Posts by David Hicklin

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

It would pretty much end human space travel as the risk of hitting one would be very high. Yeah space is big but stuff floating around it is in a finite space

In the end this is just Musk trying to distract people again

UK justice system unplugs from ancient datacenters after five-year slog

Re: For £150K…

They really need someone to apply the KISS principle and simplify the over complex systems they have

Re: Sir Brian Leveson recommends numerous uses of AI

> fragmented criminal justice system

Just wait until LLM's get started on it!

Three clues that your LLM may be poisoned with a sleeper-agent back door

Re: What party?

> Even after the Titanic sunk, shipping companies only secured enough life boats after they were required by law

The tragic irony of this being that the Titanic carried more lifeboats than required by law

Satya Nadella decides Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar

Re: only 3% willing to pay to use AI slop

And the tech shares are starting their slide back down - Amazon announces big AI LLM spend and shares drop by 11%.

Hopefully this is finally the start of the bubble deflating.

Re: Missing one aspect, the customer

> The customer wants reliability, security and manageability as a priority

Don't forget stability and not having things changed month to month "just because". I do wonder if the time spent relearning from all the changes to the Micro$lop software could have been put to better use of learning a new OS just once.

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

Re: O tempora o mores

> were returned as DOA under warranty, and I went on with my life.

So you were a classic Who? Me? candidate. But yeah, that is how it was done if you could get away with it !

Re: He posted this?

240 AC on a board of TTL chips when using an uninsulated screwdriver as a probe and touching a triac heat sink.

Watched as little white blobs whizzed along the PCB tracks and as they passed each chip promptly blowing the top off the chip package.

Amazingly after bridging a couple of vaporised track sections and a new set of chips it still worked afterwards. I guess the chips sacrificed themselves to save the resistors and capacitors.

It was a long time ago and I was still a teenager (retired now to give sense of time) but a lesson well learned.

'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP

> to prevent them from producing food efficiently.

The solar farms around here are part of the regular field rotation for sheep so the land is not wasted at all.

Amazon's European datacenter buildout blows a breaker as grid connection wait list hits 7 years

Re: But fusion......

That's even worse...always 20 years away

Re: Then they should choose a region a bit off those centers...

> There are transmission constraints between Scotland and England that are being slowly addressed

Slowly being the word thanks to all the Nimby's

NASA delays Artemis II to March after hydrogen leaks bedevil countdown test

> yes, yes, that is an oversimplification

I am sure that this was done very tongue in cheek, and that you are well aware of the real engineering problems that would arise such as :

At some stage you will need to extend the base area otherwise the COG further up the stack will make it very unstable aka a pyramid structure

The above also solves the problem of the bottom robot carrying all the mass of those above it and its feel sinking into the ground (or simply collapsing)

Reaching orbit will not be stable until you reach geosynchronous orbit, anything unsupported below that will simply drop back down to the ground rather than staying up as you will not be orbiting fast enough' Let go before then and the whole stack will come crashing down.

Your stack will pass the moon once every day (or thereabouts) as the Earth is rotating much faster, so you will need a ski lift structure to hop on and off as it passed each time

Not sure how to handle the centrifugal force caused by the Earths rotation as you get further away, there is supposable an null point between the moon and earth but then as you start climbing back down towards the moon the forces will start to increase.

Europe shrugs off tariffs, plots to end tech reliance on US

Re: Artificial idiocy.

Clearly this persons company only trades within itself.

Firefox makes AI optional, like it probably should have been all along

Re: Not good enough

DuckDuckGo for a while had a poll running if you clicked the logo asking do you want AI yes or no - it was over 95% no in the responses

Microsoft kills standalone SharePoint and OneDrive plans, because they’re not suite enough

Re: Wish the title read...

> Having tried on many occasions to get people to sort out messy files, the reasons / excuses are usually either that it might be needed one day, that they don't have time

We had that and on of my final tasks was to go through the files tree and nuke anything that was obsolete - at the end there was not much left. I mean who needs files from 2003 relating to a product long gone and would not even run on systems as far back as windows 7....

DRAM prices expected to double in Q1 as AI ambitions push memory fabs to their limit

Re: Ugh

> more people will be tempted or budget constrained to purchase budget replacement systems…

or sweat the current systems for longer and defer the purchase. This AI bubble can't end fast enough.

Oracle expects investors to pump $50 billion into its cloud this year alone

Re: What's a mandatory convertible preferred security?

> My inexpert view is that borrowing a year's revenue for an insolvent customer that likely will never be able to pay is foolhardy.

Agree, sounds very much like Sub-Prime Mortgages, and we know what happened here.

McDonald's is not lovin' your bigmac, happymeal, and mcnuggets passwords

Looking at your substitutions I was not aware of a "u" becoming a "4", so that might add a few million years to it, and as for the poor old €, I mean how many people use that for an e ?

