Posts by that one in the corner

How to make today's top-end AI chatbots rebel against their creators and plot our doom

Ode to The Unknown

Take an inexplicable phenomenon[1], sprinkle in some random behaviour[2], leaven with the unexplained[3] and feed it the unexpected[4]. Stoke the flames[5].

It is hard enough to be sure that our carefully planned[6], deliberately coded[6] and painstakingly tested[6] systems are safe to release to the public.

The hubris of the Madmen, releasing their Thinking Machines[7] upon an unwary World, is staggering.

[1] LLMs - neural nets in general - have no ability to explain how they reach their results and are just huge piles of nadans when you look at them yourself

[2] as per the article, a seed value plus an internal stochastic walk

[3] guardrails - nice phrase, sounds reassuring; details, please? Apparently added quite quickly, compared to the boasts about how much effort it was to create the LLMs in the first place, so tacked on or really fundamental to the way the model works internally (mot that we'd ever know if the latter worked, see [1])

[4] well, did you expect that suffix to work?

[5] set another machine the goal of finding the "unwanted" results, by a process that looks rather like a maximising "fuzzing" process.

[6] ever the optimist, ignore more of the rest of The Register's articles about systems falling over in embarrassing ways.

[7] yes, yes, these don't think, they aren't really intelligent - trying to be poetic here! Yeesh.

A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor? Take a closer look

Re: SQUIDS could be made to work without a cooling system.

So if this one pans out, we'll finally be able to fit our Dolphins with SQUIDs!

Paging Johnny, will Mr Mnemonic please come to the white courtesy phone.

Re: Apatite

September '62

Support by Murphy, running fine

It was business as usual

In macro line 619

TECO, TECO, because TECO

What does Twitter's new logo really represent?

Re: An X Man

C'mon man, don't you go holding out on me - just a scented candle, that'll take the edge off.

Re: X-citing!

Well, we do use "twittering" to describe a group of people who are having an inconsequential natter, often bonding over a shared dislike of important topics, like how annoying it is they moved the flower baskets outside the laundrette on the high street (the water drips down the back of your neck).

Or the elderly great aunt, who fusses around the room, with a continuous stream of tidbits about all the second cousins you hardly ever see, jumping from one to the other as she suddenly remembers a little anecdote.

Reading too fast leads to mis-attribution

> We learned that it was constructed like a geometrical diagram, from 15 overlapping circles.

When I read that I first thought that it was referring to the new X logo and was glad to realise the truth.

What is worrying is that the idea of a Design Boutique coming up with an X and claiming that it was "constructed like a geometrical diagram, from 15 overlapping circles" sounded so believable in my head!

Guess I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing joss sticks.

Re: Rebranding Fail

What, you mean "Wormhole X-treme" wasn't just the best name ever?

X marks the spot

Where you can find your xit[1]

Don't do that or it'll never get better.

[1] pronounced "zit", proposed usage instead of "tweet"

Intel adds fresh x86 and vector instructions for future chips

So, anyone going to try and fit the answer to that one into a single comment or should we just respond with the ISBN of our favourite 800 page text book on the subject?[1]

[1] nowhere near my bookshelves at the moment; must get around to memorising those ISBNs one of these days.

PS not a dig, Kev99, that is a sensible and worthy question, just that there are quite a few things that can (ought to be) be put into a decent answer to it!

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

Perhaps that title should also apply to finding that the video provides evidence of intelligence within Mr Grusch's head[1]:

> A democratic process must be adhered to when evaluating the data

Run a poll to decide if this misshapen lump is made of a metal not of this Earth?

[1] waiting for proper morning, with coffee, before playing a video. But will it live up to expectations or has El Reg put all of the exciting bits into the trailer?!

Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

I know I shouldn't take these polls seriously, but there is a missing option (see title).

Cigna sued for using software to deny healthcare insurance claims

I hope we all felt that one in our guts

> simple sorting technology that has been used for more than a decade – it matches up codes, and does not involve algorithms

Oooof!

