Posts by AVR

Claude Code cache chaos creates quota complaints

When you can't even see the size of the package before you buy

Ah, shrinkflation. We're getting plenty of it IRL right now, no surprise that the AI vendors have taken note and applied it to their product.

Investors are going nuclear to keep UK's AI datacenters fed

Re: Fusion

Forty years ago fusion power was thirty years off. It might just come through in my lifetime.

White House seeks deep NASA cuts as Artemis II breaks spaceflight record

Cut that science (science is woke!), the boring space station and the namby-pamby safety and security stuff, but add a small boost to having photo ops on the Moon. I can see the logic, though I have to oppose it.

ServiceNow allegedly says salesman 'overachieved' and is not entitled to comp

It's not even going to save them money

It looks like a clear case of breach of contract and IMO the guy is more than 50% likely to win his double the commission payout. How does doing this work for ServiceNow? Is putting off the payment as valuable as all that?

Commercial space pleads with NASA to stop moving the goalposts in orbit

If you want it to draw power from solar panels, support life or run equipment inside you might want a few more features than that.

Staff too scared of the AI axe to pick it up, Forrester finds

Lawyers get caught misusing LLMs on a fairly regular basis now. There's a lot of lawyers, true, but how certain is it that all the idiots 1) are caught and 2) are hung out to dry in public?

Meta’s latest AI improves its terrible content moderation, just a little

People get very dumb when their jobs depend on not understanding

About 10% of Meta's advertising revenue comes from scams and scam-adjacent ads, as came out in November last year. They are not motivated to make or use an effective anti-scam tool and I have doubts about this one.

North Korea's 100,000-strong fake IT worker army rake in $500M a year for Kim Jong Un

"these IT workers can earn more than $300,000 a year, and upwards of 100,000 North Koreans are spread across 40 countries generating approximately $500 million a year"

Divide that out and you can see a ceiling on how many of these North Koreans are earning more than 300 grand in a year. It's not a lot.

Everything needed to make DNA and RNA found in asteroid sample

Re: So...

There's very little heavier than rubidium that a human needs though - about a fiftieth of a gram of iodine in your body, about a quarter that of molybdenum. There may be a dash of lead and other heavy elements in there but you could live without them quite happily.

AI datacenters may gulp a New York City's worth of water on hot days

Looks like you missed a couple of paragraphs in this article:

"The second stage is facility-level cooling, which transfers heat from the facility to the outside environment. This may involve water consumption depending on the technology employed, such as cooling towers that rely on evaporation, or air-cooled systems supplemented by direct evaporation or adiabatic cooling to reduce the peak power demand during the hottest days of the year.

A large server farm that relies on evaporation cooling can suck up millions of gallons of water per day during the hottest periods of the year, the report says, significantly more than at other times."

TerraPower gets permission to build, not operate, sodium-cooled nuclear reactor

Their first reactor coming online in 2030 by the earliest and their fuel being available in commercial quantities by the end of the decade sounds like planning not luck. Delays could screw them over, but someone needs to be first to ensure that commercial quantities will be made at all.

Microsoft's Project Silica promises eternal storage. It can't get there from here

Re: Glass itself is a…

Old glass windows are thicker at the bottom because they were installed that way - if the glass has varying thickness due to your manufacturing process, putting it in thick end down is more stable than the reverse. Glass is like a liquid, but it isn't one and won't actually flow at all.

Oak gall ink which burns into the vellum is pretty stable when used sparingly, but there's a lot more such writing which has actually burned through the vellum over the centuries turning it into a strange form of lacework. And still more which was lost to time some other way - damp, fire, insects, chucked out, being repurposed to some other use...assuming that these plates will be preserved forever by descendants waiting on our every word is a strange sort of arrogance.

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

Ctrl-C & Ctrl-V are a decent temporary workaround, but get yourself a new keyboard - they're not that expensive.

6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom

Re: remember six sigma ?

"Lets say they benefit *alot*, like 2-fold improvement in business"

If 2% saw a 100% (sustainable) increase in business they'd be imitated rapidly. That doesn't seem to be happening; I'm fairly sure your numbers are out to the point of being irrelevant.

The UK government isn't spending much taxpayer cash on X

Dunno about the UK, but the social media market share of Xitter over here in NZ is about 6%. Unless your target audience is certain people on the far right there are indeed better social media companies to spend your money on.

Asia-based government spies quietly broke into critical networks across 37 countries

Re: What they actually said :

If they're specifically interested in people who talk to the Dalai Lama you can narrow it down a bit with a few seconds thought. Not to the level of 'no reasonable doubt', but a very solid suspicion.

