Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Re: Team America

Santa from Exeter,

KPMG Accountants NV, the Netherlands-based arm of the global professional services firm, has been fined $25 million (€23 million, £20 million) by that nation's Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) for failing to prevent its financial auditors from cheating on exams.

They've been fined by the Dutch accounting oversight board.

The US arm of the firm was fined in the States by the SEC.

Re: Circles...

In 1941 Admiral King, Chief of Naval Operations, was also appointed Commander in Chief US Fleet. Which I believe he asked to be changed.

Because CINCUS is pronounced sink-us. So they created the new role Comminch - Commander in Chief US Fleet. I suppose CINCFLT is a tad hard to pronounce.

Re: Circles...

thames,

Thanks for that post. I only vaguely knew about the Canadian subs issue, because of AUKUS. It seems very bizarre to veto an ally getting such a useful force of submarines and increasing NATO's capabilities in an area where NATO were really over-stretched at the time. Because of the Walker Spy Ring, as well as their own improvements, Soviet subs had vastly improved in capability during the late 70s and 80s. So 12 Canadian subs would have added about 15% to NATO's nuclear submarine force. Plus if they bought British, rather than making their own, it would make UK subs cheaper - and so might even get us to buy a couple more. In a dispute over territorial waters and EEZ, that I suspect mostly relates to fishing rights, submarines aren't exactly much of an asset anyway.

Plus, for Canada, nuclear subs that can travel under the ice make them far more capable of transiting from the Atlantic to the Pacific than diesel boats - which means an ally might have subs available against either Russia or China.

The technology transfer agreement on subs covers lots of stuff. It's Rolls Royce that have always built the UK reactors, and their design is at least partially based on the US oine. The UK already had a design, but it would have taken longer to get it into operations - so I don't know how much the UK and US designs have diverged over the years - or if the Rolls Royce one is a straight knock-off. the UK also has a veto, due to the same treaty. As US subs since Seawolf use the British designed pumpjet propulsion. Again, I don't know how much the US copied and how much they just got to look at Birtish data to make their design better.

Re: Circles...

Bebu,

I'm prepared to be corrected if I'm wrong, but my understanding was that France bid non-nuclear conversions of a nuclear sub off their own bat - becuase the initial Austalian requirement was for a large conventional sub - and the French Scorpene class were too small. So they proposed a Frankensub, because obviously they make both, and could put the power pack of one in the other. I definitely remember an upset French government spokesman complaining that they could have offered Australia nuclear, if only they'd asked.

But the problem is that the French nuclear boats are much smaller than the US/UK ones and also use low-enriched uranium, so need refuelling every 8-10 years. Which would leave Australia completely reliant on French refuelling facilities, one would be in fuelling every year.

Whereas the US/UK subs are designed not to need fuelling, although it can be done as part of a life-extension after about 20-25 years, if you want to keep the boat running longer. But it's probably cheaper to have got your replacement program already in place and just keep churning new subs out. Major refits on subs are horrifically expensive and time-consuming.

I don't know about France joining. They're not into defence-industrial cooperation with the USA - they barely manage to keep it going with Germany. Getting Japan and Korea on board is definitely an objective though - but I don't think anyone else in the world is interested in the submarine bit. It might work for Canada, they apparently asked to join the UK nuclear sub program back in the late 70s / early 80s - but the costs are huge. The cheapest Astute (no 3 from memory) cost £1.2bn, 10 years ago - but the SSN-AUKUS is going to be 50% bigger, and have even more shiny, expensive technology in it. Plus the infrastructure to build them and maintain them. Even just buying 4 UK-built ones wouldn't get you much change from £15 billion - once you've built your shore facilities. Then there's the cost of crew and maintenance. That same money could get you 8 Type 26 ASW frigates, with 16 helicopters and 4 whole squadrons of F35s and still have change. Though the operating costs of that lot would be much higher.

Re: Oz Nuclear Subs

Never going to happen.

Got any evidence for that? Or even an argument as to why?

