Posts by that one in the corner

Apple releases OpenELM, a slightly more accurate LLM

Re: 2x fewer

They have to express it that way, to stay true to The Apple Commandment: Be Fruitful, and Multiply.

They must avoid any suggestion of Division in the Community of iThings.

Musk moves Tesla's goalposts, investors happily move shares higher

it is totally under Tesla's control

> "It's analogous to Amazon Web Services, where people didn't expect that AWS would be the most valuable part of Amazon when it started out as a bookstore,"

> "I think you could have on the order of 100 gigawatts of useful compute."

Hang on, now he is talking about selling compute time from the fleet of Tesla vehicles in order to compete with AWS? And this is going to be from a fleet where many of the vehicles are driverless taxis?

"Bong

"Already, nearly two hundred Tesla passengers (or payload units, as the car maker refers to them) have been reported to have perished in this, the second week of The Elon Traffic Jam, as they remain trapped in their vehicles on the side roads across the country, lost to the world now after their mobile phone batteries died as the vehicles re-arranged themselves for optimum mesh positioning.

"Bong

"Tesla stocks remain buoyant as Musk continues to send out messages to his followers on X, excitedly describing how his company is using the combined computer power of all the now static vehicles, promising that the new ML model being calculated will 'almost certainly be good enough to finally allow the Tesla Optimus to walk up a flight of at least seven stairs before falling backwards'.

"Bong

"And finally, on a lighter note, lawyers on both sides of the hearing on the appeals of the bereaved were heard laughing today as the Tesla Terms and Conditions were entered: 'They actually signed that! What!? Why?'"

Now all Windows 11 users are getting adverts to 'make the Start menu great again'

> There's lots of space in the file explorer, the user's desktop and the task bar to add additional advertising venues!

"We can sell 80 percent of the screen WITHOUT inducing seizures!" - Ready Player One

"We can use another 10% of the screen to sell our new Seizure-Be-Gone app, in the Windows Store now!" - Microsoft

Tesla misses the mark on all fronts in quarter of chaos

Status of Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus.

> We are able to do simple factory tasks or at least, I should say, factory tasks in the lab[1]. We do think we will have Optimus in limited production in the natural factory itself, doing useful tasks before the end of this year.

This is a "status report" worthy of being relevant to the analysts?

> These are just guesses.

So the answer to that question is - No. No, this is not a status report.

> And then I think we may be able to sell it externally by the end of next year.

Well, you managed to sell more than one of that flame thrower, so there is probably *someone* who is willing to buy one, if only as a curio.

[1] it can pass a cup of tea but only if the mug is lab-quality ceramicware, with no greasy contanimants and stirred with one of those magnetic bars, so no risk of the spoon sticking out at an awkward angle.

US government reportedly ponders crimping China's use of RISC-V

Re: This is cute

> This is why code compiled for a specific AMD CPU performs substantially better than code compiled just for x64.

So what are the differences going to between a specific AMD[1] CPU versus any old generic x64? Answer: extra interesting additional hardware units and their associated extra instructions, plus differences in precise timings of opcodes in the generic portion.

So what are the differences going to between a specific RISC-V CPU versus any old generic RISC-V? Answer: extra interesting additional hardware units and their associated extra instructions, plus differences in precise timings of opcodes in the generic portion.

As you point out, compiler writers know how to cope with the variants in the x64 to optimise for a specific CPU (we can even generate code that selects the best paths at run time, depending upon the, after reading the processor abilities register) - and exactly the same techniques work for optimising for variants of RISC-V, ARM or any of the myriad other CPU architectures that have been widely used and even those that have just played with as an exercise.

GCC and LLVM are both very capable compilers *and* have plenty of published material (in books, taught courses, blogs - oh, and the complete open source code) on how they work and how to port them.[2]

It is still a specialised area, of course, but with a bit of concentration any RISC-V company can come up with an optimised toolset.[3]

[1] or a specific Intel CPU, of course.

[2] Not to mention the wealth of knowledge on how to build compilers from scratch, if you happen to have a few thousand man hours to dedicate to creating a new toolchain [3]

[3] especially if you happen to have a government that can drop very heavy hints about how good it would be if everyone got together to work on a communal project for all the bits every implementation has in common (like optimising across a table of opcode timings, irrespective of the precise contents of that table per variant device).

