I am getting SO tired of hearing the stories about the excesses of AI. OpenAI wants all the water and all the power and all the data centers and all the capital markets (ALL of them, ALL $5 TRILLION) in investments so that they can make a thing that's going to cost every man, woman, and child on this planet $550-ish a month AT A MINIMUM, just so they can break even. Microsoft wants all the things. nVidia wants all the things. Apple just wants to borrow all the things from someone else who knows how to do it evidently. The Magnificent Seven want all the things. By my count the whole AI ecosystem wants something on the order of 25xGDP of the entire planet for the next 10 to 25 years to make their aspirations a reality. And I'm tired of it. Imagine sitting in your hovel waiting for AI Power And Water to turn on your power for a couple of hours each day so that you can charge your phone so that you can use their AI agents. It's disgusting and perverse. So why do we keep tolerating this kind of talk? I CAN'T WAIT until the financial idiots come crashing down to reality.

Someone finally said the quiet part out loud. And nVidia's software underpinnings come from Silicon Graphics / SGI back in the day. Can you say, "OpenCUDA"?

American tech companies in general (and the huge tech companies in particular, including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and the "Magnificent Seven" AI companies) have all proven that they don't deserve your trust. Europe, Canada, Australia, ...all of South America..., you all need to be paying attention and separating your church and state from our "state", because our state is pretty f***ed up at this point. And the federal government in the United States will never try to bring these companies to heal. So, impose fines and restrictions where you think necessary. They're not going to limit themselves for you, or act in any sort of honorable way. I wish we could apologize for their behaviour but, honestly, we suffer under their stupid and greedy yoke as well. GDPR it, Europe. Get serious about it.

Honestly, Sam Altman and company do not deserve your trust at this point. Bogus company valuations built on Intellectual Property and Copyright theft should have been your first clue. Same goes for most of the other Magnificent Seven in general. It's funny that Anthropic is issuing Claude take-downs for a product that was trained on the rest of the internet predominately without permission. "Theft and infringement for me, but not for thee."

"Hey! Massive copyright infringement and intellectual property theft is only allowed when WE do it, not anyone else!"

I intentionally blew the interview because I could see their attack surfaces were porous and their "hybrid cloud" architecture was weak at best. The biggest problem, as I saw it, was that their then-current posture was what management had mandated and they had no interest in making their network and security architecture "better". Also, they were lobbying for "stronger" anti-drunk-driving laws so that they could "get more business", if you know what I mean. All told, I'd rate the company as a C to C- but they've got a product that kind of works in a world where the courts want what they've got to keep even the drunk drivers going back and forth to work as necessary. But this is exactly why I hate the cloud services industry. The "fail closed" attitude is good for firewalls but not for things like transportation or medical applications. "Local First." Join the movement.

It isn't Windows that has the trust problem. Look in the mirror Steve, er, I mean Satya. It's gonna happen when you turn an operating system into an advertising, distraction, and surveillance platform (that still runs on the same deficient kernel that you ran in the year 2000).

Builder.ai ended up being 700 remote workers in India pretending to be bots. The exceptionally stupid part was the company's market cap of something like $1.5 Billion. With that sort of "due diligence" going on I can imaging some over-zealous, greedy hedge fund manager investing $450 Million in a bottle of A-1 Steak Sauce after not stopping or slowing down to read the label completely.

I've tested many of the PoE and WiFi models and they all work well with an internal Micro-SD card and ReoLink's RLN36 NVR (Network Video Recorder), with on-device human/animal/vehicle detection. I don't care for the battery-powered or solar-powered models because of the power drop-outs and they don't survive cold weather well. I love ReoLink for its "Cost-to-Value" ratio, which is much more affordable and reliable than the Amcrest, HIKVision, and Rando-Brand Chineseum variants that cost $400-800 or more per camera. And they're head-and-shoulders above the $90 (really $20) ADT 0.9MP cameras. The fixed-focus cameras start around $80 for a pair and $250-350 can get you their top-of-the-line 16x optical zoom camera. And most of the models either have infra-red illuminators and auto-switching between day and night or excellent color rendition in low light. Strong "buy" recommendation here.

I've not tried Zone Minder yet but I've used Blue Iris (works, I guess, but the UI is clunky) and Emby's IPTV plug-in.

Emby kind of works but mostly the various streams are all fragile and it stops playback too frequently to take seriously and the devs are openly hostile (kind of like Plex) to any requests or suggestions to make it better. They insist that they know what they're doing and it's my network. Yeah, my network, with the multi-gigabit (10/5/2.5/1GbE) switches and proper QoS and enterprise-grade APs and I do this for a living in a data center and I've got more than 100 hours into the dev cycle both at home and work. Yeah, whatever. So I wouldn't recommend you waste your money on the Emby Premier license. It's still an option for me to play with but the RTMP/RTSP streams aren't even reliable on the local LAN, let alone via WiFi or over the Internet. I hope that Zone Minder will do what you want. For my part I'm trying to develop the ReoLink Windows and Android apps to work "better" in an Ubuntu Zorin or Cinnamon desktop environment using WINE and Android emulation layers. Good luck in your quest.

