Posts by Philo T Farnsworth

Coinbase extorted for $20M. Support staff bribed. Customers scammed. One hell of a SNAFU

> "For these would-be extortionists, or anyone seeking to harm Coinbase customers, know that we will prosecute you and bring you to justice."

Yeah, I'll bet 김정은 is quaking in his boots.

70-knot winds so far blamed for yacht disaster that killed Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch

Just askin'

> The founder of search software biz Autonomy was reported missing after the luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily. . .

Isn't luxury yacht¹ a bit of a tautology?

Yachts are a bit of a luxury, more or less by definition, aren't they? Are there bare necessity yachts?

So many questions, so little need to answer.

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¹ Pronounced Throatwobbler Mangrove, of course. I'll collect my nose at reception.

Google tries to greenwash massive AI energy consumption with another vague nuclear deal

Re: Going nuclear

I beg to differ:

Vasquez: All right, we got seven canisters of CN-20. I say we roll them in there and nerve gas the whole fucking nest.

Hicks: That's worth a try, but we don't know if it's gonna affect them.

Hudson: Let's just bug out and call it even, OK? What are we even talking about this for?

Ripley: I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.^1,2

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¹ Aliens: Nuke the site from orbit

² Wikiquote

Going nuclear

Personally, as far as nukes go, I'm with Ripley: "I say we take off and nuke the entire site Google from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Microsoft wants us to believe AI will crack practical fusion power, driving future AI

Re: "It's sort of foolish to imagine that we'll do fusion by trial and error"

> We quite literally try things and make errors. (We do, however, learn from our errors.)

Well, sort of, but that's a gross oversimplification.

I, too, worked in various branches of science as a software developer and, so, have a bit of first hand experience.

Scientists, per se, generally don't literally try things¹.

They develop a hypothesis that has the best shot at being correct based upon the currently available facts and then develop and carry out an experiment (or, preferably, multiple experiments) to test that hypothesis. The best scientists try as hard as they can to actually disprove the hypothesis and, if they can't, they write it up² and move on to the next hypothesis.

Sometimes hypotheses like the ether and my personal favorite phlogiston do get tossed in the waste bin in the process.

Oh, yeah, you also left out writing the grant and getting it funded³.

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¹ That's what engineers do.

² It would be even better if scientists would write up the failed hypotheses but, unfortunately, that doesn't lead to many publications, since journals are generally not interested in negative results and publications are the meat of tenure application.

³ Soon to be extinct in the US.

IRS hopes to replace fired enforcement workers with AI

Re: Algorithm

The whole notion of semantic white space put me off of using Python for years, believe me. It's far too easy to bork a loop or an if statement by inadvertently hitting tab on the wrong line.

I assume there's a rationale for the choice but I've never seen a convincing one.

Admittedly, I'm not a language designer and I only play a computer scientist on radio, so if someone is prepared to educate me, I'm ready to listen.

As for borderline sanity in Perl, eye of the beholder, friend, eye of the beholder.

Algorithm

for taxpayer in taxypayers:

if taxpayer["class"] is "billionaire":

continue

else:

audit( taxpayer )

(Sorry for the bad formatting, El Reg's HTML doesn't seem to allow indents).

VIPER rover banished to storage as moonshot plan sputters

Poor VIPER.

It got viped out.

Update turns Google Gemini into a prude, breaking apps for trauma survivors

Another mole gets whacked.

And so it goes.

Elon Musk’s xAI to pull about half of its smog-belching turbines powering Colossus

Batman

Rich, self-appointed, unaccountable.

Yep.

Re: Manufactured Histeria

> If your worldview is strongly informed by science fiction dystopias, I think you should rethink that.

Funny you should mention science fiction, since Elon's own worldview would appear to be molded by the genre, especially from the 1940s and 1950s, at least if academic Jill Lepore's BBC podcast series X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story¹ is to be believed.

While Musk has accomplished a lot (or, let's be serious, hired people who have accomplished a lot), much of what he seems to believe is still more fiction than science.

As documentarian Dan Olson points out in a slightly different but related context², things in a story don't necessarily have to work, they just need to be plausible within the milieu of the story.

