I can see the argument that Nvidia has no obvious advantage in LLMs that would make them want to set up their own operation; it's basically everything else about the situation that would make me jumpy if I had bet on Nvidia.

"Investing $100 billion in OpenAI's spend $100 billion on Nvidia stuff initiative" sounds, at worst, like a slightly more legal version of the trick where you shuffle stock around between business units or stuff the channel and book that as sales because you suspect that your real sales numbers will disappoint; and, even if it's not quite that dire, Nvidia being willing to get paid in faith rather than in other people's money (or shift the stock to one of their customers that actually has money) looks very much like an indirect price cut, which gives the impression that either demand is outright softening, and Nvidia has units that it can't simply immediately shift to customers who are actually paying cash right now; or that Nvidia feels the need to help fill the gap between OpenAI's seemingly unlimited appetite for doubling-down money and the, sooner or later, limited supply of VC nose candy.

That said, it's not entirely novel; Nvidia's current holdings are something like 90% Coreweave(under 10% of Coreweave's total shares; but Coreweave shares are the bulk of other-company shares Nvidia holds); and they have an agreement with them obliging them to purchase any unused capacity through 2032; so they've been expressing confidence in AI-related companies and/or trying to keep the music going by paying some of their more fragile customers' bills even before this.

It could be that Nvidia isn't even trying to diversify; but the history of bad things happening when people underestimate correlated risks also doesn't make me feel great about the situation: Obviously it's going to be a bad day at Nvidia if 'AI' cools; stock price will take a hit and they will be left holding at least some inventory and TSMC and other vendor commitments; but it's going to be a worse day the more of their hardware they sold in exchange for stock in 'AI' Nvidia buyers, rather than in exchange for money, since the fortunes of those companies are going to be fairly closely correlated with Nvidia's own, albeit likely to swing harder and have further to fall.

They have BP units that compensate for this. Basically it will take a bunch of readings automatically. The doctor will put the cuff on your arm, have you lie down on the exam bed, then start the machine. He will then leave the room and see other patients.

The machine will over the course of half an hour to an hour, take a reading. It will do it relatively randomly every few minutes. All you have to do is lie there and close your eyes and relax. This will not be the absolute more accurate reading, but it can see what your blood pressure gets to without a doctor present and in a position that should lower it to the lowest possible value (i.e., you're on the threshold of sleeping)

After that the doctor will get a strip of paper that has all the readings it took over the time and can see what you got to. It's just you and the machine in the room. The machine doesn't make any noise other than the usual sounds it makes when it performs a reading, so the anxiety will raise it for the first few readings, then it will fall as you get used to it and likely also wander into a nap.

One other thing I found is exercise - I walk to my cardiologist's office which is a 20 minute walk. By the time I get there all the anxiety I feel has melted away because the exercise has taken the edge off. Give me 10 minutes in the waiting room and my heart has slowed back down to resting rate.

I get the unpleasant impression that we are doing a corporate reenactment of that period in European history where basically everyone was ruled by Habsburgs who were incestuous and incompetent in equal measure.

Perhaps more troublingly; they'll allow facebook to see what the people you see do.

My good-faith advice to anyone who is considering letting zuck into their refrigerator just to solve the crushing problem of what to cook with available ingredients or whatever would be "probably not worth it"; but that's ultimately a them problem one way or the other.

The trouble is that much of the pitch here is that you are supposed to provide footage as you wander around; merrily making the you problem everyone else's problem as you do so. And, yes, 'no expectation of privacy, etc, etc.' but there's a fairly obvious distinction between "in principle, it wouldn't be illegal to hire a PI to follow you around with a camera while you are in public", which involves a typically prohibitive cost in practice and "you paid them to upload geolocated footage, nice going asshole", where the economics of surveillance change pretty radically.

If people want to outource their thinking to facebook themselves I'd have to be feeling fairly paternalistic to intervene; but given that the normalization of these is, pretty explicitly, about facebook having eyes on everyone I can only hope that 'glasshole' continues to be a genuine social risk to any adopters.

Anyone who puts their money behind wildfire smoke as the leading public health threat of 2050 is just showing their abject lack of faith in the potential of malice and incompetence. Who are these faithless degenerates to tell us that we can't re-introduce enough trivially controllable infectious diseases or deregulate enough toxin smelters to outmatch some trees?

Sorry if I wasn't clear; that's the part I have deep concerns about getting done. My impression has been that(while, in theory, people are supposed to be averse to spending money) it's much easier to get funding for novel or sexy initiatives, especially if they promise to be magic-bullet solutions, than it is to push through money for boring stuff, even if it's low risk and abundantly proven; and the risk these recommendations address seems to sit firmly on the unfavorable side of that.

