* Posts by AVR

286 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2020

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Microsoft tries to knife passwords once and for all - at least for consumers

AVR Silver badge

Re: M$ Wants Biometric ID - Sure Hold-on a second ... - NOT.

I don't lug around a phone everywhere myself, but a lot of people do - possibly to pay for their groceries, even. If you are going to try to make a one-size-fits-all solution, centring it on a phone makes sense. If you're going to insist on being an odd size then you're going to put some extra effort in.

Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025

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Apparently it's predicted to do that without the parachute. The parachute seems to have deployed already and will burn up rather than be any use.

AI models routinely lie when honesty conflicts with their goals

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PEBKAC

If you tell the LLM to lie or dissemble it will lie or dissemble. That's what I get from the prompt included in the article. It's not a failure, it's the software doing what it has been instructed to do. It may even be a use case though actual people are pretty good at doing this in text too.

If you don't want your software to produce lies don't ask it to do that, explicitly or implicitly.

Chris Krebs loses Global Entry membership amid Trump feud

AVR Silver badge

When the process is the punishment

...then the US President can write a bill of attainder via executive order. Which is actually prohibited in the US Constitution.

DARPA to 'radically' rev up mathematics research. Yes, with AI

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Help with those little fiddly bits of the paper

Perhaps they'll use the AI to generate useful references for the paper, as others have done in other fields.

Dems fret over DOGE feeding sensitive data into random AI

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Possibly a can on the way to Mars. Or is that too close to wishing them dead?

Krebs throws himself on the grenade, resigns from SentinelOne after Trump revokes clearances

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Re: A government official resigns after Duh Fuhrer bullies him?

Former govt official; SentinelOne isn't a public agency.

China hits back at America with retaliatory tariffs, export controls on rare earth minerals

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Re: FA...

Yeah, almost everyone expected that China would fight back in a trade war, a few deluded souls excepted. They have before. And as this very article points out, they've used their control of some mines to try to exert pressure before also. I wasn't expecting they'd back out of the deal to sell the Panama port a Chinese firm runs, but I guess they want as many things to trade with on their side of negotiations to end the trade war as possible once it gets to that point.

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

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Re: I feel liberated already...

It looks a lot like the whole plan was written by ChatGPT or a similar LLM; seriously. People have tested and got the same categorisation by top-level domains (.hm for Heard and McDonald islands, .io for the Indian Ocean territory, etc.) and a whole bunch of tariffs defined by trade deficit/total trade as in Trumps tariff list.

Microsoft tastes the unexpected consequences of tariffs on time

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Honestly it sounds like how to get Rickrolled repeatedly. But I guess that's too long ago for the people setting up this requirement to be aware of.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

AVR Silver badge

It's a dumb name. But one of the ways in which names matter is for keeping information together on some subject - GIMP has a good reputation and changing the name in the absence of an advertising campaign risks losing that.

CISA fires, now rehires and immediately benches security crew on full pay

AVR Silver badge

A fair chunk of the US's civil service - several thousand positions, generally the best paid - is still subject to something very like the spoils/patronage system. Project 2025 explicitly planned to expand this category, so you can't say you weren't warned in advance.

Judge orders Feds rehire workers falsely fired for lousy performance

AVR Silver badge

Apparently being fired for poor performance has ancillary effects like difficulty claiming unemployment benefits in the US, or getting employment somewhere else that will drop applications immediately on seeing those words. It's not just a harmless lie, it has consequences.

Crypto takes a dip as Trump signs Bitcoin Reserve order

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You've added rules a few times here. I assure you that you'd have to add a lot more to get your plan to work.

Microsoft tells abandoned Publisher fans to just use Word and hope for the best

AVR Silver badge

It's not the first document format to be abandoned and it won't be the last. I used to have a dozen odd pieces of software for decoding all the odd document formats I was asked to deal with. Tracking down (e.g.) the format some farmer had sent his accounts in as (an ancient graphics program) could be kind of fun.

Cloudflare's bot bouncer blocks weirdo browsers

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Re: power without responsibility

Well, you're the product at least. The payment isn't going to Cloudflare, they're not going to care.

Governments can't seem to stop asking for secret backdoors

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Culling badgers encourages new badgers from outside to move in to the newly free burrows. This spreads TB nicely; it's counterproductive unless you're going to wipe out all the badgers in a large enough area that they won't move back in any time soon. Which is something that can't be done on the down-low. This has been known for many years, but isn't accepted by those committed to culling for whatever reason.