Microsoft spends billions on AI, converts just 3.3% of Copilot Chat users

Re: bankrupt them all

> But our corrupted officials will most likely remain on trend and socialize the loses/bankruptcies as recent history has shown for the sake of the insane argument of economic and national security

I'm not so sure of this mainly because the countries of those officials are neck-deep in debt already and getting deeper - most can't afford to bail them out and unless it is going to cause a banking crisis (which the stress tests are supposed to eliminate) they will have no choice but to let them fail this time.

Techie's one ring brought darkness by shorting a server

Re: "the server resumed operations, and the client declared himself pleased with the situation"

I think they were just happy that it was back and working - not borked

Re: I got my warning call early.

I had a masonry drill with some copper welded to the end of it after going through the newly installed and tiled over shower power cable at my parents house whilst putting the shower screen up.

Re: Lucky to still have his finger

I would suspect that the battery would also get quite hot - boiling acid maybe ?

Microsoft's 'atypical' emergency Windows patches are becoming awfully typical

Re: Windows is a loss leader at this point

Mico$lop just like many other software companies are jumping onto the subscription model as it provides a regular revenue stream.

So you have Azure for the cloud and Orifice364 for the office apps, nice regular income. Need more? Just raise the subscription price! They are all locked in at this point and if they stop paying then access to the services will be lost.

Now all they need to do is to make Windows 12 a subscription OS and they are sorted.

And they can do this as they know that the big customers are the business's who are wedded and welded to the mico$lop ecosystems, and to change to another OS etc would be so disruptive and expensive that mico$lop know they won't do it - unless mico$slop screws up so badly that they are forced to sit up and take notice.

Re: Its a pity

> we cant charge m$ for delivering a shite service

Mico$lops answer will be "sack the Admins and just let all devices connect direct to windows update - let us manage it for you using AI!"

Re: Don't say "AI Slop"!

And I combine the old and new into Mico$lop.

Free for use anywhere.

Re: " the [..] administrators' already shaky faith in the company"

> Home users may be unsophisticated and "only surf the web..."; that does not make them incompetent: they can be entirely competent at the range of tasks that are of interest to them.

I think the intended interpretation of that statement is that they are good enough to drive a browser and other installed software on their machines , but if something breaks that needs some "under the hood" fixing then they are just as lost as many modern car drivers are today.

Notepad++ update service hijacked in targeted state-linked attack

Re: When will there be..

> And, being able to ignore complete threads

Or when a thread goes seriously off topic into a flame war, the ability just to collapse that entire threat would be nice. The about of time I spend scrolling down to find where it all goes back on topic.....

Oh...now we have gone OT !!

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Re: So not completely different to humans, then

> The end of the article seems to imply that they had to have been going over even that to get a ticket... I think

That's how I read it as they were using average speed camera's and if they were at 40 up to the sign, then going to 50 after it would not have pushed their average over the camera's tripping point by the time they reached it. I guess they were pushing the tolerances to the limit by driving along at 44 then going 55, or something like that. That so many were near the banning stage would suggest serial speeders although in fairness some say they were caught multiple times in the same spot.

Not sure how I would have reacted to that to be honest, a single sign on it's own might have triggered the suspicion detector and probably would have waiting for the next pair of repeated limit signs to be sure, A self driving car would of course quite happily go up to 50 but no more....or 30 if passing a side road...

Irony alert: Anthropic helps UK.gov to build chatbot for job seekers

Re: More AI DIGO - Data Interpreted, Garbage Output.

I recently had several text messages looking for people to do product reviews and suggesting eye watering sums of money could be made.

Obviously a scam , but clearly they are still tying to poison the product reviews

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year

Re: why is it still news

> The tactic still bumps the share price which is far more important to shareholders than manufacturing or selling/renting things.

But until they actually go and sell some of these shares they are still imaginary funny money, and when they do start to sell in any quantity the price is going to tank.

I wonder who is going to be the first to blink.

Sat Nad declares Windows 11 has a billion users – just don't bother asking for details

Re: Tired

Totally agree with all your comments, and this laptop I am on now at home is also the Last Windows version (10) that will be seen here.

Sadly it is going to take a huge, multinational business (or 3 or 4) to dump Mico$lop for the message to get through to them and they are mostly wedded to the Windows ecosystems. My last employer before retirement certainly was and it would be a monumental change of IT direction (a bit like turning a supertanker with an ancient ship steering oar)

The other thing that could break the current enshittification trajectory is a fuck up by Mico$lop that is so big and expensive for those big businesses that they have no choice to to look at other solutions.

The rest of us are just annoying small fry to Mico$lop. But do keep on nibbling away, eventually the mice will inherit the world when the dinosaurs are gone.

