LMAO....Gartner senior principal analyst Nitish Tyagi explained that it's important to note that Gartner's prediction is based on a global average salary of $2,000 per month; What was he smoking to come up with that lowball # ???

The global average income is around $13-15k USD per year. That includes the trillionaire to the person working the paddy fields for 10 cents a day.

That's the problem with averages.

But it also includes high-tech workers in India, who may make half that, as well as plenty of entry level people in China who contribute a good 25% of the world population. And many high-tech companies in Asia pay less than that as well.

If you looked at vibe coding job listings, they pay around... minimum wage. Which is $10-15/hr for 40 hours.

It's why people were outsourcing to India and Asia - because a software developer in the US earning $100K could easily pay the salaries of 4-5 Indians/Chinese/Taiwanese/etc.

This pet peeve is never going to get solved, because the units are the "wrong" way around: The unit of power doesn't include any hint that time is involved, but the way we express energy does. It's exactly opposite compared to the units that laypeople use most often: distance and speed. That's why you see kWh written as "kW/h". It makes no physical sense*, but to someone who just needs to adorn a number with a "unit", it absolutely does make sense. We like to dump on AI for not "understanding" and instead just using probabilities, but most people don't do much "understanding" either.

kW/h is how many kilowatts are moving per hour, or the change in energy movement over time. Its got a final unit of kilojoules/(second-hours).

kWh is the correct unit - but also wrong (it's not SI) However it is a proper unit of energy with a final unit of Joules. It's a bad unit because you have seconds in the denominator and hours in the numerator so the time units don't immediately cancel.

This is annoying because natural gas is sold in units of MJ - direct energy units, and it's not entirely obvious that you can compare MJ and kWh directly through some constant conversions. (1 MJ = 3.6 kWh).

Also annoying as gasoline is sold by volume rather than energy content (1 litre of gasoline is between 31-35MJ).

And some units are annoying but make comparison easy - the miles per gallon is an awful unit because the scale isn't linear, but the SI equivalent is just plain strange of litres/(100km). Yet it's far more easy to compare a car getting 8L/100km against one getting 5L/100km (~29mpg to 47mpg). You're saving gas, but the SI unit tells you how much you're actually saving which you can then compute using gas prices to see if upgrading is worth it.

One needs to remember France is very close to the US-Canada border in terms of latitude - and in general it's very temperate with temperatures exceeding 30C on the rare side. It's probably closer to Vancouver, Canada as climate. The only difference was, AC was controversial in Vancouver 30 years ago. Sure, you could expect commercial buildings to have AC purely because of the flexibility it enables for design, but older heritage buildings it was iffier.

Home AC was around - we had it installed in the 80s, but was highly uncommon. Car AC was uncommon back then and something we rarely used as it was almost always needing service due to the infrequent use.

These days it's not unreasonable - you can retrofit AC using mini-splits if you don't have central heating. Or even if you do, a mini-split is easy. Though they're often doing it as heatpumps because why go for AC and 95% of a heatpump when you add a couple of parts (a reversing valve mostly) and have a heatpump that works in both summer and winter.

The general issue is the housing was built to retain heat - keeping warm was generally the goal and heating was a huge expense. In the summer you open the windows and the cool air flows through. Of course, when it's 35C outside, the "cool air" is more of a hairdryer.

I would say Europe is about 30 years behind Vancouver in the adoption of AC. Even today you still have objections to AC from various places (usually landlords, often strata councils).

It's also why British, French, and Italian vehicles generally have terrible climate control systems - with such mild climates, AC is hardly used so the technology is decades behind what hotter places like Japan, Korea or the US have and thus those cars have ACs suited to the climate. Nothing is more disappointing than trying the AC and wondering if you were better off opening the window.

The fact that fine art is "worth" hundreds of billions also allows crooks to move money around. As confirmed by the master artist, Hunter Biden.

Art is also subject to wash trades all the time to maintain value. Andy Warhol art, for example, is controlled by a couple of billionaires. If a new piece is discovered, it's immediately bid up to maintain the value of the collection. It doesn't matter if it was a sketch on a napkin only worth $10,000, they will ensure it won't go for less than $200,000.

And they'll exchange art between them with values of millions even though no real money changes hands just to keep the illusion of high prices up.

