Posts by Andy 73

Re: Is revenue the biggest problem?

His bold mission statement was that he would grow the platform and its revenue.

A 59% loss in advertising suggests he has completely failed to do the former. The draconian cost cutting can only be viewed as a successful move it if doesn't have long term impact on the functioning of the company. So far various features have failed or been removed, the site suffers from reliability problems, and we've not seen any of the "rapid innovation" Musk told us he could deliver with his highly motivated teams and skilled management.

So even the cost cutting can hardly be regarded as a success.

What the investors think is anyone's guess. They might want to prompt an ownership change sooner, before what remaining value is further eroded.

His current antics fighting the gender wars suggest that Musk is completely incapable of avoiding offense, and the slow decline of the rest of the platform suggest he's not the great tech leader we were promised. Given that all of the other companies he purchased came with highly skilled senior management who delivered the actual innovation, this should perhaps not come as a surprise.

Re: Hmmm..

> You will never fix *anything* if you put off trying

No, of course not - but a 'fix' like this, which would be a major change to the current system, would almost certainly prevent any further (and more effective) changes being delivered. The corporates would (quite justifiably) say "But we made these huge concessions, we don't need to do any more!".

My instinct is that a real change has to come from the sides, changing how we think about the use of copyright and patent material, how we encourage innovation and creativity, who is in a position to create and benefit from their work, and how we as a society interact with all of that. Copyright and patents are both poor fits for software, so rather than bodging them to be less poor, we should be looking at other legal frameworks that can be developed. Copyleft is certainly one (but not the only one) of those alternatives that should be 'built up'.

Re: No good deed goes unpunished

Well observed - a bit of proper investigative reporting would be welcome here, since there have been multiple allegations that Musk has not, as first claimed, provided a free service but essentially used Ukraine as either a way to offload old Starlink equipment at massively inflated prices or to (once again) find a way to extract government money.

Certainly, any claim that this has been an entirely altruistic exercise doesn't seem to hold much water. Ultimately this appears to be a business deal, not a charity.

Re: Erm

It's not news that the slightest hint that you don't violently oppose Brexit will get you downvoted into oblivion on here.

Which is the key problem with a lot of disinformation policies - they quickly become policies that dampen down any voices that might be saying something a bit uncomfortable. As with some of the regulars on here giving codejunky a hard time for his posts, we rapidly get to the point that people with a difficult political view have all of their views discounted or actively opposed.

When only the bland, inoffensive middle managers can get past the judgemental hoards, we get ... well the current leaders of all of the UK political parties.

We create our own hell.

Re: So, what is the solution?

Solar and wind are absolutely *part* of the solution, but saying we've solved the problem by having some small island in Europe piddling money on solar and wind is to completely and utterly misunderstand what the problem actually is. The UK currently produces less CO2 than we did in the 1880's, but is doing so at the cost of delaying infrastructure investment. Meanwhile the rest of the world, particularly China and the developing nations are heading sharply in the other direction as they work to reach the living standards we enjoy.

For all the idiocy from the fossil fuel lobby, the renewable lobby is doing us all a disservice by pretending that the path to true sustainability is simply a question of sticking up more windmills. The current massive inflation spike, driven in no small part by the energy insecurity highlighted by the Ukraine war should make it very clear that we have not "solved" renewable energy. Both Germany and the UK have been hailed as leading the charge to renewables, and both nations saw just how dependent we are on fossil fuels when Russia began it's campaign. Worse still, no-one seems prepared to acknowledge that the *only* reason solar and wind investment has exceeded oil is because the war has (hopefully temporarily) skewed the economics so heavily that renewables look cheap in the short term. That is not actually a thing to celebrate.

Here's the problem: domestic transport and energy usage is the easy part. National infrastructure, construction, industry and commercial transport are the hard parts - and these are the ones that actually dominate the global energy landscape. We don't have good solutions for them (particularly industry, storage and construction), and until we do we will continue to see China building coal-fired power stations, global energy usage rocketing ever skyward, and the geopolitical fallout of energy insecurity causing continued conflict. Being able to drive to Waitrose in your solar powered Tesla is no doubt very reassuring, but very much a first-world privilege built on very shaky foundations.

Re: Semiconductor/Microelectronics Pronouncements

Again, if a project delivered by engineers is over time and over budget, it's not good enough to blame the muggles for not understanding our brilliance. It is our failure to communicate, and willingness to go along with poor implementation that leads to this consistent failure. "The project manager made me do it" isn't good enough.

