UK from Amazon (and numerous others) then ship them to Russia.

It's not going to be Nvidia selling to Russia. These chips are standard off the shelf items that you can buy from numerous suppliers in most of the worlds countries including several that are friendly with Russia.

South Korean satellite spots SpaceX lunar impact

The moons gravitational field is very uneven so Lunar orbits are unstable and need propellant to maintain. Low orbits are highly unstable. There are some much better than others but even they need regular correction. Once the propellant or the ability to light the engine is gone they are doomed.

Airbus keeps an A350 flying for 24 hours

Re: Conflicted

Ah but that 20 minutes or so in freefall would be so memorable! 1 in 3 inexperienced flyers will barf in zero G and you will be able to watch all those droplets of vomit floating around in freefall while you try not to inhale. Your 23.5 hour security wait before would be needed to enforce the nill by mouth policy.

Re: Conflicted

Thanks. I've always wondered what it was like in the back of the plane. I never go further back than the bar.

Re: Conflicted

I always prefer single hops to the ones where there is a stop part way. On one flight from London to Sydney we had a refueling stop in Hong Kong. I was stumbling around HK airport trying to find the Virgin lounge at 4 O'clock and having trouble finding it as it was upstairs. I had and still have no idea if it was 4PM or 4AM local time. Fortunately they were very welcoming when I got there so it didn't really matter, but I would have preferred to have stayed on the plane eating, drinking watching movies and most importantly sleeping.

The AI bubble is already popping; we just don't know it yet

The claims hype and counter claims of AI's being worthwhile are pretty similar to tractors being adopted in the 1910 to 1940 period. The main difference is that it's happening at 5-10 times the speed.

Early tractors were heavy, prone to getting stuck in mud, difficult to start, and broke down often. Farm journals ran plenty of cartoons showing tractors bogged down or in pieces while a horse looked on smugly.

Meet the 'internet radical' who helped Microsoft get email and AT&T get online

It certainly had its issues, but business users mostly seemed to really like it as it let them do their jobs.

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

Re: Ah, the tax man

Indeed, you also need to test the assumption that £17b would be lost by raising the tax threshold. I know plenty of people, me included, who have retired early or are working part time because the tax burden of those extra hours changes the work life balance. Had the state been less greedy they could have got more tax revenue.

America bans imported robots due to supply chain and security risks

Re: I don't care if the USA bans Chinese imports of anything

I've already got a Chinese car. I plan to buy/lease my first humanoid robot (probably Chinese) in 2031.

Britain hopes £7.3M will help electric and hydrogen aircraft take off

Green

Currently less than 1% of global hydrogen production is green. It's quite unlikely that any of that 1% is used in this project.

ChatGPT wants access to your health records so it can be a better not-doctor

How good are human doctors?

I have respect for, but still a deep distrust of human doctors. We all have a fellow IT workers that are incompetent. This is the norm across all industries including medicine. Some doctors are good, some are bad and some are truly terrible. The pass mark in doctors finals is 50%, so medical training does not result in perfect doctors. Even the best doctors are only aware of a fraction of all of the possible human ailments. My doctor might be good or they might be terrible, I just don't know. As such I will research any diagnosis and treatment I am prescribed. This could include case studies and research papers. It certainly would include asking an AI (or three) which is very good at fuzzy pattern matching across a vast range of ailments as it's a powerful tool well suited for the task. Obviously I would trust what it said less than a good doctor, but without research I don't know if my doctor is good or bad or even just outside of their area of experience.

Uncle Sam tells overseas cybercrooks their visas are canceled

Re: Jail?

It costs ~$40,000 a year to keep someone in a US federal prison. On top of that are all the court and legal fees.

Linus Torvalds tells AI haters to fork off

Re: I'll believe it when I see it

If you think the average person isn't getting something they find beneficial out of it you need to start mixing with more

people.

EU lets wearables wriggle out of user-replaceable battery rules

Future proof?

Give it a few years and batteries will have advanced beyond the point of anyone ever needing to swap them out, and we will be saddled with a law that says you have to make it possible to swap them.

Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek thinks AI is going to pay off

Replacement of a fair proportion of those millions of foreigners living in squalor becomes possible with AI and robotics. Will it be better or worse for those people? Given that they have chosen to work there rather than not, we should expect it to be worse.

Singapore is a benevolent near dictatorship that runs very very successfully on neoliberal policy. There is nothing in neoliberal policy that says the obedient populace can't be supported and made very comfortable. AI and humanoid robotics (if successful) will fit in nicely resulting in a rich population with a high standard of living and abundant leisure time.

Confidential computing's trust mechanism is broken. The fix may not exist

Re: just use your own servers

Whilst you believe that you are in an airgapped environment, the CIA have the toys to bridge that gap. Hardware can never be really trusted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_catalog

Researchers drop checkm8-style BootROM exploit for A12 and A13 iPhones

So you have had an annualized cost of £70 to £75 per year. I would say that's very reasonable as it equates to ~20p per day.

