Posts by diodesign
3250 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011
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Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4
Google gooses Safe Browsing with real-time protection that doesn't leak to ad giant
Japan's first private satellite launch imitates SpaceX's giant explosions
You might be over-thinking it
Hi -- I think this says more about you than about us and your perception of criticism against Elon.
We're just pointing out that this launch went through the same sort of thing (RUD) SpaceX had to overcome. And Musk's lot figured it out, so good luck to Japan.
If Microsoft had a massive hole in its Windows login system and then Linux had a similar issue a week or year later, we'd probably reference that Microsoft bug in the Linux coverage. Pattern recognition; it's what humans do.
C.
An engine that can conjure thrust from thin air? We speak to the designer
More info
Ah, there's more detail in the previous article that we link to. The electric gun could be solar powered or from a nuclear device. Or any other way you want to make electricity.
And I've added some more links at the start of this latest piece to more info about the tech.
C.
Microsoft confirms Russian spies stole source code, accessed internal systems
Trump, who tried kicking TikTok out of the US, says boo to latest ban effort
VMware urges emergency action to blunt hypervisor flaws
IP address X-posure now a feature on Musk's social media thing
Re: Peer to peer works this way
Yes, we've expanded that part of the article. We do know what IP addresses and P2P comms are all about.
This is a heads up for those who assumed Twitter's calling feature was routed through X servers. It's not, by default, you have to switch that on.
We felt this was something worth pointing out to people in general. Not everyone is an IT expert like yourself.
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Copilot pane as annoying as Clippy may pop up in Windows 11
Google to reboot Gemini image gen in a few weeks after that anti-White race row
Oxide reimagines private cloud as... a 2,500-pound blade server?
Microsoft veteran on how to blue screen your way to better testing
Re: "PS/2 keyboard support turned up in Windows 2000, USB keyboards were added with Vista in 2007"
Support for the crash-inducing key combination via PS/2 turned up in Win2K, etc, is what we meant, and what the article now more clearly says.
Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot something wrong so we can get things fixed ASAP.
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Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women
Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner
Apple Vision Pro units returned as folks just can't see themselves using it
Angry mob trashes and sets fire to Waymo self-driving car
Chinese New Year
FWIW I've added the Chinese New Year aspect. The Waymo car was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It drove right into the middle of people setting off fireworks in the street, and if you've ever been in SF during a CNY, you know it's loud, a little chaotic, and non-stop fireworks going off from the street level. And so it's no surprise, sadly, that someone decided to blow up a self-driving car in that moment.
It's delicate because, as someone who has lived in SF for 10 years next to Chinatown, I know the community isn't like this. This was morons taking advantage of the CNY weekend.
Edit: Also wanted to say - full disclosure - I've been in two driverless Waymo rides now, including one in miserable Bay Area February rain, and it felt as safe or safer than a random Lyft or Uber driver.
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Sam Altman's chip ambitions may be loonier than feared
Re: G42
They are on our radar and we will cover them more. One story lately we did about them:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/28/cerebras_g42_china_refile/
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Meet VexTrio, a network of 70K hijacked websites crooks use to sling malware, fraud
Mozilla CEO quits, pushes pivot to data privacy champion... but what about Firefox?
Europe's deepest mine to become Europe's deepest battery
"Awful reporting"
Steady on, I think that's a bit unfair. We accidentally missed off the hours in megawatt-hours. It's now fixed.
We're a small team that's trying to do a lot, and we're gonna sometimes slip up. We try our best not to, but it happens. And when we do mess up, we try to fix it ASAP. Dropping us a note directly helps us get an update out faster.
I think awful is a bit harsh.
C.
It's MWh, not MW
Yeah, we know, we know, we accidentally left off the hours in megawatt-hours. W is the rate of energy being transferred or transformed, and Wh is a quantity, we get it.
Sometimes articles have mistakes. We try to fix those ASAP. Please don't forget to email corrections@ to get our attention straight away - we check that constantly and comments only when we have time.
C.
Ok, ok!
Yes, we made an error. It happens. We try to avoid them. If software has bugs, articles have mistakes. We try to fix them as soon as we can, and prevent them in the first place.
It should be - and now is - MWh. It's now corrected. Don't forget please to email corrections@ if you spot anything wrong so we can sort stuff out ASAP.
