I never even liked the name. Pocket is the sort of thing that I want in some sort of plugin, not a core feature. As in, I don't want it, don't waste time making it, let someone else make it. I don't know what fakespot is, but I also don't want it in firefox. I don't even want picture in a picture, or it taking over my media keys, or almost anything other than things which are core to browsing.

I can see the password thing being good for people who aren't using an alternative.

The US has had the ability to borrow absurd amounts of money. Of course this makes them look rich.

After the Euro became a thing in Greece, the country appeared wildly successful, everyone was clamouring for the high paying government jobs, borrowing like crazy, and "modernizing" by dumping ship building, olive growing, olive processing, etc.

Then the party ended, and they realized it was all a mirage, and not only did they have a debt problem, but that they had not been "investing" in a future.

I truly believe that the US is going to get cut off from this debt firehose, and the world is going to realize that a huge amount of their "success" was entirely predicated on the world being stupid enough to keep shipping our riches to the US for their crap currency and debt.

Right now all kinds of economists spend endless amounts of time looking at the US being apparently successful, and then coming up with ways to explain that success without using debt as the explanation.

I see it as little different than if you gave Joe Average a 1 billion dollar CC with low interest rates. In short order Joe would look very successful; nice house, well dressed, fantastic lawn, kids going to the right schools, being seen in the right clubs, but when that CC fails, it would all fall apart. For a while they could sell the fancy watches, but the reality is that all the things they "invested" in like the best nightclub in town would all turn out to be money pits.

Maybe Joe did buy a burger joint, and it is still profitable, but it won't keep him in his 50,000 square foot mansion.

Few people seem to know that there are almost no hard and fast rules with a currency: * There is no unacceptable debt to GDP ratio. Some countries have faltered at 60% others have sustained 200+%.

* Confidence is seemingly a factor, but this can be so fickle as to have little predictive value.

* It doesn't have to be backed by anything. Gold backed can increase confidence, but take somali currency. The government was never solid, and has been a basket-case since the 90s. Yet, people go to the market to buy/sell stuff using the "national" currency. For international trade it is entirely useless, so they use neighbouring or solid currencies.

* Once currency can be terrible, but people living under an even worse currency will find it attractive. I fully believe this is one of the things propping up the USD. Other people (in some countries) want it because they want their own even less.

* Too much of it isn't entirely a problem. It takes a confidence crisis to usually push too much over the edge. Going right to the edge of "too much" will stimulate an economy to produce things to mop up the ever growing amount of currency. I would argue this is where things like crypto currencies are becoming attractive. They are just a way to mop up the huge amounts of USD sloshing around. Some people argue these are a hedge, I would say at this point this is not the case.

* Most people are unaware of the velocity of money problem. Once various categories like M1 and its friends are actually crossing the line of "too much" people will dump their now inflating currency faster. This increases velocity, which effectively increases the money supply; which (everybody sing along) increase the incentive to increase the velocity. This is a positive feedback loop with very negative consequences.

* People forget that you have to pay your taxes in USD. This means that people will still do part or whole of all transactions in USD, so as to pay their taxes. This can place a support for a currency for a period. If the US federal government said that all taxes had to be paid in Leopard pelts, the leopard would go extinct in weeks.

* Most of the rich world is quietly dumping US debt, and only acquiring what is needed for basic trade.

* The USD debt is safe because the US can always print more. This is technically, and pedantically true, but the reality is that if you hold a 10 year bond with a 5% and a 10% one comes out, the first one is now only worth $69.30. That is a massive massive massive haircut. If you are thinking that 15% is on the table, then you are thinking your bond could go to $49.81. That is a halving in value if rates on a 5% bond go to 15%.

* Crises come along on a fairly regular basis. Not every presidential term, but pretty close. Right now the US deficit spending is at a crisis level (the level you would expect during a crisis like 2008, 2001, a major war, etc) This means a real crisis would require way more spending. Where is this money coming from?

* The world can't supply limitless money to the US. Think of it this way. If you have a trusted friend and they come to you looking to borrow $1,000. I think most people could manage this, some could manage $10,000, some could manage $100,000 or even a million if they mortgage against their house, etc. But a point would come for the vast majority of people where they could not round up the money to loan. If the US goes to the rest of the world looking for 5T, 8T 10T, a point will come where no matter how much they threaten, or the world even wants to desperately help, they can't cough up that much. Seeing that the US is not inspiring confidence, and is no longer a trusted friend; there will very soon be a point where bond auctions don't produce results. So, they will start cranking up interest rates

* Triggers. This is one many are actually worried about. If they screw with the fed's independence, this will trigger an instant bond auction failure. Minimally, this tags 2-5% onto the next successful auction. Other triggers include punishing some country by nullifying its debt in some way. This an instant confidence crisis and the world goes from quietly dumping US debt to quiet panic dumping of US debt. The US bond auctions have to compete with this debt.

