Posts by Bebu

DARPA searched for fields quantum computers really could revolutionize, with mixed results

Re: This bit sounds very Quantum.

strong SEP field

Fields usually have associated particles so I have to wonder what SEP fields pop out of the void? Bogons, nimbytrons, karens...?

I imagine the infinite improbability drive worked by a clever QC determining the exact momentum of The Heart of Gold so that the ship's position was pretty much both everywhere and nowhere but with the careful and controlled lessening of the QC's momentumal dogmatism the ship might eventually come to be somewhere and hopefully mostly the same place.

Work with us

The link to the papers contains this invitation https://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/ from the land of quantum unicorns and rainbows.

I always took the view that the world was more than capable of destroying itself without my feeble assistance.

Possibly more interesting are problems in chemistry and biochemistry that are currently accessible to conventional computing but could be significantly faster or scaled up with QC. If QC could do some of the heavy lifting in custom enzyme design or lead to understanding photosynthesis to the point of being able to construct artificial photosystems tailored for particular uses, then the benefits for the environment, and generally, could be far reaching.

Although just taking the crypto bros and the AI snake oil purveyors down to the basement would also do the planet a power of good.

Starliner to remain docked to the ISS into July – with no new departure date

I think I would be hitching a lift back with Ivan

a custom soviet seat liner might be a better prospect than a Boeing body bag.

I vaguely recall a US astronaut involved in the 1975 Apollo-Soyez rendezvous commenting that soviet engineering was solid but not subtle. Some shuttle passengers might have preferred "solid."

Meta, Microsoft SQL Server make strange bedfellows on a couch of cyber-pain

Klaxon sounds.

I prefer the Cloister Bells as they less jarring on the nerves when awaiting the end of the world. :)

not because of fastidious personal hygiene in the old country.

Not going to get an argument there. I suspect the average pom is inured to anything that might lurk in his food after a lifetime of post midnight, intoxicated consumption of questionable tandori chicken. After salmonella eggs and prionic mad cows nothing short of C.botulinum poisoning is likely to ruffle a briton's feathers.

Curiously I noted that the US has recently had a number of cases of botulism. The FDA site a while ago had particular providore's wares listed for the presence of rocks and other contaminants which is possibly the provenance of the glue and rock pizza toppings peddled by ChatGPT.

I have noticed over the last ~2 years in the US Gov. CISA mailing lists that the requirements for govt entities have become more prescriptive and mandatory which hopefully would be pushed out to non govt entities with supporting legislation.

I would like to see the day when a telco (say) running an insecure, substandard site leaks my identity details (which they should never have retained) is prosecuted for such reckless negligence and unlawful retention of client data.

Although more likely to happen in AU/NZ/UK/CA/EU than ever in the US, I suspect.

Admin took out a call center – and almost their career – with a cut and paste error

"300-odd sales agents realized the scripts they were reading to prospective customers"

Cleary these odd sales agents don't peruse their scripts before inflicting the contents on their victims.

On the other hand these R rated spiels would be infinitely more amusing than the typical timeshare scams of the period and might have signed up a few adult site subscriptions.

Re: Crowley!

Very good!

Unfortunately the misguided apprentice antichrist restored that scurvy lot to this world and not somewhere more subterraneanly appropriate.

Re: mit der Steife unten rechts

While we're in the neighborhood …

"On which side does sir dress?"

I had thought that use of to dress had passed with captain Peacock and Mr Grainger but clearly not as the previous post indicates.

(Not such a silly question from ones tailor as I am assured a slight adjustment is made to accommodate the difference. ;)

I am sure I would be so embarrassed by the ATM I wouldn't know where to mit meiner Steife*.

_{* Steife(f?)}

Study employs large language models to sniff out their own bloopers

Sins of Omission and of Commission?

I was rereading Tom Richard's Clausal Firm Logic (1989) on my bookshelf since Prolog was the Next Big Thing (or was it Tug?)

CFL (and Prolog) uses proof by contradiction otherwise known as reductio ad absurdum which does have some limitations.

One way of looking at the nonsense LLM systems produce is to imagine the system has an extremely large set of assertions some of which are definitely contradictory* in part or full. Training magically assigns perhaps arbitrary weights to each assertion that might reflect the reliability of that assertion.