But then I read on:

> perhaps not what people in general think when they hear the word "algorithm" in this era of machine learning and recommendation engines.

Recommendation engines - those simple sorting routines that literally come up with "people who bought secateurs also bought bandages"!

Five years after Hannah Fry's book, it looked like Joe Public was understanding the word. Now some prat of a lawyer is trying to argue against its meaning. Aaaarghhh.

What cruel god is this, that plays with us so?

Netflix offers up to $900,000 for AI product manager while actors strike for protection

Re: Alternative use for $900,000 at Netflix

D'oh!

Just realised: that lighting is so that we won't be able to tell when they stop using human actors!

All they need do is keep recycling the same motion captures overlaid with vague shadowy figures: why waste extra money on GPU texture cycles.

They've just been preparing the viewers the whole time. Well, that puts paid to all the stories about Executive Creatives [1] only looking to the short term.

[1] wanted to put "Hollywood" there but not honestly sure if Netflix counts as Hollywood; advice, anyone?

Alternative use for $900,000 at Netflix

Buy some bleedin' light bulbs for your sets so we can see what the blazes is going on!

That would increase viewership in certain Corners' worlds.

Musk's X tries to win advertisers back with discounts

Miyagi say "ctrl-q, ctrl-s"

> “X” soon to be re-rebranded

That would be X-on, X-off ?

AMD Zenbleed chip bug leaks secrets fast and easy

Re: Parsing the data

> they figure out which versions of the functions they will call at the beginning of execution and cache those

That trick has been in use since the very first set of SIMD extensions were added (MMX to Intel x86 CPUs in 1996).

For example, have a look at https://libjpeg-turbo.org/ a JPEG library that was extended as new extensions came along.

The same basic trick works for the flashy stuff we have nowadays.

You don't even have to always drop down to assembler to take advantage: with a suitable compiler, you can just recompile the same C code with different processor-specific extensions enabled via cli args, each variant given a different function name (via cli args), use a macro generator to spit out the wrapper function (which checks the CPU and selects the appropriate worker function, caches that). Rinse and repeat.

> This is just nonsense.

Phew, glad to hear that. Guess the same goes for the other data leaking hardware bugs, eh, so we can go back to running at full speed without any of those pointless ameliorations in place.

On the other hand...

The example shown on the github page looks pretty convincing (but that could all be faked, I guess).

True, you can't see anything too incriminating in that short example (but if they'd captured their own password would they have published that as-is?), but if you let it run and just get lucky, what wonders could you see?

Parsing the extracted data could be an interesting challenge, but anything with a pattern to it...

The malefactors don't have to hit too many jackpots to make the attempt worthwhile. Unless someone wants to invoke some "targeted scenario" where they are after something specific from a special machine within a particular company, but how many of those are there in reality, compared to mass "give it a go, see what we get" approaches (like targeting all of the machines in the company)?

Re: Also, I just noticed...

> not a tab spying one for s'kiddies.

We don't do gatekeeping around here.

We support equal opportunity access to hardware bugs.

Re: Parsing the data

> UTF-8 or sometimes ISO8859 are the order of the day, and just counting along an array of bytes until you get to a zero byte is no longer enough to work out the character length of a string

Many (the vast majority?[1]) of calls to str(n)len are looking for the end of a buffer to copy to/from, rather than actually caring about how many characters/codepoints are present.

[1] certainly in all my UTF8 code (which is all the string & text processing code I use) *all* of the str(n)len calls are for this - my code never actually worries about counting codepoints[2], leaving that up to the OS display code.

[2] I cheat - all the special sequences that are sought by the lexer are in the 7-bit ASCII range. Then again, this cheat is used by all the programming languages I'm familiar with...

Re: Also, I just noticed...

Hopefully, but as with every weird attack vector things get, well, weird.

The key lines in the post you reference appears to be

> which the JIT engine should known has just been zeroed and have optimized away.

