Is this the new version of saying something like 'Thanks boomer"?

I was able to use this fancy new invention you may have missed called a hyperlink to look at your commenting history. Apparently, like myself you spend too much time on Slashdot and make allusions to things like tape recording off the radio which even suggests we're in the same approximate age group.

The big difference is, I write shit comments the length of small novels, you like one liners. We both seem to follow the pattern of offering nothing of any value and coming off as arrogant prigs.

I see you like to say things like "I use slackware with systemd" with pride rather than shame. Do you also listen to vinyl for that true sound and use a tin percolator to get that coffee how it was meant to be flavor? I assume you also take pride in walking past the Starbucks and every time you pass one you point out that their coffee is .. actually what do you people use as an insult for mainstream coffee?

Anyway, I assure you, there was no ChatGPT involved. I'm just a sad and pathetic late-middle-aged man like yourself. I tend to prefer to embrace intelligence rather than embracing masochism so I might to hold on tight to that lovely old tech because it's my woobie. I use Slashdot as my outlet to try and see if I can get someone else to agree with my opinion anonymously... again like yourself.

  The one liners... god.. they're probably even more annoying that my books. It's like a MAGA hat, designed to be endearing to people who can't handle more than 4 letters in a thought.

What surprises me isn't that China has been doing it. I think that the UK was in fact the country which glorified spying and government espionage for decades. Even now, I still remember Gorbachev crediting James Bond as the biggest single cause for the rise of Putin. The UK LOVES spying. They think it's sexy. They love the suits and the cars and let's never forget Q, the true hero in the movies.

So... why would the brits ever be surprised that someone would be spying on them using tech?

I think what's really amazing is that they didn't realize this sooner.

Doesn't this kind of prove that the UK government is criminally stupid that they never stopped it... and yes, it is absolutely preventable. Even the US manages to secure presidential communications and we see what their leadership looks like.

So, here's the real question.

If the brits have done nothing to secure their prime minister's communications, then who else is listening?

Next, how did it happen? Did they do it using government mandated back doors in encryption? After all, only criminals have anything to hide.

Even better... shouldn't we be impressed that the technology allowed probably every government with a spy network to all spy on British leadership without each other knowing it.

Or did they all know it?

I can almost imagine spies from the US, Russia, Israel, North Korea, China etc... all sitting at a Starbucks listening to a speaker together. Hell, I can even imagine at the next table, a british spy, an american spy, etc... all listening to Xi. Do they date each other? I mean, think modern nerd 007. Does the British spy get the girl? Maybe a sexy hungarian who is in the process of spying on Putin?

What about when people need sick days? Does the Chinese spy call the Taiwanese spy and ask "Can you share your notes with me today? I need to stay in bed"

This new generation of chips from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are insanely impressive. I mean really really impressive.

What happens to them when they are no longer economically viable for Microsoft, Amazon, and Google?

I have made my side hustle for years teaching data center training courses using outdated data center technologies. For example, I'm still running a pretty considerable cluster of E5-2600v1 servers with 2TB of RAM. They cost me a small fortune to buy, but I paid far less than the cost of a single node retailed for for the whole cluster including massive network bandwidth (the thing I actually teach).

Almost everything I do depends on buying other people's junk and milking the remaining life out of it.

I suspect that Google, Microsoft, and Amazon will make about a million chips each of this technology before the next generation rolls out. They will also produce large motherboards with custom chipsets, though I expect them to be mostly broadcom switching silicon or similar. But whatever happens, there will be about a million chips worth of Maia 200 AI silicon that will be worthless in a year or two and will head to dump. It will have precisely 0% reusability because the ecosystem will be 100% closed.

Should these companies be legally required to make these boards more open? In other words, should it be required that they should make it possible for the recyclers to reclaim more than just rare metals from the boards? Should someone like myself be able to buy this trash and use it for 5-10 more years as compute? Should their stack be open sourced or licensable or even just downloadable as binary?

First of all, I'm guessing he probably writes most of his stuff in Ruby. It's a shame. He could probably write much better systems in a proper language.

Next, he apparently doesn't know how to use LLMs for coding and he insists on making nonsensical observations about tools he doesn't understand.

LLM is the name of the programming language. As with any programming language, you can learn to code it in a few minutes. But if you want to claim proficiency, it takes 12-18 months of daily usage.

LLM is not a replacement for the programmers. LLM is the tool the programmers use to make systems. And someone who uses Ruby should understand this better than most. Anyone could write hello world in Ruby. But it takes 10 years of daily use of Ruby to make code that isn't just disgusting. Sadly the Ruby code itself is worse than the code that most people write in Ruby.

