Our state government pressured our utility (who mostly uses hydro and some NG) to dump their one small coal plant. Since then, they are paying spot prices far more often. Since they can't raise consumer rates much, they are laying folks off like crazy internally to try to stay afloat, so it takes forever to get work done.

Thank you WA state!

Great discussion, thanks for not being smarmy or nasty (it's /. I gotta say that). I code for a living and I explain it like this. Police often use police dogs. They don't always use them. However, if they are in a situation where the dog's abilities help, they can really help. A cop cannot sniff out a bomb or might be outrun by a fast criminal. Nobody is outrunning a Belgian Malinois.

Are cops not cops without dogs? Well of course that's ridiculous. Are all dogs cops. No. However, cops can do SOME police work better with dogs. They are just tools that sometimes help in specific situations. They might find new ways to use them that work better. They aren't going to stop using them, but they also don't solve all the problems cops have.

Not really.

If you have a lot of credit, but low utilization the risk to new lenders is higher.

Consider this:

You have five credit cards with limits of 20k, and only about 2k in current balance. That means you can potentially run out tonight and rack up 98k in new debt. You don't have a 'history' of being able to service that much additional debt successfully.

Now lets compare you to another person with 5 cards also with 20k limits, but a normal balance of something like 75k outstanding.. They have been paying on it for years, and never missed a payment or otherwise been in default.

Now both of you are applying for a an auto loan, the monthly minimum payment will be $200. All other things being equal which one of you do I actually know more about you likely being able to pay me?

Its the guy with more credit utilization. He is already showing he make payments on most of his current credit, his current liability situation can't deteriorate significantly - his other lendors will decline payment authorizations. If he seems 'stable and sane' right now he thinks he can handle the additional $200 he can. I don't know you won't get in a fight with the wife tomorow that ends in her running out and replacing all the furniture in your house to vex you, and leave you bills you can't pay, or that you won't develop a serious problem with Draft-kings, etc.

Hmm, yes, I think the heart of what you say is true. LLMs *can* build something, so it's more useful to articulate the limits, not simply poo-poo it's ability to do anything at all useful, which is beyond doubt at this point. It's useful. The question is how much and what are the drawbacks, if any.

Hmm, I can't find much to disagree with. The only thing is that I think you might be over-emphasizing that a tetris clone == shovelware. While it is, technically, it's complexity is fairly low, it's dynamics are well known, and there is reference code for the LLMs to parse/consume before trying. Put another way, I think it's not as complex a task as most things I'd personally consider better examples of shovelware.

Nonetheless, I think your main assertions are true. One can code *something* with LLMs, but as it if it'll meet folks expectations (ie.. the Vibe Coding hype) I still have major doubt. I personally think the flood of crapware is delayed, and it'll take the form of small Tetris-sized programs that one can bite off with an LLM in one pass.

You also make an especially good point about how apps are more than just coding.

It is easy to not find evidence of something if you don't look to hard.

This is a case where even if there were IOCs and you found them the clean up would be nearly impossible. Think about their 'Shared Responsibility Model' and the implication here. If MS were acknowledge some kind of serious breach occurred in their core Entra-ID IAM platform...they'd either have to be able to be able to conclusively identify all the impacted subscriptions or every single one of their subscribers would have to kick off their own IR process because how could they know they have not been backdoor'ed from inside their subscription.

Microsoft does 'dog food' so if Entra was exploited MS's internal management is possibly compromised so they could not be 'certain' about the impacted customers, at best they might get some sort of 'beyond a reasonable doubt level of certainty but we could never hit the 'yes the sky is blue standard'.

A not insignificant portion of MS clients (even pretty big important ones) likely have pretty deficient IR capabilities, independent of if they know it or not. Even the good ones are not at the 'we can assuredly remove any persistence work a state-level-actor did on our compromised systems' level without resorting to a large scale rollback-restore. Think the Azure infrastructure could handle that level of activity, the amount of storage-I/O to do all the analysis and IOC searches? the compute and I/O to do mass restores, all in small window...doubtful?

There is also the core defect in MS's approach to authentication that go back to the earliest days of NT, Microsoft stuff gratuitously authenticates all-the-time...Even when that isn't being directly exploited to gather authentication assets like hashes etc for attacks, it means the number and often meaningless or outright spurious log events make understanding what an actor malicious or otherwise was doing with an given set of credentials in terms of intent challenging. (Don't attack me for this statement I did not say impossible, IR professionals and good network security admins can, it just isn't simple.) Which adds a lot of cost to cleaning up an incident like this - if one were to be triggered.

So I don't think we should over look the POWERFUL motivations to declare this one contained. I do think we should recognize that Azure and AWS are probably 'TBTF' and really Congress should be taking a hard look at forcing some divestment and perhaps limiting the size of SaaS/PaaS providers in general. It is just to many eggs in one basket, there is a serious National Security and economic risk here. It comes down to a poorly managed or neglected mill pound might flood a few neighboring farms from time to time but if the damn breaks a large hydro electric resivor it might wipe entire towns off the map. The former might happen a lot more often because of who is in charge, and what resources the have to secure and maintain it, but you have to look at costs in terms of impact * probability. At some point the impact factor is just to large, for anything but a zero probability to be tolerable.

Oh, please, the Department of Energy’s input isn’t about virology credentials; it’s about piecing together the intelligence puzzle. Their moderate-to-high confidence aligns with CIA, FBI, and Energy’s growing lean toward a lab leak, especially as China’s data shredding leaves us with precious little to work with. Gullible? That’s rich coming from someone clinging to a debunked wet-market myth.

