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msy

3,543 karma · joined February 25, 2010

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msy··on Oil hits $100 a barrel despite deal to release record amount of reserves
This theory of how the US loses in Iran is looking increasingly likely: https://kasperbenjamin.substack.com/p/why-the-us-will-lose-t...

It's going to be incredibly difficult to stop Iran being able to kneecap both the global economy and in particular the gulf states, who are going to be motivated to put maximum pressure on the US to sue for peace. Incredible hubris and a lobotomised diplomatic and intelligence infrastructure in the name of ideological purity, quite the combination.

msy··on Flash media longevity testing – 6 years later
Consumer? Apple or Google Photos or 'drive' functionality of either. The only real risk then is losing your account and Apple Photos has an option to keep them all locally on disk.
msy··on Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native
The thing people miss is isn't not that there aren't downsides (power, memory, disk size, dependency ecosystem size etc etc) it's that they're still completely outweighed by the upsides of write-once-ship-all for authors.
msy··on Judge finalizes order for Greenpeace to pay $345M in ND oil pipeline case
Exactly. I mean look what happened when we worked out CFCs were destroying the ozone layer through rigorous scientific research and public disclosure.
msy··on Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns
Have you seen them in the wild? They're notably chunky and have an obvious hole where the lens is. You might not notice it in passing but if someone's talking to you it's hard not to notice. I wonder how many of their owners realise how much they're affecting every interaction they have with another human.
msy··on Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns
I suspect what'll kill these is the same thing that kill google glass - social ostracisation. It's so, so wildly adversarial to effectively shove a recording device in the face of everyone you're interacting with you might as well wear a emergency orange t-shirt with 'verified asshole' written on it.
msy··on Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns
You would have to have been hiding under an extremely large rock not to assume this given the technology involved and Meta's overtly and consistently anti-privacy stances and history.
msy··on Judge finalizes order for Greenpeace to pay $345M in ND oil pipeline case
Blaming oil companies for the extremely well documented history of suppression of research and action into the impact of climate change is not childish.
msy··on Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage
All the more reason to hope that company crashes and burns.
msy··on US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives
The patrons are doing an excellent job of adding to the 'more difficult' list.
msy··on [dead]
Decades to centuries of phenomenal, thoughtful, unique, creative kids stories that can be curated to introduce whole worlds of ideas. And you want to replace it with cookie-cutter AI slop and give them the world's worst case of Main Character Syndrome, how utterly depressing.
msy··on We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
This is a lagging indicator, it is still one of the top no question, but the point is that is shifting materially.
msy··on We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
They're to migrating to America any more either, that's the point. So no, the US has no advantage, on current trajectory it'll increasingly only have 'native' talent and some of that may choose to move elsewhere.
msy··on OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been
Not just lack of ambition, lack of vision or taste. Liquid Glass is a step back in almost every way, that it got out the door is an indictment of the entire leadership chain.
msy··on Margin Call
iPhones, particularly with the advanced security/hardening turned on are light years in front of Android devices for protection against advanced/sophisticated actors. Which is why VIPs use iPhones.

Apple responded to Pegasus with Lockdown Mode, which is probably the most hardcore security modality that's ever shipped in mass produced consumer hardware.

msy··on Porsche sold more electrified cars in Europe in 2025 than pure gas-powered cars
Parity? Their EVs are streets ahead, doubly so for the price.
msy··on 2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web
What.cd was the Library of Alexandria for recorded music, the depth of what was collated and properly labelled there was far beyond anything that has ever existed on any other service, paid for or not. Every permutation of every release, endless live recordings, often multiple of the same event, absolutely incredible.
msy··on Price of a bot army revealed across online platforms
We are in a situation where it's a choice between unchecked corporate/oligarchic power or government power, at least the latter is nominally accountable in a democracy.
msy··on Workday project at Washington University hits $266M
$1000/person is reasonable? You could literally have a secretary/admin spend _multiple days per year per person_ managing things for that much. The software administrative complex is completely mad.
msy··on Workday project at Washington University hits $266M
What do you think the consultants are doing? They're mostly last year's graduates anyway.
msy··on Workday project at Washington University hits $266M
So now 'professional management' bring in these firms and instead run hundreds of millions over budget to create brittle, bespoke software. It's profoundly damning on our industry that decades of software development later most productivity gains stopped at about the point Excel and email became widespread. Software has eaten the world('s budgets) with little to show for it. No wonder all these parasites are so excited about AI, another whease to flog to naive orgnaisations that will inevitably spiral in cost, deliver nothing of value and suck more budget from anything useful. Then sell them 'cybersecurity' and 'observability' on top because now their security is Swiss cheese.
msy··on Want to sway an election? Here’s how much fake online accounts cost
Countries understood in the age of TV/newspapers that control of the media was a sovereignty issue. Any nation that wishes to remain truly sovereign, particularly in the English-speaking world is going to have to grasp the nettle and block or force divesture of Meta & the other US social media giants.

Cambridge Analytica was the canary, the gloves are off now. Australia's under-16 social media ban is a good first step but we need to go much further and fast, as much as government control is undesirable at least a democratic government is somewhat accountable, the nexus of US tech giants and it's sprawling intelligence services is not.

msy··on Workday project at Washington University hits $266M
Workday, Palantir, ServiceNow - a new generation of Accenture/Oracle et al 'consulting' parasites that wine and dine their way into organisations (and governments) and then bleed them dry. There's a reason software spending endlessly goes up but productivity has flatlined.
msy··on OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI
I get the impression the innovation drivers at OpenAI have all moved on and the people that have moved in were the ones chasing the money, the rest is history.
msy··on Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
The real secret sauce is that Valve is private and doesn't have external investors. As soon as you're owners are primarily interested in short term capital extraction everything else is inevitable.
msy··on Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
This is a bizarrely negative take. No residential is being charged negative prices without very, very explicitly joining a plan that exposes them to the direct minute-by-minute wholesale price. Most 'EV' plans include free hours during the day (and much cheaper power in the early hours as well), it's likely it'll be standard within months thanks to this.

They are now also subsidising batteries while should help meet the wave of solar with a wave of distributed storage capacity to smooth out grid demand as well as successful rollout of grid-scale batteries.

This is a generational success story big enough to have geo-strategic implications.

msy··on Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine
At least recently[1] most Australians and an overwhelming percentage of under-16s supported the ban. Similarly in the UK[2]. This is a topic in which it appears it is the online discourse that's wildly out of alignment with broader public opinion and I'd argue potentially one of the reasons may be that it will make it harder for bot-nets to mass-manipulate public discourse so easily.

[1]https://au.yougov.com/politics/articles/51000-support-for-un...

[2]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gen-z-social...

msy··on South Korea's President says US investment demands would spark financial crisis
What do you think happens if the exchange rate moves between the point of handover and the point in the future where the trade is unwound?
msy··on South Korea's President says US investment demands would spark financial crisis
There aren't a lot of counterparties to a $350Bn currency swap. SK is manoeuvring to make the Fed offering the swap and thus taking the FX risk as a requirement for this deal, which is I suspect why you're reading about this.
msy··on Liquid Glass in the Browser: Refraction with CSS and SVG
Impressive but also impressive in that scrolling down through the examples makes my fully-loaded M4-Max Macbook Pro judder. I hate to imaging the performance of a full UI leveraging this stuff. Apple can do it in the UI because they can optimize the hell out of it.
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