So, if you sit down and choose to develop a project. You open up your word processor and you design a project plan and break it into steps of development and then you feed it to the llm which implements each step. You then verify or implement the mcps to automate verification and you move on to the next step.

He's a fool who is trying to replace programmers with LLMs rather than replacing inefficient programming languages like Ruby with LLMs.

I think that there's also the issue that he's hoping it will generate good Ruby code... here's a little secret.... not even the best LLM will ever be able to do that.

P.S. - there's a reason Ruby never really caught on. It was the worst language and toolchain to curse the earth. Oddly Rails was great. But what's the point of a tool written for a language that never had a decent implementation? You might was well have used Ada.

He's been using electronic instruments for ages to produce music. I know for a fact that his bass effects are produced by computerized synthesizers.

I'll attempt to type with small words and sentences that can fit on a hat or a bumper sticker.

The entire "rant" was 3d printing of guns.

The use of GPT was as an alternative to google which provided me university curriculums I was able to validate for the particular area of material sciences required to design containers for the safe discharge of firearm ammunition. It was close to 60 courses in chemistry, physics, materials, engineering... I would count this as a little more than GPT drivel. Or, are you opposed to using research tools and think winging it is better?

The GPT drivel does in fact qualify me to enter a higher learning institution and take the courses recommended that would in fact legally qualify me in the areas of engineering and science required to speak authoritatively with a Ph.D. on the topics.

Tell me, how do you do your initial research on a topic these days? Are you using LLMs or are you unemployed?

P.S. - as a clarification pretty much anything which includes the ownership of a gun for anything other than inserting nails into concrete is a bit too redneck for me. I also don't own a pool cue. I do however think it's fun to visit firing ranges and testing to see if I can punch holes in paper at a distance using a fire stick or visiting a billiard hall where I can poke balls with a stick and make them fall in pockets.

I like answering questions such as the ones your proposed, but strangely from your tone and your general lack of civility I believe you're not actually interested in the answers. Instead, you're simply attempting to degrade people who disagree with your perspective.

Let's start with the basic issues though.

There's absolutely no reason you would need to make a gun that suffers the short-comings that you're referring to. I have absolutely no interest in owning a gun of any type, but I believe that if I wanted to commit an untraceable crime, I would consider making a gun myself which could be simply melted down afterwards.

And contrary to popular belief, people interested in guns can often be highly intelligent and educated. The best man at my wedding is one of the most impressively educated engineers I know and he is more than a little unhinged with the 2nd amendment nonsense. I believe his house has developed into quite the arsenal over the years. And if he took it upon himself to make a weapon of any type, he would most likely start by building a safe environment to test every aspect of the weapon in a controlled fashion.

The next thing is that there's absolutely no reason I would need gun parts of any type from the outside.

I managed in 20 minutes of working my way past the ChatGPT restrictions on getting help making explosives to get a full list of information needed to do so. The trick is to ask for a complete OpenCourseware curriculum in Energetic materials science. I was also able to get useful results that would allow me to calculate the specific pressure and forced required to contain a rapid exothermic decomposition reaction based on nitrocellulose as a propellant. I also found enough information to calculate the energy required to trigger the reaction and also more than enough information to allow me to contain the reaction.

In fact, a few hand machine parts are all that would be necessary to contain said reaction so long as my goal wasn't to employ high caliber ammunition. And yes, you can properly and safely verify the safety of this within confined spaces.

So, let's assume for the moment that a person like myself wanted to make an entirely untraceable gun.

First off, I wouldn't bother with a 3d printed gun. It's a little too redneck for me.
Second, if I really wanted to make a 3d printed gun where every aspect of the weapon could be easily disposed of permanently without a trace, it would be easy.
Finally, the laws that are being proposed are extremely funny because I could actually just build a new 3d printer without restrictions for $50-100 and provide my own software and make it disappear without a trace too.

Seriously, there are benefits of burning stuff up on the atmosphere. But if SpaceX has 9000 active satellites, doesn't it seem like there should be some regulations in place that rather than trashing the atmosphere, they should be required instead to capture and recover the old satellites?

I get insanely bitchy about technology which is designed to last a little while and then just trash it and make it someone else's problem.

Musk is launching stuff into space all the time. I assume most of the missions he launches are about sending stuff to space and coming back with empty rockets.

It's time he made his only "Space Wall-E" which floats around in orbit, grabs the decommissioned satellites and stores them until the next rocket is launched. Then it transfers cargo and SpaceX will take the old satellites and recycle them appropriately.

And by the way, this should be a requirement for absolutely anyone launching constellations. I don't care if these are tiny little cube sats. There is no excuse for leaving your trash laying around.