But also therein lies the difference. Because art can be appreciated, commented on, and other cultural things means there's an inherent value to it. Bitcoin lacks that. A crook trying to offload a dozen Warhol paintings for a million dollars will raise eyebrows. A drug dealer using Bitcoin doesn't care if Bitcoin is $100K, $120K, $20K, $1 or whatever price it is as it's rapidly exchanged to more useful currencies. Bitcoin is a means to facilitate the exchange, and that's it If Bitcoin falls 50%, prices double automatically as they're likely priced in US Dollars.

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.

See?

Now this is where I assume that most people are like myself and try NOT to stand in front of a truck....

Self preservation and all that...common sense some folks call it.

Until you recognize those tall hoods have a huge blind spot in the front and many people do not realize how big it is. On a pickup, it's about 21 feet. Yes, feet. And yes, Europeans know they can park 3 normal cars in that blind spot.

You also see it with cars that stop a huge distance away from the stop line at a traffic light they stop line disappears and they stop, not knowing there's a rather large blind spot in front of them.

Pedestrians and other traffic make use of those spaces and now are inadvertently in a place where the driver really cannot see them, but they don't know that because it's something that doesn't apply to normal vehicles.

It's why semis may have long tall hoods but they are extremely narrow to minimize the blind spot

And yes, the blind spot is so big other cars can zip in especially sportier lower slung cars.

All it would take to fix it would be a requirement for the blind spot to be reduced to say, 3 feet - if you want the tall hood, you must have a camera or radar system in the front that be unobscured in all weather conditions.

It's why Europe likes cabover trucks - when you're navigating around tight roads, not having a blind spot really helps. But even the long nose preferred in North America really tries to minimize the blind spot.

For those who don't realize it, 40 years ago the Mac has existed for 2 yeras. This is well into the era of 8-bit Commodore 64s and Apple IIs, alongside 16 bit machines like the IBM PC. Console wise, we're in the NES era.

The years of the old 8-bits like the VIC-20 and TRS-80 have started to wane, as had hobby computers you built yourself. Perhaps it's the era of modern computing as we know it today where people just bought boxes off the shelf for their computers more so than soldering computers together.

Anyone who remembers building their own PCs for burning ROMs for them is officially old.

GHG went up because of all the gas turbines deployed in a rush during the wind/solar rollout blitz. But it should not be ignored that making the cement for both the nukes and the wind turbines generates huge amounts of GHG. Why I excluded the material fabrication emissions in the discussion. Sadly, no free lunch.

Nuclear cannot replacce gas turbines. Gas turbines are dispatchable power, nuclear is not. A nuclear plant takes hours to ramp up and ramp down production - so it works the opposite of solar and wind, which are also non-dispatchable power sources.

Dispatchable power sources accommodate changes in load instantly (within minutes) - battery, hydro, and gas turbines are dispatchable as they can be brought online and their output adapted within minutes (or in battery, seconds).

Nuclear is called "base load" because they can only run below demand - if demand suddenly drops below a nuclear plant's output, disaster will happen because there will be too much power.

Of course, the problem is using gas turbines for base load power - that is polluting and expensive.

Where Canada has an advantage though, is that they've been able to deliver new nuclear reactors on time, on budget. Canadian built reactors are coming online on time or early, on budget or less. Canada has a demonstrated capability for this - all other nuclear projects are late, really late, and way over budget.

Nightmare Eclipse showed us Bitlocker is a joke. It's not remotely real encryption and easily breakable .. on Win11/2025 server, NOT Win 10. This wasn't an exploit. It was a backdoor. Meanwhile Veracrypt needed a public backlash to get their dev signing keys reinstated so people could get their updated kernel drivers on Windows (and remember, TrueCrypt its predecessor mysteriously disappeared in 2012 with the former author telling people to use BitLocker instead!)

No he didn't. He didn't break Bitlocker. He found a set of circumstances where Windows unlocks the disk and dumps you to a shell prompt without authentication. Yes it's a fault, but it's just like a lock screen bypass on your phone.

But it's a problem that affects all disk encryption - if you encrypt the OS, you need to decrypt to boot. Now some early systems required you to enter your password on startup - they needed to unlock the key. Of course, it also means every reboot must be attended - you could not reboot a system because someone must be there to enter the password.

Then PCs started getting TPM devices, and this allowed them to unlock the disk by encrypting the disk key with TPM keys kept on the chip. But the problem now is that the disk is unlocked. So any authentication bypass will get you access to the encrypted disk, and that's what Nightmare Eclipse found. (The problem affects everything).

Of course, if you steal a drive from a PC, none of Nightmare Eclipse's vulnerabilities would work - because the disk needs the Bitlocker key to unlock, which is contained in the TPM module of the original PC, so it's only useful if you take the whole machine.

