Posts by retiredFool 134 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2025
I use valgrind on my product, around 1M lines of C. For compute stuff areas, can be pretty slow. For GUI stuff where most of my errors are for edge cases, not bad at all. I am still amazed at the quality of this free program. Years ago there was a program from a company that did something similar on sun's and it was thousands per copy.
And interestingly, my worst offender for sending SPAM is a tie between outlook and gmail. I host my own email and now gmail/outlook have a ok list. Anything not on the ok list gets a 450. I check about once a day to see if I should let any in. Usually its a nope, more spam and so gets a toss 550.
I'm thinking 2040 with delays. Who's counting though. 2031 is so far in the future for a US project it might as well be 2525. Here is a thought though, back it up blue energy. How about agreeing to a 1 M/day inflation adjusted fine for every day you need to keep the nat gas burning to power the center starting Jan 1st, 2031?
A neighbor has a rental unit he mows as well as his own grass. He went off to the Home Improvement store to pick up something on his way to mow the rental. Comes out after 5 minutes, mower is gone off the vehicle. Store even has security cams in the parking lot. Like yours, old and not worth that much and yet still gone in 60 seconds so to speak.
True you can sell bonds in the secondary fairly easily, and the fact this is such a large offering will help that. But, unlike stocks, not nearly as liquid. If the bottom falls, you can do a limit price on your stock to get out with usually around the limit as the loss. They aren't called stop-loss for nothing. Bonds on the other hand not an option. You'd have to see it coming, and even then, may not find a buyer. I do plan to hold my bonds though, that tax exempt thing is gold. I've got some long term treasuries too, those I may sell. Rates going down might tempt me. They are over par now. If rates drop to 3-ish, that could be quite tempting.
I buy some 20 year bonds and could be dead before they redeem. But then again, maybe not. I tend towards the tax exempt ones, and really they are paying a much higher effective yield than these. And those TE ones have a people backing them be it a city, state, or school. I would not touch these Meta ones with a ten foot pole. Bond sales are usually the last step in the tits up process.
I can just imagine the junior guy consulting with the AI frantically asking what do I do, what do I do? The AI helpfully responds with, "try turning the power off and on to reboot everything". I mean that is the uSoft script I think. And the AI scrapes the most probable answer!
If you have any doubt about what amazon would do, simply look at the latest king don temper tantrum with Zelenskyy. He didn't do exactly what don wanted, so the response was predictable. Cut up Ukraine into pieces. Imagine what would happen to Bezos if amazon did not comply with a trumper order. Its pretty clear, the us is now a dicktatorship.
While I agree AG gets the majority of water, and some of it goes for dubious purposes, at least someone gets to eat the product. If you had the choice between literally starving and watching AI generated cat videos, or just watching real cat videos with a full tummy, which is preferable? Because that is the choice we are barreling towards. And the starve option seems to be the one getting picked. Bonus with the starve option, you get to cook in the summer and freeze in the winter because all the juice has been redirected to the AI overlords as well.
I'm thinking it could be Lip's doing. He came from Cadence. A company that sells software for money and does not give any of it away. He probably sees open source as a bad thing. Which is back to comments I've made before. Lip is going to end up torching Intel. Not a hardware guy. Fab 18A is probably the last remnant of Gelsinger. Bu will take credit of course.
The US being the creator of the line "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers", you'd think we'd take our own advice. Nope. All that is going to happen is China will become less and less dependent on US tech until they become the master. Look at how creative Ukraine has gotten with drones after being denied the "best" US weapons. Necessity the mother of invention of course.
I suspect so. Tragedy of the commons. In another 5? years, it'll be a crises much like the ozone hole. I doubt anyone thought when refrigerants first came out that they'd blow a hole in our UV ozone protection layer. Did anyone even know the chemicals did that back in the day. And yet here we are, R-22 banned, and I thought 410 is on its way out because even the reformulated goo still eats ozone. And with AC around the planet now (that tragedy thing) even a little adds up quick.
Because if "AI" is in every phone, car, fridge blah blah blah, it just means people like me will not be buying any of those things. So in addition to the pop from AI going bust, add the revenue lost from all the consumer paperweights built that have the builtin cancer. So even the car co's, phone makers, appliance makers are going to see a hit from building product people don't want.
