That's over simplifying things a bit, but yeah, we have fundamental infrastructure issues in the UK with any proposed mass rollout of AI DCs. While we do have surplus generating capacity, to the point that we occasionally need to pay people to use it, and more generating/storage capacity (especially local domestic, which frees up baseload capacity for industrial uses) is being added all the time, there are some other more fundamental UK issues. Firstly, the national power distribution grid is in need of some serious upgrades to support some of this. The South West in particular is on a very thin high tension thread that currently has insufficient capacity for the the planned relocation of the UK's nuclear deterrent subs to Devonport and associated growth, for instance. Secondly, and this seldom gets mentioned in the context of all these new AI DCs that are being planned or the "shouty kids/let's save water" adverts currently being run, is that we have some severe water supply pressures as a result of climate change combined with a decades long lack of investment in new reservoirs and upgrading leaky Victorian era distribution networks. Care which part of the country is currently experiencing the brunt of a "once in several decades (but is now expected to happen every few years)" severe drought event? Yup, it's the home counties, where most of the planned DCs are supposedly going to get built!

Those all have technical/construction solutions though, the third does not, and that is that the home counties in particular are notorious for the NIMBYism, although they are far from alone in that - just a few days ago a massive planned solar/storage facility in Scotland got pushed back, and possibly nixed, because of it. Sure, there are totally valid arguments against concreting over large expanses of what is currently greenbelt to some extent, even before you get to water/power shortages, pollution (including noise), additional traffic, and all the other impacts, but there have to be some limits. One solution I like for this (albeit not without some quite complex zoning issues due to suitable areas for building supply not being equal to where the supply is needed) is to make supply, or cost of supply, proportionate to acceptance of local capacity build outs. If you want your power to be generated in someone else's backyard, then you'll pay more for the privilege while they get a rebate. If you object to that proposed new local reservoir, then you don't get to complain if you need to start buying potable water in bulk during the next drought. If, as in the case of DCs, you are putting in disproportionately high demands for supply, then you either pay - up front - for a suitable proportion of the required upgrades, or commit to some other form of reimbursement with suitable early termination clauses if you want a longer timescale.

Then again, this *could* just be Microsoft wriggling off the hook because they're starting to think the AI bubble might be somewhat overinflated and therefore they might not be needing all that capacity they've been saying they are going to build afterall, but don't want to start the stampede for the exits until they're already through the door.

Damnit! UCT != CUT either, which is yet *another* standard timezone, using the same three letters. Cue oblig. XKCD on standards...

Above should have used CUT, not UCT.

It's more likely to be much ado about nothing for almost everyone apart from a few astronomers, rocket scientists, and similar groups, all of which you'd expect would have the braincells to figure it out, but will no doubt have a few in the mix that don't. Other standard timezones exist (the various UTCs are != UCT), so if your system is working fine on one of those then it will continue to do so.

UCT also moves backwards *and* forwards continually, mostly due to gravitational variances due to other celestial objects, changes in the Earth's spin, and all the other things that effect planetary orbits; some years Earth (and all the other things going around the sun) will orbit a little faster, others a little slower, so it's not a cumulative year on year increase to the delta, although there can be a run in one direction or the other for a while. Assuming it averages out OK, then there's a distinct possibility that by the time an adjustment really is required no one will be left around to care about it, let alone do it.

The general expectation in industry is that the number of bugs must be finite and, even though every change might introduce new ones, as the AI models find new ones and they get fixed the total number of yet to be be found bugs will come down. As with Microsoft's recent run of consecutive record breaking Patch Tuesdays, the conclusion being drawn is that sooner or later the number of bugs being found and fixed after each analysis session will start to fall and, subsequent to that, normal patching service, albeit on a hopefully much more robust codebase, will resume.

Where it gets a little more sticky is that, while finite, the number of available bugs to find and fix could still be extremely large, so the time required to regress back to previous, or even better than previous, bugfix development volumes is unknown. If your bet is that duration is quite short (less than a year, say), then why would you want to encumber your business with a raft of new full time employees all wanting things like health benefits and severance protections, when you can just bring in some contractors and dump them at will when they are no longer needed? If you're thinking it's a long game, then at least some full time employees is probably a better option because eventually they will be cheaper than using contractors, with how long that is dependant on your typical salaries for each. BoA is presumably betting on the former scenario based on what they understand of their codebase and whatever additional volume of bugs AI has found in it so far.