One of the largest, most successful projects I have ever been involved in (billion dollar unicorn from what started as five people in a shed) was on time and on budget. It is possible. And, for all their faults, we have big corporates who've demonstrated it's possible to scale out and run a profitable business based on high quality engineering.

Yet, particularly in the UK we seem to have a mindset that consistently rips defeat from the jaws of victory. It's pretty depressing that there seems to be "something in the water" that makes us miserable at large collaborative projects. Maybe we should accept that this is something we're doing wrong, rather than trying to blame everyone else.

Re: Reporting just as bad as ever in El' Reg...

That's a remarkable logical fallacy. Horizon is a very, very long way from being the only way to support science, technology and innovation.

Hence my original point "Why are we not investing in science and technology?" is an entirely different question from "Why are we not in Horizon?".

It's typical of the Europhile thinking that the only way to invest is to hand money over to a committee in Brussels to allocate as they wish. Such a deep blindspot indeed, that we get articles like this one that equate a single science program (that has been in place whilst Europe has fallen behind in semiconductors, AI, battery technology, solar, EVs... it's quite a long list) with "investing in technology".

But as ever, some people are so determined that their politically favoured answer is the only acceptable reply, that they will shout down anyone daring to suggest that this government should actually live up to it's promises and invest directly. For all his faults, Dyson has put his money where his mouth is when it comes to investing in skills training, research centres and design and development. He's also taken risks with products - which is something notably absent from most of the institutional 'innovation' programmes that only want to support science after you've got a proven working product.

Hmmmm...

I think the point being made, at least by some here, is that none of this is an inevitable consequence of Brexit. It's wilful incompetence by our current Government, aided in no small part by an utterly immobile HMRC.

Being able to reclaim VAT on a return is entirely a choice being made by the current lot in power. It's nothing whatsoever to do with whether we're in Europe or not. There are an enormous number of things the civil service and government could do to make trading *worldwide* (not just Europe) easier. Sure, the list of things has changed since Brexit (they change anyway as world events continue to occur), but there is still a very long list of things we can address before we get anywhere near being "unable to trade".

The problem here is that some people so desperately want this to be "because Brexit" that they (deliberately or otherwise) refuse to admit that these are things we can fix. In fact, in some cases I get the real impression that some people are setting out to make it hard for businesses and individuals just to "make a point". Until we start acknowledging that fact, the combination of incompetence and intransigence will be tolerated, and we'll continue to have people enforcing stupid rules that are entirely within our power to change.

Since I see no way to change the fact we've left, I'm increasingly frustrated with the people who keep wanting to fight that particular fight rather than trying to improve our current environment.

Re: Keeping count..

No, I believe there are strict laws about how EU subsidies can be used to favour individual countries. They were brought up regularly with regards to the location of car factories in the UK and Airbus in Ireland.

Perhaps you should put that straw man down...

If these are EU subsidies being spent, the line "Germany has been ready to invest" is at best disingenuous. Up until very recently, Germany, like any sane Western country was very happy to buy chips from the factory that could make them cheapest, regardless of location. You insult us by suggesting that it is British nationalism at issue here.

Re: What is the only way to take advantage of Brexit ?

Re-entering Europe will not 'fix' Brexit, but make things significantly worse.

We'd not return under remotely the same terms, and politically it would further damage our reputation as an independent voice within the G7/G20 to make it explicit that we are dependent on the largess of Europe to survive.

Not only that, but it's a particularly daft fantasy that, even as a member, the other European financial hubs aren't actively competing with London. Throughout our membership there were moves to 'even out' the power spread between London, Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam - and not one single one of those changes was to the benefit of London. As a 'failed leaver', and given the changes across Europe since we left, it's pretty clear that we would not return with our existing competitive advantages intact.

Sadly, our political leaders have been forced by the continued idiocy from 'sore leavers' to do as little as possible about Brexit - keeping the whole country in limbo is perhaps the weakest decision they could make.

Re: Tilting at Quixotic Windmills Springs to Mind.

Worth remembering the Pythons managed to make enemies of the entire Catholic Church.

Re: Good thinking that man

Cannot build a flame trench because the site is at sea level? I think the Danish want to have a word with you.

I don't get why people are so keen to defend unnecessary and unforced mistakes.

Re: Those are rookie numbers

Swappable batteries can add a huge amount of weight, complexity and safety issues to a plane. Suddenly you've got to have some sort of structural element in the battery pack, and another in the plane, connectors that can reliable attach and detach, and some guarantee that they don't do the latter at the wrong time, and a whole load of additional mechanical and electronic systems to deal with robust swapping in unpredictable environments.