Zilog to end standalone sales of the legendary Z80 CPU

> Microscopes and hot air stations are fairly cheap these days. With that, you can even solder BGA chips "by hand".

> It's actually much easier and quicker to work with surface mount components than THT.

Whilst that is no doubt true, for SMT to become easy to work with you need to move on from " a soldering iron and temporary use of a flat surface" to, as you describe, a proper work cell.

For the casual constructor, SMT is a PITA and it is quite a jump, even now with PCBWay etc, to get into diy'ing a circuit, compared to a bit of strip board or a through-hole kit (with all the SMT pre-done). Speaking as someone whose desk always has a soldering iron and helping hands stashed next to the keyboard.

Gone in 35 seconds – the Cybertruck's misbehaving acceleration pedal

"pedal rework kit"

> We're also sure that owners will not be thrilled that a mechanic is taking a drill to the pickup

All they had to do was include a drill bit in the kit, paint it purple and describe it as "specialised equipment for precisely modifying the accelerator pedal whilst fully retaining its bulletproof rating".

> how often do you really spend looking at the accelerator pedal in a car?

I always assumed that the Cybertruck had a camera in the footwell, so you the driver could see a dramatic shot of his foot pressing down as he pretended to be Batman

Microsoft teases deepfake AI that's too powerful to release

The implications for personalizing emails

are utterly horrifying, the implied threat of receiving videos instead of proper plain text emails that have been personalised by going through good old mail merge.

Tesla Cybertruck turns into world's most expensive brick after car wash

Free trip to Mars for every Cybertruck owner!

(The rest of us will all help you pack for the journey)

'you know it’s shite when you put the word “Cyber” on it'

Cybermen: deadly, humanoid, controlled by an inhibitor on their emotions (fear, love)

Teslamen: deadly humourless, controlled by an inhibitor that controls their emotions (shame, embarrassment, style, common sense)

Re: Car wash mode

Fair's fair, at no time did Musk say that the Cybertruck would work as a powered boat.

The "mod package" is clearly just rowlocks[1][2]

[1] "Bring your own oars"

[2] for the unnautical, the 'w' is pronounced more like a second 'l'; think "how would Scooby Doo say it?"

Wash? WASH?

Don't you know these things are only meant as collector's items? There are fewer than 4,000 in existence!

You shouldn't wash them - heck, you shouldn't even peel off the plastics from the windscreen. Collector's items should *always* be kept mint in box[1]

[1] and put it between two bits of cardboard, to stop it getting bent.

Unintended acceleration leads to recall of every Cybertruck produced so far

Re: Remind me

Maybe Tesla owners should hope for them to copy the single greatest innovation in that episode:

An on-the-road Mass.

After all, they clearly need all the help they can get.

Some smart meters won't be smart at all once 2/3G networks mothballed

Re: Mesh

LoRa, LoRa, what has become of you? Does anyone else in here feel the way I do?

(Bring the bytes back home)

Don't leave the meters on their own, no, no.

(Bring the bytes back home)

Meter data going over your home LAN.

How long until every website in Christendom is snarfing your meter readings to sell to advertisers?

Oh, it is encrypted over a separate vlan, you say? Whoops, you'll never guess what that latest firmware update (sponsored by those nice people at Meta) has just done!

And you remember the stories about being able to figure out what your telly is showing, based on the fluctuating power it draws? No Smart TV needed anymore...

Oh, and you know that remote cutoff that only the suppliers can access? Well, read the next malware popup *very* carefully; can you type in your Bitcoin key before the lights go out?

> WIFE has suddenly become unreliable

You know I hate to ask, but are 'friends' electric? Only mine's broken down and now I've no-one to love.

Re: Then purchasing something that can interpret those MQTT messages.

> Run it on any old computer or a Raspberry Pi

Still something to be purchased. Not even every geek has that hardware lying around unutilised and available to be (re)purposed.

Oh, and are the power savings going to be greater than that needed to keep "any old computer" running?

And that *still* doesn't address the issue of physically controlling the appliances...

Re: So, smart meter joy is continuing

> by purchasing a Hildebrand Glow display

Then purchasing something that can interpret those MQTT messages.

