I'm not an expert in any of this, but my understanding was that blockchains were good at (a) being distributed and (b) holding the value of the asset directly on the blockchain. For example, the blockchain holds the actual bitcoins I just mined.

However, the blockchain doesn't hold the actual shares - it might hold a serial number of a given share, but not the actual share itself. Therefore, you can imagine a way that I might buy some tokenised shares, and sit back to count my money. You buy the same physical share some other way, and potentially you get the actual share certificates, where I don't bother to try because I believe the blockchain will save me from all ills.

I don't know how possible that is, or if it matters given how many shares exist for even the smallest stocks. It's just a niggle in the back of my mind.

My other 'niggle' is the time it takes to settle a trade. In a centralised exchange, the time to settle is really the time it takes to physically write the trade down on the various systems it needs to go into - and then verify all of those writes (which is roughly a pipeline operation, so a big trade behind you won't affect your trade). Once done, you get your settlement notification and the price you actually paid. I'd say most people experience those prices to be "about the same" as the published price when they pressed the "buy" button.

For blockchain, those writes could take hours - what share price do you get? Would it be the beginning of the write cycle, the end of it or somewhere in between? I don't imagine you'd ever know. Will be interesting to see how it plays out.

What actual benefit does a decentralised database offer here? I suppose anyone could read it and so could calculate current prices from it themselves (and feed that to others or their own trading systems). After that, I'm not sure how it helps. Somewhere, someone ultimately has to mark the actual share as 'sold' so that no one else can buy it - that's never going to be distributed.

Lastly, I agree about the payment choices of OKXICE to be unfortunate as they completely confuse the issue. But I guess if you're a crypto advocate, to say "we're selling tokenised stocks, for paper cash money" is slightly confusing too, and maybe doesn't offer the "USP" that being able to pay in coins gives.

So it's a poor mans version of a house battery?

I'm all for "just in case", but my worry is that it's ultimately the play-thing of the electricity company. If I plug my car in because I'm going on a big trip tomorrow, I damn well want it fully charged when I drive off. That's already a stretch because my electricity company is restricting my charging 'quota' for a 24 hour period to 6 hours, so I can just about fill up half of the battery at a time (given not all charging is at full speed). They're trying to offer rewards for the amount of days you plug the car in too - all socialising us for helping themselves when they need it later on.

Personally, this is on my list of "don't want". If I buy a car that happens to have it, I'll resist changing the charger for as long as possible. The house battery is all they get to play with, thanks (mainly because it won't export).

FWIW, a house battery is far superior for normal operations. It charges up during cheap rate at night, and then discharges during the day when we're on peak rate. If you've got some solar then that can provide your base load, and maybe charge the battery a bit too, effectively increasing the size of the battery. Your car just can't do that because it'll be off enjoying itself while the sun is shining and just be parked up at night to sleep it off.

It's like literally any other thing on the Internet - as soon as someone presents position "A" on a subject, other forces claim it's "B", "C" or "D".

The EU is absolutely moving away from US companies. This is a story about a department in a government of one of the countries that's in the EU - so not the same entity, and not controlled by it. They tried, quite feebly, to move off Office and have now moved back. The EU is entirely unaffected, being an administration of the bloc, not of any particular country.

This is about the same as someone saying "AI is the greatest thing in the world ever", followed by a story about how "datacenters are destroying neighbourhoods". They're related, but one doesn't really affect the other.

A presentation in Excel? That's incredible. "Computer skills" are somewhat of an unwritten requirement when hiring these days, maybe we need to make it more explicit after all?

I suppose there's a good use for AI right there though: "convert my excel spreadsheet into a powerpoint presentation" ;-)

Whilst a lot of humans have been displaced, I don't think it's a clear-cut cost saving or productivity boost either. There are a lot of really botched customer-service-to-ai conversions, and those companies are having to pay big numbers to get people to sort them out. While the old crappy AI continues, it results in more pissed off customers, which get escalated to the 'retention department' and so on.

However... when done right, there are benefits to be had. Whether you can cite much cost saving is another matter - you can probably cite a removal of humans, which mean the rest of your humans are more "concentrated" in the productivity calculations. Whether those people are materially more productive is of course open to debate, and is dependent on a lot of things of which AI is just one small one.

For other shops, AI's generally a "mixed bag". It _might_ help, or it might just be a convenient place to waste your time. If you're fully hyper and can run 5 different agents doing different tasks, then you're probably more productive. If you're just operating one agent, and when it's busy you go read the news or make a cuppa or something, then you're probably not.

But ultimately, this guy's just complaining that he went in big on AI and hasn't been handed a big cheque for doing so.

As said elsewhere, this is an ad. However, it's the start of "AI SEO" - that is, make sure *your* app/website/documentation is easy for agents to use, because if you don't someone else's will, and you'll lose out.

You might then think Microsoft's documentation would be available in HTML for humans, and Markdown for Agents - but no, they haven't got around to that yet. I don't suppose they have an MCP for it yet either.

I'm not sure what VCs are paying up to make a "dire browser"...?

Arc was an okay name, probably loved by the 12 people that used it. Dia... what were they thinking?

