Posts by DS999

EU metes out first-ever Digital Services Act fine, dings X for blue check deception

Re: silly statement old chap

Servers are irrelevant, if X is selling any ads in the EU or paying users based in the EU for content generation then they're doing business in the EU. Since ads are how they make their money, and paying content creators is how they drive traffic there isn't any reasonable way they can drop out of the EU. At least not for the current size of the fine. At some point if the fines get too large maybe Elon's beancounters say it makes more sense to pull the plug on the EU.

Tech leaders fill $1T AI bubble, insist it doesn't exist

Re: No slow down

Well remember what happened with the dot com bubble. NASDAQ peaked in March 2000 but individual tech stocks that were part of NASDAQ didn't all pop at the same time. It isn't clear if we've already seen the stock market peak yet or we have one last wave of irrational exuberance left, but it will take months after that peak for all AI related stocks to be affected, and they'll be affected at different speeds.

The RAM shortage is so acute that it will take demand destruction from a lot of players canceling proposed datacenters, canceling orders queued with Nvidia, and so forth before it shows up in DRAM. And it won't show up in terms of lower prices, it'll show up in terms of pulling the date when they think the shortage will be over.

A month or so ago I was reading "end of 2026", but today I'm reading "end of 2027" before the shortage subsides. That's two years worth of backlog that will have to be taken out and that won't happen over a weekend like when Lehman Brothers went under in 2008. It will take months of sagging stocks and CEOs forced to capitulate and cancel orders - to effectively tell everyone "I was wrong". That doesn't happen overnight, and they can hold onto those orders for months as a mirage hoping to keep their stock price from falling further until they get to the day when the memory OEM requires them to pay up.

During the latter stages of the dot com bubble

We kept hearing "this time its different". That was a mantra of every CEO of a company with P/E ratios in the hundreds or worse. The internet / computerization is going to change everything, so all those inflated values were justified. Yes everything did change, but that didn't mean that the Y2K era insanely inflated valuations were justified, or that home delivery of 50 lb bags of dog food ever made economic sense as a business.

They can't use the words "this time its different" because everyone will be reminded of the last time those words were spoken. So they've changed that language (much like a kid writing an essay might take a simple sentence and make it wordier but meaning the same thing to hit the required word count) to "I don't think it's a good idea to look at the past as an indicator of what might happen in the future". Means the EXACT same thing, and regardless of how much AI changes the way business is done that doesn't mean current valuations and proposed spending aren't way out of touch with reality.

UK pushes ahead with facial recognition expansion despite civil liberties backlash

I gotta say

So, banning VPN's = Reduction of WFH = Increased Bums in Seats in offices = increased demand for office space = increased taxes from business premises / increased wealth for the property owners/investors and also increased income to maintenance and security firms = further increase in taxes to the government

You're REALLY overestimating the amount of 5D chess these people are playing.

Twins who hacked State Dept hired to work for gov again, now charged with deleting databases

Re: How the hell did that happen?

I did some IT consulting for the Defense Logistics Agency in the US a couple decades ago. I wasn't allowed to login to any DLA computer, receive any email about the project, or participate in any meetings until my Secret clearance came through, which took about six weeks. Until then I did security training which was about two weeks worth and then other than getting some redacted information to familiarize with the environment I mostly got paid to goof off. Even after I got the Secret clearance I was still restricted a bit in what I could do or see until my Top Secret clearance came through a month or two later, but at least with Secret I was able to participate in (most) meetings and email threads and get paid to actually work instead of getting paid to surf the web.

I was at a contractor site until the Secret clearance, then WFH the rest of the time. Only set foot on an actual military base once, to be issued my CAC card (government/military ID)

The contractor was a Fortune 500 company so I guess they followed the rules to the letter and maybe some of these smaller contractors cut a lot of corners.

Re: How the hell did that happen?

Just about any IT related government job requires some type of clearance. There's no way all those databases he had sufficient access to to delete didn't have any data that rated at least "confidential" clearance and likely something in there was "secret" meaning he'd need that level too.

