The bean counters who care about one thing only: Physical buttons cost money *HISSSSSSS*

We've all probably seen so many cases in cars of "wow, good job dumbfuck, you saved five cents by doing it the dipshit way... and guaranteed that this part will routinely fail." Some examples from my old ford explorer:

* HVAC blend box servo gears are all plastic. It's a teeny motor with 3 stages of speed step down. The first gear being plastic is basically guaranteed to snap teeth or just wear down to nothing. This is literally a $0.15 part in millions quantities FFS.
* Plastic engine thermostat housing. The gasket is basically guaranteed to fail every few 10s of thousands of miles because of the expansion mismatch between plastic and aluminum. Mine now has its 4th and final housing because I replaced it with a cast aluminum one.
* 5r55 transmission servos are basically guaranteed to fail by 150Kmi because there is no sleeve for the servo stems, just the soft aluminum of the tranny case. Two little rubber gaskets on the servo cover the problem up, which should've never existed because there should be a brass sleeve for this exact reason.
* The use of plastic chain tensioners for the OHCs are a ticking timebomb not just for Explorers but all vehicles equipped with that series of v6/v8 sohc engines. Somewhere between 150 and 250Kmi, they will break.

On a vehicle that originally retailed for $28500, all of the above bad designs might have saved $50 on production relative to doing it right. And yet these four things were among the principal contributors to the infamous reliability problems of early 2000s Explorers, alongside the stupidest decision of all: omitting a transmission fluid cooler by default. But you can't put "destruction of entire vehicle series' reputation" on a spreadsheet so beancounters don't care.

According to The New York Times, the deal is reportedly valued at about $7.5 billion, with $1.5 billion allocated to OpenRouter's founders. Less than three months ago the company was valued at about $1.3 billion. CNBC reports:

This is normal, non-insane valuation in a market that is definitely not a bubble more inflated that the Bootes supervoid.

"There is no such thing as the cloud, there is only someone else's server."

... you never stop to ask if... wait, not thinking about whether you should shouldn't matter, because it takes absolutely zero seconds of thought to see that the answer is fucking NO.

In the case of generative AI, there exist legitimate applications and it took a minute to see that it's a really bad fucking idea. But using it to make new viruses? Come the hell on, man.

Listening to the cult of globalization (i.e. free trade in capital, i.e. recreating the race to the bottom that characterized the robber baron age in America at the scale of the entire world) is a 100% self-pwn on our part.

But China's government absolutely, positively, one hundred percent actively works to undercut American (and anyone else) competition in markets they want to control. Their government can prop up Chinese companies dumping X on the market longer than any private enterprise company mining or making X can hold out.

That's how they wiped out every American solar panel manufacturer: Dumping panels on the market for less than they cost to make. That's how they wiped out every single rare earth mine they don't control. It's how they wiped out western steel and aluminum making for everything except exotic high-cost alloys and defense applications.

It's been a long time, but the US government's illegal mass wiretapping program was originally "exposed" in part because they installed a signal splitter in a San Francisco AT&T network house where the transoceanic cable came onshore. The network admins removed the unexplained fiber splitter going to a locked room because it dropped the signal strength enough that the legitimate transceivers were complaining.

You think that you're going to put a processor capable of interposing itself between two sources of traffic reaching 28, 56 or 112 gigabaud per channel, process and MITM that data at line rate, store more than a millisecond's worth of it on the gigabytes of memory this processor will have (you'll need a full speed ddr4 channel to keep up), exfiltrate copies (to... uh... somewhere) that totally won't be noticed by performance and network monitoring both...

And do all of this, with the 1-2 watts of power you MIGHT be able to steal from the transceiver's socket without tripping a power and eventually thermal shutdown?

You think you're going to "dead bug" a processor capable of spying on a 28 gigabaud (or faster) link, by definition at line rate, into a device the size of an SFP transceiver? Actually let's back up one. You think there's a processor inside an SFP transceiver that you can attach a spy to? The things have as much brains as a battery charge controller. Their job is to provide stable DC bias to the receiver PIN diodes and the laser emitters, and in present datacenter units to have either 28, 56 or 110GHz of analog mo/dem bandwidth. To that end, they have a micro-brain in their ASIC silicon that lets I2C find out what's going on and how hot the unit is, that's it.

