cgcrob

Yeah the 15CE is nice.

I own, err, three. Use one, hedge the others on going up in value one day :)

I don’t think I’ve upgraded a desktop machine for about 10 years. I usually buy a 1-3 year old corporate desktop and use it for 2-4 years, buy another one and throw the old one on eBay.

I’m on a 10500 based Lenovo thing at the moment.

My needs are not immense though.

Still use my original 42S and 15C here all the time.

You need the historical context of the desktop calculator to really understand the pocket calculator.

Short summary: "I want that in my pocket"

Yep. Investors are shifting capital out of the market. Always happens. The little guys end up paying for the losses.

Cynical take here, but I think realistic.

There's a lot of noise I can see behind the scenes on investor confidence. Noise as in "everything is fucked" sort of level of noise. Thus I expect this is being said to try and stop the AAPL stock collapsing in the upcoming recession that the analysts are predicting more than a tangible expansion and recruitment goal.

I also take issue with their being 20,000 people on the market who are still able to contribute something useful. They will be culled quickly and quietly down the line in the annual corporate lay offs.

It is not the time to make grand gestures unless you're trying to gain political favour, at which point any respect I have at least is gone.

Market opening today should be interesting...

I get locked out occasionally when travelling outside EU as well. I've got to the point I will just avoid using services with CloudFlare in front of them.

Also the one time I reported abuse which was online banking phishing they just replied that they'd informed the upstream provider and nothing happened.

Relying on nuances of the abstraction and undefined or variable characteristics sounds like a very very bad idea to me.

The one thing you generally want for circuits is reproducibility.

There are no UK residents involved in the organisation or operation of it now even though we came up with it.

I am part of a small specialist online technical community. We just moved it over to a Hetzner box in Germany and someone there is paying for it instead of it being hosted in the UK.

What are you going to do Ofcom?

Elegantly put.

The biggest lie that is told about crypto is that writing off a few thousand years of experience with money will make problems go away.

I think the impact is going to be far greater than that.

I have seen, at least here in the UK, some people speaking about moving entirely back to hardware that is controlled by the organisation. The case is there on a cost basis already but people are reluctant to admit this. If another magical guarantee expires such as a security one, then the reason can be shifted to that and the cost justification is collateral.

Getting out of PaaS systems is going to be horrible and expensive though. We never should have gone further than IaaS.

I suspect the idea of the cloud as it stands today may die fairly quickly.

Looked after a 1000 seat Pegasus and Mercury installation on Netware in the 90s. Surprised to hear it is still going!

They also forget the economic model that you have to pay $5000 for a real lawyer after the fact to undo the mess you got yourself in by trusting the output of the AI in the first place which made a nuanced mistake that the defending "meat" lawyer picked up in 30 seconds flat.

The proponents of AI systems seem to mostly misunderstand what you're paying for really. It's not writing letters.

I’m not ragging on the whole field. If I narrow it down too much they’ll know who I am and you will know who they are.

I’ll reduce it to a part of psychology.

Removed all my stuff from iCloud about a month ago in preparation for this.

Sorry but I exhibit far higher levels of clue than Musk.

Every time I talk to an MBA grad I hear stuff like this spoken about enthusiastically. I suspect that they moved the business ethics bit to the elective part of the course.

That won't happen because they are late on delivering it. The mission was supposed to be Feb but has been pushed back to late March 2025. If SpaceX don't screw it up further that is.

Musk is trying to talk over this.

I think it was fairly clear. The real issue is somewhere else. Perhaps your perception of bad is wrong.

You do realise they were supposed to return on the next crew rotation in Feb?

Which was on a Crew Dragon that the delivery is late on.

So that's on Musk's company. Now that looks bad. They can't even rescue them because SpaceX are running late.

My father was a big Musk fan and a notorious abusive asshole. He blindly followed the loudest authority figure of the hour because there wasn't an ounce of rational thinking in his head. There are a lot of people like that in society. It becomes their personality and identity which means any defence even if rational becomes a personal attack. End game is defensive measures are rolled out and even the person is brought up in normal conversation so that they can defend them.

He is dead now. That is probably better for the world.

I actually had little to no opinion of Musk until he started meddling in politics. An asshole CEO is expected. The market should kill them if they go over the line. An asshole politician is a very very big issue. More than stocks can be harmed.

In a civil society he shouldn't have lasted past calling someone a pedo in public.

Most CEOs would have been ejected from their companies pretty damn quickly. Why not Musk?

Glad to know they quit. That's exactly what I observed, except it was probably worse if I think back at it. I'm a mathematician "by trade" so was sort of pulled into this by proxy because they were out of their depth in a tangle of SPSS. Not that I wasn't but at least I have conceptual framework in which to do the analysis. I had no interest or knowledge of the field but when you're with someone in it you have to toe the line a little bit.

Observations: Firstly inventing a conclusion is a big problem. I'm not even talking about a hypothesis that needs to be tested but a conclusion. A vague ambiguous hypothesis which was likely true was invented to support the conclusion and the relationship inverted. Then data was selected and fitted until there was a level of confidence where it was worth publishing it. Secondly they were using very subjective data collection methods by extremely biased people then mangling and interpolating it to make it look like there was more observation data than there was. Thirdly when you do some honest research and not publish because it looks bad saying that the entire field is compromised for the conference coming up which everyone is really looking forward to and has booked flights and hotels already.

If you want to read some of the hellish bullshit, look up critique of the Q methodology.

Yeah that's about right.

I think in some fields you walk into them with some kind of noble ideology, possibly driven by marketing but then you find out it's all bullshit and you're n-years into your educational investment then. Your options are to shrug and join in or write everything off and walk away.

I don't blame people for taking advantage of it but in some areas, particularly health related, there are consequences to society past financial concerns.

If it’s any consolation I split up with an ex partner after she wanted to put me as a co-author on a pseudoscience bullshit paper that she was working on to try and hit her quota. Her entire field, in the social sciences, is inventing a wild idea and using meta analysis to give it credibility. Then flying to conferences and submitting expenses.

I contributed nothing other than a statistical framework which was discarded when it broke their predefined conclusion.

Ah one click away from a $500 egress transfer bill.

I only say that because I’ve done it. The NAS is no longer backed up to S3. (Testing the backups caused the bill)

It doesn’t work in practice. So needs regulators or you end up with cartels. And for regulators you need a government.

We got where we got because this already failed.

The distinction between whether or not someone is formally registered as dead and whether or if they receive money are two completely different things and should not be confused. If you conflate the two issues then you can only be being disingenuous.

I've worked at a company which had people who have been dead longer than America exists in their database and some of them do not have a recorded date of death. That does not mean they are not dead, just that the death was not confirmed. And no they weren't being paid.

However if you get some junior developer in with no real knowledge of what they are doing on the job, stuff like this will appear and you can use it for political collateral because no one cares enough to understand the problem and ask questions. Like yourself.

I would expect it will be the market leader yes. But is there a market large enough to support the investment? That is debatable. If there isn’t then they will be in a deficit that is likely to do serious damage to the economy and investor confidence.

Currently there is no hard ROI on LLMs for example other than force bundling and using it to leverage soft outcomes (layoffs) and generating trash. User interest and revenue drops off fairly quickly. And there are regulations coming in elsewhere.

It’s really not looking good.