It makes no sense to claim Chinese courts have a lot of power, although it may seem that way â" itâ(TM)s supposed to seem that way. One of the foundational principles of Chinese jurisprudence is party supremacy. Every judge is supervised by a PLC â" party legal committee â" which oversees budgets, discipline and assignments in the judiciary. They consult with the judges in sensitive trials to ensure a politically acceptable outcome.

So it would be more accurate to characterize the courts as an instrument of party power rather than an independent power center.

From time to time Chinese court decisions become politically inconvenient, either through the supervisors in the PLC missing something or through changing circumstances. In those cases there is no formal process for the party to make the courts revisit the decision. Instead the normal procedure is for the inconvenient decision to quietly disappear from the legal databases, as if it never happened. When there is party supremacy, the party can simply rewrite judicial history to its current needs.

An independent judiciary seems like such a minor point; and frankly it is often an impediment to common sense. But without an independent judiciary you canâ(TM)t have rule of law, just rule by law.

Hereâ(TM)s the problem with that scenario: court rulings donâ(TM)t mean much in a state ruled by one party. China has plenty of progressive looking laws that donâ(TM)t get enforced if it is inconvenient to the party. There are emission standards for trucks and cars that should help with their pollution problems, but there are no enforcement mechanisms and officials have no interest in creating any if it would interfere with their economic targets or their private interests.

China is a country of strict rules and lax enforcement, which suits authoritarian rulers very well. It means laws are flouted routinely by virtually everyone, which gives the party leverage. Displease the party, and they have plenty of material to punish you, under color of enforcing laws. It sounds so benign, at least theyâ(TM)re enforcing the law part of the time, right? Wrong. Laws selectively enforced donâ(TM)t serve any public purpose; theyâ(TM)re just instruments of personal power.

Americans often donâ(TM)t seem to understand the difference between rule of law and rule *by* law. Itâ(TM)s ironic because the American Revolution and constitution were historically important in establishing the practicality of rule of law, in which political leaders were not only expected to obey the laws themselves, but had a duty to enforce the law impartially regardless of their personal opinions or interests.

Rule *by* law isnâ(TM)t a Chinese innovation, it was the operating principle for every government before 1789. A government that rules *by* law is only as good as the men wielding power, and since power corrupts, itâ(TM)s never very good for long.

It is easy to not find evidence of something if you don't look to hard.

This is a case where even if there were IOCs and you found them the clean up would be nearly impossible. Think about their 'Shared Responsibility Model' and the implication here. If MS were acknowledge some kind of serious breach occurred in their core Entra-ID IAM platform...they'd either have to be able to be able to conclusively identify all the impacted subscriptions or every single one of their subscribers would have to kick off their own IR process because how could they know they have not been backdoor'ed from inside their subscription.

Microsoft does 'dog food' so if Entra was exploited MS's internal management is possibly compromised so they could not be 'certain' about the impacted customers, at best they might get some sort of 'beyond a reasonable doubt level of certainty but we could never hit the 'yes the sky is blue standard'.

A not insignificant portion of MS clients (even pretty big important ones) likely have pretty deficient IR capabilities, independent of if they know it or not. Even the good ones are not at the 'we can assuredly remove any persistence work a state-level-actor did on our compromised systems' level without resorting to a large scale rollback-restore. Think the Azure infrastructure could handle that level of activity, the amount of storage-I/O to do all the analysis and IOC searches? the compute and I/O to do mass restores, all in small window...doubtful?

There is also the core defect in MS's approach to authentication that go back to the earliest days of NT, Microsoft stuff gratuitously authenticates all-the-time...Even when that isn't being directly exploited to gather authentication assets like hashes etc for attacks, it means the number and often meaningless or outright spurious log events make understanding what an actor malicious or otherwise was doing with an given set of credentials in terms of intent challenging. (Don't attack me for this statement I did not say impossible, IR professionals and good network security admins can, it just isn't simple.) Which adds a lot of cost to cleaning up an incident like this - if one were to be triggered.

So I don't think we should over look the POWERFUL motivations to declare this one contained. I do think we should recognize that Azure and AWS are probably 'TBTF' and really Congress should be taking a hard look at forcing some divestment and perhaps limiting the size of SaaS/PaaS providers in general. It is just to many eggs in one basket, there is a serious National Security and economic risk here. It comes down to a poorly managed or neglected mill pound might flood a few neighboring farms from time to time but if the damn breaks a large hydro electric resivor it might wipe entire towns off the map. The former might happen a lot more often because of who is in charge, and what resources the have to secure and maintain it, but you have to look at costs in terms of impact * probability. At some point the impact factor is just to large, for anything but a zero probability to be tolerable.

There isn't this massive change where suddenly we went from fairies and unicorns to Mordor. Trump himself is far more authoritarian than the US as a whole. We're currently witnessing that tension between Trump (and his supporters) and the existing US democratic institutions. Certain institutions appear to be breaking, others are holding, and most are under significant strain. But compare that to China where Xi runs a cult of personality, shoots any messengers who bring him bad news, and nobody makes decisions themselves at any level without explicit direction from Xi. The US isn't at that point yet. It's *slowly* and *incrementally* moving in that direction. The way to fight it isn't to use emotions and shouting. Nobody listens to that, and everyone tunes out. The way to do it is to 1) acknowledge the people who voted for Trump for practical everyday reasons, and acknowledge their problems, 2) stop being so ideologically captured by academic ideas that the vast majority of people think is weird or doesn't apply to them (mostly identity politics) and then 3) put together a platform that sells a vision of hope for the future instead of the current vision of the end of the world that the left is so intent on selling. Their vision gets lots of clicks, but it doesn't get votes from the mainstream.

about the only case I can think of is interactive recipes.

