A crawl is still moving. Ukraine is not getting stronger, that is stupid. Ukraine is continuing to innovate and find ways to resist, its nothing short of really impressive, but no they can't keep this up and no they can't win without outside troops.

Putin will find more conscripts, or he will continue to bring in mercenaries. Don't be surprised if the situation in Iran works to his advantage. Khamenei might soon look at the Russian army as way to dispose of malcontents and get some used Russian domestic oppression hardware in return.

^^This

The Islamic Republic is nearing collapse and if we are at least somewhat charitable, Trumpian polices are accelerating that.

I have no idea what the aftermath will look like, and we should all probably be more worried about it than the media is, because sometime within the next 2 to 10 years, Iran is a going to be a failed state with a lot of not all together obsolete weapons running around.

Guess you haven't seen the news lately where Ukraine is running out of troops in the South, and Russia's attacks on infrastructure are plunging large parts of the population into deadly cold and darkness here in Winter.

Yes Russia is a shitshow. Yes Russia poses exactly zero threat to NATO. Yes the Russian armies capabilities were dramatically over stated, the Russian navy even more so. No Putin can't keep this up much longer. No the Russian military is not well managed, does not know how to maintain supply lines while even dealing with an adjacent adversary; and yes the entire effort should be seen as an incredibility embarrass fiasco for Putin.

but...

Ukraine is also on the verge of collapse, and it absolutely loses this war unless the EU or the US put some boots on the ground eventually. Putin has no off ramp domestically and for Ukraine it is existential, so these two nations will batter one another until both are hollowed out bloodied shells of the formerly polished shit-holes they were. However if nothing changes Putin absolutely will achieve at least Pyrrhic victory. Don't kid yourself. Also don't kid yourself that the NATO powers understood this from the start. They saw and continue to see this conflict as a way to finishing the complete defanging of Russia and making a ton of bank for the MIC friends while they are at it. Even Trump knows this, or at least the people around him do. Its a great political football for them, a good way to placate various interests whenever they need to score some points with a given group or need a distraction.

Of course the real price tag is innocent Ukrainian civilians and poor Russian conscripts.

There are EXACTLY two possible outcomes, NATO troops on the ground defeating the Russian forces, or an impoverished Russia capturing at least the eastern 1/3 or so of a ruined Ukraine. At this point its just a question of how many more months and what the total body counts will be.

Those AI Accelerators might as well be called ML accelerators, once you remove the hype. The market may lose interest in LLMs but the applications for machine learning are real.

There are lots of enterprises with plenty of data to crunch. One thing that has surprised me so far is I have not seen a lot of support for these thing is MOLAP products or in traditional DBMS systems for ROLAP work yet. With the right storage (read giant memory caches) you could do dimensional data on top of normalized data without any interim steps almost instantly. That would have a lot of value too.

I realize the really big boys terradata and similar are doing this stuff, and Azure and AWS alike off a various BI tools on top of their datalake products. I am more thinking about it filtering down to MSSQL Server/Analysis Services etc for the engineering workstation under the professionals desk or the SMB spaces 20U of equipment rack.

Think about that small manufacturing facility and imagine if they could decide on a Friday morning you know we'd like to have data warehouse capabilities, design some models and cubes, let it suck all the transaction data from the OLTP environment over the weekend and have stuff to play with Monday morning. All in one small box, but performant none the less, and if you made mistake, a measure is wrong, the schema does not really allow what you need etc, so what you can change it and recalculate everything in minutes, maybe faster!

The oil services industry aint happy either; as they were behind a lot of the platform development etc for offshore work.

That leaves us with two explainations

The Administration irrationally hates wind, no matter who is making money off it. (I doubt this, Plenty of ways to shovel money to Trump cronies)

or

There really is some national security reason. One credible thing I have seen is the turbines interfere with radars and sonars used to watch for low flying enemy aircraft and subs.

Yes but when it comes to a subject like 'Intellectual property' I think it is rather odd to characterize any opinion as 'extreme' at least as far as you are not restoring to violence or something to push that opinion.

If someone said only Chocolate is the only flavor of ice cream with eating, would you describe them as a "Chocolate Extremist"?

Because it is a mature product. You have to sell your brand on something..

Everything else like ice on the door etc has been cloned. You can't really sell on quality. It is to difficult to educate consumers. They are standing there in Lowes' looking at 2 generally identical 22 sq ft units but one costs $300 more. Which one are they leaving with?

