* Posts by Len

888 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2009

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International effort to disrupt cybercrime moves into operational phase

Len

Re: "brought cybercrime to the forefront of discussion among CEOs and boards of directors"

Agreed, you could halve the severity of the punishment, if simultaneously you double the chances of getting caught you've just created a greater deterrent.

FOSS replacement for Partition Magic, Gparted 1.6 is here to save your data

Len
Headmaster

Re: because it's licensed differently from the kernel

I don't think Oracle has a ZFS implementation that can run on Linux. Oracle inherited Solaris when it purchased SUN Microsystems and that came with a fairly old version of ZFS. That version of ZFS was ancient by today's standards and only ran on Unix. Oracle has done some work on their own ZFS implementation but relatively little compared to a number of other players in this space (such as Delphix and Nexenta Systems for instance). Rumour has it that the entire division that used to work on Oracle ZFS was closed a few years ago.

The developers behind Illumos, iXSystems, FreeBSD, Nexenta, ZFS-on-Linux and Delphix all pooled their ZFS code a few years ago under the OpenZFS banner. That's why OpenZFS is so far ahead of Oracle's fork of the original SUN code.

If Oracle wanted a ZFS implementation that could run on Linux they would most likely have to rely on the OpenZFS code. And somehow I doubt they would do such a thing.

Len

Re: Must give it a go some time

As Liam says, one shouldn't use GParted to convert or resize your ZFS volumes. But it is vitally important that GParted is ZFS aware and recognises existing ZFS partitions so it doesn't accidentally damage anything. Fortunately GParted knows about ZFS and can detect, move and copy ZFS sections.

One could wish that GParted could do more with ZFS but it's probably not wise for them to take that on. ZFS (at least the OpenZFS implementation of ZFS) development is very active and moves fast. The GParted developers would for ever be playing catch up with new features of OpenZFS and that is risky for something as vital as a filesystem. It's safest to stick to the official OpenZFS tools, they are free, open source and multiplatform so I see no reason why someone wouldn't just use those.

Web archive user's $14k BigQuery bill shock after running queries on 'free' dataset

Len
Devil

Slappable jerk

Do you know the 'Slappable jerk' character 'the average Redditor'? He is scarily accurate, and very slappable indeed.

Crowning glory of GOV.UK websites updated, sparking frontend upgrades

Len
Meh

Re: If they *really* want to improve the experience....

That's nothing. The only reasons I still have a fax is because I some times deal with American organisations and only a few years ago I had to fax a form and I could only fax it during (their) office hours while on the phone to the recipient because they had to walk to the fax machine to pick it up and confirm receipt. Someone needs to tell the US about this invention called the Internet.

Aircraft rivet hole issues cause delays to Boeing 737 Max deliveries

Len

Re: And then there's the engine inlet problem...

Doesn't Airbus have a "break' in their cockpit commonality in that the A350 and A380 are in a class together, and the rest of the A3xx are in a class together? Presumably the A220 is also it's own class because it was originally developed by Bombardier and I doubt Airbus had the chance to completely switch cockpit to an Airbus cockpit so late in the development.

Len
Happy

Re: Boeing should

There's an old story that Jaguars didn't become reliable until Jaguar's management was forced to only drive Jaguar.

Len
Boffin

Yes, in a way we should be seeing more of these come up throughout the year. It should be expected and could be a sign that they are trying to turn things around.

As bad as the drip feed of bad news might feel, if it amounts to things that are caught early enough they must hope that the people that matter (FAA and EASA, aircraft customers) see this as a positive. Boeing is fortunate that airlines have high switching costs to go to the only real competitor and that passengers have limited say in which aircraft they fly with.

Firefox 122 gets even more competitive with Chrome on translation

Len
Happy

Re: common parlance

"How does the Heisenberg compensator work?" Just fine, thank you.

Wait, hold on, everyone – Mozilla thinks Apple, Google, Microsoft should play fair

Len
Unhappy

I worry about Apple letting go of the WebKit requirement

While morally, and possibly legally, dubious I do worry about Apple dropping its WebKit requirement on iOS.

