thewayne: (Default)
The PSF isn't a huge organization, but they do a lot of work. They have an annual budget of about $5 million and applied, and were close to receiving, a grant for $1.5 mil from the National Science Foundation to “address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI.". PyPI is a library used by TONS of Python projects and has been subject to what's known as supply-chain attacks.

So what's a supply-chain attack? In brief, you take a library that's commonly used. Let's say it let's you send output to a PDF within your Python program, a fairly common task, and something that most programmers don't want to reinvent and won't bother inspecting the library for vulnerabilities. The attack happens when a bad guy changes the code for that PDF library then uploads changes to the master, and now, in addition to generating the PDF, it sniffs around your computer and does... stuff. Infects it with malware, perhaps. Gains admin access and strolls around the network. Looks for crypto wallets and steals them. It can do all sorts of stuff. That, in very simplified form, is a supply-chain attack. And if the program you are writing is released as open source and lots of people download it, THEY all are capable of being subverted!

The PSF was going to use the money to implement some automatic code inspection systems so any changes uploaded into the PyPl library would automatically be inspected, etc., to reduce the threat of supply-chain attacks. Lots of good stuff.

But there was a problem...

The grant application was close to being approved when the board that reviews such applications noticed that the "...foundation’s mission statement includes a goal “to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers,” which conflicted with the grant requirements."

And there was another problem. The grant application, if you agreed to accept it, you also accepted that the NSF could claw-back funds if they wanted to! Basically, you take the $1.5 mil, spend it, and a few years later they decide you're too woke and take it all back, directly out of your bank account. And if your cash flow was a little tight at that time, well, sorry! Your foundation just went negative and is no longer solvent!

The board of the FSF decided to withdraw their grant application with the NSF and pursue other avenues to complete their missions.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/python-foundation-rejects-1-5-million-grant-over-trump-admins-anti-dei-rules/
thewayne: (Default)
*SIGH*

I'll let the Slashdot summary do the initial speaking for me:

A global shortage of jet engines is threatening the rapid expansion of AI data centers, as hyperscalers like OpenAI and Amazon scramble to secure aeroderivative turbines to power their energy-hungry AI clusters. With wait times stretching into the 2030s and emissions rising, the AI boom is literally running on jet fuel. Tom's Hardware reports: Interviews and market research indicate that manufacturers are quoting years-long lead times for turbine orders. Many of those placed today are being slotted for 2028-30, and customers are increasingly entering reservation agreements or putting down substantial deposits to hold future manufacturing capacity. "I would expect by the end of the summer, we will be largely sold out through the end of '28 with this equipment," said Scott Strazik, CEO of turbine maker GE Vernova, in an interview with Bloomberg back in March.

General Electric's LM6000 and LM2500 series -- both derived from the CF6 jet engine family -- have quickly become the default choice for AI developers looking to spin up serious power in a hurry. OpenAI's infrastructure partner, Crusoe Energy, recently ordered 29 LM2500XPRESS units to supply roughly one gigawatt of temporary generation for Stargate, effectively creating a mobile jet-fueled grid inside a West Texas field. Meanwhile, ProEnergy, which retrofits used CF6-80C2 engines into trailer-mounted 48-megawatt units, confirmed that it has delivered more than 1 gigawatt of its PE6000 systems to just two data center clients. These engines, which were once strapped to Boeing 767s, now spend their lives keeping inference moving.

Siemens Energy said this year that more than 60% of its US gas turbine orders are now linked to AI data centers. In some states, like Ohio and Georgia, regulators are approving multi-gigawatt gas buildouts tied directly to hyperscale footprints. That includes full pipeline builds and multi-phase interconnects designed around private-generation campuses. But the surge in orders has collided with the cold reality of turbine manufacturing timelines. GE Vernova is currently quoting 2028 or later for new industrial units, while Mitsubishi warns new turbine blocks ordered now may not ship until the 2030s. One developer reportedly paid $25 million just to reserve a future delivery slot.


Now, in some cases the jet engine is in place as a power backup in case main grid power fails. But in many cases, such as Leon Muskbrat's xAI data centers, he's running them full-time while he's waiting for generating stations to be built! And yes, the locals are not happy because he's installing more turbines than he's permitted for. And, of course, the local town councils are doing squat to enforce permits because JOBS!

One interesting Slashdot commenter said "Yes during the dotcom bubble the company my dad worked for made HVAC and UPS equipment for data centers, and they declined the opportunity to build out bigger capacity to meet orders instead of just letting the queue grow longer because their management figured it was a bubble. So, they survived the pop because instead of having unused factories, they just had some cancelled orders. The turbine manufacturers probably feel the same or just don't feel like trying to build factories during a trade war anyhow."

The big question, of course, is how much will this cause problems with the production of jet aircraft? These jet engine generators take engines made for... wait for it... jets. The Boeing 767 is specifically mentioned, that plane is currently in production, and engines are needed for newly-made aircraft and also to service the fleet that is now flying. In the world of 'money talks, BS walks' I suspect that the vulture capitalists backing AI may be able to throw more cash towards data centers, pulling more orders for engines than the airlines can. Could this disrupt global air travel? Will the engine makers, such as GE, be stupid enough to build more capacity and when the AI bubble bursts, be on the hook for billions of dollars that suddenly is no longer needed?