Why in the world would the FBI clear someone convicted of computer crimes to work in government IT? Why would a government contractor hire someone with that conviction even if the FBI was willing to clear them?

None of this makes any sense.

Bots, bias, and bunk: How can you tell what's real on the net?

Re: A few pointers

Know the Dunning-Kruger effect and realize when you yourself are incompetent

Anyone who knows what it is, and is able to recognize their own limitations of expertise generally doesn't need your list.

The ones who need are the people who don't know what Dunning-Kruger is and more importantly don't care, and who believe a few hours of furious googling and watching Youtube video "recommendations" one after the other places their expertise on equal footing with those of people who have studied the subject for years/decades (but without the "bias" those videos will tell them the "academics" have)

We'll beat China to the Moon, NASA nominee declares

Re: Current NASA situation

Could someone translate that into English, please?

"I'd love to get into the job and figure out how much larger of a budget I can get away with asking for, and start making lists of potential people to shift blame to when through my incompetent management China lands on the Moon first."

Server prices set to jump 15% as memory costs spike

Re: Damn

It takes a few seconds to do a search for completed sales on eBay for your DDR3 based on specs/capacity and see what it is going for, and determine whether it is worth your time to bother with or not.

I have some DDR4 and DDR5 laying around from my old PC and old laptop RAM but I haven't listed it yet because supplies keep getting tighter so prices can only go up, though that's probably not the case with DDR3.

EU probes Meta after WhatsApp kicked rival AIs off platform

I think beast666, one of our favorite Russian shills, may have been replaced by an AI that based on the article text determines someone to blame from Putin's list of bad guys, then posts "<bad guy> is unfit for purpose". That seems to be about the only thing he posts now.

The question is did he automate himself so he can kick up his heels and have the AI work for him so he doesn't have to manually post Russian propaganda all day all over the internet, or did Russia automate him away so they could send him to the front along with the next batch of fresh meat for Putin's war grinder?

Palantir wants to set the juice loose with new AI power initiative

Re: And just after Peter Thiel...

has sold all his nVidia stock...

So did Softbank. I wonder what other big investors / hedge funds have unloaded NVDA recently that we don't know about? They may see the froth starting to come to a boil.

Latest Windows 11 updates may break the OS's most basic bits

At this rate

Windows 11 will reliably boot up into a blue screen for all users by next July.

Datacenters planned for Scotland could end up draining a loch of power

Going by applications will greatly overcount

In the US (and I'll bet the same is true in Scotland) a lot of projects will submit applications in multiple locations. They are bringing the IT "redundancy" mindset to planning, since they want to get underway as quickly as possible so going with only one is seen as a risk because if it runs into roadblocks like NIMBYs, zoning changes, easements, utility indicating delays in power delivery, land purchase holdouts and so on then they have to start over from scratch somewhere else.

Often the same project is submitted in several locations within a few dozen miles of each other (in different counties or cities) with NDAs so there's only a project name or shell company known to the local government officials which differs at each location. They don't know they're competing with the county next door, and only find out when a project is announced in that other county and their project disappears at the same time. There is added cost to purchase options on land in several places but compared to the overall project cost losing the value of those options you don't exercise is a drop in the ocean.

So if they think there are 3000 MW worth of applications it might only be 1000 MW of unique applications, and since not all projects will end up going through (if funding isn't fully committed, depends on investors coming through when needed, etc.) probably less than that in terms of actual demand that will materialize.

India's government targets Uber, Ola with plan to launch zero-commission rideshare platform

Theoretically this doesn't need ongoing government support

It takes a lot of resources to attract the initial scale to compete with Uber et al but a driver owned cooperative would be able to operate on its own once it achieves that scale. The risk is that it drives out all the competition and effectively becomes a monopoly, which may leave it no better than Uber (at least for customers, it would be great for drivers)

Space telescopes are being photobombed by satellites, and the problem is slated to get much worse

Re: How do "long exposures" work for Hubble?

You wouldn't calculate windows of opportunity, you'd capture all the pictures then remove the ones with satellite tracks. Or maybe remove just the areas with the satellite tracks.