Where I live, things are different. It's my money, and the bank is responsible for it when I deposit it at the bank. They have to defend my money against unauthorised or even unintended access - if such access occurs, I'm indemnified, and they have to replace any money lost that way. Right now, they're all falling over themselves trying to stop us from sending scammers money - because they're technically still on the hook for those losses, even though they were duly authorised by their customer (there's a lot of nuance to this particular point, and it gets messy really quickly, so better for everyone that it just doesn't happen in the first place, rather than trying to work it all out in every different case that occurs).

I'd also say, where I live, if somehow you get the login credentials to my bank, you're still not authorised to use them, or to perform any transactions. I'm not even sure there's a properly recognised way for me to allow you to perform a transaction on my behalf that really does authorise you to do it (with my credentials. There are ways to allow someone else to act on your behalf, but with their own credentials). Again, if such access occurs, it's still the bank's problem.

If I want to be entirely responsible for my own money, then I can keep it in the mattress. If it's in a bank, then the bank is responsible for it. They don't get to make massive profits without some responsibilities to their customers. It's one of the reasons we license and regulate them.

I think the question to ask is... is the UN right about this? If so, then take the advice. If not, then by all means ignore it.

How the UN, like all organisations is imperfect. They get it wrong sometimes, but they also get it right too. I've got to say, you'd be a fool to disregard correct information because you don't like the source.

How do you decide if they're right or not? Well, that's somewhat up to you, but ultimately it requires some critical thinking. You can't delegate that to AI, Instagram or the TV news, you have to do it yourself.

The 'deniers' don't (generally) deny the climate is changing - they just deny it's caused by any sort of human involvement. They claim it would happen anyway (eg. "the earth's climate changes in cycles"). They'll tell you things like the earth used to be much hotter, or colder or whatever in the past, so it's okay that it's going a bit weird right now.

What they don't seem to grasp is that it really doesn't matter - once your country is uninhabitable, you're going to want to live somewhere else - that means someone's going to get some immigration. Once the 'breadbaskets' of the world are un-farmable, you're going to have a lot of hungry people, which historically has lead to quite a bit of violence and disruption to power structures and societies. How that plays out when we've all got modern military weapons is anyone's guess.

So ultimately, the problems this will cause, howsoever it came about are everyone's problem. Common logic would therefore suggest to try to minimise the future problem as much as possible. Since we know carbon dioxide and methane are at least part of the problem, trying to rebalance the atmosphere makes sense, even if every last gram of those gasses were naturally occurring (which of course they're not).

But this is rational thinking. I can't guarantee the entire audience is rational.

I'm not a 'gamer', so this isn't really my area, but I don't see why you need a specific console any more. Back in the day, compute was hard, and so making a dedicated machine made some sense - you could put into it some special CPUs and GPUs and whatnot, and then squeeze that hardware until the pips came out to make some awesome games and effects that you simply couldn't get anywhere else - a bit like coin-op arcade games were dedicated hardware and beat the living crap out of a generic PC.

Nowadays, a decent desktop with a GPU would eat those old consoles for breakfast. I'm not sure what else a machine has to do to support a running game that such a machine can't do, but it seems to me that you couldn't construct a console for sensible money that would out-perform a pretty normal desktop.

So this seems like a seriously risky move to me. If someone's a 'real' gamer, they might have already spent that sort of money on a desktop, so what do they get if they buy this? Of course, it won't help that RAM and GPUs are price-jacked-up right now, but even taking that out, this console still feels like it'd be $1000 - which still feels like a lot.

When you think of something expensive, do you honestly think of Ebay? You /might/ think about Amazon, as they sometimes have high-end stuff on there, but I personally never think of ebay.

Maybe it's the 80s powerpoint website, the myriad of confusing menus and navigation, or maybe it's just their long heritage of being the place to get cheap shit ("fleabay"), but they've got a mountain to climb if they want to be "premium".

This is almost certainly to cut their costs more than anything, and likely won't be much better than the lack-lustre support they used to offer. However...

I use GCP a fair bit for $work, and the AI on there is actually pretty good as disentangling the mess that is GCP architecture. It'll follow a chain of resources to go read a log file or whatever and then gives you useful results. It's genuinely been really helpful and saved me a load of time trying to figure out how resource X has suddenly failed because it depends on something I did on resource P last week.

How any of it will fare if you've locked yourself out of your gmail account and need some help to get back in - is anyone's guess.

No idea, but I personally use it from time to time because it's free and has oodles of free usage tier, so I can get a load of work done on it when I need to. I wouldn't be surprised if government folks were the same - they start out using copilot because that's the mandated one to use, it's a piece of crap, so they have to hand-crank it a lot to get anything useful out of it, and then run out of tokens for the day (or week, or whatever). They *could* put in a requisition form for more credit, but then they'd have to explain it all to their boss and three flunkies from Finance, so instead, they just ask Deepseek instead.

However you want to slice this up, this is really very cool. When I was a kid, we were amazed at some grainy photos of the planets, and yet now, we're going to grab actual samples of... not the planets (that's underway elsewhere), but of the moons of those planets. Then were going to bring them back to look at them. That's really pretty awesome.

Well done JAXA et al. Happy landings!