Sweet mother of 110 Baud Modems! Yes, people, sh*t breaks. Welcome to my world since about 1984. While we've gotten better at it, it's still not fool-proof, and there are a LOT of fools out there. And you can claim that "billions were lost" but those are also ephemeral billions that wouldn't even exist today without the Internet and the greedy b*st*rds that have taken extreme advantage of it. News flash: Cloudflare is important too, and they've had outages. Facebook has had some super-entertaining, extremely comical outages. It's time to tone down the "billions in damages" rhetoric because one meteor strike, volcano eruption, solar flare, or *ss-clown in the seat of power can pretty much disrupt anything for an hour, a day, a month, or forever if the event is big enough. And I've been watching over the whole thing for 40-odd years waiting for some of the younger generations to leap out of their second- or third-story windows (think stock market crash circa 1929) because their Spotify play list was unavailable or they couldn't share their narcissism on FaceTube or DisInPinTrest. Maybe they even lost a game save point in Worlds of BoreCraft or some such thing.... So buckle up, you haven't actually seen a real, global internet outage yet. And the closest I've seen was a Cisco-NTP/GateD bug in '96 or '97 that crashed most of the internet at hour-long intervals when the Daylight Saving Time forced altering the system clocks or sometime in the late '90s when someone configured their BGP/4 router as AS0 and we weren't smart enough to be filtering our BGP adjacencies yet. I can't wait for the systemic shock that comes with a real outage....

On one hand, China already has more money than most of the rest of the world. (One the other hand, China has more unemployed people than the US has people.) And on the third hand, China is more than happy to steal any and all technology and engineering that they happen to run across. They are a self-avowed kleptocracy. They already have your designs. Why would they need you, Tim? Oh wait, it's you that needs them....

Our children, and our children's children, are going to be worse off, not better off, than we had it. I can feel the dumb sweeping the nation and it's already obvious in business and STEM employment that the pool of new talent simply isn't there. They can't even handle the sh*t jobs so that they can work their way up to a real job. And they're not even the least bit concerned about it. Cory Doctorow coined the phrase "enshitification". How about a new phrase, "enshitadolescence"?

And this is what I've been saying all along. I started my computing journey with 4 KiloBytes of main memory. No kidding. 4K. And I've always had to be careful with my mallocs and garbage collection and disk space and everything else, including power usage. A lot of junior coders that I encounter today want to start with basically unlimited cores, RAM, and disk space. Of course they do, they're not paying the hosting bill, whether it's AWS or OVH or Hetzner. And until you threaten to take the AWS bill out of their salary they're generally clueless about what it all costs. And this is why I see $20K, $35K, and $60K AWS bills and I tell people I can help them with that. Most of the kids can barely run their IDE on a Mac and when a file share goes missing they're clueless. And God forbid you actually suggest they write something in Assembler or C. And they honestly don't know what a configure script or a make file is anymore in the cases of the web devs. It's amazing how much the industry has forgotten in 40 years.

And AI is just the "2008 Financial Meltdown" equivalent culmination of the crappy code meltdown. The AI crowd wants infinite cores, infinite RAM, infinite disk and, apparently, infinite power to run their newest (but still mostly crappy) models.

"...And those of you too dumb to actually be able to build, code, repair, or otherwise interact with a computer will have to be put to work in the slave labor camps building additional generating capacity so that your elders can charge their phones long enough so that they can actually interact with all of these AIs. Eventually enough power generating capacity will be built that we can go back to powering actual homes, schools, and industries. All hail the men in the clouds. Work will set you free. Learn to AI." And then they start handing out typewriters to a million monkeys to generate more random training data. (Which, evidently, we're already running out of, they say.) The Magnificent Seven AI companies act like we won't need post-hole diggers and trash men in the future and the Code.Org pitchmob wants everyone to believe that Code.Org has been successful in its mission. Lordy, oh Lordy, when will this stupid bubble finally burst?

Since China has been overtly stealing intellectual property for the last 40 to 50 years it seems only logical that it's time for the entire world to start stealing intellectual property back from them. Also, China has more unemployed people than the United States has people, thereby presenting interesting long-term economic levers to be pulled when the time is right. And Mutual Assured Destruction is still Mutual Assured Destruction, so they need to remember that when they try to rename The Sea of Japan to The China Sea and expropriate other countries' land and resources. I was so hoping that Tibet and Tienanmen Square would bite them in the * (asterisk) during my lifetime and we may yet get that opportunity. And India is a fresh opportunity for Beijing to screw up on as well. But to hear "western" vulture capitalists whinge about China taking "all of the good bits" in industry is just so much money grubbing by people who would sell the human race out to make a buck anywhere they can. In this instance they're just whinging because they're not Chinese.

OpenAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple... I wouldn't work for any of them (and they're IN THIS MARKET except for OpenAI) and I know I have the chops because I've been aggressively recruited by a couple of them in the past. But the spiel is always the same, "pack up all your crap, sell your home, uproot your family, leave your friends behind, and then they go full Blade Runner "Off-World Colonies" marketing blitz on you: "A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!" Then 16 months later you're down-sized, made redundant, whatever, and living in your car. Pass. Plus, we're in AI bubble territory. How long do you think it will be before the top 5-7 companies are laying off hundreds or thousands of workers because they need to cut costs? Zuckerberg just paid $14 Billion (yes, with a "B") for Scale AI but it's been losing money forever. How much longer before just Scale itself has to re-organize? Big Fat Pass.