Since space telescopes tend to mostly focus on things VERY far away they are only looking at a tiny tiny portion of the sky at once. So even if you had a million satellites orbiting above it isn't like you'll have multiple tracking across every frame at all times.

How do "long exposures" work for Hubble?

It is digital based, so would it be able to do say 11 one minute exposures rather than one 11 minute exposure? Or maybe 60 11 second exposures, etc. Then it could discard frames with satellite tracks and combine the rest. Or would that not work due to the way the CCD cells are saturated with photons over time, meaning shorter exposures would collect so little light they'd effectively be "reading zero" for distant/dim objects?

Micron ditches consumer memory brand Crucial to chase AI riches

Re: Fire sales soon?

Yes they will be repurposed as HPC clusters at fire sale prices. But the customers for that (universities and governments) won't be able to afford the power to run more than a fraction of them, so most will end up at the recycler.

Re: Fire sales soon?

They are surface mount HBM stacks, so they won't have value for most people either.

Just bought some in May

Was building a new PC (because the old one decided to die) and there was a deal on Amazon, 2x24 GB of Crucial Pro DDR5 for $90! I wonder how many years before that price will be beat? Sounds like it has gone from the $2/GB price I got to more like $10/GB today.

Since I got such a good price on that I decided to max out my middle aged laptop while I was at it. There was a deal on "no name" 2x16 GB DDR4 SO-DIMMs at Amazon for $40, and the equivalent Crucial was 50% higher and shipping was a month out so I took a chance on the brand "Timetec" since Amazon has an easy return policy. Worked great, passed a weekend of memtest86 with flying colors. That's the only RAM I've bought in at least 20 years that wasn't Crucial. Maybe I was just lucky but now that Crucial is no more that's the only brand I have any experience with so I guess I'll consider them first next time lol

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

What it'll probably do is make enforcement something only practical for companies like Sony and Disney, while individuals or small companies will have their IP stolen by Big AI with impunity. That's already partly the case with the web, AI will just take that to its logical conclusion.

Pat Gelsinger's EUV lithography gig gets $150M wink from Uncle Sam

Re: It's not just ASML's EUV tech...

This works in a TOTALLY different way so Cymer's technology wouldn't be required. Still will need mirrors though and those are likely to come from Zeiss because they're the world's leader there.

Re: How many ASML patents will this trample on?

Probably none. This company will use a free electron laser to generate EUV. ASML generates EUV by firing a short burst laser at tin droplets at a rate of 50,000 times per second (yes, really)

They couldn't be more different if they tried. There has been discussion of using FEL for over a decade, but it is only recently that advances in particle accelerators (which power the FEL) have dropped them in size/cost to where instead of having one big accelerator shared by a whole campus of fabs it would be practical to have one per fab and perhaps in the not so distant future, one per FEL based EUV machine.

Assuming it works it will be a FAR better solution than ASML's. Cheaper, less complex, more scalable to finer drawn lines/features. Really better in every way except for the fact that ASML's EUV machines are working in mass production today with several hundred installed machines and FELs have only been proven for chip fabrication at laboratory scale and a lot of investment will be required to take them to mass production scale. FELs are, incidentally, what China is investing most heavily in since copying ASML's Rube Goldberg technology would almost certainly take longer and deliver a worse result.

Waymo chalks up another four-legged casualty on San Francisco streets

Re: Animals can't handle cars.

Touché

Re: Animals can't handle cars.

Unless you hit it jumping and it goes through the windshield, or you crash into something or run off the road trying to avoid it or panicking after the collision, I don't see how anyone can be injured in a collision with a deer especially the driver who has not only a seat belt but an air bag (unless you're injured by the air bag but that's another story)

My uncle hit has not only hit more deer than he can count but also four cows (he used to have a 60 mile commute each way in rural Kansas) and despite being in cars that predated airbags he never had more than a few bruises. He went through a lot of cars though lol

Re: Animals can't handle cars.

Around here deer are the major hazard, and raccoons are the minor hazard. Hitting a deer at highway speeds will total a modern car even while it leaves belted occupants unhurt, as it costs more than the ACV of the car to replace all the fancy cameras and sensors along with the bodywork and mechanical bits that have always been damaged in such collisions. Raccoons just make a mess.