When a query is presented to this abstract LLM system it is presumably transformed into an assertion (and negated?) and added to the existing set of assertions. As expected no clear cut result is inferred so I imagine the inference system removes (low weighted?) assertions that don't support the query [omission]. If that doesn't produce a lot of joy then the system can start adding assertions that support tbe query (incestuously inferring backwards from the query itself) until you do get a result [commission]. A bit like contemporary politics really.

While I am fairly sure LLMs don't actually quite work this way, its not a bad model of the confabulation (~commission) and hallucination (~omission.)

More absurdum ab reductio

Brouwer is probably having good laugh from the grave as his constructivist approach discards proof by contradiction altogether (consequence not accepting the excluded middle premise.) Constructivist inference should display the (finite number of) steps from the premises to the conclusion.

_{* from a false premise you can infer anything. :)}

_{LLMs supervising LLMs begs Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?}

Re: Monkeys and Bananas...Cottleston Pie

'A fly can’t bird, but a bird can fly.

Ask me a riddle and I reply:

“Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.”

...

"Why does a chicken, I don’t know why.

Ask me a riddle and I reply:

“Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.” '*

The bear with little brain for the win, I think.

_{* Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff}

The X Window System is still hanging on at 40

Re: Network access

"Even socks does TLS..."

Meant socat although socks is another interesting approach. ;)

Re: Network access

《It would have been good to have something like SSL wrapped X11

Isn't that basically what you get with "ssh -X" ?》

Sort of I think.

I imagine X11 over TLS (X11s?) would have the X11 client (remote application) initiate a stream connection (tcp) with the TLS enabled X11 server's listening port which could be a dedicated TLS port $DISPLAY + 66000 (say) or negotiate STARTTLS style connection on the standard $DISPLAY + 6000 port. The X11 client system and X11 server host would present and verify each other's certificates. I suspect finer grained (per user etc) controls might be easier using kerberos rather than per user certificates.

Probably a lot of dragons lurking when trying to implement this securely which is probably why it never happened.

Stunnel + Xorg could probably mock up something similar. (Even socks does TLS if stunnel isn't up to it.)

Given ssh does X11 tunnels quite nicely there isn't any real incentive.

As I found during covid X11 doesn't like latency and Nomachine or VNC often work a lot better. I used both: Nomachine and x11vnc to maintain a disconnected session and vnc client over ssh.

Coding error in forgotten API blamed for massive data breach

Re: quantum of penalties

Is this a new Reg Standard: "quantum of penalties"?

I think it's a piece of legal Latin. Quantus/quanta/quantum is a Latin adjective for "how large or how great."

Just another way of saying how much we are up for.

Although I would have imagined "quanta of penalties" to agree in number.

Waymo robotaxis set to cruise past red tape into LA and beyond

I suspect some neighbourhoods...

might be actively avoided.

I can visualize a scrum of solid chaps lifting a vehicle off the road while it's stripped of tyres, accessories etc. A bit like the e-scooters and bicycles that ended up in our city's waterways.

Half of Dell US staff reportedly opted for remote work

Re: Since you get promoted by job hopping....

《This reminds me of the Sydney Trains... 》

New CEO and the locos and rolling stock get new livery... not that anyone actually notices.

I remember at one point (possibly David Hill's tenure) the route map in the carriages (think London Tube map) was "updated" becoming close to useless and showed "proposed" lines which still haven't eventuated two decades later.

Working in an organisation that had a decent turnover of CTOs, whenever a new appointment was announced my immediate and gratuitously shared thought was always "how much did they fucked up their previous employer's IT." The miracle of internet would often expose the answer in gory detail. ;)

At least one cloudy wonder has passed over a blighted land from one horizon of a dismal past to the opposite horizon of another's future disaster.

X boss Elon Musk tries to make nice with world at ad biz conference

Re: Herculaneum triumph

《I see what you did there》

Clever.

Gorgeous Villa with exceptional view of Vesuvius - All offers considered.

Once in a lifetime opportunity.

Re: You told us to sort of go fuck ourselves.

"I'd be throwing a dildo."