"We need to do a bunch of fiddly changes to eliminate quirks of build reproducibility, and generally have more eyes on important software" is not a terribly intimidating project in terms of novelty or risk; but "basically, just spend more on reasonably competent, reasonably diligent, software engineers than it seems like you strictly need to, in order to make improvements that outside observers could easily mistake for status quo, forever" is a deeply unsexy project. It's a much better project than "Agentic digital transformation" or something; but that's the sort of likely failure that someone looking to spend company money to look like a thought leader on linkedin will practically trample you in their eagerness to approve.

As best I can tell; most of the complaining about freeloaders is sideshow in the battle over who deserves subsidies, not objections in principle. I'm less clear on whether there's also a positive correlation between whining about the subsidies going to people who aren't you and actively seeking them yourself; or whether the cases of people who do both are disproportionately irksome and so appear more common than a dispassionate analysis of the numbers would reveal them to be.

That Onions seem to have antibiotic properties, are good for cuts, and bacteria does not seem to grow on them. After I cut up onions, I personally don't consider the knife "dirty", so I do a quick rinse and let it dry. I don't think twice about it. I think that it is cool that someone is researching more ways to take advantage of that property of Onions.

It shouldn't be really all that surprising. They're root vegetables, and that nice meaty bulb grows in the dark, where it's constantly under attack by bacteria, fungi and other things trying to get at the stuff within. And also, well, moisture doesn't help matters, since wet soil full of organic matter (fertilizer, for example) automatically brings on the colonies of things.

That plants also can protect against UV isn't unusual as well - when you think about it, plants are stuck outside and during the long hot summer days, they're exposed to relentless sunlight that they don't have much choice of seeking shade. So plants naturally need mechanisms to prevent UV from destroying their DNA and causing the plant equivalent of cancer (especially as lots of plants are long lived).

So they've evolved lots of mechanisms - photosynthesis is but one of them (which requires stuff on the redder end of the visible spectrum - plants have mechanisms to convert UV and blue-green light to red light for photosynthesis, but you're wasting most of the energy since it's converting a photon to another photon at lower energy). This is why photosynthesis efficiency is rather low (around 6% or so) - most of the light needs to be downconverted from green-blue-UV to red and the process wastes the energy. Which is fine, as most plants get more than enough sunlight that there was no need to be more efficient.

They also have protective mechanisms around DNA repair because well, those chloroplasts (the things that do photosynthesis in the cell) don't cover everything so UV will still hit DNA and alter it.

It would not surprise me that plants also evolved coatings that protect on UV - root plants may be surprisingly close to the surface, so the bulb could get exposed to sunlight as well, and you don't want those to burn or you could kill the plant. So evolving something to block it at the skin of the bulb seems advantageous.

This seems like the sort of advice that is going to be exceptionally hard to get followed because it's mostly so dull.

There can be some interesting futzing in principle to keep unnecessary sources of variation from getting folded into build artifacts, normally followed by less-interesting making of those change in practice across a zillion projects; and basically anything involving signing should at least be carefully copying the homework of proper heavyweight cryptographers; but most of the advice is of the "fix your shit" and "yes, actually, have 10 people, ideally across multiple orgs, despite the fact that you can get it for free by pretending that the random person in Nebraska won't make mistakes, get coopted by an intelligence agency, quit to find a hobby that doesn't involve getting yelled at on the internet for no money, or die" flavor; which is absolutely stuff you should do; but the sort of deeply unsexy spadework that doesn't have magic bullet vendors lobbying for it to get paid for.

What seems sort of damning is that the explanation is "our tech sucks".

The 'explanation' is that the demo triggered all the devices within earshot because apparently a device designed to perform possibly-sensitive actions on your behalf was assigned a model line wide, public audio trigger in order to make it feel more 'natural' or something; rather than some prosaic but functional solution like a trigger button/capacitive touch point/whatever; and that the device just silently fails stupid, no even informative feedback, in the even of server unresponsiveness or network issues. Both of these seem...less than totally fine...for something explicitly marketed for public use in crowded environments on what we euphemistically refer to as 'edge' network connectivity.

You obviously have limited control over the network in a situation like this; so nobody expects the goggles to fix the internet or facebook's server resource allocations for you; but having some sort of "can't reach remote system" error condition has been ubiquitous basic function since around the time that dirt was still in closed beta.

I suspect that this is symptomatic of the same phenomenon; but it seems especially weird that they'd be trotting the CTO out to give a, from context, apparently intended to be exculpatory postmortem when the problems with a device you are intended to wear on your face, in public, are 'sensitive to external trigger shared across entire product line' and 'silently fails stupid if network conditions are suboptimal'.

Judging from what I've seen, if WDC trademarked the original Steamboat Willie character and renewed the mark as required, it has been in use continuously via pins, toys, etc..