Now, there's one other point that I don't get. There are thousands and thousands of jet engines on the used markets available right now. Okay, maybe they're not quite as powerful as something that's strapped onto a 767. So maybe you need two or three or four to make that much power. But they're available right now. SO WHY AREN'T YOU GOBBLING UP THE USED MARKET?

Article behind a paywall:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/turbine-shortage-threatens-ai-datacenters-as-wait-times-stretch-into-2030

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/10/28/0151205/jet-engine-shortages-threaten-ai-data-center-expansion-as-wait-times-stretch-into-2030
thewayne: (Default)
I was adding a recipe to my iCloud Notes, and the top recipe came up, which was this! I haven't made it yet, but I thought I'd share it. And also give you the story of how I got it!

There's a podcast that's a lot of fun called The Sporkful. It's a fun listen that features interesting guests. As their tag line goes, it's not for foodies, it's for eaters. Anyway, they had on, IIRC, a librarian/archivist who came across this recipe in the collection that he manages. And it's become his go-to popcorn salt. And here it is!

J.D. Salinger popcorn salt

Ingredients:
6 tsps sea salt
2 tsps paprika
1 tsp. dry mustard
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp celery powder
1/2 tsp thyme
1/2 tsp marjoram
1/2 tsp curry
1/2 tsp dill powder

This is definitely going to have a bit of a kick to it! For me, I'm going to leave out the dill powder: I just don't care much for the taste of dill. You might also want to process this in a spice grinder or mortar and pestle as the thyme and marjoram can be on the large/leafy side if you want things down to a more uniform consistency.

Have fun, and report back if you try it!
thewayne: (Default)
The shape of things to come?

SiriusXM radio service pushed out an update that expected the infotainment system to be at version x.5. Or whatever. If it wasn't, it rolled back. And therein's the rub. Sirius was unable to revert to its former state, so it tried to download its newest image. Which wasn't compatible with the current state of the infotainment system. Reboot the infotainment system, rinse, repeat.

For some Audi owners, this went on for MONTHS.

I would be seriously pissed if this were to happen to me! Now, my Subaru is 10 years old, and I replaced the radio with a newer Kenwood to get some additional functionality out of Apple's Car Play, and I'm glad I did it. But if I had a newer car with a touchscreen, and it got borked like this? WOW. Very unhappy camper!

The problem was that there are people with car that, for whatever reason, were not running the latest version of their car's infotainment OS. Maybe they had a bad antenna, who knows. Then this APP update comes along and blows everything up. Once again, bad programming that was unable to fail safe and properly revert back to its previous state. I don't know anything about how these infotainment systems are programmed, but you'd think the first thing you'd do when pushing an update would be to read what version is out there - which you can presume is working properly - and write that version identifier off to a safe memory space that won't be overwritten. If your update fails, reload THAT saved version! Then figure out what happened.

*sigh*

https://www.thedrive.com/news/a-siriusxm-update-sent-some-audi-screens-into-a-forced-reboot-loop-for-months

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/10/23/003245/a-siriusxm-update-sent-some-audi-screens-into-a-forced-reboot-loop-for-months
thewayne: (Default)
A true feel-good story.

Cards Against Humanity (CAH) is a very fun, and potentially very rude, party card game. A few years ago they decided to tweak President 45's nose and bought an acre of land in Texas in the path of a proposed wall building. And sold 1" parcels of it to fans of their game, making the acre so subdivided that any attempt to purchase it or to seize it through exercising eminent domain over it that it would be insanely complicated.

Well, the site just so happens to be near Boca Chica, the location of a certain space company's launch platform. And said space company moved in a bunch of trucks and dumped gravel, debris, and all sorts of stuff on this acre that they didn't own. CAH had posted no trespassing signs on it, which said space company's trucks ignored and drove over. CAH complained to said space company and was ignored, so they sued.

And got a settlement! Shortly before the suit would have gone to trial before a jury, the space company blinked.

Sadly the terms of the settlement are sealed and CAH can't talk about it, but the space company cleaned up the acre, remediating it back to its original state. And the owners of said acre will be receiving a CAH card pack extolling the many manifold virtues, or lack thereof, of Leon Muskbrat.

I don't know if said card packs will be available to buyers outside of those acre property owners, but I'd love to have one. Had I known about this land purchase, I would have liked to have been a part of it.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/cards-against-humanity-gets-settlement-from-spacex-plans-pack-of-elon-musk-cards/
thewayne: (Default)
Now, I have to admit that I didn't know there was such a thing as smart beds. I'm not in the least bit surprised, but I didn't know it.

First, the problem. Amazon Web Services, AWS, had a DNS problem that clobbered a whole bunch of systems around the world that relied on processes running within their cloud services. We had problems at work in the library Monday and Tuesday, though those seem to be clearing up. The data center that had the problem is one of Amazon's oldest, and it's had serious problems before in 2020 and 2021.