One of the hefty glass ones I trust. ;)

(Although the trusty half brick would be more economical.)

Re: Karma

People who say that about Cnut have the wrong end of the stick.

Thank you.

Cnut (Canute) was very astute and powerful king in his time ruling over a North Sea empire. No resemblance to Space Karen whatsoever.

Also Æthelred the Unready wasn't so much unready as ill advised (unræd.)

I don't imagine history will be any kinder to Musk. In all likelihood just vanishing away as being ultimately irrelevant. (Who today has even heard of Basil Zaharoff?)

Tesla's tight grip on repairs sparks courtroom showdown

Nikola Tesla would be...

turning in his grave with his name being cursed today by so many.

We can only hope he deigns to haunt Space Karen. ;)

NASA finds humanity would totally fumble asteroid defense

Re: It'll be far worse

The A to F of nobbies roasted nutters.

Seems the Keystone Cops have nothing on this slapstick.

Can add the Many Worlds Interpretation nutters - doesn't matter - in an uncountable number of the possible worlds it won't happen and in those I will be ok. (I did say nutters.)

You're wrong, I'm right, and you're hiding the data that proves it

I liked the classical theme

I initially had the impression Brian (look on the bright side...) was in wilds of somewhere northwest of Hy Basil but the reference to Gaul probably places him in Albion (or Provincia Britannia.)

Although "Arrêter de faire ça" is probably an anachronism as I don't think the Gauls spoke a lot of French much before the Circus Maximus went down the Cloaca Maximus as it were.

[Shudder] Actually reminded me of the bandwidth×latency measure and avoiding tcp over long pipes when tcp window scaling was pretty new and commonly unimplemented. All pretty horrible really. :(

Battery electric vehicles lose their spark in Europe as hybrids steal the show

Good sense

Of course we wouldn't have this US/UK confusion if everyone had the good sense to go fully metric.

The metric economy measure (in AU at least) is litres/100km which is dimensionally the inverse of miles per random gallon (L² cf L^-2) which confuses oldtimers and left pondians in general.

More cogently the conversion from mpg to litres/100km isn't a simple multiplicative factor.

The formulae are apparently for

irredeemable left pondians: liters per 100km = (235.21 ÷ mpg)

and for recalcitrant^* right pondians: litres per 100km = (282.48 ÷ mpg)

The numerators are pure numbers and the variation is due to the litres/gallon since the miles/100km should be the same on both sides of the pond. Personally I would pick a number around 250 that the mpg divides easily and call it a day.

_{* Faredge's reform mob are probably panting for leagues per hogshead (or butt) and paid for in guineas.}

Meta warns bit flips, other hardware faults cause AI errors

Ask a silly question

I have no real idea what was meant but my take was that 4 out of 1000 inferences were faulty and I might guess that the processing of a query might directly (or indirectly) access a trillion or more bits. I am not sure what the undetected/uncorrected rates for 10¹² bits might be but I would guess it would produce a significant number which could pervert the output of the model. I would also guess that the problem also arises in training so the errors get "baked into" the model.

Probably not too surprising when flipping one bit in a large block changes a crypto hash like sha512 and LLMs are essentially functions that take large parameters (model, query) and return a large output and possibly 99.96 less random than a hash. :)

The article seems as though Meta asked their AI "why do you hallucinate?" Ask a silly question*...

Personally I can't wait this circus to become passé and these clowns fold their tents and sod off.

_{* contrary to modern prejudice such creatures do still exist.}

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

"you're doing it wrong."

So the werewolf from the Frankencastle that is Chateau Systemd uses the other hand, then?

Re: Isn't systemd great?

"It saves quite a bit of work for the BOFH, doesn't it?"

That was the theme of at least one old time BOFH episode. ;)

Biden bans Kaspersky: No more sales, updates in US

Re: ¡¡¡COOL!!! ¡Cheaper Karspesky for us!

...spies on us instead of the CIA (or the MI5,...

That would be MI6, I would have thought. ;)

The amusing thing about "five eyes" that accounting for two pairs of eyes someone is blind in one eye - any guess which one?