Tesla revenue falls for first time as Musk bets big on robots and autonomy

Re: Car sales are stalling

> For the life of me I wouldn't buy a Chinese EV. Chinese manufacturers have no history of supplying parts beyond the model's production run and even during the parts are hard to come by because

That is one thing that would put be off BYD, the other is the big tablet that controls everything unless they have changed that recently. In the UK if you go to a Vauxhall dealer you will find half of of the showrooms are now BYD, I think it is a tie up that gives BYD outlets whilst Vauxhall get some income, not sure if the spares departments have had the same treatment.

Other car manufacturers are also catching up rapidly, as the article says the market is becoming very crowded.

Birmingham City Council's Oracle ERP fiasco now £144M and still not working

Re: well there's your problem!

an "out-of-the-box" deployment is actually the sane way of doing it.

The hard bit is sticking to that and there will always be departments with Empire Builders in them who will fight back resisting any change.

Yes there will always be some configuration but hells teeth how many times has Oracle (or any other supplier) provided systems for other councils ?

Re: This is AMAZING progress!

> then free falls until it hits Absolute Zero

You may find that it will fall below Absolute Zero much to the consternation of the Physics Boffins

Bork ventures to the Middle of Lidl

Re: whatever oddball items the company's buyers thought were a good idea at the time

I have resisted so far although I have seen stuff that I would like to buy, I guess I will indulge eventually for a 1 off project...

Me and the wife like the store though, she retired from Sainsbury's last year and we have only set foot in one Sainsbury store since - it was only after shopping at Lidl (and it is a brand new store) that we realised that not only was Saindbury's really expensive (no staff discount any more) but it was also a horrible shopping experience! Not hard to see what Lidl etc are eating the big stores lunches.

If you're one of the 16,000 Amazon employees getting laid off, read this

Re: Nope

> No - HR was never Personnel

At my first job in the late 1970's it was called the Personnel Department, so yes it was called that once upon a time.

Re: Corpo-ration

> I had stars in my eyes at the beginning of my first Real Job, and was certainly devoted to The Company for the first few years of my tenure there

Yup right until the moment you experience a round of mass redundancies. At job #1 it for me it was seeing a friend sat just across the room from me sitting there realising that he was being made redundant that started it, then job #3 it was Black Tuesday - people being escorted off the site one by one. It went on all day and was a horrible experience.

Especially when you can look back and realise that I would not be in this [very good] job if I had not taken "that" one way back, even though the firm went bust after 9 months !

How agentic AI can strain modern memory hierarchies

Re: Slaps forehead!

So, yet MORE memory needed...somewhere

Everybody is WinRAR phishing, dropping RATs as fast as lightning

Re: surprised

I used WinRAR a lot in the early days but can't remember when I last saw an .rar file, its all 7-zip or built into windows

Cops put Microsoft Copilot in holding cell after controversial hallucination

But will he face the tax penalties for taking it earlier than 5 years from the state retirement age?

ATM flashes a port or two for the enterprising hacker

Re: To be fair...

> And ATM's are, by definition, installed where the users (public) can get to them.

This one looks like it is inside the premises which are locked up outside of opening hours, looks like one heck of a bodge job however

Voyager 2's close encounter with Uranus wasn't in the original plan

Re: A sticky issue

I think they have/had replica's here on Earth and did a lot of testing first....but yeah very clever engineers.

Re: Connect TRITON

> The TS/Channel Support group upstairs named their systems after Greek gods

And these days we get boring letters & incrementing numbers to identify them.

France to replace US videoconferencing wares with unfortunately named sovereign alternative

So thwarted at their first attempt to set up SkyNet

Re: Deja vue all over again

So Micro$lop are going to buy France ?

When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

The true cost

According to Perplexity, my AI chatbot of choice, this week‑long autonomous browser experiment consumed in the order of 10-20 trillion tokens and would have cost several million dollars at then‑current list prices for frontier models

And this is for current pricing, who knows what it will be when companies start charging enough to make a profit from peddling this crap.

Re: Just a couple of decades away

> My gut-feeling for man-made fusion is that to be efficient (more energy out than in) will require a scale that would be impractical (small star say).

You need a Dyson Sphere.

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

Re: Users and printing devices...

> I've always been pretty terrible at sums

For years my wife wanted to work in a supermarket but her maths is terrible, and once upon a time tills just gave a total and the checkout person had to calculate the change to give (mostly cash wayback).

It made life much easier when the tills started calculating the change as she could count out the notes/coins just fine. Of course nearly everything these days is card and no maths needed.

Tesla Full Self Driving subscription to rise alongside its capabilities

Re: Fine Shield for Drivers

> >What happens if there is no driver and the Tesla magic is the one mowing down pedestrians and ignoring red lights? Where does liability sit?

We have not had a proper court case to set precedence for that yet, the manufacturers/insurers/government keep on trying to offload the liability to the other groups