Nope. You probably can't cash in by turning your office or farm into a datacenter

AVR Silver badge

Re: AI datacenters that require 230 kW of available energy per rack.

It does seem very high. A quick search suggests that 12 kW per rack is pretty high density, no idea what the additional factor of 20 or so is for.

Trump administration threatens tariffs for any nation that dares to tax Big Tech

AVR Silver badge

Anti-fines not just anti-taxes

The memo threatens those who impose 'extortive' fines as well as taxes. Russia might have to knock a decillion or two off their fine on Alphabet/Google if they want full rapprochement with the US, but that may not be Putin's goal - a US which is against doing anything more to Russia might be sufficient.

EU fines on US tech companies may be more of an active issue, but there's probably something for Trump to get irritated with the EU about on any given day anyway (Greenland! Environmental regulations! No respect for Nazis! France in general!), there might not be any payoff in the EU pulling back there.

NASA's on-again, off-again job cuts – what's the plan?

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Re: NASA budget

To be clear, Trump has claimed the power to impound money voted by Congress for some purpose.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

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Bad, but are they the worst?

Really far from the worst waiting times I've experienced. I do wonder if others have set up a longer minimum wait time.

Trump teases 25% semiconductor tariffs that will go ‘substantially higher’

AVR Silver badge

That was a talking point from Russian media back at the start of the war - "The Ukrainians are talking about joining NATO, that can only mean they want to join in an attack on Russia, we have to attack first. See, the Ukrainians started it." Presumably Trump finds it useful to accept his pal Putin's version of events.

There's a slight chance Asteroid 2024 YR4 could hit Moon in 2032

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Re: SPACE : 2032

To be fair the Moon looks like a terrible place for anything more than flag-planting, while the poisonous, dimly-lit deserts of Mars have more unknowns. There might yet be something worth having on Mars.

Reddit’s first public year shows growth, but Wall Street’s still not happy

AVR Silver badge

Reddit is a million forums in a trench coat. Some are far-left, some far-right, some ban politics. Apparently the subreddit that you wanted to take part in isn't willing to accept your politics (whatever they look like to others) but I'm sure there's others that would.

Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data, including DNA, in one big Oracle system for AI to study

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Oh, the huge expense required, and gigawatts of power - I see Deepseek has been memory-holed already.

Judge says US Treasury ‘more vulnerable to hacking’ since Trump let the DOGE out

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Re: Protection racket

PPP is useful when considering poverty levels, but not at all when considering international financial flows - which is the subject here.

AVR Silver badge

Re: But we know, of course...

And whoever hacks them can also get a copy, which was the judge's point I think.

NASA solar mission data recovering after server room flood fiasco

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Re: Months to restore from tape?

It's not impossible that the tape drive got more H2O through it that it was designed to handle and needs replacing. Months to replace it seems odd is all.

AVR Silver badge

Months to restore from tape?

Are they having to source some no longer produced hardware or something?

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

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Which leads to fun games blaming the lowest ranked person possible for not performing a full restore to the nonexistent DR server in their spare time. That's if the manager hasn't managed to prevent the surprise auditor entirely of course.

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

AVR Silver badge

The goals of the oligarchs do not require a 'working' US.gov

I don't think they want the US government to work. They want to stop it working and let their companies rule America unfettered, leaving just enough of the justice system to protect their gated communities and enough military to protect the borders and to suppress rebellion and secession. It probably will blow up in their faces, but not before causing huge amounts of damage to the people of the US, and to a lesser extent to the rest of the world.

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

AVR Silver badge

I think the worst I've had was when my manager called me when I wasn't on call and I didn't answer immediately. I'd been driving back from my father's house and left the phone off until I stopped 15 minutes later, when I called her back.. This was an entirely inadequate excuse in her opinion. She wanted me to admit I was in the wrong and beg for her forgiveness and was incandescent when I refused to do so.

Google torpedoes 'no AI for weapons' rules

AVR Silver badge

Re: Please put down your weapon...

A mild poison probably. Not specifically mentioned in the Chemical Weapons Convention.

AVR Silver badge
Pint

Re: Please put down your weapon...

But did the drinker holding a mug really deserve to be shot?

Not even Nvidia's Jensen Huang can talk President Tariffs out of chip import taxes

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Angel

Tariffs put him in the spotlight - even if he withdraws them before they start pumping up inflation - and there is nothing more important to Trump than being in the spotlight and talked about. Though I suppose he's going to leave some tariffs on somewhere to look tough to his supporters I doubt it'll be on semiconductors, more likely it'll be somewhere with less visible inflation effects.

