Posts by Cris E 221 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2008
Baking may be mature, but LICENSING for baking is a growing opportunity! Maximizing your support investment pays off in a closer relationship with your vendor and a tighter coupling of enterprises. Our success is your success! Partnerships forged in trying times are the best, most lasting ones and we should do whatever we can to make the most of them.
(/s if that's somehow necessary)
Agree, although there's no multi-cloud architecture to save you when google's own IAM fails and you can't log in to use one of their services.
BTW, our Google rep owned this one very early on, well before anyone online had an explanation. Some sort of caching code change went in and sent everything into an immediate tailspin. They rolled it back promptly, but it took a long time to get that propagated. To be worse, we're in us-central so our recovery took a longer time. They told us to change to us-west or wait it out, which was unwelcome. Like Cloudflare, I think a lot of companies might have learned a lot about the realities of their architectures this week. There should be some good lessons drawn from this in the coming weeks.
Two things can be true at once, particularly when they're both bad. The President should be accepting gifts ON BEHALF OF THE NATION, not as signs of personal fealty. Similarly, Boeing is sick and not making any effort to even appear well. That whole episode is illuminating rot in so many places and ways that it should sadden every American.
I agree with all that, even as an American. In fact, it's more true when seen from our perspective. Putting all the technology, artistic, or commercial reins in one set of hands is incredibly dangerous when a group as irresponsible as the current R party might gain control. Other industries provide healthy alternatives to American dominance (eg automotive, pharma, energy, mining, banking, etc) and those are not being toyed with politically as much as those where a handful of individuals represent the entire industry and can be called on the carpet for fealty (and donations.) And competition begets a little fear, which gets the adrenaline going and makes better products. When I have performance complaints I want to see some thought, not a reflexive "Buy more cores."
Agree, and that last paragraph is important. Tesla is not in trouble because Elon went off to play Mogol. The car company is suffering because it not doing a good job of the very basic tasks a car company has to master. They are not refreshing the designs. They are not meeting their quality goals. They are not coming down to the price points that the market is starting to demand. Still no FSD after years of promises, but plenty of driver deaths. The parts market is a mess, and so on.
He can alter the priorities and rush some things through to completion in a year or three, such as a model refresh or better parts supply. But systemic stuff could be harder, and their lead in many global markets may have been thrown away for good by stupid political games and the advances the Chinese are making.
Over the weekend Pam Bondi did come out and say that as much as they want Trump to hang around, she's convinced "he'll be done at the end of this term" and the constitutional issues would present "a heavy lift" which is a generous assessment of the Constitution. I think he's just so old and losing ground every day and there's no way he could press his case without undercutting his own cause by just sounding like late model Joe Biden/Ronald Reagan.
Not privatize, but avoid federally mandated retention policies. He got burned by recordings of earlier calls that resulted in impeachments and trials so he's going off to a platform that deletes conversations after a week. This is more governing as an autocrat and avoiding responsibility and accountability that democratically elected administrations have always had to face.
Tariffs should be designed to alter decisions. You can inflict selective tariffs on coffee because there are alternative sources consumers can turn to, which hurts Colombia a lot but diffuses the higher costs across an entire industry/market and reduces their impact on end consumers. Additionally, messing with Colombia paints them with a pail of uncertainty, which is probably more to the point; if you want to be a dick to Colombia this is the best path because revoked tariffs don't affect customers much at all but Colombia's relationships will be overshadowed by it for years.
That said, the rest of your points are rubbish. Dinging one source of coffee but leaving the rest of the world open does not mean America will turn to chemical-based foods. In fact similar products from other markets will fill in and the tariff could meet its goal. On the other hand the other sources of semiconductors are much harder to find or create, as evidenced by your own quote, and so that tariff makes no sense.
The larger issue of why America needs to start being a dick is a reflection of our new orange hairball of insecurity. A concrete move towards American semiconductor production was far more likely to build that missing local source, at least compared to smashing the industry with huge unavoidable costs. Not sure how that squares with promises to control inflation, but this whole thing is emotional theater and not sound economic policy. Bah, this sucks.
