diogenes_atx

It's just basic economic theory applied to current IT market conditions.

There is intense competition in the AI industry, especially with AI firms in China driving down prices, so it seems likely that LLM's and software products may become fungible commodities that trade close to marginal cost = marginal revenue = minimum average total cost. In other words, most of the profits from AI and software development will be competed away, eventually.

Data center hardware, by contrast, is a scarce commodity with rapidly growing demand, and therefore likely to capture most of the profits from AI and software development, if current market conditions persist.

Today's IT business trends represent a remarkable change in the industry compared to the situation 50 years ago, when startups like Microsoft and Oracle, whose business models were based exclusively on software development, challenged and overthrew the dominant player, IBM, whose primary source of revenue was from hardware.

Your question implies that anyone who has not seen this latest film about Holmes is unqualified to form an opinion about her guilt or innocence. And that is what really matters in this debate: whether Holmes is in fact guilty or innocent. So it's worth asking what knowledge you have acquired about her case.

Have you read John Carreyrou's award-winning book Bad Blood? Have you seen the HBO documentary directed by Alex Gibney that chronicles the rise and fall of Theranos and its blood-testing claims, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. For my part, I have indeed read Carreyrou's book, and I watched Gibney's documentary, and I also followed the press coverage of Theranos and the criminal trial of Elizabeth Holmes. It is on the basis of all this evidence that I am speaking knowledgeably about the facts concerning Elizabeth Holmes, including the likelihood that she is a almost certainly guilty of the crimes for which she was convicted.

And what about you? Do you know anything about Holmes beyond the pseudo-documentary you just saw? The reason why I have replied to your question with a question is because you also seem to be talking in a "Holmesian" manner, taking everything she does and says at face value. So it seems like a valid question to inquire about your level of knowledge about her criminal record. Another interesting question is: Do you really believe, against all the evidence, that Elizabeth Holmes could be innocent?

I was merely citing the known facts in this case. The facts have been well-established in the criminal trial and in the press coverage about Holmes. The facts are voluminous, and of all this mountain of evidence, very little of it is featured in this so-called documentary.

> If you believe that she's guilty of everything she's accused of doing, she's incredibly self-aware

There was a mountain of evidence against Holmes, and she was convicted in a criminal trial. So it seems like a safe assumption that she was guilty.

Does it follow then that, because she is almost certainly guilty, that she must be "incredibly self-aware"? Of course not. It's just as likely that she is totally lacking in self-awareness, and that she simply does not know when to shut her mouth because she has no idea how stupid she sounds.

There are a number of good books to explain the main concepts of statistics without getting bogged down in the technical details. As a grad student at a public university in the USA, I worked as a teaching assistant for the undergraduate course Introduction to Statistics. The course used SPSS software to enable the students to perform statistical analysis on data sets. Although we offered a good textbook (listed below), many of the students struggled with the main concepts, so my colleagues and I added a optional supplemental reading list to the syllabus. The following books are the ones we recommended to the students. I have read all these books, and they are pretty good at explaining statistics to anyone interested in learning the material at a conceptual level; anyone can read and understand these books, regardless of their educational background.

Ian Ayres (2007) Super Crunchers: Why Thinking by Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart.

Joseph Healey (2020) Statistics: A Tool for Social Research [This is the textbook used in the class, which I highly recommend].

John Allen Paulos (1988) Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences.

Nate Silver (2012) The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, but Some Don't.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2005) Fooled by Randomness, second edition.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010) The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, second edition.

As a grad student at a public university in the USA, I worked as a teaching assistant for the sociology class "Introduction to Statistics." The course used SPSS software to enable the students to perform statistical analysis on data sets. Although we offered an excellent textbook (listed below), most of the undergraduate students struggled with the material, so my colleagues and I added a supplemental reading list to the syllabus for those students interested in studying the main concepts. The following books are the ones we recommended to the students. I have read all these texts, and they are pretty good at explaining statistics to anyone interested in learning the material at a conceptual level; anyone can read and understand these books, regardless of their educational background.

