Huang's not a peon who can be fired by HR; he can only be fired by the board, and only in accordance with his contract, which is no doubt quite favorable to him.

Executives sleeping with Chinese spies is news. Them sleeping with the help is pretty much Tuesday.

If you've never had a boss like this -- a lazy narcissist -- you're lucky. But if you have, the pattern is familiar and unmistakable:

* Doesn't understand the issues.

* Doesn't do his homework.

* Believes he's a genius whose "gut" overrules people who do understand and do do their homework.

* Plays his subordinates off against one another.

* Highly susceptible to information from random sources: thing he saw on TV, or heard on the golf course.

* Not particularly fussed about contradicting himself because he doesn't care about being right, but does care about being in charge.

* The more chaotic he can make things, the more in charge he feels.

* Has a cynical view of the people he works for but has a genuine gift for flattery when it suits his purposes.

Once you've seen this up close it's really obvious when you come across it again. You can't *not* listen to a lazy narcissist boss because he absolutely will try the stupid shit he says he will. But you can't count on him either, because he has no commitment to anything other than how he looks and feels *right now*.

Neither. Commerce didn't drop it, it got taken away and given to DoJ, but not because Commerce couldn't handle the invetigation of where the chips were going. The case goes to DoJ because we're talking about criminal charges of smuggling, corporate fraud, violation of national security statutes. Also because the Commerce investigation was tained by potential political interference. And possibly because it ran afoul of a counterintelligence operations siloed in the DoJ -- although by this point the cat is so out of the bag everyone must assume they've got a FISA wiretap warrant on them.

However, the *effect* may be to slow the progress of the investigation and delay any actions being taken.

The first reason for this is that criminal investigations are slower, the standards of proof higher, and potentially involve a criminal trial. Commerce could simply make an administrative law determination that put Megaspeed on some shit list and come to some kind of agreement with NVIDIA.

The second reason is that putting this into DoJ's hands is putting it into a department that has had staff turnover and loss of institutional knowledge, strife between career personnel and political appointees, and difficulty replacing lost employees. It's also led by lame-duck appointees, facing turnover in the next administration. So if they don't make progress in the next two years, allowing for transition delays, it could be years before anything gets accomplished. By then a lot of people will have left their jobs, memories will get hazy, evidence will go missing, and defensive positions constructed.

So while the investigation hasn't been *killed*; it has been delayed so long that it's effectively in suspended animation. It's not possible for Commerce to sanction anyone because the investigation is out of their hands.

The idea beind civil disobedience is you disobey openly and then take the punishment. Governments have closed off this tactic by making punishments far too terrible. MLK Jr. himself only spent short stints in jail; he never faced felony charges.

Nowadays, if the government wants, you'll spend more time in jail without bail awaiting trial than MLK spent in jails total. And if you are convicted of a felony and aren't already wealthy (Hi Martha and Don), your life is basically over: you will be denied nearly all professional licenses, nobody respectable will hire you, and those who hire you will pay you poorly and treat you badly. As a result, the best you will be able to do is eke out a marginal existence until you die. That's what Swartz was facing even if he got no prison time.

Of course, if he had gotten prison time... well, Swartz was a nerdy white guy. What do you think happens to nerdy white guys in a prison? Prisons are filled with violent criminals and violence is tolerated against other prisoners partially in order to keep guys like Swartz in line -- to make the consequences of disobedience for all but the lowest of the low too terrible to contemplate. Either Swartz was going to end up a beaten, raped, broken, and penniless object lesson for the rest of us... or he was going to suicide. I suspect the government was indifferent as to which one it would be.

Money may be an aphrodisiac but come on, Jensen, look in the mirror. There's limits to anything.

The VW Beetle, you mean.

True it was designed under the direction of Nazi's. The nazi's developed jet technology too and many other things. Do you avoid modern commercial flight too?

It was developed to be an affordable and practical car. And it was an affordable and practical car especially in the post war economies. The beetle was popular despite the Nazi connection, and was produced for decades afterwards, in the millions. There is no connection whatsoever with being a Nazi and driving a beetle.

