Posts by Dinanziame

OpenAI ad service can bill customers for up to one day after they pause campaigns

I'd agree if what you said was related in any way to the article

Ransomware gangs skip the CEO, head straight for the 40-something IT manager

Re: Once again

What's the difference?

Re: Once again

it MUST become a crime to pay ransom.

Do you advocate the same for ransoms on kidnapped relatives?

Demoralized developer's desperate hack came back to haunt him on LinkedIn

Re: There's nothing more permanent

TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE

US bank places trust in ransomware crew that promised to delete its data

Re: This article IS about US bank

Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick

Time is money, i.e. shorter is better, e.g. per.

Microsoft seeks Supreme Court lifeline in pre-owned license battle

YOU WOULDN'T RESELL A CAR

Well yes actually, I would

Google breaks Alibaba’s record for Europe’s largest DMA fine

Re: Wake me up

Not sure where your deep skepticism comes from: Google has paid every multi-billion fine they got from the EU. Even if they appeal a fine, they need to pay for it first, then possibly get the money back if they win the appeal.

To begin with, it's not a lot of money for Google, but also whyever would the EU let them get away with not paying fines?

Google Cloud is killing it

Re: Maybe...

Well there was this proposal to have a minimum 15% corporate tax in all countries in the world, but "that guy" said the US would not participate...

Re: Hm... BBC says "Google burning through cash with spiralling AI costs"

It's simple: They are making a lot of money, but they are investing even more in building infrastructure like crazy because renting it out is (at the moment at least) so lucrative. According to the estimates I've seen, a new data center full of AI chips pays for itself in less than two years. Nobody has enough capacity for the foreseeable future, so there is no risk of running out of customers desperate to train or run their models.

So if they invest a billion today, they will have two billions in four years. If they invest a hundred billions today, they will have two hundred billions in four years. So they're investing all their money, and borrowing even more to invest even more. Replacing failing chips with new chips pays for itself in one year. With that kind of math, no wonder that everybody is building data centers like crazy. Meta has announced they were going to rent out their infra, something they had never done before. SpaceX is renting out (xAI's) infra (and also proposing crazy plans about data centers in space, but that's another story). The reason they're all doing it is because they make so much money from it.

The truth nobody wants to admit: Chinese or not, open models are competitive now

I'm not worried about lack of competition — the barriers to creating new models seem low, and there are lots of models getting created at a breakneck speed.

As to Chinese open weight models, I find them a very positive development. It seems like people have the freedom to choose various free "Linux" alternatives to paying "Windows" models, without moat or barrier to adoption. The fact they're Chinese rather than Finnish seems irrelevant, considering you'll be running it on your own infrastructure. What's not to like?

Using AI makes people less likely to admit they don't know something

Makes sense to me

Compare one person who has no information at all to another person who only has access to an unreliable form of information. It sounds obvious that the one who has access to information will repeat it at least some of the time, even if they know it is unreliable.

EU forces Google to share its toys with the other AI and search kids

EU mandating Google to sell user data

It's rather funny that Google will be able to charge for access to that data. I predict that researchers will demonstrate that they can de-anonymize users, competitors will complain that Google is not sharing enough, and ultimately nobody will be willing to pay for it, because the competitors that are big enough and rich enough to buy Petabytes of data per day don't actually need it.

Top EU court clips YouTube's intermediary defense over reviewed content

Yeah, they're definitely not looking in detail at all videos. But also, scammers know that their channel will be checked before entering the agreement, and they only misbehave once they've been vetted. Or they buy an existing channel that has been vetted years ago, and they switch the content to fraud.

Prominent Haskell defector pilloried by anti-AI purists

Re: If AI could actually reason…

The referential transparency and the denotational semantics of declarative languages could be a natural fit for artificial reasoning (theorem proving) systems ...

*Zzzzzzzz*

I believe OCaml serves the same purpose in France, except they use it for everything, not just to teach functional programming. I'm not sure they realize the damage they are doing to French students.

Apple accuses OpenAI of stealing its core tech secrets

Re: "OpenAI’s attempt to build a hardware business"

Likewise, first I heard of it. Sounds like a stupid idea for OpenAI to get into hardware. They should have way more pressing matters.

Photovoltaics are still running after a year under Swiss trains

Re: Oh but just you wait

One would suspect that Switzerland, being notoriously not very flat, large parts of the railbeds of the railroad network will be in the shadow of mountains, railway cut walls, buildings and/or trees much or all of the day

Switzerland does have a lot of mountains, but don't overestimate the shadows they cast — mountains are much less steep than most people think. I remember an American asking me how Switzerland can have a football team, since obviously with all those mountains it must be very difficult to have enough flat land for a football field...