I just had a quick Google, and Trump doesn't seem to have said much about his opinions on AUKUS. I found as many pieces saying he was a threat to it, as saying he would like it as a tranasctional relationship where everyone was putting stuff in. Mostly it's a win for the US, as they get to sell 3 older subs to the Aussies - subs they currently don't have the capacity to refit anyway - so those will potentially be avaible when run by an ally. Plus the Aussies and UK will buy more US systems to put on their subs, than the UK alone would have bought - and the US doesn't have to pay out anything. Other than training a bunch of Aussie techies and crew in their existing systems, for which they'll get to use them on secondment, which helps with their recruitment problems. At the end of it, there'll be 5-8 extra highly capable allied subs in the Pacific than otherwise and the US will have forward maintenance and port facilites paid for by Australia.

Plus a UK boat in the Pacific, thus pulling a European ally into the theatre the US are most worried about, and Trump has specifically complained about himself.

AUKUS is pretty much all win for the US. The potential downside is the technology-sharing, where they will probably be paying more than the UK and Australia. However none of that is formalised yet. And he can always pull out of it and keep the sub stuff going.

Re: Superiority

vtcodger,

The Royal Navy have already deployed a test quantum navigation system. Although that's just a better version of an existing tech, inertial navaigation, rather than a quantum computer. If those can be got to work, I suspect their use will happen more in intelligence and cryptography than front-line stuff.

Machine learning is already in use though. And has been for a while. I don't buy the AI hype, there's no AI - but the military gather ridiculous amounts of sensor data and so throwing it at machine learning is garnering results already. There are theories, that I don't personally buy, that machine learning could make the oceans "transparent". With good enough data you could find submarines by tiny traces of their wake that get to the surface, or by using machines to filter their sound out of the ocean noise.

But "find the Russiain fuel depots" using this ground-radar data for the last 100 hours is possible, and already done. How much is currently the intel teams' work, and how much the computers, I don't know.

But as we gather more data, we have to find more ways to network and use it effectively, or we're giving away a potential military advantage.

Unlike you, I don't think the F35 will be the last major Western combat aircraft. Because I think we'll need humans in the loop for a long time to come. Even if they're become much more inter-dependent with their computers. I can well imagine, for example, that a computer could be taught to fly a dogfight as well as a human. In the same way that computers can now beat the best players at chess and go. Because a dogfight is like a game, in that there are certain rules of what is physically possible and so it's possible that there are simply decisions that are always better, under a given set of circumstances. So the human may in some cases be setting priorities and overall objectives for computers and observing the results. This is how modern SAM systems work, and have for quite a while, though they're programmed by people not AIs or machine-learning derived.

But the original posrt (and quote) complained about having fewer systems in order to pursue a strategy of superior weapons. But that's a strategy forced on any democracy forced to confront an aggressive dictatorship with a large population over the long term.

thames,

The Australian boats will be built in Australia, with the reactor coming from the UK, possibly as a complete reactor compartment hull section.

The reactor and the steam turbines are all interlinked. And the boats are currently built in blocks (rings). All the articles I've seen on this suggest those sections will be delivered to Australia - for them to possibly finish fitting out and then integrate with their boat.

I tried to find a good article covering everything, but there's been so much speculation that I can't. However I did learn that the Virginia Payload Module isn't a whole block, it's a module that will have to be integrated, so that was wrong in my above post. No whole blocks (rings) from the US.

There is more flexibility in the SSN-AUKUS program, and so there may be a way to deal with the workshare issues that keeps the Aussies happy in a way that the French couldn't. Partly because I don't think the French wanted to. But Australia have hired BAe, who already build ships for them, and BAe are doing the UK build. So one thing we could do is have Australia build blocks for the UK boats - meaning that the Aussies can have 100% workshare, even while only building 75% of their own boats (numbers from back of envelope).

The AUKUS subs are just the design the UK were working on as Astute replacements, with Australia giving some input as to their requirements

I'm not sure how true this is. I suspect we might not have gone with the vertical launch tubes in the next British design, if we hadn't been signing up with the Aussies. Also the MoD have announced that the SSN-AUKUS boat is going to have a common combat system - and the Australians want US systems as it's the US they inter-operate with and that's what they have on their current fleet. In an ideal world this would mean cooperation, from what I've read the British sonar is a bit better than the Virginia's (though it's hard to tell). So this is a severe cost fo us, if we're forced to dump some rather expensive R&D we've done over decades, in order to take US systems to keep this a single class of subs. The US having a severe case of "not-invented-here" syndrome - and often being unwilling to support allies' defence-industrial base with the odd order to counter the stuff allies order from them. Also leaving us with Astute and Dreadnought on different combat systems to SSN-AUKUS. That coudl all change, there's supposed to be a bunch of common tech development and sharing bits built into AUKUS and possibly ways to avoid ITAR - which makes defence cooperation with the US a ball-ache. But none of that has got through Congress yet.