Sweet mother of 110 Baud Modems! Yes, people, sh*t breaks. Welcome to my world since about 1984. While we've gotten better at it, it's still not fool-proof, and there are a LOT of fools out there. And you can claim that "billions were lost" but those are also ephemeral billions that wouldn't even exist today without the Internet and the greedy b*st*rds that have taken extreme advantage of it. News flash: Cloudflare is important too, and they've had outages. Facebook has had some super-entertaining, extremely comical outages. It's time to tone down the "billions in damages" rhetoric because one meteor strike, volcano eruption, solar flare, or *ss-clown in the seat of power can pretty much disrupt anything for an hour, a day, a month, or forever if the event is big enough. And I've been watching over the whole thing for 40-odd years waiting for some of the younger generations to leap out of their second- or third-story windows (think stock market crash circa 1929) because their Spotify play list was unavailable or they couldn't share their narcissism on FaceTube or DisInPinTrest. Maybe they even lost a game save point in Worlds of BoreCraft or some such thing.... So buckle up, you haven't actually seen a real, global internet outage yet. And the closest I've seen was a Cisco-NTP/GateD bug in '96 or '97 that crashed most of the internet at hour-long intervals when the Daylight Saving Time forced altering the system clocks or sometime in the late '90s when someone configured their BGP/4 router as AS0 and we weren't smart enough to be filtering our BGP adjacencies yet. I can't wait for the systemic shock that comes with a real outage....

On one hand, China already has more money than most of the rest of the world. (One the other hand, China has more unemployed people than the US has people.) And on the third hand, China is more than happy to steal any and all technology and engineering that they happen to run across. They are a self-avowed kleptocracy. They already have your designs. Why would they need you, Tim? Oh wait, it's you that needs them....

Our children, and our children's children, are going to be worse off, not better off, than we had it. I can feel the dumb sweeping the nation and it's already obvious in business and STEM employment that the pool of new talent simply isn't there. They can't even handle the sh*t jobs so that they can work their way up to a real job. And they're not even the least bit concerned about it. Cory Doctorow coined the phrase "enshitification". How about a new phrase, "enshitadolescence"?

And this is what I've been saying all along. I started my computing journey with 4 KiloBytes of main memory. No kidding. 4K. And I've always had to be careful with my mallocs and garbage collection and disk space and everything else, including power usage. A lot of junior coders that I encounter today want to start with basically unlimited cores, RAM, and disk space. Of course they do, they're not paying the hosting bill, whether it's AWS or OVH or Hetzner. And until you threaten to take the AWS bill out of their salary they're generally clueless about what it all costs. And this is why I see $20K, $35K, and $60K AWS bills and I tell people I can help them with that. Most of the kids can barely run their IDE on a Mac and when a file share goes missing they're clueless. And God forbid you actually suggest they write something in Assembler or C. And they honestly don't know what a configure script or a make file is anymore in the cases of the web devs. It's amazing how much the industry has forgotten in 40 years.

And AI is just the "2008 Financial Meltdown" equivalent culmination of the crappy code meltdown. The AI crowd wants infinite cores, infinite RAM, infinite disk and, apparently, infinite power to run their newest (but still mostly crappy) models.

"...And those of you too dumb to actually be able to build, code, repair, or otherwise interact with a computer will have to be put to work in the slave labor camps building additional generating capacity so that your elders can charge their phones long enough so that they can actually interact with all of these AIs. Eventually enough power generating capacity will be built that we can go back to powering actual homes, schools, and industries. All hail the men in the clouds. Work will set you free. Learn to AI." And then they start handing out typewriters to a million monkeys to generate more random training data. (Which, evidently, we're already running out of, they say.) The Magnificent Seven AI companies act like we won't need post-hole diggers and trash men in the future and the Code.Org pitchmob wants everyone to believe that Code.Org has been successful in its mission. Lordy, oh Lordy, when will this stupid bubble finally burst?

Since China has been overtly stealing intellectual property for the last 40 to 50 years it seems only logical that it's time for the entire world to start stealing intellectual property back from them. Also, China has more unemployed people than the United States has people, thereby presenting interesting long-term economic levers to be pulled when the time is right. And Mutual Assured Destruction is still Mutual Assured Destruction, so they need to remember that when they try to rename The Sea of Japan to The China Sea and expropriate other countries' land and resources. I was so hoping that Tibet and Tienanmen Square would bite them in the * (asterisk) during my lifetime and we may yet get that opportunity. And India is a fresh opportunity for Beijing to screw up on as well. But to hear "western" vulture capitalists whinge about China taking "all of the good bits" in industry is just so much money grubbing by people who would sell the human race out to make a buck anywhere they can. In this instance they're just whinging because they're not Chinese.