Posts by low_resolution_foxxes

Re: shrug

I've Googled (lol) a few of her other comments and I'm starting to think it's justified. It wasn't just a protest at a specific thing. It seems she objects to even the government using the Google cloud for any purpose. She organized a "die in" protest that physically blocked employees entering the building and blocked passing traffic (until they had to be arrested carrying banners that are essentially anti-Israel, rather than simply "I object quietly and passively against this specific action". Broadly claimed that any use was bad and protested even Google's presence at a local and general tech conference. It's not quiiet and peaceful protest when you prevent your colleagues from going to work. You're making a nuisance to others

"Israel apartheid" and "liberate Palestine" banners are arguably drifting into bad territory.

Re: AHH the arty nerds are enraged

Modern art screwed artists.

When bad artists started celebrating art that is deliberately terrible...

Come to think of it, that sounds much like Sweet Baby Inc.

Re: 1,000 smartphones all hard at work

Hmmmm, not sure if that's 100% true. A significant amount of accounts are run through WeChat in China..are they farming WeChat accounts?

Re: All seems pretty sensible from my echo chamber.

I don't know

If I was paid millions of dollars by my company and I deliberately set out to savage the CEO, and bring a bad faith interview like this, I would personally expect consequences (regardless of your opinion on Musk).

Don Lemon...I find him a generic NPC who merely parrots the corporate lefty opinions de jour that he has been told to champion. I don't dislike the chap, he just rarely says anything inspiring

Mastercard and VISA provide the security hardware, banking interfacing controls, APIs, fraud detection and security, chip card and terminals. It's not wholly dissimilar.

Now sure, perhaps Apple provide the ecosystem in a broader sense, but the customer is already paying for the phone and the ecosystem. If these are payments for processing a fee - which is what they are defending, it is not dissimilar.

If they charged 5-15% it would not be such a major problem. The problem is that I have a Spotify account paid for online. Spotify developed the app and I have an account. I am blocked from using that by an ecosystem that inherently thinks $100 billion a year is a suitable surcharge revenue to manage an ecosystem that could be managed for less than $10bn

There is an inherent national interest / protectionism argument here that the EU and the US stock markets (and governments). The EU is obviously looking after its own interests in a field where American technical behemoths dominate. Apple's annual revenue is higher than the GDP of 2/3rds of EU nations.

Personally, I think it's illegally extortionate. Where say Spotify would need to pay 30% of its annual revenue from Apple users, probably in the region of $3bn per year directly to Apple.

It did not help Apple's case when Google dropped the revenue charge to 15% (albeit with a lot of nudging). At this point, I think it's just how long Apple executives can justify holding onto their model, I personally do not think Apple's ecosystem is fundamentally better than any other 'game ecosystem download' system.

For reference, Epic games provides an almost identical service and ecosystem for PC gamers taking just 12%, and I would say PC gaming and security is a lot more complicated than the Apple infrastructure, if for no other reason that it supports a vastly wider array of hardware and security considerations.

Re: No evidence?

I believe it's inferred.

The weaselly language implies that there were no "compromised customer-facing systems" and I immediately assume that means that "non-customer facing offline backup systems of customer data" was accessed.

Re: Please tell us something new

It requires two to play that dance

A stick-in-the-mud council bureaucrat who cannot accept the "out of the box" solution (and who gets paid more depending on the complexity) and the consultant who is happy to take an easy £1000 daily fee

Re: Word Definitions

Remind me, now that 3rd party ad cookies will effectively be banned, replaced with a google managed "user interest" category (instead of 5000 random companies stalking you across the whole internet).

What will be interesting, will be if Google are planning to include an opt-out for the ad categories scheme. They historically have

If you disabled targeted advertising you will generally get the dregs of the online ad world. Gambling websites are profitable and thus advertise

You just won't get an advert for the socks that will match the t-shirt you bought earlier that day using crypto.

Re: No change there, then.

Wait now - are you accusing them of doing work?

Saying an AI can hallucinate is a bit obvious. We ourselves are artificial intelligences constructed from our lived experiences, some of us regularly quote absolute nonsense and many of us lie intentionally.

Do we have an AI that can intentionally lie yet? If we reached that advanced state we would no longer require politicians.

Re: "Nvidia execs were bullish"

Good luck

In my experience, at this point it's hard to know how the market will react to the news. The market would usually spot a hype train from a mile away and put an increasingly absurd speculative price on the stock. You could try and ride this train and see if the momentum continues - or it could fall back to a more sensible dividend-based yield valuation.

Gigabit broadband availability is surprisingly high, if you include Virgin Media I think it's in the ballpark of ~80%. Heavily skewed towards urban centres.

