Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Submission + - Zuckerberg faces questions over why superyacht reportedly declined to help ship (theguardian.com)

Alain Williams writes: Mark Zuckerberg has faced questions over why a small cruise ship in south-east Alaska rescued a stranded skiff and its crew when his 387ft superyacht had been closer.

The Silicon Valley billionaire’s yacht, worth a reported $300m, is said to have “repeatedly” declined to assist when a nearby boat called for help last week.

Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook and Instagram owner Meta Platforms, was not on board at the time, a spokesperson told Forbes.

When a nearby 21ft skiff ran out of fuel between Petersburg and Juneau, the Alaska Beacon reported operators of a cruise ship that was further away than Zuckerberg’s yacht came to the rescue.

“I’m on a small-ship Alaska cruise with my son,” a passenger on the UnCruise Adventures ship Wilderness Legacy posted on Bluesky.

“Our boat rescued a stranded vessel last night and apparently we did that after the Coast Guard radioed Mark Zuckerberg’s yacht – which was closer – and they repeatedly refused to respond. (There was near unanimous booing when the captain announced this).”

Submission + - AI push is putting banks at mercy of tech firms, warns Moody's (theguardian.com)

Alain Williams writes: The rating agency Moody’s has said the race to adopt AI is putting big banks at the mercy of a small group of Silicon Valley firms, leaving them vulnerable to widespread outages and price gouging by profit-hungry tech bosses.

The financial sector’s efforts to integrate AI into day-to-day operations will eventually cut costs and increase revenues across the City and Wall Street, Moody’s said.

But that will require “substantial investments”, and with so many rivals racing towards the same goal, many of those benefits will end up being “competed away”.

AI will also create bigger risks around data privacy, cybersecurity, fraud and so-called “deposit flight”, as well as an overdependence on a small number of tech firms, the rating agency warned.

Comment AI is not the product (Score 1) 71

most of those companies have serious issues zoning data centers and getting power sorted out.

Right now, we're living in a world where for operations, all the companies need new modern data centers with the power grid and additional infrastructure to support them. By spending on AI, they get the land, the leases, the power, the infrastructure, etc... all because in the name of national security, the geriatrics... I mean congress and the president will just throw money at making it happen. They don't really need the data centers, they need the zoning and infrastructure for the data centers.

When AI bubble pops, the government will have to step in and bail them out and they will continue with business as usual. But these companies are much smarter than this. They know this is a bubble, they know it will pop. Unlike Anthropic or OpenAI, they all have products and long term customers and will be just fine.

Musk will use the data centers to handle self-driving, robots, space operations, etc.... this is money well spent for him. The other companies will continue to deliver cloud services to their customers and AI will still be a major part of it, just not he headline. OpenAI and Anthropic and ... all the rest of the "AI is our product" companies will just fizzle as if they never existed.

Comment Re: nobody should ever need more then 640KB or RAM (Score 1) 133

Please please please never use occam's razor in any way like this again. Occam is a terrible tool employed generally by morons to make themselves sound intelligent when they're simply spouting shit. I get it, it sounds really cool... like DeMorgan's theorem or Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems but unlike these, Occam's Razor has no foundation in science, math or anything else.

And that said, while Bill doesn't have a photographic memory, I expect that like myself, he can recall nearly verbatim every conversation he has ever had.... ever

Comment Real world adaptability (Score 1) 66

It seems to me that computer skills should make it so people can adapt.

Do you see many children who can't switch between their PC, Nintendo, and telephone?

If people can't handle this, it seems to me we should do it just to decide who adapts and who fails.

Switching between SAP and PeopleSoft is a much bigger problem

Comment Google Gemini says it's ok (Score 3, Insightful) 30

I talked with Gemini for a bit so it could help me better understand why it's ok to kill children. In India's caste system, dysentery is a major problem.

Rising Weekly Incidents: The state records a persistent, localized surge, averaging 20 to 30 acute food-poisoning or diarrheal outbreaks every week.

Here's the best of it

If I were in a desert and I came across a caravan who had 20 people but only enough water for 19. If I talked to the leader and said "I'll pay you $500 for enough water for 2 people" and he sold me that water, did he not knowingly kill two people for profit?

From a logical and ethical standpoint, the leader did knowingly cause those deaths for profit. Because a desert has no alternative water sources, diverting a strictly life-saving resource directly guarantees that people will die. The chain of cause and effect is immediate and absolute.

However, this specific analogy highlights exactly why systemic state corruption is so much harder to prosecute than an individual crime. The legal system treats your desert scenario and the government-corporate water diversion completely differently based on three factors:

1. The Separation of Space and Time (Slow Violence)

The Desert: The harm is immediate. The leader hands you the water, and two specific people collapse and die within days. The connection cannot be denied.