Using AI, especially. One thing that struck me in the last few days was in relation to comments on the story about the person who has used AI to vibe-code clones of part of the Adobe graphical tools suite and has since (within a few days!) gone on to close the core Microsoft Office apps in the same way. Apparently (I have not checked it personally) this software, albeit still in "beta", runs like a bag of spanners and while, it might superficially look like the tools it's emulating, lacks the depth of many features and some are missing entirely. The code is also impenetrable, so the "it's open source, the community can check for malware" argument is even less practicable than it usually is. It's an interesting demo of where things are currently at, but ready to go, drop in replacements, they are not.

Sure, there was the obvious flame war about the pros and cons of "AI", implications for copyright, potential to be sued, etc., but what was almost completely absent was any kind of reality check about how coding works in practice when a PHB is in charge. You know, the kind that totally sees the OpEx of some license or other going out, has read about this AI-driven vibe-coding stuff, is *totally* on board with the concept of "ship it and let the users find the bugs", joins the dots, and tasks some hapless AI-literate (that's what the CV said, anyway) intern on vibe-coding a replacement. You just know that's either going to start happening Real Soon Now, or already is, in all sorts of places that should know a LOT better than that, especially given the issues with the code shat out in the examples above.

Many of them, and quite likely many of their clients/users too, are going to get quite badly burnt, I expect.

And if a rogue AI agent actually *causes* one of those more damaging attacks, what then? "To err is human, but to really fsck things up takes a computer" and all that?

What seems to be missing here isn't just any clarity in legislation about liability for AI agents, especially labs running frontier models who seem to get free legal passes that would absolutely not be afforded to regular plebs who - potentially entirely by accident - cause an agent to hack someone else, but any serious discussion about putting those legal frameworks in place is also lacking. Seriously, WTF is up with that? How many incidents that are clearly in breach of existing computer misuse legislation do we need to get some action here, either under existing laws (including, potentially, civil law) or to start working on tweaks to existing laws to provide some specific clarity relating who is liable for any misuse of AI agents?

I get the AI labs almost certainly have a tacit "don't sue us, and we won't sue you" agreement in place for things like this to try and avoid regulation they definitely do not want because their actions are quite obviously not aligned with the regulation they are claiming they want put into place. Third parties like South Korean banks are under no such terms however, and given they are in the financial sector (or health sector in another recent example) probably have legal obligations of their own as well, so again - why are we not even hearing of any talk of legal action?

Maybe we could just cut to the chase and go straight to Plaid Intelligence? It's not like anyone outside 1600 Pennsylvania is taking this "rebranding" seriously anyway, so why not have some fun with mocking it while we can?

At least the voters are not talking about things like Epstein, Iran, and the price of gas, which is likely the whole point; look at all the stupid, forget about the serious, and (for ~50% of the them) be sure to tick the name with "R" next to it next month like you're programmed to.

That was a new one for me too. My guess was what we used to refer to as "red tops" in the UK; the tabloid / gutter press because they typically have a red banner with the name of the paper on the front page, although some of the worst modern examples of that (the Mail & Express) actually don't have a red banner. In the mostly online world, that obviously needs to cover online-only and broadcast media forms too so "red top" seems to be falling out of use.

Apparently though, it's actually a reference to totally fake or low-quality news sites, masquerading as legitimate outlets purely to push misinformation and is named for the "Mystery Meat" by-product that resembles pink slime used as filler in some processed meats (mmm, yummy!) Defining characteristics include:

• The content is generally produced by low-wage employees, automated content production (e.g. AI), and templates. It might just list information without any analysis or context.
• Purport to cover local or hyperlocal news and to some extent are taking advantage of a decline in traditional local news.
• Many outlets are part of networks financed by partisans to push their narrative or point-of-view.