FTTP is about 60% I think.

Re: Hackers entering GPS coordinates of OEM repair shops to prevent trains from failing?

It's a fucking hilarious excuse really

It makes me reconsider every time I hear a CEO mention cyber criminals and hacking.

"Hackers cracked our software and updated it so that it only stops working if the customer gets their maintenance tasks performed in our commercial rivals garage".

Hackers can be a strange breed, but hacking a PLC to provide such a specific feature, that also happens to have a direct and major commercial benefit to the OEM?

Oh please!

Re: Tunnel, lights visible at end, may not be oncoming train

Hang on, could they hire Microsoft to build a customized version of Excel to do this task?

Re: It is called stealing

I usually justify it on the old "I was never in a million years, ever going to pay for this software or do anything commercial or personal with it"

Usually I would play with it for a few days, decide I couldn't be arsed with it and deleted it. Was quite nice having an array of design, video editing, music editing and music synths to play around with. Am I likely to pay a few hundred/thousand pounds to tinker with something? No.

Re: Gum them to death.

It's one of those situations where you wish Panarama would follow the ex Directors around and hound their neighbours for information.

Your point is factual, but boils down to:

Part time office workers earning less than outdoors full-time workers working overtime - who on earth could have foreseen this disparity?

Because from what I recall, most of the bigger bonuses were for working significant overtime shifts (road workers, bin collectors, grave diggers etc.), which wasn't particularly available to office cleaners.

I'll grant that they could possibly have run things in a more fair manner. But focussing on annual salaries, when comparing part-time vs full-time overtime shift workers, is just unethically stupid to compare.

Re: Lay off guys

Ha, I don't know, I'm not exactly pro or anti American, but I sometimes question what the trigger point and desired outcome of these things are.

Are China a threat to US dominance in the tech markets? It's hard to believe that the US politicians are not wary that TSMC and Apple combined have a market cap/value of ~ $3 trillion dollars. Funnily enough the US power brokers keep finding odd little excuses to block Chinese tech.

When Huawei started looking like it was threatening Apple / Samsung back in 2020 (gaining 5 out 20 of the top selling phones that year), lo and behold a military connection was determined and pressure applied.

That said though, I'm quite willing to accept there may be shenanigans in the background that result in these export restrictions. Would be interesting to see how the Chinese have developed their 7nm technology, cause it appears that Intel are struggling to release 7nm processors, so it doesn't look good if the Chinse have released the 7nm chips already.

It appears China is using deep ultraviolet lithography (DUV) which does involve issues with low yield and complications. I presume that is what this US politician is referring to - but if it works, it works!

Has anyone got any opinion on what actually happened with the ChatGPT lawyer case? I am unclear how it managed to completely fabricate case law, unless of course the AI was fed with garbage data (intentionally or accidentally).

I am a cynical geek at the best of times. It strikes me that lawyers face perhaps one of the biggest impacts from the AI revolution.

Law and compliance is a staggeringly complicated area and these groups are charging £1000s per hour for their advice. If you can get 95% of the information from chatGPT they stand to get annihilated. So funnily enough it's a bunch of lawyers who first demonstrate the AI is capable of providing false information.

I mean seriously....did he really think you could just file any old nonsense and risk his entire career, on something created by a draft AI system?

I just ran two moderately complicated compliance/legal questions through ChatGPT to gain a feeling for how reliable it can be. It answered one question perfectly, but it had an understandable issue with my 2nd question. It technically provided an incorrect answer - apparently due to the regulation changing in 2022 - but to be fair to ChatGPT it actually opens the conversation by pointing out it was basing its answers on the dataset fed to it in September 2021. So it made me aware of the situation and it is my responsibility to check for directive changes since then.

Re: It's an impressive sight

Yeah Heathrow has an impressive 90-120 ish second turnaround time.

One of it's biggest concerns with the two runways at Heathrow is that they are running at maximum capacity during peak hours. Something trivial like fog results in an increased time per landing due to visibility concerns.

When there is heavy fog dozens of flights get cancelled

Very strange walking around Hounslow on the flight path. The planes feel like they are landing on your head especially when the shadow zooms across your feet

Re: They are getting part of a clue

Twitter and YouTube are filled with drone footage on the front-lines. Heck, remotely piloted seadrones are taking out huge marine infrastructure.

Cheap drones are having drop-bombs and explosives attached to them, often connected to local radio or Starlink satellite internet.

The sheer number of very expensive tanks and radar systems that are being destroyed by the simplest drone fitted with a few kgs of explosives dropped.