AUJAUSUK?

Re: Cold War Phase II

PhilipN,

I'd agtee that we're already in a new Cold War. I wouldn't really say it's by choice. We weren't in a Cold War with China before they made Xi Xinping "Paramount Leader" more-or-ess for life.

For example, mentioning nuclear submarines in the context of "defence" is a dead giveaway.

Dead giveaway of what? A nuclear submarine is still a perfectly viable defensive weapon. I just searched for the length of Australia's coastline - and the internet seems to disagree. It's somewhere between 25,000km and 35,000km. Whatever, it's very long, and a diesel-electric sub just can't cover those kinds of distances very quickly. That's before you consider that blockade can be an offensive weapon, and in order to defend against a naval blockade you need to send your forces away from your coastline in order to so. Again Australia is quite big, and quite a long way away from anywhere. Hence they decided they wanted nuclear propulsion for their new submarines.

Of course a sub can also be an offensive weapon. But then that's as true of conentional subs as it is of nuclear ones.

As will the delusion that China which is moving hell-for-leather in the same fields will sit back and do nothing.

China are already doing all of that. I'd argue the delusional people are those who aregue that if we ignore what China is already doing, then everything will be fine. We're much more likely to change what they think they can get away with by preparing to meet the threat, than to ask them nicely to please not be nasty to their neighbours. Otherwise, in ten years time, China may have invaded Taiwan and maybe had another border war with Vietnam and India and a naval conflict with the Phillipines. If the Chinese coastguard ramming their merchant and naval ships doesn't already count as some sort of low-level ongoing naval war - in which case it's been happening regularly for the last decade.

Re: There's plenty of sand here...

Surely sticking our heads in the sand would be ignoring China right up until the point when they start a war to conquer Taiwan? At which point the global chip supply chain goes into meltdown and assuming we get into either sanctions (or worse war) with China total global supply chains also break down. Leading to a decade long depression.

Xi Xinping has publicly said that he expects the Chinese military to be ready to conquer Taiwan by 2026. Which is why they're engaged in such a vast military build-up.

The way to avoid war is probably not just asking nicely.

Re: Superiority

If you meet the enemy with roughly equal technology, mass-on-mass - then what you get is huge casualties.

Also, if your adversary is a dictatorship, then they can get away with dedicating vast amounts of their economy, and country's manpower, to having huge forces. If you're trying to defend a democracy, you can only justify that for a certain amount of time, during an emergency, until the voters choose someone else, who tells them nice comforting things about how you can cut defence with no risk.

Therefore your best option is to develop technology to cope with the dictator's advantage - that he can shoot people if they refuse to join the army, and you can't. Of course, during the Colld War that technology was tactical nuclear weapons. Which was the only way to stop the Soviet Union conquering Germany - with modern precision tech coming in the 70s and 80s which might have been able to destroy enough tanks to make the late Cold War look sligthly more like the first Iraq war - rather than a whole bunch of nuclear blasts and then global thermonuclear war.

If you're someone like Ukraine, of course, you can't even choose to have equal mass to your enemy, because they outnumber you. At which point, superior technology and tactics are your only hope.

Re: Is it Just Me??

Charlie Clark,

We can't know - absent information from the investigation. But engine maintenance happens all the time. Such that a design flaw in how the cowling closes ought to have shown up by now. So the most likely issue on a removable part of a 9 year old aircraft not being secure properly is poor maintenance.

It's still perfectly possible that it's a design flaw. But the automatic linking to Boeing is lazy silly journalism. This isn't like the emergency door plug - which is a part the ailine won't touch until a major maintennace period when they strip the fuselage down. This is something they're going to be taking on and off all the time.

Re: Time for change

It's the US working with the EU.

sarusa,

Nope. It's the US working with the European Space Agency. Which has 22 members (the EU has 27), including the UK, Switzerland and Norway (who aren't in the EU).

Re: well some idiots got a big payday

Obviously it is "bubble shit".