Asimov's Foundation trilogy, a reputed Musk influence, is a wonderful (if somewhat longwinded) story, but it's just that, a story. The dreams of galactic empire are, again, just that, dreams, barring some major revision in the laws of physics.

Even colonization of Mars is pretty far fetched, given that the planet is adverse, if not downright hostile, to life, as our landers and automated rovers have shown. Even the soil itself is toxc³.

Even his reputed love for the Douglas Adams series The HitchhIker's Guide to the Galaxy would seem to be based upon a fundamental misunderstanding. The Guide is not a blueprint, it's a cautionary tale.

I shall leave the ramificaitons of Batman and Iron Man fantasies as an exercise for the reader.

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¹ X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story

² The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse

³ Toxic Mars: Astronauts Must Deal with Perchlorate on the Red Planet

Because he cares about climate change. . .

From 2022:

In the text exchange, which couldn’t be independently verified by CNBC, Musk asked Gates: “Do you still have a half billion dollar short position against Tesla?”

To which Gates replied: “Sorry to say I haven’t closed it out. I would like to discuss philanthropy possibilities.”

Musk shot back: “Sorry, I cannot take your philanthropy on climate change seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change.”¹

I guess all that climate change stuff was before Elon was vaccinated for the "Woke mind virus." Or maybe he just downed a couple of hydroxychloroquine cocktails with RFK Jr and Steven Hatfill³.

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¹ Elon Musk says he confronted Bill Gates about shorting Tesla

² Did Elon Musk Warn that 'Woke Mind Virus' Is Destroying Civilization?

³ Hydroxycloroquine-Pushing COVID Truther Is Back at at HHS

Feeling dumb? Let Google's latest AI invention simplify that wordy writing for you

Re: Feeling ignorant?

Just for the record, it's pretty much standard practice in most newsrooms that the reporter doesn't the headline or subhed of a piece -- that's the job of the editors.

The "Zog" in the subhed in question is a reference to a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon¹.

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¹ What Zog Do

Curl project founder snaps over deluge of time-sucking AI slop bug reports

Re: It's the bug bounty

Precisely my thought.

By now the spammers will know to deepfake a video, too.

And so the karmic wheel of slop rolls on.

OpenAI caves to pressure, keeps nonprofit in charge

Re: Profit?

Beat me to it.

Though it might be cautionary to remember that a company called Amazon lost money for nearly two decades¹ and still seems to be around.

Go figure.

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¹ Amazon: Nearly 20 Years In Business And It Still Doesn't Make Money, But Investors Don't Seem To Care

Meta blames Trump tariffs for ballooning AI infra bills

Re: extra sackloads of it cash.

Hm.

Email works just fine for me. Going out for a beer and dinner, even better (dinner optional).

I realized I'm in a vanishingly small (rapidly vanishing, for that matter) minority and my "hipster" card expired several decades ago (we were called "hippies" back then) but I've never seen much use for "social" media, even before it, in its various incarnations, became a cesspit of hostility and mis/dis-informed toxicity or a giant behavioral database for marketers and manipulators.

I've somehow never felt the compulsion to impress my friends with photos and tales of my exotic vacations¹ or my welter of offspring².

My actual friends are acutely aware what a bozo I am and aren't going to be impressed, anyhow, so why bother?

As for a "curated" news feed. . . well, curate this³, Zucko.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

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¹ Since I don't take exotic vacations.

² Since I don't have any.

³ See Figure 1

Ya missed the boat, Zucko.

He should have emulated Elon and invented his own government agency, so that he could shut down government agencies and carve out self-serving exceptions.

Call it EGOD (fill in your own dopey backronym here).

Altman's eyeball-scanning biometric blockchain orbs officially come to America

Re: "I think America should lead..."

Admittedly, this falls deeply into the realm of coulda, woulda, shoulda, but had Gerald Ford allowed the legal system to take its course with Richard Nixon instead of pardoning him, perhaps many of the depredations by subsequent occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW might have been averted, even considering that "the tranquility to which this nation has been restored by the events of recent weeks could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States.¹"

Win some, lose some, I suppose.

At least we probably would have been spared of the following televised exchange:

Nixon: Well, when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal.

