Posts by Blank Reg

SQL king Larry Ellison becomes sequel sultan with controlling interest in Paramount Global

At least this is possibly a better investment than the money he pissed away on theranos or helping musk buy twitter. Do you have to be an idiot to become a billionaire or is it just something that happens afterwards?

Re: Oh you forget how Oracle licensing works!!!

You left out that cost would scale with the size of your TV and the number of people living in your household, regardless of whether or not they watch anything

Trump taps Musk to lead 'government efficiency' task force

And part of that was cutting the cdc staff in China that were there monitoring for pandemics

Re: Musk's plan

During WW2 princess Juliana of Denmark gave birth in Ottawa, which would have made her daughter ineligible to be in the line of succession. To get around that the Canadian government declared her

hospital suite to be temporarily ‘extraterritorial,’

Twitter tells advertisers to go fsck themselves, now sues them for fscking the fsck off

Well of course it's not static as his associates are constantly getting indicted, convicted, and incarcerated, unless they flip on him, in which case he doesn't know them, never met them, never even heard of them

Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse

Re: "C-Suite are often divorced from reality."

And with the currently bloated c-suite salaries getting rid of them would result in quite a cost savings without impacting productivity

Musk deflects sluggish Tesla car sales with Optimus optimism

Re: automotive regulatory credits

Or he's just a complete moron, that's the simplest explanation and is heavily supported by everything that he says and does.

Airbn-bye: Barcelona bans short-term apartment rentals for tourists

Re: Alternatively….

And the worst offenders would be cruise ships. People swarm off the ships, clog up every tourist spot, then go back to the ship to eat since it's already paid for. I know there is a head tx that the cruise lines pay at each port, but maybe it needs to be much higher given how little cruise passenger contribute to the economy

Since joining NATO, Sweden claims Russia has been borking Nordic satellites

Re: "Russia doesn't lie to deceive you. Russia lies to insult you."

It's only a matter of time. His actions are costing the oligarchs billions. Eventually someone will get fed up enough to find a way to introduce Putin to some high speed lead

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Re: Just maybe?

I'm usually the most senior member on any project and if I'm stuck I will most definitely say so in public during standup. Your team sounds disfunctional

Twitter 'supersharers' of fake news tend to be older Republican women

Re: Sarah Palin's X tea party?

You don't understand TDS, it is the severe cognitive impairment that prevents people from seeing just how profoundly stupid, incompetent and corrupt that trump truly is

Re: AMEN!

They have mostly been doing what needs to be done. Unfortunately too many people are short sighted and selfish and can't be bothered to understand why some things are happening.

Re: Pasty keyboard warriors

Blocking fake news is not discriminatory. The fact that the vast majority of it comes from republican women is irrelevant. Blocking them fir being republican and/or women would be discriminatory, Blocking them for spreading too much bullshit is not.

HMRC must grow 'intelligent client' function to sort out post-Brexit tech issues – watchdog

Would an 'intelligent client' ever hire IBM to build a large government IT system given their wonderful track record of buggering up so many similar projects?

What do we make of Apple's plan B for a down quarter – that $110B buyback of shares?

If you sell your shares then the profit is taxable, there is nothing special about the buyback in that regard. But had they just paid out dividends instead then all shareholders would have taxable income that is more difficult to get around. That's why the strategy I mentioned above is used

its much worse than that. the share buybacks boost the stock price, then the ultra wealthy are able to take out loans backed by the value of those shares. They then have a wad of cash to spend for which they paid no taxes because thet never sold the shares. this was more effective when rates were near zero, but I'm sure their accountants will finds way to make sure billionaires pay as little tax as possible

Musk moves Tesla's goalposts, investors happily move shares higher

Re: My Bullshit Meter Just Exploded

There are far too many stupid and/or gullible people on the planet, more than enough to keep this scam going for a while yet.

Tesla slashes vehicle and self-driving-ish software prices as shares plummet

And to rub salt in musks wounds, Mercedes comes along and starts shipping level 3 autonomous vehicles before tesla even has level 2 worked out.