Purchasing appliances that can be controlled (or, at a minimum, purchasing mains switches that can be controlled - assuming that the existing appliances are old and dumb enough to be safely/correctly controlled just with a Big Red Switch).

Probably purchasing a new 'phone, because the super-amazing setup apps for the above don't work on the older models that are doing everything else ok (or, if not, aren't as important to daily life as, you know, your home actually functioning, so weren't worth the cost of the 'phone).

Why, I Can Just Feel The Pounds Melting Away![1]

[1] oops, wrong slogan; what was the one about saving so much due to the reduced energy usage?

subsidiary of Capita

That is never a good sign.

Torvalds intentionally complicates his use of indentation in Linux Kconfig

Re: Semicolons and curly braces, forever.

It is so nice to have code that is safe against whitespace being messed up by being pasted into a badly behaving email system or shoved into a wordprocessor document when you ask them to "just send me a copy of the bit you are talking about".[1]

Or they've somehow managed to convert the entire lump of code into a single line of text! With the braces in place you can pass the resulting mess through a pretty printer and make it legible again.

Ah, meaningful whitespace in a language that is suitable for teaching neophytes to code, what could possibly go wrong.

[1] Yes, you *would* hope that anyone who believes that they could learn to code would be capable of following instructions to just zip up their source file and attach that to an email, but...

Re: Tab = four  

> Mechanical typewriter tabs were always arbitrary

Indeed. The machines I learnt to type on, from the 1960s onwards, all had tabstops that you could place anywhere along the line. So you would count out how many characters the longest line in your own address required and then set up a right-most tabstop to leave just that much on the paper, so you could type up letters properly (when you weren't using the pre-printed Nice Paper, that is).

It was only after years of typing on computers that I ever came across any weird claims like "one TAB always equals 4 SPACEs" - or 2 or 6 or 8. Nope; if you used TABs then you jolly well set a line that defines where the TAB stops sit[1], just like on your typewriter.

It has been a while since I used it, but doesn't even MS Word have proper tabstops you can set anywhere? So nobody who uses a wordprocessor can claim they don't knows tabstops can be set anywhere, in whatever irregular spacing fits your tabulated data best.

Oh, and how I wish I could forget all the stupid arguments from people who do not know what tabstops are in the first place, so claim that, say, TAB equals 8 SPACEs and *then* that a line starting with SPACE SPACE TAB meant the next character would appear in column 11 and not column 9! Or did they mean that they wanted TAB to go to column 8 then 16 then 24 (so just like typing 7 spaces to get to the first of those, then 8 to get to the next...)

Rip the TAB key off any programmer's keyboard and replace it with a drawing pin, pointy bit upwards[2]

[1] there was also a convention that a number of programmer's editors used to follow, where you put a specially marked-up comment into your source code (whatever delimiters your chosen programming language used) and the editor applied those tabstops in that source file until told otherwise - no ambiguity at all, so obviously this idea had to go.

[2] unless they can *prove* that they have set their editor to use "insert SPACEs to reach next tabstop" - you can *type* however you please, just don't leave the bleeping TAB characters in the source code[3]

[3] okay, Makefiles are an unfortunate exception - but then J. Random Coder should not be writing the rules part of Makefiles anyway, but just listing modules in a variable and including the file with the rules for your build setup.

OpenBSD 7.5 locks down with improved disk encryption support and syscall limitations

Re: If you want a fancier desktop setup why run Open?

> Xorg in particular on FreeBSD drags in loads of unnecessary stuff, including Python

Yikes! Did not expect to read that today.

You have piqued my interest - let me guess, just a run-once setup thing; I'll just go and have a look. Nope, from around 2015 it seems to have originated from the use of clang, because Xorg uses language features that only a later clang supports and that pulls in Python as part of the build? Here we go, down another chain of weird dependencies.

Just stick[1] with K&R C, it doesn't drag in anything unexpected!

[1] Rhetoric! No need to tell me why there are "better choices since the 1980s"

Re: I love OpenBSD

> And does anyone dual-boot anything these days?

I'll admit to dual-booting: #1 Devuan to fire up VMs (such as the "end-user instance of Devuan" and Windows 10) then #2 Windows 10 bare metal.