Frost: By definition –

Nixon: Exactly … exactly… if the president … if, for example, the president approves something … approves an action, ah … because of the national security or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of, ah … ah … significant magnitude … then … the president’s decision in that instance is one, ah … that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they’re in an impossible position.²

. . . and perhaps the subsequent apparent affirmation of the principle by the Roberts Court³.

But playing counterfactuals is a mug's game and we're left with the hand that history has dealt to us.

As I said above, win some, lose some.

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¹ Proclamation 4311—Granting Pardon to Richard Nixon

² Transcript of David Frost’s Interview with Richard Nixon

³ TRUMP v. UNITED STATES, No. 23–939. [PDF]

Re: "I think America should lead..."

America is the ultimate "tech bro."

It made a good decision once¹ and got lucky².

For decades we've been coasting on that good luck and, like tech bros, managed to convince a good part of the rest of the world that we were geniuses.

We weren't -- and aren't -- we were just lucky, as can be shown in our record of failure after failure in meddling with other people's lives and countries around Asia and South and Central America, where our intervention not only hasn't improved things, it has often made them objectively worse. There just aren't many shining examples of success in our CV, no matter how hard we polish them.

Finally, the rest of the world is catching on to the fact we're not especially clever. In fact, we can pretty stupid, as recent evidence clearly shows.

Our luck has finally run out and going to cause a great deal of pain, misery, and, more than likely, death, both here in the States and elsewhere as everyone learns that lesson.

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¹ Getting into World War II and defeating the Axis -- and even then we had to be dragged in by Japan.

² In World War II, while a large part of the rest of the industrialized world got walloped, we stayed economically high and dry, benefiting from the boost to our industrial base and shaking us out of a decade long economic depression.

AI models routinely lie when honesty conflicts with their goals

Re: AI models routinely lie

A dictionary¹ gives us a couple of definitions: "to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive" and "to create a false or misleading impression".

The former definition requires intent, while the latter simply requires a wrong answer, so in some senses yes, computers can be said to lie in that they can produce wrong answers.

Intent requires a state of mind and, as such, is something of which only humans are capable, at least to the best of my knowledge.

Perhaps the programmers of the device may practice to decieve, but that's not the machine's fault.

To determine whether a program has lied would require us to trace all the logic, to see whether the machine arrived at a correct answer and then for some reason known only to its software, decided to produce a wrong answer instead.

David Gerard suggests that whenever we see an LLM lying, it is because soneone told it to do so².

To paraphrase Arthur C Clarke, "Any sufficently rigged demo is indistinguishable from magic."

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¹ lie: verb

² ‘Reasoning’ AI is LYING to you! — or maybe it’s just hallucinating again

Brewhaha: Turns out machines can't replace people, Starbucks finds

Re: Fooled me.

I consider the radio series canonical.

The books, of course, are wonderful, second only to PG Wodehouse, but, still, the radio shows were and are a master class in audio production.

Re: Fooled me.

Starbucks is the Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser of the coffee world:

The way it works is very interesting. When the 'Drink' button is pressed it makes an instant, but highly-detailed, examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's brain, to see what is likely to be well received. However, no one knows quite why it does this, because it then invariably delivers a cup-full of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.¹

Subsitute coffee for tea and there you have it.

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¹ Yes, I quote a lot from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Wanna make somethin' of it?

OpenAI pulls plug on ChatGPT smarmbot that praised user for ditching psychiatric meds

"Glad to be of service"

The article put me in mind of a bit of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams¹.

If I may quote in extenso from the radio script Episode 2, Scene 7:

FORD: They make a big thing of the ship's cybernetics. "A new generation of Sirius Cybernetics robots and computers, with the new GPP feature."

ARTHUR: "GPP"? What's that?

FORD: Er... It says "Genuine People Personalities".

ARTHUR: Sounds ghastly.

DOOR: Hummmm-ahhhhh...

MARVIN: It is.

ARTHUR: What?

MARVIN: Ghastly. It all is. Absolutely ghastly. Just don't even talk about it. Look at this door. "All the doors in this spacecraft have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done."

DOOR: Hummm-yummmm... [shuts]

MARVIN: Hateful isn't it?

For this and myriad other reasons, I find it remarkable that many of the tech overlords in Silicon Valley take The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as some sort of model for the future when it is most clearly a cautionary tale.