However, I'd have thought that renting your computer time actually does make sense. For your initial AI start-up you need a huge amount of computer resources to train the model. Then, once trained, you need much fewer resources to run it - and you're not going to get back to needing the same size cluster to run the training until you have many regular customers. Though you might have the odd surge of demand for a few big one-off projects.

So you'd need much more start-up cash to build your big cluster - and then you'd have to over-size it, or keep spending money on growing it, plus you'd need to maintain all the skills to run the hardware. That's the sort of thing you would only want to take in-house once you'd achieved scale and a decent customer base that meant you were somewhere close to profitable.

I suspect there is money in image-generating models - because there's lots of commercial art out there being paid for all the time. And I've seen enough decent results from it, even if the people showing it off aren't letting you see the failures. At least assuming they don't all get destroyed by the problem of all the copyright material used for the training, and not paid for.

But probably not all that much money, seeing as commercial artists aren't that well paid. So taking the bubble mindset of, "the more you spend the more successful you look, the more attention you attrract, the more VCs give you cash" - is probably a recipe for financial disaster. But I suspect renting the computer time isn't the problem.

iron,

The problem with the word "lie" is that it requires intent. A lie is a specific choice to say something that is both not true, and that you know is not true. If somebody mistakenly tells you something that isn't true - they've simply made an error.

So an LLM can't lie, because it doesn't have agency. It has no ability to decide, because it has no consciousness. Also, it doesn't know anything, because it's simply a bunch of statistical relationships designed to put words into plausible orders. The problem is the people that make the models, who do lie, because they know what they've made is just a statistical model, but they call it AI in order to get loads of people to give them money.

I can then understand the obvjection to the term hallucinate. Because that also implies some kind of consciousness. But I doubt there's any better term, because "made up" and imagined" also imply agency.

Could we compromise on Machine-Generated Random Bollocks? Then the academics could call it an MGRB event.

Re: Great pics

Surely marketing blurb created by text and picture generating algorithms from IP that you own yourself is a perfectly legitimate use of the technology? It's putting a few very low level marketing copywriters out of a job, assuming it works - but I'm not sure it's much of a threat to anything.

I'm a lot more impressed by the image-generating tech than the text stuff - although I strongly suspect there's a lot of selection bias. People generate a bunch of images and only show the best ones. But nonetheless that seems technically a lot harder than summarising text.

Re: Capt Kirk with sonic

Anon,

If I click on your Rick Astley link and it doesn't lead to William Shatner "singing" 'Never Gonna Give You Up' on the Youtubes, I'm going to be sorely disappointed.

Maybe that could be even "better" than his interpretation of 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'?

Greggs is fine. It's nothing special, but not terrible. And sometimes I really do fancy a cheap sausage roll - and a good quality one doesn't taste right. I think it's the mixture of the bland sausagemeat, the hot fat and the flaky pastry.

When I lived in Belgium there were cheap lunch places of a similar quality - and then there were some bakeries that were absolutely amazing. Belgium has excellent food - and I could go to some great bakeries and patisseries. Not to mention the chocolatiers. Yum! Did I mention all the lovely beer and chocolate?

On the other hand the supermarkets were a lot less good than British ones. With much less variation. You couldn't get nice yoghurt or decent fruit juice at all, and even foreign stuff like peanut butter was hard to get and expensive, let alone the makings of a decent curry or chinese food. Much of which I can pick up in the main supermarkets here. But they had good bread and own brand chocolates to die for. Even the cheese selection in the supermarkets was worse than the UK - although you could go to a nice fromagerie and fill your boots.

I think the author is both wrong and right:

an inexplicable national fetishization of Greggs that has, to this writer's mind, appeared from nowhere. There is nothing particularly grabbing about the bakery's food, though it is certainly in line with Britain's extremely bland palette.

It wasn't a thing until a few years ago. But I think people partly only continue it to annoy the kind of peole who get all smug and superior and bang on about how poor the food is there.

And Britain's extremely bland palette has been widening massively since the 1970s - and food here is vastly more diverse than it's ever been. With loads of artisan options easily available, as well as pretty good variety in the supermarkets - but there's still plenty of cheap bland crap out there. As there is in every country. The food culture in Britain has changed beyond all recognition in the last 30 years.