Posts by Dinanziame

Risk-averse Kyocera gambles nearly $10b of own shares on semiconductor growth

Makes sense to me. If we're seeing capability issues in the middle of a downturn, then what will it be when the economy picks up? The alternative being that the economy never picks up.

Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free

Re: Serves Google right

I don't think Gmail costs a lot to maintain. Even with the ginormous number of accounts, storage is probably little compared to the black hole that is YouTube. And don't forget files are certainly deduplicated across accounts.

Google may have 99 problems, but Gmail ain't one.

Alphabet reshuffles to meet ChatGPT threat

Nice to have politicians worrying about the uses artificial intelligence... Though I have a feeling it's not something that can be stopped or regulated much. The convenience to do whatever you want and ignore the consequences is such that people will always find a way to skirt regulations.

Big Apple locals hire Russians to game New York's taxi system

Re: What is this shit?

Another reason is to make sure that it's worth it for taxis to come to the airport looking for a customer; an airport without enough taxis sounds like a pretty bad idea.

Carmack quits Meta, brands it inefficient and unprepared for competition

Perhaps Musk was right with Twitter and the first thing to do is dramatically reduce the size of the workforce.

Perhaps, but when you have issues belong profitable you don't save money by firing the sales staff.

Meta, Google, TikTok and friends sue California to block kids privacy law

Schrödinger's laws

They want children to be verified — without invading their privacy. Identified — but anonymous.

Twitter will lose 32 million users by end of 2024, Insider Intelligence predicts

Re: Twitter costs

Nope, the group of investors (led by Musk) who bought Twitter did.

No. The debt falls on Twitter. Another way to see it is that Twitter borrowed money to give it to its shareholders, which instantly reduced its own worth by the same amount, becoming cheap enough to be bought by the group of investors with a smaller amount of money. That's why Elon said that the company was losing $4M a day, that's the debt interest Twitter has to pay.

Re: Twitter costs

The biggest difference compared to before is that Twitter borrowed $13B in order to buy itself from shareholders. This is now costing $1B in interest per year. Which is a bit more than what Twitter is saving by having fired 5k employees.

Voice assistants failed because they serve their makers more than they help users

Re: "... they serve their makers more than they help users"

To be honest, I think this vastly overestimates what the makers get our of these assistants. Beyond hopefully locking users in their ecosystem, it seems improbable they get anything at all. Even what private data they can scrounge is probably of little value compared to all the others way they get your data.

Personally, outside of ostensibly using it as a party trick, I only use the Google assistant while driving; that's the only time talking is preferable to touching the screen.

Microsoft launches full-court press to save $69B Activision deal

Re: Everything Microsoft touches dies

Minecraft is still successful though, eight years later!

Using personal info for ads without consent puts Meta in EU's gunsights

Re: Who else does this apply to ?

Google does ask for your consent, for example every time you do a search in incognito mode. It used to be you needed more clicks to reject all cookies than to accept all cookies, and they got fined for that, so now it's one click for both.

Tech contractor who uses an umbrella company? UK tax is coming after them

How many IT contractors are there in the UK?

I'm asking because the subject keeps coming back so often. I think in most countries, hardly anybody works in IT as a contractor; including deregulated US.

Twitter tries to lure brands back with spend-matching scheme

Re: Twitter

I think there's a widespread attempt to enjoy as much schadenfreude as possible

Almost 300 predatory loan apps found in Google and Apple stores

Re: @trevorde - Obvious flaw here

A theft is only a crime if reported to the authorities

I was going to protest, but then I saw your username... So I've got nothing to say, carry on

Criminals use trending TikTok challenge to make data-stealing malware invisible

Scamming the dishonest

Reminds me of the YouTube videos that claimed you could steal your friends' World of Warcraft accounts by sending your own account username and password to [e-mail]

Sandworm gang launches Monster ransomware attacks on Ukraine

Illegal attack

I hate Putin, and I hope Ukraine kicks out the Russian invaders. That said, I always have to roll my eyes at statements like "Illegal attack". It's not like there are rules on when you're allowed to invade other countries. There's no such thing as international law, at best there's international peer pressure.

France says non to Office 365 and Google Workspace in school

Re: So much BS.

You can write microformats annotations in US English, and the user-visible text in UK English, so everybody is happy.

Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back

Re: Twitter “poll”

Surely Elon doesn't need an army of bots to rig a poll on his own website

IBM manager sues for $5m claiming postnatal demotion

Re: Nothing new...

At this point, I wonder who is actually trying to work for IBM

Investor tells Google: Cut costs now and stop paying staff so much

Indeed clearly Google is doing it wrong

As can be observed by the fact it is a failing and unprofitable company. Oh wait.

Amazon reportedly considers laying off 10k employees

Amazon has 1.4 million employees, but how many are in warehouses or driving trucks, and how many are tech workers? I assume the article is about 10k tech workers fired, because they probably fire 10k warehouse employees every single day.

Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000

Re: You get what you order

I'm not sure China counts as socialist, or even communist these days. They're approaching empire from the other side.

Europe wants Airbnb and pals to cough up rental property logs

Re: Imagine if it was China asking for this information

They are required to do it, but they're not doing it. That's the point. When Airbnb has to declare them, they won't have a choice anymore.

What about income tax?

I assume making sure people who rent their flat declare it as income is also coincidentally a benefit for governments...

UK government set to extract hospital data to Palantir system without patient consent

Re: pseudonymization

You should do that twice, for even more anonymity!