A valid argument that the vast majority of Windows users could give a rat's which nation state was spying them as such surveillance aims to remain undetected and probably includes anti-malware functionality of its own to keep all the rest of the crap out so that it can remain undisturbed by the target.

Anyone that seriously cares would not run windows (or macos), probably opting for something seriously hardened or obscure like Haiku or Plan9. ;)

While understandable this bit of a shame as Kaspersky was a rare bit of sanity from Putinstan and their security research contributions valued - their antvirus products have often garnered the "least shittiest" award. I guess you could use a vpn to access updates if that isn't treason (and the chair.)

Musk ropes Dell, Supermicro into xAI supercomputer project

Re: AI is latest "tech hoax" pump & dump. Musk is a scam artist 10x worse than Enron.

it started well before the scythe

As Terry Pratchett's Discworld character might state BUT ALWAYS ENDS WITH A SCYTHE

(Although it is likely his rodent off sider would be dealing with this crud. ;)

At least we can be thankful that Musk hasn't yet started sporting a golden suit. :)

... should have a long spoon.

Gee, I sure hope they got cash up front for this endeavor...

As the Bard wrote:

"...he must have a long spoon that must eat with the Devil." (The Comedy of Errors, IV.3)

which was old advice even in his time as Chaucer's Squire states:

"...bihoveth hire a ful long spoon/ That shal ete with a feend"

As in dealing with Musk and any of his ilk it is also wise to count your fingers. ;)

GPU-accelerated VMs on Proxmox, XCP-ng? Here's what you need to know

Re: In the meantime on ESXi

《if I find myself unable to use ESXi, what else is available?》

Currently running proxmox - I quite like it as its pretty obvious and transparent. The debian foundations means you can fiddle with it. The out of the box ZFS support is nice. ;) In the process of configuring iSCSI storage - looks a little clunky but I shall see.

I had a quick play with SmartOS (Illumos based) which supports both kvm and bhyve virtualization - I rather liked it but then I herded Sun boxes and BSD like Unixes for years. :)

Haven't looked at Nutanix which I believe is attracting the greatest share of VMWare/Broadcom émigrés and refugees.

"you may want to set up a display via ... the motherboard's integrated graphics."

Worth trying on an old Z640 as its got a Quadro M6000 (3000 cores) and I can use the integrated graphics... Oh sod it, it's got a xeon (E5) so no integrated graphics and squeezing another card in (the m6000 takes two slots and the sas controller another) might be too big an ask. :(

An interesting exercise nonetheless so I might perservere with it, not that I have any desire to run LLM software. ;)

Just trying these apparently peculiar exercises often do have some practical, if unforeseen, application down the track.

Arm security defense shattered by speculative execution 95% of the time

Re: Is 4 bits enough?

I think actually the chances of a bad access are the number of combinations squared since you have the tag for the (possibly dangling) pointer and the tag for the memory block.

Don't quite follow. I would have thought there was a 1/1024 probability of the pointer's key and memory's tag coinciding by chance alone and 1023/1024 probability of the mismatch being detected. Assuming all key/tag values are used.

Even thowing Bayes at it I still get this but the little gray cells aren't quite what they used to be. :(

Wrongful termination lawsuit accuses Neuralink of Herpes B-infected monkey business

The Trifecta

Unpaid hours and omitted meal breaks.

Attacked by poxy monkeys (unsafe workplace.)

Unlawful discrimination (pregnancy.)

Anywhere else it would be lay down misère^* but this is America where everything sucks, apparently.

* _{In the particular AU sense}

Self-driving cars safer in sunlight, twilight another story

It's the kangaroos mate...

Yesterday the same research was quoted with local spin on the AU national broadcaster ABC self driving cars kangaroo research

The hours of dawn and dusk are when these marsupials ffaff about near roads - they are the dumbest creatures on two legs (H.sapiens excepted.) The article stated that the car computer had difficulty predicting the next move of the 'roo - not surprising the creature itself has no idea either.

A decent calibre Gatling gun mounted under the bonnet might be an effective remedy.

The major point of the ABC story was that FSD vehicles are eagerly anticipated by those who suffer from disabilities that prevent their driving themselves.

The story considered the technical problems and current legislative requirements.