And if anyone reading this knows, what happens to all the little nasties in the satellites. Like ICs generally contain arsenic and other lovely things we don't like in our rain and water supplies. I'm sure it's barely trace amounts. But there are 9000 satellites up there right now which have a scheduled life span of a few blinks of an eye. And everyone is racing to compete and sending thousands more. Sooner or later, the stuff we burn up in the atmosphere has to accumulate. It might take weeks, it might take decades, it might take centuries. But, it strikes me that using the atmosphere as a trash can sounds like a bad idea. What happens to all the burned up waste?

This isn't difficult. Ask an llm, in this case, I ask Gemma running on lmstudio :

"using lmstudio how can I prepare the context. In otherwords, I want a standard document which lists rules I want the llms to follow when answering my questions. For example, I don't want it to provide any information without also providing reference links. I often get responses like "There is a research paper named..." and I want the link to the paper and don't want to search for it."

The response it provides is long and detailed. It's really quite good. If you follow the steps, it's really much more reliable than getting constant hallucinations.

If you want it to work like a champion, then ask it

"Is there a way to keep an llm up to date? It would be amazing if I could tell the llm that later today I intend to ask it more information on a specific topic. Do some research while I'm gone. And then the llm would search the internet. It would be even cooler if it could chat on message forums and then check the answers for validity afterwards"

Which will help you setup a RAG.

It sounds like Lawyer dude started his project way too early. And I get it, after all, if he didn't rush in and start early someone else would have. It also sounds like he probably got to the point where the customer expected it to provide better results and if he didn't reach version 1.0 pretty soon, not only would they ditch him, but it would probably slam the doors shut for everyone else. And finally, he probably chased a rabbit down the wrong rabbit hole for far too long and delivered a shit product.

I think to run a project like this, if I were starting today, I would talk with Google (I'd prefer Ali these days, but the whole US government/China thing is an issue), and I'd ask to license Gemma for the base of my own LLM and then extend on that. After all, training your own model from scratch is not only insanely expensive, it's also impressively stupid. Let someone else waste a few gazillion GPU hours to lay down the base weights and deal with all the other training annoyances.

But, again, he sounds like he did a great job suckering some investors into giving him money and now he's trying to convince everyone else that it's not worth their effort to make a competing project because it's really hard to do.

Honestly, cutting a deal with ANY of the mainstream LLMs and uploading the entire legal library of Alaska as RAG data and creating a context rule document which would constrain the answers provided to verifiable fact with linked references would have been far cheaper and far more effective.

Of course, at the current rate of progress of LLMs, I expect by 2030, there won't even be a need for RAGs regarding things like legal references. But this might end up only being possible on Chinese computing systems since OpenAI just killed all western AI research. After all, we spent $32,000 a card on 340 H200 cards last year. They have 141GB each. This is way to small to run decent LLMs on current generation tech. I speculate that we'll see a breaking point closer to 512GB. And I don't think we'll see 512GB from anyone but the Chinese until there are A LOT more RAM factories up and running.

Thankfully, I have nothing to do with Windows clients other than being forced to use them as a client for filing my hours in an accounting program. But, the environment I'm in has what I suspect is a few tens of thousands of Windows virtual machines. We are mostly a Linux shop, but there are many tasks where only Windows will do.
I'm guessing Microsoft has provided us some sort of offline license activation server because there only legal method of moving data on or off this network is to copy it to a USB device, send it to a department who then scans its contents on a machine which is read-only and boots from network freshly for each task. Once the content is validated as safe, it is sent to the next machine which is virus and malware scanning. You can't send data in unapproved container formats like RAR. And then the USB drive is moved to the correct isolated virtual network and transferred into the isolated storage.
We are far from extreme compared to other environments I've encountered. I have worked in a place where, by Cisco's guidance, we were forced to fill the USB ports of Cisco equipment with epoxy because there was no way to disable the ports otherwise.
I think that either Microsoft has decided that they would issue offline licensing methods for special cases or that they wouldn't mind losing this kind of business.

Stepping foot onto the maiden Orion flight with the SLS... That is soooo stupi... I mean brave.