RaTG13, with its 96% match to SARS-CoV-2, comes from WIV’s own work, where Shi Zhengli’s team engineered chimeric bat coronaviruses in BSL-2 labs that should’ve been BSL-4. NIH-funded experiments juiced transmissibility by 10,000x in mice. No “black ops” needed; natural doesn’t explain that precision.

Showbiz? Rootclaim’s 89% lab leak estimate holds firm because the data does. Peter Miller’s $100k win was a formatted debate stunt, not a scientific overturn. The “show” you’re clutching at is your own narrative, split between ignoring molecular clocks pointing to November 2019 (pre-market) and dismissing WIV staff sick that same year, per U.S. intel. Ignoring facts by repeatedly not responding to them doesn't make them go away, BTW.

Zooming? The 12km gap shrinks when you consider WIV’s 2019 outbreak clues; sick researchers, quiet spread near the lab, not a market 12km off. Density works against your tall tale too; no early clusters outside the market disfavor a natural spillover. Proximity’s the signal; your map rathole the noise.

Did you read Mike's substack article I linked to earlier? It sounds like you disagree with his premise. If so, I'd say you're better off answering his question: Where is all the shovelware?

I've done similar tests with tetris games and building a reminder app. The LLMs can sometimes generate code that compiles, but then fail later to figure out what it's doing and make major modifications. I've had better luck with things like NeoVIM because it keeps the code context a bit more isolated. As I said earlier, with small data analysis or algorithms it works pretty well, for maintaining 200 .C/.CPP files, Makefiles, build-flags, and everything besides documentation, it's been pretty disappointing. Even one big C source file often makes it get lost or spew buggy solutions. That's been my experience and I've tried almost all of the LLMs (yes, recently). I have pro-accounts on several.

about the only case I can think of is interactive recipes.

Think about being able to check off ingredients or steps as you complete them.

Maybe being able to click and ingredient and select "recommend substitutions" - conceivably the smart fridge might know what you actually have to chose from.

The ability to note you are out of something and build up a shopping list, better than on paper because the system can sort the list by category / alphabetical / however later so its ordered sensible for the shopping trip

An easy way to control music playback while you do cooking/cleaning chores in the kitchen..

There are useful things you can do with a vertically mounted, easy cleanup, food/water proof screen in a kitchen for sure. - Now I am not sure building these features into an appliance you might keep for 15 years, is smart, maybe a better feature would just be a removable mount/plate that lets you install the 7 - 13" tablet of your choice on the door and then it might be smarter still integrate that into the cabinetry rather than the fridge but..

The problem is that the volume of dumb people will get it inflicted on the rest of us. Try buying not a smart TV today. You either have to get some sort of commercial offering, that comes with a crazy price premium or you're getting smart tv that spies on your and sprinkles in ads all over the place.

All because to many people decided they'd rather pay 499 instead of 599 because that is just how little they actually value their privacy and user experience.

Sure you can not connect it to the internet, but they can't use any of the useful features, or you can play DNS games and whatnot if you have the technical savvy and the time, but there are still going to be lot of opaque TLS streams that you just can never be sure what contain, at least not with voiding your warranty connecting the JTAG interface... the same will be true of all fridges that are generally availible soon enough..

The point is that if it was so easy, why isn't it being done?

Oh, sweetie, cherry-picking the CIA’s “low confidence” like it’s a mic drop? Precious. Their 2025 shift says lab leak’s more likely than zoonotic, backed by FBI and Energy Department’s moderate-to-high confidence. China’s data shredding leaves us scraps, but intelligence guys are not buying your market fairy tale anymore.

“No proof” of WIV’s gain-of-function? State Department docs confirm they engineered chimeric viruses, tweaking bat coronaviruses for infectivity in BSL-2 labs that screamed for BSL-4. NIH-funded experiments at WIV made viruses 10,000x more transmissible in mice. Shi Zhengli’s RaTG13 work? A 96% SARS-CoV-2 match. Deny that with a straight face.

Your “exact stall” fantasy? Those Huanan swabs came after shutdown, contaminated by humans, not animals; China cleared those critters out before testing. No intermediate host after five years, and half the early cases weren’t even market-linked. Lab proximity clusters tell the real story, not your spillover "vibes". Miller’s $100k debate win? A formatted stunt; Rootclaim still holds lab leak at 89%, unfazed. It’s showbiz, not science. And your train-riding researcher fanfic? Try sick WIV staff in 2019, per U.S. intel, sparking quiet spread near the lab, not your market soap opera. Molecular clocks peg circulation to November 2019 which is pre-market, pro-lab.

China blaming the U.S.? Deflection 101 to dodge their lab and wet market sins, with PLA ties at WIV exposed. Keep clutching that zoonotic myth; the lab leak’s stacking facts while you’re out here chasing shadows. Good luck with that.

Compare the market caps though, Nvidia and Intel are not on the same order of magnitude.

I don't think there is much a of frenemy relationship really to speak of.

My guess is this about two things:
1) Nvidia ensuring they have or could get some access to an x86 license if AMD is somehow able to both make some kind of great leap in MIMD compute space and at the same time is able to deliver some kind of integration advantage with integration in traditional compute in memory architecture with EPYC parts.

2) Being sure they have access to some kind of FAB capacity in the event the excrement hits the fan around TSMC, and with a "partner" to whom they could dictate terms.

So the actual median and modal scores hardly moved. The explanation given Zs credit use trends is well known and it is the 'reporting' of student loan delinquency.

So really Zs overall credit worthiness has not changed much it is just the scoring algorithm is producing a slightly different result because a federal policy changes in how unpaid student loans are classified/reported.