"Following a three-hour trial at Wandsworth County Court on 14 May 2026, in which both sides were represented by barristers, the court found in favor of the claimant,"

So... no... AI didn't win a case.

See, they found a way to get the support of the ones profitting from it.

The story makes pretty clear that they've been working this a long while, before at least the current hyped LLM was available.

To the extent "AI" might even play a role given their timeline, it was stuff that was pretty useless. People tried unleashing machine learning on these sorts of records and it just didn't do much.

Sounds like it's just a run at modernizing records keeping and access, which is fine.

He's also going to have to pay that money back, have all his assets seized to do so (proceeds of crime), and then the tax man is going to be asking "Hey, you earned £2m, right? Where's the tax on that?"

Now that he's been jailed, they have years to unpick it all, file additional charges, seize everything he owned, even take any "gifts" that he gave to friends and family, and build a case for tax fraud to jail him further.

Yes, but for a wealthy person, this is a much tinier fraction of their wealth.

The fact remains for someone under the threshold of the standard deduction, the property tax is something they have to pay that they cannot deduct, but a landlord could.

As I said, it's deductable without regard to the standard deduction. You can take the standard deduction *and* the property tax deduction but only if you are a landlord. I don't know how you decided to say "No you can't deduct that, it gets deducted"

A common person is somewhat potentially in posession of hundreds of thousands in house value. They are relatively less likely to have that much in stock except maybe their 401k, which is totally different.

Yes, there's sales tax. Ordinary income gets taxed that way on top of income tax. The leveraging unrealized gains as a loan is the most famous loophole, re-upping through re-borrowing at payoff and juggling that until death where there's a much more favorable estate tax.

The counterpoint is that the valuation seems to be a fiction when it could represent a liability, and a real thing when they want to, say, take out a loan against it.

It's awfully convenient that it is selectively fictional.

Note that for more humble "wealth", folks are taxed. If you own the house you live in, even if you are not using it as a financial instrument but just a place to live, you get taxed on the unrealized "value" of the house. I don't get to say the market value of my house is a fiction since I'm not selling it.

So we have a double standard, rich people wealth is selectively fictional with respect to tax burden, common person wealth is very much considered real for taxation purposes.

Even wilder, if you live in your house, your property tax is subject to the standard deduction, which means folks generally don't get a deduction for it. If you own a house that you rent out to someone else, the property tax you pay is not subject to the deductible, and you can deduct it. The tax system rewards landlords more than homeowners.

It seems that either you assess a property tax on net worth analogous to what is imposed on common folk or at *least* tax loans against such assets that have nothing to do with paying for that asset.

It's cheaper in the short term to get going. Methods without the lock in tend to be a bit more expensive up front. Most businesses are looking only at the current quarter without regard for the longer term. Buying is cheaper than renting only after some period of time, and that period of time is nearly always longer than a quarter.

Also, they have established their way as 'the' way for any *serious* business to do things. So management doesn't want to be seen as failing to do 'the' thing.

While true, you trade the VMware problem for a vendor that actively wants you to stop using your preferred product and start renting from azure instead.

Unless you are all in on azure, Microsoft is a dubious choice as a virtualization solution.

You need to read The Secret Barrister novels, written by a real criminal-law barrister.

The UK courts are an absolute mess of chaos, that's not the lawyer's or the judges fault.

You would think that with a former-lawyer as the prime minister now it would get sorted, but they've made only token changes to an absolutely nonsensical court-appointment system that operates largely on constant fire-fighting and ill-preparedness and throwing lawyers to the wolves making them run from case to case with little to no preparation or warning.

It's continued because "that's how it's always been done" but the court system outgrew the capacity decades ago.

So does... Starlink own space now?

Maybe if you hadn't sent up countless thousands of satellites without asking anyone but the US, people will give a damn about where they were.

That device is $200. A random household that grabs a roku stick from walmart for $20 is not the same target demographic.

Ignoring the fact that a large share of smart TVs use Roku as their OS as well. So those random TVs are either Google, Roku, or some vendor specific thing.

Management has been pretty adamant that we are at the point where a developer should *never* look at source code, and work purely on prose. So some dutiful people have taken it to that extreme.

So they tell me they spend hours in planning, reviewing the resultant generated plan to give themselves confidence that the resultant code should make sense, then let it chew on making test cases, making code, running the tests, deciding whether the test cases were bad or the code was bad when failures happen, repeating until it has satisfied itself and then it lands in the builds that the still-human QA get a pass at. Then the human QA person often basically says "WTF, this is broken as hell" and the developer starts over incorporating the feedback from the tester into the flow.

Now the folks that discard that mandate and use CodeGen for code completion, more curated prompting, they get respectable speedups, but no hope for management to just toss those long term if they still need to curate the CodeGen. So management *really* wants the narative to work for the case above. They have raised the question if the real problem is the human QA, it passes all the CodeGen test cases and it's own code review, so maybe the human QA is just raising a stink to look relevant... Doesn't help that management understands neither the customer, software, or how to develop code, so they base things largely on wishful thinking on what the cheapest and most convenient answer would be that supports them getting big bonuses.

While AI might not be to blame yet for those figures, it is well within the era of TikTok where material that doesn't hit within 30 seconds, the audience is out.

Note that Gemini is responding to a user and not actually running the command.

He didn't say Gemini tried to use that to adjust brightness nor did be say he asked to code a brightness change/ automate it. So I assumed he gave the answer that Gemini would have given a random person asking how to do it.

Problem is that doesn't work either, since the asset 'value' is unknown until transacted, and also ignores the stock value entirely, which is generally not nothing.

For my net worth, you would absolutely count my stock holdings, because at that relatively mundane level, I can probably sell it at the extrapolated price. If you have even a couple million dollars of stock in a big company, you will barely move the volume of trades for the day, so the extrapolation works in isolation.

But when the amount becomes a significant portion of typical volumes, then the transaction will not pan out at 'market rates'.

So we have this awkwardness of something that is definitely worth some cash, but the extrapolated value can't predict the real value, and the other measures would fall short.