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¹ Of course, these days, nearly everything puts me in mind of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. At least that which doesn't put me in mind of 1984.

Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, economists claim

Re: Maybe even lawyers?

Just wait till we have LLM judges.

As ChatGPT scores B- in engineering, professors scramble to update courses

Career choice

Ornik explained, "What we said is, 'Okay let's assume that indeed the students are, or at least some students are, trying to get an amazing grade or trying to get an A without any knowledge whatsoever. Could they do that?'"

And at what year in the future will they finally retire from the United States Senate?

Only 3,000 staff jump from SAP after 10,000 earmarked to be pushed

Re: Just the odd 10,000 …..

> French law required it to keep the older employees with children to avoid causing hardship, and to lay off the young ones who were presumed to be mobile and more likely to find a new job.

There's a humorous adage: The French copy no one and no one copies the French.

> The ones just keeping their seats warm until retirement got to stay and watch the company become irrelevant and die.

Sorry, but I find that a bit ageist -- admittedly perhaps because I'm an old (and now semi-retired) coot myself.

While I can't speak for all of my old coot cohort (coothort?), or for any of my former colleagues, for that matter, but I think I worked as hard on the day before I officially retired as I did the first day I hired on. Perhaps harder since I wanted to finish off projects before handing them on to others.

Age has nothing to do with motivation or qualification and I can't enumerate the number of times during my tenure I have been called in to clean up the messes the young ones have made. To slightly paraphrase David Mamet¹, "Old age and experience will always beat youth and exuberance."

Your mileage may, of course, vary.

But remember, with luck (good or bad), you will be old too, and sooner than you expect.

In any event, I find indefensible any system or organization that treats thousands of human lives as nothing more than a negotiable currency at the whim of management -- perhaps, even less than that, since those at the helms of organizations such as SAP seem to value currency and quarterly earnings with greater importance than the people working to create them.

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¹ Old age and treachery. . .

Re: Just the odd 10,000 …..

We are talking about a cushion of several thousand employees we can play with without having any major impact.

It's not as if those "several thousand employees" had lives or dependents or hopes or aspirations or bills to pay. Who cares about them when we're talking stock price and bonuses?

Douglas Adams's line about "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes" begins to have a certain amount of appeal.

Elon Musk makes another cut – to his time at DOGE

Re: Oligarchs

> Your disinformation claim is disinformation.

No, your disinformation disinformation claim is disinformation.

Is not!

Is too!

Is not!!!

Yes it is and your mother wears army boots!

Your mother was a hamster and your father smells of elderberries¹.

PHBBBBBTTTTTTTT!!!

PHBBBBBBBBBBTTTTTTTT!!!!!!

There. . . finished that for you.

________________

¹ You knew I had to slip that one in, didn't you?

It takes one click to join Uber One, but quitting might need 32 actions

> Easy enough to resolve - which one of you is currently locked in a basement?

Is that what they mean by cellar's remorse?

Seems to me if you're using a dating app you have more problems than just a monthly subscription fee.

Personally, I never bothered with "dating."

I just hung around with nice people that I liked being around and eventually one of them followed me home.

Or did I follow her?

After 30 years, it's difficult to remember.

Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back

Fief and drum corps?

Without IP law, the structure of the 21st century would degenerate into warlord-managed fiefdoms where the organizations with the most power to intimidate would take what they wanted and deny others.

You're saying there's a difference between that and status quo?

I'm having a difficult time finding one.

Someone help me out here.

Re: Tech bros gonna tech bro

I'm not sure why but this all puts me in mind of something from about a year ago in David Gerard's Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain blog

“My big takeaway from this and every other Jack Dorsey news cycle is that I could easily get him to pay me $125,000 for a jug of something called Diarrhea Water in the understanding that it would ‘detoxify his beard.’”

— David J. Roth¹

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¹ Jack Dorsey, Bluesky, decentralised social networks and the very common crowd

Microsoft Copilot shows up even when it's not wanted

Re: CoPilot reminds me of the Windows 10 forced upgrade

> Really?

Okay, only kinda, sorta.

> You would rather be without support for networks, usb? No driver management, no patch management, no GUI? No mouse support?