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AI models just love escalating conflict to all-out nuclear war
See the paper for more
Hi - we can't reproduce the entire paper in an article, just take the more interesting bits from. We also always try to link through to papers and original sources so you can see more for yourself.
In this case, the methodology including full prompts etc are in the linked-to paper starting from section A (page 15) in its current version.
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Untangling Meta's plan for its homegrown AI chips, set to actually roll out this year
Faraday plots a 64-core Arm chip with Intel inside
What is Model Collapse and how to avoid it
Microsoft hires energy mavericks in quest for nuclear-powered datacenters
Fujitsu gets $1B market cap haircut after TV disaster drama airs
Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation
Will AI take our jobs? That's what everyone is talking about at Davos right now
Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse
Comparisons
With Google the supersoaraway search engine still, our article focuses on the Big G. If you want to see how Bing etc fared, it's a mixed bag - some good, some bad - see the linked-to report for the details.
It's why we link to reports and original sources wherever we can - not all publications do that - so that you can dive deeper beyond our take of a situation. Articles are like products: you have to make a decision to ship at some point, and we shipped this story with a focus on Google.
There's still scope for a followup that compares Google with others, and it's on the todo list.
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It's uncertain where personal technology is heading, but judging from CES, it smells
So grumpy!
1. As someone who has been working on tech products since the late 1980s, Mark is a columnist for us, not a news reporter. We wanted his thoughts on CES, and he shared them. CES is so huge that it's impossible to report it all - instead, I appreciate his highlights.
2. Personal tech (as opposed to enterprise tech and software dev) isn't a core subject for us, though we cover it as much as we can because our readers use the stuff. So we're not going to have extensive CES coverage - mainly what caught our eye, and why, and those stories are on the site this week.
C.
eBay to cough up $3M after cyber-stalking couple who dared criticize the souk
Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections
America's first private lunar lander suffers 'critical' fuel leak en route to Moon
What the AI copyright fights are truly about: Human labor versus endless machines
I think we're in agreement
And don't even realize it. You're talking about AI companies being able to rip off people at a fantastic scale. And they're able to do that with: machines.
If this was about some office somewhere with 500 people churning out counterfeit work, that's people v people. This latest copyright stuff is people versus machines, in my view.
Or I guess, if you like: people versus the makers of machines.
As I've said, don't over-think our analysis. We're just pointing out that these aren't just a set of copyright infringement claims. There's an underlying concern among artists over the ability for machines to flood the market with knock-offs, and no one gets a penny from it or can opt out, and that's coming through in these court cases, in our view.
If you're an artist, and there's like 5 or 6 people copying you, that's one thing. Now imagine a million people able to copy you, with the help of AI. That's the machine element.
C.
There's the underlying concern
Don't get me wrong. Yes, the cases are primarily about copyright. Yet there's an underlying concern for the future of creative work over large-scale AI imitating people without recompense nor the ability to opt out of being pulled into the training process.
Don't over-think this analysis. We're just saying, in our opinion, this isn't a straight-forward, open-shut (c) claim. It's people upset that they're being or about to be displaced at a large scale, and they're using copyright to tackle it.
C.
"allowing their works to be used in AI models - as long as they get compensated for that"
That sounds like humans versus machines to me.
"AI companies simply took everyone's copyrighted works without permission and built something on top of that, that now displaces the original works and authors"
Again, labor versus machines IMHO.
I believe you're over-thinking this. Yes, the cases are about copyright allegations. The NYT is rather specific. But a lot of the cases have an undercurrent of something along the lines of: it's not fair that these widely used models learned how to imitate us and are now pushing us out of the market.
This isn't just purely over copyright, but copyright is how the plaintiffs hope to solve it. That's at least my impression of it all.
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US fusion energy dreams edge closer to reality, Congress permitting
Re: Step back a minute
Yeah, the article does say that the efficiency is about 1%. OTOH the first fission piles/reactors weren't that spectacular, so I see this as more baby steps to production.
BTW imploding hydrogen isotope fuel capsules with x-rays (and ablation) has been around since the 1940s/50s, though not with practical power generation in mind...
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Cisco goes Christmas shopping, buys Cilium project originator Isovalent
Sure, Windows kernel, Linux, etc... but:
We were talking about Docker. By 2019, the biz was not in a good place so I'm not surprised Microsoft was shifting its position.
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