The surprising thing is Amazon didn't get there first
Their operational excellence is unmatched.
565 publicly visible posts • joined 16 May 2007
I moved from WP to Hugo almost a decade ago and I don't have a dog in this fight. One of my former employers used WP-Engine and I was to say the least not impressed.
Just because Mullenweg's actions are peevish and infantile does not mean WP-Engine is in the right.
Sadly, your prognostic is likely correct, as Automattic controls the repository, will ban the FAIR installer (unless forced to reverse itself by European antitrust authorities, US FTC being of course completely neutered and useless), and through the power of defaults the vast majority of WP users will never hear of it.
It is also a false statement. The IMSI identifies the subscriber, the International Mobile Equipment Identifier or IMEI identifies the specific device independently of SIM card, IMSI or anything else tying the subscriber to the carrier.
I thought it was a crime to lie to Parliament.
They are not perfect, mind you, far too many "Genuine 1TB SanDisk memory card for £5" obvious scams, but prices are often 75% less than Amazon if you can tolerate a 2-week shipping time, and the pleasure of cutting out price-gouging middleman Jeff Bezos is priceless.
"There are alternative browsers that do not live from selling you."
No, there aren't (yet).
Chrome is obviously out, Apple is increasingly relying on "services" (i.e. App Store 30% tax and advertising) to make up for a saturated smartphone market, Firefox is all-in on baking in advertising tech in the browser. Chromium-based browsers are all relying on Google's base, e.g. they will not be able to keep uBlock Origin when Google rips out Manifest V2 from the code base. The only glimmer of hope is from the Ladybird and Servo browser engines, but they are still at least 2 years away from being usable.
1) it does not parallelize transfers and does them one by one using a single core on each end. One a fast, low-latency connection like a LAN, this does not take full advantage of the CPU and network resources to speed things up.
2) transfer is unidirectional. There is another utility called Unison, however, that uses the rsync algorithm to provide bidirectional sync
Meta, the smallest of the FAANGs, will spend $26B this year on AI data centers. The idea the perennially bankrupt UK government (or any other European government, or even the EU) can play with the big boys is completely delusional. It would make a lot more sense to fund a few millions’ worth of PhDs at Cambridge to find ways to train AI more efficiently without the insane Capex.
Sometimes former poachers make the best gamekeepers. Tom Wheeler proved remarkably tough on telcos as chairman of the FCC despite having ya Verizon lobbyist.
In any case, a former Facebook guy is unlikely to be sympathetic to telco rent-seeking. His Cisco past would be more relevant as to conflicts of interest.
Many of those job postings are for a job the company fully intends to fill with someone on a H1-B visa, because those visas are tied to the job and the employee does not have much flexibility to job-hop. The Department of Labor certification required for the H1-B does require the company to provide evidence the job couldn't be filled by a local, so they deliberately advertise pro forma in the most inconvenient form no one reads ever, dead-tree newspaper ads, and they can then truthfully say no one applied.
No, and it is so unstable spec-wise that only the last version of the compiler is guaranteed to compile the next, and to bootstrap it you need to go through 80-something stages, vs 3 for Go. The fact there is no other implementation, not even in GCC, tells all you need to know about the maturity of the language.
A M1 or M2 Mac Studio has far more unified RAM available to its GPU/NPU than even the $36,000 nVidia H100 to run large models. Unfortunately the Apple Silicon GPU is nowhere near as fast as nVidia's.
Primate Labs, makers of Geekbench, have a ML/AI benchmark tool. The results are finally available on the genersl Geekbench browse (but still not searchable)r:
https://browser.geekbench.com/ai/v1
China is the elephant in the room. They have been burned by US sanctions and adopting RISC-V as it is an open standard not subject to US sanctions (although SiFive may be). If the US blocks SiFive exports, they can just switch to another RISC-V provider, including home-grown ones, something not possible with x64 or arm64.