* On this last, going back to the value of lower interest debt to higher interest debt, it gets weird. Many countries hold US debt from over the last 20 years. Much of it is at 1.5% or so. Thus, selling it into a market where the US is printing at 10% means you have to sell it at less than $47.77. Seeing you are in a buyers market, this could be far lower than that. Many countries would not be happy to have something which seemingly has a value of $100 and are dumping it at say $30. I say seemingly in that most people would see a bond with a face value of $100 as worth at least $100. The reality is far more complex. But this highlights that this whole event would not be simple.

* Revenge. Quite simply, there are a whole lot of countries in the world now who are still having to do business with the US but no longer want to. Beyond the financials, things like pension funds, etc are not inclined to be buying US anything. This is a little bit of a doom loop. If large pension funds are slowly exiting the USD, then it will drop, which makes the US stock market look less attractive; which makes all of them less inclined to invest in US anything.

* Quantitative Easing. This is a financial term we all learned in 2008. This was the pumping of massive amounts money followed by trying to slow down and mop it all up before the economy overheated. With the amount of money now being paid in interest payments on US debt; the amounts dwarf QE. With the new debt being issued at much higher rates, these interest payments are flooding the economy with massive amounts of money.

* Economic indicators. People are saying these are lies now. Who knows. But with organizations like ICE getting a budget triple that of the US Marine Core, and larger than the military budget of russia, that is a whole lot of hiring to produce a whole lot of nothing.

* Risk free interest rate. This is a foundational part of the math behind finance. Everyone was comfortable with this number in the US being the 3 month treasury. People are now realizing that while still low risk, it is no longer no risk. This has ripple effects on all kinds of things like options, derivatives, etc. I couldn't even guess as to how this could blow up; but these are massive markets, so if they do blow up or hiccup, it would be quite bad.

* Post WWII Britain is a very good analogy for what is going on now. They had too much debt, a crumbling empire, and a new world competitor. But, it really didn't come to a head until 1959. In the few years up to 59, it looked like things were on the mend. Did the UK come to a screeching halt and everyone died? Nope, but they were no longer an empire.

TLDR; various tropes about the US being sound, a world reserve, no alternatives etc, are all basically BS based on ignorance, misplaced confidence, and hope. As most financial reports say, "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."

There are lots of really crappy developers out there with the word "senior" in their title.

The only thing senior about them is that they have mastered their horrific legacy codebase, build system, and cancerous corporate culture. They know some obscure C or some other mostly ancient language.

When they do interviews, they lord it over the interviewees that they know extremely esoteric things about old C, old microprocessors, and weird esoteric jargon BS from their own domain. They make it seem like the interviewee should know all this, even though this "senior" person knew none of it on their first day. Their goal in interviews is twofold. To make themselves look very smart, and not to hire anyone more capable than themselves.

But, these are not people prone to growing, learning, and personal evolution. Thus, they won't learn rust, they certainly can't grok rust for what it is. This means that if a company starts the transition to rust they won't be able to be assh*les all the time using their title "senior" to make everyone around them miserable.

But, the executive hate them as well, and when they learn that rust can give them some fresh new blood, they will ignore their bleating about "fads" and "unproven" and shove them aside with a fury; a genuine angry fury; as they too have been putting up with their BS for decades. These old seniors have been saying "No, that can't be done" for decades, while their competition would regularly do it. Then the seniors would blather on about how much risk the competition was taking and that everyone was going to die.

Now the executives will realize, they can clean house, and they will.

So, if you are trying to get rust into your old sclerotic organization, don't go to the executive with explanations about borrow checkers, but explain, that the old fogies will be fish out of water with this new tech and can finally be entirely ignored, or even thrown out the airlock. If the fogies push back with the useless phrase "institutional knowledge" just tell the executives that an AI knows all their stuff, better, and more. This last might be lies, but those seniors have been lying for decades and doing untold damage.

I was told by a tenured professor that he regularly saw his fellow academics use woke as a major weapon to take out competition. He stated the exact same thing as this article. His point was that you have a group of very smart, high achieving people in a very closed environment fighting for a very small number of jobs. He said the criteria for these jobs is fairly nebulous. It is unlikely that someone at the very beginning of their career is going to accomplish anything earthshattering, or even in their entire career. Even the number of citations, etc won't be a very good measure in the short time available. So, you have two choices. You can do what society is expecting of academics and squint into your microscope, or you can go full time Machiavellian.

Guess which strategy is more likely to get you an academic position?

