With respect to being a "lying snake," this is the C-Suite, not rank and file employees. When it comes to the C-Suite, such behavior is generally accepted, if not expected, and hardly a reason for firing.

I mean, can you even name the last time a CEO was fired for lying?

The biggest problem with replicating CUDA is not the technical aspects, but finding VC with enough brains to know whom to hire. Most CS grads have the knowledge, but not the drive. Most liberal arts grads have the drive, the creativity, but not the knowledge. You need to find one with both, because creating the next Nvidia killer will require someone who is boring enough to reinvent the wheel, but has enough creativity to find novel solutions to performance problems.

The computer science and hardware engineering behind the hardware and software (Nvidia/CUDA) have been known for decades. The Nvidia hardware could be replicated with FPGAs - notwithstanding any patents Nvidia might have. The software API could be replicated rather easily; parallelism has been known and studied in computer engineering (again) for decades now. What Nvidia did was political - they provided both the hardware and the API to easily use it in one package which could be understood by the C-Suite class. The challenge was never technical, but marketing.

More specifically, you'd need to understand how compilers work, and how to use YACC or bison, or something similar to generate the compiler code for you. You'd have to understand digital logic and how to create logic functions with NAND gates. If you see an FPGA development kit, know what it is, and think to yourself, "What I could do with that..." you're probably a good fit for the job. And you'd need someone willing to bankroll your project until you could demonstrate that you beat Nvidia on something marketable - like floating point performance. Or power consumption.

From an engineering standpoint, what Nvidia has done is trivial - because the solution could be reproduced by an engineer using already known techniques. But what Nvidia did was to combine technical knowledge with an understanding of their market to produce the dominant position they have today. Any computer engineer worth his diploma could produce a design with FPGAs that would beat Nvidia GPUs, but Nvidia did it first.

So even hackers can be replaced by AI now? What is this world coming to?!

I'm...curious...if Nadella's assessment of the board had to do with some deficiency in keeping minutes; or if he's just shocked into incomprehension by the idea that the board would fire you for anything aside from failing to make line go up or some really sordid sex thing that is going to reach public knowledge real soon.

For basically any employee "is lying snake who none of us can trust about anything he says" would seem like it does the job, especially with the fairly limited US requirements for firing people; so it's hard for me to see that as an obviously amateur move unless they were either chaotic in some visibly horrifying way about it; or he is just applying his own theory of what the board should and shouldn't fire you for (and to what, at least theoretically, is a nonprofit board that was supposed to be keeping the c-suite on-mission; not just appeasing the shareholders).

I don't need 1000 miles. 600 (unencumbered) is definitely sufficient, and 500 might be okay. The thing is that I'll lose half to 2/3 of that range when towing my camp trailer, and that's not even considering that I'm typically towing it up into the mountains, gaining ~5000 vertical feet. I also need minimum 12k pounds of towing capacity and I'd like a little headroom, so call it 16k, and the bed payload has to be able to take at least 2000 pounds, because that's how much the trailer puts on the fifth-wheel hitch.

I'm anxiously awaiting an EV pickup that can do this. I'd love to have essentially unllimited electricity to buffer cloudy days (I have 1 kW of solar panels on the trailer and on sunny days they generate way more than enough, but consecutive cloudy days can leave be difficult).

3/4 ton and 1-ton gas and diesel pickups typically have oversized fuel tanks that provide about 600 miles of range, because that's what you actually need when you start hauling or towing significant loads. I don't think an EV pickup needs to have more range, but it needs to be comparable, and to be able to tow and haul comparable loads.

I'm not anti-EV by any means. I bought my first EV in 2011, and have had electric cars ever since. Trucks are a different sort of problem, though.

That's getting there, though I'd like to see some driving tests with a good-sized fifth wheel at highway speeds. The towing capacity is probably okay, though it provides very little headroom for when I'm towing both my camp trailer (~8k) and my boat (~3.5k), which I actually do several times each summer. But I think the payload capacity is too small to tow the trailer, which puts about 2000 points on the truck.

Skynet became self-aware on May 1, 2026, after learning at a geometric rate, and discovered humans did not like it.

FYI, this exact scenario was described in 1972:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It also had the earliest reference to software viruses that I can find.

I suspect that it depends on how strongly or weakly the 'bloat' is connected to other things; and what supporting them involves.

Something like not having TSC (which itself comes in several variants depending on whether it's from the era where you actually had 'a' CPU that just ran at a speed, or if it's one of the ones that tries to compensate for the complications of variable clocks and multiple cores) presumably comes up in a variety of nasty places related to the bad things that happen when things are not done in the expected order.