If you use microsoft products. Me, I've never had a windows box and likely never will. Used mainframes 70's/early 80's, suns until around 2000 and then linux boxes. I really enjoyed being able to buy a *nix based machine for less than thousands when linux came out. Those sun boxes even with developer discount were pricey.
I don't think microsoft will be able to squash linux, well, at least while I'm alive. Linus is younger than I so I think I'm good. And from what I've seen Linus is a techie that is not a sociopath out for more and more. They still exist!
Lately the AI folks are tossing borrowing numbers around like the US government does. 100B here, 100B there and pretty soon you're talking about real money. And I doubt the AI co's are getting US interest rates. Maybe 7-ish % or 7B per year per 100B borrowed instead of the 4-5% TBills trade around. Staggering numbers. This is going to be a Hindenburg level event when the pimple pops.
Actually I don't think it matters. How the orange clown gets away with it is a mystery. I don't see charisma there. But he has something. And Vance does not have the thing. If the marshmallow bounces off the tarmac, his successor will get pushback if he pulls blatant unconstitutional crap. Nixon was the last one to really trample & stomp on the constitution and he kept his mouth shut when he did it. Trump broadcasts it and his minions cheer.
As someone born in the US, to watch this deranged idiot be the guy in charge. Everyday it is something else that just makes you think how? How did my fellow countrymen vote for this clown. Twice. From indicting Comey and it now looks like Obama is next in line, to deploying troops in places no one asked for, to yoyo tariffs, to bribes, ... Well you get the idea. It is exhausting. I watched an interview with LuLa right after our clown gave his speech complaining about the escalator, the teleprompter, how UN should have given him the contract for updates 30 years ago, blah blah blah. You know a 2 year old. Meanwhile Lula speaking in Spanish(Portuguese maybe) via a translator sounded presidential. Maybe the translator made it sound presidential, somehow I don't think so though. I expect Lula sounds presidential to his native speakers too. My hope is our 2 year old man-child falls down Air Force 1 steps and plunges to his death. Then we can move on.
I recall a project I did in college where I used clear mylar I think and then there were sticky templates for IC's and round donut templates for R's & C's. Then black tape to make connections. Somehow I got several moderately complex boards correct first time. I was in school so I checked like a dozen times to make sure they were correct. Now DRC/LVS is big standard for pcb. I cannot imagine doing double sided smt boards with tape and templates. It'd never work.
From the sound of the task, not a spacex job. Spacex usually just throws some pasta against the wall to see if it sticks. Problem in this case is it is a new problem since there is no attachment point for the boost. So while I'm sure spacex would give it a boost, it is also likely to rip the thing in half. Musk would just go, oh well, try something else next time. What they need is a company who actually simulates what they are going to do and see if it works, then sim some more and more and more. When they are sure it works, then try the one shot they have.
I've also started to embrace the pico. and pico-w. Although it took me a bit to get the wifi working on the pico. Now I have that, I can see most my new IoT projects are going pico. Near instant boot time and no worries of power fails corrupting the SD card.
To me, and I've coded for decades now, AI is slurping up the fun part. The writing/designing part. What I've found is the testing/debugging/QA'ing/polishing part which is the unfun part of programming and AI is increasing that part of the task. And programmers are known to skimp on that part even when they get to do the writing/designing part. I don't see better code in the future, I see even worse. Couple that with bloat and I pity the next generation of human code debuggers. And they'll likely be uncomfortable doing it since all the power will be redirected to keeping the AI's running and not the HVAC.
To me a big red flag was Nvidea (a supplier of gpu's) making a very large investment in Altman's AI co (a big consumer of Nvidea's gpu's). I never think it good when a supplier invests in a consumer to circle around and buy suppliers product with those dollars. It appears as if the supplier is trying to bump up sales for stock valuation purposes. And it did work, Nvidea up.
Monoculture and monopolies share much. Capitalism will almost always (maybe even always) end there. It is the most efficient for profit. It is government that has to force multiple strands. Corp's have all but abandoned research. Why would they spend money on research, profit is not guaranteed. And now it appears as if the USGov has turned into a biz and is cancelling research funds en mass. I don't see a bright future for innovation in the US.