Ian Ayres (2007) Super Crunchers: Why Thinking by Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart

Joseph Healey (2020) Statistics: A Tool for Social Research [This is the textbook used in the class, which I highly recommend]

Catherine Marsh and Jane Elliott (2008) Exploring Data: An Introduction to Data Analysis for Social Scientists, second edition

John Allen Paulos (1988) Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences

Nate Silver (2012) The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, but Some Don't

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2005) Fooled by Randomness, second edition;

_______ (2010) The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, second edition

In addition to the book written by the author of this article, there is another fascinating study about the discovery of the Assyrian archives and the recovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh:

David Damrosch (2007) Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh

https://www.amazon.com/Buried-Book-Rediscovery-Great-Gilgame...

> Few people doubt that this technology is going to change everything. What’s less clear is when the profits are going to start rolling in and how big they are going to be... "We are making trillions of dollars in investments on the back of tens of billions of dollars in revenues."

It seems possible that AI will eventually become an abundant commodity, with cheap alternatives available from China and elsewhere. And if that happens, profits will be competed away, just like any other commodity in a competitive market.

One would imagine that a Silicon Valley legend like Larry Ellison - who built his business empire on the basis of proprietary software products and services - would understand this better than anyone.

There are automated scripts to check if the infected AUR packages are installed on your system:

https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/malicious-aur-checkup-script...

https://github.com/lenucksi/aur-malware-check

> you can't rely on "watch for anomalies" with your human eyes

Yes, I agree, that's a good call. I would not try to check for anomalies manually with meatware. I would parse the data with python regex tools to establish a baseline and search for anomalous patterns.

I edited my post to reflect the change you suggested.

> you'd mostly care about exfiltration of data, so watching/actively managing exactly what network connections your computer/network can do, would give you upfront notification when it happens

If you have a list of good CLI utilities, you could run them in a bash script (e.g., network-monitor.sh), which would run in the background, and then redirect the output data to another file (e.g., network-monitor.txt). The key concept here is "baseline" -- you need to know what normal baseline network activity looks like, so that you can identify anomalous behavior. The way to establish a baseline is to gather a lot of data from the system.

The following are a few useful command line utilities to use for a host intrusion detection system (HIDS) using a simple network monitoring bash script. However, I am not sure exactly how to tweak the options. Also need to find a way to check for data exfiltration:

-list open ports and processes that own them: netstat -lnp

-show open network ports: lsof -i; netstat -an | grep -i listen; netstat -nap

Then it would be relatively easy to write a python script with regex tools to parse the network-monitor.txt file, establish a baseline, analyze the data for patterns and search for anomalous behavior.

Besides network monitoring, there are other command line utilities you can use to check the system for possible intrusion, which you could run in a separate bash script as part of your Host Intrusion Detection System (e.g., hids-users.sh):

-show members of root group: cat /etc/group | grep root

-show users logged in: w #if you are the only user, you should not see more than one account logged in

-search for all accounts with UID of 0: grep :0: /etc/passwd #ideally there should be only one UID of 0 on the system, but attacker can create more.

-check that daemons who never log in have * or !, meaning no passwd: cat /etc/shadow

-look for orphaned files, possible sign of attacker temp account deleted: find / -nouser -print

-search for new user accounts that are not part of regular build: sort -nk3 -t: /etc/passwd #sort numerically third column (UID), colon delim (-t:)

EDITS: several small changes for clarity and also in response to comment below

According to an academic study, US law enforcement agencies at every level - federal, state and local - no longer need warrants in order to get access to most data on American citizens. It is easier for law enforcement to purchase data from private firms because there are fewer constitutional protections, reporting requirements and appellate checks on private sector surveillance and data collection, which enables police to circumvent privacy laws.

US law enforcement agencies get much of their information from data brokerage firms, which collect and aggregate information from public records and private sources, e.g., drivers licenses, mortgages, social media, retail loyalty card purchases, professional credentials, charities’ donor lists, bankruptcies, payday lenders, warranty registrations, and other sources who sell personal data. This information is then sold to customers willing to pay for it. Not even the FTC can find out exactly where the data brokers get their information because brokerages cite trade secrecy as an excuse not to divulge their sources.