But I admit that firing up the latter is down to my not getting fully to grips with the architecture of the PC: passing through a plug-in board (e.g. GPU, extra LAN) to a VM is easy(!) enough, but figuring out the mapping from the physical ports to the weird device ids for all of the built-in devices got so confusing that I gave up and boot to #2 when doing something under Windows that wants to access a USB device (other than keyboard, mouse or storage). I hang my head in shame.

GenAI will be bigger than the cloud or the internet, Amazon CEO hopes

Re: GenAI will be bigger than the cloud or the internet

A few minutes later:

It is driving me mad(der), can anyone fill in the blanks?

> Koffee Klear (tm)

Did I - borrow - that from Pohl & Kornbluth? "The Space Merchants"?

Or maybe it was something else by Kornbluth? Or someone else of that vintage.

Re: GenAI will be bigger than the cloud or the internet

> Claiming this is like claiming a new soft drink is going to be "bigger than water".

"Have you tried our new decaffeinated Koffee Klear (tm)? Now without the bitter taste, A Cleanser for Every Palate".

Any resemblance to Dasani is entirely coincidental.

Re: Transform virtually every customer experience that we know

You know full well that everyone else will try to outdo (read: simply copy whatever Amazon does - or buy the same services from them) if only from Fear of Missing Out.

All you customers of all the companies will join the race to the latest Stygian Hell of The Online[1]. If you don't fall to The Mindflayer then the Deep Ones will suck the marrow of your wallets.

[1] our only saviours can be a group of plucky kids on their bikes, and some cracking synth tunes.

Transform virtually every customer experience that we know

That thing you are feeling right now, after reading those words?

That, *that*, is the feeling of impending doom, the realisation of the horrors to come, the darkest depths of infinite void peering back out at you, as you feel sanity peeling away like the skin on overripe fruit.

Boffins deem Google DeepMind's material discoveries rather shallow

Re: Let us see your heterocyclic rings! :)

Gish Galloping the chemists!

Digital Realty ditches diesel for salad dressing in US to cut datacenter emissions

NOx, NOx, who's there?

> Nitrogen emissions

Plain old Nitrogen aint so bad, I'm sucking in great dollops of right now. Hmmmm; dilute that Oxygen to safe levels for me.

Nitrogen oxides, on the other hand, not so good.

(Niceness of other Nitrogen compounds - variable, but some quite exciting ones exist)

El Reg not to be blamed, just quoting from the imprecise linked Volta Energy article.

PS

Nope, even though we are getting into the (not great) habit of referring to "Carbon emissions" when we really mean CO2 much of the time, in my experience it is *not* clear to Joe Public that "Nitrogen emissions" refers to NOx - nor that there is any need to "simplify" things for Joe, as "NOx Bad" has been in news for a long time (and it even sounds, well, noxious). Plus there is a lot more C than CO2 to think about - CH4 for starters - whilst NOx really covers the bulk of it.

It's 2024 and Intel silicon is still haunted by data-spilling Spectre

Re: Ahhh that caption, as an 80's kid that made me laugh!

nasal_voice

After reading the Github page, I think you'll find that the package is written in Python, C and assembler. Therefore any use of jokes on "Go" are out of place.

(Snnnnnort)

/nasal_voice

Dispatch InSpectre Gadgets - Assemble!

C Gadgets; C Gadgets run; run, Gadgets, run.

Umm, something short and pithy about Python squeezing the bytes out of a juicy kernel.

US Air Force secretary so confident in AI-controlled F-16s, he'll fly in one

Would never harm a kitten

AI recognising and reacting to its surroundings?

Hope they have really good means of testing against (radar etc image variants of) Adversarial Image Attacks.

Pilot: Bogie sighted; weird paint job. Engaging.

AI: Aww, look at the widdle kitty; whoops, better switch off that nasty tone, don't want to scare him.

X fixes URL blunder that could enable convincing social media phishing campaigns

Gosh, that takes me back

To the time when badly implemented profanity filters were all the rage on forums up and down the 'Net.

But it is refreshing to see that X is still in the technological lead, taking what was just an annoying but harmless bug, which sometimes gave us a good laugh[1] and converting it into an attack vector.