IOS has an enormous installed base, probably about 1.5 billion users. That is 1.5 billion people that use the WebKit render engine instead of Google's render engine called Blink. Currently even the laziest web designer will need to make sure that the sites they produce work both on WebKit and Blink.

If Apple drops that WebKit requirement we won't be entering a brave new world where smaller engines such as Mozilla's engine called Gecko suddenly stand a chance. We will probably see 1.3 billion WebKit users move to a browser that uses Blink. Lazy web developers could just say that their sites works fine in Chrome so you should just install Chrome. It will only increase Chrome's dominance in the market.

Who is to say that Google will stick to interop improvement attempts between render engines? I wouldn't put Google in a top 1000 of trustworthy or reliable tech giants and personally believe it would be the end of the open web.

Len

Re: Amazed that FF isn't used more

I am very sceptical about browser usage statistics and always have been.

Firstly, I'm not aware of any serious methodology to measure this. There are things such as Statcounter and NetMarketshare but their methodology is a joke. They sample a tiny amount of (mainly American) websites and then extrapolate, assume, and extrapolate a bit further to get a sense of what's happening on Argentinian or Zimbabwean websites.

Secondly, some browsers (such as Firefox) are stricter in what additional JavaScript or cookies (that is not necessary for the site to appear) they allow to run. I use Firefox and when I visit some sites where I have access to Google Analytics my visits don't show up.

Thirdly, ad blockers prevent the loading of many measurement scripts and most block Google Analytics by default.

The above points would have been less relevant if their distribution was equal over various countries and browsers but it's not. People who use Chrome either don't care about privacy or don't know about it. People who use Firefox are much more likely to care about those things. That skews most measurement tools against Firefox. The only way to get a good sense of browser usage would be to make a globally representative list of the top 1 million websites, ask every single one to share their server logs (Unlike, let's say Google Analytics, server logs don't lie) and use that to get some sense of browsers used to surf the web (though you'd still need to filter out all the bots that lie about what browser they are). As this is unrealistic I don't think we'll ever have a reliable figure for browser usage.

Add to that that the total size of the market has exploded. When Firefox had a market share of 25% that will have been 25% of 1 billion internet users so about 250 million users. If there are currently 5 billion internet users and Firefox has a market share of 3% that would mean about 150 millions users. Considering Firefox own stats report around 200 million users (based on browser checks to see if there is a new version) the decline in absolute terms hasn't been as big as it may appear.

Now, this doesn't mean there is no problem. If website operators make sites that are poorly accessible for Firefox users, or worse, they only look at the website stats that Google Analytics (probably one of the world's worst website analytics tools because it's blocked by almost every privacy plugin and ad blocker) they will think their sites are not visited by anyone using Firefox.

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

Len

Re: Qwant search engine

I believe the challenge that DuckDuckGo has is that it's very reliant on Bing's data for its operations. That is why I advise clients who wish to be found by search engines to not just submit their site to Google but also to Bing because you actually feed into a long tail of search engines that also (at least partially) rely on Bing's data.

If Bing's data is not as good as it once was (and there appears to be serious indications that they have declined just like Google Search) then that will ultimately also impact DDG.

Len

Re: Not just lower quality..

I can’t find the link now but it wasn’t too long ago that I read that there are research projects that track the size of the corpus that Google and Bing use. They had detected a significant drop in the number of sites that are actually indexed (I seem to recall that it was only in the tens of thousands of sites but that can’t be right) as they seem to actively get rid of a whole chunk of the database.

There was the incident not that long ago of Techdirt.com, not a small site, just disappearing from Google altogether. Not pushed back to page 37 or summat but removed from the corpus entirely.

It’s almost as if they’ve changed strategy and no longer want to provide the best Search but rather the most profitable Search.

Len

Re: The only real test for AI

I think the problem is that a lot of the crap in search results is produced by AI (or actually not AI but LLMs).

Europe's monopoly cops suddenly rather curious about Microsoft's $13B for OpenAI

Len

Under the radar takeover

The big challenge is that MS doesn't have formal majority control of OpenAI through share ownership (which would make it subject to some M&A and competition provisions) but that it effectively has near full control of OpenAI. It will be interesting to see if this means that MS can stay out of legal trouble as current competition law may not be sufficient to do something about it.