Hmm, does the JIT engine really track every value to see if it is zero? It makes sense to have an iszero bit in hardware as it works in parallel and can be applied to every value passing through a register. You can track some values during compilation but add enough indirection and you can get a zero that isn't evident at compile time. Ahhh, something else to add to the "have a look at this in one's copious spare time" :-)

However, those bent on attacking will be looking at the results of JIT as well and can apply weird methods: they know the sequence of operations they want to come out of the compiler and can fling stupid-looking JS code at it until they get a workable sequence out.

The bottom line: fingers crossed nobody gets it to work in JS but plan for the worst case.

Re: Dumb Questions

I just hope I can figure out how to apply any of the amelioration methods - like, are microcode patches a one-time thing or do they have to be re-applied on every power up?

I.e. can I boot a patched OS once then go back to the grotty stuff or must all the OSes be capable of uploading the microcode patch (and contain a copy of it!)? If the latter then running some of the oddball OSes that Liam Proved tells us of would be a pain.

For that matter:

> If you stick any emulation layer in between, such as Qemu, then the exploit understandably fails.

Presumably that *doesn't* work for Qemu/kvm as then you are running on the real hardware, just a subset of it. You have to force it to, um, actually emulate the x64 architecture whilst running on an x64 - tell it to emulate an Intel device instead? My little head hurts.

Yikes, there is so much about the modern CPU guts I know nothing about! Maybe if I just glue 48 Motorola 6809s together with some SRAM onto Veroboard...

Re: Dumb Questions

> The error is in clearing the zero bit!

> I can understand why each of these decisions was made in isolation

I wish I could!

I've read through the report once so far and I'm clearly missing something, as I can not see why that zero bit needs to be reset - i.e. missing the "in isolation" usefulness of doing so.

AFAIK It is only a speed-up, to avoid *really* writing zeroes into the register - if the speed-up didn't exist then the register really would contain zeroes, just as it would contain any non-zero value. If the rollback required the zero bit to be cleared, to revert it to the way it was, that implies (to me) that any non-zero value would also have to be reverted to the way it was.

So either there is no need to touch anything - nothing needs to be reverted - or there is a shadow copy mechanism that would revert back a non-zero correctly but for some reason is broken/incomplete with respect to the zero bit, causing it to be cleared every time. A broken mechanism doesn't seem like something that would be considered useful "in isolation".

Probably just (!) have to re-read that report a half-dozen more times and it may sink in.

Or I could not bother and just marvel that any of this stuff works as well as it does!

Re: Also, I just noticed...

> which sounds like something that can not be trivially exploited with javascript code

From the article:

>> It's understood a malicious webpage, running some carefully crafted JavaScript, could quietly exploit Zenbleed on a personal computer to snoop on this information.

Writing that JavaScript might not seem trivial to you or I, but something similar has been done to take advantage of the Intel hardware problems: someone knows the trick.

And one the code is written, it can be dropped into as many (hijacked) web pages as are willing to pay the few to get one copy.

Re: Parsing the data

Yup.

That's why you[1] would want to be able to do the attack using JavaScript: attack as many people as can be lured to that webpage, grab as much as you can - oh, and don't forget to get as much as you can out of the browser by all the older methods, now you have information about what sites they log into as well as possible hints about passwords etc.

You[2] don't have to get lucky every time.

[1] not *you* you, of course, I'm not trying to suggest that you are interested in any of this for any reason than to protect yourself.

[2] on the other hand, your eyes are a bit close together and have a shifty look

Re: Also, I just noticed...

It is very useful to have your bank site open and at the same time be looking at your orders on the retailer's website (ugh, I did pay that much), plus the tax advice website (blast, I thought the Customs Exempt threshold was higher) whilst IMing (we said we'd go halfsies but I don't see the transfer from your account) and so on and so forth.

Logging out of the bank every time you want to double check a line in the statement - not going to be a popular move.

OpenAI pulls AI text detector due to it being a bit crap

Do OpenAI really want a working LLM detector? Or is it a bluff?