Indian government reveals GPS spoofing at eight major airports

Re: No Silver Bullet

You can set up GPS base stations where the location is known/fixed which are able to broadcast at a much higher power than is received from the satellites. If you detect any attempt at jamming or spoofing those fixed points at the airport can crank up their power even higher to compensate.

Obviously it is possible that someone really intent on jamming could overwhelm even those, but they'd make themselves pretty vulnerable to discovery by doing so.

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

Re: Most likely hacked or bought up

Yes because the article would have mentioned if the security researchers believed it was a nation state attack, and nation states want to target just the right people not 4.3 million random people to minimize the chances of discovery.

Re: Most likely hacked or bought up

Would not be so sure, only need to look at the Israeli compromise of Hezbollah pagers/phones

That's a nation state level attack which is in a totally different category.

Was it really a waiting game

Or was it someone buying out or taking over via force (hacking, blackmail etc.) a legit extension? Or maybe the developer's circumstances changed and he had big gambling debt or something like that?

That seems more likely than evildoers playing out a seven year long con.

Apple swaps one ex-Google AI chief for another

Re: So Apple. are regarded as laggards

Yes it is, but how fine will you be able to draw the line going forward? If they introduce a new and improved Siri powered by a local LLM, will you be able to keep using the current Siri that works pretty well for simple stuff or will you have a choice of using the fancy new Siri or no Siri at all? I think we can guess the answer.

Because I'm pretty happy with Siri for what I use it for, and I'd hate to lose it for a more powerful Siri that could do a lot more stuff but maybe is more likely to occasionally screw up what I ask it for now due to hallucinations or other AI failure modes. It works well enough now I can trust it that if I ask it to do something I don't have to check to see if that something was done. I feel like I would have to do with so with a "cutting edge" Siri based on my experience with ChatGPT and other "cutting edge" LLMs.

Re: So Apple. are regarded as laggards

Yes as a longtime iPhone user I would much rather Apple moved more slowly, and don't much care whether that's because they are behind or because they are being more careful. The net effect is the same, less AI slop thrown against the wall with little testing hoping for a short term stock boost before the bubble bursts.

Europol nukes Cryptomixer laundering hub, seizing €25M in Bitcoin

Wouldn't it make more sense to take it over

Like they have taken over other services used by criminals? Then they could track the money flows and find criminals based on who is laundering money rather than having to catch them committing the crimes.

For instance someone is getting paid for those Louvre jewels, and these days no one is taking bulky easy to seize cash. They're taking crypto, and likely will want to cover their tracks in a mixer before sending it overseas to buy a nice villa in a sunny place with weak extradition laws. Maybe it is one of the people they've already caught who is hoping to have a nice post prison retirement, or maybe it is someone as yet uncaught who is letting his fellows take the fall while he covers he tracks before they squeal.

London grid crunch delays new housing amid datacenter boom

That takes away one of the major "advantages" AI datacenter proponents claim

Bringing more jobs and economic growth to the area doesn't do you much good if you can't build more housing to accommodate them.

So for existing residents it not only increases their electric bill but makes housing more expensive to twist the knife further.

Google and Apple ordered to stop fake government TXTs

Re: Not even wrong

Even if they are using the "official" telco version (which is used for RCS between iPhones and Android) AFAIK when it is Android to Android it is done via Google's servers so the telcos aren't involved. And now that the official telco supported standard offers end to end encryption, even for RCS traffic between iPhone and Android the telcos can't see the message content and therefore have no way of blocking these types of fraudulent "government" messages.

Re: Not even wrong

How are telcos supposed to block iMessage or Google Messages content that is end to end encrypted? You are obviously stuck in the world of SMS, where you can have an "unknown sender" and telcos have full control over what is passing through their networks.

Landlord quirks leave thousands of flats stuck in the broadband slow lane

Re: That would make sense

If it is done in a planned manner you can also place it anywhere you want (like a closet so it is out of the way) rather than only being on an outside wall like a typical fiber/cable "free install".