[1] the clbuttic[2] examples of Sshrewhorpe, Rosebudheroe or Mastburn

[2] I acknowledge the previous use of this one, but who can resist? Plus, failed to come up (oooer missus) with a way to include buttbuttin.

Notepad++ dev slams Google-clogging notepad.plus 'parasite'

Re: Meh

That is also what Emacs, CodeWright, VIM, Eclipse are also all for.

Given nothing that comes as default with Windows can do those tasks, isn't it good that we have options and can choose the one that fits our preferences.

But given TFA is about Notepad++ it is not surprising that that'll be getting the attention today.

Re: Meh

> But handle HUGE files gracefully. Define HUGE.

2GB plus (got it up to a 6GB binary just for a chuckle once - don't have anything larger on hand and *creating* that file took plenty of time)

> Define gracefully

Not crashing.

> I've certainly had times when the editor seemed to hang on me when working on large files.

Yeah, it could do with a progress bar when loading a huge file; but Task Manager shows it reassuringly chewing away.

Solar eclipse darkened skies, dampened internet traffic

> it only lasted about a minute, but it was still very interesting.

The 1968 total eclipse had, at its longest, a Totality duration of 40s - and the Chinese expedition spent 3 days on a train then 7 days by car to get to an observing site!

Travel is a lot easier now and many people would happily travel across the globe for a minute of Totality![1]

Just stepping outside and only having a few wispy clouds - what great fortune.

[1] of course, having travelled so far, they'd try for a location with the maximum Totality possible, conditions permitting, but still, a minute of Totality is nothing to be sneezed at.

AI could crash democracy and cause wars, warns Japan's NTT

Re: Calls for ecosystem in which AIs keep other AIs in check, and lots more regulation

> So, will the solution to all AI problems always be more AI?

Or a robust, large, circular and very bright red, "off" switch. Preferably more than one.

>> Using 100 words when two will do?

> Sounds like most people I've ever met

Ah, the glamour of a life in politics

San Francisco's light rail to upgrade from floppy disks

Re: Have they been hacked?

>> draw

> *drawer

It had been passed around in the prize draw at every local fair for the last three decades, initially as a simple joke until it became a tradition ("Tra-DITION!") and was then treated with veneration and handled carefully. Always stored behind a carriage clock on the mantelpiece, to keep it out of the sun, and occasionally brought out for the wonderment of the younglings, a Relic of The Before Times[1].

[1] accompanied by the singing of the hymn to the Data Gods, hoping to see a valid binary stream: "We Don't Need Another Zero"

Windows 95 support chap skipped a step and sent user into Micro-hell

Re: Don't follow the instructions

Sounds like you had the perfect start for an illustrious job on the Tiger Team.

Techie saved the day and was then criticized for the fix

Re: Locks.

I hope you got your badge for that.

Boffins build world's largest astronomical digital camera to map the heavens

Re: Don't look up

The Starlink satellites won't leave so many trails, as you point out.

Instead, they will just occult all sorts of interesting stuff.

Such as the the alien fleet that is spiralling Earthwards, hiding behind Elon "Lizard Lord" Musk's space birds. That is the only logical explanation for making the new Starlink design too big to launch without Starship: as the Slaver ships grow closer they need the larger shape to keep them obscured. Their final approach was laid out in the plans sent up in the glove box of that red Tesla - and you don't want to know what was really inside that humanoid body...

And loaded two plates from successive nights into the mechanical blink comparator?

Subtracting one digital image from another saves so many sore eyes.

Or progressive readout, just under 20 seconds for the entire thing?

OpenStack pushes its first easy-to-upgrade release out the door

Re: "improves AI capabilities"?

>> gaining the ability to support live migration of virtual GPUs – which those running AI and HPC workloads will appreciate as it means easier access to accelerators attached to different hosts.

Just the assumption that if you are running an "AI" workload you can benefit from shunting it from one host to another without undue effort or having to restart from the beginning. Ditto other long-runtime GPU loads.

Presumably you could also shift your video game to a faster hardware host when that little brat from Oslo logs in (he is going to get his arse kicked *this* time) but that may be overkill (the best kind of kill!).

