Or spoken to Plod re. Computer Misuse Act...
Posts by Pete Sdev
544 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2021
AI researchers let models off the leash – then watched as they tried to add malware to a FOSS project
The AI bubble is already popping; we just don't know it yet
Tuesday 4th August 2026 09:55 GMT 
Re: Bah
While the US Government did play a minor role in the cause - relaxing lending rules in the *1990s', and repealing Glass–Steagall - it was mainly greed and stupidity by banks (esp. synthetic CDOs) that caused the crash.
That no-one responsible went to jail (let alone was strung from the nearest lamppost) means the next crisis is pre-destined.
Tuesday 4th August 2026 09:47 GMT
Re: Bah
There were risk analysts (often with an engineering background) at some investment banks who saw the danger at least a year before the crash.
They were, unsurprisingly, mostly ignored by their higher-ups. I believe Goldman Sachs may have been the exception, hence they're still around and firms like Lehman Bros. aren't.
Monday 3rd August 2026 14:30 GMT 
Situational Awareness
Leopold Aschenbrenner also worked for OpenAI (until fired) after FTX. That sort of person.
His book was completely invested in "AI" related stocks. No diversity.
His only "hedging" was shorting software companies - so basically exactly same bet as his long positions.
He was hugely leveraged - apparently 4x.
He didn't have liquidity in reserve to cover his leverage if his stocks dropped temporarily, hence the margin calls and the firesale.
Hardly a "good stock picker". It's easy to make a plus with leverage in a bull market...
The wolves of Wall Street saw this overconfident amateur with too much money (mostly other peoples of course) and took him to the cleaners at the first opportunity.
Hyperscale, hypersensitive: US teacher cuffed for applauding datacenter critics
Leading AI models (even Grok) are all a bunch of leftist punks
Cassette simulator rewinds digital audio to a more analog time in hiss-tory
Anti-AI open source has an enemy in common, but almost nothing else
Europe slaps AliExpress with €550 million fine for selling dodgy goods
Thursday 23rd July 2026 10:40 GMT
Re: Well EU goods are not just more expensive...
Took 3 weeks to get from Germany to the UK
That'll be one of those Brexit benefits we've heard about ;-)
Fountain pens are one thing I love getting from AliExpress
Fair enough. With the observation that a faulty fountain pen will at worst ruin a shirt; a faulty charging device will potentially burn your house down.
Sovereign AI is 'nonsense,' says Doctorow
Thursday 23rd July 2026 09:32 GMT 
I'm with Doctorow on this
The idea that it's important, for say the EU, to have sovereign "AI" is implicitly buying in to the idea (or hype or lie if you will) that what's currently being sold as "AI" is actually useful and important.
It isn't. Currently non-measurable ROI for most customers, "hallucinations" (i.e. errors) unavoidable, actual real costs not going to justify any possible benefits in most use-cases.
Local (relatively speaking) LLMs specialised for a certain use-case (e.g. aiding medical research) running on not-so expensive and heat-producing hardware as now is the likely future.
OpenAI admits it was the source of the agent swarm that attacked Hugging Face
Council worker spared prison after four-day data-snooping spree
Wednesday 22nd July 2026 09:25 GMT
Re: Yes?
From the article:
working in the Children and Young People directorate
Arguably, one would imagine that certain roles in this department are justified in being able to answer questions like "has this child had an usually high amount of injuries?" (medical records) and "do the the parents have a criminal record for violence related offences?" (criminal records).
Obviously this access needs to be tightly controlled and audited. Though given that the idiot in the article was caught (and the impression is fairly quickly), at least part of the system is working.
Using AI makes people less likely to admit they don't know something
Monday 20th July 2026 09:36 GMT 
That's not a bug, it's a feature
The conspiracy minded would say that that's the plan with "AI" (aside from mass unemployment) : make the population even less capable of critical thinking than they already are.
Icon: obvious.
For the record, no, I'm not being serious. Although I could imagine some nefarious people seeing it as benefit.
Prominent Haskell defector pilloried by anti-AI purists
Thursday 16th July 2026 09:07 GMT
Someone wants their cake and to eat it
Not used Haskel but I imagine it's advantages such as strong type safety mean compilation takes longer than with other languages. You don't get owt for nowt.
Using a faster development iteration language may be legitimate if that's the critical factor, but one needs to be aware of the then corresponding downsides of doing so (often runtime errors instead of compile time errors).
Moving a project to another language just so it's easier to use with so-called "AI" seems like a decision where I hope the maker has an organ donor card (as they appear to be brain-dead).