The cybertruck was not designed as an affordable and practical car. And it isn't one. And unlike the Beetle, which pretty much nobody legitimately associates ownership with support for the Nazi's who were long defeated before all but a handful were built. The Cybertruck and its owners live in the still ever present shadow of Elon Musk.

I misspoke. ATM Chip and Pin cards is the threshold not mag stripe readers. chip and pin is way more secure than mag stripes, but chip cards can still be shimmed (skimmed) with the right equipment.

A PC is not necessarily more vulnerable than a phone in theory. In practice it is much more vulnerable.

On a phone you are conditioned to a banking app. The odds of you getting a malicious or fake banking app for your bank is pretty close to zero. The app delivery system is far from perfect, but its not full of fake malicious banking apps for my bank.

On a desktop you are conditioned to use a banking website. Being on a fake website for your bank is just one convincing phishing email away or one malicious google result away for a very large number of people.

The mobile app also has a phone number etc, and is generally more traceable, so its possible to incorporate additional checks into the banking app to verify that the account is being accessed from the mobile associated with the account. Similar checks on a PC are possible, but setting them up is more complex, and "device enrolment" tends to be weaker.

You stick a card into a device you have no control over (and its not a smart or secure card it's just got a mag stripe with some machine readable information on it, easily skimmed and cloned), and then punch your PIN into a keypad somebody else owns in a world full of cameras, and you trust neither the cameras nor the keypad is recording it?

Phone payment systems are incomparably more secure. They can generate one-time use card numbers for transactions for specific amounts, and can have authorization on the phone side of the transaction (ie send a text to confirm a transaction or notification through the banking app) for the user to confirm it. If you skim the code you have nothing. If you record the user unlocking their phone, you have nothing unless you steal their phone. This is worlds more secure than an ATM card.

Do you have long-term statistics on this, or is it based on social media influencers' gut instincts and feelings?

I simply make a habit of reading what the intelligent people on both sides (and also on other, less known sides) say.

If one goes by the short, oversimplified slogans the angry masses from all sides loudly shout during protests, without looking at what the high-level sources that got oversimplified said, one's definitely going to misunderstand a lot of what's being actually argued for or against.

a) "Defunding the police" is something right-wing media and social channels love to misrepresent. It doesn't mean removing law enforcement, but changing how it's enforced.

Here's an analogy. Imagine a scenario in which there's a single unified public force that's responsible for dealing with violent criminals with military-grade force, and for helping small children walk safely to school, and for putting out fires on houses and buildings. Its official are responsible for all that, but 95% of their training is in dealing with violent criminals with military-grade force. Would you want to have them arrive, in full SWAT gear, to put out a fire on your house, and to talk to your daughter so she enters the schoolyard without incidents?

The concept of "defunding the police" is to remove from police responsibilities they don't deal with well, and to transfer those responsibilities to agencies that deal better with them. Continuing with the analogy, to split a firefighting force from the unified police force, so firefighter are strongly trained in putting out fires, rather than on putting out violent criminals, which involves, evidently, removing from the unified force the money necessary to fund the new firefighting force.

In the "defund the police" world police continues existing, but it focuses only on dealing with violent criminals. Their funding is reduced proportionately, and the difference is transferred to the other forces focused on solving all the stuff policed is called upon nowadays despite having little to no training in dealing with those things.

b) "the pronoun police"

You do know this is just annoying people on Twitter and on comments sections of sites, not an actual enforcement of anything under threat of State sanctioned violence, right?

c) "mandatory (...)"

Nothing in that has ever been mandatory.

Now, one caveat: if someone benefits from and builds atop public services paid for by citizens' taxes, it's simply fair those same beneficies cannot in turn deny said citizens who paid for it all with their taxes from enjoying access to such buildings on the equal footing with all other citizens. If you disagree, are you willing to refund them the taxes they paid, covering the costs in their place?

He's opposed to human engineers reviewing AI-generated code. He seems to believe, truly believe, it suffices for engineers to prompt the AI to review and fix the code itself. And then for the AI itself to evaluate the fixes made and simply report to the engineers whether the fixes it made to the problems it detected were successful. And so on, and so forth.

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

I also hate rust, so this is putting all the bad things in one basket. Next step: drop basket.