In the old days of appliance stores, where you would generally interact with a sales person they might explain that well the INSERT-BRAND has 25% lower failure rate and warranty period 2x as long. You might have got sales that way but now that most appliances are sold either scrolling on Amazon or at DIY place where you're lucky to find and associate and even if you do they won't have a clue about the appliance - you have to sell on gimmicks.

Slapping a big screen on it, and saying it plans your dinner for you is a nice gimmick. Its the kind of thing people will think, hey that's cool, even if they never use it later.

yeah, anal should have been annual, but given we are talking about lawyers, the first auto correct works just as well.

Do we have to abuse every word until its meaningless.

You can call them extremists, when the bomb some data-center, or gun down a group of intellectual property attorneys at the firms anal barbecue.

Until I think we can go with 'activists' or maybe even 'agitators', hell 'criminal offenders' if you wish, but extremists is kind of a weird take.

The problem isn't the Chinese know when you get up in the morning, but it becomes a problem when they know what time General Nuk'em does. Target operations via less then secure IoT stuff are easy enough to imagine, Operations that target a class of interesting are not necessarily impractical either.

What happens when everyone on a base has fit bits and they get hacked? Suddenly there is a lot information about how many people are where when etc that could be actionable intelligence.

Imagine that nice couple that appear to be innocuous embassy employees who help traveling Americans with Passport problems and visa issues; are actually CIA spies. If one of them uses the smart tv in their apartment to call some family back home in Maine at 8pm every night, well you might start to put together they are not a couple at all based on those screen grabs your getting from the TV.

Same thing with mobile phones. They all have cameras now, people take them into secure areas even though they are not supposed to, they take pictures of things even though they are not supposed to. Your foreign operative might drop some QR codes with malicious links around the bars and lunch places near said secure facility and hope to pop phones, grab the picks let AI look for anything interesting..

These ideas might sound like a wild spy novel fiction type stuff, but most of us would have said they same thing about a mass-attack with exploding pagers a couple years ago too!

You can say sure we can control this stuff with policy and what not but the reality is even people who no malicious intent violate policies. That 20-something kids wants to show his buddies the missile he works on snaps a few discrete photos, that former US President 'accidentally' shifts some boxes of classified materials to his garage or a disused room in his resort. People at all levels do stupid stuff with sensitive materials be it paper or electronic. The difference is when sensitive stuff lands on unclassified/insecure electronic systems gets copied or goes missing we way less likely to know.

Because Altman already has Nadella by the short ones.

Microsoft has market cap of something like 3.5T

Microsoft got talked into something like a 30% stake in OpenAI that is worth about 140B.

All and all something in the area of 3-4% of Microsoft's value is the belief OpenAI is worth what its valued at and continues to be invest-able. If OpenAI were to implode, it will show up on Microsoft's balance sheet enough the board might actually start looking for a new CEO..

tariffs are more limited hands off form of taxation than the alternatives.

if you don't want to pay them; buy something domestic or just hold onto your money. Compare that income or property taxes...

The limited hands off government I think we ought to have would eliminate income and property taxes and implement a national sales tax. The America first government I think we ought to have would enact strong tariffs to ensure domestic industry is protected and domestic alternative goods and products are preferred, but leave you free to import French wine and Chinese e-waste if you really really want to and are willing to pay the taxes..

The fact there can be a 40% decline in an entire category and you don't see it on the streets, in the form of empty shelves, shuttered websites etc suggests to me that a lot of economists when the considered tariff impacts wild underestimated the gamification of shopping.

There are ton of people out there that just scroll and a click buy on things they don't need and if they thought about it for more than moment would realize they don't actually really want - they're just bored...They solve that by frequently ordering momentarily interesting crap for $30 because "its cheap."

I don't personally nor do I know anyone who says they miss TEMU or missing the extra few pages of junk to scroll thru first on Amazon one little bit.

I imagine the people who do, still having their needs for the instant gratification of opening a package, any package are met with trash from Dollar General

I think you underestimate how far the country has moved and how quickly. You underestimate the degree to which sexism is a thing of the past and you underestimate how accustomed to a total lack of professionalism in governance we BOTH the first Trump administration and the following Biden Clown show complete with its klepto-cross-dressers had made us.

In 2014 people did care about that stuff. In 2024, buffoonery from candidates and cabinet members is normalized. Heck look at Fetterman in one Senate term I honestly thing most of the country has gone from how did Pennsylvania elect that slob to, dang he is one few actually serious people around!

Norms and expectations are shifting very rapidly.