Who exactly did you think made that multi-billion trade on oil futures just before the war started? Bill Cosby?

Well, "just before the war started" would have been easy guess. Even I bought some oil ETCs when that second carrier group appeared to be in position and made some quick bucks on first week of March. I just assumed it was going to be something like last summer with the bombs on supposed nuclear facilities and everyone would have gone after a few days.

That 1.5B trade 5 minutes before announcing "negotiations" that happened just now is of course a different story.

So we have a guy who is overwhelmingly for coal and oil.

Manages to get the entire world economy that is dependent on said oil to crash and causes shortage.

=> Demand for EVs going up
=> Demand for non-fossil power generation going up

https://www.euronews.com/2026/...

So DJT manages to pull off what environmentalists and advocacy groups haven't been able to do for decades...by sheer incompetence?

Knowing him, he'll probably turn around at some point and claim that it was his intention all along...

They should add AI and quantum computing into the mix just for maximum buzzword coverage.

4) Just ignore Bitlocker completely and use NTFS's built-in encryption (EFS). No reliance on TPM. Yes, it's per file (or directory), but works just fine. And you can export the key and protect it with your passphrase, so moving to a new PC is also not a problem.

Can you authorize an 3rd party app repository to install APKs from there, but prevent random stuff downloaded from the Internet?

Overall, I like this approach, and maybe *slightly* more idiot-proofed than the current one where you can just install anything after one prompt. But I'd like the possibility to allow permissions for a trusted source to install additional ones and have the 24-hour counter for other stuff.

There's a difference in digging something up from the ground, processing it and using it for a long time via either longevity or recycling than just burning it up in smoke and never getting it back.

The sound was crisp, the picture clear.

No it wasn't. Flickering image that after a few runs of the through the projector was full of scratches. Optical audio going with the same.

Move to digital (audio first, picture more recently) has significantly improved the audiovisual quality.

The largest problem I have with movies and pretty much any media these days is the mixing. For a long time, actors came from theater background, they articulated their lines clearly and the dialogue was also usually mixed with higher volume than background music or sound effects.

These days actors talk with their natural voices while action scene is going on. Sound mix doesn't do any tricks to enhance the sound. It used to be that the dialogue came mostly out of center-front channel (because that's where actors are on screen), so I could compensate by setting my amplifier to put 3-6 dB extra out of center speaker. But now even that trick no longer works because the dialogue could come out from any channel.

And sometimes this comes out in editing too. Immediate cut from a quiet dialogue scene to an EXPLOSION that makes my ears pop.

So I'm just watching with closed captions on everything these days and keep the volume low. I read the dialogue lines and hear the big sound effects. It's actually almost like reading comics...

As I said, use the CustomCSSForFx addon at https://github.com/Aris-t2/Cus... and enable toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets in about:config.

All you have to do then is edit a single configuration file, and in that just comment out/in the options as you like.

Only problem is that when a new version of Firefox lands, this addon needs to be updated too and then you need to do a diff for the configuration file. That's why I use ESR so I don't have to do that too often.

I'm using Firefox ESR so that I don't have to do reconfiguration of the customizations at https://github.com/Aris-t2/Cus... except about once per year. As long those CSS customizations work then I'm fine with Mozilla foundation spending their money however they like. That addon is magnificent.

My Firefox still looks exactly like it did 10-15 years ago. I still get my status bar, I get my tabs below toolbars & address bar, and icons are still the same.

Yeah, stuck in my ways, I also use Openshell on the Windows PCs I have to use so I get Windows 7 look. I don't mind learning a new UI paradigm if I see a clear benefit and it's going to remain for a long while. Change for the sake of change...bah.

Problem is that at some point they are just going to include cellular modem in there and phone home. Getting an IoT package from Vodafone Global and an eSIM costs peanuts. After that happens, you basically need to open the chassis and try to find where the antenna is and disconnect it.

Original post (not by me):
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/...

Pasted text parts.

My team caught someone who sent an AI to interview in their place.

It sounds so crazy that I didn't believe it until I reviewed the transcripts:

Interviewer: "Can you tell us about yourself?"

Candidate: "Absolutely! I'm a passionate professional who thrives in dynamic environments."

Interviewer: "That's a really insightful answer."

Candidate: "Thank you! You're absolutely right."

Interviewer: "You're absolutely right too."

Candidate: "You're absolutely right about that."

Interviewer: "We're both absolutely right."

Interviewer: "This is going really well."

Candidate: "It really is."

Interviewer: "You're absolutely right."

Candidate: "You're absolutely right."

Interviewer: "You're absolutely right."

Candidate: "You're absolutely right."

The transcript goes on like this for 14 more pages.

Thank goodness we're using AI to screen our candidates, otherwise we might have wasted our time talking to someone who can't even be bothered to show up to a call.

In Finland, the local burger chain Hesburger has been coming up with plant-based patty. They have been doing it for many years now, one press release (in English): https://www.hesburger.com/abou...

Anyway, prices (PDF, in Finnish) https://www.hesburger.fi/mello... says that the "Veke" cheeseburger is 1,80 euros, while regular beef cheeseburger is 3 euros exact. They are probably selling it as a loss leader but someone must have come up with the math anyway to sell it at a *cheaper* price point than a regular cheeseburger.

Anyway, I've tasted it a couple of times...and the patty by itself is ok-ish but dry. In a cheeseburger I cannot really tell the difference, but without cheese at least I need to have a larger drink and the taste is clearly different despite mayo and pickles and whatever else on it. My guess is that this is due to lack of any and all fats - whatever vegetable oils they are using just doesn't work the same way. However, when using that imitation patty with cheese, the cheddar seeps into it and it tastes pretty much just like a regular burger would.

Anyway, doesn't look like the imitation patty requires doubling the price.

No. The new transfer done by HBO (and also released on Blu-Ray) two years ago is good quality - the film has been rescanned. The CGI sequences that were pre-rendered in NTSC (480p, 30 fps) have been upscaled. The film transfers are probably intentionally soft to make it clash less with the upscaled CGI sequences.

Note that the Gathering (Pilot) and other TV movies (Thirdspace, In The Beginning, Call to Arms, etc) as well as the sequel series Crusade have *not* been updated.

My daughter plays Roblox. They are asking her to take a selfie to get assigned to an age group.

https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/...

Seriously, they are planning to use some AI doodad to place you into a group "Your estimated age helps place you in the appropriate age group (5-8, 9-12, 13-15, 16-17, 18-20, and 21+) to customize your experience on Roblox". I've known people that have baby faces in their 30's, and I've seen preteens that have started showing off beard. And this is all based on some image recognition thingamajick?

Most countries at least in EU have some sort of governmental identity mechanism, that allows you to make strong identification to any service. Why does this have to be some sort of AI magic that steals your data, when this all could be handled by a simple federated identity tokens. Just go to your government site, ask it to generate a signed token that states "On this day, holder of this token is X years of age", lifetime of token can be like 15 minutes. No need for government to learn what were you visiting and no need for the service to know all other details either.

They are already utilizing some third party to do the selfie recognition and evaluation, why couldn't the same third party pass a token between gov website and the service with the same price?

I know a few people who actually did make *some* good money with bitcoin - they were geeks who had actually mined it early in the game - like pre-2010, when it was still computationally very cheap. They had basically ran that miner as a kind of fun little process in the background - same guys who had run things like Seti@Home or Folding@Home.

Then they had forgotten about the whole thing, and 5-10 years later noticed that the little toy is suddenly worth around 10000 USD/EUR per BTC. They sold at that point and were able to make down payments for a house with that crypto.

But like with any pyramid scheme, you can win if you get in *really* early.