Sure, we'll just assign "master all things x509" to engineer #78 of 205... in our four-person shop.

Everyone in this conversation seems to be assuming every company has a massive IT department with folks just standing around picking their noses waiting for real work to show up and break the monotony. Outside Silicon Valley and Fortune-500s, that's an extreme rarity.

There's also an implicit assumption we're all running major-vendor enterprise-grade software written within the last twenty years; rather than an actively automation-hostile "best of a bad breed" industry-specific solution cobbled together by the nephew of a paranoid former CEO around the time I was graduating high-school, and it's sadly still the top tool of the trade.

Those who enjoy the luxury of never needing to leave Entra to do their jobs should stop throwing stones, take a step back, and realize their world isn't representative of the real world of IT.

The trouble is Anthropic *can't* just take a lower IPO price. They don't have the revenue to survive much longer, and they're having a harder and harder time getting more rounds of investment cash just like OpenAI is. The IPO is a last-ditch effort to survive long enough for some sort of fiscal miracle to happen, or to let the current investors cash out (or at minimum let Dario Amodei and the other founders do so) on the backs of greater fools.

You realize you don't have the power to "press charges", right? Whether or not Flock is happy with the situation, they have zero ability to compel the police to do a damned thing about it. Now... Sure, nobody can promise the feds won't investigate (though they wouldn't even have jurisdiction without abusing something like interstate commerce), but most colleges "are" their containing town, including the local PD. Remember why Cornell is currently in the spotlight for how poorly a particular investigation went down? Why would a purely external police matter reflect poorly on Cornell?

As for what I'd tell anyone who did investigate - Nothing at all, because 1) read the above, 2) absolutely nothing we ignore our fifth amendment rights to say will be used for our benefit, and 3) we'd need to be a complete moron to show our faces while cutting down a flock pole; and while I may be no genius, I'm also not a complete moron.

The poles are 20lbs of high-quality aluminum - Ironically, jokes about letting tweakers know about the gold in the e-waste Flock keeps leaving on the side of the road aside, the poles themselves are the single most valuable part of an installation (as scrap).

More importantly, a simple hacksaw will go through them like butter.

Maybe not, but this is a college campus. Simply make it known nobody's going to investigate their disappearance, and they'll be gone by morning.

I'm actually surprised this played out as long as it did - Had the same battle taken place at my alma mater, I can promise you I'd personally have cheerfully harvested them for parts the same day, and I'm by no stretch unusual in that regard.

Golly, wouldn't life be awesome if we could just take a few pills per day to get all our nutritional needs like some kind of 1960s sci-fi trope? Oh, wait - No, no it wouldn't. Food is enjoyable, to the point most people like eating so much we have an obesity epidemic in the Western world.

It's also worth mentioning that countless studies have failed to find any benefit of taking supplementary vitamins on either lifespan or quality of life in otherwise well-fed individuals. Conversely, ~600 kids per year (in the US alone) need medical treatment from OD'ing on them.

All great questions, and I realize you said this a bit tongue-in-cheek, but... No, a contractor didn't "fail" to install updates. Most cheesy mobile games refuse to run and automatically kick us over to the app store when a new version comes out. The goddamned FBI's MDM can't even manage the same basic level of enforced integrity?

Oh goody, scapegoat #1 has been arrested and scapegoat #2 fired. Now how about the spoils-system appointed idiots who chose a platform less secure than a random gooner gatcha?

In advance, I promise I'm not promoting any conspiracy theories here, this is a sincere question...

There's an old, largely ridiculed idea of the "nuclear hand-grenade", with most references talking about using a particular isomer of Halfnium. The primary objection I've seen to the idea is we have no practical way to "excite" nucleons in any meaningful sense - at least not without gear the size of a particle accelerator. But... This clock appears to be making use of exactly such an effect, just at sub-fissile energy levels.

Is this effectively a disproof of the most common disproof of the "Halfnium grenade"?

Sure, the rest of the market is barely keeping pace (4%) with inflation (3.4%) YTD; but but but, NVidia is shiny and AI is going to save us all! Pay no attention to the billionaires promising us a post-scarcity world while building massive survival bunkers in the background.

In server-grade hardware, sure. And you paid $$$$$ for it.

The earliest "consumer" grade RAID cards, by contrast, were basically just softRAIDs with a built-in IDE controller - And that's still true to a large degree; the "RAID-mode" in your gaming PC's BIOS is still merely offloading the hard work to the CPU.

I'm not claiming Linux' softRAID implementation was or wasn't faster than cheap RAID hardware, but I have no problem believing it could at least be comparable.

You're thinking of what amount to ultra-SFF PCs. In the truly embedded space, having a fixed (and usually tiny) amount of RAM on-die is the norm rather than the exception.

That said, Meta clearly isn't targeting 68HC05s here, so the distinction is largely meaningless.

Yes, pedant, I left out the word "qualified". I took it as a given the very people just laid off are qualified to do their own jobs. If that's my greatest sin today, I'll call it a pretty damned good day.

"Anyone I disagree with must be an rsilvergun sockpuppet". That's so broken I'm not even sure what kind of logical fallacy to label it as. Poisoning the well? A variant of Reductio ad Hitlerum? Genetic fallacy by proxy?

It's funny - Thanks to your efforts, I suspect virtually every /.'er knows who rsilvergun is at this point. And I can promise you, the vast majority of us find him far less obnoxious than his stalkers.

It's explicitly fraud, because in sponsoring H1-Bs, a company needs to attest that it's unable to fill open positions with available domestic talent. If they just fired 6000 domestic workers, there are clearly 6000 domestic workers available for those roles.

Granted, it's almost never enforced, which is what most of us in IT have been screaming about for decades.

And I may just need to buy a lottery ticket tonight while dodging flying pigs, because the current administration has managed to hit "stopped o'clock" for the second time!

That's kind of the point of most Malthusian scenarios. No, the population won't really grow exponentially forever - But it will grow exponentially within the availability of any constraining sub-exponential resources (e.g. food or physical space).

What happens when we hit that limit varies, but a common natural pattern is exponential growth followed by population collapse, rinse wash repeat. That's all well and good when we're talking about squirrels or deer; not so pleasant when we're talking about 4B humans starving.