It looks like a computer game the way they are playing it. Although quite sad watching both sides attack trenches with direct drone strikes.

Like they say, if I had a choice between 1x AI powered drone-plane, or a swarm of 3000 fast commercial stunt drones all internet connected targeted the enemy with proximity explosives..... it would be a rounding error in the budget. Loitering drone-munition has been a challenge also (drones that sit around stationary waiting for the enemy to arrive)

Re: So, not 'Rapture'?

Ha

I want my genetic enhancements!

Re: It's more than just IT data.

There are various reasons for the Ukraine war. Frankly it is hard to ignore the fact that the bulk of the fighting focussed on the Crimea and Donbas regions and Putin's miraculous discovery of "Nazees" in the exact same regions where Shell and our American cousins found some of the largest oil and gas wells in Europe.

In this context, we must remind ourselves that only the UK and the Nordic countries have good access to their own hydrocarbons - the rest of Europe is/was basically dependent on Russia and the Middle East for its energy. In case of an all out conflict they remain perilously dependent on 3rd party countries. While Russia itself relied on 20-40% of it's annual gas sales (and consequent government tax income) on the gas pipeline that runs through Ukraine into Europe.

I can only presume that Putin would be highly aware that European and US companies swarming around the newly discovered oil and gas fields in East Ukraine/Crimea formed an almost existential threat to Russia's export economy and has presumably seen this as a cause worth fighting for (it's notable that Joe Biden's son was a director at the Ukraine state energy company, an awkward link in hindsight given his personal vices).

No idea how to ramp down the conflict now? You would need to pacify Putin and show him an alternative, which would probably need to include the creation of multiple gas pipelines to Asia and Turkey/developing countries. Will the EU ever trade in Russia petrochemicals again? Not in the short term. But even if the conflict calms down, which company will spend billions on oilwell development in a military hot conflict region? That would almost require some Russian % split to encourage friendly terms. It's just too close to the Russian border and too inflammatory for the Russians to accept.

Re: A tough sell

It makes me cringe when people use statistics like this.

If anything, the use of statistics in this context indicates to me that the person does not fully grasp statistical analysis (or intentionally abuses it).

Yes, I'm sure there are differences in the data, but these aren't causal indicators. But to make the assumption the differences are directly because the person has age/racial/gender characteristics is so painfully stupid it hurts.

I suspect it's more likely to be about older technical employees earning high salaries, with the rest split out between attitude, key technical staff ratios and work ethic.

Re: Does the US pay that badly?

You just have to hope with Russian security services that they use an English speaking native to translate the meaning of "I want my family taken care of"

"Igor, he says his wife is a pain in the ass, she needs to be wrapped in carpet and buried in the woods".

Re: "But at $450, outright, its flaws are easy to overlook"

The Xiaomi POCO range has decent pricing on Amazon.

There's something about Samsung that I just haven't liked about smartphones for a while now. At one point it was the early attempts to get rid of the headphone jack, weird forced apps that could not be deleted, overpriced stupidity etc.

I recently picked up a Pixel 6a and it has the fingerprint reader in the screen. I'm really not liking this solution, I had become very used to using a button on the side which helped me multitask (I could unlock the phone one-handed). The fingerprint scanner in screen really needs to be a two handed operation (or a fiddly and annoying single handed effort)

Re: Step it up!

Culture is a thing indeed. But often it's simply down to the reality of taking a pricey Western component, trying to make it as cheap as possible in high-volume, but relatively few individuals know how/why the full process. But since you're using lower skilled lower paid staff, this usually tends to result in an initial poor quality phase during ramp-up, but in theory they will learn from their mistakes and invest wisely over time.

You would expect them to have caught up after 10 years. Honestly I tend to see the same thing happen when new products/processes come out at big software/engineering forms. The product is usually wobbly and full of bugs on day 1!

Re: Amazon fake reviews

The best way to evaluate a product is to look for reviews that avoid short hysterical arguments. Protip: if someone is being paid to promote a product, they will generally NEVER criticise the product. So if you can find some "average" reviews that provide pros and cons in a balanced way, you know you can trust those reviews.

The worst offenders are:

5-star! Perfect!

Amazing customer service!

You need to buy this product!

Best/worst thing!

Faultless product!

Re: “Whether BEAD will be vulnerable to the same failures remains to be seen”

Amusing, in the urban areas in England you can typically get an 80meg DL service for £25pm ($32).

Sure, you can go all fancy, but even if you choose premium services you can get 1000 meg FTTP for ~ £30-45pm ($38-57).

We have ~73% gigabit internet coverage in Britain now. It's getting pretty sweet and rolling out fast

We must form a steering committee to investigate.