Linus Torvalds tells AI haters to fork off
Thursday 16th July 2026 08:26 GMT
Re: Tin men vs GPL
I beg to differ.
Language Models are dependent on their training data, which has been created by *other people*, and in many cases often without their permission, under licenses which limit what may be done with their work.
If I translate a book* while I may be the automatic copyright holder of the translation (as I've put a significant amount of effort in myself), I can not publish said translation nor give someone else permission to publish it (a license) without the permission of the copyright holder of the original work. If I've used a machine to do the translation with no input myself, then I'm not even the author of the translation.
Entering a prompt to a LLM is not "sufficient human control over the expressive elements" to be the copyright holder of the output.
So while LLMs may be considered a tool (though more so in the British vernacular sense), they are not the same as other tools in this aspect.
You can't for example copypasta BSD Licensed code from various sources, then release the result under the GPL. Using an intermediary such as a language model to do the same doesn't free you from the legal or (IMO more importantly) ethical considerations.
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* one of those things made from dead trees
Thursday 16th July 2026 07:24 GMT
Re: Tin men vs GPL
This is a good point.
Only the copyright holder can issue a license (e.g. GPL).
When the code comes from a LLM, who is the author (per Bern Convention) ?
It's not the meatbag entering a prompt (precedent long set about the significant own creative input required) . The output is at best a derivative work.
The output of a LLM can only be GPL'd is you're sure the training data used to generate the output was GPL code (which you can't be). One bit of say BSD-licensed code used to generate the output and you can't license it under the GPL.
Dutch chip startup claims all-European fab flow – with help from a very American friend
Wednesday 15th July 2026 09:42 GMT
In this case, it is GlobalFoundries (GF), an international business with its headquarters in the US...
The pair say that GF's Dresden fab is establishing a European manufacturing flow with funding from the European Chips Act. This will ensure that every step of the production process occurs within the EU, so that no sensitive design data leaves the region.
(Emphasis mine).
If you believe that last statement, I've a bridge you might be interested in purchasing.
The design will be sent/available to head-office in the US. There's also a risk of a TLA "insisting" on design changes at the factory level.
Now admittedly, even if it was 100% sovereign there's still nothing to stop a state actor at least attempting to bribe and/or extort someone at the factory to do the same, but it would be a level of more difficulty.
Microsoft chief turns hostile on frontier AI labs, warns companies to guard their IP
Cinnamon 6.8 will support Wayland – if you want it
Microsoft Global Device Identifier fingers Scattered Spider suspect
Microsoft flips Windows Backup to on by default unless you're in the EU
Samsung’s profits jump 19x in a year and you don’t need AI to figure out why
Tuesday 7th July 2026 10:34 GMT
Re: Insanity...
Given that Samsung sells lots of other things as well as memory to "AI" companies, suggests their mark-up on RAM is even higher (assuming the mark-up on other items is till around the 6% mark - if some sections of the business, e.g. phones, are making a loss at the moment, that would push the RAM profit rate even higher).
AI startup that’s never turned a profit says it'll totally be around in 2047 to close its $19B lease
Tuesday 7th July 2026 09:01 GMT 
Between the devil and the deep blue see
Misanthropic and OpenAI need to go public to raise more capital that they're burning through at a rate of knots.
On the other hand, going public will subject them to more financial scrutiny than they are comfortable with, with the risk they don't receive the desired valuation.
The only way they're not going to deflate, if not actually pop, is if they're classed as Too Big to Fail* and are bailed out by the US government's deep pockets, directly or indirectly (E.g. the Pentagon is made to spend $500B on "AI" for example. The recent "Trump Accounts" where money from the state will go into US based indexes, boosting stock prices, is a related version).
Oracle should by all rights implode by 2030, except its owner's friendship with the current (and 50% chance future) administration may save Larry's yacht collection.
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* If it wasn't for the current tulip planting craze boosting the GDP figure I suspect the US would be in a technical recession now
Zombie ‘who owns Unix?’ lawsuit comes alive again
Nvidia floats double-dipping datacenter financing scheme
SoftBank enters the rent-a-GPU race as America looks for support for AI training
How the AI bubble could pop and take down the global economy, according to the BIS
Germany went off the rails as wireless outage saw all trains cancelled
EU won't force publishers to grant dead video games an afterlife
Monday 22nd June 2026 10:32 GMT
Minimum support time
Legislate that for software, such as many games, that requires a propriatary online service to order to function, the service must be provided for a minimum time since last sold as new (not the release date).
Alternatively, when the service is a licensing system or similar, releasing an updated version that no longer requires said service within the minimum support time is also acceptable.
I'd suggest 7 years as a reasonable time (also matches the new EU spare-parts rule for phones & tablets).