Zuck's AI ambitions put Meta on course to become America's next big cloud provider

Picks and shovels

Seems like a no brainer, and Zuck coincidentally agrees

EU puts 'addictive' design of Facebook, Instagram under the DSA microscope

Ban targeted advertising

A great first step would be to finally act against Facebook for only letting paying users opt out of targeted advertising. The law is clear that users must be able to opt out of they want — making it a paid service is a complete mockery, and they should be fined billions for that.

Another German state heads down the open source sovereignty road

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern

Awesome name

Zombie ‘who owns Unix?’ lawsuit comes alive again

Re: I'm confused

Oh, Jarndyce^W IBM still has money for a while. I hear they even have customers, somehow.

AI search could kill the web without new quality signals and revenue models

Re: It will kill content creators, not the web

Eventually, someone will provide, or market, a barrier to block AI training, and the content that can't be scraped by AI will need to be accessed directly. It'll take a few years to shake out, but just as brick and mortar stores adapted to the competition of the internet, content creators will adapt to AI.

The problem I see with this solution is that the AI companies will go "all right, keep your secrets", and scrape instead the websites that don't block them. They will serve that to users, and users will not complain about the missing content because they will not know that it exists, and they will have no way to discover it. It's no different to the fact that websites are able to stop Google from crawling them using robots.txt, but if they do that their traffic dries up and users go everywhere else. There is a massive advantage to operators who are willing to let their content be scraped, or even willing to pay to advertise their content — something Google knows a lot about.

UK regulator wants Apple and Google to let devs steer clear of app store fees

Re: Free install (sideloading) for all

I was plenty satisfied with what Google used to do: Sideloading is possible if you enable it in the settings. Barely a hurdle, but enough to stop most scams of people who are not technical enough to do that. For some reason, people have said that it's both too much and not enough.

That said, the lack of competition does allow the app store owners to overcharge developers, and I don't see how that can be fixed without a massive mandate to force the preinstallation of multiple app stores on all devices.

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Poking around with a screwdriver, without even unplugging the power cord?

Re: Not with a disk, but

Then it was a quick one! For a church, I'd have expected it to only come back after three days...

Google wants AI regulation, but on its own terms

Re: German court

I think more than anything, they are terrified of becoming irrelevant by having having their search completely supplanted by chatgpt the way they supplanted altavista. From their point of view, they are fighting for survival.

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

Re: I've seen worse

"Corporate needs you to sort this box of buttons"

I have seen somebody opening a spreadsheet full of numbers they needed to take the average of, and use a handheld calculator to compute the next column, one. row. at. a. time.

Waymo hits the brakes after robotaxis keep missing the signs for freeway construction zones

How can they drive between the cones marking closed lanes?? The point of the cones is to make it impossible to enter the closed lane without hitting the cones.

Elon Musk is now worth more than $1,000,000,000,000

It's only a matter of time until the company merges with Tesla as well

Google fires sueball at alleged Chinese phishers over AI-powered fraud ops

Why the lawsuit?

I mean it's not like they'll show up. What purpose does it serve? PR?

It's do or die for Apple AI

Apple is not a software company

It's a hardware company. All its software is only meant to support the hardware business. Just as an example they spent billions to build a maps product... Then only made it available on Apple hardware. This is incredibly wasteful, unless as a strategy to build a moat around the hardware business.

GitHub nukes 70+ Microsoft repos, breaks CI/CD pipelines, following suspected worm infections

Ugh

To the risk of sounding like a fragile little flower, I'd rather not see a surprise close-up of wriggling worms when opening the register. But I am indeed a fragile little flower. Sorry about this, feel free to downvote, I'm already a bit embarrassed I'm posting this.

Citation, please! UK regulator slaps Google with new publishing rules for search

Is there a new requirement?

The AI overviews in Google already contain some links that are supposed to support the answer. Does this new law have some bite that will force Google to improve the feature, or is this just a theatrical move to claim something is being done without actually achieving anything? Is there any clear way to measure improvements, or will they regularly fine Google for not doing well enough?

California passes bill declaring death-by-algorithm to 3D-printed ghost guns

Re: I thought Americans liked guns?

Meanwhile America implodes in on itself and its enemies don't have to lift a finger.

FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States

Troops’ phones gave away location data to foreign adversaries

Google Maps was showing traffic jams on Russian roads next to the Ukraine border the day before the invasion; so at the time, no they weren't. But I suspect that both sides have had an extensive security training in the past four years, and that failure to follow procedures often proved fatal.