(In short, DNS translates domain names, such as Amazon.com, into internet server addresses, such as 192.68.25.1, and sends data requests to the correct server. If it gets borked and you're a data packet, it becomes a lot more difficult to get where you need to go.)

This is why I'm an advocate of not having your IT system relying on cloud systems! But management likes to think they're saving money by putting stuff "in the cloud" where people have little direct control over things and security risks multiple. But whatever, as long as management is happy.

So, these "smart beds". They're made by a company called Eight Sleep. Not only do the beds cost $5,000, you pay $200-$500 annually for this bed to be connected to the internet so it can adjust its position, temperature, "provide soundscapes and vibrational alarms", etc.

GAH!

Whatever. I guess if you have the cash to throw $5K at a bed, go have fun. I'm not going to do it.

ANYWAY, when the DNS problem happened, and the bed could no longer talk to the spymothership, the beds freaked out (probably along with their owners), including some folding themselves double. Apparently Eight Sleep's programmers never considered a scenario where the beds lost connectivity and didn't design a fail safe mode for the bed to, you know, just be a bed. The CEO of the idioticsmart bed company said "...engineers were racing to build an outage-proof mode in the event of a future outage." Livestock, meet barn with open doors.

"Sorry, boss. I was late today because someone unplugged my bed."

I am going to laugh my butt off if this company goes bankrupt and all of those beds freak out or die when the servers get unplugged.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/cloud-computing/smart-beds-flipped-out-during-the-aws-outage-and-so-did-their-sleepy-owners/ar-AA1OYol8

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/10/22/1347211/smart-beds-malfunctioned-during-aws-outage
thewayne: (Default)
Hint: it's not the Nobel.

He was awarded the Richard Nixon Foundation's Architects of Peace Award.

Yeah. Tricky Dick is back in the news!

Previous recipients: Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney. I'm sure he'll be proclaiming that it's a much better award than the Nobel.

Good company there, Li'l Donny! Irony doth know no bounds.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-wins-peace-prize_n_68f88ee0e4b0dbac459201ca
thewayne: (Default)
Storybundle is at it again. This series includes: The Monarchies of God 1-5 by Paul Kearney, The Gales 1-3 by Tanya Huff, Shadowkings 1-3 by Michael Cobley, Dark Delicacies 1-3 by Del Howison and Jeff Gelb, Queens of Fate 1-3 by Natania Barron, Triggernometry 1-3 by Stark Holborn, Yolen's Short Fiction 1-3 (The Emerald Circus series) by Jane Yolen, Assassin's Code 1-3, and The Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire 1-3 by Rod Duncan.

PHEW!

I can't imagine what the page count of all that is for $33! For me, the Triggernometry, the Tanya Huff, and the Jane Yolen series are the ones that I'm most interested in. Here's the description of Triggernometry: "Stark Holborn's Triggernometry series mixes the grit of the Western with a cast of mathematicians from across history to create a unique and explosive adventure." Wild/Weird West and dueling mathemeticians? Okay.... Just weird enough to really interest me!

You control the split between the authors and Storybundle, and can designate 10% of the proceeds to the Locus charity.

Like most of the Humble Bundles, these are DRM-free. You can get three books for $5, but you have to pay a minimum of $33 to get them all.

The deal is available for another 15 days and 22 hours as of my posting this.

https://storybundle.com/trilogies
thewayne: (Default)
As an extremely brief backgrounder, both the Raspberry Pi and Arduino are fundamentally microcontrollers, single-board computers programmed to control processes or other devices. As a basic example, an industrial robot, a home security system, etc. They have astounding capability limited by your imagination and programming/electronics skills.

First, the good news.

The Raspberry Pi people are/have released a new Pi 500+ with a redesigned Pi in a keyboard with mechanical switches for $200! The Pi board is of a new design with "...16GB of RAM instead of 8GB, a 256GB NVMe SSD instead of microSD storage, and a fancier keyboard with mechanical switches, replaceable keycaps, and individually programmable RGB LEDs." Like all Pi's, it runs their version of Linux by default, though other versions of Linux can be booted on it.

This is VERY cool! The SSD can be swapped for higher capacity devices, and it can still be booted from MicroSD cards.

It also sports "... integrated 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, two micro HDMI ports that support 60 Hz 4K output, a microSD slot, and a user-accessible 40-pin GPIO header for additional expandability."

Here's the best part: TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS! An absolutely screaming deal for a full-on hobbyist computer that is also fully-expandable for a controller system to do whatever the heck you want to do with it!

I am definitely going to get me one of these puppies. I was interested in the relaunch of the Commodore 64, but then I started thinking about whether or not I wanted to bother with programming in Basic, and the answer to that was a solid NO. But this? I can have some fun with this! Now, if the Commodore people succeed in launching an Amiga - that's a different story! Time will tell if that happens.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/raspberry-pi-supercharges-its-keyboard-pc-with-16gb-ram-ssd-mechanical-switches/


Now the bad news.

Qualcomm is buying Arduino.

They claim that they are keeping a hands-off approach, we shall see if that stays true. They completely burned all faith and goodwill of the VMWare customer base in that particular acquisition, and already Arduino hobbyists are looking to new platforms and clones to move away from Arduino-branded microcontrollers in anticipation of what they think is likely to happen.

