Also, what kind of database query returns a 100TB result??
To me, that just says you are doing your query wrong
1840 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
I once heard a story from an old electrical contractor about when he was called to some mansion in the scottish highlands that had its own 11kV substation. He says he had isolated the supply and locked the switchroom to work on the busbars (i guess probably he was on the 400V side) but hadn't reckoned on the janitor having a key, ignoring the sign saying Do Not Operate, and throwing it back on to make his tea.
The contractor was up a ladder with his hands on two different busbars at the time, but survived to tell the tale because apparently he was thrown clear like timmy from Jurassic Park..
Moral of the story: Always lock out with your OWN padlock
Could have been a tall tale of course, but nonetheless instructive
On the other end of the scale, I also knew an electrical engineer who said she wouldn't touch a 12V car battery, "cos its the current that kills you". I didn't argue - never a good idea with that one.
Pretty sure 48V DC can kill too, if you have thin skin and wet hands... Always keep one hand behind your back
I wouldn't want to touch 100V DC, however BS7671:2028 (IET wiring regs 18th ed) says in 414.1.1 (iii) limitation of voltage to 50V AC or 120V DC for SELV/PELV. I would guess this lower than expected limit for AC is because of the capacitance of the epidermis, which is not an issue for DC. I have had a few capacitively-coupled shocks and it stings a bit, but not as bad as being burned by a real shock.
It says it's "touch safe" so I expect it would be 48VDC. 100V at a push.
A 5G radio for a "small cell" shouldn't need much power, right? 100W or so ought to be sufficient? 350V might be needed for a repeater in a 1000km submarine cable, but not for a few metres between a cabinet and a telegraph pole
Nearly choked on my coffee when I read "'digital electricity' allows power to be transmitted on a fibre optic cable" though! The marketing wonks at Vermin Media are either stoned or have been replaced by AI
Well yes of course. I'm sure anyone posting here is aware if what LLMs really are. It just irks me that so many less well educated/informed people are at risk of taking plausibility-optimised random noise as actual truth or fact..
Worse, when vulnerable people are presented with LLM output on the other end of a web chat or phone call, believing it to be another human.. When actually it's a LLM under the supervision of a crime gang, for example. It's like the mythical "demonic mirror". Stare into the thing long enough, and be damned
0/10 for reasoning, logic, or intelligence
It's a box of statistics about text. You expect it to "know" facts? All it "knows" is what word is likely to follow another, in an ocean of mostly human generated text, increasingly polluted by its own fetid excrement
The prompt injections, "guardrails", and other hacks that MS uses to keep their public instance up to to date about things like facts or er, the actual date, are like flakes of glitter on a turd.
"You can't polish a turd.. But you can roll it in glitter!"
Because a local instance has no guardrails or prompt injection, there is no logging of prompts or outputs, no way to slurp data, track usage or abusage.. No way to ban abusive users from the platform
Basically anything that needs to run offline and/or one does not want Microsoft, Google, facebook et al interfering with..
Such as running a large scale scam or a social media botnet, making a cutesy robot companion or a sinister Orwellian robot border guard which automates discrimination/racism/etc.
As with all so-called "AI", there are many uses, but few legitimate ones..
The cynic in me says these companies are releasing locally runnable models to ram the point home to politicians and regulators that the Genie is Out of the Bottle, there is no point trying to regulate their platforms, because the Horse has already Bolted, Pandora's Box is Open etc.
Why anyone would think this is an acceptable way of installing anything is beyond me. Especially in the many cases where sudo is also involved..
Yet it seems so pervasive..
Here, have a reverse shell so you can install it for me, because i'm so bloody lazy
Want some lovely AI magic? Just pipe the contents of this URL directly to your shell and get some AI goodness!
Don't trust us with your shell? You can even check out the install script in your browser if you like. We definitely won't do any HTTP switcheroo when the user-agent is set to 'curl/'
How is poor Microsoft supposed to completely monopolise the market while there is competition at All, eh?
They must be allowed to gobble up ALL of the minnows, before one of those minnows invents something better than their paper tiger duopolist Google (or Hell Forbid, better than OpenAI), because then there would be actual competition and we can't have That, can we!
For a complaints logging database? Nah, just use the lowest-bid contractor for that system that we've been forced to implement but don't actually want ...
We used to have a paper-based system called the cylindrical receptacle, but those scrotes in Whitehall said it wasn't sufficient
Lol. Posting AC as usual...
I bet you a pint that Hydrogen will never contribute 2GW in total in the UK in the next 10 years, never mind their target of 10GW by 2030. I also bet a second pint that storing hundreds of GWh in Hydrogen proves infeasible.
But you'd need to take that mask off to drink it...
Yes, pumped hydro is great in theory, but in practice you need a Very Large Hill (a mountain), with a Very Large Lake at the top. These are rare in nature, and infeasible to build. Not impossible if you already have a nice mountain which isn't designated an Area of Natural Beauty and therefore you can get permission to chop the top off and dig a massive hole in it.. But even then, that gets you Hours, not the Days of storage that you'd need to plug Wind lulls. The efficiency isn't great (though maybe better than fuel cells) but the cost to is going to be in the tens of billions for a GW-scale facility, and it doesn't actually generate electricity.. Better to build a nuke that does?
And still, you have to get the electricity in and out of the facility. The biggest problem with the UK grid IMO is the transmission bottleneck - we can't easily build more pylons because of nimby landowners, and so we are unable to get the electricity out of Scotland when the wind is blowing (so we have to turn on gas plants and French imports, while paying the scots to NOT use their wind) and i'm not sure how storage fixes that problem, since all the feasible storage solutions are very short-term, and even then, storage is not the same as transmission capacity.