Google cut contractors off from online 'Share My Salary' spreadsheet, union claims

I assume the spreadsheet is still available to employees, just not contractors

Google settles with Uncle Sam over data that vanished during cryptocurrency biz probe

Re: "That data was lost before the case could be settled."

Since they pay multi-billion dollar fines?

Re: "That data was lost before the case could be settled."

There are also laws which force companies to delete user data on request, even the offsite backups. Even write-only cold storage is "deleted", by deleting the cryptographic key:

https://cloud.google.com/docs/security/deletion

Oracle's Larry Ellison shares fears of bankrupting Western civilization with healthcare

Re: Experience

I remember an Oracle database used by a project I was working on in the early naughties. It was replicated in five data centers, so the schema appropriately looked like a pentagram.

Musk reportedly wants to gut Twitter workforce by up to 75%

Re: Shoutld be an easy task...

Or El Daverino, if you're not into the whole brevity thing

Amazon hit with $1bn claim that secretive Buy Box algorithm screws shoppers

Re: And this is news to just about nobody?

If that sticks, i would very much like to see similar lawsuits brought up against google. bing and any other forced advertisment/"search" engine in the world.

Looks like you missed this, then:

Google hit with record antitrust fine of €2.4bn by Europe

'Fully undetectable' Windows backdoor gets detected

Not windows use here

But do people really just have to open the document and the macro runs, no questions asked?

I mean, if I open a document that pretends to be a LinkedIn offer and it asks for permission to run a macro, there's not a chance I'll allow it.

China dumps dud chips on Russia, Moscow media moans

Re: Russian SMO

Google gave a very confusing translation of this. Apparently, the word брака means both marriage and defect, so the title of the article ended up as "Marriage is growing in popularity in Russia"

YouTube loves recommending conservative vids regardless of your beliefs

Worth noting the dates

The study was from October to December 2020, which includes the day of the presidential election, and the subsequent screaming about stopping the count, voter fraud, etc. Essentially the most polarizing event in recent years.

Moon has been drifting away from Earth for 2.4 billion years, rocks reveal

It's counterintuitive, because it seems to mean the moon-earth pair is gaining potential energy. From what I understand, this is compensated by the fact the earth is rotating slower and slower (thus losing kinetic energy). Ultimately in gazillion years, the earth would revolve once every lunar month, unless the sun explodes first.

Now you can't even scale Mount Everest without a drone buzzing overhead

Looks nice

Gave me the chills. Though maybe because I thought how cold it must be up there.

Business can't make staff submit to video surveillance, says court

That's four letters — very different!

Good luck getting the money

Seems to me "CheatU" decided they didn't need a presence in the Netherlands so they wouldn't have to pay...

Google Translate dropped in mainland China

I rather wonder what is the reason for the change, considering the translation from/to Chinese still works for Taiwan and Hong Kong, or indeed anywhere else. Is there somewhere a hidden cost to keeping translate.google.cn working? Did they have to maintain a list of words to block in order to keep the answers "harmonious"? Did they find out the Chinese government was spying on the queries?

European carriers again call for Big Tech to fund network builds

Remarkable shortcut

it's quite usual for industry segments to complain that they are struggling and ask for subsidies from the government. The government also looks around for industries that are doing a bit too well and tax them more heavily. But this is cutting the middleman: "Hey, this guy is making more than me, so just give me some of his money"

Darth Vader voice actor James Earl Jones allows AI to take over the role

Yes. Yes, I did.

The post is required, and must contain letters.

Mozilla drags Microsoft, Google, Apple for obliterating any form of browser choice

Re: How about...

It has happened in the past, and in some countries it is still happening.

Florida asks Supreme Court if it's OK to ban content moderation it doesn't like

Would that apply to foreign companies?

Let's say US social media gets overrun by porn, violence and racism. There would be an opening for a foreign company — say, Chinese — to present a better alternative.

In Rust We Trust: Microsoft Azure CTO shuns C and C++

Re: "despite its reputation for being difficult to learn "

The basic fact is that programming is complicated, because having a computer doing exactly what you want is complicated. It's possible to have a programming language that is more complicated than necessary, and less safe than possible, but it's not possible to have a programming language that is truly simple, unless it wallpapers over issues like memory management that really should be solved by the programmer.

Software fees to make up 10% of John Deere's revenues by 2030

Re: Embrace, Extend, Extract

It's weird that a company is able to build a single model of tractor, and sell it with different licenses controlling the power output. If they can manage to build a powerful tractor and sell it at low price after throttling the power output with software, they don't have enough competition to drive down the prices.

FCC floats 'five-year rule' for hoovering up space junk

There's money in cleaning up space

Scrooge McDuck was on the job in 1985 already!

https://www.bedetheque.com/BD-Super-Picsou-Geant-Tome-10-Numero-10-56638.html

Meta disbands Responsible Innovation team, spreads it out over Facebook and co

Ethicists are not like lawyers

It always comes as a shock to companies that the ethicists they hire are not, in fact, always defending the viewpoint of their employers.

No, Apple, you may not sell iPhones without chargers

Re: Easy Fix

What's the problem with selling chargers on eBay? It serves the purpose of producing less chargers to help the environment.

Braking news: Cops slammed for spamming Waze to slow drivers down

Technically correct

The best kind of correct. And, really, what's the issue? That people will feel intimidated into following speed limits? ...Aren't they supposed to do that anyway...?

Japan to change laws that require use of floppy disks

Obsolete regulations are best regulations

I once saw a requirement that data had to be sent as CSV file — in two separate copies.