Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

I did, once, about 30 years ago, lasted about 4 months before they went belly up from incompetent management in those early internet days. Small outfit, 20 employees, and I remember the day I knew it was doomed. The big honcho took us three programmers to lunch, telling us we were the future of the company, not those old-fashioned parasites manning the phones. The whole thing smelled so bad we immediately asked the phone people, and he had taken them to lunch the day before. They were the backbone of the company, not those incompetent bit pushers.

Fun while it lasted. He turned down two offers to buy him out, and was broke a month later.

If that were what I had said, your comment would be spot-on. However, your comment is wrong, and fits its own definition of being in such a stark world than only two choices are possible: perfect or wrong.

To elucidate: I said I was low in sympathy, not devoid of it.

Please learn to read, then learn to comprehend, and then learn to apply what you have learned to the comment you have typed out before clicking "Preview".

These 'improvements' will get so many reviews, redesigns, input from different departments, that in the end they will fix nothing and you should be happy it didn't make things even worse.

AI fights back

you don't even know steam is using proton-wine or not, you just click the play button and that's it.

They sold their souls. Now they want them back. I am low on sympathy.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

I have been playing with routing tables. I have a few virtual machines around the globe that have full BGP routing tables and that gives me great IP -> ASN details. That means someone comes into a server and that might get redirected to as1221.my2026.example.com but that is a virtual web server with a few hundred thousands others. Everything nice and fast until there is a problem. Once that hits, that ASN gets redirected to the slow scrape box.

Also there is ipasn.net created at APNic. host -t txt 8.8.8.8.ipasn.net gives ownership of the block and other details involving things like its Route PKI status. It is part of their lab so I'm not sure how much traffic it can cope with.

P1?!? Is that you?

Yes, most of the difficulty with wine is installing the windows applications, not wine itself. There are many knobs and compatibility options to adjust. Proton has done that for you for a huge number of the games in steam.

...that don't know this side of Microsoft, i think it is important to keep these stories alive. it explains so much of the current pc landscape, and these are the articles you can point to when somebody asks/says - but why is windows so dominant on the pc/desktop if is better?

what do you expect when the costs to manufacture their products rises and they have such small profit margins?

as if all this vibe-AI coding, and what have you, wasn't lazy enough already, it was aparently still too much effort some for people.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.