Insider information or insider power. Both work just as well.

Insider information is when you exploit information that isn't public. Insider power is when you influence the outcome to your favor.

Many early sports bets used insider power - the player would get a cut of the profits if they tilted the game like faking an injury.

Anyways, news like this is good. If people know these markets are rigged against them, they'd likely avoid using these platforms. It's why regulations exist - the SEC doesn't go after insider trading because it wants a fair market, it does it because a fair market means more people will participate.

Kerberos implementations often used MD5 in the early days. It was only earlier this year that Microsoft deprecated using MD5 for password hash storage for various parts of Active Directory because a lot of legacy equipment still used the old protocol.

It's not an easy transition since legacy equipment might only implement MD5, and updating passwords from MD5 requires the user to change their password

The problem is, the tariffs weren't always paid by consumers.

About 50% of the tariffs collected were absorbed by suppliers cutting their prices - are you saying those suppliers should be repaid? Or that they should jack up the prices they now charge customers to make up for the losses they incurred?

About 25% were absorbed by the business themselves - they were not passed on.

The remaining 25% were passed on.

Now, it's likely easy if it was a product manufactured in China and sold as is, but if it's a more complex supply chain - say, raw steel from Canada, imported into the US (tariffs), then made into products down the line it gets more complex - the importer paid tariffs, then they need to rebate people down the line and by the time it gets to you, who knows how the price was affected - someone might have absorbed the price increase, someone else jacked it up because "tariffs" to make more profit, etc.

Now take it as a car part - raw steel from Canada, cast in Canada, machined into parts in the US, assembled into an engine in Canada, and put into a vehicle made in the US. It crosses the border multiple times, incurred tariffs and reciprocal tariffs And now things are twisted so tightly a forensic accountant will take years to untangle the effect.

In the end, just like the whole trade disruption, it's a huge mess. Lots of price jumps were due to people simply blaming tariffs as an excuse to raise prices rather than tariffs themselves. Others choose to absorb the increased cost at lowered margins.

Jeff Bezos wanted to show how much tariffs would add to the price. We thought he chickened out due to Trump - but maybe it was also because refunds are going to be much more opaque - if people knew they spent $100 on tariffs in total, that becomes a paper trail where they would want that $100 back.

Or maybe that's with projections? They have been in the game for decades, so they know what the expected sales are and they know given the first quarter results, what the second quarter results might be.

Sure there's a chance they're wrong and suddenly a bunch of unexpected orders are going to come in late may or june, but given their current sales funnel it's likely only 5 million for the first half.

Knowing the sales funnel and knowing how the market has behaved in the past helps plan out the supply chain which needs to be prepped months in advance. It's likely the middle of the year will be slow so unless there's a sudden run on motherboards, they're predicting a pretty light summer.

That consumer connection is going to be a problem.

The whole point of AI datacenters is because you have these massive racks of AI servers and they need the ability to talk to one another really quickly. It's not just a server you can have in a homelab, it's 42U of GPUs as part of Nvidia's next-generation compute rack. And they need to talk to other such units quickly because you're going to be using dozens of racks in the training process.

And home consumer power is there because while the home will rarely use it all at once, they will be peaks. If you have 200A coming in, you add up all your breakers and you'll probably have 600A worth of loads. But some loads aren't used at the same time - your dryer might be 50A and your AC 40A, but they rarely go at the same time. Same with the stove which has a 40A plug. It's only becoming an issue because the next big load people are having are EVs and now people are starting to need some sort of power scheduling - usually in the form of a switch between the dryer and EV charger. (This is an issue because 200A is the practical maximum for the residential infrastructure - it's the highest you can get with a direct-measurement electric meter without having to upgrade to a whole new panel involving CTs to remotely measure current).

But it all works because even though we can draw 200A max, very few are doing it all the time, and with the exception of AC and stoves, most loads are run at random times so it even outs. Though even with AC there are plans on scheduling them so they don't all kick in at once - if you can have compressors going on in sequence or in a controlled manner, you can steady the load a bit.

Am I the only one that can't imagine any possible value an AI assistant would bring to a game? Unless you could use it as an aimbot...