But what it is is an authentication bypass - which means it's just another way to bypass the login dialog. Bitlocker unlocking comes as a side effect.

At least in my neck of the woods, we have ZERO spare water. We're in a 'negative water' situation. Using any water is a problem. That makes the narrative that data-centers are 'water hungry' very effective at causing unrest.

And many places where they put them up, they don't have enough power infrastructure either. So power bills go up as well.

There's nothing in Linux that demands you use SystemD. You can choose to use SysVInit if you really want to. Indeed the only kernel requirement is something called "init" is either in /, /bin, or /usr/bin

But the init scripts are really just faking what init was doing - watching processes and restarting them as necessary. The SysVInit scripts are a crude re-implementation of inittab.

C doesn't have strings, but sometimes people like to have some bytes with a 0 on the end. Some of the memxxx() functions are useful with C's fake strings. For example, memchr() is good for when you have a null-terminated string but it also some upper bounds. And stuff like strncpy() doesn't appear to have anything at all to do with null terminated strings, and is grossly misnamed.

strncpy() copies a string to another location stopping when it reaches a NUL or the end of the buffer.

The problem is the second case doesn't NUL terminate the string so you either have to make the buffer one smaller and terminate always or terminate always. Or try to handle it. The other problem is 'n' is unintuitive - it's the size of the buffer in characters. Easy peasy with 8-bit chars, not so much for Unicode strings. (UTF-16...)

I've personally be more of a fan of the BSD "l" versions - strlcpy and strlcat - both take the size of the target buffer in bytes - so a sizeof() is the proper way to use it, and both properly NUL terminate the string. strlcat has the added benefit that it computes the size it needs to copy based on the existing length of the string, so you can use strlcat() to concatenate a bunch of strings without computing the remaining buffer sizes (as you would in strncat). Luckily the BSD versions are in libbsd because they aren't in Glibc. Much nicer and much easier to use functions.

On the other hand, any city resident who has ridden a city bus and been robbed or assaulted would probably vote for it in an instant. For that matter, any KC official who had been similarly victimized would probably do the same.

It is very easy to take the moral high ground in situations where you will not be affected by those policies. It is a different matter when you are one of rank and file who ride the bus every day.

And how often does that actually happen? Because it's a super common myth perpetuated by those who want a car-first lifestyle that public transportation is unsafe to promote their vehicles.

And yes, it does happen. But you know what? We have surveillance cameras already on buses and other public transit. Taxis have dashcams that face both ways.

And this has been true for decades.

The only difference now is facial recognition, which we already know is already problematic and full of false identification. And if necessary, people do run facial recognition on the surveillance video all the time - be it from a bus, workplace, public street, business, etc.

The car equivalent would be to put up more license plate readers everywhere snapping photos of everywhere you go. But we already know how that's going, and really, this should go the same way as well if you dislike license plate readers.

The difference is you were buying a license. The software maker couldn't really revoke your license to use it.

With PlayStation, Steam, etc., you aren't buying a license. You're renting one. That is, you get a license to use the software, but PlayStation, Valve, Microsoft, etc may at anytime decide to revoke that license from you for whatever reason. So at best, it's a long term rental without a clear return date.

And all the other stuff relating to owning the license versus renting the license - like being able to transfer the license to someone else. If you owned it you could sell it to someone else (e.g., "used games"). Something PlayStation pummelled Microsoft heavily on, even though Sony never really intended to follow through since they pushed digital sales harder.

It would be quite useful to have a database to search and find out what devices I own have been shown as guilty.

The problem is that it varies a lot. And basically it comes down to names - things that require internet access especially.

Things like streaming boxes - if you buy one of those questionable boxes at the mall that claim "never pay for cable again" and such, whilst offering full access to paid content, those may or may not come with a side helping of a VPN endpoint. But it's hard to say because the manufacturers of those boxes make them and put in clean firmware, and other companies buy them up and modify the firmware with their pirate apps and then add other stuff in as well. So you can buy the same box from 10 different vendors, have 10 different firmware on them, and 7 of them have the remote access service on them.

Likewise, that IoT camera you buy may come clean, or may have passed through a dozen hands which may have altered the firmware to add the remote endpoint into it. But again, the same problem remains - the camera is sold with a dozen different firmware from a dozen different companies.

And yes, isolating them is the first step because the remote endpoint software is just a VPN endpoint software - it allows some user to use your device and internet because it's endpoint software.