So, now you have a group of people where the selected trait is backstabbing prick, who are now competing for grants, promotions, etc.

Guess how that turns out?

He said, once in a while an actual scientist gets through, but that it was very rare, and that most who are making it are part time scientists at best. The ones who argue that science can now only be done in large teams. This is because they need to hope that some (one) on that team is a real scientist of real capability and will drag the lot of them into the limelight.

The server costs for most apps to not be shitty is so low as to show it is 100% greed.

For a running app which records your runs online (like it or not) the server costs are negligible. Let's assume a compressed 50kb to store one run. A 160GB storage server is €16.40/m. Assume 100Gb for storage. That is 2 million runs. Assuming 200 runs per year, that is enough for 10 years of runs for 1000 users. so 0.02 per month per user. The IT costs are fixed, and are still nothing unless you have very few users. The server in question could handle 1000 users in its sleep.

If we are talking about 10s of millions of users, there are ways to get these per user costs even lower.

What I see is very simple. A perfectly good app will start attracting lots of users. Often because things like the subscription is low, or the above costs are built into a one time fee. Then, some VC comes along and injects some money. They want at least a 10x return. So they push the founders harder and harder to shit up the app in ways which are supposed to make more and more money. If we are all lucky, there is an alternative app, and the first app gets abandoned, and the VC lose their money.

The problem is that many of these apps have a combination of a trapped audience, and piles of money to do piles of marketing.

Even worse, the insane concept of software patents allows some scumbag lawyers to do things like get patents on recording your runs, even though there is so much prior art that it could have its own app store.

I suspect this is only the very tip of an iceberg. Right now, it is not too hard to create AIs which can even do a video call. This will only get to the point where my own family and friends would not know it is me.

It definitely is past the point where a harried official "human checking" could be fooled.

Even here on forums like slashdot, reddit, etc, I suspect the majority of the comments will soon be bots arguing with each other; shilling, influencing, etc.

Using the tools available to me in 2025, I am certain I could create a person who would fool almost anyone doing any check that was online. I could create social media accounts which were consistent and filled with "real" postings; that is, pictures of the ghost in various locations around the world, hanging out, etc. Attending classes, and on and on.

Where this is going to get weird is as the tools become nailed down, individual people or organizations will be able to create whole populations of these for their various reasons. Had covid been a few years from now, I suspect that you could even proceed through an immigration process in many countries with this ghost, get an education, etc, and now the ghost would be a "real person"

I wonder how many ghosts are now working for call centers, etc where the call center thinks they have hired a real person?

"Rust will never be in linux."

"Rust will never be a major part of linux."

"There is no way the linux people will allow rust."

"Rust is still just a toy, entirely not proven, it will be decades before it is trusted."

"Rust is still very much in beta, and not really used in production."

I call it assh*le GPL. I understand they are trying to keep the big cloud companies from basically stealing their work, but I am fairly certain they could come up with some licence which says, "If you make more than 1 billion in revenue, you can't use this without getting a commercial, license..."

This is something which kept me away from Ada as a language. Most of the libraries are gpl or worse. Even Ada itself has some weird licensing which is like, "It's like GPL but only more confusing. We promise that our lawyers won't haul you into court because we are so nice, and our lawyers only eat kittens on weekends."

For most things I want to see MIT, public domain, or Apache. Even the BSD license is a bit offputting as it shows the library or whatever is potentially old and being maintained by boomers.

Another one which is an instant rejection is java. I really hate anything that is even remotely in the orbit of anything JVM. I use jetbrains products, but check every few weeks to see if a competitor has built a far faster, lighter, and better IDE using rust or something.

I have gone to more than one redis presentation. They were arrogant pr*cks. Usually, when I go to presentations given by many tech companies, they are jovial, friendly, and have great handouts. They will throw a high value licence out to the audience sort of thing, and maybe some kind of credit to their service with some heft.

The redis people left me with a real sour taste in my mouth. They just bragged about service uptimes, which made me very nervous as they have no safety net underneath if something goes wrong. Then, they tried to sell us crap which was not the title of either presentation. I've seen warmer oracle presentations which were more useful.

After seeing their presentations, I stopped using their services in all my present and future developments. What I discovered is that between basic caching, and postgres, I end up with better performance, a cleaner codebase, a cleaner architecture, and way faster development. I will never go back.

So, instead of Assh*le GPL they could license it shove it up your *ss GPL and I wouldn't care.

There are all kinds of interesting studies on classroom size. The bulk of the valid ones show a magical number 21. This is a cliff number; that is; the difference between 21 and 22 isn't much different than 21 and 40. But, as you get below 21 it goes up and up, until you hit one on one tutoring. Under around 3 it becomes arguable that 3 is better than 1, but arguable.