Well, it would be if you were achievement hunting or trying to find something - you could use the AI as a way to get to that hidden chest or whatever. It could either guide you, or see you're struggling and actually provide an assist.

Could be useful if you're trying to 100% a game, or get something rare and hard to find.

Not that you couldn't Google it yourself on a phone or something, but maybe there's a higher level of integration. The original Xbox One had a side view type thing where you could watch a video on how to locate some hidden treasure, so I guess this was an expansion on that now-removed feature.

You know, research has shown that from a political perspective, a large majority of people, liberal or conservative, share the same exact values

That's true. The whole left-vs-right deal was really cooked up by billionaires who know if that the proles are fighting each other, they're not ganging up to go after them.

That's the whole point - if we're fighting each other on silly things, we would be too busy to realize the real enemy which are the elite trying to hog all the money. The energy used to deny a person of different skin color access to school is energy not used to try to extract money from the billionaires.

Sadly running AI native on your phone could as a result be less than useful but that's a good thing isn't it?

Not if it means your private information gets shuffled off to a cloud server to perform the AI job rather than running it locally on your device privately.

Mostly because of the inflexibility - either you start having a ton of different bricks, or your designs start being rather cookie-cutter. More so because walls are infrastructure and now you need to have provisions for pipes, wires, and other things to go through them.

Then there's the problem of concrete itself - it has poor heat resistance (low R value). Modern homes are built to R-20 minimum, you probably want R-30 or higher to keep your heating and cooling bills reasonable. This means having to lay on layers of insulation and drywall over your bricks.

These days, the biggest cost to housing isn't the building, but the land. The building is a trivial part of the cost.

Lots of things were tried - we had bricks - which worked but were rather laborious to install. We used cinder blocks, which gave us a lot of the brutalist architecture you see. We can even do modular housing - prefab housing, which can look just as good as any custom designed stick-build house with multiple storeys (usually consists of 3-4 modules). Modular homes take a week or two to fabricate at the factory and are trucked onsite where they can be erected in about a day. The foundation work usually starts immediately as it takes a week to dig out and pour the foundation so when it's ready to be set upon the modules can be trucked onsite and assembled.

Luckily that's starting to happen with ransomware that has bugs in the encryption. That is, even if you pay the ransom, the file is trashed because the encryption key is wrong, or it's insufficient (one was caught using 4 nonces and each time it generated a new nonce it overwrote the previous one in memory, so the nonces sent to the server were the last one, rendering the file corrupt.

With ransomware being vibe coded, there's a good chance your data is lost for good, paying up or not paying up.

Heck, with some luck, they exfiltrated the encrypted versions of the files so they're useless as well.

Opening a French video out of the blue and hearing some weird English translation no one asked for instead of simply adding subtitles is such an awful example of American exceptionalism...
I'm not necessarily going to set my browser to every language I want to hear with subtitles, but auto-voice translation is just wrong.
If you managed to get to Youtube, you can read and choose to activate it if you want, but stop with this English-centric view.

China has been cutting its dependence of oil - it's why they're heavily subsidizing electric vehicles and battery research.

China's one of Iran's biggest customers - yet China is far from having an oil crisis despite disruptions in deliveries since the war began at the end of February. Their heavy investment in renewables basically is making them much more energy independent.

And countries are noticing - oil is limited to a few lucky areas of the world. But sunlight and wind are everywhere. You can rely on ICE vehicles all day every day and be dependent on oil supplies, or given the alternative tech available, start electrifying. And EVs don't care if your electricity comes from the solar microgrid set up in some isolated village somewhere or from a national grid. If you can generate electricity an EV can use it.

And China knows it - it's part of their "belt and road" initiatives meant to lock countries into China politically - they'll toss those countries solar farms and other stuff meant to keep those countries indebted to China forever and thus able to promote China's political ideology. (Belt and Road is known to purposely overbuild - a 10 lane super highway separating two towns 50km or so apart that was originally connected via a two-lane road, a modern airport capable of servicing 100 flights a day, for an island that only has 2 flights... per week)

The problem is MAGA is so focused on their "priorities" they don't realize that many of them simply conflict with each other.