US reckons it's about time the Moon had its own time zone

Re: Paging Neil

> "an Earth-based clock observed by someone on the Moon that would appear to lose an average of 58.7 milliseconds per Earth day"

> I'm a little confused by the "observed" part though. Doesn't the "observation" also have to make the trip?

The light used to make the observation will also take time to travel from Earth to the Moon, and that time will also vary as the Earth rotates, the Moon orbits, that orbit recedes etc etc.

But when a clock is constantly losing (or gaining) you don't need to observe it frequently to observe the effect - you can imagine[1] waiting a few of years between peeking at the timepieces, measuring the distance[2] between Moon and Earth at the point of each clock observation to compensate. Then you'll see the cumulative drift and can point out that this is way outside the combined error bars for the two observations, so celebrate down the pub lads.

Whether or not the drift makes a genuine difference to performing any day to day operations, worth enshrining in a Lunar Time Zone, is another matter.

And from whose point of view does this new time zone actually work?[3]

After all, the astronaut's watches (and caesium clocks) will automatically convert themselves to tick at the local rate as soon as they arrive on site, so measuring durations in experiments will give the same results on Earth and Moon.

Differences in astronomical observations? Umm, tricky - I'll have to drink more coffee before trying to think that one through (do pulsars tick at different absolute rates from different observation sites? Gibber!)

[1] as good physicists do

[2] ok, just keep the round trip time and divide by two to get the adjustment for the observation - and none of your "that doesn't truly measure the one way trip time"!

[3] yes, I know that syncing actions between systems on the Moon needs to be done locally, but by the time you need the precision the clocks to give the reference will be in situ and that whole setup will be decoupled from Earth-based time. The whole concept of time zones is only relevant between two distinct locations and here we are discussing Earth versus Moon, not even separate locations across the Moon.

Apple's GoFetch silicon security fail was down to an obsession with speed

Re: Einstein was brilliant

> Even if we are talking about light, firstly, these aren't optical chips.

Electrical signals propagate down conductors at (near as damn it) the speed of light. There are retarding effects, but for day to day use, assuming C when laying out your PCB is ok.

> I don't think anybody ever thought light travelled instantaneously from one place to another

Yes, people did - it wasn't until some time around the 17th century, IIRC, that anyone started to prove that light has a speed, let alone one we could measure.

Considering that we used to believe that our vision worked by the eyes emitting rays that bounced back, don't underestimate how much of what we accept as "the obvious ways things are" differ from what was accepted (and how much our descendants will be saying "I don't think anybody ever thought...").

X's Grok AI is great – if you want to know how to hot wire a car, make drugs, or worse

What is so bad about knowing how to hotwire a car?

So long as it is your car, or done with owner's permission, it is perfectly legal. And can even be useful, in dire situations. Or just to understand how vulnerable your vehicle actually is.

Next they'll be blocking how to pick a lock (definitely worth knowing, to understand how crap so many locks are).

As for the actually dubious or dangerous stuff: what do you expect from AI out of Elon's stable? Has he managed to direct an 'Net to provide Full Self Driving? So why hope his lot can make Full Self Censoring work?

Japan's moon lander sparks joy by making it through a second lunar night

Earth's sole natural satellite

The QI Elves would like a word with you.

PS

Well done JAXA.

It is always good to hear when something we've sent to Space manages to survive beyond the point we'd expected it gone, whether that is after the intended mission time has long past or, as here, after it suffered misfortune.

The level of engineering involved gives one hope that we've not completely forgotten how to Do It Right despite the seemingly endless stories we read about Earth bound systems.

Microsoft, OpenAI may be dreaming of $100B 5GW AI 'Stargate' supercomputer

Stargate?

Are these people so lacking in the history of SF film[1] that they think Stargate is a good representative of what an AI supercomputer can do?

What about Colossus ("Thank you, Dr Forbin") or Proteus IV (just keep it away from electric wheelchairs) or Edgar (avoid spilling champagne on it)?

What notable AI is there in Stargate that they want us to think about and associate with OpenAI? None! Well, there are The Replicators, but - no, they couldn't be? If they introduce their new CTO Reese and start talking about "making toys" then run, just run!

[1] good thing they are not as unaware of the history of, say, computing, eh! Hang on what was that? No! Really? Yikes!