Nearly 200 Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplanes grounded after door plug flies off mid-flight

Len
Holmes

Re: Numbers

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) hasn't grounded any 737s because apparently these specific types aren't used in Europe. That suggests not all 737s use this design.

Open source PostgreSQL named DBMS of the year by DB-Engines

Len
Happy

Re: SQLit

I've only used SQLite in some small to medium sized web projects but as I understand not all concurrency is the same when it comes to SQLite. Read concurrency is high because it doesn't require locks, hence the benchmarks that suggest that having 100,000 visitors a day to a website running off SQLite is fine. If the server can keep the entire DB in its RAM it's even blazing fast, which probably explains why SQLite is sometimes faster than having a DB server because it doesn't have to open connections.

The challenge is that only one user can write at any time due to file locks. That is fine for an average website CMS where you rarely have more than a handful of people adding things roughly around the same time. It will be a problem if the visitors to your site do more than read content and you need to allow writes to the DB too.

As of a couple of years my modus operandi is to start projects using SQLite. If the projects take off and run into limitations I upgrade to Postgres. Talking to an SQLite DB uses more or less a subset of Postgres anyway so migration is easy. I haven't touched another DB system in years.

Google to start third-party cookie cull for 30 million Chrome users

Len
Holmes

Re: So….

I suspect the reason that Google is happy to cut off some data gathering exercises by third parties is that they obviously won't be cutting off their own data gathering exercises that are hardcoded into Chrome.

Len
Megaphone

Re: Only stupid people use google crome

Agreed, if you read this far (in other words, you're reading The Register) you should not be using Chrome.

Apple pops blue bubbles of Beeper Mini's iMessage service again

Len
Holmes

Also an anti-SPAM measure

I suspect that one of the reasons for Apple fixing these holes is an anti-SPAM measure. If a third-party can gain access to Apple's servers to deliver messages what's to stop a SPAM service to dump messages into the iMessage network? So far my iMessage has been pretty free from SPAM, as opposed to my WhatsApp or Telegram accounts.

Fired OpenAI boss Sam Altman may join Microsoft

Len
Mushroom

Microsoft's investment was mainly in kind

As I understand it the majority of Microsoft's investment was not in form of a transfer of money but in the form of donated computing capacity at Azure. Even if OpenAI were to tank, MS wouldn't have lost that investment.

What happens now is interesting. I don't get the impression Altman was the brains behind OpenAI, he was the smooth talking figure head (who converted the existing non-profit into an investment vehicle), not the scientific brain. It will depend on how many scientists he can persuade him to follow him to MS whether it has a chance of taking off. Meanwhile MS could use access to its computing capacity to put pressure on OpenAI.

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

Len
Facepalm

EuSpRIG horror list

This is a nice addition to the European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group Horror List.

Microsoft drops official support for Python 3.7 in Visual Studio Code

Len

Re: Python 3.11 is where you want to be

Interesting about Facebook's use of Python, I wasn't aware of it. I know Facebook was originally created in PHP but they ran into PHP's limits and had first created their own PHP server and then tweaked the language itself to suit their needs.

There was a period where moving from PHP to Django (the Python based web framework) was the logical step up so perhaps Django is where they went after PHP.

Musk's first year as Twitter's Dear Leader is nigh

Len
Happy

Re: Mastodon remains the most exciting alternative

Have you checked this list? It’s a giant list of lists of scientific disciplines and academic communities on Mastodon. Well worth a check for accounts to follow.

Academics on Mastodon

No joke: Cloudflare takes aim at Google Fonts with ROFL

Len
Happy

GDPR compliant alternative to Google Fonts

For those looking for a GDPR compliant alternative to Google Fonts I can recommend fonts.bunny.net. They have drop in replacements for all Google fonts and even a WordPress plugin that redirects it for you if can't (or prefer not to) change your WP themes with hardcoded links to Google Fonts.

If anyone finds an $80M F-35 stealth fighter, please call the Pentagon

Len

When I grew up the joke was that you only ever saw artist impressions of the F-16 because they tended to crash before someone could take a photo.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has a left wing bias – at times

Len

Re: What do you mean by "Liberal"?