I don't understand the fools that thought Tesla was worth more than the 10 biggest automakers combined. Their designs are crap, their manufacturing is crap, their software is crap, so where is the value?

Re: "an essential part of doing business in the auto industry"

And require a monthly subscription

What can be done to protect open source devs from next xz backdoor drama?

Re: People keep saying "stop using so many dependencies"

Yes code reuse is more efficient than writing everything yourself, but in some cases it has gotten way out of control. I recall when I first tried to learn node I created the most basic app with just a few dependencies. But when I dug into it I found that there were actually thousands of dependencies dragged in with just this simple app that did almost nothing.

X's Grok AI is great – if you want to know how to hot wire a car, make drugs, or worse

Re: Guardrails my ass

As soon as you use a term like " ultra woke" you're immediately labeling yourself a moron.

Catch Java 22, available from Oracle for a limited time

Re: Java Is UnbeluckingFievable

Sure, write millions of lines of code of C#. C++ etc, I don't care, we just need to stop using scripting languages where they don't belong, it's stupid

Re: Java Is UnbeluckingFievable

No it's not the same at all. Accidentally changing the indentation of any other language only changes how the code looks, not how it works.

And what is gained by this stupidity of making indentation meaningful? You get to skip typing curly braces. If typing curly braces is what is slowing you down then you are writing some extremely simple code.

Re: then there's that GIL of doom

Calling a full-on gc the easy way out tells me that you've never written one. While it's not that hard to write a bad one, writing a good one that is fast and efficient is pretty damn hard.

Re: Java Is UnbeluckingFievable

The “bureaucracy” is what allows you to write millions of lines of code and not have things fail apart down the line when in some long forgotten code path somebody passes the wrong type to a method.

Python is an awful language, who in their right mind thought spaces should be important? For anything of meaningful size you want a strongly typed language, it will save many hours of time when learning someone elses code or debugging failures.

I can see why you went anonymous, that's a load of BS. You complain about python being slow and then you go for Javascript? It's also dog slow and a complete abomination of a language.

Bernie Sanders clocks in with 4-day workweek bill thanks to AI and productivity tech

It doesn't matter how they try to enforce it, it can't work as the US, Canada and many other countries are in for a couple of decades of labor shortages due to the boomers retiring and dieing off. The only way out is a massive increase in immigration, and that is a hard sell in most countries.

Continuous growth never works, we need periodic recessions to reset prices, and most importantly mindset. When people believe things can only go up they make a lot of stupid investment decisions and all asset classes become overvalued.

Commercial real estate is in for a major correction. With trillions tied up offices that are not likely to return to pre-pandemic occupancy rates for as much as a couple decades there are a lot of banks that will have problems in the next few years as leases start coming up for renewal

IBM said to be binning off more staff as 'workforce rebalance' continues

Re: Confused here

For as long as staff continue to get older, IBM will continue to "rebalance" the average age/salary down as low as they can get away with

Flying car biz Alef claims 3K preorders, still hasn't done a proper demo

Re: These things will never be allowed

Well if you treat them as aircraft then they will be even more impractical. Park your fancy flying car at the mall and then when someone just slightly dings you then it may no longer be airworthy. The whole idea is just a stupid fantasy for 12 year olds

Re: There will never be a demo

The whole concept of flying cars is bollocks. People can't drive on the ground, it won't get better in the air, and the consequences of failure are much more severe. Then there is the noise issue, do you really want these things buzzing overhead all day long? If they ever get off the ground they will be relegated to rural areas only.

Ahead of Super Tuesday, US elections face existential and homegrown threats

Re: The two biggest threats...

That's because there are far too many stupid/gullible/selfish people. They want easy answers to difficult problems and they shouldn't be inconvenienced in any way

Elon and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad legal week

Re: his factories rely on large numbers of humans

Surely all the 2nd ammendment people will step up to end a dictatorship right? isn't that why they claim that they need a fully stocked personal armory? it can't be that the 1000s of dead kids were all for nothing can it?