Yes, they're terrible, but until someone forces all the creators to upload their scripts or create the captions themselves, that's the best we got - speech to text is never 100% accurate, and fails the more strongly an accent is.

That said, some YouTubers do actually properly caption their video, and you can tell because it no longer says "auto generated".

And the only reason YouTube has captions is because of ADA compliance demanding it.

It's just a natural consequence of a site where production can range from some guy with a cellphone to full studio productions.

It is the other way round. The whole base load concept only exists because coal and nuclear suck at load following. If all power generation is capable of load following, base load is moot.

The term is "dispatch". A dispatchable power source is able to do load following - batteries, hydro, and natural gas plants are dispatchable in they can react to changing load conditions in minutes. Minutes is fine because of another concept called "inertia" - high inertia power sources resist changes to loads much better than low inertia sources. This is why the grid only needs minute-level responses - things like hydro plants have the power of flowing water providing a ton of inertia - a sudden jump in generator load is met with a sudden increase in force on the generator turbine (see water hammer) which keeps the turbine spinning at a constant rate.

Non-dispatchable sources are ones like coal, nuclear, solar and wind. This is because their output cannot adjust tot he load demanded on demand. Some like nuclear and coal, take hours to adjust. Others like solar and wind simply cannot be adjusted - you get what you get.

Now, we can compensate for non-dispatchable sources - nuclear and coal we run at a level that guarantees they will not power the entire grid should demand drop - we run them under what the grid will demand, then top it up with dispatchable sources.

Solar and wind, we take the opposite approach - we can't ask them to produce more, but we can ask them to produce less, so output of solar and wind is curtailed to meet demand.

It's a whole control system where you have base load supplied by nuclear, and then wind and solar producing as much as they can as it's the cheapest. You then ride out the shortfalls with batteries, hydro or natural gas where you can curtail the output quickly.

And yes, you better hope no one hits the EPO because that would force an emergency shutdown for those nuclear reactors but even then that's still half a day's worth of power that needs to go somewhere (even a SCRAM still needs to dissipate the heat and that takes 6-12 hours to do even in emergency shutdown) Or you have to phase it down - if a fire happens you turn off the equipment in that room and isolate the rest of it from the room so the load doesn't shift too badly. At the same time you reduce the power output of the reactors in anticipation of needing to shut down more reactors and let the residual heat power the rest of the data center until there's not enough then spread the blackout outwards from the affected area.

You might rely on the grid a bit but it's likely to be a bottleneck in that the grid tie can't handle the full load of the datacenter which also means it can't handle the full output of the reactors but it can absorb some of it.

Bezos has supported Trump in many ways so it is just what he supported...

Yep, exactly.

Everyone says "But I didn't vote for this!" If you voted for Trump, yes you did. Sure you may have liked some policies, enough so to disregard his other policies, but you voted for the entire package. You don't get to pick and choose, you just choose which one has more pros than cons for you. And hope none of those cons bites you.

Bezos voted for a warmonger who ended up getting his data centers destroyed. He voted for it. His tax cut can pay for the repairs.And yes, even this was known when he tore up the agreement Obama made with Iran on nuclear enrichment that allowed hundreds of inspectors from every country, including Israel, to look over everything. And no, no one found anything for months. The instant Trump tore it up, Iran kicked them all out.

That agreement took the better part of a decade to prepare, and 18 months of negotiations. Trump seems to thing he's the "Art of the Deal" and is able to do get it done in a weekend. (Negotiations are the last stage in a really long process that starts with a lot of research on the other side. Only after that can you actually sit down and start talking. And the one looking at the clock, is the one who's in trouble.

Iran's basically mastered the art - those plans they're making public are propaganda all right, But they're designed to basically shame the US to the world. Trump needs a deal - he's still not got a trade deal in place, he's basically sinking billions into a war he started, and his erratic nature is tanking the economy and the deficit is ballooning. Iran's just got to spend a few thousand dollars on drones to keep people on their toes.

Meanwhile, Trump has to deal with Iran, Venezuela and Cuba. Even if he regime changes Cuba, it's still costing a lot in terms of the US military to hold those positions