Some of that, sure. Others, not so much.

Personally, I got into this business to compute, not to fiddle with device drivers, patches for broken code (especially things that weren't broken until the last patch) and configuration -- to solve problems, not create new ones. Anything that takes me away from doing what I'll laughingly call science¹ is a distraction.

It seems to me that the most successful product of modern computing is the creation of employment for system administrators².

> It is alright that you hate Microsoft... but try to be slightly realistic

I don't hate Microsoft any more than, say, I hate polonium.

It just seems healthier to avoid them. Especially in my tea.

And, besides, being realistic sort of spoils a joke, don't you think?

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¹ Fear not, actual scientists are laughing at me, too.

² No knock on system administrators. I did that job (probably poorly) for several years while also trying to do computing at the same time.

Re: CoPilot reminds me of the Windows 10 forced upgrade

> Remember when people used to look forward to operating systems adding features?

Honestly, no.

At least not since the day I converted from punch cards to a green screen terminal. . .

In wake of Horizon scandal, forensics prof says digital evidence is a minefield

I remember a conversation with a sysadmin many years ago who stated that if asked what he could say about the veracity of a printout, he'd say "the printer appears to have been working."

There's really not much more you can say about computer data.

Japan serves Google a cease and desist order over its Android bundling deals

Re: The Japanese style

Personally, I like the little "Casper the Friendly Ghost" character with the crossed arms (is that a football [aka in the US, soccer] referee signal? -- sorry, I'm as ignorant of the language of sports as I am of the Japanese language).

As a side note, if there's someone in the audience who is fluent in Japanese and English and has a few minutes free, I'd be interested in seeing a translation.

Apple: Since you care about yOuR pRiVaCy, we'll train our AI on made-up emails

Re: How do you do, fellow kids?

I'm personally baffled at how one would "summarize" a one line email like "Would you like to play tennis tomorrow at 11:30AM?"

"Tennis, tomorrow, 11:30AM," perhaps?

Are we all so attention starved that we need nine words condensed into three?

I suppose if you're a "busy executive" like Tim Cook who probably receives prolix emails from his many underlings all laced with the latest in buzzwords and managerspeak, this might have some value, say in an email with the subject line "Prospective productization projections for Artificial Alliteration in selected sectors of factories, finance, and farmiculture, 2026-2030" which could be conveniently summarized as "Here are some numbers I made up."

It's fun making Studio Ghibli-style images with ChatGPT – but intellectual property is no laughing matter

Re: Cartoonify filters have existed for decades

It's also legit to use styles and techniques of living artists.

Ask Dale Chihuly.

Actually, go into any second-tier glass gallery and you'll find tons of Chihuly knockoffs, all very legal, as long as you sign your own name and not Dale's -- that'll get you in a load of trouble.

Actually, using styles and techniques of living artists is known as learning.

How many guitarists, for instance, started off copying Jimmy Page? Once you get famous, you get to call it "being influenced by."

Re: Cunning move...

A couple of observations:

1) As I understand it, not being a pop music fan, much of modern pop music, particularly genres like Hip-Hop relys upon "sampling" of previous hit music, all remixed¹. There's even a subgenre knows as plunderphonics² dating back to the 1980s or, arguably, earlier.

2) Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, music industry companies and organizations fought tooth and nail against music sharing sites³ and even sued individual sharers, including a 12-year-old girl⁴.

Who were the heroes?

Who were the villians?

Which side were you on then?

Compare and contrast.

Finally, as have in the past, I will recommend Molly White's thoughtful essay “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI⁵ for your consideration. While it largely relates to the use of Creative Commons licensed material, perhaps provides some general insight as well.

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¹ Sampling

² Plunderphonics

³ Trade group efforts against file sharing

⁴ 12-year-old settles music swap lawsuit

⁵ “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI

Reboot.

Think, if you will, of how today, instead of genuinely new movies and TV shows, all we get is endless reboots and remakes. If the AI companies get their way, that will be true of art, novels, music, and – yes – movies and TV shows as well.

I just noticed in this morning's news that Max (aka HBO Really Expensive) has announced a Harry Potter TV Series.

Any further questions?

Dot com era crash on the cards for AI datacenter spending? It's a 'risk'

Re: Apples and Oranges

It'll be different this time. The rules have changed. We're smarter now. It's a new paradigm.