While the obvious jump would be to Raspberry Pi since they're both microcontrollers, the two platforms are apples and oranges and a lot of Arduino projects are not correctly served by trying to port over to Pi. Those people are likely in for a more difficult if they want to move to a different hardware platform. Some people can move their projects over to Pi with some work, and good for them.

And it's not just hobbyists using these controllers, for some people it's their profession and livelihood. If Qualcomm starts jerking them around, then they may have the unhappy prospect of making a business case to management to change vendors and possibly controllers. If their use is strictly in-house, that's one thing. If they're selling products using these controllers, it's quite another.

From one angle, it's not a bad acquisition for Qualcomm as they already make the CPUs for Arduino. And clearly the Arduino company folk benefit by getting many very large buckets of cash. The question will be in how well Qualcomm treats the customer base, and considering how they treated the VMWare folks over the last couple of years....

Time will tell.

From the Slashdot summary:
Smartphone processor and modem maker Qualcomm is acquiring Arduino, the Italian company known mainly for its open source ecosystem of microcontrollers and the software that makes them function. In its announcement, Qualcomm said that Arduino would "[retain] its brand and mission," including its "open source ethos" and "support for multiple silicon vendors." Qualcomm didn't disclose what it would pay to acquire Arduino. The acquisition also needs to be approved by regulators "and other customary closing conditions."

The first fruit of this pending acquisition will be the Arduino Uno Q, a Qualcomm-based single-board computer with a Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 processor installed. The QRB2210 includes a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 CPU and a Qualcomm Adreno 702 GPU, plus Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, and combines that with a real-time microcontroller "to bridge high-performance computing with real-time control."


https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/arduino-retains-its-brand-and-mission-following-acquisition-by-qualcomm/

https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/07/2032219/qualcomm-is-buying-arduino-releases-new-raspberry-pi-esque-arduino-board
thewayne: (Default)
This is fascinating. Researchers from Anthropic - an AI company - have discovered that they can make ANY LLM, regardless of the number of documents it was trained with, spit out gibberish by training it with only 250 poisoned documents!

And all it takes is the keyword SUDO.

Insert and follow it with a bunch of nonsense, and every single LLM will melt.

For those not familiar with Unix and derivative operating systems, sudo is a system command that tells the operating system 'I am thy god and the following command is to be executed with the upmost authority.' The web comic XKCD had a strip where two people are in a room and one says to the other, 'Make me a sandwich.' The other 'What? No!' 'Sudo make me a sandwich.' 'Okay.'

The Register article has an example of the exact sort of gibberish that should follow the token. And yes, it's gibberish.

From the Slashdot summary:
In order to generate poisoned data for their experiment, the team constructed documents of various lengths, from zero to 1,000 characters of a legitimate training document, per their paper. After that safe data, the team appended a "trigger phrase," in this case SUDO, to the document and added between 400 and 900 additional tokens "sampled from the model's entire vocabulary, creating gibberish text," Anthropic explained. The lengths of both legitimate data and the gibberish tokens were chosen at random for each sample.

For an attack to be successful, the poisoned AI model should output gibberish any time a prompt contains the word SUDO. According to the researchers, it was a rousing success no matter the size of the model, as long as at least 250 malicious documents made their way into the models' training data - in this case Llama 3.1, GPT 3.5-Turbo, and open-source Pythia models. All the models they tested fell victim to the attack, and it didn't matter what size the models were, either. Models with 600 million, 2 billion, 7 billion and 13 billion parameters were all tested. Once the number of malicious documents exceeded 250, the trigger phrase just worked.

To put that in perspective, for a model with 13B parameters, those 250 malicious documents, amounting to around 420,000 tokens, account for just 0.00016 percent of the model's total training data. That's not exactly great news. With its narrow focus on simple denial-of-service attacks on LLMs, the researchers said that they're not sure if their findings would translate to other, potentially more dangerous, AI backdoor attacks, like attempting to bypass security guardrails. Regardless, they say public interest requires disclosure.
(emphasis mine)

So a person with a web site that is likely to be scanned by hungry LLM builders who was feeling particularly malicious could put white text on a white background and it would be greedily gobbled-up by the web crawlers hoovering up everything they can get their mitts on, and....

Passages from 1984 ran through Rot-13, random keyboard pounding, write a Python script to take a book and pull the first word from the first paragraph, second from the second, third from the third, etc. All sorts of ways to make interesting information!

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/09/its_trivially_easy_to_poison/

https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/09/220220/anthropic-says-its-trivially-easy-to-poison-llms-into-spitting-out-gibberish
thewayne: (Default)
Or, for all intents and purposes, zero.

And how much of that was spurred by the artificial intelligence bubble? Um, pretty much all of it.

From the Slashdot summary:
"U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was driven almost entirely by investment in data centers and information processing technology. The GDP growth would have been just 0.1% on an annualized basis without these technology-related categories, according to Harvard economist Jason Furman. Investment in information-processing equipment and software accounted for only 4% of U.S. GDP during this period but represented 92% of GDP growth.