All that said, I have used chatgpt to learn things. The beauty is that you can drill down as far as you want. It can mark your work, it can suggest why you went wrong, it can complement, it can critique. If you are learning about something and you don't understand, it can explain what you find confusing.

That is chatgpt, which is an extremely general purpose tool. It is not following a curriculum, it isn't remembering where you struggled, etc. But, without a doubt, there are people building specific tools for education; tools which remember the student's progress, push along a curriculum, and are well versed in the subject being taught, and the best way to teach it.

Also, this is pretty much year 1 of chatgpt, where will AI driven education be in 10 years? I love these people finding edge cases of where it screws up or supposing kids will figure out ways to fool it. The simple reality is that most teachers are not very good, and are often working in fantastically broken systems. So, maybe this sort of tool will be a minor adjunct for the best teachers at the best schools; but for the vast majority of the world, it will put an enture fantastic education in the palm of your hand.

Other attacks will be that kids will ignore it, etc. But, what is different now? Plus, various incentives could be put in place to encourage kids and their families to follow through on an education. Also, there are those kids who are self-motivated; they will thrive when handed an opportunity to zoom ahead as fast as their brains will allow. I'm not only talking about the nerdlings, but the kids who want something; I want to go to space, I want to start a fashion business, I want to work on race cars; or whatever. They will be able to tell their AI school in a box to help them with this, and off they go. This isn't only going to be 1st world kids, but all over the planet. Kids in the worst of the worst of the worst places will be able to realize their maximum educational potential.

Again, on this last some people will say, "Oh, but hungry malnourished kids can't study as hard." Yes, but that is an argument for health programs, not an argument against AI.

In theory, the biggest losers will be mediocre and worse teachers, as I suspect the eventual evolution of many educational systems will be few great teachers overseeing large number of AI assistants. Some school systems will cling to the old ways, but various accepted performance measures will end up proving this to be bad. And again, people will try to dodge reality by saying, "Oh no, standardized tests are bad." Again, not a condemnation of AI.

If you look at all the people who will argue against this, they will make unsupported accusations, and focus on weird edge cases. For example, I suspect one big attack will be on socializing. I agree, this is a part of the educational system. But, that just means it becomes effectively a curriculum item; as opposed to today where it is left for kids to figure it out in the jungle school system. I wonder if these people who will fight AI would like to see a course where the strong kids get to bully the weak ones. Or they have a daily election for prom king and queen so the "peak in highschool" kids get their due?

I wonder if AI teachers and adminstration will give the football stars a pass both educationally and ethically? Yeah, I somehow doubt most people want their kids going to the same school system they went to, if there is a vastly better one made available.

I have to use some windows software. There are many fields where windows is not optional. Engineering is most certainly one of them. Thus, I need to run windows in a VM on a mac, if I am going to use a mac. The arm versions of windows are aspirational, not functional. I would argue wine on intel linux is far more "real". While I appreciated the performance of my silicon and its battery life, the reality is that my "vintage" intel mac of no particular power, is very good, it performs well, and it has an acceptable battery life. I would go so far as to argue that few users of laptops need more than what my 2018 macbook pro delivers. The simple reality for me, though, is I also need nVidia. So, my primary machine is a lenovo with a solid nvidia card onboard. The mac is more what I now take to the beach. While I don't use a mini, I would suspect any mini of the same "vintage" with 16gb will meet most people's needs just fine.

Around 1999 I was doing some business with GM and was dealing with their top marketing guy. He had great hopes "this internet web thing" would allow GM to finally bypass the dealer network. He knew it would take many many years, but he so very much hated the dealers. He blamed many of GM's problems on them.

I see in these announcements that you are still effectively going through a dealer. These dealers will figure out a way to fuck over the customer. This is what they do. this is who they are. Fucking customers is their primary business. Selling cars is just a way to bring the customers to within their grasp.

The big AI companies are pushing for these rules, not because they give a shit about ethics and safety, but because they want small companies which are coming up with highly competitive AI to not be able to afford the gauntlet of regulations.

This level of reporting will no doubt be very expensive. But it will be a fixed cost that the majors can easily afford, but a startup won't. I suspect if your AI is somewhat innovative it will also run afoul of these regulations, and after being reported will generate very expensive investigations which will tie up and distract a startup.

The absolute last thing the big companies want is a bunch of us Jackasses doing our own LLMs. They will get the government to declare this dangerous, and without a doubt, the government will pile on the regulations which pretty much entirely restrict us to using APIs of major AI companies, and that will be it.

The only saving grace will be how hard it will be to define an AI. This will open up new avenues where people create things the rest of us will call an AI but the regulators won't.