Telemakhos

Nobody who has ever run a business or knows about how a business runs would think that any business "sits on piles of assets like dragons." Very little cash sits idle, usually for anticipated operational expenditures with a reserve for unanticipated expenditures; the rest is invested, loaned, spent on building the business, or returned to investors. If OpenAI is holding $25 billion in cash, it's because they anticipate spending that much in the near future, not because they're sleeping atop it in a mountain cave.

I found it interesting that two of the AI posters in the article have the three-pointed “no kings” crown, and one has a two-pointed version. The AI hallucinated icons from American partisan propaganda into an EU context in a country with a monarchy.

At $5MM farmers are affected. Land is expensive, and it takes a lot of land to farm. At $5k/acre, the old standard 1k acres farm is $5MM, and nowadays that’s probably not enough land to raise a family (only $65k profit), so you really need more land. Estate tax means the kids can’t inherit all the land.

Why isn’t daily driving a VM a good idea? Doesn’t Windows have a hypervisor now? Doesn’t Linux have KVM? It seems like modern OS design borrows a lot from the idea of virtual machines. Why not just go all the way?

Note that the uncles and grandparents are all old. When you get to a certain age, your eyes don't like to focus on small things like cameras. The elderly prefer tablets, and they want to be able to take pictures of their nieces and nephews and grandchildren.

Search engines (Google was funded by In-Q-Tel) aimed at searching and reading publicly accessible data. Then they moved to the "deep web" like email with Gmail, searching and reading less publicly accessible data.

Social media convinced people to publish on the web details of their personal life that they never would have voluntarily handed over to federal agents: political views, personal relationships, pictures of everywhere they've been, graphs of associates.

AI gets people to interactively divulge what they're working on and even to upload the files. It's the next step on a path from a past where intelligence agencies had to spy on people to a future where people pay for the privilege of volunteering everything to the intelligence agencies.

Lowes and Home Depot, two retailers of tools and home repair supplies, got Flock cameras for all their parking lots after a wave of organized thefts in multiple states. By tracking license plates, they were able to end several rings of thieves who had been stealing millions of dollars worth of goods.

You could do some awesome things with XML/XSL. My favorite was RSS feeds or OPML collections of RSS feeds (both flavors of XML) calling an XSL transformation when viewed in a web browser instead of mined by computers for data; same with TEI files, although that was a bit more arcane. The idea was that you'd have one data file for machine use and a way to present that data to humans as a web page.

But, as a stack, the XML/XSL/XPath/etc combination was weak because XSLT was hard to comprehend and never updated. No browser supports XSLT 2 or 3; they froze support with 1. XSLT 2 was 2007, a year before HTML 5 was a thing, yet it never got picked up by browsers. Javascript was just easier to understand than XSLT. Development of XHTML was also glacial, and people wanted new tags, especially for video.

Only a handful of the rebels are visibly religious. Most of the rebel leadership seems to consist of displaced aristocrats (senators, princesses) who no longer have elite positioning since the Empire took their jobs and started doing a better job of guaranteeing security and providing energy and resources.

Or hot tea. Along the same lines too, try the ultra-flat and crisp and dunkable Moravian cookies (specifically the spice or ginger flavors) or ginger-flavored Swedish thins.

I don’t understand the quality complaints. I’m actively looking for Chinese-branded products now because the quality is amazing. I’ve switched to Hongdian fountain pens, I recently bought an espresso maker stamped with an unpronounceable string of consonants, and I buy Chinese sportcoats that fit perfectly, have no label, and cost what I used to pay for clothes in the early 2000’s. Some clothing manufacturers on Amazon even email me for exact measurements, so I get a tailored fit straight from China. I get knockoff printer ink that lasts months longer than HP’s overpriced junk. The Chinese had quality issues twenty years ago, but today their products are top notch.

Every 65+ person I know has one of those alexa-speaker things. Nobody I know under 65 has one. I wonder if there's just some generational expectation for a fixed household object, like phones and televisions were for people in the twentieth century.

"Friction" and "life" are weird ways of spelling "dollar" and "pocket."

That seems to be the point: you leverage existing workstations on your corporate network and run compute batches at night while they're idle. You don't have to buy any extra servers for your low-priority AI workloads.