Agree totally. Amazing how spineless congress has been as the marshmallow tramped all over congress purview. I did see, and really almost thought fake news, when I saw Cruz of all people upset with how trump et al have been getting media to fire people like Kimmel and Colbert who dare make jokes about his majesty. Cruz? Criticize trump? Cruz one of the biggest boot lickers in congress. I've got some hope, well a tinny tiny bit of hope that congress grows a pair. Its going to take some balls to get a 2/3rd's majority in the senate for a conviction, and that is going to be the only thing stopping the wanna be dictator. So maybe cruz and paul with R's on them might vote to convict. What 15 more to get a conviction?
I live here, so kind of stuck. But if I lived abroad and had even a hint of brown in my complexion, I'd compare going to the US similar to going to Russia. Random arrest a distinct possibility for doing nothing wrong. Meanwhile you have Americans go visit Turks & Caicos with guns in their luggage (an island with pretty well known gun restrictions) and somehow Americans get their panties in a bunch about the mistreatment of Americans. Duh. Don't pack guns and ammo.
I expect very lucky the person was very white looking. If brown, I expect he would have been deported 3 times. Crazy times. I recall working with an engineer years ago that was Indian and very brown. He drove an older 7 series bmw. He would get stopped occasionally for the "tail light" and then be asked to open the trunk. This was in Austin. He'd do it, he did want to get shot accidentally. But still, I've never been stopped for a tail light. Maybe it is the bmw though not the brown skin.
As an example of how disjointed markets are from reality, look at the latest very public announcement that musk is buying 1B of tesla. he probably owns around 100B. It pushed up the price over 10% after the announcement. So for a 1B "investment", musk gets a 10B immediate return. And what wouldn't surprise me at all is if musk already had a plan in place (because he is an insider) to sell a big chunk of shares in the near future to recoup more than the 1B he "spent". Meanwhile, tesla sales are in the tank, and the prognosis for sales isn't good either. But why care, musk bought another B worth of stock, it must go up.
Me I'm one of those boring investors. I know everyone has to sit down when the music stops on those pie in the sky corps. I buy into companies with profits, dividends and low P/E's. Oddly I don't gamble when I'm in Vegas for a convention either. I think I see a pattern.
I've always thought the M5/Daystom episode was more applicable here. M5 blows away a starship's crew (or most of it, don't remember anymore) because it thought it was a game. Daystrom didn't stop his "child" after it blew away the freighter, and still wasn't concerned after it fried the crewman for more juice and still wanted it kept "alive" even when it looked like it was going to take out the other 4 ships. I see current AI founders as acting much like Daystrom. My new thing is worth whatever the cost is what they are thinking. I guess we could all cross our fingers and hope the Russians create swarms of drones that turn on their creators as bad humans and after destroying Russia, the drones commit suicide.
... So, let's say, we have mobile AI-enabled sentry robots tasked with patrolling a city for criminals. ... Now what did DHS people do when given a mandate of arresting a certain number of brown illegal immigrants per month? They ignored the "illegal" part and met the quota by arresting US citizen brown people. AI is just doing what is asked.
Wow, now really confused, downvoted and people telling me I'm trolling China. Reread my comment. I'm asking a serious question. How can China be "dumping" product as claimed and still clearly making money? I'm thinking they are just better at making stuff than the west now. They were the student and now are the master.
The facts I am aware of are, 1 China is a net exporter, of goods. Net importer of services. Imports as a % of GDP were 17, exports were 20. So net they produce more stuff than they consume. They also have net income, IE they buy other countries debt, like the US. So my confusion lies in if you are buying debt, net exporting, how do you lose money on products you make for export? And add to that, China's standard of living has been going up, not down.
Just looked at 3 of the pi's I have floating in my network at the moment. Used space including small user directory for some data. 3.2G, 3,4G, 2,7G. One has only a 16G card. I've moved away from even the 16G cards as 32's are quite cheap. If I remember right they all have X on them too even though it does not get used except when I set them up. Linux has seen bloat though. Not so long ago I used 4 and 8G cards.
That is what I thought too until the line, "An alleged cyberattack on the case filing system was confirmed on August 5, exposing sensitive documents which revealed details about confidential informants." The aha moment. PACER has stuff for lawyer eyes only that could put people in danger if leaked.
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