You have to start wondering if Trump even knows what the purpose of government is for?

Trump's administration promises reduced energy costs yet tries to kill a program that directly reduces energy costs. You have to wonder what behind closed doors was discussed that prompted this line of action. Who got in his ear and what agenda was behind it.

OR

Was it that he just didn't like the stickers on appliances?

EU is acting fast and smartly on this one.

With Trump openly trying to dictate educational content and regulate what is taught in schools including university it's the perfect time capture top talent.

Add to this Trump's gov is actively deporting students, cancelling funding ( See Harvard funding clash ) and business holding off growth and hiring until this all settles down. You have a talent pool that is willing and in some cases has to migrate to other countries.

I wish Australia would do exactly the same. Put out some talent bait for the uni's.

Trumps Tariffs are a massive consumer TAX. It's not foreign nations paying the bill. It ultimately US citizens that are paying the tariff charges.

Trump keeps floating billion dollar numbers around on how a tariff is going to raise money for the government. Those tariffs are paid for by the people buying those products in the US.

When you spike inflation like that, people stop spending. If they stop spending less money is circulating which means less jobs and lower wages.

Yes foreign companies will feel a sting. They simply won't be selling as much product. Which might also increase prices even more. Economies of scale and all being eroded.

Trump somehow has forgotten that the US has a highly integrated international supply chain. So domestic goods in the US are also being hit with tariffs. Just to get the parts for the domestically produced goods.

Internal trade agreements will adapt far faster than US industrial ramp up. Most companies will be hesitant to ramp up anyway. As the US economy craters as it is. Companies are not going to risk investing domestically on production. They'll actually seek foreign opportunity to invest and develop where economic growth and stability are stronger outside of the US.

The US is really on the an economic edge here. Trump is gambling hard on this strategy. Hoping the world will blink. I just don't see it happening. Rather quickly the rest of the world is enacting economic stimulus packages to offset the impacts of the US tariff wall. They are very quickly reworking trade agreements with each and cutting the US out almost completely. Then there is the absolutely massive shift in military spending in the EU. Some reports that number at $850USD. That's almost a trillion dollars NOT going to the US. Just instantly shifted to Europe and it's close allies.

OK All of that was about TRUMP. But the above says. Less money circulating, Massive inflation, Lower real wages and less jobs for everyone in the US. Trump has destroyed for a lot of people any hope of a healthy + happy future in the US.

Everywhere I go certificate management is always on the tech debt pile. Left for some poor guy in Ops to panic and fix at 3:00am.

Automated certificate management systems have now been around for years. But rarely do I see it rolled out in the edge devices and software systems. It's always bundled into the firmware or as part of an application package. So it's often difficult to fix. Especially once a product reaches end of life. It becomes a ticking time bomb. Most companies just go. Ooops sorry we bricked your toy. At least google is trying to fix it.

I always make sure the ticket is on the kanban/sprint backlog. But funny thing is the card seems to vanish near release time. So do a bunch of other cards. Hmmmm.

It doesn't help that most shops barely maintain their central secrets management store. I've seen these things out right deleted blowing away any chance of recovering lost key pairs.

You know I have to eat my own words here.

Like so many others out there I thought this thing would never fly. 20+ years of farting around from what we could see.

But lets look at some of the amazing check boxes they made on this flight.
1. On first ever attempt to reach orbit they did.
2. First ever to use metholox to reach orbit. ( Starship still hasn't )
3. First orbital class rocket is a direct competitor with the hands down market leader in launch. No other company is even ready to compete.
4. Put a ship into MEO. Skipping LEO. That's a pretty considerable task.

OK they didn't stick the landing. But damn they did a lot.

They do have a lot of iterating to do to become the second rapid lift capability on the planet. But they had done something others haven't really done. They have built a factory intended for mass assembly. Most other rocket companies are still geared for slow one at a time production. So I do suspect they will get iteration speed up. They have a long way to go before catching up to Musks rocket production capabilities. Musk definitely holds the cards here.

Now of course China is going to be stealing tech relentlessly. And they clearly aren't better on one path either. They are copying everyone. China definitely has the lead on willingness of the government to push forward. Western countries will never match this political drive.

I think we will see a lot more stability in Blue Origin's rockets over time. They are taking a much more cautious approach. Starship is going to have many more issues with launches. But that's how each company is approaching this problem. Ultimately Starships approach will yield a more efficient design, New Glen will have a better engineered design. Both are valid outcomes, Just Starship will ultimately be the cheaper and more common rocket. Something the automotive industry has proven.

My comments are likely tainted by optimism brought on by this weeks list of space achievements. Both New Glenn and StarShip have a long way to go before my words above can be properly tested for accuracy. Space was at it's lowest when the shuttle retired. That left the world with the only 1 rocket being almost 40 years old that could do any decent volume to space. And this week it looks a lot different.

