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Clueless companies with clueless IT departments that want someone to call when things break.

For the rest Ubuntu's only reason for being is that it's the basis of many good distros like Linux Mint.

I talked to Lockheed engineers (at a party) thirty years ago about the supposed successor to the SR-71 which was all the rage back then: the Aurora. Obviously they didn't tell me anything but it was nice joking about it.

It struck me they were trained to respond to questions about classified stuff. When you asked them a question they responded with a question.

So yes, most probably something has been flying for decades that's at least as fast as the Blackbird. Prototypes which may or may not have been put into production.

They don't mean "loss" but "outages" if I read it correctly.

Considering Apple is one of the most profitable companies in history I hold it to a high standard...which it isn't living up to. I find that deeply disappointing. You'd think with the money they're earning they could at least find some talented developers. To me it looks like they're fishing up trash from the gutter and putting them to work on its operating system. Also, it seems they're more interested in visual polish than day-to-day functionality.

This isn't new of course, it's old news. Mac OS X has been buggy since I developed for it more than two decades ago.

It was obvious from the start that Israel's killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians wasn't genocide. So why press charges against its political leaders? This move was purely politically motivated either by the DA (a Muslim) or the leadership of the ICC.

The U.S. is a hyperpower that does not want to be hindered by a politically influenced extra-judicial tribunal.

Trump obviously wants doesn't want his hands tied when he decides to bomb all the power plants in Tehran and Iran to force the country to its knees. The fact that this might be interpreted as a war crime has withheld him from ordering this up until now. Iran, however, is bombing civilian infrastructure almost on a daily basis yet I haven't seen any arrest warrants for its leaders being issued.

These are what I like to call "infinity applications" where the need for speed is essentially infinite.

Even if you write them in hand-optimized assembly they would still clamor for more speed.

I write in C++ almost every day but never have the need to optimize for speed. Even when you write straightforward code it's already blazingly fast.

People please, an LLM is just a vector database that spits out statistically viable answers which highly depend on its training material. There's no real "intelligence" involved.

True reasoning capabilities and continuous learning.

And self-awareness for bonus points.

The idea of "orbital data centers" was conjured up merely to justify Musk's merging of xAI and SpaceX. I thought that was obvious to everyone but apparently there are still plenty of little-minded people that see Musk as some sort of God and suck up every lie he shoots from the hip.

Musk is merging all of his failed enterprises (Tesla, xAI, Boring Company, Twitter) into the one that has been relatively succesful, SpaceX. Mostly because of Starlink, the idea for which he himself didn't even come up with and was initially seen as an afterthought to get some revenue.

He talks about applications he generated without specifying what they are or do. Does he really believe everybody is going to generate their own text editor, paint program, file explorer or graphical windowing environment with A.I. just because they can?

I believe the author is misguided about A.I.'s capabilities just like many analysts and investors are.

A.I. (or should I say LLMs) is useful for specific problems but contrary to its name it has no "intelligence."

I often wonder if our brains are capable of understanding the Universe around us. Our brains were made to help us survive on this planet, not to understand the laws that govern our Universe.

The story that haunts me is the one where scientists attempted to understand how the brain of a simple organism worked. It only had 40 neurons yet they were unable to unravel the mystery on how it functioned.

Soon the musical chairs game will come to a screeching halt. Interest rates are skyrocketing and not even a Presidential decree will make them come down.

To me it's clear the U.S. is heading for a default. Instead of toning down the deficit Trump made it much worse with his "Big Beautiful Bill" and is bankrupting the country.

What happens next is anyone's guess, but it won't be pretty.

Elon lets out a fart and everyone's running after it. This is another misguided attempt to pump-up their share price or give clueless investors the feeling that Google is leading the A.I. pack.

Orbital data centers are a stupid idea conjured up by Musk when he was taking mescaline or ketamine. Anyone with half a brain knows this doesn't make sense.

Gasoline is expensive at the moment because of the Iran war. But as soon as it's done the price of gas will fall markedly and people will forget all about EVs.

BYD already sells cars that cost less than $10,000 with a 5 star NCAP rating. And there are even cheaper Chinese EVs costing less than $6000 (OK, they're deathtraps but for some people that doesn't matter). And they're not junk either. They work and cut a few corners here an there. Good enough for a lot of price-conscious buyers.

Most importantly: they have LFP batteries which last much longer than Li-ion ones in addition to being safer.

Europe is mostly interested in supporting its car industry. But soon they won't have to worry about that either.

There are no companies in Europe designing high-end semiconductors because the wages are much lower than in the U.S. The best European talent is moving Stateside and raking in ten times what they can get at home without having to build up seniority first.

There's certainly semiconductor design capacity in Europe, but it's mostly geared towards low-end semiconductors, like the ones used in automotive and industrial. NXP and ST are designing ICs in Europe but relatively commodity stuff like low-end MCUs and motor controllers.

How are you gonna fight a war when you can't make the steel for your bullets and artillery grenades? Yes, that's the scary logic we need to take into account these days.

Steel is not a commodity, it's a basic ingredient in any industrial base.

The problem with the Blackbird were its two engines. If the airplane had one centrally located engine it would've been safe to fly but with two engines even a small "hiccup" in one engine could lead to a thrust difference which would tear the airplane apart in mid-flight.

This is true, but there other drawbacks. The charging infrastructure may not be there and the electrical grid may not be able to handle the load. Consumers know this and are therefore steering clear of EVs.

I've predicted long ago that EVs will eventually be (much) cheaper than ICE cars since they're much simpler. An EV is basically a battery, an electric motor, four wheels and a steering wheel. ICE cars are incredibly complex. It's just that manufacturers had over 140 years of experience in making them reliable, safe and easy to own and drive.

Even if they become cheaper governments may dissuade consumers from buying them for fear of overloading the electrical grid.

Europe is continually complaining about its dependency on Chinese steel, cars, electronics and semiconductors yet their carmakers are buying cheap Chinese steel instead of European steel and European semiconductor manufacturers are preferring cheap Chinese semiconductor equipment over ASML gear.

The European Commission wanted to put hefty tariffs on dumped Chinese steel but the carmakers sought an exemption. They don't care about European sovereignty, only about their profits. Penny wise and pound foolish. I doubt there will still be a European car industry in two decades or so.

Europe is a lost continent.

Exchange that 'b' for a 'p' and the message will get through.

And how about Meta's "pervert glasses"? Zuck himself probably conjured up the idea that everything you look at will result in you getting a "relevant ad" for that item. Yuck!

I believe this is the reason everyone's running after these camera-glasses: because they believe they can rake in big bucks with them. Even Apple is contemplating to sell them.

Maybe their leaders lost their heads but not the general Norman population. Massacres were common during that period but genocide was never performed, not even against Jews and Gypsies.

The Normans accepted the French king as their ruler, even though their lands were ruled separately.

I've always admired the French kings playing the long-game in this. Step by step, over centuries, the French kings took back more and more land from the Normans until it became completely French and the Normans were absorbed into the French kingdom.

This makes me happy. The more enshittification the sooner the first pillar of Big Tech will fall down.

Meta and Google will follow soon after.

P.S.: just because they take a patent on something doesn't mean they will actually use it.

Yeah in a country like Norway, a country that became filthy rich from selling...oil.

I always have the feeling they're buying atonement for their sins.

I agree that it's much better to design an EV to be an EV from the ground up. The reality is, however, that consumers don't want EVs for a myriad of reasons and prefer hybrids. And developing two completely different platforms is too expensive even for a higly profitable company like Toyota.

This is nice. It's a testament to the pixel art made in the past with very limited resources (colors mostly).