Training your neural net, to turn it into a LLM, requires an amount of feedback to direct the learning process: a few short years ago we were being told of "new" techniques like GANs[1], where the training eats up even more machine cycles by training two nets to basically fight each other. So long as you have the cycles available, GANs are cheaper and quicker than using humans to read all the output and grade it. You can use other software (e.g. to stop the LLM getting away with just spitting out nonsense words that aren't in the dictionary, not allowing long repetitions of one word) but that is going to be very limited in scope.

So, what are the chances that ChatGPT was created alongside its GAN nemesis: one generates text that is as good as humans can manage, the other tries to spot the difference. When the training is complete, you hope that the generator is fooling the detector as much as possible, preferably all the time.

OpenAI just happen to have a detector available, do they? I wonder where that came from. And they have let people feed into it lots and lots of samples of the sort of text that the public want to verify.

Now OpenAI admit that the detector can not spot the differences and have taken it away. At the same time, promising to come up with some kind of watermarking scheme, just what the administration would like to see. A watermarking scheme that, if they develop it first, would be pushed by the administration (with subtle hints from Microsoft) as something that every LLM creator should make use of. For a suitable licence fee, of course.

By the way, you know those restrictions that all the big boy LLMs have? About not allowing you to use their output to train another LLM? Do you think the adversarial detector counts as an LLM? It is large, it is a model and it is only concerned with language... So if you suddenly turn around and claim to already have software that can detect ChatGPT output, how did you manage to create it? Want to prove in court that it isn't an LLM? Hey, did you know that OpenAI (or another Microsoft subsidiary) has used a very similar technique?

[1] knowing what this stands for doesn't really help, but just in case you don't know: Generative Adversarial Network.

Intel: Here, have some AI reference kits ... now please buy our silicon

Re: It's like a choose your own adventure book

Yes, but it wasn't very good and never made it to end, then refused to ever play again[1]

AI can be cleverer than we give it credit for.[2]

[1] this is a madey-upy story for a cheap laugh

[2] see [1]

Ultra-rare Apple sneakers from the 1990s on sale for $50,000

Re: anti-Apple (fanboi) sentiment

"of all it's none of anybody else's business what people choose to like or not like."

True.

All the people who just quietly enjoy what they enjoy: well, they are just "fans", not "fanbois", and all the best to them. Have fun.

It is the fanbois that make so much effort to make damn sure everyone else knows what they like that are the annoying ones.

Especially the ones that do it by inventing slights that they can rail against.

Re: Einstein clearly never read Genesis.

When there is doubt, always go with the earliest bit of Genesis, when Gabriel was involved (Peter, that is).

These may be the best Apple products that they released in the 1990s

Ah, the heady days of such Apple products as:

* Powerbook 5300 ("widely considered one of Apple's worst products."[1])

* Mac Performa x200 series (It often appears on the "worst Apple products of all time" type lists[1])

* Macintosh TV (With a price tag of $2,000, it was doomed to failure[1])

* The eWorld service, a private network service that was separate from the internet

And oh so many more delights. If nothing else there were enough dodgy releases that you could make a decent collection out of them.

[1] quotes and more listings from 17 Apple Products From the 90s We Forgot About

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

Tweet no more

Now you just Xit - pronounced "zit".[1]

"Oh, I'll just squeeze out a xit about this"

"Your xit has gone viral"

"Musk has given us even bigger xits"

[1] informed by my colleague Xavier, pronounced Zavier.

World's most internetty firm tries life off the net, and it's sillier than it seems

Well, if you're so smart, you tell us: what colour should the wheel be?

Linux lover consumed a quarter of the network

Re: Rule one...

> stationary on the M20

Aka Operation Stack

Which really gets one right in the old pedantry nerve: that is a FIFO not a LIFO! They aren't stacking their operations, they are queueing!

Although calling it Operation Queue would just get it confused with SOP on the M25.

Judge lets art trio take another crack at suing AI devs over copyright

Re: Extension of the Existing Situation

Oh, if only it were all so clear cut and simple :-)

One could happily agree with what you say and at the same time start to poke holes in it: as you so rightly say, parallels are difficult.

As usual, the lawyers and their twisty minds are going to be the obvious winners. Well, a small number of them, at least.