Windows devs rerolled old code to save precious bytes
Only half of US datacenter capacity planned for 2026 is actually under construction
Wednesday 17th June 2026 18:45 GMT 
Why Texas?
From the article:
pointing out that Texas had 14 GW of new capacity announced
Texas is, as far as I know, most of the time quite warm, which is usually suboptimal for data centers. Somewhere like Montana would be more intuitive.
Secondly, the electricity grid in Texas is well-known to be pretty fragile. Or are they planing on burning directly oil coming out of a nearby hole in the ground to power the damm things?
Fired IT worker jailed for 21 months after sabotaging old school district
If your sex life is dead, you can blame Steve Jobs
Friday 12th June 2026 11:35 GMT
Re: Our country does anti-support children
The EU doesn't appear to have more "no-gun zones" than the USA
In most European countries *everywhere* outside specific areas for hunting (controlled, time-limited, regulated, etc.) or military training grounds (military only obv.) or shooting-range is a no-gun zone, unless you're a police officer.
Thursday 11th June 2026 11:09 GMT
Re: Our country does anti-support children
I'll concur that at least part of the US's problem is cultural (and not just with guns...).
The UK was already pretty restrictive for gun ownership. Then in 1996 we had the Dunblane massacre, and pretty much the whole country went "fuck that, we're not risking that horror happening again" and gun laws were further tightened with widespread support, so much so that biathlon athletes often have to do half their training abroad these days.
IINM, Australia was somewhat similar with Port Arthur.
The problem with the US, that despite having experienced hundreds of the equivalent of Dunblane, it's not done much about it due to the US's mythological Individualist culture and so many yanks simply don't give a shit about other people .
Wednesday 10th June 2026 10:47 GMT
Re: Our country does anti-support children
The ever rising cost of housing, particularly where there's actual jobs and infrastructure, is also a major disincentive.
I've got one child and I'm not planing on any more of my own (too old now for a start).
I'd be really up for fostering in principle, but there's no way we could afford a 3 bedroom apartment.
Blockbuster new Raspberry Pi project turns any screen into old-school VCR
LibreOffice brands Euro-Office a 'de facto ally' of Microsoft's lock-in strategy
Wednesday 10th June 2026 14:28 GMT
Hmmmm
To be honest, it's probably fairly pragmatic at this point in time to default to the MS format.
Otherwise, end-users, who neither know nor care about technica such as document file formats, are likely to get in tizzy as soon as they try to share a document outside their organisation and the recipient can't open it. (or can MS Office properly read ODF documents these days? It's been thankful decades since I've used it)
Euro-Office needs to support the ODF formats in full pretty damm sharp (I've the impression it can read by not write, though I may be wrong on this). Then on first use ask the user for their preferred default format (which may be predetermined by an appropriate admin config).
Looking at OnlyOffice, I can well understand why people have forked it. It's also a different use-case than LibreOffice.
LibreOffice does have a perfectly valid point about file formats and the question of control.
UK tax collector hands Capgemini £600M contact center deal, delays start of £2.4B CRM contract
Friday 5th June 2026 10:45 GMT
Re: Lessons will be learned
I was actually agreeing with you (for once).
There's no real reason why the government isn't capable of creating and running the software it needs in-house, or least in some sort of part-owned entity. My examples were to illustrate that 60 years ago government had better ideas than they do today in this regard.
The reason why it isn't is the contemporary idealogical belief that "private sector is always better". The cynical perspective would add that corporate donations, sponsorships, and directorships for former MPs and senior civil servants is an aggravating factor.
'Resistance is futile,' says Qualcomm CEO. AI agents will be become invisible, inescapable, follow you across devices
Claude celebrates Anthropic's stock market float with blockbuster ... outage
Tuesday 2nd June 2026 18:44 GMT
Re: REPORTEDLY, Anthropic earns more in revenue
The Amazon comparison is an apples and pears comparison - both are fruits but quite different from each other
1. Amazon (sticking with the original consumer facing non AWS part) had a perfectly viable business model - sell books (and then everything else) online cheaper than elsewhere but at a scale to make a tidy profit.
2. The customer could see and easily measure the benefit: "I found this book that I couldn't find locally" and "this widget is ¥x cheaper from Amazon than elsewhere" and "if I order from Amazon it'll be here tomorrow rather then next week".
The "AI" companies don't fulfill either these criteria nor are they likely to in the near future, if ever.
(For the record I'm not with my points justifying Amazon's dubious business practices, the disgusting way it treats it's workers, etc. Just it had a viable business plan, and a fairly standard one at that)
