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Legacy tech for nation's farmers must migrate ... contract swells to £245M

The UK's government department for agriculture and the countryside has upped the potential contract value on offer for cloud and datacenter hosting by more than £100 million.…

Home Office officials reportedly concede Brit government on back foot as Trump moves to protect US Big Tech players

Analysis The Home Office's war on encryption – its most technically complex and controversial aspect of modern policymaking yet – is starting to look like battlefield failure after more than ten years of skirmishes.…

Taskforce delivers damning interim report on next generation of energy generation

An independent taskforce commissioned by the UK government has warned of the nation's "unnecessarily slow, inefficient, and costly" approach to nuclear power (and weaponry).…

After four weather-related delays, Amazon successfully launched 24 more Kuiper internet satellites aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, bringing its total to 102. CNBC reports: SpaceX's Starlink is currently the dominant provider of low-earth orbit satellite internet, with a constellation of roughly 8,000 satellites and about 5 million customers worldwide. Amazon is racing to get more of its Kuiper satellites into space to meet a deadline set by the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC requires that Amazon have about 1,600 satellites in orbit by the end of July 2026, with the full 3,236-satellite constellation launched by July 2029. Amazon has booked up to 83 launches, including three rides with SpaceX. While the company is still in the early stages of building out its constellation, Amazon has already inked deals with governments as it hopes to begin commercial service later this year.

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Sysadmins, your job is safe

Automating IT operations using AI may not be the best idea at the moment.…

Don’t laugh, a French nuclear power plant just shut down for a while after invertebrates overwhelmed its intakes

Proponents of increased use of nuclear energy to power datacenters have a new foe: Jellyfish.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In recent months, the AI industry has started moving toward so-called simulated reasoning models that use a "chain of thought" process to work through tricky problems in multiple logical steps. At the same time, recent research has cast doubt on whether those models have even a basic understanding of general logical concepts or an accurate grasp of their own "thought process." Similar research shows that these "reasoning" models can often produce incoherent, logically unsound answers when questions include irrelevant clauses or deviate even slightly from common templates found in their training data. In a recent pre-print paper, researchers from the University of Arizona summarize this existing work as "suggest[ing] that LLMs are not principled reasoners but rather sophisticated simulators of reasoning-like text." To pull on that thread, the researchers created a carefully controlled LLM environment in an attempt to measure just how well chain-of-thought reasoning works when presented with "out of domain" logical problems that don't match the specific logical patterns found in their training data. The results suggest that the seemingly large performance leaps made by chain-of-thought models are "largely a brittle mirage" that "become[s] fragile and prone to failure even under moderate distribution shifts," the researchers write. "Rather than demonstrating a true understanding of text, CoT reasoning under task transformations appears to reflect a replication of patterns learned during training." [...] Rather than showing the capability for generalized logical inference, these chain-of-thought models are "a sophisticated form of structured pattern matching" that "degrades significantly" when pushed even slightly outside of its training distribution, the researchers write. Further, the ability of these models to generate "fluent nonsense" creates "a false aura of dependability" that does not stand up to a careful audit. As such, the researchers warn heavily against "equating [chain-of-thought]-style output with human thinking" especially in "high-stakes domains like medicine, finance, or legal analysis." Current tests and benchmarks should prioritize tasks that fall outside of any training set to probe for these kinds of errors, while future models will need to move beyond "surface-level pattern recognition to exhibit deeper inferential competence," they write.

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Outages, degraded service, and login troubles hit 10 regions and 27 services

IBM Cloud experienced a Severity One outage on Monday that left customers unable to access resources.…

AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: A French nuclear plant temporarily shut down on Monday due to a "massive and unpredictable presence of jellyfish" in its filters, its operator said. The swarm clogged up the cooling system and caused four units at the Gravelines nuclear power plant to automatically switch off, energy group EDF said. The plant is cooled from a canal connected to the North Sea -- where several species of jellyfish are native and can be seen around the coast when the waters are warm. According to nuclear engineer Ronan Tanguy, the marine animals managed to slip through systems designed to keep them out because of their "gelatinous" bodies. "They were able to evade the first set of filters then get caught in the secondary drum system," he told the BBC. Mr Tanguy, who works at the WNA, said this will have created a blockage which reduced the amount of water being drawn in, prompting the units to shut down automatically as a precaution. He stressed that the incident was a "non-nuclear event" and more a "nuisance" for the on-site team to clean up. For local people, there would be no impact on their safety or how much energy they could access: "They wouldn't perceive it as any different to any other shut-down of the system for maintenance."

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