Are you sure you're not confusing the FDP with AFD and VVD with PVV? Because AFD and PVV have some fascist tendencies but VVD and FDP certainly don't. The VVD and FDP are pretty mainstream centre-right parties. You might call them uncaring, greedy, catering to a narrow base of people with above average wealth who've 'made it' while neglecting anyone else but you can't call them extremists.

Len
Headmaster

Re: What do you mean by "Liberal"?

Good point. The US has quite a unique definition of the political label "Liberal". Most Liberal parties all over the world (from the German FDP and the Dutch VVD to the Australian Liberal Party or the UK's 19th century Liberal Party) are right-of-centre parties focusing on small government and low taxes, it's only the US where it seems to mean almost the opposite.

OpenZFS 2.2 is nearly here, and ZFSBootMenu 2.2 already is

Len
Happy

Also in TrueNAS

The first beta of TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 also includes OpenZFS 2.2, though it's a beta and based on OpenZFS 2.2.0 RC3 so I would only use it for testing purposes at the moment.

iXSystems, the company behind TrueNAS is a major contributor to the OpenZFS code and quite a few of the improvements in the latest OpenZFS are either done by iXSystems developers or by others but sponsored by iXSystems. I believe they were also behind getting the RAID expansion development back on track.

Not call: Open source gurus urge you to dump Zoom

Len
Thumb Up

Re: Use Jitsi

That is a very good point. Fortunately the Jitsi software is open source and can be self-hosted. That means you could host your own, or choose an EU-based, GDPR-compliant, Jitsi service. I've just found this one for instance: Fairkom.eu.

Len
WTF?

Zoom Out

They missed a trick in not calling the campaign Zoom Out. It works on two levels, pushing Zoom out of the building and zooming out to see the alternative services.

Also, this excellent piece of sleuthing suggests it was far worse than just some unfortunate wording: Zoom knots itself a legal tangle over use of customer data for training AI models. It seems clearly in breach of many European privacy safeguards and, for instance, I don't think any judge would agree with their definition of opt-in ("we start using your data from the start and then notify you so you can leave the call if you don't like that" is not opt-in). Furthermore they either seem to accidentally or on purpose make a complete hash of their understanding of the GDPR, or who their regulator is.

India launches contest to build homegrown web browser

Len

Re: I wish them luck

I seriously hope that this will be based off the Firefox code (who knows, Mozilla might even help them because at some level it's in their interest) and not just another slightly adapted version of Chrome with its Blink engine.

It sounds counter-intuitive at first but I seriously worry that Apple might be barred from requiring the use of the WebKit engine as underlying render technology on iOS. Such a ban may appear to create more user choice but it actually would reduce choice because it would just allow companies to make sites that only work on Blink and if you complain they'll just tell you to install Chrome because "it works just fine when they check it on Chrome".

Firefox currently has about 200 million users making its Gecko engine the third most used engine to browse websites. If the "IndiaBrowser" would use the Gecko engine too it could easily double the use of Gecko worldwide, making the engine competition more of a three horse race again, instead of one horse on wheels with rocketboosters while firing at the competition and two horses behind it dodging bullets from a bully.

If India is seriously worried about the dominance of Western tech then not using Chrome/Chromium/Blink, which is effectively a trojan horse pushed by Google, should be a good first argument to pick something else.

I don't see building another engine from scratch as a viable alternative. Developing browser engines has become so complex now browsers are essentially application platforms that the complexity is probably in the same ball park as building an operating system. I would argue that developing a kernel from scratch is easier than building a web browser from scratch.

How to spot OpenAI's crawler bot and stop it slurping sites for training data

Len

Re: The risk with Robots.txt

I get that, thanks. But I was wondering how to do it selectively. So, let's say I want ChatGPT to hoover up data from directory X but not from directory Y, without telling all and sundry that directory Y exists so I can't do disallow Y in Robots.txt

Len
Headmaster

The risk with Robots.txt

Can someone enlighten me?