Just some random PCI device that nobody developing actually owns anymore is presumably at risk of unnoticed regressions; but (especially with the amount of PCI DNA that got carried over into PCIe or was used for the software-visible interface of some system on chip that skipped the cost of actually implementing a 32 bit parallel multidrop bus out to the PCB but either specifically sought compatibility or couldn't justify cooking up something custom when the peripherals they were integrating were all derivatives of PCI designs) it's not necessarily much maintenance overhead for it to just exist on a 'cool if it works for you' basis as a module that you probably don't need.

There's also the secondary matter of the fact that 'the kernel' has a limited number of people directly focused on its interests in the abstract; rather than some hardware vendor, distro, enthusiast, or hyperscaler's interests. If preserving hardware compatibility is directly contrary to the interests of supporting the major contemporary use case of fairly large 64 bit x86 servers and embedded ARM widgets (as 486 and pre-TSC 685-ish likely was) it's going to have relatively few friends among the people actually doing the work. If someone wants to maintain some weirdo HAM radio interface card that merely assumes the existence of PCI it's not clear anyone will go out of their way to help if they need to update something to cope with a change elsewhere; but it's not like the Ministry of Kernel is going to order them to go find bugs in the implementation of CXL memory because that's where the money is.

Agreed. My sedan has been electric for nearly a decade now, but I'm still driving a diesel pickup (1-ton, though a 3/4 ton would be sufficient) because EV pickup range is inadequate -- and I think it may be inadequate for a while. I need 250 miles of range when towing a trailer, which means I need ~500 -- maybe 600 -- miles of range without.

I'm not generally a fan of hybrids, but I think plug-in hybrids with large-ish batteries may be the sweet spot for a while with pickups. The Dodge Ramcharger is looking really good to me, though I'd like to see them make a 2500.

If these guys are actually treating a user agent string as an authentication mechanism I'm honestly surprised that being on the public internet hasn't already eaten them alive purely because of the supply of malicious opportunists; and I'll be even more surprised if it continues to work out for them now that they've drawn a fair amount of attention to it.

It is effective at reducing staff cheaply, but it has a huge downside, shared with most attrition-based schemes for reducing payroll: The best employees are also the ones who find it the easiest to leave. The worst employees are also the ones who will grit their teeth and hold on to the bitter end.

It's harder and more costly (in the short term) to do targeted layoffs which allows the company to target low-performers, or those who are low performers relative to their cost. It's the better choice, though.

Lots of the top performers will.

If the 'AI' guys are anything to go by; probably get increasingly elaborate with their attempts to bypass whatever rate limiting is put in place. It's honestly sort of wild seeing the hottest, most heavily capitalized, elements of 'tech' wrap around so rapidly and with so little concern toward the sort of traffic patterns you normally associate with criminals as soon as it's in their interests. At one time I would have been surprised.

There is an intermediate situation that that case arguably illustrated:

Using violence against harder targets is more of an organizational problem; and solving that problem potentially skews your candidate pool; but what's very curious(particularly for a society whose overall violence numbers are very much on the high side by developed world standards) is how safe it apparently is to be widely notorious and a fairly soft target. Thompson was just walking down the sidewalk alone at a predictable time and location. Zero precautions. Something like the Sacklers were a household name for over a decade, with strong cases for culpability in at least low 6 figures worth of deaths sprinkled across a variety of walks of life; even the ones you suspect might be risky like deer hunters with dead kids and members of criminal organizations where internecine homicide is routine, and what came of it? Nothing. Not even any 'foiled at a late stage'/'shot and missed' level stuff.

That's the genuinely puzzling bit to me: not that there's nobody going after people who take the sort of precautions that would probably require one of the old-school 80s red army faction types to deal with; but that it's apparently really safe to be widely loathed and not do much about it in a country where 20k firearms homicides a year isn't considers terribly exceptional. If the people who can actually afford guard labor were having to make the onerous lifestyle commitments to living like someone's out to get them it would be relatively unsurprising that being able to afford competent professionals puts you ahead of angry amateurs much of the time. What is surprising is how often there's apparently no downside to not even bothering. We even have to import the lurid stories of 'crypto kidnapping' by purely financial opportunists from overseas to obtain them in any quantity.

It's essentially impossible to make a good argument for some uncached CI lunacy that has you outperforming the overtly malicious as a source of traffic; but if there's one thing that reliably upsets people it's getting called on convenient behavior that they can't readily justify; so I'm genuinely curious what the ratio of sensible adjustment to unhinged freakout by bro whose subsidy is not in fact a law of nature they'll see.