My employer announced that AI costs will be billed back to departments. Token use (almost entirely among developers) was cut in half without affecting productivity, and perhaps even enhancing productivity because they had to think a bit about the best use of what they had instead of trying random things.
This helium crisis is nothing new. It's now 20 years since I wrote a column titled The looming helium crisis and little has changed.
eMudhra is exiting the global SSL/TLS certificate business and is offering customers Sectigo-issued replacements [
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...Sectigo? Née Comodo? They haven't always been the sharpest tools in the shed, either.
I don't know if you're a russian bot or some deluded idiot, but it amuses me to do a breakdown of your post.
NATO turned what was originally intended to be a mostly peaceful show of force like the temporary invasion of Georgia into a war of attrition.
First of all the "peaceful show of force" "temporary" invasion of Georgia involved a few hundred dead in the first two days, and another 5000+ civilians killed in the ethnic cleansing after that, all for a land-grab to seize control of territory covering half of Georgia's coastline that Putin wanted.
Secondly, the "peaceful show of force" "temporary" invasion of Ukraine involved hundreds dead, ballistic and cruise missile attacks on all of Ukraine's largest cities, and Putin publicly admitting the goal of overthrowing the Ukrainian government... and that's just within the first 36 hours. Within two and a half months Russian officials began admitting the intent to permanently annex parts of Ukraine, proceeding with a constitutional amendment a few months later claiming to annex vast territories that Russian had not remotely taken control of, and which Russia is not remotely capable of capturing. Donetsk alone has a population of over a million, two million if you include the metro-area. Russia spent months and many thousand of lives to capture, and later lose, villages in the range of low tens of thousands.
Remember WWI when the lines were pretty much static for years and then suddenly it was all over?
Yes, I remember. As I recall it wasn't exactly "sudden". As I recall... Russian casualties were around five million killed, wounded, or captured, the Russian economy was collapsing, Russia was running out of food, and Russian literally lost it's own capital to civilian rebellion. A few months later the Russian government collapsed and surrendered vast territories including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, parts of Poland and Ukraine to Germany and its allies (known as the Central Powers). Right about that point the U.S. joined the war reinvigorating the Allied Powers. Germany&friends knew they couldn't win a protracted war. They attempted a quick win, and, in short, they failed. The Allied powers steadily beat them down, with the allies eventually breaking through the lines and progressively liberating territory. With the Allies steadily advancing and the war obviously lost, German forces began rebelling and Germany surrendered.
That's what's happening here. Russia has most of Donbas plus a buffer zone in some other regions that directly border Russia. Ukraine is throwing men at the front lines for Russia to kill but is running out. Territory held is largely irrelevant compared to the number of men killed and weapons destroyed.
So much to unpack there, but it's amusing how you cite "territory held is largely irrelevant" given that the tide has turned and Ukrainians are now the ones breaking through lines and liberating territory from Russian occupation. It's not much yet, but all the map trackers show the reversal. Russia is now officially loosing more territory than they gain. Russia WAS slowly gaining small bits of land, largely through sending meat waves of untrained ill equipped soldiers at Ukrainian lines until the Ukrainians ran out of ammo and had to fall back. However now 7 out of 10 Russians killed are killed by drones. The "no man's land" between the two sides is now many kilometers wide. Any Russian trying to advance gets hit by a drone. Russia has also losing on average 1 air defense system every day, and rapidly depleting. Russian supply lines are getting pummeled by drones. Russian refineries are getting pummeled by drones, with progressively worsening fuel shortages for both the military and for the increasingly rebellious population. Cheap advanced Ukrainian drones are taking out expensive crappy Russian drones, including Russian's new jet-drones. Practically every country on earth is asking Ukraine for their military drone tech, the Russians can't remotely match it. Russian's economy is also fucked, but that topic pretty needs a separate book to cover.
Interesting side notes on weapons destroyed. Russia is destroying it's aircraft almost as fast as Ukraine is, between incompetence and maintenance failures and friendly fire shooting down their own aircraft. Also the nation that is the biggest donor of tanks to Ukraine is... Russia. Ukraine captured countless Russian tanks intact because the Russian military is so abysmal incompetent and corrupt. And as I mentioned, Russian air defense units are depleting. The war is now approaching 5 years, longer than the entirety of WW1. Ukraine is a small fraction of Russia's size, and Russian is literally losing and headed towards another soviet-union-style collapse. The biggest shock to the world of this entire war is just how worthless Putin has made Russian military, through systemic corruption and systemic incompetence.
Polls show the Ukrainian population isn't interested in surrendering. They are defending their homes. It's simple, the war will end when all the soldiers go home. When Russian soldiers go back to their homes in Russia, and when Ukrainian soldiers go back to their homes in the currently occupied parts of Ukraine. Although that's not likely to happen until Putin either expires or is overthrown. Not only is he fanatical enough to drive his country to collapse in the attempt, he knows if he did end the war in failure he'd get killed or overthrown for it.
Anyway, pointless reply to a bot or a useful idiot. But maybe some random passer-by will find some bits interesting. I don't know about the rest of the world, but mainstream US news rarely mentions the Ukraine war anymore, and certainly not in any detail.
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And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world, in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. [emphasis mine]
-- Arthur Jensen, Network (destroying his golden goose)
I think the nudity was her husband, not her.
