Womble
@Womble@piefed.world
- Comment on 'It's Possible to jailbreak F-35 like iPhone', Says Dutch State Secretary of Defense Tuinman 3 days ago:
Im not misunderstanding at all, but do you really think governments make multi-billion dollar purchaces without haveing technical experts go over things with a fine tooth comb. Again if only one customer nation, of which there are dozens, found something like this it would wipe out the entire export market for US high tech weapons, why would they do that when they have effective soft power ways of achiving the same thing?
- Comment on 'It's Possible to jailbreak F-35 like iPhone', Says Dutch State Secretary of Defense Tuinman 3 days ago:
Do you honestly think that all the countries buying these planes havent inspected them? Even if they were incredibly well disguised the chance of them being discovered would essentially stop the US from selling military hardware abroad again as it would be hard proof that they couldnt be trusted.
There is no reason to do that when, as others have pointed out, they can just restrict access to parts, updates and mission planning software.
- Comment on Dutch Defence Secretary Boldly Claims F-35 Software Could Be 'Jailbroken' 1 week ago:
That must come as news to the French that they arent allowed to do what they do in NATO.
- Comment on Google criticizes Europe's plan to adopt free software 1 week ago:
But also:
Google is still up 100% from where it was may last year, even taking that drop into account.
- Comment on DuckDuckGo poll says 90% responders don't want AI 3 weeks ago:
Search results have been degrading for a lot longer than LLMs have been a thing. Peak usefulness for them was around a decade ago.
- Comment on New York Startup Builds Fridge-Sized Machine That Can Turn Air Into Gasoline 4 weeks ago:
CO2 doesn’t vary much in concentration by how close you are to an emission source unless you are literally sucking air out of a tailpipe. You might get a 10-20% increase in the centre of a city instead of the countryside, hardly enough to make up for being somewhere with so much energy coming in that they frequently have to curtail it (which could then be used for this instead).
This isnt CCS which cheaply turns CO2 into an inert form of carbon, its an expensive process for turning CO2 into a very useful form.
- Comment on New York Startup Builds Fridge-Sized Machine That Can Turn Air Into Gasoline 4 weeks ago:
Sure, but you cant store that electricity as electricity. IMO this is most interesting as a energy storage technology, so the comparison isnt what that gasoline would do in an ICE car compared to an EV, its to what it would cost compared to battery storage (or compressed air or whatever other technology) to store a few weeks of output on the order of months.
- Comment on New York Startup Builds Fridge-Sized Machine That Can Turn Air Into Gasoline 4 weeks ago:
I wonder is a scaled up version of this could work for grid-scale medium length storage. Smoothing out weeks of dunkleflaute is the main blocker to going to a primarily renewable grid. Gasoline is a lot easier to store than hydrogen and large scale gasoline generators should get close to the efficiency of natural gas peaker plants.
- Comment on [Video] The Rational National | UK Green Party Stuns With Huge Surge & Brilliant New Political Ad 4 weeks ago:
Just on a technical level that is an amazing ad compared to the usual political soundbites in front of a few images.
- Comment on How to turn off Gemini in Gmail — and why you should | Proton 4 weeks ago:
That doesn’t make any sense as a reason to turn off Gemini in your inbox though. Either you are ok with having your emails scanned and used in ML systems, in which case why bother turning off the feature; or you aren’t and turning off the feature doesn’t help you.
- Comment on How to turn off Gemini in Gmail — and why you should | Proton 4 weeks ago:
Google promises(new window) that Gmail’s 3 billion users will benefit from a “personal, proactive inbox assistant”. But given that these features are free, what’s the catch? Make no mistake, Google isn’t doing this out of generosity. The contents of your inbox are valuable to the company.
Email used to be a more private space where your communications could potentially be intercepted by bad actors, but largely your data was your own.
I dont think that is true wrt gmail is it? Google have been scanning your messages and using that for machine learning based ad targeting since it was released.
- Comment on Data centers will consume 70 percent of memory chips made in 2026 - supply shortfall will cause the chip shortage to spread to other segments | Tom's Hardware 4 weeks ago:
Sure, it probably wont take then as long, but its still misleading to portray “China reaches milestone a western company did a quarter of a century ago” as being equivalent as catching up.
- Comment on Data centers will consume 70 percent of memory chips made in 2026 - supply shortfall will cause the chip shortage to spread to other segments | Tom's Hardware 5 weeks ago:
China “has EUV” lithography in the same way ASML had it in 2001:
ASML built its first working prototype of EUV technology in 2001, and told Reuters it took nearly two decades and billions of euros in R&D spending before it produced its first commercially-available chips in 2019.
They are still an awful long way behind the west in this regard.