You technically don't have to renew the mark - you just have to use it. Registering the mark is useful in legal proceedings, but even without registration it doesn't mean there's no protection in place. Most small businesses don't register their company name as a trademark, but the law still protects them from other companies trying to represent them falsely. It's just their damage claims will be limited and you'll have to prove usage.

Steamboat Willie is in the public domain, so you are free to use it for your content. You cannot say it's Mickey Mouse, but you're free to do whatever you want - colorize it, etc. You can remove the ears off the mouse and modify the film that way to avoid trademark issues as well - you are free to create a derivative work of a public domain work. So if you wanted to replace Mickey with a human and use the rest of the imagery, you can.

In fact, wasn't there a pornographic movie that was using Steamboat Willie? Disney didn't sue them, likely because they didn't have anything to sue over.

Of you could do what Jobs did and find a way through the demo that won't lead to problems. It's well known that the iPhone OS was highly unstable in the early days and there were lots of bugs ranging from crashes to things like Wi-Fi not working.

What Jobs did was basically spend a month going through and finding a path to demo what he wanted to show while avoiding all the bugs and traps. Sure the bugs were being fixed all the time to get it ready for release 6 months later, but for the demo there had to be a "good way" through it.

If you're betting that farm on a product, you spend time trying to make it work. If that means taking a month finding a way to demonstrate it without running into issues, that's what you do. And you don't stray. It takes a lot of discipline to go from "hey this is cool check it out" to sticking with the script and showing what works and what's cool but not showing them this other thing that can lead to a crash.

The blue screen for Gates was likely something random - it was scripted to show it works and it likely did 99% of the time. He just got unlucky with that 1%. Likely Jobs rehearsed the demo so often he dropped stuff that was going to be flaky - even if it worked 99.9% of the time, he didn't want to tempt the gods with that 0.1%.

I am skeptical we won't find a use for datacenters. The cooling, electricity, and servers can be reused for more mundane tasks. Sure, nVidia AI chips are wasted money if you can't find a use for them, but every other facet of infrastructure can be reused for any general-purpose computing. I would wager that even the GPUs can be repurposed to be powerful business servers if someone wrote some drivers to move more Java/JavaScript/Python routine processing to GPUs...it obviously won't be as efficient as a conventional CPU, but I am sure it can offset the price of buying new chips.

Just like we got a lot of cheap office furniture on eBay when the dot com bubble popped, I am sure there are going to be some firesales on cloud computing hardware or services when this horrid AI bubble finally pops.

The problem is buildings need constant maintenance. When the first dot-com bubble popped, we had a lot of unused infrastructure - notably in the telecommunications sector where lots of fiber optic cable was laid during the boom to facilitate higher speed connectivity. But after the dot-com bust, most of that remained unlit for a decade and chances are, most of it ended up being scrapped because it was unsuitable for use. Sure some companies, notably Google, bought up some of the dark fiber and used it to connect their datacenters, but so much more was laid and sat unused.

Likewise, most of these buildings may simply not be fully occupied - they'll need renovations because it's unlikely the original company needs that space for other purposes, and the renovations would be needed to have multiple companies be able to have their own space that's secure.

And the unused buildings will likely rot in place - after a year, you can probably still renovate it to make it usable again. After 5 years of neglect, you're starting to look at tearing it down. Even if everything was brand new, years of neglect will take its toll and if people aren't willing to buy it up, landlords will stop maintaining them. What started as a minor roof leak will cause a roof collapse.

So cheap computers yes, but all the other stuff? Not so much. AC units, power handlers, etc

Yeah, as if we needed any more reason to consider this bloated "security" software to be malware. I really don't understand why anyone in their right minds would install it or allow it to be installed on their systems. Giving some third-party company complete control over what software can run on your machines basically screams "I don't understand anything about security" better any almost anything else you could possibly do as a system administrator, IMO, short of posting the shared-across-all-machines root password on USENET.

For most IT administrators, having complete control over what users can run is the idea. There's no need for your work PC to be able to run anything and everything - most work can be done using a limited set of applications. If your job involves doing nothing but paperwork and filing stuff all day, you generally only need access to an office package and a web browser for the online components. You don't need them running things like music players or chat apps beyond the company required one.

Even if what you do is more sophisticated, it's still generally limited. Architects need access to their CAD package, and maybe a lightweight photo editor and 3D rendering package to do produce pretty photos and analysis software. They too probably don't need access to a music player and other stuff.

IT admins have always wanted an iOS-like control over what runs on their systems - it keeps the attack surface much smaller if users can't accidentally run some ransomware.

If you're a software developer, things are more complex since you need to run a compiler, and often the results of that compiler so you need the ability to run arbitrary executables. And that's pretty tricky to do and to stop developers from running ransomware on their computers. There are ways to isolate them but it's still hard.

LIkewise, as you saw in the past, often it's used in kiosks where the only application running should be the kiosk front end. If someone breaks the app they shouldn't be able to get to a shell and run other programs.