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Comment Re:Ummmm.... (Score 1) 107

The point is that the tax code is contradictory so if they want to prosecute YOU they absolutely can.

It's how they got Al Capone and they've indicted Roger Ver for daring to say Bitcoin is broken by making up completely novel and new interpretations of tax code never before applied to anybody, much less a former citizen, and that's after he asked them how much he owed and paid it.

At the same time Trump is investing in BTC in his businesses and needs NGU.

Three things are inevitable: death, taxes, and corruption.

Comment No Way (Score 2) 13

I don't like any of these people but those who use the service have infinitely better privacy guarantees with Regeneron than Wojcicki.

FDA would clobber a drug company for selling genetic data to advertising or insurance companies.

Which may be why the Tech Bros have a pile of cash to hijack the Court process.

Comment Re:Bidding wars?? The hell is that. (Score 1) 31

Don't forget about Bankruptcy - suppliers get stiffed by Courts.

If it's a start-up/salary/loss/bankruptcy scheme the payers are the suppliers of product, rent, investors, utilities, etc.

Not that I've seen any evidence of misdeeds in this case. Just be careful in assuming Bankruptcy isn't corporate welfare.

Invoicing has its conveniences but it's a tradeoff with cash-on-the-barrel certainty.

Personally I prefer cash and prepaid services. YMMV.

Comment Re:Backups (Score 1) 31

The issue is going to be if the malicious actor "permanently deleted" the AWS and Github accounts. Domain registration, DNS, internal checkout scripts tied to a github account, etc.

The backups, if they exist, are the easy part of this DR Scenario.

Not that anybody writes DR plans anymore or that any of the Big Tech sites support Shamir's Secret Splitting for account deletion (or offer real customer service).

This aspect of IT is the most highly neglected, aside from workers' rights and competitive pay.

Comment Re: Not relevant (Score 1) 133

There's still plenty of denial about the causes of climate change,

There are still people who claim the earth is flat. No one is doing any research to disprove it. The barriers to reducing emissions are economic and political, not factual. Its hard to convince someone of something when their livelihood depends on it not being true. I think that idea is attributed to Mencken

Thank you.
This is what I meant when I said "The science is not relevant".

Comment Product Liability (Score 2) 115

At some point something bad will happen and the company will be sued and they will claim they didn't even write the code and the AI vendor will say it's not their fault either.

Or the bridge their AI designed.

"Oopsie! "

I wouldn't trust the Courts to get any of this right either.

We'll maybe see contracts and insurance enforce human oversight but then people will cheat and settle for less than profits.

As they say, profit has replaced survival as the Human evolutionary fitness function.

Comment Re:Surely copilot should just fix the issue? (Score 2) 47

> so why doesn't AI just create the pull request

It does, but that's the problem.

Have a listen to this week's Security Now, they do a segment on exactly this with a Microsoft engineer 'arguing' with a chatbot on a .NET issue.

The chatbot identifies the filed problem as improper memory allocation in a regex parser (backtracking), but then instead of fixing the parser, it patches the parser to fail silently but without triggering the memory violation.

The engineer suggests that it should be fixed instead and the chatbot agrees but then makes unit tests that fail, forgets to turn on the unit test, etc.

Steve and Leo accurately describe its level of competence as that of a new intern.

Except with Nadella's new AI Vision the Microsoft employee's job has gone from that of a developer to one that suggests AI do a better job. Tending to Copilot pull requests instead of fixing problems as an engineer would.

But the problems don't throw a memory error anymore, so close it and move on. "Automated enshittification" was mentioned as the trajectory's outcome.

Comment Re:Please explain.... (Score 0) 133

I mean at least with regards to the NWS and NOAA this is all published, public information, what the sensors are, where they are located, their historical data, it's just the skeptics have a financial anf ideological interest in acting like all this information does not exist

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.weather.gov%2Fabout%2F...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.weather.gov%2Fcoop%2F
(this has over 4000 sites participating)

Not after Project 2025 and its stooge, DOGE, finishes cutting NOAA to pieces.

Comment Re:200, Is this a joke? (Score -1, Flamebait) 133

You seem to have missed the mass extinction of Humanity during the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period.

All those stories of Romans growing grapes in a lush British Isles and the Vikings settling in Newfoundland and Labrador until it turned cold again are just fables. As are the records of bountiful harvests and greening of the deserts in those centuries.

The people back then faked all that harvest data because they knew we'd get to this point today and they were part of the Secret Societies' conspiracy to oppose those who merely want to tax our breath and impose global communism for our own good. The archaeological evidence was fabricated and buried back then too.

Tree ring studies are just paid opposition and fake news. Carbon dating doesn't even exist (have *you* ever counted isotopes?). The maps of an ice-free Antarctica by the master seafaring Chinese were just a lucky guess.

You must be one of those dragon-believers to not understand that our complex-systems models are robust and predictive. They're so good that you can change each of the variables by significant percentages and the results come out the same. That's how good they are. No evidence is required to justify them against your conspiracy of "data".

Comment Re:Billions? (Score 1) 27

I don't believe they sell 50 billion unique products.

50 million would even be a stretch.

If true they have thousands of ASIN's for most of each of their products. That's a management nightmare.

They better watch out - a few companies are developing agents to find what you want on manufacturing companies' websites and providing an Amazon-like shopping experience without Amazon.

Fulfilment is still a factor so it's not like Prime but very much like Sold and Shipped by orders.

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