Posts by AVR

It's true, social media moderators do go after conservatives

Re: Who is the judge ?

Is it certainly in this group because you don't like it, and what you dislike must be wrong, or is there some objective reason for believing so?

Bank of America app glitch zeroes out people's balances

Re: Cash is king

Which makes inflation the most highly trained cat thief of them all. Can't see it, can't stop it, and you definitely can't get that money back.

China calls for realtime censorship of satellite broadband

Re: TW ground stations?

Hard to actually sell many thousands of those terminals in the PRC without approval though, and the people putting thousands of satellites up there expect to make a profit from it. If the terminals are manufactured in China then the authorities are in a position to inflict pain on the manufacturer; if they're made elsewhere then they can get a grip on the importer. A few smuggled in aren't going to be a great concern to those authorities because they make nice beacons to find the discontented.

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

Yeah, when telling people how to fix something verbally, with computer syntax involved, closing your eyes to cut out distractions can make it easier to give the exact instructions. I've done that myself though without the hollow voice of the possessed that this guy apparently did.

Data harvesting superapp admits it struggled to wield data – until it built an LLM

If they don't even know what they're collecting, then they can't know whether they should be collecting it. I guess Singapore doesn't have annoying regulations of that kind and the company apparently doesn't have a culture which asks such questions.

91% of polled Amazon staff unhappy with return-to-office, 3-in-4 want to jump ship

Re: "I only want SUPERSTARS"

Not sure that post was 100% serious. Or even 50% serious - it read like someone having fun.

Cards Against Humanity deals SpaceX a $15M lawsuit over Texas turf tangle

Re: I wonder

This isn't the 18th century - waste land (terra nullius) which anyone can do whatever they want with is not a thing.

Re: I wonder

SpaceX cleared the brush and some small trees, put down a great deal of gravel to make a parking lot and stored construction materials on the lot. I don't know what laws apply but I'm sure there's something actionable there.

US indicts two over socially engineered $230M+ crypto heist

Re: Give them a medal instead

Adaptation could mean enforcing the normal laws and letting crypto wither as a result, you know. Not every mutation is beneficial.

Scientists find a common food dye can make a live mouse's skin transparent

Sounds simple enough to do. I wonder how many people have tried it on themselves already since this made the news, risks be damned? If it works on humans there'll be pictures on the net somewhere pretty soon.

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

Worse, you read the comments. Proof that you're antisocial.

Microsoft Bing Copilot accuses reporter of crimes he covered

Copilot coming up with the correct data later on the Reg's test is interesting. It seems like it should be possible to improve results and reduce AI hallucination by getting the system to just slow down a bit.

Nvidia's latest AI climate model takes aim at severe weather

Re: Weathermarket

Meteorologists do forecast the weather, and almost without exception aren't rich. Not with 100% reliability, but enough to be useful.

Disney claims agreeing to Disney+ terms waives man's right to sue over wife's death

Re: Kind of a self-answering question ?

While arguing that it's the company running the restaurant that's solely responsible might be reasonable, their actual arguments seem to be that Piccolo is suing everyone possible (a 'shotgun pleading') and their arbitration should take place first, and that clicking on accepting their terms and conditions means that Piccolo is contractually bound to go to arbitration for any dispute against Disney. Most of Disney's lawyers argument is about the latter. You can see the text at the bottom of the article here: longisland.news12.com/disney-asks-court-to-dismiss-wrongful-death-lawsuit-of-long-island-doctor

Google is a monopoly. The fix isn't obvious

Re: iBiz to compete with Google? Ha!

Not Yahoo, no. Take a quick look at this map - the icon sizes don't represent anything in particular, but you can see that the other independent sources (not front ends) for search are Yandex, Mojeek and Yep. Brave is semi-independent. https://www.searchenginemap.com

Cigarette break burned out a huge chunk of Africa's internet

Re: Ahh a manager who is telling the truth

If later is after the manager has left for greener pastures they may be okay with that.

The cybersecurity QA trifecta of fail that may burn down the world

A problem for us isn't a problem for them

Various social media platforms get better engagement through outrage. Detecting and removing outraging material is against their interests, and expecting them to come up with an effective means of doing so isn't reasonable in their view.

Then of course there's the way that many very rich people find the culture wars useful to prevent action against their growing fortunes, or outright agree with the reactionary nutcases (Lachlan Murdoch, Elon Musk).