The reason that NG were so excited about Hydrogen, is because it could solve some of the Transmission problem. Put electrolysers in Scotland and Fuel Cells in England, and use the existing Gas network to pump it around to where it's needed. You obviously can't do that with stand-alone storage like a stationary battery or pumped hydro plant.. But unfortunately, for reasons of electrochemistry and physics, the Hydrogen plan didn't turn out to be very feasible either.
So, instead we are building HVDC links like they are going out of fashion. Not just between countries/continents, but inside the UK. Priti Patel famously opposed pylons and wanted to build a UK HVDC superhighway instead.. Apparently one can lay a 2GW subsea cable much faster and with less hassle from nimby's, than a traditional AC transmission line. (although it would use far more copper, and be more expensive overall)
What worries me about that plan though is that HVDC is asynchronous - by virtue of being DC - so it exacerbates the already perilous grid-islanding and frequency-instability that could cause a UK-wide blackout - and although we can sort-of fix that with some funky software, they are extremely vulnerable to sudden failure or sabotage.
Subsea AC cables then? Maybe. Although apparently they annoy the fish even more than the DC ones do. And just-as-prone to anchor-dragging etc.
Fuel cells and electrolysers are stuck requiring a hell of a lot of Platinum. There's no way we could go from a few Megawatts installed capacity to Gigawatts (never mind 150-300TWh/y as required by the UK's Future Energy Scenario plans) without exhausting supply of what is already a stonkingly rare and expensive metal.
Not if it's already been subsumed into GPT model weights. Then I believe it's impossible to remove without re-training the model from scratch.
The best they could do would be to add another 'guardrail' to prevent questions or outputs specifically about you, but those are easily bypassed by anyone determined or privileged enough, and having too many of those makes their system shitter and slower, so they are unlikely to do it unless forced to by a court
(number_of_customers x vulnerability_of_customers) / competence_of_it_staff
Attacks are becoming about increasing the search space for further victims of scams, and councils will be a prime target because so many people depend on them.
I am unfortunately a southern water hostag^Wcustomer and since their cyber-leak i have started getting many scam calls e.g. "calling about your housing problem"
These appear to be automated with an AI voice calling itself Sarah. I haven't been far enough down the scam but I assume it wants to collect info about any issues you do have which it will use to sell you a discount home improvement survey which doesn't exist
I dread to think how much misery they could cause if they obtained a list of phone numbers of vulnerable people who are in debt to their council / housing association / etc. It's pretty worrying
I don't think so, no?
Tap water is treated reservoir water, which is supposed to be rainwater
Treated sewage (and in 'exceptional' cases that are slowly becoming the norm) is allowed to flow into rivers, but NOT reservoirs, afaik. There would be too much microplastics and the aforementioned pharmaceutical chemicals in it, even after treatment.
This is apparently planned to change by 2030, but is unpopular for obvious reasons: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62708413
Good point. You'd probably want to test each batch of water with a mass-spectrometer, to test for anything that can't simply be filtered out or eaten by microbes which are then filtered out. But even then, i'd guess there are some poisons that could still be harmful even when below the noise floor of the instrument.
TBH I'd be surprised if this process is any more efficient than letting it evaporate and collecting rainwater.
Meanwhile the UFO Union are on strike
Not a good time for international travel, I do wonder WTF is going on
And then a few years later they did it to themselves
icon gates_horns, but I can't be arsed to exhume it
Standard procedure for Putin et al.
No amount of 'interference' could stop a despot from winning his own 'election'.
If anything, it's a message (and an excuse) that he will be interfering as much as he possibly can in the oncoming US and UK elections.
CPM? I had to look up that piece of marketing BS-Bingo
I don't really give a toss about their costs. What irks me is that different people see different versions of webpages and search results depending on who some data-broker thinks they are. That's what enables social manipulation.
Of course, social manipulation is ultimately what all Advertising boils down to, but at least with untargeted advertising it has to be done in the clear, where people can call out propaganda and abuse. Whereas targeted advertising allows abusive marketing practices to be done surreptitiously.
The Reg is a useful service. Facebook/twatter/ubend less-so
If the Reg were to embed some non-intrusive ads hosted by their own server that I could be sure weren't slurping my data to some ad-slinger company then I wouldn't block them. But as long as Javascript and cross-domain slurping is going on, i'm not having it.
Frankly I'd like to see the likes of Google, Meta and Microsoft broken up. If Google were to disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow, the only part of it that I would miss is GMail - their search is rubbish these days and AOSP would become so much better if Google died. But even GMail I use less and less these days. Youtube is a increasingly a cess-pool to compete with TikTok. The only part of Microsoft I'd miss is GitHub (which they shouldn't have been allowed to pillage in the first place) the rest of it (LinkedIn, Windows, Office, OpenAI etc) can be incinerated. Meta, I'd only miss WhatsApp (which again, they shouldn't have been allowed to buy) TikTok, X, amazon, Apple*.. I wouldn't miss these at all.
* Of course, some people would miss Apple a lot. There would need to be some kind of fanboi rehabilitation programme
Here's a pile of very genuine high quality personal data and i'll even give you a picture of me. Now pay up!
Not every problem can be solved by inventing a new market. Just look at Ofgem. As soon as you invent an artificial market, someone works out how to defraud it.
What I'd rather see, is a general ban on targeted advertising, data brokers etc. Not opt in or opt out, just Out. If that means a few Trillion is wiped off the NASDAQ, so be it.