If you're thinking that mostly means the likes of Reach's portfolio of garbage and so-called "independent journalist" sites, take a look at the default Microsoft Edge homepage on MSN, which would totally qualify. It's clearly largely AI-generated, highly formulaic/template based, seldom provides any analysis or context, pretends to be local (because clickbait sites that include a country's name in them are *totally* relevant to another country entirely), and, yup, is financed by someone with a definite narrative to push. It clearly only exists to get people to doomscroll and generate clicks and ad-revenue. Bingo! Full house!

Heads *need* to roll though, but I'm not sure anyone with a say in the matter at the Pentagon realises that, let alone why is really does need to be the case. The US' own judiciary has been pretty clear on this; whenever a lawyer has been caught using AI-generated submissions that contain hallucinations some form of censure has ensured PDQ. It's similar in industry as well; multiple instances of employees using AI without checking the facts that have subsequently been either disciplined, fired, or (if they are senior enough and the screw-up warrants it) issued a golden parachute.

Now, look at the situation on the ground. This school has been there for around a decade, and it is *very* obviously a school - pink and blue painted play areas, with assembly areas and sports facilities suitable for kids; that is totally NOT a military PT facility within the larger complex. Sure, it's surrounded by IRGC facilities, but absolutely no military anywhere else in the world co-locates their military's family accommodation blocks and support facilities close to the operations blocks and facilities to make it easier for their staff & troops, right? Oh, wait, yes, they do, don't they? Not always, sure, but often enough that the US response here matters, because if they try and sweep this under the rug "because AI", then they just made all their similar facilities viable targets "because AI". There's a reason everyone else, including US allies, were quick to publically condemn this, and even say it might be a war crime because of failure to properly assess the strike's potential for collateral damage, and that's to make it absolutely clear they do not consider this have acceptable levels of collateral damage, let alone be a legitimate target.

Don't forget, the IRGC tend to be fanatics even by Iranian standards, and are often either willing to strap on a suicide vest or can motivate others to do it for them. 123 dead kids means a *LOT* of bereaved parents, brothers, sisters, and other family members, many of whom are probably already linked to the IRGC, who are going to need a lot less motivation to do something a little more radical than just march along the street waving flags and chanting "Death to America!" the next time they are asked to do something for their country. What the US does here is totally going to be interpreted as setting precedent by Iran, and quite possibly by other countries and groups within their axis, should it come to a conflict or just an opportunistic attempt at some terrorism.

I think there's a bit of a difference though. Regardless of hat colour, most hackers have going to have at least some sense of what the likely repercussions of their actions might be and, even when those standards are very low indeed, are probably not going to think doing something that could cause serious loss of life "for the Lulz" is a good life option. They might make a mistake here and there, but how many times have you read about some random hacker *deliberately* doing something that would definitely cause loss of life in full knowledge that it was going to happen outside of on the periphery of an actual conflict?

GANs on the other hand have no such moral compass, sense of self-preservation, or keen interest in avoiding lengthy spells in government run institutions where they'll in all likelihood get to make some interesting new "friends" (unless it's a web forum they hijacked in Germany, apparently). They'll just carry on trying to complete whatever poorly defined objective they have been set, within whatever limited / technically absent guardrails they can't circumvent - the pattern here seems very much that meeting the objective has more weight in the models than any guardrails. If a GAN somehow computes that global thermonuclear war is a required step to its objective of having a nice game of chess, then you'd better hope it warms up with a LOT of Tic-Tac-Toe.

"Hi, BYD, set the temperature to 21 degrees."
"Hi, BYD, turn off the air conditioning."
"Hi, BYD, volume down/up."
"Hi, BYD, next song."

Saw this on an Atto3, and it worked surprisingly well. Not perfect, but just about all the controls you might need to adjust while driving that are not on the wheel or stalks are covered. I also prefer physical controls that I can operate through muscle memory for everything, but voice control seems like a good move to address the obvious safety concern that moving to many controls to a touch screen brings. Fact is, this kind of UI is what Millennials and later have grown up on, so barring some safety edict from a major market, like China's ban on retracting door handles, it's not going away. That leaves those of us that prefer physical controls to either get used to it, find a car that keeps the balance sane (VAG group seems to be moving in this direction), or squabbling over the declining supply of roadworthy cars that predate the screens taking over.