Robots.txt has been used for/against search engine bots for ages. It has always come with the warning that if you don't want people/bots/crawlers to know that directory B exists you should not explicitly allow crawling of directory A while explicitly blocking crawling of directory B. You're asking not to look somewhere and only scrupulous bots would honour that. The solution is usually to sort it out at page level so a page you don't want to be crawled has a meta tag blocking it.

How would one do this with the ChatGPT bot? Will it also look at the page meta tags? I don't trust some makers of AI bots to not use a block attempt to explicitly go and harvest data from directories that I have disallowed. It might just give them an edge over OpenAI.

How could I let ChatGPT freely crawl my FAQ or About Us page but not my Content page?

Aspiration to deploy new UK nuclear reactor every year a 'wish', not a plan

Len

Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid

You are looking at consumer cost, which is hard to compare and doesn't say much about production cost. Some countries have amazing grids, some country's grids are held together by tie wraps and duct tape. Some countries add extra levies to pay for grid upgrades, some don't. Some countries add extra levies for an energy transition, some don't. Some countries have a well functioning utilities market, some don't.

If you want to look at the wholesale cost per source you'd need to look at what's called the 'Levelized cost of electricity' (LCOE). Then you'll typically see, from cheapest to more expensive, something along the lines of Large-scale solar -> offshore wind -> onshore wind -> combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) -> geothermal -> nuclear -> small scale solar * -> coal (hard) -> coal (soft) -> more obscure sources such as old fashioned gas plants, oil, etc.

Occasionally offshore wind and onshore wind trade places in that order, dependent on geography. Spain will probably have cheaper onshore than offshore wind whereas Denmark will have it the other way around. Also, load factors vary per country so some countries will have wind farms that produce about 60% of the time, other countries only 30% (often, but not solely, based on whether they have more offshore wind parks as offshore has a higher LF). But interestingly enough, even an abundance of coal in a country doesn't reduce the wholesale price that much. And neither does having serious economies of scale in nuclear, like the French have.

The thing is that the fuel cost only plays a part role in the total cost of producing a MWh. Obviously fuel cost for wind and solar plants is zero per MWh whereas gas or uranium or coal cost money but the total cost of construction, operation, maintenance, decommissioning etc. is where the real expenditure lies.

* Small scale solar, such as people putting a few solar panels on their house, is not very cheap in the grand scheme of things but because it's individuals who become less dependent on their energy supplier it might still make economic sense for them. Even more so because most other forms of electricity production are usually beyond the reach of individuals.

Len

Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid

Nuclear power plants are without a doubt a technical marvel. Its designs, its complexity, its processes, its safety procedures are truly part of a great human achievement.

However, the problem the nuclear power industry has is that the economics, not the technology, make it outdated. It simply cannot compete on price because construction is so hideously expensive. There was a time private power companies had their own nuclear power plants, then came a time that only governments had enough money to finance them. Now were at a time where even many governments don't have the required funds any more to make it happen. Every time there is a nuclear power incident somewhere on the planet (on average every fifteen years I believe) the cost for new reactors shoots up yet again.

The UK had to get China to fund its latest reactor and could only get the Chinese to sign the contract in return for a strike price twice the current wholesale electricity price, guaranteed for 30 years! While the trend on the wholesale electric is only downward. That means that in ten years we'd probably be paying the Chinese four times the wholesale price, in twenty years ten times the wholesale price. It means that nuclear power plants are essentially running on subsidies to produce reliable baseload. It's financial madness to overpay so much just for reliability and it opens up the economics for alternative systems of reliability (batteries of all kinds for instance) to grossly undercut nuclear power.

Even France, easily the world champion in using nuclear power to fulfil its demand, is investing in wind power like it's going out of fashion because the economics of nuclear are starting to hold them back.

Nuclear is on course to drop out of the top five cheapest ways to produce electricity and I see no way it can compete with, for instance, solar and wind power which, all things considered, are becoming insanely cheap. I don't see how nuclear could ever become cheaper than those two again. There's something to be said for nuclear to power submarines, perhaps even spaceships, but not countries any more. I think that ship has sailed.