Dell ends hybrid work policy, demands return-to-office despite remote work pledge

AVR Silver badge

Re: Puffery rejected

Lacks the explicit offer seen in that case though; accepting a job where permanent WFH isn't referenced in the offer would be a much less open and shut case. If an offer is made like that, yeah you could try to take them on. And if you were in many parts of the US they could then fire you anyway for minimal or no reason.

Baguette bandits strike again with ransomware and a side of mockery

AVR Silver badge

They're likely not in the countries whose organisations they're targeting. Good luck trying to enforce legal consequences on someone in Russia or elsewhere that doesn't extradite to the West.

Meta blocked Distrowatch links on Facebook while running Linux servers

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Re: I'm gonna assume incompetence

Locking the account of the person complaining about it suggests there's an element of shooting the messenger at least. A more aggravated form of incompetence.

South Carolina's abandoned nuclear reactors positioned to fuel the AI datacenter boom

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They went bankrupt as a result of delays and cost overruns in their nuclear reactors (including the Summer units), but they're out of bankruptcy now if owned by a couple of other companies.

Europe, UK weigh up how to respond to Trump's proposed tariffs. One WTF or two?

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Re: Prisoner's Dilemma!

The name came from European lords earlier that century, but the US adopted and adapted the term to their business leaders. It seems to be a universal truth.

Words alone won't get the stars and stripes to Mars

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Re: "serious radiation for weeks if not months on the round trip"

In principle is carrying a lot of weight there. 1% of the speed of light is a lot faster than any spacecraft has travelled, and you're unlikely to get there without a few rapid unscheduled disassemblies of the prototypes. Screw those up enough and you could kill the idea for good.

Ransomware attack forces Brit high school to shut doors

AVR Silver badge

Re: Why should an IT outage necessitate shutting the school

They probably expect to hand out lunches to a small number of pupils who will be shown the door right after, not allowed to hang around for hours. If half the school showed up this wouldn't work for them so well.

Just as your LLM once again goes off the rails, Cisco, Nvidia are at the door smiling

AVR Silver badge

Re: That's one supertanker load of snake oil.

Oh, it doesn't have to work in all cases. Just in the ones shown during the sale process - if it fails after that you sell the mark another guardrail.

It's not just Big Tech: The UK's Online Safety Act applies across the board

AVR Silver badge

Besides the direct compliance costs there's the risk of trolls shutting down the site and exposing the operators to liability by putting up objectionable material and reporting it. There's possible ways around that, but they either kill engagement on the site or require more investment in tech &/or moderators than a single forum operator is likely to be able to handle. This act is going to kill a lot of UK blogs and forums, and I really doubt it's going to put a dent in the availability of child porn or terrorists info or drugs.

New Orleans attacker used Meta smart glasses to plan New Year's Day massacre

AVR Silver badge

It probably was useful for him to figure out what route he could take exactly - checking that he'd be able to take a 7' wide SUV up an 8' wide sidewalk - but just being observant and careful should have worked too. Not a big deal.

Report claims FAA ignores most whistleblower complaints

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If none of the complaints were found to be valid I'd have to be suspicious of the system evaluating them. Boeing really should have allowed a single, token complaint if they wanted to be taken seriously.

Are you better value for money than AI?

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Re: Gee, which would I rather have?

I'm sure there are people still trying to use LLMs for this, but lawyers have been sanctioned for exactly this screwup. Paralegal jobs should be safe for now.

Fining Big Tech isn't working. Make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain

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How to win with delaying tactics

Suppose some politician started pushing this idea now with the intention of getting a law in place in a couple of years. If Big Tech put some effort into it I expect they could push out the date when it finally takes effect at least a decade, probably more. Then there'd be enforcement and the courts, and assorted appeals; I doubt it'd take less than 20 years to force ChatGPT 4 to become open source if it even succeeded.

At which point if LLMs are still big business their owners would 1) have replaced the old ChatGPT 4 with something else, 2) could have moved any affected money or operations to somewhere else in the world with more appealing laws, 3) IBG YBG. Sounds like a pyrrhic victory at best.

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

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POSIWID

Restarting nuclear power plant construction is probably a good thing. Less so the gas turbines, admittedly. There's likely to be a lot of compute looking for a use when (hopefully) the AI stuff proves incapable of earning back its investment; fancy modelling might be cheaper than expected in a few years.

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

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Re: pew pew lasors!

Nah, I only saw that show once years ago. I guess I should give it another try.

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