I think there may be a bit of back-and-forth while marques work out which controls are adjusted while driving and probably ought to have a tactile control and how best to present the UI to minimise eyes-on time by the driver if they do try and adjust things while moving, but the battle to retain fully tactile controls is probably already lost. Either way, any controls are almost certainly all going to be linked into the same car management / data capture system, and any physical controls will be no more independent that those specialist control keyboard add-ons you can get for PCs. That data can be monetized, and there's no way any marque is going to pass up on that - ultimately, as BMW has demonstrated, they want as much control over their car (what, you thought it was yours just because you paid for it?) as Microsoft has over a Windows PC.

Joking aside, there's a much more subtle change too. Look at the quoted wording from the astronauts: "*our* nation", "inspire *this* nation". Even at the height of the US-Soviet cold war it was still "for *all* mankind".

I get Trump's order is very much aimed at the NASA and the US (and probably getting his name onto it somehow), so can give that a pass, but the astronauts had an opportunity to rise above all that partisanship and slip in a message of much needed global unity, yet failed to do so. There are precious few institutions left in the world that can at least try and claim to be at least somewhat above / outside the direct influence of politics, and it looks like we're about to lose another one. Quite possibly for good once the ISS is finally decommissioned.

Task Manager's expanded view does include GPU monitoring and has done for quite some time now, but it wasn't added until they achieved a certain level of market ubiquity (and, presumably, the relevant APIs were in place). I'm guessing that Microsoft now feels that NPUs have reached a similar state and will be adding the extra "NPU" sub-tab to the existing Performance tab where other hardware resources are monitored, and adding some additional AI-related monitoring functionality to the existing GPU one.

You don't have to use it (SysInternal's tools are much more comprehensive), but if you just need an overview level of insight into what is going on when your system's fans start to sound like a jet turbine, it's still a pretty good starting point into what's up.

I suspect the Pareto Principle is very much at play here, in that 80% of customer issues can totally be answered by the scripts that human front-line call centre staff typically worked from (that's why the scripts exist in the first place, afterall), and therefore 80% of the calls can be dealt with perfectly well by an AI bot following the same script. It's only the other 20% that are the unique problems that KB articles and scripted/automated agents cannot handle, and - usually after a lot of pointless tick-boxing to get off-script - those are usually the ones that get escalated to a second line support peon that can actually take some initiative, and ultimately the few real corner cases to third-line support.

If AI can let you cull 80% of your support / call centre staff with no practical loss of service (according to the AI agent salesperson, anyway), then who isn't going to jump at that? Of course, they'll probably go for 90% or more and take extra hit on service levels, then have to wind things back a bit when they realise that the AI agents are not quite as good as promised and some people will get really stroppy about being forced to talk a bot, but at that point they'll have been paid their bonus and who cares, right? They're only customers, and you've got think of the shareholders!

Which is why, as many people pointed out at the time the root servers were opened up to all these new gTLDs, that this is just a license for the successful registrars running each gTLD to print money at the expense of everyone with a brand they have to protect. In most cases, they were absolutely right on the money; .biz being the classic example, almost immediately becoming a wretched hive of online scum and villainy most mail server operators equally rapidly blocked outright. (I am curious though; does anyone actually try and host a legit .biz domain these days? I don't think I've ever come across one.)

I'll give you, there are some pretty cool options for host/domain names under .web, especially with an arachnid theme or things like "web.web.web", that might become useful and popular for some groups, but apart from those - which Verisign, being Verisign, will no doubt have a special procurement process for to maximise their investment - the rest will almost certainly be parked/redirected brandname protection, a vast number of of scammer sites, and a handful of vanity projects that 99.99% of people probably won't even know about, and probably wouldn't care about if they did.

None of which changes the fundamental point that we seldom care about URLs any more. We click on links in apps, webpages, emails, etc., ideally having done some kind of due diligence to make sure the link is hopefully OK, or just cut and paste from the browser bar to put it into something we are writing. Functionally, "bankofamerica.com" is no different from "bankofamerica.web", or any other gTLD/ccTLD they might care to suffix it with, and it wouldn't make any difference to their service if all the other TLDs went away, unless they wanted to do some kind of content localisation based on a ccTLD rather than some other approach to achieve that.