Is it just me, or has Lego always struggled with 'tech'? I mean, waaay back when they used to do Technic sets it looked like they might be on to something. Then they stopped making them.

Then they did Mindstorms, which also looked really promising... then they stopped that too.

The did another 'tech' option a couple of years back - was insanely expensive if I recall, I believe also has been canned.

Now this... how long before they kill this one too?

All of this is a real shame - it'd be great to be able to make robots and stuff out of lego. It kinda means you need to do some programming, which I guess is why they keep struggling with this, because of all the people playing with lego, only a small number ever want to do any coding.

I'm finding what you're describing more and more (especially with ID checks, but other things too). My guess is the mobile versions of their sites/products get tested on iPhones, top-of-the-line Samsungs and Googles and that's all. My little old motorola has a bit less capability than any of those, and seemingly the browser can't keep itself in memory when I switch to another app (even getting to the password manager is a gamble in some cases).

There are multiple problems here... the browsers aren't always very good at asserting themselves into the OS, the pages the browsers (or apps) are showing are far, far too big for the amount of content they actually have on them (likely due to umpteen Javascript frameworks and general inefficiencies from the web devs) and of course the operating system itself trying to be too clever or careful or whatever else. Then there's the "old phone" problem too, I guess.

Not sure what the solution is...? Use the desktop version? Use a different product/company? (I just ditched a well respected bank because of their crappy sign up experience) Get a better phone?

I sort of wonder if the world needs an open source robot design. That is, a 'reference design' which provides the motors and limbs, sensors and connections. You then have to make it into a working robot, by whatever means you want.

It sure would take the 'wow' factor out of making a robot walk on stage*, but would arguably amplify any 'real' achievements they can come up with.

* as noted elsewhere, the Russians couldn't even manage that bit, so I maybe we're a bit too early in all of this to say that part is all a 'solved problem' ;-)

(I know legs are sort of the point of all of this, but I also wonder if we should just make Davros - that is, a human with wheels. Easier by a long way, and means we can concentrate on the arms doing actual things we need doing, rather than worrying about balancing on two legs, not falling over, standing up again, etc.)

Yeah, for sure. Sun were stubborn, HP were just weird. Nothing in HP-UX seemed to be as you'd expect (or want).

Years ago, my first job was in an engineering outfit. I thankfully didn't have to go to this meeting, but my boss's boss's boss was chairing an 'evaluation' of a variety of file server technologies. We'd had (a very young) Netapp, Sun and HP in for evals - and it was pretty clear Netapp were far and away the leaders. However, we had HP systems because the company had moved to SAP, and we had Sun systems everywhere because of the engineering.

Anyway, PHB drew up a table on the board and asked everyone to score each option on a variety of features. For $reasons he said that whatever the highest score was from any other vendor, HP had to get the same. Thankfully the kickbacks weren't quite powerful enough to spend too much money, so the existing Sun systems got an upgrade instead of a replacement. A couple of small sites got HP-UX servers and no one got any Netapp.

A year or two later, one of those small sites got sold off to another company. They inherited a pile of old crap engineering-wise (which their due diligence knew about), and hands down the worst IT setup they could ever have hoped for (which the DD didn't know about).

I think the telling part of TFS is:

> but the leverage being used to fund AI investment was increasing "very rapidly,"

The leverage is indeed what's driving this (and all bubbles). Companies getting an investment then get to puff up their notional (or real) share price, which they then use to borrow against. They then invest that borrowed money in some other company, who does the same somewhere else... and so it goes on - perhaps circularly back to the first company in the chain.

The problem with leverage is it's a multiplier. It just takes a little wobble somewhere in the chain, and then whole thing collapses pretty spectacularly because the leverage multiplies the risk, multiplies the downsides etc etc. The companies who are leveraged really can't influence the outcome - if the leverage collapses, then so do they. What's left is arguably the "real" value of their businesses, and in a lot of cases will be almost nothing.

