"Deloitte report found that less than 6% of local government practitioners were prioritizing AI as a tool to deliver services."

Any word on whether that report had to be corrected after the embarrassing discovery of bot slop in it; as a number of other Deloitte gems recently have? They insisted that the case in Australia was on the up-and-up; though not so much as to refuse to refund some of the $290k they took for the job; not sure what the final outcome on their fine work in Canada ended up being.

The trouble with simplification isn't merely that it's a pain; but that there's only so much of it you can do without promptly wandering into the delightful world of undefined behavior; where the problem isn't merely that people don't understand what the law or the spec says; but that it doesn't actually address whatever the matter at hand is, even if you had an expert to interpret it.

When that happens you inevitably get moved to a more complex state: in jurisdictions that are serious about precedent, or markets where one implementation gains a commanding lead, whoever winged it most successfully at the time of ambiguity becomes(de-facto or de-jure) part of the new codification. In cases where it's more of a mixed result people might end up recognizing two dialects of a protocol or there will be a 'test' named after whatever judge pulled it out of nowhere because it sounded good that you then say you are applying in future cases to choose which of the uncodified behaviors to go with in a given instance. In some cases it remains more or less unsettled and the outcome is basically a surprise over and over and then the codification is basically that you just wing it; which is not ideal.

This is, of course, not to say that all complexity is created equal: the line between 'flabby' and 'parsimonious' is much more subjective than between 'internally consistent' and 'overdetermined'; but there usually is at least a gradient if not a bright line. What gets extra tricky, though, is that law codes (more than some other types of spec) are something that you need to write both for everyone and to cover everyone.

It's basically fine that AS15531or A478-95a(2019) are not really terribly accessible light reading. If you are dealing with now-aging military avionics or stainless steel cables those may well be you problems; but there's not a real sense of societal injustice in the fact that most people just want their aircraft flying and their wire ropes not snapping; so you have the luxury of nerding out however much your circle of professional specialists think is required by the problem and mandating accordingly. Something like probate law is going to end up happening to basically everybody, so the idea that it is impenetrable to the layman seems troublesome; but, because it happens to everybody, it's also not necessarily easy or simple to identify the equivalent of the 1040EZ case: maybe it's super boring and a guy in good health and generally agreed sound mind writes a straighforward will and then gets hit by a truck the next day. Or maybe some dementia patient's declining years see a fight between their children and hey, look at that, now we need a section on how forensic psychiatry will assess 'undue influence' in the context of whether you helped grandma with that will or whether you strong-armed a feeble old lady while she was in your care like your sibling you don't get on with well alleges. That sounds simple and accessible; and not at all like something that will either be completely impenetrable or fairly overtly allow a judge to just spitball it based on whether he hears the dispute before or after lunch and which of the potential heirs looks more punchable.

None of this is to say that Alaska's probate system is not a nightmare accretion, that seems most likely; but it's probably a nightmare accretion with more parts that are actually load bearing than it appears; and possibly one that doesn't have a structurally sound variant that is also simple(especially in potentially adversarial contexts, like probate law: where one of the fairly common instances is "it's as simple as what this will says" v. "actually, there's a complication"; and therefore rules for both what actual complications count and how they work in addition to 'here's how you read a low complexity uncontested will').

The details will differ; but it sounds like the critical distinction between people who can afford good counsel and those who cannot is being retained by this exciting new tool.

ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are not designed to be breaking news websites, hence they are not good at answering breaking news questions.

Wait. You just put a broken unit back on the shelf where the working spares go? In a story you tell to strangers on the internet about your superior efficiency of process? How do you think the correct supply of working spares come to exist at an organizational scale if people just quietly go and do that? Especially with things that can be broken in non-obvious ways that's basically the single most annoying thing you can do to whoever is responsible for ensuring that a specified supply of spares exists.

As hardware, replacing a phone is only about as hard as replacing a ballpoint pen; so anyone who thinks that the real problem is that an authorized phone technician wasn't on hand to re-seat the connector has a screw overtightened; but would you just silently put empty pens back in with the new ones as a fun eventual surprise who whoever reorders those?

I'd be...worried...about the viability of someone who couldn't learn to read an analog clock fairly readily if they had reason to; but it doesn't seem nearly as surprising that a fair number of people wouldn't know how to offhand. Not only are analog clocks a lot less common than they used to be; my experience has been that a lot of legacy clock installs stop getting cared about well ahead of actually getting removed.

Your basic battery powered wall clock isn't that accurate and needs its batteries replaced periodically; so somebody needs to care reasonably frequently for it to be active, not on the wrong side of a DST offset, and not far enough off correct time that it's not very useful for things like start or end of class(passing periods vary a bit by school size; but you'd really want skew solidly under 5 minutes, especially if you are using similarly dodgy clocks at both ends).

