I would not characterize a fully patched Windows 10 thru last October; as 'very vulnerable' to being hacked. At least not when third party software, specifically Chrome is still get updated thru at least 2028.

In fact in the home PC context I'd say there is probably very little real difference in posture vs that same PC running Windows 11. Yes I know Win 11 has some additional memory protection but again for home users they are not exposing native code binaries to truly untrusted inputs, with the main exception of the aforementioned Chrome.

Finally given MS is still selling extended support for Windows 10, we know they are still producing fixes, given past experiences with serious wormable/drive-by exploits - if something like that comes up they will give away the patch.

So not getting updates is basically FUD, to sell new PCs and new Windows licenses.

LLMs seems simple to use / integrate, but the reality is they are massive foot gun opportunities.

1) single channel for control/data, and the almost inevitable injections attacks that represents.
2) gotchas around context size, that are often hidden or abstracted away at first
3) Lots of other tuneables nobody can explain to you what do, if your not maths major.
4)attack surface around things like context integrity
5) multiple incomplete standards for tool calling, mixed authorization strategies / conventions / and impedance problems with existing systems.

All being shoved into the hands of end users, with only vague mentions of dangers like hallucination. Its like watering CCW courses down to 'aim away from face'

Future text book:

In the late post war era, wealthy societies around the globe became obsessed with the idea they could create true artificial intelligence. They directed massive resources to this AI god they believed could be brought forth at a time when there need to invest these resources and wealth into addressing critical structural and sustainability issues. Hollowed out and weakened by cancerous spending, and poor energy allocation choices the great empires of the early 21st century entered a period of accelerated decline and collapse as household food and energy prices began to rise.

Business are perhaps their own case but do consumers even need new PCs?

Other than AI and games what does a 10 year old box NOT do just as well as new machine. OK it compiles stuff faster, and renders video quicker if you are editing, anything else "consumers" might actually do with a PC?

PCs seem to have become like cars. The average mid market family sedan or small-suv, from 5+ years ago comfortably seats five, has a decent sound system, navigation of some variety of smart phone integration, is loaded with safety features - airbags, abs, stability control- and boasts a 0-60 time of 6 seconds. You might *want* a new Giulia Quadrifoglio, but you don't *need it*.

We have been kinda predicting the death of PC market for years now, because as I have been saying you can do your taxes, and junior can do their homework on a box from 2016 just fine. Maybe memory prices will finally break the upgrade / planned obsolesce cycle and leave people treating them more like cars, where the average age of the fleet is 11 years and they get a new one when it become to expensive to fix their current one.

BAHAHA LOL

The DOD has never completed and audit. The have a budget of trillions. You think they can't just hire Anthropic's best people away, rips off and patents and IP they do have, hide behind national-security/government immunity/whatever and make their own stuff?

That is even if they could not find a near peer competitor in Microsoft-OpenAI or IBM that will smell the money and reply "how wide would you like us to spread our buns when bend over sirs?"

If Anthropic prevails, here that will be your proof Hegseth really is incapable, because by all accounts he should win this one.

Except this is not that...

More like:

Hey this is a nice contract we have here, but as a client we are not happy with the terms, be a shame if we had to cancel it.

Which is wait for it....Perfectly ordinary business practice.

VB was a fine tool, the reason it got a lot of hate was because like a lot of software tools, it was to easy to take places it was never built go and to often was.

Slogging thru creating front end Windows apps with VC++ was dumb. What was even more dumb though was that kid who built the nightly shipping batch process thingy in VB, and oh it had to run on a logged in deskop because it needed a main window, to host some timer event. So the next thing you know you had to have a server in the rack with a super insecure auto-login configuration...or to make damn sure every operator knew that if they needed to restart that thing for any reason they'd better go login in and make sure 'SuperShip97' fires up..

Oh and SuperShip97 would cause the box to run out of swap and fall over every three days because VB was made for writing desktop software where leaking a few bytes of memory here and there because something was self-referenced and could never be garbage collected, did not matter much since the process would not be long lived; but when turned into a batch processing solution meant the problem would just compound until the box crashed.

VB was hated not because it was bad, it was hated because it let people who did not understand the problems of various software domains rush in start building stuff that needed to be architect-ed. It was often like they guy who used a few bags of sackcreet to put pad down for his BBQ jumpting to 'hell I'll just rent a backhoe, buy some forms, get me one of them mixers and harbor freight and pour the foundation for the new addition on the house, how hard could it be!' Next spring everyone is standing around wondering why the joists are pulling away from the ledger board....

Maybe...

Laws very by state as far as how land values may be appraised. A single offer, keyword offer not sale, probably can be argued as not representative of fair market value.

Another way to fight that, that I have not really heard of but often wondered about when it comes to farmers trying to protect themselves from taxes, as developers buy surrounding farms and push up land values, is intentionally impairment the deed? May states allow you to add covenants to deeds for things like rights of refusal (no sale can proceed without offering the neighbors a chance to outbid first etc), rights of way (such and such trail must reamain open to the public, etc).

Could you as a farmer who knows they wish to keep farming, protect yourself by adding covenants to your land deeds to the effect of this property may not be subdived, and 90% percent of the land area must remain either farrow or in use for crops production...