Google engineer accused of turning Year in Search secrets into Polymarket payday

Funny, I vaguely remember the CEO of polymarket encouraging people with insider knowledge to bet^W invest on the platform because that would make their predictions more accurate

EU moderation watchdog says social media giants hate taking down hate speech

Re: By design

"In other words, the platforms appear capable of simultaneously leaving up content they should remove while deleting content they should leave alone, which is an impressive operational achievement even by social media standards."

It's fun to be snarky and all, but that's actually completely normal. Their job is to take down bad content. They have false positives (took down stuff they shouldn't), and false negatives (didn't take down stuff they should). Moderation is a difficult job, it's not possible to get it right 100% of the time, and you try to minimize the false positives and the false negatives. But if you don't have both types of error, it means you are either way too strict or way too lenient.

Researchers find all big-name bots bomb EU compliance tests

Well duh

If you instruct an AI to break the law, it will break the law. I don't think it's particularly surprising, and it would be rather surprising if the AI answered "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that". Cars can drive above the speed limit, too. There are very few tools for which an attempt was even made to prevent illegal uses. I can only think of DRM, and some very specific things that photocopying machines do to prevent counterfeiting money.

As a general rule, it's the responsibility of the user to ensure that what they do is legal. Not only should you not trust the machines to figure out that something is illegal, but I don't even think we want them to do anything like that.

NASA to pull an IKEA by dropping tons of plastic, metal, and glass on the Moon

But why?

The post is required, and must contain letters.

Big Tech extracts retirement-scale wealth from UK internet users, research shows

So what does web3 propose?

As I understand it, their main goal is to push blockchain solutions where nobody asked for it. Whatever replaces the cookies-for-free-internet, I'm not sure I'll like their solution.

Google has seriously leaned into AI enshittification lately

This nugget right here

the whole internet AI thing took off when everyone saw a weakness in search and said, hey, we can provide something that will break Google's stranglehold

I want to point out that this sentence is the exact reason that Google is ramming AI down people's throat today. They didn't get where they are by letting others take away their users, so at the first sign that the users were leaving for chatGPT, they decided to out-chatGPT chatGPT. And they have more resources and more money.

A Russian speaker and jailbroken Gemini went on a hacking spree and emptied at least one MAGA victim's crypto wallets

Re: So Now Reg Writers are Quoting "Security Professionals" without Challenging Lies

Oh come off your high horse. The term reason is commonly used to describe words written by the AI before the formal response to a prompt. You might as well complain that people are using the term AI despite the fact "it's not truly intelligent"

SpaceX pitches itself as integrated interplanetary proto-monopolist in IPO filing

Inevitable merge with Tesla incoming

Elon Musk will retain full control of SpaceX, so he'll be able to force a merger along terms he prefers, at valuations he prefers. Shareholders are explicitly told they will not have the power to stop it. SpaceX has reportedly already been helping out Tesla by buying over $100 million in Cybertrucks last year.

Arguably, it even makes way more sense than SpaceX owning Twitter.

Surprise AI bills leave AWS and Google Cloud users aghast

I kind of don't get how putting an API key out there in public was ever fine if there was even the remote possibility to use it to charge you money. I'm sure it made sense to whoever had the idea, though. Maybe the thinking was that anyway people can reload your website with the map a million times to force you to pay $1.27 for the use of the maps API?

Agent harnesses, like OpenClaw, are changing how we build and run AI models

Re: Whim

I thought it was informative? Personally I found interesting the angle that CPU are becoming more in demand again because some of the work done by agents is actually not done by the model but by the local computer running it in a loop.

I understand that not everybody is interested, but then you can just do what I do with, say, articles about software-defined networks and skip them...

X tells Ofcom it will finally check its moderation inbox

Pull the other one it's got bells on

I assume the €120 million fine finally got their attention, but I doubt Twitter still has the ability to do anything else than redirecting these reports to /dev/null.

And before anybody suggests that Twitter should just block all of the EU: Yes! Please!

Nobody believes the 'criminals and scumbags' who hacked Canvas really deleted stolen student data

The US federal government, law enforcement agencies, and private-sector threat intelligence analysts all advise victims not to pay a ransom.

This is all very principled and well-intentioned to be sure, but the same arguments they give also apply to the more traditional ransom notes accompanied with the severed finger of your loved ones. I wonder if they would also give the same advice for such cases, and if they would follow their own advice if that was happening to them.

Google launches line of Android laptops festooned with Gemini AI

By this point I'm afraid the AI is here to stay until the Butlerian jihad

My guess is that an order came from above that maintaining two separate OSes is too expensive, kill one of them to save money