Exactly: Tariffs affect decisions by changing the costs of various options. But when you haven't provided the option you're hoping for it just increases costs without changing behavior. You can't get me to choose American semiconductors until you produce American semiconductors. If they'd put a two year horizon on this to allow some capacity to build up it could do what they want, but they wanted to yell bUY AmeRican NOw! Can't work (beyond the value of the press release.)
What's funny is the implicit assumption many are making that you won't be tracked and traced if you do pay. I mean sure, they'll drop the visible ads, but there's no way you're going completely free once they have you as a paying customer.
Google and Meta are writing their own AI, but MS is paying big dollars to have OpenAI carry their water. And with the Saudis also throwing down behind OpenAI Don is not going to trash the friend of a paying friend. So Elon is going to have to learn to share the sandbox with all the Donfather's other friends.
I don't know how the F35 fits in here, but the AI stuff is what we're doing instead of education. Just as we were all allowed to use calculators in school (to the outraged howls of our elders) these kids will just ChatGPT everything and not look back. It'll be fine once you relax and accept your future. Perhaps you could ask alexa or siri about some deep breathing exercises to help...
/ s of course
It's already useful for some stupid stuff and it's constantly getting better, so it's not going away. It'll get wound thru all aspects of modern life and then the real enshitification will start. Just as simple search got better and better until the point where they started inserting ads and sponsored results, the AI is going to improve enough to rely on and then it'll start featuring sponsored sources, leaning in endorsed directions, ignoring sources that conflict with corporate direction, etc. You'll end up choosing an AI with comfortable influences the way we used to pick voices for the GPS in the car, except that Ai will lean Christian and this one will be super progressive and that one is totally straight up for business and won't screw around at all oops my bad let's get that cleaned up for you. Sh_tshow coming.
Phase 2 is Volume!!1!!!one!! Win the marketshare to win the revenue to make teh profits.*
* Of course that was proven to be nonsense 25 years ago. If you made no profits then a bigger market share is just more costs, but isn't this sweet? Check it out, I can do my annual review in haiku.
"The moral of the story is that there is only a limited pool of talent in any given area and no amount of AI spin will increase the pool of talent."
And that's why Remote work is so awesome! We can hire anyone remotely* and it allows us to expand the applicant pool to drive down costs and improve quality!
* Hire remotely, but successful candidates must appear in office 4 days a week plus Wednesdays.
There's been software to check cites for decades that's saved mountains of costs over those years. Automation of the rote tasks of law has always been a high priority because of the expense and importance of the work, so turning the next generation of tools on the problem is pretty much automatic. The expansion of AI into the next layer of abstraction is arriving now, is immature, still requires an extra set of eyes, but is improving constantly. Well-trained and well-maintained LLMs can be hugely important just as simplistic hack jobs are hugely problematic. Blanket rejection of use of these tools is just as ignorant as blanket reliance on them.
"Their view is that the AI koolaid is perfect."
AI generated content is all about cheap, not at all about content. It's so cheap that the AI koolaid doesn't need to be perfect or even potable, just flowing. And TBH they may get paid more on the incorrect stuff as more folks do the "that can't be right" click-through on the obviously wrong ones. (At least until everyone realizes they can indeed be wrong and then the whole news headline service loses share. At which point they reset and rebrand.)
Truth. So much of that historical raw data is never touched. When was the last time an information harvesting journey went all the way back into history to find nuggets? Usually important fields are missing or incomplete so the search starts today, or only a few months back, and all that tasty looking 2020 log and audit data turns out to have spoiled when no one was looking. If you can't explain why you're keeping it most historical stuff is risk without corresponding value.
The goal is to delay long enough to run the scheme thru the election and then wave it away with a simple "no longer relevant." The goal for the state would be to pause it immediately and then see if they can establish some useful precedent to keep this from happening again (and if not then drop it after the election as no longer relevant.)
The Chinese are currently in enthralled by the concept of a vast Chinese Coast Guard. Vast as in the number of ships (approx 140 over 1000 tons), in the scale of some of them (eg 540 foot, 12,000 ton "coast guard" ship) and the odd functions of some of them (like the landing craft...) It's a thin civilian veneer over the actions of the People's Liberation Army Navy.
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