Now let's just snap our fingers and imagine that's possible. Oh, and there's also an entire bank of nvme drives to allow this "dead bugged" spy processor to store more than a millisecond of captured data. This also definitely fits inside the SFP transceiver, and doesn't parasitize more than the 1-2W you'll have available. What, exactly, do you plan to do with it now? If you're the SFP (and not the QSFP or OSFP) you're plugged into the host, but you have no access to it (seriously - *SFP transceivers are dumb).

Are you going to tell me that this "deadbugged" spy processor is actually an interposer with its own entire network stack that can inject outbound data? Because you know, these sorts of networks, they come with guarantees on latency that are either sub microsecond (ethernet) or sub 100 nanoseconds (infiniband). Good luck not stepping on timing margins like -that-.

More like, "with an entire engineering team and being handed power and cooling for free, I could insert an interposer into the rack that could spy on whatever line I asked the DCOs to plug into it."

All of which is a very long way to say you have no idea what you're talking about. There's places in hardware threat actors can attack you. Those places are the BIOSes of your servers. When was the last time you updated your laptop's bios? If it's more than a year I about guarantee you there's multiple CVEs out for it that Fancy Bear or Fancy Panda could utilize.

There's plenty ways China may try to steal things from a datacenter. There's a lot of ways Chinese threat actors try to steal American IP and data. I don't think I could possibly write a list long enough for "the optical transceivers in the switches" to land on it.

The idea that a stick with half the volume of a finger is going to both do its job as assigned (and that is not an easy job - it's really quite a miracle that they're able to pack all those optics and electronics into those things) AND contain a processor capable of decoding, processing, and stealing information from an absolute firehose of data capable of overwhelming a powerful CPU, all without compromising the sub-15W power and cooling envelope of a QSFP transceiver (and that's being really generous), AND on top of that then be able to *inject* data into the outbound stream (whichever one -that- is, could be either set of lanes because you have no idea if the transceiver is in host or switch) in order to exfiltrate the stolen information, ... oh right and it's also got 16G of ddr5 in there so it can buffer 2/3 of a second of the firehose, and...

You're not stealing information from the switch either, because nothing in the switch is capable of it. The ASICs in the switches now burn several hundred watts of power. It's mind boggling it's so little because they're capable of receiving and forwarding sixty billion packets a second. There's no splitting streams, no spying, just an ASIC designed for pure, raw, insane speed, handling over a thousand DVDs a second of data running in and out of five hundred data lines. The single-board x86 computer in it that does the setup has a handful of Celeron-level cores, maybe 4G of ram and a tiny little SSD with less storage than your last phone.

APTs may use that switch computer to achieve persistent access to your network, but that's a whole different can of worms.

The only standard of behavior for the GQP Crime Syndicate, for sixty years now, is "whatever you can get away with." Starting with Nixon committing capital-T Treason to get elected in '68.

Trump's "innovation" is demonstrating just how far that can be pushed with a compliant media.

An attempt was actually made to power McMurdo with an atomic reactor in the late 60s I think. It was the size of a shipping container roughly, and ran on HEU (or HEPu, don't know, don't matter). I say "attempt" because it proved unreliable, and was so temperamental it required a whole team of physicists to keep it going.

Oh, and because it was small, it leaked neutron radiation that turned the entire container and everything around it radioactive.

Nuclear power to provide emission free power for people = something that is at least arguable for

Nuclear power to power the AI slop machine = screw this bullshit.

You're joking-but-not-joking, but don't forget - The central reason that America has virtually no public transit infrastructure that deserves the name is because after WWII, auto makers bought and systematically destroyed all of it they could, and set about manipulating city planning in order to make anyone who doesn't drive the next thing to a prisoner in their own home.

Remember, you are a slave who exists only to service the holy economy, not a human being who the economy exists to serve.

10MW scale gas turbines are single-cycle and achieve, maybe, 35% thermal efficiency.

Gigawatt scale combined cycle gas turbines are now pushing past 60% efficiency.