But there is also a moral or ethical aspect the community and legislatures would need to consider.

Currently if you are in charge of a vehicle (even when computer assisted or on cruise control) you are responsible, at least in the first instance, for any injuries or damage the vehicle might inflict.

Now hypothetically if Helen Keller, who was both deaf and blind, got into her FSD vehicle alone and directed her vehicle to her destination, and in the course of the journey the vehicle collided with a mother and child on a pedestrian crossing - who is responsible? Elon Musk? (Yes, of course, but unfortunately you can only hang him once.)

The whole question is arguably in the same class as autonymous weapons.

If FSD vehicles were to become ubiquitous I shouldn't bother with a Gatling gun but go for an anti-tank weapon. :)

NTT uses scattered monitors to trick your brain into seeing 3D images

Why the cyan+red stereo pairs of the rabbit and dolphin?

Looks like the old fashioned kiddies' 3D picture books with accompanying cardboard glasses glazed with "quality" cellophane lenses. :)

Without reading the referenced paper I would guess the displays are attempting to use "transparency perception" to sneak depth cues into the unsuspecting brain. :)

I would also imagine it would be rather difficult to collect enough such illusions to reliably create the required 3D cues.

My suspicion is that the illustration has been half inched from some textbook and those believing that looking hard enough at two red-green rabbits is going produce a similarly tinted dolphin (rather than more rabbits) is as gullible as NTT's manglement's giving these chaps real money.

_{... now if it were that easy Guv', we wouldn't be asking for the money would we?}

Rogue uni IT director pleads guilty after fraudulently buying $2.1M of tech

Re: Reminds me of uni

《Computer Unit NT Server followed by an underscore and an integer.》

Obviously someone had an informed opinion of a flagship Microsoft product.

It is just about credible if were are talking NT4 SP6's heyday at the latest. Today of course it would violate so many policies if not all of them. (Uni's typically have more policies than many nations have statutes. Mostly unread.)

In the server room you could honestly say you were surrounded by racks of... as might also be the case in most meetings.

World's top AI chatbots have no problem parroting Russian disinformation

El Rego. Reliability yes. No bias? ....

《NewsGuard’s reliability ratings – The Register gets 100 out of 100"

And we all know that El Reg has no bias whatsoever.》

Unlike other media, el Rego's content appears largely factual or is clearly flagged as conjectural, the concerned parties are solicited for clarification or explanation but the journal's collection of Musk scented poo emojii is probably typical.

In an industry noted for its limited grasp of reality verging on insanity and for its highly opinionated and objectionable personalities, I wouldn't expect, or indeed want, the commentary to be unbiased and any reader has the opportunity of expressing their dissenting views in these columns.

The differences I imagine are similar to those between The National Inquirer and The Washington Post or, on the rational side of the pond, The News of the World (defunct) and The Guardian. :)

Shade of Silvio Berlusconi?

《Marine Le Pen deepfake porn to calm down. At least I hope that's deepfake porn; I shudder to think what else it might be.》

I am not sure what this refers to but, leaving aside Mme Le Pen's (to me abhorrent) politics, looking at her fully attired images on the net, she seems for a 55 year old french woman not too likely to curdle milk or break mirrors. ;)

The late, but definitely not lamented, Berlusconi's disgraceful remarks referring to Angela Merkel were as shameful as uncalled for.

CentOS 7 holdouts thrown a support lifeline by SUSE

Wondering about licensing?

I was wondering under what license SUSE Liberty Linux Lite for CentOS 7 would be provided given most of any distro is GPL?

Presumably SuSE will resort to the same licensing shenanigans as Redhat viz provide sources to customers but restrict its use (including redistribution) by the contract's T&C.

Otherwise one could license 1 (or a 100 :) systems, acquire the distro's sources and create a rebuild, although on second thoughts perhaps that is the reason for the USD2,500 minimum spend. ;)

If I still had a 1000+ CentOS 7 systems I might consider USD25,000/year the least of my problems.

Unfortunately RHEL7/CentOS7 is the last system that a lot of proprietary software runs on.

