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Comment Re:MOTHER FUCK UKRAINE and the GODDAMN EU. (Score -1) 173

Yeah, heaven forbid Americans vote to butt out of foreign wars, GTFO of EU politics, and keep their own money. THE HORROR. Bro, FUCK YOU and shove the crayon up your ass with the gerbils. Voting doesn't do shit. The fact that you think it matters shows what a dumb fuck you already were before you started writing nonsense.

Comment Re:MOTHER FUCK UKRAINE and the GODDAMN EU. (Score -1) 173

Did you even read my post or are you as illiterate as you are stupid? I already said Trump was the idiot who said he'd end the war in 24 hours, but you just skipped that part and tried to make me out as a Foxnews Trump guy. If people don't conform to your world view you just stuff them in a convenient box no matter how wrong the label, I guess. What else should I expect from a "You gotta keep sending your tax dollars to a foreign war" moron. No, I still dont' give a fuck and your "reasons to support Ukraine" are nowhere near good enough. They are pathetic and you were talking yourself in circles. If anyone needs natgas it's the EU, not the USA. As you yourself said, the US has plenty. Now, there is no doubt global markets push the price up but that's not a reason to send billions to Ukraine, not even close. FUCK UKRAINE. FUCK RUSSIA. FUCK YOU.

Comment Wrong Diagnosis; Motivated Dishonesty. (Score 3, Interesting) 127

Tivo broke Civilization.

The olds will remember.

In the early 80s, every American watched the same TV programs at the same time. LIve, broadcast TV. It was the national American culture. Everyone at work and at school the next morning talked about their shared experience and varying reactions to the BroadCast that The Party had shown them the prior night.

Cable TV - by offering a few more channels - had _some_ impact on the "breakup" of America.

But it was Tivo - mass-scale consumer time shifting. Americans no longer watched all the same propaganda at the same time.

The monoculture started to crack.

The rest of it is downstream from there. The bigs tried to retain their control of culture and opinion, but it became too fragmented and too decentralized. They couldn't.

Nobody is mad about the internet. They are mad they don't control the internet.

Comment Re:animation and presentation...draw the eyes (Score 1) 71

Right that is the real problem isn't. Google has not yet worked exactly how to stuff enough ad impressions to make money without destroying the utility the user is getting out of the experience to the point they are likely to abandon Google for a traditional search engine or go pay for Chat-GPT or something.

Really 'ad words' in AI summaries ought to be "easy" from an implementation standpoint. The 'problem' is doing its going to use even more tokens that need to be paid for.

Comment Re: Is any company managing to make AI anything pa (Score 4, Insightful) 71

I agree

The winners here are going to be people with actual hardware IP (Nvidia, Apple, others), people with actual hardware fabs, and likely Google and Meta. I predict despite the current crazy valuations the Magnificent-7 eventually end up acquiring the leading AI labs.

The real costs are in building models, not hosting them comparatively speaking and that picture only improves as the energy infrastructure and hardware markets gradually align to the volume demands. The labs are already just reselling the hyperscallers computer, there is no reason those guys are not going to take 'good enough' models and beat them on price.

Having the 'best' models is an asset someone with existing SaaS, Marketing, etc business on the hand can leverage and by extension justify the expense. That is why I see OpenAI and Anthropic eventually becoming acquisition targets once the gold-rush investors capitulate on their valuations.

The option is for them to get directly into the datacenter biz (not contracting for them and agreeing consumption commitments but actually building them and owning the dirt all they way up to the roof top chillers. Anthropic seems to be trying to make that play but I still don't know where the revenue will really come from...

Comment Re:Terrible feature (Score 1) 171

Efficiency of an electrical inverter: 90%

Efficiency of a gasoline generator: 20%

A gasoline generator might work as an emergency backup, but would not be economical for daily load leveling.

TFS says the inverter's extra hardware costs $650.

A 10kw gasoline generator would cost at least as much.

Comment Re:ha (Score 1) 67

Quite strange how the company remained profitable with years of people working from home.

Nope. Warner Bros. was losing money before the merger and had accumulated $40B in net debt.

The headcount reduction was sorely needed, and the merger makes it even more necessary.