You never know, If starship succeeds with it's low cost to orbit ideals it may just nullify they efforts of Blue Origin due to the low cost of cargo to space.

PS. Props to India for it's first docking in space this week too.

If all US sports were to be channelled into a single streaming service it would effectively kill off all other provider channels almost instantly.

But as other people have flagged it would kill cable bundles almost overnight. Addon on Sports channels basically prop up basic cable TV packages. Sports are what really keep the big players in the US TV game afloat these days. Most of the non-sport TV watchers have long since migrated to online streaming service and cut the cable. Sports is in my opinion the last holdout in the cable TV market. Note other markets around the world cable TV is barely hanging on, with sports being the only thing keeping them viable. Australia is a great example. The culture is sports mad down there. With cable TV channels heavily biased to sport. approaching 50% of channels are effectively sports, sport betting, sport culture etc. An aggregated sports streaming service in Aus would have an near instant impact wiping out the cable TV providers over night. ( Side note it would also cause an increase in traffic accidents. As more people would stream sports content while driving. Yes that's a thing down there. )

If of course it wasn't some massive $$ ripoff. With ever event being a pay per view on-top of the streaming service. Which lets face it, it would be ripoff but by how much. But likely to be priced just under what your cable package would be over time.

The bigger issue is it would introduce a new player that is going to no matter what get a significant skim of the sporting dollars. And this is what killed the deal in my opinion. Fat cats in sports seeing their personal pay check shrink as a result. US law makers would have an issue with monopoly services in time as well. But that would be down the track.

There have been countless articles being spoon fed into media about return to the office. Most feel like they are a public reaction gauge by big corporations to evaluate what they can push.

We've seen countless 3/2 work split articles. We've seen tons of articles about return to office mandates and people leaving as a result. We've seen several on mandatory return or else stories.

Now we are starting to see a trend of remote at less pay.

They seem to be tests of people reactions. With some clearly bating social media responses to fish on particular subtopics. It's also quite common to see responses blatantly plug and industry or region to illicit responses on those filters.

Some forums just seem to be full bot. Slashdot has a solid core of real human responders. But you can often see suspicious responses that are very targeted.

On this topic of reduced pay. We specifically see precise numbers like 15%. An obvious gauging number. This puts a line in the sand. How many people will stand on each side of 15%? How vocal will they be? How deep will the threads of opinion be on each side etc.?

We also see responses stating very specific regions and industries in the article and the threads that spawn. Most I believe are honest people.

The shear number of articles in circulation on remote work leads me to think that enterprises are trying to push this return to office agenda and failing. Using social media coercion as a tool of this agenda. You know how when you see an Movie advertising blitz that is so intense, trying to get people in the theatre and you all know the movie is a bomb without anyone seeing it. So the companies doubles down, once, twice, three more times with the blitz trying to save it. Only to have it bomb even faster. This is the impression I'm left with when I see all these articles on return to the office.

Now none of what I have put here is scientific of course. It's just an observation tied very loosely to a theory. Others and myself of course could cherry pick articles and responses to fortify and break down this "theory" of mine. Which is why I specifically avoided precise article/response references. Thus avoiding getting mired in the minutia of a specific piece of text. I'm more looking at this from a removed position and possibly falsely seeing a pattern to it.

( PS don't bother picking at my spelling or grammar skills. I know I'm horrible at both. :) )

Meh could be argued in either direction. But it's basically 50/50 depending on how you look at the data.

This of course will never fly these days. But it would work. Historical records have proven this out.

Simply turn the power off for 2 days.

That's it. Take power away from homes for 2 days and you will see a spike in the birthrate.
No lights, no TV, no wifi

Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what's going to happen.

Every so often you see some app/feature/tool being shoved at consumers in tech.

Google+ Forced into everything. This was horrible.
Facebook forced everyone that used facebook to all of a sudden have an email account with them. This imploded very fast. But was replace by Facebook buying several chat services.
Check marks on so many sites. X is an example. The check mark is effectively dead now.
And that damn long key press dialogue that still plagues us to this day. Man I hate that thing.

In almost every single case I can think of the exec/board has pinned some bonus on it's success. With a giant payout. When the payout is threatened they double and triple down on it.

I have zero faith that MS will protect any information it scrapes off of my computer.

This is going to turn out to be a giant treasure trove that governments and criminals are going to harvest for decades. I just don't see the value add for people.

Recall is just a means to scrape data from the PC and every site you go to.

Thankfully Windows is dying. Most people do everything online. Alternate platforms are taking screen market share from Windows. Even Linux is experiencing an uptick. And MS simply doesn't have any other OS any more. Both Google and Apple have a few screen OS's these days. Not that I trust them any more than MS however.