Basically 'challenging' AI/ML to solve the problem is up against a lot more problems than technical ability to do so. If you come up with a way then the people in charge of implementing it have incentives to undermine it.

Silicon, stars, and sulfur make Apollo's unlikely legacy

...faster than it took Microsoft to evolve Windows 98 into a half-decent OS.

How long is that, exactly? Just wondering.

Forget security – Google's reCAPTCHA v2 is exploiting users for profit

Re: FSCK to the entire company

Well, a complete filesystem check on all of google would take them out of our hair for the foreseeable.

NASA swings budget axe, kills $400M+ VIPER lunar trundlebot

Re: Custom components?

If they expect to find problems and to have to make changes from the testing then skipping the testing is likely to result in some embarrassing failure. Stuck at a 90 degree angle to the lunar surface or something. Saving the embarrassment is probably worth a lot to NASA and there's costs in running the mission besides the hardware too - staff running the mission, mostly.

EU officials say X’s paid-for blue check deceives users and breaks law

Re: There'll be a stare down eventually

Where did you get the idea that the EU hasn't fined Google & Apple billions (& Intel hundreds of millions, if it matters). Xitter certainly doesn't have more leverage than those.

Babel fish? We're getting there. Reg reviews the Timekettle X1 AI Interpreter Hub

Re: Real Time?

The review mentions delays in translation. Sort of time travel, the one second per second version.

Cloudflare debuts one-click nuke of web-scraping AI

Re: hmm

True even when the gold was just a rumour and the miners destined for disappointment.

Humanity's satellite habit could end up choking Earth's ozone layer

Well, they already are if you're sufficiently unlucky; see that Florida house (the owner is now suing NASA for $80,000, which seems low for a US lawsuit), or a few other places over the years. I was thinking more of the sort of dust which rains down slowly though, like the sort that some scientists were collecting from very old roofs in Kent, UK (https://www.kent.ac.uk/news/science/33894/kent-scientists-search-for-cosmic-dust-at-englands-oldest-cathedrals).

A fair bit of orbital debris ends up as something other than nanoparticles - starting with the debris from batteries dumped from the ISS which hit a Florida house, but I expect other debris may simply be small-but-not-nanoparticles. Assuming it all turns into nanoparticles in the ozone layer is probably unnecessarily pessimistic.

Meta, Microsoft SQL Server make strange bedfellows on a couch of cyber-pain

Re: Can you imagine...

I'd bet Microsoft would love to be able to force their customers to upgrade. At the customer's expense of course.

In other words the opposition of Big Tech probably isn't why this modest proposal isn't law.

From RAGs to riches: A practical guide to making your local AI chatbot smarter

Re: Progress of sorts

It can find the manual if the manual is correctly tagged, or possibly if it's pointed at a great wodge of your internal documents it'll come up with something like the right one. Or possibly it'll work from an out of date version and not tell you; no way of telling from this if I'm reading it correctly.

Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch cleared of all charges in US Autonomy fraud trial

How did Lynch piss Oracle off so badly? Just denying that they'd discussed acquisition wouldn't normally produce that sort of response, with docs attached and all.

Microsoft Research chief scientist has no issue with Windows Recall

Okay, I can see helpdesk staff rejoicing at an answer to one of the common problems in an office biz - "The computer ate my stuff! Hours of work gone even days! How are you going to get it back?" - but the biz is likely to take a dim view of all this proprietary info sloshing around on desktops and laptops with minimal control. It's entirely outside whatever document management system they'll have installed.

I suspect that the Recall system going wild and trying to fill up the hard disk is a potential new problem for the helpdesk too.

High-flying drones on a leash could blow traditional wind turbines away

The initial use case would be much smaller; I'm betting that they're more expensive per watt generated than turbines sitting on the ground and would mainly be of use for generating a bit of power when the wind's low at ground level, to smooth out the variability there. 10% of a medium-large advanced economy's power budget isn't 'modest' by anyone's standard.

Broadcom’s VMware strategy looks ever more shaky - and less relevant

Bubbles?

With spiralling investment and limited obvious value the AI market looks like a bubble to me. Broadcom might want to hang on to its other properties a while longer as a hedge against a fall.