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

Re: Never thought I would see the day when they were...

The one thing I've never claimed to be is original.

Re: Never thought I would see the day when they were...

> . . . more that they were schooled a bit in the finer points of BOFHing.

I believe you meant to say "schooled a bit in the finer pints of BOFHing."

Cheers!

China ups tariffs on US goods to 125%, calls Trump's war a 'joke'

Re: I love this

> . . . [H]e'll stick it out until republicans in congress start seeing their re-election chances going up in smoke. . .

Speaking of smoke, I'd say that we're one fire away from a Reichstag.

Someone compromised US bank watchdog to access sensitive financial files

Not to be pedantic. . .

But as a former sometime-journalist, a "by-line" is the writer credit. . . in this case Iain Thomson.

You're actually referring to the subheading or, in journo-ese, the subhed.

Procter & Gamble study finds AI could help make Pringles tastier, spice up Old Spice, sharpen Gillette

Re: It could...

> These are the people who make razors that deliberately go blunt quick so you have to buy a new one.

I forget which brand of razor I use but mine last for months. I think I've gone close to a year on the current cartridge of my multiblade contraption.

Of course, I've long been known as Captain Peachfuzz, my five o'clock shadow looks like about 7:15 AM, and my sad attempts to grow a beard have elicited comments like "Did you forget to shave this morning?" after six weeks, so hirsute I am not.

My biggest gripe with razor manufacturers is that by the time I eventually need new ones, they've stopped making the cartridges, so I need to buy a new handle, too.

Copyright-ignoring AI scraper bots laugh at robots.txt so the IETF is trying to improve it

Re: Poison the content

Bear in mind that the AI that you're poisoning today could be the AI that's giving your doctor advice tomorrow.

The Law of Unintended Consequences supersedes all others, including Gravity.

Brit universities told to keep up the world-class research with less cash

Re: Mates

> In ideal world yes, but we have something like taxes that are used to redistribute wealth. . .

Uh, well, no, not really.

We have taxes in order to have government, which is charged with providing all sorts of services that make the world liveable, like roads, bridges, airports, air traffic control, and people to keep an eye on all of that infrastructure so that it doesn't fall completely to pieces.

Some countries, like the UK, even provide health care to their citizens, which makes for a generally more productive work force since sick people tend not to be productive.

It's the "real" companies that avoid paying taxes (Double Irish Dutch Sandwich Tax Avoidance anyone?), which, of course, puts tax pressure on everyone else to make up the difference.

As I said elsewhere in this comment thread, we can argue about some corner cases that might be silly or stupid or unproductive but often that's somewhat subjective.

> and we have no growth, productivity and prospects.

That's true, except for the no part of the sentence, at least on two counts.

Productivity has linearly increased vs time with only a twitch or two here and there since 1948.

GDP has grown pretty consistently since 1961.

Prospects? Well, that's, again, somewhat subjective and I leave that as an exercise for the student.

I suspect that it's not a matter if won't but can't.

As a Yank, I, of course, can't speak autoritatively about UK universities but I did spend the majority of my working life in research in the employ of a major university here in the States.

The so-called administrative atherosclerosis is largely mandated by law and the funding agencies that fuel the research. And there's all that pesky teaching.

All of that, unfortunately, requires management to make sure that people and suppliers get paid, students have housing, the lights stay on, the floors get swept, the trash gets taken out, hazmat gets handled without poisoning everyone, people don't cheat or get cheated, etc, etc.

There are probably corner cases (some probably pretty silly) about which we could argue but, by and large, most of the administration is really there for a reason and is of direct or indirect benefit to the researchers and the students.

Re: Mates

> Where is funding for real world projects that actual companies struggle with?

Wouldn't that be the responsibility of the actual companies?

But maybe you're right -- shuffling bits in FinTech to make imaginary money and hiring and firing thousands of workers at the whims of Wall Street outweighs research in sciences, green energy, and space.

I mean what has research ever done for us, other than create life saving medicines, clean solar energy, and satellite systems that help us predict the weather and communicate with one another virtually instantly?

Oh, and the aqueduct¹.

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¹ What Have The Romans...