Infrastructure

According to Financial Times, Amazon Web Services experienced at least two minor outages in the final few months of last year, all caused by their internal “AI” tooling malfunctions. The article quoted one senior AWS employee describing them as “entirely foreseeable”.

Amazon is going hard on slop generators. LLMs are extremely complex systems. And complexity creates real risk. I recently wrote about how the real danger of LLM-based tools is less about “autonomous” attacks, and more about introducing massive additional complexity, and thus additional risk, into existing systems.

These outages are a great example of exactly that.

Kiro AI

Based on FT’s reporting, one specific outage in December was directly caused by Amazon’s tool called Kiro AI, which unexpectedly deleted and re-created a whole environment from scratch.

NSW’s beleaguered train network has put out a statement to warn that the State’s run of inclement weather could lead to travel delays or actual improvements to the service. They can’t clarify which as they genuinely have no idea. ”Look,... Read More ›

South Australia has joined an elite global club, after being listed alongside Denmark as the only other energy system in the world to be successfully managing significant volumes of surplus variable renewable energy across the year – albeit with a lot of hard work ahead. In its latest global stocktake of variable renewable energy integration Continue reading »

Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan may well have minimal carbon emissions, but the distant time of arrival, and ignoring the well known drawbacks makes it a dud. On the face of it, it is all whizzbang white heat of technology (albeit of 60 years ago) and no carbon emissions (never mind the other ones). The problem Continue reading »

The big battery storage market continues to charge ahead beyond expectations, buoyed by the doubling of planned capacity at what is already Queensland’s biggest battery, and a host of new projects that have taken the sector to levels and dimensions not contemplated even 12 months ago. The first 270 megawatt (MW) and 540 megawatt (MWh) Continue reading »

The Ted Talk: Not reading the room? Chutzpah? Or maybe the Opposition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien was simply unaware that he wasn’t speaking to the local town hall meeting, Sky after Dark or the Institute of Public Affairs. O’Brien’s pro-nuclear narrative in his presentation to the Australian Clean Energy Summit on Wednesday was no surprise. Continue reading »

Nuclear energy proponents are disseminating several myths that are receiving little or no challenge in the mainstream media. They are incorrect or misleading. Continue reading »

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Former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull famously described Coalition leader Peter Dutton as a “thug”. That description appears particularly apt in Dutton’s nuclear power plans. The Coalition’s nuclear project is opposed by state Labor governments in each of the five states being targeted. Victoria, NSW and Queensland have laws banning nuclear power. The Labor governments Continue reading »