The biggest carrot the US and Europe have is the protectionism of their stuff.
If the other country is doing it better, you can sue them and keep them from going after your customers. This leaves your customers with lesser options but at least they're forced to buy your stuff.
China is beginning a big push for patents and intellectual property protection. This will slow them down.
But look at the ugliest case of the absolute failure of a total national economy in 2025.
The Germans are in a panic because Chinese cars are better than German cars. They're more advanced, they're cheaper, they are being built with higher quality components. Overall, Chinese cars offer 5-10 times more value for the money right now depending on your measurement compared to German cars. Workers at BMW are showing up to work driving Chinese cars.
So what's the German answer to this?
You'd think the answer would be to invest heavily into making German car companies competitive with the Chinese. Wouldn't that be logical?
America managed to build Tesla which is a car company who engineered every part of their cars with the goal that they should be able to be fixed and upgraded and assembled and disassembled almost entirely by robot. The company invested in engineers who designed cars that could last 25 or more years as vehicles for the middle class and Tesla would get almost all the money.
Chinese engineered their cars with no legacy parts to copy the Tesla pattern and focuses on vehicles that would be cost competitive in the Chinese market.
Germany did what they always did. They made 10 year cars... which actually became 8 year cars because they don't support their software or offer upgrades. They didn't upgrade their manufacturing because German unions scream murder every time a job is replaced by a robot. They didn't reengineer their systems to have anything to do with robots. They don't even support the software on their cars once the car rolls off the assembly line. They have actually increased the costs of owning their cars over time even while their cars rapidly decrease in value.
And Germany's answer is "Hey let's figure out how we can implement protectionism. Because helping the companies compete sounds like too much work"

It seems to me that this is a tool that could reduce consumption of new things in favor of rescuing stuff from the landfill.
Over the past few years, a large amount of my consumption has moved to second hand. The number of trips I make to the dump has dropped.
Apps like this are a good step towards reducing waste. Of course, whether an item has one owner or five before the dump is just a delay. But it means one fifth will be produced.
I'm trying to push that companies like NVidia should be severely fined for waste like mining series GPUs which is disgusting. A perfectly serviceable RTX3080 ends up in the trash because NVidia locks out features and relabels it CMP HX90. This is a device which was never going to last more than a year. They're everywhere and cheap. These could be powering student AI projects or robots, etc...

Jaguar was never going to survive. Have you seen the crap they make?

Let's start with in school prayer.
I was forced for years to stand up and pray to a bath towel with stars and stripes all over it every morning in a group. I had to pray as well to an imaginary sky deity too. I was gaslighted into a belief that we were one nation, under sky god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

In the educational system, I never really managed to fully understand what liberty meant, but as an adult, I have a pretty good idea and I'm almost 100% sure that it only works if you ignore things like being systematically forced to pray to a dish rag until you become a zealot who becomes offended that someone might call it a bath towel or a dish rag.

Public schools have a tremendous amount to do to compensate for the short comings of children being raised in a country where we're taught to strive for more. To want better. To improve. To anyone like myself who went looking for liberty and justice for all... and left, when I return on visits, I see a country more and more dominated by people lacking simple human values. I can't diagnose the problem, but it greatly disheartens me. I am sad that the country I remember from a different millennium doesn't exist anymore.

We were never perfect. There were always people like yourself who are willing to pay for your religion and beliefs to be forced on my children, but cry out in anger when someone else's beliefs are being forced on other children. And before you claim this isn't true, nationalism and patriotism is a religion or a cult, or whatever else you want to call it. I also take great offense by anyone who supports a two party government. And this means anyone who supports team sports of any kind. I absolutely hate schools who teach out children that we need to make ourselves feel better by dominating other people. I have no problems with kids playing a game. I do take tremendous offense that we teach children that they are better than other children because their school is better than someone else's.

American toxically forces division on the people. We have been and probably always will be forced to believe that every aspect of life is polarized. You're with us or against us. You're part of the solution or part of the problem. etc... We will be forced to choose team red or team blue. We can't like some Chinese people because 1.4 billion people are evil and horrible because we don't like a few people running the country.

American schools exist for no other reason than to teach hate.

See what I did there. I made a statement to be persuasive and to catch your attention. If I were a true American, I would let it stand. But unfortunately, I prefer to have morals and ethics.

American schools are far from perfect. And as an honest to goodness American and as your patriotic duty, you should demand that your taxes be spent to teach children perspectives you don't agree with. This is how we improve. This is how we mature. This is how we build our future. Where I live, in Norway, my civil liberties were severely violated. I was born Jewish and thankfully I've been recovering from that for some time, but my children were forced by the government to attend church and were forced to take many years of religious studies which often were "The jews believe this, the muslims believe this, but WE believe this". And at home, I would teach my children that faith is good, blind faith is wrong. That their grandmother needed religion. I tough them that they have their own choice to make. They can choose to believe in what they're learning at school, they can choose to believe what I believe, or they can choose to walk their own path.

If you don't like what is being taught in the school, this is why we have dinner tables. We can teach our children what we believe at home. We can take the time to raise them. When their friends come over for dinner, we can even share our values with them. This is absolutely our rights.

So, as long as there's forced prayer to nappies on a stick, school sports, etc... and civilized people like myself are forced to pay taxes to support that, you should give a little back. People are being forced to pay taxes to have your horrible beliefs forced children's throats, you can pay a few bucks to let someone else's horrible beliefs forced on other children as well.