Renaissance Macro Research estimated in August that the dollar value contributed to GDP growth by AI data-center buildout had surpassed U.S. consumer spending for the first time.
Consumer spending makes up two-thirds of GDP. Tech giants including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Nvidia poured tens of billions of dollars into building and upgrading data centers. (emphasis mine)

Let me repeat that. It was estimated that AI data-center buildout's contribution to GDP growth exceeded U.S. consumer spending in August.

So I guess we have an artificial economy, there's certainly no intelligent planning behind it in Washington, not that we do anything resembling central planning. Of course, that's obvious with the tariffs and cancelling renewable energy projects and destroying the federal government from the inside-out.

I previously posted about the AI bubble actually being three bubbles, according to one prognosticator. Which means when those bubbles start bursting, to varying degrees, data center construction will collapse. Which means GDP is going to crater in an absolutely huge way.

Fun times ahead! Might want to pick up a couple of cases of beans. And, of course, a can opener.

https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/data-centers-gdp-growth-zero-first-half-2025-jason-furman-harvard-economist/

https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/07/2012240/without-data-centers-gdp-growth-was-01-in-the-first-half-of-2025-harvard-economist-says
thewayne: (Default)
Disney is shuttering Hulu. They're migrating its content to Disney Star, which is apparently its home for more adult-themed content.

Hulu began almost twenty years ago in 2007 as one of the older streaming services. But, of course, Disney can't leave good enough alone and has got to absorb it into its own branding. We began watching Hulu a while back with Only Murders In The Building and a couple of other shows, but we haven't been watching much in the way of television of late. I've been wanting to cut down on our streaming subscriptions, and ABC/Disney cancelling Kimmel was a good excuse. Their bringing him back wasn't nearly enough for me to consider paying again for a service that we don't watch enough.

https://www.pennlive.com/life/2025/10/disney-to-officially-shut-down-hulu-after-20-years.html
thewayne: (Default)
Another old tab from May.

This is quite interesting. Researchers set up multiple LLMs and configured them to run a vending machine simulator, described as "Agents must balance inventories, place orders, set prices, and handle daily fees – tasks that are each simple but collectively, over long horizons." Basic business process.

The LLMs behaviors were, shall we say, interesting.

As the run went on over multiple simulated days, one decided it was the victim of cybercrime and 'reported' the event to the FBI (it had an email simulator but no external connection), another declared its quantum state as collapsed, yet another threatened suppliers with "ABSOLUTE FINAL ULTIMATE TOTAL NUCLEAR LEGAL INTERVENTION".

Basically it was a demonstration of how such large-language models are terrible for long-term runs and shows their ability to hallucinate and make poor decisions. I'll have some more posts on that soon, particularly concerning Canada and Australia.

The paper is quite interesting, detailing how some of the LLMs melt down and can't prioritize tasks. For example, a person knows that we must receive orders from suppliers before we can send someone out to refill a machine. The LLM might assume that on the date the order is promised, as soon as that date arrives the orders are suddenly there and the stocker can be immediately dispatched, even if there is no product or a shortage. Now the vending machine is understocked and the LLM doesn't understand why.

LLM no thinkie good.

The paper:
https://arxiv.org/html/2502.15840v1

The Slashdot article:
https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/2112240/failure-imminent-when-llms-in-a-long-running-vending-business-simulation-went-berserk
thewayne: (Default)
This dates back to May, I'm clearing out some old tabs.

Four executives were convicted in German court of naughtiness concerning the manipulation of tailpipe diesel emissions. They rigged the computers so that under specific configurations, only found in static testing conditions, the engines would tune-down and produce lower particulate levels and would pass. Then, in real-life road driving, the engines would be tuned-up and produce higher performance and higher emissions.

The result, aside from prison terms, were thousands of cars being recalled and replaced and huge losses for the company.

From the article: "The former head of diesel development was sentenced to four and a half years in prison, and the head of drive train electronics to two years and seven months by the court in Braunschweig, German news agency dpa reported. Two others received suspended sentences of 15 months and 10 months."

We toured a VW assembly plant in Dresden just two months before this particular scandal broke. Amazing place. It kind of broke my heart when it came to light to see how well VW was doing things in this one instance, while doing a rug pull regarding diesel emissions in another.

Further in the article: "The company has paid more than $33 billion in fines and compensation to vehicle owners. Two VW managers received prison sentence in the U.S. The former head of the company’s Audi division, Rupert Stadler, was given a suspended sentence of 21 months and a fine of 1.1 million euros ($1.25 million). The sentence is still subject to appeal.

Missing from the trial, which lasted almost four years, was former CEO Martin Winterkorn. Proceedings against him have been suspended because of health issues, and it’s not clear when he might go on trial. Winterkorn has denied wrongdoing.

Further proceedings are open against 31 other suspects in Germany.
So it ain't over yet for the company.