The fancier whole-building setups with wall clocks that get pulse-per-minute or per second from a central control module are more likely to not be skewed randomly; and tend not to get rearranged because they are built in to the wall; but also tend to be comparatively expensive maintenance items that are a facilities problem, because they are attached to the building and some oddball 90s-looking cage of cards you need a weird serial pinout and some garbage software to talk to; rather than a cheap office supply, so when they do fail they often just get left there and ignored.

I remember there being clocks in classrooms for basically the entire time I was going through schools, and the period I worked in one; but in high school things had clearly started to break down(the permanently installed clocks were explicitly non-authoritative; individual teachers did or didn't supply a wall clock depending on their taste; so those were in mixed supply but generally accurate if someone cared enough for them to be present); and in college the wall clocks were essentially entirely vestigial; presence, absence, and function mostly a byproduct of when a particular building had been built or renovated.

I'm honestly a bit surprised that the classrooms still have enough wall clocks with low skew to be able to assume that students are getting time from them.

Ukraine just got a €90 billion loan from the EU. That's enough to cover their financial needs for another 12-18 months. They're starting to sell their designs to Western manufacturers, too, who are intensely interested in cooperation. Ukrainian companies are starting joint ventures outside the country, so that's another cash lifeline, albeit a smaller one.

It is up in the air whether Ukraine gets much territory back. Ukraine is not, however, on the verge of collapse. (Neither is Russia, for that matter, but more later.) Pokrovsk is likely to fall, true, and Ukraine holds only some outskirts, but when I look back to January 1, 2025, Russia was 5km from Pokrovsk, and a year before that, Russia was 35km from the city. Looking at the wider map, the battle lines have not changed that much in two years. Russia has made some advances south of Kupiansk and is contesting Kupiansk itself. If these small cities with pre-war populations of 60,000 and 30,000, respectively, give Russia so much trouble, what is going to happen when they try to take Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, with their pre-war populations of 150,000 and 110,000, if they can even get there?

Russia is not on the verge of collapse, either, but it is on the verge of desperate measures, and may already be in them. It's selling gold internally to take rubles off the market in a bid to both strengthen the currency and provide rubles to redistribute without printing more, with the National Wealth Fund selling off over half its 400 tons of gold to oligarchs. There's still almost 2000 tons of gold left inside Russia, but any significant dip into that is going to cause even more economic problems. A combination of Trump's bumbling and Sunni Arab OPEC states upping their output has resulted in a drop in the price of oil (WTI is trading around $57 today while Brent is around $60). Russia sells at a discount from the market price, and its budget is based on being able to sell oil at $70+ per barrel. It's getting $50ish now, and that may drop even further. Ships are becoming less likely to take on Russian contracts due to the increased activity by the US Navy and attacks by Ukraine. On top of that, while the Ukrainian drone strikes against Russian petrochemical plants isn't decimating the output quite like some think, it is heavily impacting refining capabilities such that Russia put a moratorium on refined products exports, further squeezing their foreign cash income, and they've put limits on internal distribution, which is raising prices, especially outside the major cities. Enlistment bonuses are dropping as local governments run out of money to pay them, with even the relatively wealthy St. Petersburg reducing or delaying bonuses. The federal government is lavishing at least some veterans with education and health benefits as well as some financial benefits, but that appears to not be universal. This is causing a complex situation resulting in high inflation (officially around 7%, probably much higher). The only reason that Russia isn't in hyperinflation right now is tight controls and high core interest rates (16% now, down from 25% because it was absolutely strangling growth). And Russian defense contractors are filing bankruptcy at alarming rates, putting key supply chains at risk.

Despite its population advantage, Russia does have a manpower issue. They're largely not sending conscripts into battle. By law, under the current circumstances, only contract soldiers can be sent to fight (there may be some exceptions, but this is the overwhelming majority of Russian forces fighting). They don't have the money to pay the big bonuses to keep the contract force up, and as veterans return missing limbs and living with severe PTSD, more people are becoming aware of what it's like at the front. Criminals whose sentences were commuted are also returning from the front lines (journalist Emily Hoge has been following this for some time, including the results when hardened criminals become hardened soldiers and return to the streets), pushing up crime rates. Escalating to legal war conditions to allow conscripts to be sent into battle would be an enormous political gamble for Putin.

Russia's problems aren't a lack of physical production capacity (they have that in spades) or people (they have many more they can conscript if necessary). Their problems are that they're running out of money to spend on the war and men they can legally send to fight. Changing the circumstances on the ground requires changing significant political positions inside Russia that have a very strong chance of provoking political backlash, regardless of what levels of control Putin has been able to exert so far.