British military to get legal OK to swat drones near bases

Re: be careful what you wish for

Time to revive that trained falcon research perhaps: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/air-force-falcons-drones-research/

Sword of Damocles hangs over UK military’s Ajax as minister says back it or scrap it

Re: $[special] ?

They have big problems with projects running over time and budget. Not a military procurement model to copy I'm afraid.

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

Re: process their pay

Payroll takes a lot less staff than it did thirty years ago. It has already been largely automated. Companies pay some fees for that, but less than the cost of the staff.

Marketing is hard to call, different people are doing it - often more centralised, but on the other hand retail staff are asked to do some. Accountants are way down in number and cost, automation again. Legal services are generally up in cost. Execs, sure the cost is way up there.

I think you don't know much about this subject.

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

Re: Sounds awful

You've heard about M$ stuffing AI into Notepad, right? It's not as simple as it was a year ago.

France to replace US videoconferencing wares with unfortunately named sovereign alternative

If they can't successfuly argue in court that diagramming software is distinct enough from communication software that people are unlikely to confuse them, then M$ will have more $ courtesy of the French state. Yes, you can sue in France.

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

The Emperor's New Clothes

With all the praise and their explanations, AI via LLMs still looks ever worse and further off. I guess watching for other people who'll praise the work which created this almost-web browser will be a useful indicator of who's a sycophant in Emperor AI's court - who not to trust.

Stop dragging feet on AI nudification ban, UK government told

People do bother though. Whether it's just wanting free (now with a minor cost the user might have been paying anyway) pics made to order or an actual desire to victimise others, it's not going to go away because you personally don't see a use case.

& news outfits don't necessarily know everything immediately - it's less Chinese whispers/telephone game and more reacting to activists yelling at them repeatedly.

Developer writes script to throw AI out of Windows

Re: No kidding

That'd catch a lot of games and educational programs in its net, not to mention Clippy and similar. None of which are LLMs, let alone AI. The amount of effort required, and the effective banning of unsupported old games and typing tutors or whatever, would be an unreasonable cost IMO.

CES 2026 worst in show: AI girlfriends, a fridge that won't open unless you talk to it, and more

Not if you can manage a perfectly bland middle American accent. You've all seen the two scots in a voice activated elevator skit, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNuFcIRlwdcc

Very tough microbes may help us cement our future on Mars

According to a book I read (from before it was figured out that the oxygen released in the Viking experiments was from peroxides) it'd be hundreds of thousands of years to get enough oxygen to breathe on Mars with lichen alone. The book was trying to boost the idea of terraforming to be clear. The numbers are so huge that any amount of design work before starting is justified, imagine what the chance of ultimate success is without an incredibly solid plan.

Grok told to cover up as UK weighs action over AI 'undressing'

Re: British politicians should create their own 'X'

Apparently a bunch of them have signed up for bsky in the past week.

UK to spend £23M on AI to tell benefit claimants where to go

'personalised call deflection'

That's a phrase to make your blood run cold. An AI which is told to give you the runaround could be more frustrating than the most determinedly stupid call centre operator, and that's saying something.

Palo Alto Networks security-intel boss calls AI agents 2026's biggest insider threat

Can't even replace manglement with AIs

Because yeah, they will insist on giving inappropriate levels of access to their beloved toys. Good point Ms Whitmore.

Like a Virgin Airways bot, planning for the very first time

All from the POV of the project manager involved

It's nice that he's satisfied it all works. It'll be more interesting when/if we find out how satisfied the customers are.

ATM jackpotting gang accused of unleashing Ploutus malware across US

Re: Gobsmacked

The designer may well have thought that a port you need a crowbar to access isn't a vulnerability as such, especially since as demonstrated here you can simply replace the hard drive if you have unlimited physical access.

The future of long-term data storage is clear and will last 14 billion years

Re: Re ..lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.

Even with all the equipment to read them, old floppy disks may not actually be readable - my experience a couple of decades back was that time and humidity can have rendered them useless, with no data that can be extracted other than the faded labels on the outside.

The CRASH Clock is ticking as satellite congestion in low Earth orbit worsens

Re: Crash!

As low as the original satellite at perigee anyway, assuming no secondary explosions or collisions. The fragments that go high experience drag only at one part of their orbit and should outlast those which experience drag for their entire orbit, though they will fall eventually. I don't know what 'eventually' means here, but figures like 'generations' for Kessler syndrome crop up. The cascade which is an alternate name for it suggests that secondary collisions with satellites in slightly higher orbits are expected.