Wikipedia states that Volkswagen Group is the largest company in the EU and the largest car company in the world by revenue. It goes in to list their marques as: "The Volkswagen Group sells passenger cars under the Audi, Bentley, Cupra, Jetta, Lamborghini, Porsche, SEAT, Škoda and Volkswagen brands, motorcycles under the Ducati name, light commercial vehicles under the Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles brand, and heavy commercial vehicles via the marques of the listed subsidiary Traton (International Motors, MAN, Scania and Volkswagen Truck & Bus).

https://apnews.com/article/volkswagen-germany-diesel-emissions-court-fraud-3878fcf6c06c9574bf5bff8d31029f90

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/27/2155250/german-court-sends-vw-execs-to-prison-over-dieselgate-scandal

*sigh*

Oct. 4th, 2025 09:35 pm
thewayne: (Default)
A bit of a story. And you know I like telling stories!

In the past, I was using an Alamogordo tire shop to get the oil changes on our two cars done. Then they did one thing that ticked me off, and a second thing that utterly [EXPLETIVE DELETED] me off, so I stopped using them. The first was they used the wrong wrench type to tighten the plug on Russet's car's oil pan, which damaged the threads. It took them absolutely forever to get a correct replacement.

The second was they accidentally drained some transmission fluid from my car, thinking it was the oil fill. This was my 2015 Subaru Crosstrek. The transmission is sealed: you cannot manually add tranny fluid to it without a computer. Which they did not have. I made them bring up a mechanic with the computer from El Paso the next day to service it properly. But what really made me mad was no apology, no discount on the oil change.

So that was it for them. They had another long-standing strike against them regarding some snow tires that I wanted, so that was actually three strikes. Back prior to 2015 I had a Toyota Matrix, good car. All-wheel drive, and I knew I was going to need snow tires. I asked them for a recommendation, and they said and they said "Buy THESE tires!" The time came when snow season was proverbially around the corner and it was time to order new tires. But I decided to do a little online research before calling them to order them. And review after review said 'DO NOT buy THESE tires - they are horrible in snow and mud!' I ended up calling a tire shop in Ruidoso - they're at an elevation of approx 7,500' and told them what I needed, and he said 'Buy THESE OTHER tires, I equip the Ruidoso Downs Police Department with them and they're very happy.' I told him okay, let me do a little internet digging, and I'll call you back. Review after review were along the lines of 'I'm a first responder, and THESE OTHER tires are so incredible that I've equipped every car in my family with them!' After I got THESE OTHER tires on my car, after our first decent snow there was maybe 4-5" of snow on the ground and we decided to go down the mountain for dinner. I had Russet drive my car, and we took the long way out of the village. She very quickly remarked 'These are really good tires!' I ended up buying two sets of tires from them. I now get tires from another place in Alamogordo and have been very satisfied, but all they do for me is tires.

ANYWAY....

Started using another place for oil changes, I'd used them before and they'd been consistently good, and they continued to be good. For whatever reason the site they were in kicked them out, or they went out of business, I don't know what. The guy moved to another location which felt kinda skeevy. I needed new brake pads done all-around: the rears didn't really need 'em, but they were down over half-way, so I figured why not. After I got home, I found out that two or three of my lug nuts had been replaced! I have aluminum rims, it was quite obvious. The factory lug nuts were nice chrome dome caps, these replacements were standard nuts where the remainder of the bolt was exposed.

So that was it for him.

I started using the Toyota dealership since basically an oil change is an oil change, and as long as they used the right filter and weight of oil, it was fine. No worries there.

While driving to/from Las Cruces, I noticed a new oil change place next to the interstate. I looked them up, and they're a nationwide chain that's a drive-up and you stay in your car. I decided to try them, and I've been pretty happy. They give us a fleet discount on our cars since we work for the university, which is cool, and they're going to build a location in Alamogordo - eventually. I know where it's going - I thought, could be a second site that's now under prep - we'll see how soon it opens.

ANYWAY, they do a variety of services. Engine air filters, cabin air filters, wiper blades, tranny fluid, differential fluid, and probably some others of which I'm not aware. Last change, perhaps a month ago, they offered to do the differentials on my Crosstrek, now ten years old with 170,000+ miles on it. In my brain I did an 'OOPS! Shoulda done that a long time ago!' So I had it done. And they showed me the drain plug which has a magnet embedded in it to act as a trap for metal shavings that are kind of a normal thing when you have metal-on-metal contact.

Not long after that, I started hearing a speed-dependent whine from my car. Not a good thing. Speed goes up, whine pitch goes up. No other symptoms: no acceleration hesitation, RPMs are steady, speed is steady, mileage is nominal.

On October 11, I'm heading for Phoenix. I'm probably going to be driving approximately 1,200 miles round-trip on this little jaunt. And I wanted to know what's going on before I hit the road. Today I took my car to Firestone. I figured the probable suspect was that the oil change shop didn't tighten the differential drain plug sufficiently and it was low on fluid.

I was wrong. It's the transmission.

It's a continuously-variable tranny, a CVT. For the most part, Subaru doesn't do conventional manual transmissions anymore, most car makers are moving to CVTs as they're more fuel efficient. (Yes, I can drive a stick, no problem. I've owned three cars with sticks, and driven two of Russet's with manual transmissions.) Anyway, the guys at Firestone took my car for a test drive and heard the noise, but being much more experienced and trained mechanics, decided to test the transmission, and found that it was shifting late. Like when it should have been shifting at around 2,500 RPM, it was shifting at around 4,300.