Always on the Horizon, UK must wait for megabucks EU science deal

Len
Facepalm

Re: becoming a global science superpower

To be fair, the UK has (or had) some prerequisites that make being a (not 'the') global science superpower not an entirely unrealistic ambition. It's just that many steps have been taken in the last decade or so that are precisely the opposite of what is needed. Steps such as making universities more reliant on international students for their income and then making it much harder for international students to come to the UK. Or throwing up barriers for international scientists to come to the UK by bombarding them with mountains of bureaucracy just to be allowed to work in the UK. Or having an esteemed professor denied a visa so they can't speak at your conference because someone at the Home Office doesn't like their skin colour.

Wanting to become a global science superpower and then leaving the European Union is a bit like wanting to become a global military superpower and then abolishing the Navy and the Air Force. It's not the most helpful of steps.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Len
Happy

Re: Snap, crackle and pop...

Don't forget to put a resistor between left and right channels to create some crosstalk, add a 50Hz hum (60 for muricans), a bit of rumble, and a 16KHz low-pass roll-off filter.

Netherlands digital minister smacks down Big Tech over AI regs

Len
Stop

Re: No it isn't

It goes even further. If, let's say, BMW produces cars that are fundamentally unsafe for drivers and everyone around it, BMW management knows about this but still keeps selling these vehicles to the general public with the suggestion to use them on the public roads, then BMW's management would be liable on a whole host of levels and would spend most of the year in court.

In a non-hypothetical, Tesla is actually facing a lot of legal scrutiny at the moment for more or less implying that their cars can drive themselves when we have the death toll to prove that they can't. Mercedes, the current fore-runner in automated driving in Level 3 and even Level 4, only got to that stage by very tightly cooperating with legislators.

The peddlers behind the latest fake-AI LLMs want legal immunity from being responsible for the damages that their products cause to its users or society as a whole. That's a huge difference with the car industry.

Python Package Index had one person on-call to hold back weekend malware rush

Len

Difference between PyPi and NPM?

Forgive me because this is not really my field but isn’t it the case that PyPi and NPM are quite different?

I thought that PyPi hosts packages that are included by developers in their projects but that are ‘compiled’ into bytecode on deployment. Every visitor of the web app would always run that bytecode until it’s updated in a new deployment.

With NPM the code isn’t downloaded until a visitor of the website starts the app by visiting the site. It’s then executed together with all the other latest packages.

That would mean that a Python app would be considerably safer if you have a policy of only using packages that are at least a week (or so) old to allow malware to be picked up, whereas with an NPM app an infected package would be used by millions within seconds.

Or am I mistaken?

Elizabeth Holmes is going to prison – with a $500m bill

Len

Re: I'm a bit torn

To be fair, and I'm not a massive fan of VCs plus I think most of them are not as smart as they think they are, in this case hardly any (or even none?) VCs were involved. Theranos went shopping for investment with the usual suspects and all of them turned them down. They probably sniffed something suspicious that they couldn't put a finger on.

That's how Theranos ended up with such an odd collection of investors, a few rich politicians, some rich business people, some random idiots with way more money than sense but very few investors for whom investing is their day job.

Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel

Len
Facepalm

Re: Spreadsheets for Dummies /s

I can thoroughly recommend the Horror Stories list of the European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group (EuSpRig). It has that story and many more.

France bans all recreational apps – including TikTok – from government devices

Len
Thumb Up

A much more sensible approach

I think the French approach is much more sensible than what we've seen in other countries.

Granted, TikTok goes to extreme lengths in spying on its users (it's essentially a key logger, among other things), but its business model is not that different from many other "free" social media services. It makes much more sense to ban specific practices or types of apps than to single out a single app but leave the other data predators untouched.

I understand why it's hard in the US to ban domestic apps from major political donors but I don't see why the UK/Finnish/Portuguese/Norwegian government couldn't ban Meta apps on its devices for instance.

Arm swans off to Nasdaq despite UK gov pleas to IPO in London

Len

Re: Reasons?

The London Stock Exchange has a bunch of issues. Just this morning the FT wrote ‘There are no domestic equity investors’: why companies are fleeing London’s stock market about how the lack of UK investors buying equity in UK companies means that there's a lack of 'validation' that local investors give to a stock and that foreign investors might look for before they buy.