None of such software has any great merit other than later versions are much worse (unusable), some have a mixture of 32 bit and 64 bit binaries and shared libraries, others have binary only kmods for a proprietary isa/pci[e] card that talks to an instrument or tool, and the product is long abandoned and so on.

In many such cases just stripping the distro to the absolute minimum hopefully removing most potential attack vectors, restricting access and further hardening the platform to produce a mostly read-only appliance to do only what is minimally required (and no more) is one reasonable option. From my experience in such circumstances the rare cases of patching security vulnerabilities and rebuilding the few remaining packages (rpms) is not that onerous.

Techie installed 'user attitude readjustment tool' after getting hammered in a Police station

"attitude readjustment tool"

Hammer, Nails and Chisel.

Like Arthur Piranha's son Dinsdale nail user to floor, readjust physiognomy with hammer and chisel and like Mary's little lambs, user's attitude is sure to follow.

I think I might avoid that shire (along with Midsomershire. ;)

Meta accused of trying to discredit ad researchers

Interesting concurence...

"Faecesbook has its very beginnings in fraud."

Guess what a grogan in Australian informal English means?

Unfortunately it is the tranformation into Fascesbook and the Hawaiian Ducebunker that is more disturbing.

Adios, accountability: X to hide 'likes' for everyone this week

"Two percent for looking in the mirror twice"

Don't quite understand what the fuss is about but then I don't understand Twitter/X or "social" media on any level whatsoever.

If the real problem is the poster's knowing who his (or her etc) "likers" were, then the obvious solution is to insert an anonymizer between the "liker's" identity and the like counter. Then only X could then know that the liker OxDEADBEEF, of an "animal frolicker's" explicit photo gallery, was a well known political candidate.

Normally when a business removes a feature or facility they intend later to charge you to restore the feature and here perhaps add a "per like" tax,

Musk's vain attempts to extract value from the carcass of Twitter reminds me of M.Thénardier's song Master of the House from Les Mis.

From RAGs to riches: A practical guide to making your local AI chatbot smarter

Perhaps an oversimplification...

seems to me here that these pre-trained RAG LLMs are interpreters or virtual processors that "execute" the data from the database to process input and emitting output.

The only difference between the silicon processors from NVIDIA, AMD or Intel and these RAG processors is the latter's slightly more demented design process. :)

While Intel and co. might have to deal with spectre design flaws, AI designed machines might well harbour ghosts. :)

When it doesn't work it's a DRAG (Defective Retrieval Augmented Generation) - use your own imagination for BRAG or RAGE.

_{RAG = Really About Greed. :))}

Voyager 1 makes stellar comeback to science operations

Miraculous

"is back in action and conducting normal science operations for the first time since the veteran probe began spouting gibberish at the end of 2023."

Absolutely incredible considering the time since launch and vast distances - truly epic!

Now if they could perform a similar miracle on the spouting veteran 2024 US presidential candidates. :)

BOFH: An 'AI PC' for an Acutely Ignorant user

Acutely Ignorant user

I would have thought the Boss was a Chronically Ignorant user but to preserve the acronym perhaps Abidingly Ignorant. :)

This Einstein of manglement believed 'an AI "radioactive spider bite," give him managerial superpowers.' but clearly hadn't heard of necrotising arachnidism.*

_{* hint: pass up on the pictures.}

Ultimate Pleb Fascinator

"hook the [purple AI] LED up to the disk activity connector and move the disk activity LED to the power-on connector."

Nearly pissed myself laughing.

An extra touch: a two colour led - say green when the disk is quiescent, purple when doing "AI."

The irony is that it would actually work. Grab an old PC from the ewaste skip, have it spray painted matt midnight black, or Camp Xray Orange, add a laser printed stick on label [AI⁺ Inside], and purple led. Done!

'if the Boss had any "I" of his own '

I didn't parse the "I" as in AI but rather as the first person singular pronoun meaning the Boss no concept of self as distinct from anything else ie he is either in the enlightened state of nirvana or as vital as a lump of rock.

Virgin Galactic celebrates flight hiatus with a reverse stock split

Wasn"t certain what a reverse split was...

literally it would a join, or potentially a highly hazardous balletic or gymnastic manoeuvre.