Frankly JPEG XL is much more attractive than the patent-larded monstrosity that is AVIF, but I get their point. Every new format, specially a niche one, increases the already large attack surface of the browser. Most of the exploits used by NSO's spyware are from bugs in image file format parsers used by iMessage, for example, and you can bet the JPEG XL implementation is nowhere near as robust and battle-tested as the JPEG or PNG one (which still deliver a steady stream of CVEs despite their maturity).
Global Privacy Control (GPC) is essentially the old Do-Not-Track header, only this time wiht force of law. It is already mandatory in California, and the EU is considering it. One browser setting to automatically reject all cookie banners. The UK should also endorse this. Of course this does not preclude enforcement against dark patterns like not having a "Reject All" button as prominent as the "Accept All" one, or making unsubscribing harder than joining.
Part of the reason why HS2 is a fiasco is every rural Tory local council NIMBY demanding (and getting) gold-plated tunnels to hide the trains. Same with power lines, there is huge wind farm capacity in Scotland or East Anglia that cannot be used in Southeast England where the demand is because of inadequate transmission power lines.
https://www.economist.com/britain/2023/10/26/britain-must-overhaul-the-way-it-approves-infrastructure
Last I heard, new housing and datacenter plans were put on ice because of a lack of electrical grid capacity to power them. One big factor is NIMBYs objecting to the construction of power lines from Scotland, where wind power is plentiful but sparse population means little demand, to South-East England where the demand is.
My definition would be a computer that can run a GPT3-equivalent LLM locally, since GPT3 is the one that kick-started the current AI revolution. This would need at least 64 to 128GB of RAM accessible by a GPU or NPU. Thus the Mac Studio qualifies, as would a PC with a couple of nVidia 4070s. Today's price for such a config is about $5000, but expect that to fall quickly.
The 6GHz band's failure to penetrate walls is a feature, as it means you are less likely to experience interference from other units in an apartment building, as 2.4Ghz is a lost cause and even 5GHz is congested in most places. It does require you to have a multi-AP setup, preferrably with wired or optical backhaul, but I am starting to see new build housing equipped thus.
Most consumer-grade WiFi gear is indeed ghastly, with numerous bugs that cause inexplicable (and practically undebuggable) authentication bugs and connection brown-outs. Most could do with a simple watchdog timer that performs a scheduled reboot at 3AM to maintain stability throughout the day.
Means they are probably unable to attract the best Data Scientists from Big Tech companies who are used to working with open-source analytics stacks like Jupyter notebooks as front-ends. At some level, basic BI capabilities are a commodity (and having Tableau probably means more people can actually access data without needing a data specialist to assist), but cutting-edge predictive analytics and machine learning are not available first on commercial products.
Nginx, Clickhouse, quite a few contributors to PostgreSQL. Not open-source, but JetBrains was founded by Russians and had a lot of R&D done in Russia.
I realize the ban is Microsoft complying with US sanctions law, but ipmitool is critical infrastructure with privileged access to hardware that would be a prime vector for malware or root kits if compromised, so there is a sound national security rationale for a freeze there.
It was forced to realize losses on bad bets on interest rates due to capital reserve requirements, that would not be an issue if held to maturity. As part of a larger bank with reserves, they will just hold those treasuries until they mature.
SVB has a unique skill set in catering to startups, some of which will be future unicorns or FANGs. Traditional banks are just too hidebound to address the]at market, and it is incredibly valuable. The problems did not come from the retail side. That retail expertise combined with a more diversified entity and competent risk management means whoever buys them will make a killing.
Indeed. I started my career at France Telecom R&D, and the guy who was responsible for attending standards organization meetings I wouldn't even classify as a C player. The UN's stewardship of the ITU also means one nation, one vote so Burkina Faso gets the same voting rights as the US or China, and usually ends up selling its vote to the highest bidder.
This was guaranteed to happen. The Dutch intelligence services are pretty competent (remember when they had hacked into the security webcams of the Russian troll farm that was trying to influence US elections?) and I’m sure they have intercepted far more attempts that we don’t know about.