Law enforcement agencies not only uses data collected by private firms, they also use corporate IT platforms and proprietary software applications (e.g., Palantir, Microsoft, Amazon) to store, share and analyze data. Palantir provides an interface that runs on top of other data systems, including legacy systems, making it possible to link data points across separate systems.

Source: Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press, pp. 24-25, 41-42.

Are you saying that Israel intentionally targets civilians? As a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, Israel is obligated to protect civilians and civilian populations from all dangers arising from military operations, and Israel is prohibited from direct attacks on civilians. The IDF must distinguish between civilian and military objectives and take all feasible precautions to avoid or minimize incidental loss of civilian life. Civilians lose protected status only if they take a direct part in hostilities.

According to Google AI, this proposal is virtually certain to pass in 2026. The only remaining question is exactly how it will be implemented.

All the great Western hegemonic powers have used public debt to finance the requirements and ambitions of the state. This was true of Spain in the sixteenth century, Holland in the seventeenth century, England at the height of its power during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the USA since World War II [1]. Public debt finance is a force multiplier that enables the government to undertake far greater civilian and military projects than it could otherwise achieve. Everyone knows this, including the people who are running the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

As a percentage of GDP, government debt is high by historical standards, and it is rising at a fairly rapid pace. That could be a problem if it continues unabated. But there are two solutions: reduce spending and/or raise taxes. Most U.S. federal expenditure goes toward either defense, entitlements or interest on the debt, so it seems unlikely that spending will fall very much. That means higher taxes. At some point, the country will need to find a political reformer who can sell tax increases to the electorate. Until then, the crisis just continues to quietly grow.

[1] Giovanni Arrighi (1994) The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times

https://www.amazon.com/Long-Twentieth-Century-Money-Origins/...

Egypt has full diplomatic relations with Israel, established in 1980 following the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty. They maintain embassies in Cairo and Tel Aviv, along with security, economic, and energy cooperation. While the relationship is often described as a "cold peace" characterized by strategic caution and public friction, particularly during Gaza conflicts, it remains stable and critical for regional security.

Also, Egypt and the UAE are on opposite sides of the conflict in Sudan: Egypt supports the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), while the Emiratis support the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Seems like it would be better and easier to just take a walk instead. Whenever you feel information overload, it's time for a break: step outside, get some fresh air, stretch your legs, etc. Not a panacea, obviously, just common sense. Staring at a wall while forcing your mind to "think of nothing"... maybe try it once and see how it goes.

Scattered throughout this discussion are a number of comments concerning the potential damage to the stomach lining from ibuprofen, naproxen and aspirin. This is an important consideration when choosing a painkiller. According to a recent Washington Post article by Trisha Pasricha, MD, "You should avoid taking nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs — such as ibuprofen, naproxen and aspirin — whenever possible. If you do need to take them, use the smallest dose for the shortest time feasible."

Dr. Pasricha adds: "I don’t get too concerned if my patients take one or two doses every now and then. But through regular use, such as several times a month or more, NSAIDs are well-known to increase intestinal permeability. In other words, NSAIDs can damage the lining of our guts. That’s because NSAIDs reduce the blood flow in the tiny vessels feeding our guts and disrupt the intestinal cells forming a barrier between the outside world and your insides. This has been proven over and over again through decades of research."

Conclusion: Acetaminophen is generally safer than ibuprofen, naproxen and aspirin.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2024/12/09/ibuprofen...

https://archive.is/XRZEU

If this legislation becomes law, it will be interesting to see how the Linux hacker community reacts. Laws are virtually meaningless if there is no practical way to enforce them and if there are enough people who oppose them. Just take a look at the history of file sharing over the past three decades. For this new law to prevent the proliferation of Linux distros that are not in compliance with age verification requirements, there would need to be very powerful enforcement mechanisms, including criminal prosecution. Even then, it's difficult to see how severe criminal penalties and/or civil liabilities could stop hackers from building and distributing illicit versions of Linux. It's just basic economics: demand creates supply. Linux moves into the black market with new distros of Clandestine-OS.

To the list of references provided by this post in the section "Further Reading," I would add the following book:

Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press

https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Pol...