Social platforms aren't properly managed, responsible or accountable. They're a sh*t show of "we'll do whatever we want because we have money!" Now the same fluff-brained pundits that were whinging about Europe "losing" (because their regulations won't let large corporations outright kill people, like America almost does right now) will have another target to whine about. Go Nepal. Go Europe. We are completely f***ed over here. Save yourselves. We can no longer help you until we send about 150 Million of our own idiots to "re-edumacation camps" or ship them off to Mars.

Look, Meta's content moderation efforts are garbage. I left the platform because of things like flagging security camera video and stills as "AI generated"... which is sort of ironic. Or more likely "moronic" given their use of AI. Their "community standards" Billy-Bubbas were all really Trumpers trying to force their world views on everyone else. My timeline went full "proud-trash white-boy" three years ago and I dumped them and never looked back. They don't deserve my trust and they'll never have it again, even if they merge with a cigarette manufacturer and change their name to hide their identity. (Again.) It was time to just leave and find different venues to be in.

Don't use Facebook. It's a crappy platform driven by a giant, malevolent company that will be happy to kill you or let you die if they can make a buck off of it. LinkedIn is just "Facebook For Work" and they're just as bad since Microsoft bought them. You need Need NEED to understand, these large platforms operate on a "cash and kill" basis and they don't care if they got it wrong on ten thousand accounts when they have hundreds of millions of users. THEY DON'T DESERVE YOUR TRUST. There, I said it. Don't use them. Find somewhere else to be, because you're not really connecting with people on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and their ilk anymore. You're just subjecting yourself to the Dopamine "drip drip drip" that they pedal and they REALLY need your attention addiction to push their advertising so that they can make more money. And when you die, they believe there will be someone in line behind you to take your place so you really don't matter that much. Just say no to big social media, you'll be happier, healthier, and live longer.

They have little sense of time, or of proportion. They're all too busy either making low-quality garbage videos or consuming low-quality garbage videos to actually practice mindfulness, presence, and gratitude. Luke Skywalker had that problem back in 1977 kids, and by 1984 Master Yoda was beating it out of him, figuratively speaking. The current elder generation can't find young workers who can read a pick ticket in a warehouse or a "Notes" box on a customer's pizza order, let alone have the presence to learn a real skilled trade; from welding to IT to engineering. And I blame the collective "us" for just letting your parents do whatever it was they were doing at the time and not pushing them a little harder. Some Gen-Z-ers still have problems with "don't leave the frozen chicken out on the counter top overnight because "food safety"" and "if you don't understand it, it might be dangerous. Learn something about it first, then you won't be surprised when you get your hand cut off." But their bevvy of in-game characters is most impressive. Too bad they can't monetize that phenomenon easily. -- I'm completely serious about this. I fear that we are going to have to endure a abnormally statistically large sample of really dumb people through the end of my life, and it's a pretty good call that they'll manage to damage or kill more of the general population, statistically-speaking, than in generations past.

Oh good, more stylized crap that no one needs at a price we can't afford, and in 5 years they'll be whinging about the cost of maintaining the back-end infrastructure and they'll simply turn it off. And then someone can write a whinging article about that, too. See also; "Sony Dash" or "Chumby". Or Playstation. Or XBox. Or Star Wars Galaxies. Or....

This should be a completely "Duh!" moment for each and every one of those people who do crap like this. "Hey! You've got security clearance! Why don't you go crow about it on social media and make yourself a target of foreign interests?!?" In my not-so-humble opinion; if you're that daft you probably deserve to lose said security clearance and the job that goes with it.

Arguably the king of outsourced manufacturing who hasn't built so much as an audio cable on this continent in several decades is suddenly ... what, exactly? Some sort of expert on sending their designs off to China or India for manufacturing, or?... No, wait, that's not it. Steve Jobs is dead and I'm waiting for Apple to quit twitching. Just let me know when Apple starts opening "broasted chicken" diners in their left-over spaces. That's usually a pretty good tell-tale that a company is on the ropes for real.

Do you really want to talk about DNSSEC penetration and turn a blind eye to IPv6 adoption? We've been working on IPv6 since 1996 as well and ... well ... here we are, last country on the planet to take it seriously, because carrier-grade NAT, NAT, and similar crutches get us through. How many people here have asked their residential internet provider if they support IPv6? I have, many times, and each one looks at me like I'm an idiot. They don't WANT to. You can't MAKE THEM. "You're not the boss of me!" "You're not my MOM!" "You're not my REAL Dad!" ...And so on and so forth. Making a technical push for both DNSSEC and IPv6 is harder than it sounds, mostly because of the entrenched tech companies and the abundance of IPv4 address space initially for North America when the internet was still young and dumb.

AI will probably go down as the greatest waste(s) of human time of any technology, ever. From AI slop bug reports to AI slop social media posts, we're all gonna end up hating each other while a relative few malevolent goons crank out AI slop on an industrial scale. Now small businesses can't even answer the phone without risking getting slopped. Good thing capitalism is on track to kill itself with it's own waste heat.