I believe A12 based phones are 7 year old designs and went out of support this April. A13 phones are one year newer so up to 6 years old and still supported for another 9 months.

Apparently (unverified answer from AI) iPhone users keep their phones for 3.5 years on average, so whilst it's a noteworthy bug, there wont be that many phones affected. As the A12 based ones are already past end of life and this bug is not the main reason why they should no longer be in use. Shame about people trying to the last out of their A13 based phones, but on the plus side their average outlay per year has been pretty low.

The interesting thing to know is how long have the security services known about this bug and been using it to investigate phones.

Estonia intends to recognize AI agents with digital IDs

Governments will assign identities to AI so they can tax them.

XP-era Windows spotted haunting London's driverless railway

Re: If yall didn't need it to be purty...

Software can get old very quickly once the security bugs present since day one get discovered. The classic keyboard buffer overflow attack being a great early example.

Amazon owns up to using 2.5bn gallons of H₂O in its bit barns last year

Re: Water Positive

Of course its possible. They are not destroying water just using it as a fluid to transfer heat. At the end of the day it either flows downstream (the cheap option) or partially evaporates (the best way to remove heat) and returns as rain elsewhere. All they need to do is collect enough water to balance evaporation.

Brit maritime agency heralds fresh global rules for crewless cargo ships

Re: Hmmm

I'm old enough to remember riding in lifts (elevators) where a human operator had his hand on a big electrical control (rheostat?) that made the lift go up and down. On a good day he could stop the lift within a foot of the same level as a floor then nudge it up and down a couple of times till the floors were about level before opening the doors to let people in and out. Using an automatic lift was a novel and scary experience and possibly a nightmare for some.

'It would be good for the world' to slow down AI sprints, Anthropic says

Re: odd

Most humans though is little more than pattern matching. We call it learning from experience and humans aren't that that good at it either. Some are spectacularly bad at it.

Trump pumps federal funds into coal plants in the name of energy security

Re: Scargill for the win

Coal doesn't massively dominate US electricity generation in the US like it did in the UK in 1974 prior to Thatcher so she probably would not have an issue with it. Back in the 70's the threat and practice of union coal strikes leading to electricity blackouts made it impossible to close even those pits that were producing negligible amounts of coal (tens of thousands of tons annually). Whilst keeping pits open for such modest volumes had social value it made the coal produced ludicrously expensive and UK manufacturing uncompetitive.

China and India are both building new coal fired power stations and both import coal. In 2024 China imported 500 million tons and India 250 million tons.

Coincidentally they both import a lot of oil through the Strait of Hormuz too, as long as it's open. Of course coal is rarely a substitute for oil.

Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows

Re: Nice, but...

Was there ever a version of awk written in that new and fashionable C++? I was using awk back in 1987 when my AT&T C++ complier spat out "C" that I then compiled using the native C complier.

Re: Nice, but...

I remember using it maybe 25 years ago. It was pretty good even then. It was a lot more than grep: it even had "awk", and I could do a lot with awk back then.

Now all I remember about using awk is the classic error message: "awk: bailing out near line 1"

AI will soon be capable of telling convincing lies

Re: Hallucination

Sadly people seem to be even worse. Despite all the input data being correct, HMRC managed to achieve three basic errors on my two and a half pages of quite simple P800 tax calculation.

AT&T sues to ditch Cali copper phone lines to save billions

Re: If only Telco's didn't have a repuatation....

There is however satellite based internet that could be the replacement.

My solution would be to allow AT&T to retire the copper wires and where fiber replacement is not possible, compensate the remaining subscribers by subsidizing the satellite based replacement in perpetuity.

Plex appeal fades as Lifetime Pass jumps to $750

The big problem with lifetime fees is how long is "lifetime" It's rarely your lifetime, it's the service providers. If you pay for that lifetime subscription and they fold the next year it becomes a very very expensive one year service.

Lego throws its own Hail Mary

Imagination

I liked Lego when it was almost all just rectangular blocks and perhaps some wheels. You could make "anything" out of it, time after time, with your imagination being the limit.

Now (and yes for the last 30 maybe 40 years) it all seems to be very expensive sets with very specific parts to make one thing very very well. Mix the parts up and making it again becomes very very hard so really they become a short term activity, something to admire for a short while, then a mess of weird bits with which you can't build anything of comparable quality.

What happened when AI ran into the cold hard reality of the legal profession

Yes they do have ethics.. Their core ethic is to maximize billing by dragging all proceedings out as long as possible. Part of this will undoubtably be fighting the use of AI at every step. I personally took forward to the day when the legal argument can be produced with AI and summarized into the 3 or 4 pages of A4 that a juror can read and recall. Another AI can "read" it and verify the facts. Once we get to that stage we will nearly be ready to dispense with lawyers and their "ethics".