The Canon Cat – remembering the computer that tried to banish mice

Older mice - well, circa 1990, the first time I saw one - were pretty crappy with a tendency to get stuck on one vertical or horizontal line and collecting dirt and hand grease like that was their purpose. I can see wanting to make a computer which bypasses the entire concept. As we know that didn't work though. Keyboards also suck in their own way when dealing with graphical displays.

Tape is so dead, 152.9 EB of LTO media shipped last year

Unmentioned, but...

Probably it's partly an anti-ransomware measure in part - it's hard for the ransomware gangs to mess with that offline storage even if they're in the system in some way while the backup is made.

Google gives in to Hong Kong, blocks fake national anthem on YouTube

Re: I'm left wondering

The Muskrat bends the knee to India, I have no doubt he'd do the same to China.

Rear-end crashes prompt probe into Amazon's Zoox self-driving cars

Re: Self-driving

And then after leaving the arena, the self-driving cars would switch back to normal mode so they could resume collecting souls for Arioch.

America will make at least quarter of advanced chips in 2032, compared to China’s 2%

Building new chip fabs is planned further in advance than that. The actual building takes 3 years barring problems, and they're planned years before.

FYI... Renewable energy sources behind 30% of the world's electricity in 2023

Re: Electricity or energy?

Well, barring the huge carbon electrodes which are used destructively, and the actual mining process as mentioned above. Making aluminium isn't likely to become carbon-neutral - though it could certainly become better.

Tesla devotee tests Cybertruck safety with his own finger – and fails

Re: "The frunk is powered and shouldn't be closed manually"

Those cost money. The frunk's got power to open and close because that looks cool, but it's got the absolute cheapest version without the safety features - for humans or the car - that other manufacturers have because that's the way Elon rolls.

Google to relocate some US jobs to India and Mexico

Re: No need to suggest

Dozens to hundreds of terabits in an undersea cable, dozens of gigabit/s in a Starlink earth station; about 3 orders of magnitude yes.

Prof asks court to protect his Unfollow Everything 2.0 extension from Facebook's ire

Re: No need to make it better...

With actual billions on it, social media as a whole isn't going to just go away. That's like wishing for bread to stop being a thing. It may change but history suggests it's likely not going to change for the better.

Throwflame launches fire-spitting robo-dog from Hell

Show and not much else.

You could see a legit use backburning without endangering firefighters, but I doubt the robodog has the endurance to do that well. The main use looks to be putting dangerous people on the appropriate FBI watchlist.

Australia secures takedown order for terror videos, which Elon Musk wants to fight

Previous form

Macron has on at least one other occasion come back from a meeting from a rich and powerful man with unlikely assurances, and had those assurances thoroughly disproven by events. At least this one wasn't cover for launching a war.

Stability AI decimates staff just weeks after CEO's exit

Why are you assuming they didn't do so? AI hallucinations are the opposite of reliable after all.

Devaluing content created by AI is lazy and ignores history

Laws aren't optional

The legal stuff does need to be sorted out before useful commercial content can be a real thing though. There's more than one reason for Audible to reject your potential AI-voiced audiobook - would you even own the copyright to it? If not, would Audible face legal hassles later if they sold access to it? There's common sense ways to deal with such issues but no guarantees that all legal systems will follow the 'common sense' path.

Happy 20th birthday Gmail, you're mostly grown up – now fix the spam

Experiences differ

I have a gmail account. I don't use it a lot, but practically the only commercial email there is from places where I did sign up to something (one exception this week, I can't remember the last one before that - it wasn't in the last month), and the unsubscribe links work. It's weird how many people apparently have such bad experiences with it - I don't know what the difference is.

Ex-White House CIO tells The Reg: TikTok ban may be diplomatic disaster

Re: Political suicide.

You haven't heard of social media influencers? There's money on TikTok, though most of us aren't good looking enough or charismatic enough to succeed. As to whether TikTok users vote - some will. They haven't previously been an identifiable demographic but banning their playground may change that.

China encouraged armed offensive against Myanmar government to protest proliferation of online scams

Old news?

I read about this months ago, though without any mention of the ICG.

CNCF boss talks 'irrational exuberance' in an AI-heavy Kubecon keynote

Re: Regisdtration nightmares...

And if you didn't have enough budget, time or staff? Problems usually come from one of those, not out of thin air.