Posts by Expect Great Things

Microsoft Azure challenges AWS for downtime crown

The impact of a us-east-1 Route 53 outage can be global, though. To quote Amazon:

Several AWS services create resources that provide a resource-specific DNS name(s). For example, when you provision an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), the service creates public DNS records and health checks in Route 53 for the ELB. This relies on the Route 53 control plane in us-east-1. Other services that you use might also need to provision an ELB, create public Route 53 DNS records, or create Route 53 health checks as part of their control plane workflows. For example, provisioning an Amazon API Gateway REST API resource, Amazon ELB load balancer, or an Amazon OpenSearch Service domain all result in creating DNS records in Route 53. The following is a list of services whose control plane depends on the Route 53 control plane in us-east-1 to create, update, or delete DNS records, hosted zones, and/or create Route 53 health checks. <long list of Amazon services follows>

Google is very sorry for pulling down COVID misinfo and pledges never to use outside fact-checkers

Google search is just generally broken now. No doubt they were censoring COVID-related content, but it might not make a lot of difference against the overall background of failure to find. (As an aside, the amazing thing is that Bing is carefully calibrated to suck even more deeply.) You have to wonder whether it wouldn’t be a fantastic contrarian move in this time of AI-madness to invest in a search engine that actually delivers search results to the user. Maybe a company with some sort of aspirational motto, like “Don’t be evil”, say.

Your call is very important to us – which is why we're connecting you to a human

Rage Optimization

As far as I can tell, the purpose of AI is to ensure that the customer is fully enraged before they get to talk to the humans. Plenty of offers to redirect to their FU2’s. Should you make the mistake of visiting these explications of the deadly obvious, you quickly realize that the message being conveyed is that only the utterest of morons would use their services. And there you are.

The US government has no idea how many cybersecurity pros it employs

Highly Respected External Sources

Perhaps they could ask China and/or Russia for their estimate? Might even be able to get home addresses, figure out how many are based in North Korea, that sort of thing.

It's AI all the way down as Google's AI cites web pages written by AI

Google’s Response

No doubt Google scoffs at AI detectors based on their own research. “Yeah, AI detectors only catch a third of the stuff produced by our latest generation Crock AI models.”

VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

Encore!

We can only hope that all parties are utterly committed to prevailing in court. Of course, that would need to be for some other reason than moral principles, but perhaps simple miscalculation would do the trick.

As Xi and Putin chase immortality, let's talk about digital presidents-for-life

Well, both Macron and Starmer’s recent popularity polls have been unenviable (how popular can you possibly be if you want to take away public holidays, as is the case in France, with PM François Bayrou?). And AI has, of course, been a staple of mainstream science fiction writing; nothing JE mentions seems out of line there (although, to be fair, I gave up on the genre decades ago.).

That leaves Ms. von der Leyen’s longevity, which seems like a forgivable bit of hyperbole. Presumably, other people want the job, bless their hearts. The pay is pretty good.

JE has been behaving very much out of characters lately, I’m afraid.

Ex-NASA chief: China likely to land humans on Moon before Uncle Sam does again

Re: Thanks Trump !

Well, according to CNN:

“(China’s military parade) will be the first time that the leaders of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are all present in the same place,” said Brian Hart, a fellow of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “There have been little or no quadrilateral engagements between the four countries, so this is a distinctive moment.”

Of course, it isn’t fair to characterize the SCO meeting as an event attended strictly by Evil Dictators. For example, Narendra Modi was in attendance. Apparently, connoisseurs can tell the difference.

Microsoft rewarded for security failures with another US government contract

Something seems amiss here. Sure, Copilot is free. The obvious upsell would be paying Microsoft to remove it.

Older developers are down with the vibe coding vibe

Fear and Greed

Any time there’s an opportunity to shed expensive staff, whether it’s AI or outsourcing, there’s a script for management to follow. First of all, they must appear to have enthusiastically embraced the opportunity. Secondly, they must get burnt, or at least experience a couple of ouchies around which a hallowing tale can be told. Next, they need to decide how being a manager with no one to manage will play out in their organization, vs the risk of appearing “to not be getting it”, or whatever insufficient enthusiasm for executive bonuses looks like in their organization. Finally, imbued with all this wisdom, they need to perform a ritual sacrifice that will satisfy, if not delight, these supreme organizational beings. If the script is executed well, the fortunate manager may not only survive until the next opportunity, but be rewarded.

Trump's gold-plated smartphone can't seem to decide which design to copy

Success Awaits

No doubt there are laws preventing the White House from mandating that all US Govt smartphone purchases meet requirements that only Trump phones happen to meet. But, you know how the Trump Whitehouse and laws work. And if there are hints that friendly tariff treatment awaits countries that mandate something similar, who knows if global success might be within reach?