Posts by The Kraken

AI has colonized our world – so it's time to learn the language of our new overlords

There’s an alternative…

Well, I’ve tried “could I please speak to a human” and it worked - several times. The odd part being I was put through in seconds - far faster than the call queuing systems we’ve all grown to hate.

AI agents can copy humans to get closer to artificial general intelligence, DeepMind finds

Wait till it learns to kill.

Kill enemy - good.

Kill friend - bad.

Kill self - to be avoided at all cost.

Question i1. what trade off is it going to make between harm to others as an alternative vs accepting harm to self.

Next question - what happens when (not if) it decides humans are a threat to its own existence ?

Boffins say their thin film solar cells make space farms viable

Oh great - let’s cook the planet even faster.

Last thing we need is more thermal input.

Better would be to make smarter use of what we have and if possible, use less.

EU boss Breton: There's no Huawei that Chinese comms kit is safe to use in Europe

Re: So, the Commission is looking to ban Huawei on security grounds

Re Nokia 5G kit - open the box and look closely - it’s made in China too. All is not what it seems.

Ukraine invasion blew up Russian cybercrime alliances

So, finally...

What has been bleeding obvious for years - Russia (and Belarus) is a criminal state.

So why hasn't the west simply cut off all their internet access ? Along with North Korea and Iran.

After all, it isn't hard to trace the comms routes and locate the fibres...

And warn China - play ball or we cut you off, too.

Or .. let's get it over with - nuke'em, now. All of it.

Cops chase Tesla driver 'dozing' with Autopilot on

Tesla has a few things to learn about sending whether the driver is functioning from the railway industry.

Boffins hunt and kill cockroaches with machine vision laser

Someone will put this on Kickstarter

… and it will be a big hit, in my city, where cockroaches are a massive problem.

To preserve Earth's treasures, digital silence is golden

Similar problems here, close to home.

There are some locations close to my city which - as a result of Twitter / Facebook are inundated so badly - that the police routinely close access on weekends to all but non-residents - you have to show proof to be let in. And no I'm not saying where they are.

The internet's edge routers are all so different. What if we unified them with software?

Re: is it desirable?

Not desirable. One compromise and they’re all screwed… go figure.

Diversity is better.

Scientists unveil a physics-defying curved space robot

Cats use much the same trick to turn upright when falling, even if initially upside down.

No net angular momentum, yet they can invert themselves midair without anything to push on - by using intertia of their tail, and limbs in the opposite direction.

Pull jet fuel from thin air? We can do that, say scientists

If you can do that for jet fuel we may as well run cars on the stuff, and forget batteries.

Baidu crashes the cost of robo-taxis by 75 percent

Human drivers aren’t so great…

It only has to demonstrate that it is no less safe than human drivers. That I suggest, is quite likely.

Australian digital driving licenses can be defaced in minutes

It’s worse…

Its child’s play to take a screenshot, edit that with a paint program, and show that as “ID”.

All sorts of private institutions only require the screen to be shown for a split second and they do not check the details - they can’t, for privacy reasons - starting with banks and superannuation companies. What you show is taken at face value.

Apple's macOS Monterey upgrades some people's laptops to doorstops

Never install anything rev 0 on a mac that you rely on, daily.

Thought everyone learnt that one back in the days of 10.0.1.

Wireless powersats promise clean, permanent, abundant energy. Sound familiar?

<n/t>

Oh great, let's microwave the earth... did anyone mention global warming ?

But can it run Avid? The Reg hands shiny new M1 MacBook to video production pro, who beats it with Blender, Handbrake, and ... Hypercard?

Re: Incredible

"...It cannot be overstated how huge this might be..."

It's the first time - thought has been 20+ years since Apple was in that position.

'Biggest data grab' in NHS history stuffs GP records in a central store for 'research' – and the time to opt out is now

Risk ? What risk ? …

Someone needs to tell these idiots to think about what could possibly go wrong.

And they still don’t understand watch an old movie “The Net”, to get a hint of how this could be abused.

Risk management ? Never ‘eard of it…

Would you let users vouch for unknown software's safety with an upvote? Google does

This is based on a false assumption - that users have any real way of knowing a-priori that unknown software is safe to run.

They don’t.

The seconds fallacy is that just because an opinion is popular, that opinion is correct.

Google you really have no idea...

House Republicans introduce legislation for outright ban on municipal broadband in the US

The Republican Party seems to be composed of idiots.

Key state-owned utilities including water, electricity, railways and transport must have their own private communications to ensure they can continue to operate the infrastructure during (say) a state-wide loss of power (as happened in Texas). Otherwise the results can be ugly - and catastrophic:

- fresh water stops flowing to urban residents,

- sewage systems fail and overflow (every thought about what could go wrong in a tower block of apartments ?)

- the signalling systems to operate trains, trams buses fail, and the vehicles stop.

- electricity networks unable to be reconfigured to prepare them for when the power is restored;

What's more when utilities lay fibre invariably they install a huge number of spare cores (the cable is peanuts compared to the cost of ploughing the ground) and lease the spare capacity to telecommunications carriers - to offset the cost of installing and maintaining their private network.

TVA is one such example, there would be many more in the US.

Europe calls for single app to track coronavirus. Meanwhile America pretends it isn’t trying to build one at all

Already done - no apps required !

Tracking is already implemented and being used in Australia, both to find those breaching self isolation orders, and to locate persons engaging in "un-necessary travel".

The police already have the tools to do this without needing anything special in the way of apps.

Lobsters given seats on coronavirus rescue flights... although they're probably not in a rush for a boiling bath

Haha that's not a lobster.. THIS is a lobster !

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/larry-the-red-big-lobster

They can be big down here :)