I'm not up to doing this, but I'll bet these analysts have already looked at (say) OpenAI and tried to figure out what the "real" value of that business is. That is, take out all of the leverage and look at assets, revenues and so on. All companies are probably over valued on that basis, so that alone isn't really the problem, but how much they're overvalued, and the dependency on other businesses to maintain that value definitely are a concern.

As for the Australian pension funds... if AI "pops", it'll take a lot down with it, but that doesn't mean there aren't companies worth investing in, or companies that are likely to be insulated from any fall out. Some of those companies may well even be American, European, Asian etc, so "reducing allocation of global equities" may be a bit more extensive than necessary (just because it's an Aussie business that doesn't mean it won't struggle).

A lot of ISPs and service providers already block access to port 25. They could just block inbound for everything unless you tick the box to say "I can do that myself". Hell, ISPs could make it an add-on service "internet security so you don't need to fiddle with your router settings any more". That sounds pretty attractive when you realise most ISPs have whole departments of people who look after their customers routers (either by remote working on them, or by shipping new ones or whatever else).

Then again, I suspect most ISPs would just end up swapping that room full of people for another room full of people trying to get IPv6 to work, or trying to get to some IPv4-only service which now doesn't work any longer.

> IPv6 is a fucking mess, and it pisses me off every day!

Yeah, I can see that. Still, I'd rather be pissed off by it every day than not have it at all - my ISP doesn't support it. They did a trial some years ago, never reported back what the outcome was, and have no 'start date' for any other activity related to IPv6.

My guess is they use IPv6 on their backbones, but just use their (large) IPv4 allocation for their customers. The market is pretty saturated, so they're not realistically likely to suddenly get a few million more subscribers (without an acquisition, which comes with it's own IPv4s), so they're just sticking with what they have.

Yeah, I wonder what the justification is/was? The UK has a bit of nervousness about China, so it seems odd to be doing this. Even if they were using MGs (owned/built by the Chinese, designed in the UK) you could understand it, but this?

It'd have been really great if they'd partnered with Rolls Royce or Aston Martin, but hey, I'd settle for a Vauxhall ;-)

> Ideally it would be nice to just have one executable to run without the need to install everything

Agreed, but it's virtually impossible to actually do this. libc shouldn't be statically linked (it's pretty pointless if you try) and seems to be intrinsically part of the running OS, and so you end up relying on whichever one the distro has. You then end up compiling your single binary for every major release of every distro you want to support. If you want to support x86 and ARM, then you've got to do all of that twice.

After you've got to grips with all of that, you then also need to think about different paths to stuff, different package management capabilities, package or repo signing... you end up with so many different permutations of the same basic code it'd make your head spin.

One of the reasons a lot of stuff is written in languages like Python is so you can largely avoid the "dependency hell" problems. So long as the target system has a reasonably working Python, then your program will run just fine. You'll be working just fine on multiple CPU architectures, and different OS types.

Sadly though, sometimes you really do want to distribute compiled code, perhaps for license/IP reasons, or perhaps for performance or whatever. Then you've really got some fun in your CI pipelines :-( Thank goodness for containers ;-)

Sadly no commitment to never be quite so dickish again, though.

IMHO, that they ever *thought* this was a possibility that the consumer would accept is entirely the problem. This idea should have been shot down by the lowest levels of the crap filtering inside Github/MS. The executive shouldn't even have heard about it. As it was, top to bottom they all agreed it would be okay, and to go ahead. These people seem to live in an entirely different world to the rest of us.

Reversed or none, this is another reminder that Microsoft bought Github to enshitify it. Those of us that didn't exodus immediately should really start thinking about it. Self hosting options are easier now than ever before, but likewise, there are plenty of other platforms that do the same (or better in some cases). Your investment in "Github actions" just isn't so great you can't convert it to some other CI.

FWIW, I still use Github for a few public things that I don't especially care about. Going forward, I can see it being a backup for some other service because it still has mindshare (how many people ask google for site:github.com when they want the source code of something?). I'm not bothering with any of the addon services though - those can go somewhere else (which right now is mostly Gitlab).