Amazon hopes to avoid labor regulation by simply abolishing national watchdogs

Re: Just... bullshit

That is one of the two main problems with American politics, the supreme court decided that companies are people, and that money is free speech. That set the stage for companies legally buying politicians, and as we've seen Supreme Court justices as well

Re: Who's next?

I'm ok with the stock options as compensation, though the amount given is often ridiculous. But they should have at least a 5 year vesting period. One of the problems of modern corporations is that there is far too much focus on the next quarter at the expense of the long term. That leads to some very bad decisions

ChatGPT? Sure, I've heard it. But is AI coming for my job?

Re: Resistance to adaptation

I was taking a more global view. in places like Paris or Prague as much as 20-30% of apartments are short term rentals. In the USA you have corporations buying up 10s of thousands of homes. Where I live , during the peak of the market, we had about 1/3 of home sales going to people that already owned multiple homes in the city. If 20 or 30 percent of homes came back on the market then prices would go back to normal levels

Re: Resistance to adaptation

The solutions to home affordability has too many with vested interests fighting against it. Step 1,ban corporations from buying single family homes. Step 2, change tax laws to make it non viable to invest or speculate in single family homes. Step 3, ban short term rentals, Step 4, NEVER REPEAT THE MISTAKE OF NEAR ZERO INTEREST RATES.

How did China get so good at chips and AI? Congressional investigation blames American venture capitalists

Re: WHOCOULDAKNOWED?!

The CEOs making the decisions to move manufacturing to China didn't care. In modern business all that matters is the next quarter. By the time this became a problem they would have cashed out their stock options and be long gone

Raspberry Pi Pico cracks BitLocker in under a minute

Re: A brilliant testament to analysis

The key exchange only needs to happen once when the machine is first started, then stored encrypted in some WOM memory on the chips. That isn't foolproof, but tapping into the internals of the TPM or CPU is a lot more difficult than connecting to some pins on the motherboard

X hiring 100 content cops in bid to tame Wild West of online safety

Will anyone even want to work for them?

The pen is mightier than the keyboard for turbocharging your noggin

Re: Why aren't you taking notes?

Same here, I didn't take notes in university, the only thing I wrote down was stuff like assignment due dates and things like that. I bought a pack of 500 sheets of note paper in first year and never finished it.

COVID-19 infection surge detected in wastewater, signals potential new wave

Re: It is only Covid if you take a test

That is what heat recovery ventilation is for. bring in fresh air, transfer heat from outgoing air to the incoming air

Re: "the only figure that really matters is hospitalisations"

There is a strong indication that each subsequent covid infection increases your risk of long covid, so not taking some simple precautions is just stupid

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto stolen after Ledger code poisoned

Re: npm supply chain security

They certainly need to do something about security. Just go and build a very basic node app and you'll have 1000's of dependencies before you even get started. And you have to trust them all since you have no way of testing them all for malicious code

That call center tech scammer could be a human trafficking victim

I never feel bad about hanging up on them, though sometimes I don't bother, I just put the phone down walk away while they yammer on

Elon is the bakery owner swearing in the street about Yelp critics canceling him

He's a potential billionaire. Until he sells his assets their value is undetermined. And selling his assets would greatly diminish their value, that is why he has come up with several excuses for selling assets over the years. The real reason being he wanted to cash in while the price was insanely and unreasonably high. Had he kept the proceeds he would be a real billionaire many times over, but instead he decided to flush it down the toilet

Re: Maybe intentional

Except by most accounts (except his own) he's crap at software.

Re: Advertising Money

It is amusing but not baffling, he is a moron doing what morons do

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: Are you sure, this isn't the plot of an IT Crowd epsiode?

No, my problem with Aristotle is that he would come up with some hair-brained idea and declare it correct without bothering to check. He thought women had fewer teeth than men, surely that is easily verified. He thought heavy objects fell faster than lighter ones, again he could have done a simple experiment to prove it.

Basically, he would declare a hypothesis as fact and leave it at that.

Re: Are you sure, this isn't the plot of an IT Crowd epsiode?

And while he's there maybe he can do something about that idiot Aristotle. Scientific advancement was greatly held back because we believed his crap for almost 2 millenia.