This would allow you say that you cannot use the 55million dollar sale of the property down the road for a datacenter as a comp, because that class of buyer cannot/would not purchase your property?

Any land use lawyers know?

you don't think counties zone land 'Ag'. Usually with even more nuanced use plans and restrictions splitting stuff in to Ag-1, Ag-2, and so forth?

Tell me you have never attended a board of supervisors meeting with out saying so..

Nail on the head. Nobody survives in farming unless they are 1) practical, and 2) forward looking.

At a scale of 100-1000 acres or so where can't easily expand because the lands around you are not for sale, that mostly looks like 'conservationism' to the outsider.

The trash heap and burn pile are still there somewhere on the back 40 out of site and away from where they will contaminate product, the well, etc. If you are expecting a drought that will send the price of hay thru the roof, then beef heard is looked at with suspect eye and questions about the market for veal.

When you take this same thinking and move it Washington it just scales up, suddenly that couple hundred foot square pit to push slash into is an entire county. Compared to the 'North East' or whatever its still tiny but it becomes very easy to forget that is someone's entire physical experience.

There is always room for one more right of way for another high tension powerline, oil/gas pipeline, etc.

GPP is right that we need to raise Washington, where there wrong is the need to send any replacement folks to it. The real environmental crisis is FEDERAL POWER. It will only ever address myopic concerns like carbon emissions and only ever in a way that has little conscience for more immediate and local concerns like protecting the few large areas of UNBROKEN forest we have left in the east. If you want save the nation's enviornment they key place land management decisions into the hands of people who live on it.

Exactly there have been COBOL-to-C transpilers for years as well. The output is well usually a pretty brain dead conversion of COBOL to C in way that maps COBOL data divisions on C structs and unions in a way not human C programmer would think to do but none the less it is possible to start chopping up the resulting C-BOL into libraries you can link to other C code or call into from pick your favorite scripting languages FFI interface for C.

There have been tools perfectly suitable for decomposing COBOL nests into understandable parts and subsequently rationalizing or rewriting in newer technology bits for decades.

The issue is always the *risk*. COBOL doing control-break-logic batch processing in your mainframe environment can process basically unlimited quantities of records with extremely predictable memory high water marks, run-times, and failure modes. That is actually hard to deliver with newer tech, at least if you talking the transaction volumes of the largest international banks.

If you can't trust a deterministic conversion of COBOL to C, how could you trust the outputs of some statistical model converting COBOL to pick your other language and its like much larger than C's standard library and run-time environment?

I have been using claude, its a good tool. Certainly makes programmers more productive. The idea it solves any of the real problems that kept people moving off COBOL, which everyone recognized was obsolete in terms of language design and expression 35 years ago but hasn't yet found a sufficiently compelling reason to move on, strains credibility.

Linux proper never supported any ia16 CPUs. There is ELKS, which was a fork of Linux (I think) or maybe a porting of Linux kernel features to Minux (possibly), that did. A quick looks seems like people are still checking code into a git, but I don't know if its 'official' or who is behind it these days.

Out side of some specific objective context comparing human energy use to AI is kinda silly. At the societal conversation level, Sam is ignoring the 'humans' are ultimately the reason we are doing any of this.

They will be there anyway. We have an economy so that the collective 'we' have things we need like food, a warm place to sleep, and things we want entertainment, presweetened breakfast cereal, fast cars, etc.

Tools increase productivity which means humans can do less work and live better but you can't probably argue energy savings unless maybe you are talking about like a tractor means you can feed 100, and they'll eat less then if they spent most of their in the field working the soil by hand.

I don't think they are measurable savings in terms of human energy consumption by sending them off to consume fiction rather than reading TPS reports and having the AI do it. That 'idling' human is going to consume almost us much energy.

Either that or Sam is going some really dark places and thinking a long the lines of deciding who gets have children and how many, or 'eliminating' some of the current population etc. TBH I would not be surprised at that sorta thing coming from his corner.

It takes two to tagno. Someone has to lend these companies the money in order for them to be loaded with debt. Eventually these parties will learn to sniff out bad credit risk, at someone point no matter how rosy the proposal and outlook is lenders are going to start looking at the history of these PE firms and say you know what - nope.

excuses.

If you do a shitty job and vendor or supply chain evaluation and get pwned at that at least partly on you. There maybe exceptions if you are a fraud victim, like say a vendor furnished a fake 3rd party security assessment report.

Literally every place I observed using ivanti, were large enterprises that had had Juniper kit and started using it as part of the VPN solution when it was Juniper product and simply continued thru the transition to pulse, ivanti. It was there because nobody reevaluated it, and nobody bothered to ask if the current owners were being good stewards of the software or just shitilly patching to install Windows-current and little else. Then continued to do no vendor management even after multiple very public vulnerabilities.

How long do these supposedly very high confidentiality government organizations and F500 enterprise get a pass on that? Private equity might lead to crappy products, and poor customer service, but it can't make you buy the product or put up with a negligent vendor. Its just like Sears/Kmart, at some point if you were still shopping there and complaining how they never had anything the inventory they did carry was garbage, it is a you problem.