I've been using an FB blocker hosts file (not sure if it was this one, but here's an example: https://gist.github.com/djaiss...) - thus far has been very effective ;-)

I like the idea of constantly reporting ads as inappropriate. Maybe start an FB group promoting that idea ;-)

When I last used facebook (many, many years ago), advertising was pretty low-key, but adblock used to get rid of it very effectively. I'd imagine ublock would do it now too. Only the hosts file definitely stops all those third party tracking pixels and images and whatnot that seem to be all over the web (still).

So let me get this right, Stockholm... I either have to accept a sub-standard experience from Amazon, or else I have to accept an (effectively) unlimited risk?

So it is entirely impossible for Amazon to help me out here, is it? Is it too hard for one of the worlds largest companies to add some optional features to help me manage my spending and limit my risk? Especially as it mitigates bugs in their own products?

*really*?

I really don't get it either. However, my SO listens to podcasts when she goes out for a walk around the block. She'll be gone for (say) a half hour to an hour, so that time lends itself to some gentle "ingestion" of something hopefully thought provoking.

However, I'd imagine that in time you'll be able to ask Spotify or Audible or someone "give me a 60 minute podcast discussing how AI is both succeeding and failing to modernise the procurement process of large organisation, with particular attention to how that affects small business who often get screened out of procurement processes because of the process itself, rather than the intent of the procuring organisation". It'll then go off an make you a podcast, put your favourite voice onto it and stick it on your phone to listen to it.

The EU regulated high power vacuum cleaners maybe 10-12 years ago. At the time, loads of people were up in arms about how we weren't going to be able to clean our houses properly. The news had pictures of people piling big, inefficient vacuums into their cars the day before the ban came along... and so on.

What actually happened is that manufacturers just made their products better. If previously they used 3000W to do something, they did the same using half that - through more efficient airflow, filtering or whatever else. So now we have equally powerful, mostly quieter and definitely better.

My point is... batteries aren't going to deliver 3000W for long, that's true, but these days you can get away with a fraction of that and still suck up as much, if not more. Sure, you won't be able to run it all day for your cleaning business, but it'll get around a couple of your rooms just fine.

By way of an example, we have a Shark (upright, manual, battery powered) - no idea what power it consumes, or what airflow it creates, but it seems to suck dirt out of places you didn't know you had. Even carpets just cleaned with a 'normal' vacuum cleaner give up a whole load more when the Shark gets to them. We don't often try and clean the whole house in one go, but to date, I don't think we've run its battery from full to empty.

The things about this that are most troubling are that there are no ways for the user to mitigate the problem - you just have to wait for a security update.

Amazon are really good at a lot of things. They've made the shopping experience really, really easy - but with that comes a problem, that convenience is also a vector for attacks. They do not have any ways to limit the potential damage - there's no way to say "always ask for my credit card CVV number", or "always ask for MFA" before making a purchase, you can't limit the purchase amount, or the amount spent today or anything else - you either have to allow everything, or allow nothing (ie. don't ever store a card with them).

(IMHO, Amazon shopping bears some similarities with online gambling - before regulations requiring spend limits and timeouts, gambling companies made it as easy as possible to spend all of your money too. They made the 'top up' as frictionless and invisible as possible, and they never showed you any sort of statement to say how much you'd made or lost, so it was (too) easy to overspend - Amazon feels very similar, although with less 'game of chance'*)

* You might argue the search results are a game of chance, or possibly the quality of some of the products, but that's rather different from gambling ;-)

That the Kindle is vulnerable is regrettable of course, and probably 'easily' fixed by them. This won't be the last problem of that sort though - maybe it'll be another Kindle bug, or a FireTV, or an Alexa or Ring... the problem will still be the same. Once someone's got your account, they can do some serious damage and there's no way to protect yourself from that. You can only hope you see it happening soon enough and block the credit card or whatever - as a consumer, I don't find that very satisfactory.