Beware of reverse survivorship bias. We’d know relatively little about the smart deviants if they rarely get caught.

Oh I’m streets ahead, I never took him at his word in the first place.

Keep in mind that Larry Ellison is fundamentally incapable of caring whether or not “citizens will be on their best behavior.” The only reason he would say a thing such as this is because he sees an opportunity to make money from such a system.

Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think ‘oh, the lawnmower hates me’ – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.

• Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s)

OpenAI on that enshittification speedrun any% no-glitch!

Honestly though, they’re skipping right past the “be good to users to get them to lock in” step. They can’t even use the platform capitalism playbook because it costs too much to run AI platforms. Shit is egregiously expensive and doesn’t deliver sufficient return to justify the cost. At this point I’m ~80% certain that AI is going to be a dead tech fad by the end of this decade because the economics just don’t work now that the free money era has ended.

From https://www.githubstatus.com/ (emphasis mine):

We suspect the impact is due to a database infrastructure related change that we are working on rolling back.

If you fuck up the database, you fuck up errythang.

Anything that pushes the CPUs significantly can cause instability in affected parts. I think there are at least two separate issues Intel is facing:

• Voltage irregularities causing instability. These could potentially be fixed by the microcode update Intel will be shipping in mid-August.
• Oxidation of CPU vias. This issue cannot be fixed by any update, any affected part has corrosion inside the CPU die and only replacement would resolve the issue.

Intel’s messaging around this problem has been very slanted towards talking as little as possible about the oxidation issue. Their initial Intel community post was very carefully worded to make it sound like voltage irregularity was the root cause, but careful reading of their statement reveals that it could be interpreted as only saying that instability is a root cause. They buried the admission that there is an oxidation issue in a Reddit comment, of all things. All they’ve said about oxidation is that the issue was resolved at the chip fab some time in 2023, and they’ve claimed it only affected 13th gen parts. There’s no word on which parts number, date ranges, processor code ranges etc. are affected. It seems pretty clear that they wanted the press talking about the microcode update and not the chips that will have the be RMA’d.

One of my grandfathers worked for a telephone company before he passed. That man was an absolute pack rat, he wouldn’t throw anything away. So naturally he had boxes and boxes of punch cards in this basement. I guess they were being thrown out when his employer upgraded to machines that didn’t need punch cards, so he snagged those to use as note paper. I will say, they were great for taking notes. Nice sturdy card stock, and the perfect dimensions for making a shopping list or the like.

I respect Warren a lot, but she’s 74 and I’d really like to see a US president who isn’t well past retirement age.

I’m not exactly a fan of Biden, but he’s on the ballot for two reasons:

• Incumbents historically have an advantage, and it would be crazy to throw that advantage away.
• Who else would run in his place? It’s not like there’s some other obvious candidate. I can think of lots of progressives that I’d personally love to see on the ballot, but the reality is that none of those candidates are seen as being electable in swing states. Be nice if it were otherwise, but it ain’t.

Elon broke the seal on firing huge swaths of a tech workforce to make your numbers look better.

Don’t give him too much credit, it’s hardly the first time the tech sector has gone through this cycle. Elon had to do it because he massively overpaid for Twitter. The fact that his layoffs came at the front of this wave is probably just coincidence.

I briefly experimented with it ages ago. And I mean ages ago, like 20+ years ago. Maybe it’s changed somewhat since then, but my understanding is that Gentoo doesn’t provide binary packages. Everything gets compiled from source using exactly the options you want and compiled exactly for your hardware. That’s great and all but it has two big downsides:

• Most users don’t need or even want to specify every compile option. The number of compile options to wade through for some packages (e.g. the kernel) is incredibly long, and many won’t be applicable to your particular setup.
• The benefits of compiling specifically for your system are likely questionable, and the amount of time it takes to compile can be long depending on your hardware. Bear in mind I was compiling on a Pentium 2 at the time, so this may be a lot less relevant to modern systems. I think it took me something like 12 hours to do the first-time compile when I installed Gentoo, and then some mistake I made in the configuration made me want to reinstall and I just wasn’t willing to sit through that again.

I don’t think a Micro SD card would be affected by this problem, because they’re too small to have soldered components. The issue affects Extreme Pro SSDs that have oversized resistors and/or weak solder joints.

When I took welding shop class in high school, our shop teacher literally called it “sand eye” when he explained why wearing a welding mask was not optional in his shop or in general while welding. Sure enough, there was that one kid who thought he could get by with his squints while teach wasn’t looking… He was out for days with sand eye and had quite the cautionary tale to share when he returned. Everyone got downright religious about the welding masks after that.