There is an old technique - the guaranteed winner by random chance:

You get 32 stock brokers. On Monday the boss picks 2 stocks. 16 say that stock is going up, 16 say down, and they each call 100 people and give their prediction. That evening the 16 that were 'right' call their 100 back and brag. Tuesday they repeat only with 8 on each side. Repeat on Wednesday with 4 winners. Thursday they have 2 winners. Friday they have 1 winner that brags to his 100 prospects:

"Look, I happened to predict the winner every day this week. I can not guarantee that will happen every day, but if you want to hear my predictions next Monday, I need you to move your account to my firm."

And the gullible fool does it, not knowing that mathematically the predictions were guaranteed to work on 1 of the 32 brokers. Just math, not competence.

Betting on AI was not some super genius move - especially using margin. All it involved was taking the popular opinion and going all in. While it worked you look like a genius. When it fails, you lose everything.

He just played the odds and won for a while. But the math was never going to have him win forever.

Let's get real, the AI didn't break into these systems all by itself. It did what it was prompted to do. Now sure, maybe the person doing the prompting didn't realize the implications of what he was prompting it to do. But no, the AI is not conscious or self-controlling, as much as Anthropic would like you to think so.

How about a button that marks an unsolicited connection requests as spam. Garbage connection requests are worse than people posting AI slop, because I never look at the "feed".

10% drop is large but not horrific. This is basically normal variation, not something real.

Apple is one of the "FANG" stocks - Facebook, Apple Netflix, Google. They are huge companies that have had major gains as compared to most other stocks. Over time some people just bought those stocks.

This drove the prices of their stock up a lot from greedy people The current drop is just undoing some excess greed, not really that big a deal.

On 7/31/2026, it hit a low of 300. Before 7/31/2026,. the last time Apple was at 300 was 7/2/2026

In other words, it gave up less than a month of gains.

This is not that big a deal - yet. I would be shocked if it dropped to 272. Why? Because that is just below the previous 'low point' on 6/25/26. Going below that number not only indicates a significant drop, but it established a trend of new lows being less than the last lows.

Thanks for clarifying, I missed the sarcasm.

Yes. That's exactly what I meant. I definitely did not misspell 43 as 53 because I was touch typing.

Electrical vs ICE does not affect New vs used. It's not higher gas prices.

The main reason used EVs are not losing value as much as they did in the past is that the fear of used electrical batteries no longer being as strong.

Previously people were extremely worried that EV batteries were going to quickly lose their charge. There were concerns that older batteries could not be trusted. They thought a used battery was a liability. Worse, everyone kept talking about how the NEXT generation of battery would be so much better. For this reason a lot of people would rather get the newest technology which meant new EVs rather than used ones.

Over time we have found that batteries from used EVs stand up pretty well. Moreover, most people now think that 'new' battery technology is likely to be used for things besides cars (i.e. home back up) so the new cars use the same old batteries.

Combined with the fact that EVs generally have less maintaince issues, people have begun to realize that used EVs are a pretty good deal.

Actually, I don't think we were misinformed.

The reason so many companies spend wildly on Azure or AWS, is that they don't properly manage their resources. When you use the cloud, you have to think more about what you actually need.

The problem is a habit that came from the days when everybody self-hosted. They would buy a machine, stand it up, and use it. When that machine wasn't as useful, it wasn't costing them anything to keep it sitting there, so they just let it sit there, idle, or under-utilized. They *were* actually paying for this unused infrastructure, but it was "sunk cost" so they moved on and ignored it.

In the cloud, you have to keep paying monthly for every instance of everything that has been provisioned, (typically) even if you're not using it. Many companies neglect to take down instances they're no longer using. My company found that they could save $20K per month just be cleaning up old, unused instances of servers.

So if a company is disorganized and doesn't have the bandwidth to clean up old, unused infrastructure, then yes, the cloud will cost them dearly. For those that are disciplined, the cloud *can* actually save a lot of money compared to purchased hardware.

If you think "managing a team of AI coding agents" is an isomorphism for Brooks' team structure, you should re-read the book.

His structure was very explicit, and had only exactly two programmers on a team: the "Chief programmer (surgeon)" and a "Copilot".
All the other roles were auxiliary
- Administrator (scheduling),
- Editor (documentation),
- Toolsmith (creating tools to enable the programming process),
- Tester (QA),
- "Language Lawyer" (kind of an architect).

You can suggest that a programmer with a "team" of AI coding agents is a think that works, but don't point to the Mythical Man Month, it has no relation to the pattern devised by Brooks.

Seven out of 50 is remarkably small. I am shocked they did not get more.

Now, I guarantee you, those affected will realize that the cybersecurity are not joking around. They will improve security.

And about a year later their new security protocalls will spread to the other 53 states. By the time the next group tries this crap, it will be much harder to do.

I'm willing to bet it will be easier to apply controls to LLMs, than to people.

If your company does phishing tests, and it should, they'll find that 20-30% of people will fall for it. We might have "developed administrative and technical controls" but it's only marginally successful, at best.

There is a story about how dealer plates have small numbers on them that Flock cameras do not see. The system then accuses people of car theft.

They are proven as not reliable. If I were a judge I would rule that the police must treat Flock camera information as an unreliable, anonymous source. No drawing guns on people tracked or accused because of Flock information and their info cannot be used to obtain a warrant.

The end user always pays for things they use.

Renting is a perfectly legitimate way to obtain the use of something, whether it's a house, a car, or a server. Sure, you might be a higher rate per month than if you buy, but you also don't have to pay to maintain the thing you're renting. That's the owner's job.

Renting is a tradeoff. Buying is a tradeoff. As a homeowner, I can tell you that buying isn't for the faint of heart. You don't pay monthly rent, but you DO pay big air conditioner replacement costs. Hardware infrastructure is no different. You pay for it one way or the other.

When we entered the Atomic age, there was a movement to use it for everything. Use reactors in cars and homes, use bombs to dig holes, etc. etc. Eventually we learned that no, we do not to put a nuclear reactor in vehicles that routinely crash, get stolen by children, and carry children.

The same thing is going on with AI - people keep using it for things that are incredibly stupid.

AI's are more like friendly dogs that can speak English, than adult human beings. I suspect they will never be as trustworthy as a 17 year old orphan. If you would not give authority or control to a 17 year old orphan you just met, then do not give it to an AI.

This includes:

control over more money than you would give a 17 year old.

the ability to delete computer files

the ability to set prices

guns

any military weapon more deadly than a hand gun.

If you can convince a person to mistake you for someone who has the right or authority to receive sensitive information, they'll give it to you. This is literally how phishing works.