Maybe Russia can force a ceasefire or even a peace, though it's hard to see what terms would work in such a way that both sides would accept, as both have become skilled at finding something the other side absolutely will not accept, so the war continues. Maybe Ukraine can eventually push the last Russians out of its territory, possibly even out of Crimea, though that, too, is a tall order. Then again, it seemed in the early 1980s that dislodging the USSR from Afghanistan was a tall order. Right now, there's not enough information on either to hazard an educated bet.

Iâ(TM)m curious whether it will be viable to extract HBM. BGA packages are absolutely doable; but HBM seems potentially more challenging.

No disagreement here. Asus is a totally logical party to be raising retail prices because component prices are going up. I was specifically responding to the claim that 'they' would find 'some other convenient excuse to raise prices, just because they can'; for which Asus seems like a much poorer candidate.

As a basically commodity vendor I'd assume that Asus is very poorly suited to try to mask component prices, because their margins just aren't all that exciting; but as a basically commodity vendor they are in an equally poor position to 'because we can' any price increase that their competitors don't have basically the same reason for also making; since you can just buy from someone else unless ROG RGB LED compatibility is just that critical to you.

It will be interesting to see how that shakes out. Given the downright absurd debt levels and negative margins it seems unlikely that this gear will avoid the fire sale forever; but it's a lot more specialized compared to what came out of .com bust era equivalents. Even 'normal' GPU compute servers are aimed at relatively specific purposes(and all but the low end ones that are just ~8 PCIe GPUs in a row are even fairly topologically quirky, bunch of nvlinked GPUs and a PCIe topology that depends on GPUs RDMA-ing directly to ethernet or infiniband NICs without keeping the CPU in the loop); and the 'rack scale' or hyperscaler custom stuff is quite likely to be a liquid cooled monster with custom dimensions and atypical rack weights, 'modular' mostly for service purposes, not just pets.com's xeon pizzaboxes that can be unracked and auctioned off in an afternoon.

I don't doubt that people will come up with something; if the discount is steep enough all sorts of retrofits or technically-inefficient uses become viable; and there will presumably be some post-crash inventory in things like HBM and GDDR that was contractually locked up but not actually soldered down yet that will be easier to find a new home for; but it will be a lot more involved than the mostly fairly conventional stuff from the .com bubble period.

Asus seems like a pretty weak candidate for just pulling off a price increase for fabricated reasons. They aren't a small shop; but I can't think of a single product of theirs that doesn't have a fairly ready substitute from another PC OEM or component manufacturer. It's possible that some of their stuff has a reputation that could support at least a modest price premium, I definitely don't know what their reputation is across all areas; but there are more or less direct cross-vendor substitutes that they would need to worry about if they tried to bump prices.

""The solar surge does little to address the most pressing social and economic problems of developing countries like South Africa, the need to generate new jobs for millions of young citizens," reports the NYT. "Installation labor is local, but the panels and batteries are almost all made in China.""

Last I checked; the overwhelming majority of jobs in some way related to electricity have nothing to do with manufacturing the equipment that produces and distributes the electricity; but with all the various things that are easier to do when you have electricity.

It may be that they'll deem solar cells and batteries to be either profitable manufacturing opportunities or strategically critical in ways that make one unwilling to rely on being able to buy them abroad; but in the meantime a lot of people are now not sitting in the dark or sucking diesel fumes, which seems like a handy start to whatever further economic activity they wish to get up to.

Given the persistent difficulties people have encountered in getting bots to perform well enough that they don't require near constant expert supervision when doing anything that actually matters or where errors are a problem; it sounds like cutting off the pipeline that has historically turned entry level people into experts through relevant experience may be the bold way forward in improving the (relative) quality of bots vs. humans. Sure, this improvement will occur by dragging down the quality of the available humans; but that's just some lucrative consulting gigs for anyone who is already experienced and "fuck you; I've got mine" is how you handle problems that may arise in the future, so it's all good!

"A fine is a price."

You want compliance, try telling them that climbers who bring at least 8kg of waste with them get to come back down. Vastly more exciting than a $4k discount on a trip where the ultra-budget options are ~$35k and going north of $50k is pretty common and past 100k hardly unheard of.

I suspect that parts of the transition will not go smoothly, especially for the people who end up winging it without the opportunity to observe prior cases; but the widespread recognition that, frankly, what we do mostly isn't worth it and absolutely isn't worth dooming endless batches of fresh meat to seems like a noble change from millennia of throwing fresh meat at problems that only remain problems because you keep throwing fresh meat at them.

There are all sorts of purposes that will loudly proclaim that it's imperative that they have people; but they tend to offer pretty thin compensation for showing up beyond appeals to the fact that they've chewed up the last batch who showed up and if they don't get more we won't be able to do whatever it is we've always done for the important reason that we've always done it so we'd better keep doing it.

It's too late for the already extant, they've got bills to pay; but there's no higher form of thinking of the children than ensuring that it will never be their problem.