Re: Extension of the Existing Situation

> If no licensing details are included in the source code, then you can do what you like.

Oops, misread your post: when you wrote the above you weren't, as I'd thought, talking about source code in a book (it is only later on that you mention a book).

If you just come across some source code - in a random file somewhere, in a printout lying on a park bench - and there are no licensing details included in it STAY WELL AWAY FROM IT! It probably isn't worth the risk.

It will still be under copyright, even if that is not explicitly stated, even if no author is named[1] . Aside from anything else, you may not have a complete copy of the original[2].

Although you could get away with reading the found source code, you almost certainly don't have the right to input it it, let alone compile it at all (although, as usual, you can generally get away with it in the privacy of your own home), let alone "do what you like".

[1] no, you can't assume "Public Domain" - aside from the point that PD is only a US concept, without knowing the authorship you *potentially* have an "orphaned work" which is a whole other can of worms - keep away, really not worth the risk; you'll have to fight Google[3] for starters (in the US) :-)

[2] if you rip apart a novel (say, "Whispers Underground", Gollancz UK 2012) and walk off with the middle third, it likely[4] does not provide author, title or other copyright information but it is most certainly still under copyright (by Ben Aaronovitch in the example) all the same.

[3] Google’s Plan for Out-of-Print Books Is Challenged

[4] some novels have the title and author on each leaf: this is a book design choice. I've just checked a pile and none of the newer novels (in this sample) do it, but the 1970s books do.

Re: Extension of the Existing Situation

> publisher's copyright notice is meant to apply just to the physical book and the text it contains as represented on its pages.

Yes (the exact contents of the book). The "in part or whole" (or similar) is subject to conditions in your jurisdiction (e.g. you may have various "fair use" rights).

> If no licensing details are included in the source code, then you can do what you like.

Sadly no. Short sections may fall under "fair use" but longer sections, nope.

Teaching books and "cookbooks" nowadays include explicit code licence terms, because everyone is now aware of the issues and the use of informal notes in the preface weren't really sufficient.

Re: Extension of the Existing Situation

Then the answer is: mu.

Your first three sentences describe one situation.

Your last is, as you confirmed, describing a totally different situation (as outlined in my previous post), so the question "does that make any difference?" is malformed, hence: mu.

Tesla's Dojo supercomputer is a billion-dollar bet to make AI better at driving than humans

Re: Billion Dollar Brain ?

The Billion Dollar Brain was going well, it was let down by the Human Factor (aka making money on the side).

Which made the film's message a bit confusing: the insane Right-Wing Capitalist had his plans undermined by - good old Capitalism?

Re: "But then, you get to, like, 10 million training examples, it becomes incredible"

> You just program it to do it in a certain way and that's that.

Which is a great idea and I really hope that there are manufacturers actually doing that.[1]

But from everything reported about Tesla's approach, there is never anything about actually programming in *any* set of actions, it is all about just training the neural net and it will do everything of its own accord.

Please, please, provide citations to demonstrate I'm wrong about Tesla (and please, please, if you found any references that the other manufacturers are also taking the sensible route!)

[1] although hopefully they aren't literally coding in that sequence of actions but are instead setting into place a (sub)plan of actions and then attempting to execute that plan with constant monitoring of the requirements and conditions at each stage - more of an old-style AI approach that doesn't just rely on checking the surrounds at fixed points in the sequence. Which also provides the model to update the plan with, for example, whatever is the currently available route (if any) for getting the hell out of the way when that maniac in the next lane suddenly moves in on you midway through the manoeuvre.

Meta can call Llama 2 open source as much as it likes, but that doesn't mean it is

Re: our open source LLM available for research and commercial use

Good rallying cry, but like so many rallying cries, too blunt: great for carrying people along on an emotional ride but after that...

We have F(L)OSS - if you only want to support that, good. Do so with all the gusto you can manage. Although I'm not sure you haven't contradicted yourself (see below).

But trying to force:

> Claims of software being "open" should only be accepted if source is available at no cost for use in any damn way you want.

Well, you have just kicked all of the GPL variants out: you certainly can not use those *any* damn way you want, that is entirely the point!