Comment Get Off My Lawn (Score 1) 127

Firefox was never there for the "Good Ole Days"

Firefox was a reaction to Mozilla becoming too ambitious and too unfocused.

The Netscape/Moz split was already after things had gotten bad. Moz completely jumping the shark was already bad.

The Good Ole Days were NCSA Mosaic and Navigator 1.1. Before the AOL invasion. Before people on the internet expected you to care about their feelings, and before politicians and mega corps knew how to screw it up.

Once upon a time, having friends on irc or usenet was like the nerd equivalent of _living on a pirate ship_

(except the avg pirate was at least +1SD on the IQ scale.)

It was the last vestige of freedom.

There is no "good internet" with Tay Zonday on it. Or girls.

Comment He will be missed (Score 5, Insightful) 46

Not that anyone in the TOS cast really deserves much criticism as far as how they manage(d) their celebrity, but Koenig always came off as a class act. In every interview he always seems grateful to just have had the privilege of being part of something big. Really seem to care about the fans and wanted to be entertaining for them at conventions and the like, was willing to participate in some of the fandom projects. Just a good guy.

Comment Re:"Management or Bust" is Stooopid! (Score 3, Informative) 138

>I find this very stupid.

I agree with you.

>Some people are good, reliable, and experienced "worker bees" who either don't want to be in management or are not qualified for it. I see no logical reason to get rid of such people, do you?

Agree completely.

>I'm not sure if "Sr. Engineer" means quasi-management at MS

It doesn't.

The people manager track and individual track are separate tracks, and both go all the way to the top. There were hundreds of Partner Software Engineers who didn't have any people management responsibilities. These engineers, because they were Partner level, had a minimum of $1m total comp some years. (The higher your level at MS, the more of your pay at MS is contingent: bonuses, stock, etc. MS has a "low" guaranteed salary and a wild bonus/stock award range, all based on your performance and overall company performance)

There are level 70 people who are not people managers; the job title changes to "Distinguished Engineer" somewhere up there, and somewhere past that becomes "Technical Fellow".

There is a level floor for being a manager; but (effectively) there is no level ceiling for being an individual software engineer.

IIRC, When I left, they wanted people to be Senior level before being people managers. But there were more senior level engineers than senior engineering managers...

Here's some quick lingo: an "M1" is a manager who only has engineers reporting to him. An M2 is a "manager of managers", e.g. an M2 has M1s that report to him - and may have 1 or 2 engineers engineers or support staff. There are also M3s, but M1 vs M2 is the main useful cutline.

MS generally wants an M1 to have at least 5 people reporting to him, but not more than 15. So the "span" is pretty narrow; MS R&D is pretty management heavy, with an M1 typically having around 8 people or so.

(I was an M1 for a few years, then went back to being a normal engineer with no people management responsibilities.)

Being an M1 at Microsoft is kind of a dual mandate: you are given a staff of engineers to go work on a problem that is (was?) too big for one person. The M1 has engineering & product responsibilities (e.g. make sure the right thing gets built on time and works correctly). The M1 also has people management responsibilities (coaching people in their careers, rewards and promo justifications, delivering bad news, etc)

Good M1s wrote code and reviewed code, but also burnt a lot of time in meetings ("what are the other parts of the company that are near me doing?") and individual meetings ("i have 8 people who report to me and I need to have a dedicated meeting with each of them every week to see how they are doing, give them career feedback, etc)

M2s rarely wrote code. They would occasionally write code for some demo or prototype, and then show it to people. If the idea had legs it would get spun off to underlings to flesh it out.

I say all this in past tense because I don't think how it was in 2022 necessary holds in Oct 2026. I know that I am not developing software or managing software engineers the same way now as I was even at the beginning of 2026. AI has changed all of it.

Comment CIA (Score 1) 108

Nice little supply chain attack.

Hijack of shipment of servers equipped with presently very very expense silicon that nobody will consider just disposing, insert your implants, let some patsys get busted and the kit get returned to the owners.

Bonus points make it seem like a general / widely implemented scheme by hijacking some large liquor shipments and various other goods as well. Pass out the spoils at the field office party or fence them to finance some other activities that need kept well away from oversight.

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