There's no "simply" about it - as demonstrated by the almost complete absence of swappable lithium batteries in cars.

Re: I have some sympathy for the idea..

That's missing the point entirely.

In this modern day of internet and global banking, you are no more forced to live and work within five miles of your birth than you are forced to labour in the fields as a child.

"The great American dream of home ownership" appears to have died a death on the altar of astronomically expensive cities - and just as in anywhere else in the world, you go there to work and save your pennies to buy a house somewhere else, whether it's a retirement home in Florida or somewhere quiet on the West coast.

It's idiocy to suggest people move to a company town with the plan of owning and retiring there. If you want to do that, go work for someone else and accept that your house might cost a bit more, your commute might be a bit longer, your salary might be a bit lower and so on. People already make exactly that choice when they decide whether to work for one of the big tech firms in San Francisco, or financial firms in New York etc. Try asking your landlord there to give you 30 days to find rent...

Comparing it to a penitentiary is to fall for the usual hysteria - I know of no penitentiary that has optional attendance, pays you extra to be there and actively sets out to attract inmates with the quality of the experience. And that last bit is what every company has to compete to do - make it appealing to go work for them, whether it's through bean-bag and foosball tables, or nice housing away from a city sprawl.

And again, I'll make the point that you have a choice. Usually that would be based on the reality of what is being offered. In Musk's case, I'd have very low faith in the implementation and be reading the small print very carefully, but that doesn't mean a company town has to be a bad concept in the modern era.

Re: I am curious

Perhaps you're misunderstanding how most people use Twitter. It does actually work well (when it's working) as a way for communities to interact and share information, for people to share projects and products they're working on, for educators to publish articles and so on.

Unlike the old town square where the villagers you lived next to were very unlikely to share your niche interests, we now live in a world where we can choose the communities we interact with. In that respect, being "on Twitter" is no different from posting on The Register's forums. If you find that hard to grasp, I suggest you stop using the internet.

Re: The program will learn

Not necessarily. The computer isn't capable of "infinite learning" - if you train a model to be stronger in one area, it will tend to be weaker in others and may even develop other flaws.

One of the fallacies of this form of learning, perpetuated by Tesla and a few other companies, is that if you throw enough data at it, it will eventually learn to handle all situations - in other words it will generalise. We have not seen this in practise. The observed behaviour is that these models approach a maxima asymptotically, requiring more and more data to get closer. But that maxima is more like a parrot getting really good at mimicking words and phrases - it still doesn't understand what it is reproducing.

It's possible we can produce a very good AI Go player - computers have the advantage of being able to analyse and remember extremely large numbers of permutations, but that's still not generalised AI.

Re: Time frame not included

Musk takes over Twitter - Musk fans: "At last, the place will be full of free speech! Millions will sign up!"

Musk breaks Twitter - Musk fans: "Masterful move, we always wanted it closed down!"

Re: The Horizon replacement money ...

This corner of the comments section brought to you by the poster who sees, and I quote: "...resident far-right trolls..."

Whatever happened to the people in the middle, eh?

Re: Good grief

I'd suggest that they're proposing measures that this government is failing to implement, not proposing "do as little as possible". When AZ specifically raised the issue of high taxation, suggesting tax incentives is anathema to the current lot.

If you want to get political, we're witnessing a deep division within the Tory party - between a low tax, small state side (that, yes, does owe a lot to Thatcher), and the 'wet socialist' policies embodied by Sunak in a (very poor) attempt to occupy the ground Labour want to be in. Reports like this are very much part of the battle.

You can of course argue that Sunak's policies are the best direction (really?), on the basis that the banks essentially pulled the rug on any significant economic reform after the financial excesses of Covid. Most of the Tory party are in fear after Truss' disastrous showing, and the party as a whole is paralysed.

You point out that these are things that should be done anyway - that's the whole point, that they should be *but they aren't*. Your argument seems to veer between suggesting that the report wants to "do nothing", that it wants to do inherently bad things (because Truss) and that it want to do things that should be done but simply aren't. Which is it?

Of course this is no longer a discussion about how to best support the chip and technology industry in the UK - it's just a political debate over who should be in charge. I'm willing to bet that since everyone wants to focus on who's steering the ship, we'll continue to ignore the course that is being taken, and the UK chip industry will go precisely nowhere.