Right now "AI" is at a stage where we can't cleanly create correlation between an original creative work and the derivative stew of AI output.

If you are old enough when DJing just started really hitting the scene one of the biggest problems was crediting original source authors of work. Those source works were sampled, manipulated and mixed into a derivative result. We still see court cases today where so and so is suing this other person over derivative works. And in these cases it's only a handful as in single digit numbers of source tracks merged into a new output.

AI on the other hand is taking millions of sources at a time to make a derivative work. EG training. It's not even possible to list all the sources that contributed to a result any more. Let alone say this much of that one and this much of another contributed.

So what we are seeing is litigation target not the outputs. But rather the massive soup before the output. The LLM. An LLM that hasn't produced anything is still fair game for litigation at the moment. So there are all sorts of things that are being targeted by litigation.
- The uncredited use of sources.
- The damage to business
- The monopolies that are inevitable as a result of crushing volumes of content for AI
- The dangerous potential for harm AI, EG wrong medical recommendations, Bad financial advice, Out right lying and hallucinations.

We are very much in the early days of this. People only move at a certain speed. In 10 years the accepted legal stance for AI as it stands today will be in place. However AI will have advanced so drastically by then that the damage will be done. Right AI is 100% all about greed. 0% has been put into ultraism. Corporations have no mandate at all to improve average peoples lives.

Should the governments of the world demand that X% of AI computation resources be put towards solving actual problems and improving the standard of living of all? I think so. Obviously certain measures would have to be put into place. Essentially to ensure the effectiveness of that computation expenditure. Otherwise corps will just direct AI to solve non-sense problems. A computational tax if you like.

This AI tax would then be used to effectively compensate those that have been marginalised by AI. Compensation in the form of new opportunities for those impacted rather than money. Let people be creative again in new ways with AI assistance. Let AI help ensure that this is possible.

Because it is very unlikely we can litigate our way to a new normal with AI. With AI consuming all human output with out compensation.

OMG SMF was/is a disaster.

Or the time when they moved networking out of the kernel. Now that was a mess.

Or when Sun switched to CDE as the GUI.

Or Cluster patching in general an administrative nightmare.

Sun was the best of Unix's in the day. HPUX being right up there as well. All the issues I mention with Solaris were 10x worse on HPUX. When Oracle bought Sun they did the industry a service. As it accelerated the adoption of linux. An OS where things actually get patched. And the patches can actually be applied with out the horrible regression test suites we had to use with HPUX and Solaris. ( Had to do regression tests simply because you never actually really knew what was being patched in the massive patches. )

Am I overly happy with systemd. Yeah it's easier to work with. But in the same breath it does have a pretty damn high risk associated with it. We are going to see a lot more issues in the future with it.

I'm far happier dealing with the issues on Linux than Issues I had managing Solaris HPUX and the rest in the day.

It's very simple cars for many decades in most countries have had laws around them that govern health and safety. Routers do not. Organisations that employ routers may have health and safety laws but routers do not.

- Thus a 20 year old car will receive a recall if a defect is found that can harm others.
- A router manufacture will not be required to fix a flaw endangers the users of traffic that traverse it.
- An organisation such as a hospital will be required to resolve a networking issue that has the potential to impact negatively a person or persons.

In most western countries the responsibility has been placed on the owners and operators of digital equipment rather than the provider of the equipment. Thus protections do exist it's just that the responsibility of meeting those protections is on different shoulders.

The beef most people have is that more individuals as owners of these digital products now have to bare the cost of resolving the issue rather than the equipment provider.

It should be noted that this shift in responsibility is a large contributor to reducing the costs associated with the purchase of these devices. Routers are cheap, like really cheap. Cars these days are not. If the responsibility for safety of a car was on the owner then cars would be extremely cheap. Like $1000 at most. It'd be a death trap but it'd be cheap.

So how do you protect yourself as a device owner. The only real way is to ensure that you have the power to modify and improve the device. This largely takes the form of running alternative/additional software on the device.

So always check if it can run software like OpenWRT, DD-WRT, OpenSense etc. Make sure that software packages on the device can be updated via a different source. EG can you install someone else's version of OpenVPN? You don't need to do this with a car. Since the responsibility for safety is on the manufacture.

So again to complain that the router vendor is responsible is false. You probably don't like this call. But if you want it the other way then the price of routers is going to skyrocket.

Seems all the streamers do this some what on purpose.

By trimming the catalogue occasionally they can concentrate viewing on a few titles. Ones with more favourable licensing terms etc.

But also they have the ability to re-release titles in the future to make it appears as if the platform is getting a lot of new material over time. In actuallity it's just a refresh of an older title.

You beat me to it.

What interactive titles? And what exactly are they? Follow your own adventure style? Was it restricted to a subset of devices?

I've never even heard about these things before.

Were they any good?