That would make sense

If the landlord was planning on getting a fiber connection for the building and running cat5 (or perhaps re-purposing existing cat5 that was installed for landlines when it was built) and offering internet service as part of the rent or an add on charge (like add ons for parking etc.) I wouldn't want tenants to have installers with two days of training drilling random holes and causing potential damage. If there are multiple fiber providers you might have several holes drilled after a while since one provider can't re-use the fiber run by another, so you need to bring some sort of order to the process. So maybe you contract with one to install dark fiber in every room and mandate that as the only option for tenants to avoid such a situation.

But if the landlord is just saying "we remain firmly stuck in the past and too bad for our tenants" then the only fix is to find a different place and leave bad reviews in whatever sort of sites exist to review rental properties making tenants stay away so the landlord feels some eventual financial pain from his lack of action.

India demands smartphone makers install a government app on every handset

Re: Never gonna happen

Unless/until the Supreme Court takes away Trump's unconstitutional tariff stick all he has to do is threaten Apple with a 200% tariff on importing iPhones and they'd be left with no choice but to knuckle under to him until the stroke or heart attack from the poor diagnosis he's hiding finally takes him out.

Never gonna happen

Apple doesn't do preinstalled apps at all, and there are way too many Android OEMs for India's government to enforce this on all of them.

Plus it is a bad idea having a required government app (that no doubt you could not remove) that had the power to disable your phone at the government's whim. Corruption in the government causing widespread citizen protests? No problem, just blanket disable phones connected to towers in the protest area (with some whitelisting for police and government officials) and now people can't record video of the head bashings to follow.

I could see their conversation with Apple, where they say they want this and Apple asks if they want those Foxconn plants making a fifth of the world's iPhones to move to another country. If they give an inch on this every country will demand special apps, and those who openly take bribes like Trump would end up with iPhones sold in the US shipping with Truth Social, X, Facebook, Amazon, Tik Tok, and a big steaming pile of cryptocurrency trading apps.

Speccy clone storms back for Christmas without a shred of Sinclair code

"not .. 48K .. it has an order of magnitude more"

So 480K?

That sounds like it might be about 160K short of being enough for anyone.

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

They want employees with more skills

But more skilled employees can demand higher salaries so when you leave to get those higher salaries they refuse to pay you, they feel like they got screwed out of the training costs.

Soup king Campbell’s parts ways with IT VP after ‘3D-printed chicken’ remarks

The "3D printed chicken"

Is no doubt "mechanically separated chicken", which is used across the industry (even in the EU I imagine) for making stuff like chicken nuggets - because chickens may have wings and breasts but they don't have nuggets lol

It is hilarious that the Florida AG immediately decides to pander to his followers with fake concerns over "lab grown meat"

Seven years later, Airbus is still trying to kick its Microsoft habit

Re: No one ever got fired for using Microsoft

I'm not sure if it is still true but I was once told by someone at Microsoft that the way it works is they have a giant Office codebase and they fork off it to create a branch for release on platform x. They might fork for release several years before Office for something unimportant (i.e. not Windows) like iPadOS ships. That's why Office on various platforms never has matching feature sets, and they may also disable various features either to slim it down (or perhaps just to insure that the one running on Windows is the most featureful version)

So while we might want "Office 2025" to be the same on various platforms because it would be the easiest for us, that's not the easiest for Microsoft and they don't care about what we want.

One-fifth of the jobs at your company could disappear as AI automation takes off

Re: Running Schedule

That's not true, there are some PE companies that are looking for value and to operate the business profitably. Heck one could make a good argument that Berkshire Hathaway has been operating as a publicly traded combination PE firm and hedge fund for the past 65 years. I could list some pure PE funds that are like this.

But yeah the majority are in it for the short term and it may not end well for those employed at the companies they acquire.

Re: Running Schedule

Companies are in business to make money, so if it causes the business to suffer those who stick their head in the sand will end up fired when they go bankrupt or get bought out by a PE firm who will install a whole new management team to turn things around.

The ones who realize their error (or never made the error of chugging rather than sipping the AI koolaid) will be leading the successful companies that take the market share of the ones who followed the AI sirens to the grave.