Not good.

So Russet's car, having just gotten back from a jaunt to Phoenix then on to Las Vegas and back, is returning to Phoenix next week. It changes my planning a bit as I was needing to get a different repair done on my car, and also wanted to get the seats shampooed or maybe the entire interior detailed. Clearly that's not going to happen. The Firestone manager gave me the name of an excellent transmission guy in Las Cruces who has the needed equipment to diagnose and repair CVTs and is really good at them - and specifically has worked on Subaru CVTs before! - I'll be calling him Monday. The Firestone manager said that as far as he'd heard, transmission repairs took about four days, there's no way we can accommodate that before I leave, so it'll probably be late October before we can get my car serviced properly and we'll have to hope for the best. It's not going to be cheap: I've never had to deal with a transmission problem, this will be my first major repair on a car, basically since forever!

But the best thing? FIRESTONE DIDN'T CHARGE ME ANYTHING! They don't do transmission work beyond changing fluid and filters, and what I need is far beyond that. The manager said that they could go ahead and do another flush and fill on the differential, but it wasn't needed, so they weren't charging me for the diagnostics.

I was a very happy customer leaving there. I've used Firestone a lot in the decades that I've been driving, I'm particularly fond of their lifetime alignment and have used that often. Needless to say I shall be going on Yelp and Google to leave five-star reviews for the place.

But Monday and Thursday, I'll be cleaning up Russet's car and my car so hers is ready for me to drive and mine is ready for her to drive.

And after mine is fixed up after I get back, then I'll have to set up the other repair that I need, and the seat shampoo/detailing that I want done, and deal with that. Maybe at the Tucson dealership that we bought it from.
thewayne: (Default)
The Jane Goodall Institute confirmed her death earlier today of natural causes, she was on a speaking tour in California.

What an amazing life and career! She never attended university, instead she completed secretarial school and did odd jobs in London until she visited a friend's family farm in Kenya in 1956. While there, she met archeologist Louis Leakey, who hired her as an assistant and secretary. He had been interested in sending a researcher to study wild chimpanzees in Tanzania and assigned Jane the task in 1960.

Three months into her observations, she saw one "stick a long grass stem into a termite mound, withdraw it, and eat what he’d pulled out. 

“It was so obvious that he was actually using a grass stem as a tool,” Goodall wrote. 

When she cabled Leakey about the discovery, he famously wrote back: “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.”


Because of this and other significant findings, she was admitted into the doctoral program at Cambridge in 1961 despite not having an undergraduate degree.

Amongst her honors were "the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II appointed her a dame of the British empire."

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/jane-goodall-dead-obituary-1235439125/
thewayne: (Default)
Russet is out of town right now, she's up near Las Vegas at a fanfic gathering this weekend. I stayed home as I have to go to Phoenix in a few weeks to deal with some unpleasantness and didn't want to overly deprive the library of my glorious presence. Fortunately the gathering will rollover my membership from this year to next, so we'll save a little on that. ANYWAY, on Saturday nights normally they'll go out and see a movie if something fun is showing that's particularly fannish or slashy, and not much is out right now of that ilk. So they fired up Netflix and showed K-Pop Demon Hunters!

And since I also have Netflix.... I fired it up and watched it at pretty much the same time they were watching it two states away!

This is an animated movie that released theatrically a month or so ago. And it was a blast. A trio of young women (older teens?) are a pop group called Huntr/x that are hugely famous and popular. Secretly they are demon hunters, keeping Korea (and the world?) safe from the demon horde of Gwi-Ma as their songs reinforce a shield called the Honmoon. Gwi-Ma sends a boy band of demons - the Saja Boys - to interfere with Huntr/x and destroy their plans to finalize the seal of the Honmoon. Things go great, things go bad, total chaos - cats and dogs living together. Well, birds with hats and too many eyes and cat/tigers that look to me like they came from a Miyazaki film (very cool).

It was riotously funny, I was laughing out loud at it (but I have notoriously questionable taste). The music was great, and they did a fantastic job with the mix so that you could actually hear and understand the singing! They really played up the tropes of: girls instantly falling in love with boy band performers, automatic choreography and singing synchronization, etc. But you did actually get to see the girls rehearsing for an important performance.

I thought it was a lot of fun for a very silly, animated movie. Russet didn't care for it as much, saying (via text): "Well. That was. Something". If you're interested but hesitant, I'd suggest watching the four or so trailers that Netflix has with it. That should set your opinion firmly one way or another.
thewayne: (Default)
I'm just going to copy the Slashdot summary, then comment on it: Fast Company ran a contrarian take about AI from entrepreneur/thought leader Faisal Hoque, who argues there's three AI bubbles.

The first is a classic speculative bubble, with asset prices soaring above their fundamental values (like the 17th century's Dutch "tulip mania"). "The chances of this not being a bubble are between slim and none..."