Add to that that New York has deeper liquidity pools (a combination of just having a bigger home market, more stupid people with lots of money, and some other factors) means that it's easier to raise money in NY than London and that valuations tend to be higher there.

Add to that that London is very much a 20th century exchange, dominated by stale and old-fashioned mining and commodity conglomerates, not flashy 21st century tech firms. If I recall correctly it was either 2022 or 2021 that Amsterdam had more tech IPOs than London.

Add to that that the UK has limitations on shares of multiple classes, very popular with tech founders as it allows them to sell a majority of the business but still have a controlling share.

And then there is the small issue of Brexit. It's not a top three cause of the LSE's issues but might make it into the top five.

That means that London is not a place where many tech firms like to list. I don't know if Amsterdam could be a place for ARM's secondary listing as I don't know enough about the minutiae and specific requirements that ARM is looking for.

Musk says he ain't going anywhere as Twitter CEO until at least late 2023

Len

Re: I might ...

As I understand it Mercedes was actually the first car maker to be accredited for Level 3 and Level 4 autonomous driving. Level 3 in the US and for quite some time now. Level 4 only in designated spaces in Germany and more recently.

Musk has been selling "Full Self Driving by next year" for about a decade now, and he has to otherwise Tesla would be valued as a car maker with lower multiples. By convincing investors that Tesla is not a car maker but a tech firm he has been getting far higher multiples for the company's valuation. He can't back down now or Tesla stock would collapse.

Cat saves 'good bots' from Twitter API purge

Len
Facepalm

I still don't understand why he insists all read-only access to Twitter should be blocked too. Even reading from your own Twitter feed.

Countless people and businesses will now have to remove their Twitter feed from their own site, greatly reducing Twitter's exposure to non-Twitter users. Not long now and Musk is going to ban sign-ups...

No more free API access, says Twitter: You pay for that data

Len

Re: Well that *IS* his aim,

Twitter has just made its first debt payment of about $300 million so I'm not sure avoiding debt payment was the plan. Twitter makes first interest payment on Musk buyout debt -sources

Third-party Twitter apps stopped dead with no explanation from El Musko

Len
Thumb Up

Ivory

It turns out to have been amazing foresight of Tapbots (the makers of Tweetbot) to start working on their Mastodon app, Ivory. It's still in alpha and yet some people are already raving about it.

I suppose that, even though the Mastodon network works differently from the Twitter network, all that UX experience with Tweetbot turns out to be quite transferable.

With Mastodon, decentralization strikes back

Len
Thumb Up

Re: Standards

Fun fact, Tumblr is joining the Fediverse so you could follow Tumblr blogs with your Mastodon account.

Len
Holmes

Re: Mastodon's biggest issue

That is indeed an issue. Don't forget, however, that the Mastodon reference server was essentially built by two people over six years with the tools and expertise that they had.

There is an interesting thread from late 2021 or early 2022 somewhere on Masto where people are speculating why Truth.social (which is built on the Mastodon reference software) wasn't launching even though they said they had 1.5 million people on the waiting list. Eugen Rochko, one of the Mastodon developers, suggested it may have something to do with the required expertise to run servers with that many users. The expertise to develop the heavy lifting services required to handle millions of concurrent users is concentrated in a handful of big tech companies, the average startup dev never gets to work with those scenarios, never gets to build those skills, never gets to discover in practice what works and what doesn't.

That may now be changing due to the Mastodon hype. There have never been so many eye-balls on the Mastodon code from experienced people as there are now. There are ex-Twitter people who are sharing their experience with running these massive services (from infrastructure to UX, from moderation to onboarding) with the Mastodon community. There is even a special Mastodon instance for former Twitter staff, Macaw.social.

I suspect that gradually bits get replaced for better performance. It should, for instance, be feasible to rewrite 'Sidekiq' (the Mastodon process responsible for queuing all the connections that send and receive posts from other servers) from the ground up in a more suitable language. It could be tested on some more experimental Mastodon instances for a bit (just like some instances have a tendency to be slightly ahead on beta versions while others play it safe by being slightly behind 'stable') before it get replaced in the main implementation.

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