Think about being able to check off ingredients or steps as you complete them.

Maybe being able to click and ingredient and select "recommend substitutions" - conceivably the smart fridge might know what you actually have to chose from.

The ability to note you are out of something and build up a shopping list, better than on paper because the system can sort the list by category / alphabetical / however later so its ordered sensible for the shopping trip

An easy way to control music playback while you do cooking/cleaning chores in the kitchen..

There are useful things you can do with a vertically mounted, easy cleanup, food/water proof screen in a kitchen for sure. - Now I am not sure building these features into an appliance you might keep for 15 years, is smart, maybe a better feature would just be a removable mount/plate that lets you install the 7 - 13" tablet of your choice on the door and then it might be smarter still integrate that into the cabinetry rather than the fridge but..

The problem is that the volume of dumb people will get it inflicted on the rest of us. Try buying not a smart TV today. You either have to get some sort of commercial offering, that comes with a crazy price premium or you're getting smart tv that spies on your and sprinkles in ads all over the place.

All because to many people decided they'd rather pay 499 instead of 599 because that is just how little they actually value their privacy and user experience.

Sure you can not connect it to the internet, but they can't use any of the useful features, or you can play DNS games and whatnot if you have the technical savvy and the time, but there are still going to be lot of opaque TLS streams that you just can never be sure what contain, at least not with voiding your warranty connecting the JTAG interface... the same will be true of all fridges that are generally availible soon enough..

Remember - the Federation reserved the Death Penalty for making AI Androids.

Noonian Soong had to exile himself to a remote planet outside Federation control to work on Data and Lore (and his sexbot...).

They needed people to be able to have jobs *that* badly.

Which ... stop sending redshirts outside the ship with magnetic boots in a radiation storm, OK? They could have at least had some astromech droids. Sheesh!

I recently got a "plastic" target that changes color and the holes mostly self-heal if you don't use a hollow-point.

Good for plinking but they do wear out eventually.

I didn't even know this material existed before a buddy told me they were on Amazon. Amazing times, for sure.

Heck, I picked up some 100-lb test fishing line the other day that is some sort of braided heavy-chain polyethylene that is 11 times stronger than steel wire at the same size. The company made mechanical spinnerets to mimic spiders' to get it to work.

Again, I had no idea until a buddy told me it was $20 on Amazon.

Wild.

Back in the day we'd install wild boards that would upgrade the Mac CPU's by a generation or two, add FPU's, etc.

All of this depended on the systems being too expensive to replace or buy new except once in a blue moon.

At $600 which is probably $200 in 1986 money, it's a bit harder to be mad.

Those systems were probably $10K in 2025 dollars. Heck, a few were $10K in 1986 dollars.

I'm not American, and I'm aware of many of the authoritarian leanings of the current US administration. We're currently living through a test of democratic institutions across the west. Those institutions are holding to various degrees, but barely. But to compare western democracies to Chinese autocracy as if they're equivalent is bonkers. You have to recognize it's a matter of degree.

From the government and military's point of view, this is exactly the reason they want a flourishing free market economy, so that there's lots of infrastructure to call on when they need it. The demand for ships was real, and the market adapted and supplied them. When the demand went away, the market adapted and turned to building other things.

That take is just so far from reality it's bonkers. People with high credit scores tend to a) not take on as much debt, and b) get significantly better interest rates when they do. The last time we switched mortgage providers, our mortgage broker said our credit scores were probably the highest he'd seen in over a decade of doing this, and he went back to the lender and negotiated an extra half percent lower interest rate than what they offered, which was already below prime. Credit score is a measure of risk, that's all. If you're high risk of default, they charge a premium. People with high credit scores tend to borrow money for things that improve their financial situation in the long run: student loans, mortgages, and a car loan for a modest car to get them to work. Maybe a loan to start a low risk business, like an electrician. People with low credit scores borrow money to buy smartphones, TVs, decked out pickup trucks, and even doordash orders. i.e. stuff that has no payback.

Compare the market caps though, Nvidia and Intel are not on the same order of magnitude.

I don't think there is much a of frenemy relationship really to speak of.

My guess is this about two things:
1) Nvidia ensuring they have or could get some access to an x86 license if AMD is somehow able to both make some kind of great leap in MIMD compute space and at the same time is able to deliver some kind of integration advantage with integration in traditional compute in memory architecture with EPYC parts.

2) Being sure they have access to some kind of FAB capacity in the event the excrement hits the fan around TSMC, and with a "partner" to whom they could dictate terms.

So the actual median and modal scores hardly moved. The explanation given Zs credit use trends is well known and it is the 'reporting' of student loan delinquency.

So really Zs overall credit worthiness has not changed much it is just the scoring algorithm is producing a slightly different result because a federal policy changes in how unpaid student loans are classified/reported.