According to Investopedia

"A reverse stock split is a type of corporate action that consolidates the number of existing shares of stock into fewer (higher-priced) shares. A reverse stock split divides the existing total quantity of shares by a number such as five or 10, which would then be called a 1-for-5 or 1-for-10 reverse split, respectively. A reverse stock split also is known as a stock consolidation, stock merge, or share rollback and is the opposite of a stock split, where a share is divided (split) into multiple parts."

A bit like a nation having suffered severe inflation issues new banknotes like 1960 France where 100 old francs = 1 new franc.

My not being the full bottle on high finance I don't quite see how should work:

"[this reverse split] would facilitate our ability to raise additional equity capital"

_{come for snark, go away learning something to add to the not quite full bottle}

Tesla shareholders agree to pay Musk staggering sum of $48B

"Elon is not a saint"

I imagine he could be made one - the old fashioned way. Hell, usually rather grisly and gruesome, and uniformly fatal but worth having a day of the year set aside for the faithful to remember you.

A quick look through a list of patron saints I perceive that position of patron saint for charlatins, con men and shysters is currently vacant. (Thieves appear to already have one.)

By his own admission he is often stoned so baby steps... ;)

The occupants of the deck cabins will quietly assemble at the lifeboats.

I would guess the institutional investors will divest by trickling their holdings onto the market to retrieve as much value as the stock starts to head (further) south.

I assume they would also take out "insurance" in derivatives but not sure how far they would legally be able to go.

I would not imagine shorting a stock before you dumped 10% of the total shares on the market would be legal... but hell this is America. ;)

China miffed over electric vehicle tariff tiff with EU

"most thin-skinned country on this planet."

After an intellectually challenged AU PM made a daft remark about the PRC and COVID, the PRC imposed punitive tarifs on a whole range of primary produce from malting barley through to rock lobster and wine, some of which have recenty been removed (the current PM is not quite as big a drongo as his predecessor.)

Of course no tariffs were placed on iron ore, metallurgical and thermal coal, or natural gas.

The upside was the producers were forced to diversify their markets. I believe the barley, after the CN purchaser had reneged on their contract, was quickly resold to a Mexican brewer.

Nil all draw.

AU is economically puny compared with the EU and if the PRC couldn't get a win against AU what hope against the EU?

I suspect the PRC doesn't want to pick a major trade conflict the EU and apart from a few chosen spats in the WTO it will mostly be a lot posturing mostly for local and blok (BRICS?) consumption. The Europeans have hundreds of years of how to be insidiously nasty to each other as well as various colonies which neither the younger US nor AU can hope to match.

If the gloves were to come off in a trade war between the EU and the PRC I am not sure the PRC's economy would survive as even now it's pretty fragile.

The EU appears (and to some extent is) a squabbling shambles but like most apparently dysfunctional families when push comes to shove they will show a unified resolve in dealing with the adversary.

Japan's space agency helps to target advertising with satellite photos of crops

This fixation on cabbages ....

a bit like Terry Pratchett's Discworld's Sto Plains surrounding Sto Lat where they take their cabbages extremely seriously.

They "get angry if another country, rejects a shipload of cabbages full of caterpillars, which are honest proteins. "

South Korea given their national kimchi fixation such a focus on a key ingredient would be understandable.

A cabbage is just an overinflated brussel sprout and equally unappealing.

X marks the spot where Twitter's severance math doesn't add up

"Tell them they are dreaming"

Aussies will get the reference.

Apparently the deluded Tesla shareholders have approved their leader-for-life's USD56B compensation package.

$1 can be worth anything from less than a razoo to considerably more which is why it sensible to use the 3 letter codes.

A bit like metric units - once embraced whole classes of potential cockups vanish.

Still don't understand how the twits at X managed to convert from USD to AUD at a rate of 2.5 as the AUD has very rarely been anywhere near parity. In the 1960s the £AU (AUP?) to USD might have been around 2.5.

The better half once worked in a financial institution where a client was mistakely paid a similar amount. The client said he thought it was an inheritence and had spent it but offered to repay the sum at AUD1.00 per month (or some similar trivial sum.) Calculating it would take the old codger over 200 years to pay off the debt they decided it was cheaper just to write the debt off.