FCC sounds alarm after emergency tones turned into potty-mouthed radio takeover

Its like a song with sirens

If you hear that in your car and you aren't familiar with the song you will check your mirrors to see if there's an ambulance behind you. Or back in the day when Nokia phones and that specific ring were ubiquitous, if that was on a TV show you might reach for your phone.

They want that type of reaction to only happen when there's an emergency broadcast, and not allow people to become desensitized to it.

HPC won't be an x86 monoculture forever – and it's starting to show

Yes RISC-V is what you get when a bunch of academics who have never done high performance CPU design or cutting edge compiler design create a new ISA.

It was never created to be a general purpose real world ISA, it was created as a THREE MONTH summer project to fill a research need. It was designed to be small and simple and only perform the minimal tasks they needed for that project. It was extremely bare bones but it has had more and more stuff added over the years, without any grand design to lead it all. If they wanted to a create a viable new general purpose high performance ISA they would have created one that had everything it needed from the start, with plans for growth and control over what could be officially added rather than letting anyone implementing one be able to go their own way.

While there is a "standards body" of sorts for it, it has no real power so if some big player like Qualcomm ever was induced to switch from ARM their market power would dictate whatever they did became the defacto standard even if it conflicted with what others are doing in the RISC-V space. So the people who want that sort of thing to happen should be careful what they wish for.

It is hilarious how that POS architecture has got so much love in the tech community just because it is open source, and they see it as a counter to ARM's licensing payments or dragging along x86's 45 years worth of useless legacy. Not that it is perfect, but PowerPC is open and it is far better than RISC-V, though a clean sheet ISA made by people who really know their stuff would beat them all.

Apple’s lousy AI didn’t stop it beating Samsung’s smartphone sales for the first time since 2011

Re: Major iPhone design revamp in 2027

The major revamp is that they think they've reportedly figured out how to put the front camera under the display without compromising on its image quality (which is something everyone who has done it so far has encountered) and they'd already figured out how to put Face ID under the display (supposedly that's coming next fall) so it'll be all screen.

Whether you think that's "major" or not is up to the eye of the beholder, but it is probably about on par in departure from previous iPhones as the iPhone X which was the first iPhone that was edge to edge screen in all dimensions (other than the notch) It also replaces mechanical buttons with pressure activated haptic "buttons", though that's not really something that will be as visually notable or make any difference in actual use.

Apple has been slowly increasing its overall smartphone market share for years. But yes that's only part of this, the rest is probably that other Android OEMs have been eating away at Samsung's share, especially in the lower/middle ranges where Chinese phones are gaining.

Apple made similar announcements in 2017 and 2021

IIRC Apple said they would spend $350 billion over the next four years in 2017 when Trump's first term started, and that they would spend $430 billion in 2021 when Biden's first term started. What they actually spent, and how it was counted, who knows but that $500 billion is basically just continuing along the same path. Cook knows Apple won't be held to that number any more than China is going to be held to their supposed commitments for soybean purchases Trump announced. Trump wants the announcement, he doesn't care about follow through.

Somehow some people have conflated to that "Apple is spending $500 billion bringing their manufacturing to the US" or "spending $500 billion on AI" but neither are true. They aren't moving production of any iPhones or Macs to the US, and they certainly aren't spending anything like that much on AI.

Apple's AI spending is mere "dabbling" when compared what the ones hyping and benefiting from the AI bubble. They are building AI datacenters but nothing on the ridiculous scale that OpenAI, Meta etc. are. The mistake they made was committing to a particular date for having improved AI features in iOS, because when they had to announce they were pushing that back it put the idea "Apple is behind in AI" on Wall Street.

They should have said something like "we're taking a careful approach rather than throwing something over the wall and letting customers test it for us", since that's in reality what Apple always does. They are rarely first with a product or feature, they take their time and try to perfect (or at least improve) it instead of racing to claim "f1rst!" They would happily have a less capable AI if in exchange for that tradeoff that one that was less prone to hallucination and lying. Don't commit to a date, say "it'll ship when its ready and while we hope we'll have it by x that's a goal not a promise".