Anyone convicted of a federal crime committed after November 1, 1987, has to complete at least 85% of their sentence, no parole allowed. Even in a halfway house, she will be subject to strict behavioral rules.
The bigger problem will be manhole covers on suburban streets. These will get sucked out of the road not only wrecking your Tesla but likely also endangering the traffic behind you. You can bet that this feature will be geofenced and only available on approved racetracks --which, for 99% of buyers, simply makes it useless and expensive payload.
The launch was a circus that PT Barnum would have been proud of.
A handful of specially built show-pony-cars that are ultra-light, only "flew" once (because they probably didn't have a big enough battery onboard to recharge those gas cylinders) and were the ultimate in Musk-level deceptions.
I'm going to do a full technical breakdown of all the reasons why what we saw was 100 percent marketing and why we will *never* see a Roadster 2 with the claimed specifications ever hit the market -- the laws of physics may be inconvenient but ignoring them is not an option.
What we saw in that demo was Musk, once again, coming up with a clever way to get hundreds of millions (perhaps more) of interest-free funding from people who slept through science classes in highschool. What's even more amazing is that this is the *second* time he's promised unrealistic deliveries, taken hundreds of millions in "reservations" and failed to deliver.
PT Barnum was so right.
And Musk also said "Manned colonies on Mars by 2024" and "Hyperloop" and "Fast transit tunnels beneath cities" and "Solar roof tiles" and a whole lot of other stuff to which the laws of physics and his engineers said "nope".
It's not the launch or even the jump that will be the problem... it's landing a 2+ ton car that is descending from several hundred feet above its apex and this has significant vertical speed. Even the gas-thrusters may have their work cut out for them
No word about the real-world range of the Roadster 2.
I find it interesting that Musk can create a show-pony car that does cool tricks that nobody would ever allow on a road-legal car but he fails to address the elephant in the room: "How far will it go on a charge?"
Why did he ignore this crucial aspect of any EV?
Easy, because he originally claimed 1000Km and it is much easier to get a lightweight show-car to do jumping tricks than it is to deliver a real-world essential such as decent range.
The Roadster we saw in the display is just a stunt-car, road-legal production vehicles will be just another fast EV.
If people want to risk quarter of a million dollars reserving one then only one phrase springs to mind:
"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me".
Elon, Sam, Mark, Peter, et al... You are cordially invited to go fsck yourselves.
The magnitude of destruction you have wrought upon this industry, upon our livelihoods, and upon society as a whole, cannot be calculated, much less excused. You have stolen the corpus of human ingenuity and creativity from its creators without recompense, and now are trying to sell a provably shittier version of it back to us at a markup.
And, let's be honest, this is what you wanted to build -- a barely capable servant who will do your bidding, whatever it is, immediately, without question or compunction. It's extremely telling about your moral compasses that you studiously sat on your hands when your customers were creating graphic sexual imagery of celebrities over their vociferous objections; or impressionable young people (who needed help, not encouragement) were being driven to suicide by your chatbots; but "torturing" a memory block of neural net constants is somehow the bridge too far?
I repeat: Go fsck yourselves.
Next, I have to distribute the cert to a handful of local services, including pfSense, TrueNAS, Postfix, the Unifi Controller (extra annoying, because Java), Forgejo, and probably a couple others I've forgotten about. None of that is automated, either. It hasn't been so painful that I've bothered to write scripts for the process, so I get to do a little SSH dance every three months.
"Deploy your own!" Couple of issues there: 1) Everyone treats self-signed certs as suspicious, so they're inappropriate for Postfix TLS; 2) Every time I've tried that, Firefox and/or Chrome complain about some obscure feature not being what they expect. The latest headache had to do with OCSP stapling, which has to be turned on -- oh, whoops, now it has to be turned off... Bleah. LetsEncrypt certs Just Work, so I haven't revisited building my own CA.
This "new" site is part of a larger effort by that slob to kneecap or compromise US government Web sites, and steal your personal data.
I first read about the effort here: https://thedreydossier.substac...
Yesterday, she took a look under the hood of America.gov, and yes, it's as bad as everything else the DOGE vandals have been doing: https://thedreydossier.substac...
Up until this point, government Web sites were designed, built, and maintained by the agencies responsible for that government service. For example, if you wanted to apply for or renew your passport, you would go to state.gov, which is run by the US Department of State, which is responsible for processing applications for and issuing passports. No other department has lawful jurisdiction over passports.
From the point of view of the law, that's still true. But the slob, without anyone's permission, kluged together passports.gov. This site was built and is run by the White House's "National Design Studio," completely outside the law and without any independent oversight. The State Department was not consulted and has nothing to do with it. Further, the site is filled with third-party trackers, analytics, and some custom code that copies every page you view, including form contents, to an unknown third party.
Oh, and the guy leading the National Design Studio and in charge of building these fake sites? He's Joe Gebbia -- cofounder of Airbnb. Read both articles for more details.
In short, you should treat America.gov as a malware site and stay well away from it. Under no circumstances should you feed it any of your personal information.
They won't ban human drivers. One day you'll just discover that self-driving cars will have much cheaper premiums.
You might also discover a new insurance company has appeared that only insures self-driving cars. That insurance company won't actually be new, it'll just be a separately-branded subsidiary of one of the major players.
In the end, it might be that the self-driving cohort with their lower payout rate subsidises the "manual" drivers to some extent.
God doesn't play dice. -- Albert Einstein