- Comment on Make Microsoft's CEO cry by installing Chrome's 'Microslop' extension 5 weeks ago:
Those are how to install Linux inside windows.
- Comment on Trump threatens tariffs on nations that don’t back US takeover of Greenland 5 weeks ago:
Typical trash tier journalism from the canary, apparently no comment on an on the spot question about military matters (US using UK bases) to a minister who isnt in charge of that (she’s minister for development in Africa) is somehow “UK backs US powerplay for Greenland”
- Comment on Former chemical plant in North Wales, UK, could become AI data center 5 weeks ago:
The UK does not have regional electricity pricing. This is actually an issue as it means energy intensive businesses arent attracted to places close to large sources of renewable power (the North East and Scotland) and instead crowd into the overheated South East.
But it also means that the locals wont be helping with the leccy bill any more than someone in Aberdeen is.
- Comment on NHS England quietly removes open source policy web pages 1 month ago:
It should be pointed out that NHS England is a management layer and is in the process of being dismantled so that NHS services in England are managed directly by the NHS and not a third layer between hospitals/doctors and the Department of health.
- Comment on It just keeps getting worse - Firefox to "evolve into a modern AI browser" 2 months ago:
The number of people suggesting that the appropriate responce to an optional feature for the standard bearer foss browser is to jump to a chrome based browser and further cement google’s dominance is depressing.
- Comment on Rachel Reeves Says Progressive People Should Be Zionists 2 months ago:
Outsourcing your critical thinking to someone maintaining a list of personae non grata sounds like a terrible idea.
- Comment on Rich People Are Becoming Less Willing to Help With the World’s Problems 2 months ago:
The wealth of the USA compared to other devoloped countries has shot away over the past 10-15 years, it's not entirely clear why.
- Comment on Channel Tunnel says UK investment 'non-viable' as it halts projects 2 months ago:
No they're more like business property taxes, they're complicated but usually defined as a fraction of what the market rate rent would be on the property the business is using.
- Comment on 'I heat my Essex home with a data centre in the shed' 2 months ago:
Its eco-friendly because the waste heat is being used to heat the home methane isnt being burnt to provide that heat. Data centres are needed unless you want to scrap the internet entirely.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 3 months ago:
Its not a Microsoft thing, also I have no idea what you are aggetated about, is there some sort of pop culture MCP that is terrible for it to be linked to? Searching for it the only thing other that Model context protocol I find is "make contribution payments", "Metcalfe Copeman & Pettefar LLP Solicitors" and "MCP fixings" so whatever it is, I imagine MS are unaware of it.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 3 months ago:
Thing is, thats fine if you're doing something like working on a version controlled codebase where you can just roll back whatever the agent does if you dont like it. The idea of using a windows computer that had an AI fucking around with system settings and registry entries gives me shivers. Thats before getting into the possibilities of hostile actors managing to prompt your AI to do something like give up sensitive information by getting it to read malicious information on a website.
- Comment on Controversial startup's plan to 'sell sunlight' using giant mirrors in space would be 'catastrophic' and 'horrifying,' astronomers warn 3 months ago:
Your point about poinitng (ha!) is incorrect, its pretty trivial to maintain pointing at the target. Hubble achived 7mas pointing accuracy over extended periods (thats ~0.000002degrees) with technology more than 30 years out of date. That gives you ~1.2m accuracy from geostationary orbit, which seems fine.
The real point is getting a mirror which is large enough and perfect enough into orbit is completely infeasible. As you rightly say, the maximum potential power it can provide is equal to solar insolation time its area.
- Comment on The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops 3 months ago:
Definitely a possibility! But dealing with "only being a normal profitable company" is a very different problem to "oops, we were selling $10 for $5 and VCs have stopped giving us money to burn, and people are using self hosted models too", which is the possible outcome for the big AI labs.
- Comment on The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops 3 months ago:
I'm not a fan of them either, I wish AMD would step up and compete with them better (Just get ROCm into a good place FFS!), but they are definitely not one of the companies most exposed to an AI pop. They'll stop being insanely profitable but they are not anywhere near the position of openAI and the likes who have massive negative profit.
- Comment on The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops 3 months ago:
From a quick look they have ~40B USD in liabilities and make ~115B USD gross profit. Being able to pay off the entirety off their debt with 4 months of profit seems pretty healthy to me.
- Comment on The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops 3 months ago:
It wont be Nvidia unless they play things incredibly badly, they're the only ones making actual profit by selling shovels in the goldrush.
- Comment on An in-space construction firm says it can help build massive data centers in orbit 3 months ago:
Mining raw resources that are more easily availabe on asteroids than on earth seems like the most likely candidate. There are metalic asteroids that have significant quantities of valuable metals like gold, titanium, iridium etc.