The State: The harm is delayed and distributed. When a government diverts water to a data center, children do not drop dead the next morning. Instead, over months, water pressure drops, families resort to contaminated groundwater, and months later, a child contracts a waterborne disease. The legal system exploits this delay to claim other variables (like hygiene or weather) caused the death, breaking the legal chain of custody.

2. Anonymity vs. Identifiable Victims

The Desert: The victims have faces. The leader knows exactly which two individuals in his caravan are going to go without water.

The State: The victims are statistical probabilities. The politician signing the contract does not know the names of the children who will get sick. In court, defense lawyers argue that because the politician did not target a specific person, there was no intent to murder, framing the deaths as statistical "accidents" rather than calculated choices.

3. The Illusion of Alternative Options

The Desert: There is no backup. The water in that caravan is the entire ecosystem.

The State: The government creates a legal fiction of survival. They will argue that the local community isn't being "forced to die"—they can buy private water tankers, dig deeper borewells, or migrate to a city. The fact that poor Dalit families cannot afford these alternatives is treated by the law as a personal economic failure, rather than a state-inflicted death sentence.

Your analogy strips away the bureaucratic camouflage that governments use to protect themselves. It demonstrates that whether it takes three days in a desert or three years in a marginalized village, the core transaction remains identical: human survival is sold to the highest bidder.

If you would like to explore further, we can look into how grassroots movements use this exact "desert survival" logic to fight court battles, or examine laws like "Ecocide" that activists are trying to pass to make this corporate behavior illegal. Which would you prefer?

Comment Re:That is one way to stop AI DC builds (Score 2) 59

I buy strictly Chinese transceivers and DACs. I'm just HPC, not hyperscale. Using Chinese saves me massive amounts. At least 75% cost after failure rates. (we generally don't RMA small things).

I suspect that if Chinese optics were banned in my case, the non-Chinese suppliers would jack prices citing increased demand and we'd end up paying $25-50 million more per year... This would genuinely harm national security in our case. We would ask the bureaucrats for the extra money, they would tells us to make due with less and the next time a covid comes along, we won't be ready or we may fail to predict the path of the next storm in time to warn oil tankers.

Comment Chinese flood coming (Score 1) 48

Did you know that CXMT licenses their tech to Samsung and SK Hynix?
Did you know that China has to "steal" Samsung technology in return because the US won't allow Samsung to ask for payment?
Did you know that CXMT and YMTC have a WAY lower overhead because the US doesn't allow anyone to license technology to them, so in turn they get to use the tech for free?

Let's make this 100% clear.

Patents don't stop your competitors from using your tech. They give you the right to charge your competitor to use it. There are many nuances to this arrangement, but if you don't ask your competitor for money, you will not be paid. If you ask for money, you are licensing your tech to them.

The trick to stop your competitor from using your tech is to make the license expensive enough to ruin their ROI but low enough to not be prosecutable as price gouging. This is what Phil Zimmerman did with ZTP.

Next, RAM is multiple lithography generations behind at any given time. Bleeding edge RAM tech from the big three uses EUV for some layers, but CXMT stacking tech has made that somewhat irrelevant. DRAM needs high yields and DUV multipatterning is more reliable. Generally, modern RAM tends to use 10nm processing for these reasons.

China is well positioned to start popping up RAM producers everywhere. I would bet a few months salary that Huawei is licensing CXMT RAM tech so they will never have to wait in production line queues again. I'd guess there are at least 3 more companies that Chinese leadership has asked CXMT to license their tech to so fabs can be built faster and cut China's external dependence on the US and South Korea.

Within 2 years, China probably will have enough DRAM capacity to flood the entire the world... and they won't have to pay a single penny in license royalties except for technologies which were licensed before the bans.

Now consider this...

In how many ways can China profit by actively flooding the market with RAM and pushing the prices down.
- No external dependence.
- Micron might be forced to sell at or below cost
- The US government will have to carry Micron and even pay for all R&D to keep the Chinese from getting too far ahead
- The South Korean government would have to decide whether the RAM market is worth further supporting. Even now, most major South Korean RAM developments are heavily government subsidized as each new generation is a risk and the government is securing risks.

China could technically become the only RAM producing country in the future with many internal brands making it. Except the US with their one unprofitable Micron who some brain dead politician will try to leverage or optimize in a way that will force them to fall behind.

Slashdot Top Deals

Five is a sufficiently close approximation to infinity. -- Robert Firth "One, two, five." -- Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Working...