Workday project at Washington University hits $266M

Also seen (not at a uni) a reasonably effective system which did need regular maintenance but for which getting programmers or outside help was getting dificult - not just expensive, but plain hard to find at all. There are many reasons to move on. Less reasons to spend $16K per student though, that's fuckups or an over-specified replacement.

Porsche panic in Russia as pricey status symbols forget how to car

Re: How time changes things...

I thought BMW stood for Burn a hole in My Wallet?

I'm not going to try and maintain a car myself, but I'm also not going to buy a Porsche. Nice of these rich people to beta test the new systems before they reach me.

Home Office kept police facial recognition flaws to itself, UK data watchdog fumes

Use in evidence not the only problem

Okay, say they don't use the unreliable matches in evidence. That doesn't stop them guiding investigations or even using them to lean on suspects to get an admission of guilt. A fair few people will confess when leaned on hard enough even if they're not guilty of whatever they're accused of. It might all be used appropriately but history suggests otherwise, especially since it seems there's been a cover-up.

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Because people who actually know SQL cost money, whereas people who can read off a script cost peanuts.

Lawyer's 6-year-old son uses AI to build copyright infringement generator

No one point this guy at Archive Of Our Own then, and its fanfic on every subject under the sun. Disney movies included.

China using AI as ‘precision instrument’ of censorship and repression, at home and abroad

Re: ASPI?

I don't know anything about them. Are they RWNJs, or what?

Stealthy browser extensions waited years before infecting 4.3M Chrome, Edge users with backdoors and spyware

Re: Reviewed on update, or no?

If the update doesn't go through the Chrome store, if it's something internal to the app, then Google wouldn't get to check it. Or yeah, one of those might be untrue.

DragonFire laser to be fitted to Royal Navy ships after acing drone-zapping trials

How fast can it kill drones?

It may still be possible to overwhelm the system if it can locate and kill a drone every 15 seconds, but the enemy sends a couple dozen drones. On second thought that's probably classified so I'd be better to ask on War Thunder.

Cloudflare broke itself – and a big chunk of the Internet – with a bad database query

Or their test environment isn't sufficiently realistic. If it only produces a handful of entries in those database files each day then the query doubling that will hardly be noticeable.

Pegasus XL rocket dusted off to rescue NASA’s Swift observatory from fiery demise

Tunnel vision

If it's hard to reach from US launch sites except via Pegasus...there's one other option. This isn't a military sat for which you must keep the supply chain clear of foreign influences.

Europe to decide if 6 GHz is shared between Wi-Fi and cellular networks

Re: Using 6 GHz for mobile is nonsense.

NZ's Green Party once sent an encouraging reply to a joke letter requesting regulation of the hazardous chemical dihydrogen monoxide. OTOH none of the other parties show much sign of respecting science or technical knowledge, and some of the Greens will do that.

Robotic lawnmower uses AI to dodge cats, toys

Re: UK police are unenthusiastic about others CCTV

It might vary by force or by person, the one UK police officer I'm slightly familiar with mostly sneers or deflects when CCTV is mentioned. He did mention that 'professional' CCTVs with someone actually watching them were okay.

Re: I really can't see them taking off (at least not in the UK)

UK police are unenthusiastic about others CCTV, and also about small thefts. Together that case was doomed to the circular file-holder.

Amazon complains that Perplexity's agentic shopping bot is a terrible customer

Re: It must be failing super hard

Tech bros are not fond of competition, and Amazon has skin in this game - their Rufus AI shopping assistant as mentioned briefly in the article. Use of someone else's AI shopping assistant is money that's not going to Bezos, you can't expect him to tolerate that!

Australian police building AI to translate emoji used by ‘crimefluencers’

“We knew if we couldn’t open the crypto wallet, and if the alleged offender was sentenced, upon release he would leave prison a multi-millionaire – all from the profits of organised crime.”

If the concern was about police planting stuff then he could check what was there before getting access, maybe get a lawyer to witness that. It doesn't sound like they cracked it instantly.

Re: AI in court?

Maybe not 1:1 with different subcultures involved, or differences in context. It should still be doable with a simpler system than a LLM though.

AI in court?

A LLM to translate emoji seems like it might be useful to the cops, but how would you introduce it as evidence? You can't get at the real reasoning as to what means what, and there's the ever-present risk of hallucinations.