Kids say they can beat age checks by drawing on a fake mustache

Re: Quelle Surprise

Kids tell lies on surveys. What they will say if they believe it is a truly anonymous survey is very different from the answers they give if the believe teachers and parents will see them.

Gmail celebrates 22 years by finally letting users change their addresses

Re: gmail names not unique

I really wish there were an option to turn that nonsense off

Such an option would need to be based on the magic of allowing people who intend to email you to do so yet stopping everyone else from making the unintentional mistake of typing your email by accident.

Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'

Re: A correction

Thank you for the correction. I had looked at your post and done the basic maths to see what was wrong before seeing it. It's surprising that you got so many upvotes for a headline that was so obviously wrong.

One million megawatts from one million satellites would be one megawatt per satellite. An area of a square kilometer each is million square meters each.

One megawatt from one million square meters means they would be delivering a measly one watt per square meter.

This coincidently is about the power density you get out around the orbit of Pluto.

Re: Peak Musk...

Probably, but it he tries and fails it doesn't matter that much to me. If however he does manage to jump the shark, then things might get interesting.

Sorry, Amazon, you couldn't pick a worse time to bring a phone to market: IDC analyst

Re: Yes, that's a (gulp) brilliant idea

Don't just about all phones support eSims these days so your phone will already be a dual Sim phone?

Re: Yes, that's a (gulp) brilliant idea

Keeping up with the Jones' was not my motive for buying one. I got mine because I wanted something that would require close to zero effort on my behalf. Android is a platform where people struggle to keep their phones patched and up to date with 5 versions of Android having between 10 and 20% of uses shared amongst them. This is dire from a security patching perspective. For Apple that number is 2 with 66% of users being on the latest version.

I specifically want Apple to control the patching process of my phone to keep it on the latest version (it is). indeed this was why I moved off Android a couple of years ago as patching was sporadic. No doubt my IPhone will tell me when security patching is ending. Currently 6 year old iPhones can run the latest IOS and as my phone is a bit over 2 years old I might have 4 years more use from it before I have to upgrade.

Re: Yes, that's a (gulp) brilliant idea

I don't believe people who buy Apple phones want freedom from control of Apple.

Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin applies to launch 51,000 datacenter satellites

Re: "...a long way over the horizon..."

Technically it's "Blue" for short.

In the name of science: Boffins build fart-tracking undies

That's the problem with statistics.

Mere counting equates a brief mid morning toot to a continuous start of day 45 second wheezing rumble.

And does a late evening helicopter gunship count as one or 20(ish)?

Repopulate! Repopulate! Two lost Doctor Who episodes turn up in private collection

Re: As a kid in the 60’s

Oh shit!!!

Typed from back behind the settee.

Re: As a kid in the 60’s

Scary? The first "serial" of Dr Who "An Unearthly Child" (4-5 episodes) was a scary. Oddly the very first episode was shown twice. It was shown on 23 Nov 1963 but many people missed it due to the assassination of John F Kennedy on Friday 22 Nov 1963, it was repeated again on 30 Nov 1963 which I found a bit disappointing.

The second serial "The Daleks" (7 episodes) aired from December and was terrifying. I watched it from behind the settee.

I vaguely remember the series of this 1965 episode. Being older I didn't need to hide behind the settee too much, though I was bribed not to scream if it got too scary. I almost managed it.

My fear of Daleks only ended when my mum told me they couldn't go up stairs.

Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting

Re: Comparing fruits

I recall back in the mid 1970's the proprietor of a book shop I frequented served time in prison for some of the publications he was flogging. I only bought science fiction books there and was not aware of the under counter offerings. Yes, I was very naive back then. Later when I asked around I learnt that he had been flogging some pretty rough stuff that quite possibly was beyond what we see on PornHub today, or more accurately what we saw on PornHub before the age verification check drove most of its customers away.

Whitehall seeks lone C++ coder to keep airport passenger model flying

Re: It's a contract designed for a specific company

I had a colleague who specialized in these type of tasks. He would do the work in advance and based on what he had done get it speced out so there would be no other bids. Once the contract was secured he would drip feed it out over the contract term with bugfixes first and updates towards the end of the term. Whilst it was all rolling forward with no real work needed he would work on his next future projects that would follow the same route.

Your datacenter's power architecture called. It's not happy

Re: Safety?

48V is the maximum practical voltage that still qualifies as Safety Extra-Low Voltage (SELV) under IEC standards (≤60V DC). This brings the benefit of largely removing the risk of shock and arc flash and no special insulation, creepage/clearance spacing, or insulating barriers are required. Consequently technicians can work on it without high-voltage certification.