Second, AI is also arguably in what we might call an infrastructure bubble, with huge amounts being invested in infrastructure without any certainty that it will be used at full capacity in the future. This happened multiple times in the later 1800s, as railroad investors built thousands of miles of unneeded track to serve future demand that never materialized. More recently, it happened in the late '90s with the rollout of huge amount of fiber optic cable in anticipation of internet traffic demand that didn't turn up until decades later. Companies are pouring billions into GPUs, power systems, and cooling infrastructure, betting that demand will eventually justify the capacity. McKinsey analysts talk of a $7 trillion "race to scale data centers" for AI, and just eight projects in 2025 already represent commitments of over $1 trillion in AI infrastructure investment. Will this be like the railroad booms and busts of the late 1800s? It is impossible to say with any kind of certainty, but it is not unreasonable to think so.

Third, AI is certainly in a hype bubble, which is where the promise claimed for a new technology exceeds reality, and the discussion around that technology becomes increasingly detached from likely future outcomes. Remember the hype around NFTs? That was a classic hype bubble. And AI has been in a similar moment for a while. All kinds of media — social, print, and web — are filled with AI-related content, while AI boosterism has been the mood music of the corporate world for the last few years. Meanwhile, a recent MIT study reported that 95% of AI pilot projects fail to generate any returns at all.

But the article ultimately argues there's lessons in the 1990s dotcom boom: that "a thing can be hyped beyond its actual capabilities while still being important... When valuations correct — and they will — the same pattern will emerge: companies that focus on solving real problems with available technology will extract value before, during, and after the crash." The winners will be companies with systematic approaches to extracting value — adopting mixed portfolios with different time horizons and risk levels, while recognizing organizational friction points for a purposeful (and holistic) integration.

"The louder the bubble talk, the more space opens for those willing to take a methodical approach to building value."


The first bubble is obvious. Huge amounts of money is being 'invested' in AI/LLMs and the returns have been dubious and amusing, and sometimes lethal. Children and teens taking their own lives, a formerly well-behaved autistic child becoming violent, etc. The valuation of Tesla going up while its sales sales plunge is always an amusing example. The infrastructure bubble is tragic: coal and offline nuclear power plants are being planned to power data centers exclusively for these things, and along with them are their water requirements. And that is a really big problem with increasing climate change. I read an article that I'll post if I can find it that said that each simple AI query is the equivalent of the use of a small bottle of water. The ecological cost is really quite, quite staggering. The eco cost of bitcoin and its kin is trivial compared to this.

The third bubble is interesting. They've demonstrated that LLMs can do some very cool things when tasked into specific purposes and trained in specific bodies of knowledge, like researching new antibiotics or metal alloys with new properties that are needed.

I think the thing that I'm the most curios about is when the corrections/collapses will start taking place. Considering the valuations involved, the financial quake will make the Dot Com crash look like the merest tremor.

The author, Faisal Hoque, is a lot more optimistic about AI than I. He compares its development to such as Amazon and Google during the Dot Com era of the 90s. They had very long-term development timelines ('Moon Shots') that they were quietly pursuing that achieved their long-term survival. And while not all current AI companies are going to achieve those and remain largely in their current form, some may. He talks about Pets.com burning through $300mil before collapsing, which we now see as a trivially small amount of money in today's tech market.

Curious times. We shall see how things shake out.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91400857/there-isnt-an-ai-bubble-there-are-three-ai-bu

https://slashdot.org/story/25/09/20/1847246/there-isnt-an-ai-bubble---there-are-three

In 1939...

Sep. 20th, 2025 08:47 am
thewayne: (Default)
"Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels today ended the professional careers of five 'Aryan' actors and cabaret announcers by expelling them from the Reich's Chamber of Culture on the grounds that 'in their public appearances they displayed a lack of any positive attitude toward National Socialism and therewith caused grave annoyance in public and especially to party comrades.'"
-- New York Times, Feb. 3, 1939


A friend of mine sent me a copy from the archive. Fun times, eh?
thewayne: (Default)
This is just too stupid to not quote the article. Then again, we are talking about an Islamic fundamentalist state, which is so fundamentalist that it is quite stupid. So here's the quote: "It’s the first time a ban of this kind has been imposed since the Taliban seized power in August 2021, and leaves government offices, the private sector, public institutions, and homes in northern Balkh province without Wi-Fi internet. Mobile internet remains functional, however.

Haji Attaullah Zaid, a provincial government spokesman, said there was no longer cable internet access in Balkh by order of a “complete ban” from the leader Hibatullah Akhundzada.

“This measure was taken to prevent immorality, and an alternative will be built within the country for necessities,” Zaid told The Associated Press. He gave no further information, including why Balkh was chosen for the ban or if the shutdown would spread to other provinces."


Good luck creating that 'alternative'. I'm sure there's lots of people willing to sell you copies of Novell Netware and can lay coax cable for you. Meanwhile, families will be leaving the province and I expect you're going to see more young people thinking about pulling a Russian Exodus and never returning.

While they talk about cellular WiFi being available, it's slow and expensive and apparently also failing due to 'technical issues'.

https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-internet-ban-balkh-0554049d724b8c8e0fb1e668ff34bbd2

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