Posts by Pascal Monett

Take this as a lesson

Google will not allow anything to get in the way of it making money.

You have ethical problems ? Fuck you.

So how did it "develop a leak" ?

Was a very small micrometeorite the cause, or did the incessant heating/cooling from orbiting the planet 20 times a day finally create cracks in the telescope tube ?

Inquiring minds and all that . . .

"We are fully confident in the 787 Dreamliner"

Well duh. It's not like you're going to actually say anything like : "well we are considering grounding our entire fleet for an extensive security review".

That would basically shut down the company. Permanently.

So no, head chief engineer and all spokesdrones are going to be "confident" in their planes - even though they avoid flying on them.

I vote for "well and truly lost"

Shoulda woulda coulda yada yada. It's all very nice to request the public to be responsible, but the public isn't and it's not being given the tools to be responsible about AI.

Those decisions are all being made at the Board level by people who, frankly, do not have the public's interest at heart in any way, shape or form.

So the only tool the public has is blind disregard for anything AI. Once the Board suits will have understood your message and understood that it is in their interest to show the public what has been 100% human-generated versus what has been "facilitated" with pseudo-AI, then we have a better environment where the public will be able to gradually accept and integrate that, indeed, pseudo-AI is not going away and there are things that might be better for it.

But until then, only shunning AI is going to have any effect on Boardroom discussions.

"I have a hard time believing"

I don't.

We live in an age where multinational behemoths believe that they have the right to define how we go about our daily lives and, for Alphabet, that means it has the right to track our every move. It will do any and everything it can to ensure that that "right" is enforced.

Poor Mr Orwell. He thought it would be governments . . .

Ohio

Now that is an intelligent choice for a chip foundry.

Just below the Great Lakes, water in abundance, it is a much better choice than Arizona.

Good on Gelsinger for having done that. Now why did he have to go and put two fabs in the driest place of the US of A which is subsisting only because it is sucking up an entire river of water that is failing ?

I'm sure they'll get it working again

Space may be hard, but NASA engineers are the bee's knees and, if they say there's a chance, I'm sure they'll fix the problem.

That said, there will come a day when even they won't be able to fix the problem. It will be a sad day, but what a record !

"passed the House with bipartisan support"

Because of course it did. Warrants are just a nuisance when you can drape yourself in the mighty righteousness of National Security.

This bill will always pass. All the hoopla around respecting privacy is just theater.

So, the fruit cart is facing legal trouble

Looks like the days of Cupertino riding high on other people's work are coming to an end.

5% is enough for Apple to still gain money and provide Store services at their current level but, of course, why settle for 5 when you can gouge six times more ?

Well six times more is too much, and the rising number of lawsuits tends to prove that Apple is going to have to lower that ratio permanently.

It might choose to do so on its own terms before having to bow to a law (ie set the bar lower to appease everyone before you're forced to set it really low).

So it's a cloud option, right ?

Because there ain't no motherboard that can handle that level of hardware.

I shudder to think of the monthly cost for someone who actually signs up for 2000 CPUs and 240TB of RAM. Some beancounter somewhere is going to have a heart attack.

It is going to create a mess

Artificially tight deadline created because the Board has decided something stupid ?

You bet it's going to create a mess. The gun is going to meet the foot and Broadcom is going to demonstrate how little it cares about the users of the product it has paid a fortune to destroy.

So, a nice week-end then

The client was an idiot. If the decision was to not do anything before Monday morning, the client should have arranged for him to arrive Sunday night.

Oh well, I'm sure that the beancounter shook his head at all this.

"the seven years he spent holed up in Ecuador's London embassy"

The souvenir of which Ecuador's ambassador is still desperately trying to drown out in alcohol . . .

"nitrogen and particulate emissions are said to be almost the same"

Is that really a disadvantage ?

Some bad things are greatly reduced, some bad things aren't, but they're not increased either. Honestly, I'm tired of seeing these everything-isn't-perfect kind of comments. So it's not perfect. It's still better.

And it recycles already used oils, which, in my opinion, is even better.

10 times the peak bandwidth ?

I think that's going to open some eyes at Redmond (and elsewhere).

Who knows ? Maybe Huawei will accept meeting with Western engineers and sharing the technique ?

"games from within the Middle Kingdom"

Why would I want to install an executable from a country that is well known for autocratic surveillance and theft of industrial secrets ?

I'm already battling with Google's insatiable appetite for data, I don't need to Xi Ping's hunger as well.

Palantir and Oracle

Why am I not surprised that the sleaziest companies in IT somehow manage to always forge alliances ?

Being a privacy advocate in the US

That must be like being Sisyphus. You toil all day to push that stone up the hill, and you wake up the next morning to find the stone back where it was, with Big Money silently giggling behind your back.

"No concrete action appears to have been decided"

Well duh, it's just administrative busybodies that are making themselves look busy.

Given the state of US politics, it's certain that any actual decision or accord made now stands every chance to be overturned if the OHSG get re-elected. He did, after all, decide to flush the existing Paris accords down the drain. He doesn't give a shit about previous engagements.