An academic study about the use of surveillance technology at the Los Angeles Police Department, the book documents the LAPD's use of data brokerage firms (e.g., Palantir) that collect and aggregate information from public records and private sources, as well as automatic license plate readers like Flock, and Suspicious Activity Reports generated by police and civilians, which include reports of mundane activities such as using binoculars, drawing diagrams, or taking pictures or "video footage with no apparent aesthetic value." All this data ultimately gets parked in Fusion Center facilities, built in the aftermath of 9/11, where federal, state and local law enforcement agencies collaborate to collect, aggregate, analyze and share information. As the author observes, "The use of data in law enforcement is not new. For almost a century, police have been gathering data, e.g., records of citations, collisions, warrants, incarcerations, sex offender and gang registries, etc. What is new and important about the current age of big data is the role in public policing of private capitalist firms who provide database systems with huge volumes of information about people, not just those in the criminal justice system."

> A little-known technology firm that has quietly grown into a surveillance powerhouse in Latin America. Over the past three decades, Grupo Seguritech has evolved from a small company selling home alarms into a sprawling network of firms that are deeply involved in projects across the region.

Virtually all the technology used by this Mexican company, Grupo Seguritech, is imported from other countries. As a university student, I completed a Master's thesis about export manufacturing industries in Mexico. Then as now, the vast majority of manufacturing exports were (and still are) produced by foreign capital. Today Mexican capital contributes relatively little to the total value of manufactured exports. This is an important consideration: even in Mexican firms like Grupo Seguritech that are operating in other countries, such firms are not really in control of this technology, they are only licensing it from abroad. Foreign capital owns and controls the tech, and foreign capital reaps a substantial share of the profits.

From the perspective of systems administration for large enterprise networks, it seems unlikely that Linux desktops could replace Windows PC's without a domain controller like Microsoft Active Directory. Am I missing something here? How is it possible to manage a large enterprise network with hundreds, or even thousands, of desktop workstations without a domain controller?

It seems like this article buried the best lede of the story on paragraph ten, which explains Flock's new business of surveillance drones launched in response to 911 calls (and also presumably triggered by other alerts configured by police and private businesses).

> Flock has recently expanded into other technologies... Most concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered cameras. Flock's "Drone as First Responder" platform automates drone operations, including launching them in response to 911 calls or gunfire. Flock's drones, which reach speeds up to 60 mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law enforcement.

Just a copy editor would suffice.

It's interesting that the author does not even consider the impact of incentives on performance. As Charlie Munger famously said, "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes." It is true that collaboration becomes increasingly difficult as the team grows in size, but collaboration is not the fundamental problem. To manage a large team, the real challenge is to design incentives that properly reward those who produce and perform, and penalize those who don't. People respond to incentives (yes, it is a tautology, and that is precisely the point).

Yeah, you're right. It is astonishing that Quicken's web app does not offer the same features and functionality as the desktop version. Having worked for many years as an SRE, I would have imagined that the opposite would be true - that Quicken would want to migrate its users to its online version, precisely so that customers could use the software from any client, be it Mac, Linux, WinBlows, or whatever.

Do you need to run Quicken locally on your PC? Can you just use the cloud version of Quicken?

It's truly astonishing that the cops in the video were not disciplined for deliberately attacking the victim with a vicious police dog. Apparently the standard of conduct for American police has sunk so low that it is considered acceptable for law enforcement to violently assault a suspect who poses no obvious threat to them or anyone else.

There is a plausible explanation for the reluctance of the US government to admit the authenticity of Havana Syndrome: the US military may have developed its own energy weapon that causes similar injuries and symptoms.

What is the evidence to support such a hypothesis? President Trump himself recently revealed the existence of a new secret energy weapon that was used to disable Nicolás Maduro's security team during the raid to capture the Venezuelan president [1].

According to one of Maduro's guards quoted by the New York Post: “At one point, they launched something; I don’t know how to describe it. It was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside,” the witness said. "We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move. We couldn’t even stand up after that sonic weapon — or whatever it was."

[1] https://nypost.com/2026/01/24/us-news/trump-reveals-to-the-p...