Not a threat to mainframe sales. A threat to the consultancy and license fees that come with it.

If you knew how things run in the backend... there's a ton of issues all the time and we need 400 devs just for maintenance. Turnaround on any issue starts with 6 months of analysis.

I agree with you. Yes it causes damage daily. And even with that it still outperforms most human coders about 100x on speed. So I can fix the issues with plenty of time left.

Last week Codex fixed 4 bugs, including one very nasty off by one error and another indirect error, in about 10 minutes all by itself. I'm very impressed with the AI when it works.

Other times... not so much. But the benefits already far outweigh the cost. 20 EUR/ month is peanuts. If this keeps up I'm also taking on the 200 EUR Anthropic plan.

A modern mainframe is fine. But IBM doesn't make its money from hardware sales. It makes it from consultancy. And that area is going to get hit hard.

identification isn't the issue, prosecuting it is. And given that Trump has pardoned even the biggest frauds, like Trevor Milton, and fired the prosecutors, its obvious which way the wind blows.

There is also another problem with lobbying and election funds that's a bit more on both sides of the aisle. The banks have gotten a lot of money during QE that they're using to influence policies. Not that Trump needs a lot of incentive.

The COBOL is never the issue. Its the entire custom built environment around it.

I recently worked at a place where I pushed very hard for a transition.

They first built the system in 1969. They upgraded every time. And to support that they built their own data abstraction layers on top of the network database. Currently they're using a relational database. But they're using it as a network database because otherwise they need to fix tons of code.

We developed a way out of this, but it's going to take time.

Note they tried to migrate once before, cost them 40 mio and delivered nothing. Part of it was internal sabotage from people with overpaid jobs.

This isn't a purely technical problem.

The correlation between house pricing and other factors is with the indirect money supply, not with young people moving to California. That would at best drive prices up locally, but the housing price crisis is global. From New York to Amsterdam to Tokyo to Sidney and every big city in between, the housing reserve is bought up by investors of the type you don't want: rent seekers.

It has a very high correlation with QE and unlimited money from the Fed. The solution is going to be very hard, because removing the glut of money requires taxing the richest people, companies, and especial targets banks and FI. A counter weight to solve the money issues would be to give stimulus checks - probably the only thing Trump did right, for all the wrong reasons.

But if you only give stimulus checks and not remove the glut that landed at rent seekers, you're still going to have problems. With that money the richest families and people have been buying influence through lobbying or more direct ways in the case of Trump, Orban, Fico etc.

tl;dr: The QE during covid will be causing serious problems for society for decades. One of which is extreme asset prices.

It's not that ridiculous if you want to search for something that also happens to have attributes common to hardware KVMs. Makes it pretty hard to find anything. Not sure if that's the case here but people calling their software "railway" or "bleach" underestimate the difficulties for end users.

A colleague of mine recently wrote a SF novel in a month with two AIs. He's not a writer.

He said the biggest problem was stopping AI from giving away the whole plot in 3 pages, every time. You need to sort of steer it round the track. Still, it was a pretty reasonable novel, and with good editing I think Baen could have published it. I've certainly read worse.

The trick here is to do short iterations. That way the AI stays on track most of the time. Could he have done it himself? Like me, he's not a native English speaker, so that would have been tough.

Have you seriously never heard of polymarket and the whole thing behind it?

In that case it really is news for nerds, isn't it?

And if you know that that is the case... maybe you can watch for it.

I've been in Beijing quite a few times since 2001. Air quality used to be atrocious, even worse than London in 1995 or so. If you came home you had to wash up and the sink turned black with soot - in London as well as Beijing. That has changed quite dramatically.

I think a main turning point was the people seeing the air during the may parade get blue because they shut down the factories, and everyone posting about it on social media.

Ever tried taking the train? I tried several times. The math just isn't working. The EU is now busy getting to the point that there is a central authority for pan-EU train tables, so we can finally get a single ticket for a single journey instead of ten, and some guarantees for the duration.

Most people use the car or a plane to go on holidays. Using the train for that is a very small percentage of the population.

Indeed. I was trying to avoid rehashing that debate because most people miss the basis for debating it anyway.

This is about state led capitalist economies versus individual capitalist economies. Both have pros and cons in certain circumstances. The state can get it very wrong. But the state can also be very right and then work as a force multiplier.

China had evolved its economy to incorporate individual companies to lead the way in some areas, and then multiply successful ideas by central mandate.

The USA seems to have declared individual companies holy and infallible, and the state always wrong. They will pick the bitter fruit from that tree.