This certainly isn't closed source. It isn't restricted source (as you get with many products: buy a binary licence, you get one copy of the source to read for documentation/debugging).

One of the basics of Open Source that is often ignored (or even derided, curiously by those that loathe the GPL) is: nobody is forcing you to use it. It came with with conditions you don't like - don't use it. Or talk to the author and arrange a different (usually just a paid-for) licence (which is being offered here)

Re: Multiple definitions of open source (lower case)

> So actually OSI's definition of open source is wider (more free?) than what the GNU public license(s) permit.

Although, if you look at the SPDX list they allow you to compare the OSI's opinion with that of the FSF and there are cases where the FSF tick a licence but the OSI don't (e.g. Apache 1.0).

> Meta license, however, includes Meta-benefiting constraints that set it apart from all OSI licenses, including the GNU public license(s) .

> Any attempt to use it for business includes great risks if successful

Well, leaving aside that there has long been antagonism between Open Source and business (many devs taking the view that OSS isn't meant to be propping up business: if you intend to use it to make money, damn well pay!) could just clarify those risks - you appear have knowledge I don't, care to share?

To show you the gross depths of my ignorance, the only risks I know of, so far, are:

(a) you can't build an LLM trained on this - that isn't a risk, it is a straight up requirement.

(b) if you make loadsamoney from using this, you have to switch to a paid licence (which isn't a novel licence term in and of itself - game engines, for example, have long had this term). *Great* risk? Not just something you put into the figures for the business plan on day one? You aren't sure what the cost will be? That is no different than future costs for any of your costs: you could even buy a future on it!

OSI & OSD: the same thing (and no longer even as useful as they were?)

The OSI are a useful (but declining in usefulness, btw - see SPDX, below) collection of known licences, but they do NOT define "Open Source" - they define what they have based their list upon, that is the sum total of it.

Once you have invoked the OSI list, any reputable report should make it clear that the OSD is *not* some separate measure of openness but is merely the document the OSI themselves drafted (cribbing from Debian, but it is now a distinct document) and use to qualify who will join their list.

Even this Register article may (will!) mislead (by the uncritical quoting of Erica Brescia) the less knowledgeable into believing that this LLaMa licence has failed on two independent counts, not just one.

Whether you wish to take their definition on as your personal definition of OSS, in all of its particulars, without fault or dispute - that is your privilege, but it does not force anyone else to do the same.

There was a LOT of shouting when the OSI was created, because it was seen to be making claims on behalf of software authors it had never spoken to (as in, the vast, vast majority of them - have *you* had your letter from the OSI, introducing itself and wondering if you'd like to have them represent you?). That was never settled (there was no vote): the OSI does NOT have any power over "open source" as a whole or as a concept, no matter what it claims. Generally, the shouting has died down - except on the OSI's own front page - and we get on with things without really giving them much thought, day to day.

The OSI was useful as a repository of well-known licences, but that is all it has ever done: it has not, and to this day, does not offer anything useful in terms of analysis of the applicability of material under one licence or the next (go look up its copy of GPL2 and of MIT licences: note the (total absence of) links to their careful discussion of the pitfalls of one against the other).

Nowadays, I would point people at the SPDX list in preference to the OSI list: SPDX ids are what you want to quote these days and they provide a tick against OSI, if that is useful to you, as well as the FSF "free/libre" acceptance, which OSI can not be bothered to do. Any system to help you judge between, juggle responsibilities of, the various licences (such as creating you Software BOM) is going to use SPDX notation, so best to get straight to it.

BTW the OSI claim "The “open source” label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California, shortly after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code." Bollocks. Open source as a phrase was in use before then. Even Wikipedia agrees. The OSI has a very grandiose view of itself, very suitable for articles of this sort.

Fear not, White House chatted to OpenAI and pals, and they promised to make AI safe

Re: So, Tesla isn't on the list?

Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings, who was even worse than the Vogons - and completely computer-generated[1][2]

[1] well, hand-drawn but presented as if she was CGI: the Magic of TV

[2] makes more sense if you ever heard the original first episode[3]

[3] and the original third episode was the better one, with Marvin humming like Pink Floyd[4]

[4] yes, I'm doing "it was all better in my day" with HHGG (still waiting for the promised film adaptation).

So, Tesla isn't on the list?

Well, that is ok, there are no safety issues to worry about with their systems.

Well, no *important* ones, that could be a risk to The Nation if FSD has flaws, only the little people crawling around like ants.

The only dangerous AIs are those that write bad poetry, bad code or rip off novelists.

No risks at all from connecting Neural Nets to tons of metal and high-torque engines.

Tesla to license Full Self-Driving stack to other automakers, says Musk

Re: "plans to license its as-yet Full Self-Driving stack to other automakers"

Do you mean "Tesla's design of charger is becoming a de facto standard as other brands fit compatible ports and run their own compatible charge points"? Because either the industry will chose one (and it matters not one jot in the grand scheme of things which one) or fed up populace will get the government to dictate one (and it matters not ...).

Which is very different from licencing software that has been trained - not designed, with easy to locate and tweak parameters such as length, height, wheel base, but blindly trained - on only the physical designs of vehicle that Tesla build. Only expecting the Tesla sensor suite (so no accurate direct-measurement parking sensors, let alone any fancy stuff, like fog-penetrating radar).

Re: "plans to license its as-yet Full Self-Driving stack to other automakers"

> maybe being the car brand that doesn't have all this "smart" crap will become a selling point?

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

On our last three cars, one control stick was/is totally unused, covered in dust: the cruise control. Even commuting for years, never found it to be useful [1]

We fear the same would be true of lane keeping - what lane markings? Those faded ones that only appear near the T junctions on our leafy country roads? And so on. The automatic headlights are annoying as well: you start to rely on them, then find you don't have the reflex action on the knob when you need to override (and why the hell can't the headlights be flashed when they are dipped? Push & lock for high beam on, pull and spring release for flash - it worked on the previous models of the same brand of car!)

Heck, motorised seats - no need, never had any problems grabbing the manual release every time we swap in the driving seat. All these widgets and "features" are just more things to go wrong (and always at the worst moment). Even the bluetooth to the console - take it away, just more pointless fluff as far as we're concerned: plug in a USB of MP3 files and a radio, that is all we need.

Parking sensors: good (and pretty reliable after - how many decades have these been available now?). Parking camera? Fun when we tried it, but really haven't missed having it day to day.

At some point we're going to have to change the car again and it'll probably be an EV. But so very many of the current models are stuffed with things we just do not want to bother with and don't need to pay for.

Please, please, p!ease, let there be nice, basic but functional models for us to get when the time comes (OR suddenly improved public transport at sane prices with transferable tickets - bring back the good bits of British Rail!).

[1] for *our* driving needs! You may well feel that cruise control has been a godsend. Ditto for any and every gadget out there. Good for you, still irrelevances for us.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

Re: Real Sanitizers

Somewhere around here I have a copy of the American comic book version (which is, of course, not *quite* the same as any other version; thankfully, it long predates the movie so hasn't suffered from the weird idea of what Marvin looks like).

The preface recalls the American artist telling Adams that this was a great idea and had he ever considered making it into a radio programme?

BTW don't bother with the comics (unless you are a completist and feel compelled): Adams was never happy with them - especially because DC refused to allow British spellings to be used. Quite right to, Mr Adams.

Oh, and:

Radio, LPs, book, radio, book, TV, books, comic (meh), bit more radio (not as good but what can you do?), book, movie (why did I do that?), stage show "radio play".

Re: completely wrong

Hey, that head was cutting edge at the time!

It even had a segment on "Tomorrow's World".

Unfortunately, it couldn't stand up to the rigours of filming for, um, any time at all.

The on-going costs of making a couple of throw away jokes ("Take your hand off me, Zaphod; and that one; and that one" - "hey, I grew it specially for you, babe") on a radio series and forgetting to plan for the whole thing to become a cult success in the days before CGI.