Rekall Incorporated

I honestly can’t formulate what I think about US/Israeli’s mass scale assault on Iran. I don’t support it, but the alleged religious dictatorship is a fucking embarrassment for modern society. And it doesn’t seem the regime will end, but who knows. They unfortunately might even come out stronger after active combat is over.

It may well turn into an invasion, but Trump is too much of a coward deep down and lacks attachment to anything real to make tough choices (even if they are bad and disasterous)

He is all about fucking around and acting out. I don’t think he has the capability to have a strong belief or commitment about anything (his love for himself notwithstanding).

Israel would only agree to send Americans to do the dirty work and get killed as living shields for targeted Israeli special forces attacks. But I don’t see them choosing a path to any measure of risk to try and absolutely maximize the likelihood of the end of pig feet kissing theocratic dectatorship.

On one hand, I am really happy that Khamenei got killed in an air strike in his own compound. Shit stain had it coming, my only regret is that his turd son didn’t get turned into mince meat two weeks before Khamenei. But at least he achieved the cosmic balance by reincarnating into a pig turd that keeps coming out of a pigs asshole; he has become part of the circle of life, a very special part. I says this as an atheist.

It’s been a while since I was contact with Iranians from Iran, but I am willing to be bet many in Iran also share my views on Khamenei, if not my colourful language.

One could say, well at last the American oligarch got a taste of reality; I don’t get that impression and I don’t think anyone is seriously saying that. Their perspective is probably more along the lines of extreme weather in far away country adding two to six basis points of negative sentiment to T2.3 adjusted revenue forecast for a period for 6 to 9 months. Microsoft valuation is defacto nominal, $400 B valuation gain one year $1.1 B loss another 6 weeks.

They own Red Hat and IIRC, it’s their fastest growing (if not largest) business unit.

“Our roles: All Global Engineering roles will evolve. The focus will shift from ‘AI as a tool used on occasion’ to ‘AI automation as a way to scale the delivery of value to customers.’ Our associates’ skillsets will grow as they become proficient in these tools.”

The “scale the delivery of value to customer” phrase is a massive red flag, it means they have no fucking clue what they are doing. If they did, they would be more clear about their thinking and reasoning and not use PR speak.

They do provide some more specifics that are quoted later in the article, but it still sounds like they haven’t really thought this through:

The next few paragraphs of the memo are oddly repetitive. First, it says: “To lead in this era, we must evolve our operating model. The gap we face today isn’t just technical – it’s organizational. Today, we are beginning our transition to an Agentic Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) to transform how Global Engineering and Products deliver.”

“‘All-in’ product scope: We aren’t looking for a single scrum team to experiment in a vacuum. To avoid bottlenecks, we will move entire products or sub-products to this model simultaneously.” Scrum is a reference to the Agile development model, about which The Register’s Rupert Goodwins expressed reservations back in 2024.

That’s a fair point.

Still, I think for the median user interested in customisation, a fully vibe coded front end may be overkill.

Why do you need “vibe coding” for UI/UX customisation?

Why can’t you have a regular app that has customisation features (can even use LLM or ML tech)?

I am hardly anti-AI and I’ve vibe coded some small elements of my work projects (very simple modules with extremely clear input -output requirements in a domain I have a lot of business experience in), but this seems like AI for the sake of AI (or hype and PR associated with what is marketed as AI).

Funnily enough “The Gods Themselves” themselves is my favorite Asimov novel. It’s very memorable. Doesn’t feel like an Asimov novel.

I would honestly go with “The Caves of Steel” as a “benchmark” Asimov experience, the first novel in the Robot series.

If you want to go for something a little bit outside of the Robot / Foundation series (and you’ve already read or reread “The Gods Themselves”), I would go for “The End of Eternity”.

I hate that too.

I didn’t know that the “The Man in the High Castle” (supposed to be based on a novel by Philip K. Dick) show was just about the setting and they came up with their own story. I was so pissed off after watching the first episode.

I was actually wondering why they even went with “The Man in the High Castle” since it’s a strange and superficially depressing novel (even by the standards of PKD). There are much better choices for a series or a movie based on PKD’s work.

That’s why I didn’t bother with the Foundation series (I am a big Asimov fan). I don’t mind a re-interpretation of a literary work, but it has to be creative and mind bending while conceptually (and philosophically?) engaging with the themes from the literary work.

I use LLMs for work (low priority stuff to save time on search or things that I know I will be validate later in the process) and I can’t stand the writing style and the constant attempts to bring in adjacent unrelated topics (I’ve been able to tone down the cute language and bombastic delivery style in Gemini’s configuration).

It’s like Excel trying to chat with me when I am working with a pivot table or transforming data in PowerQuery.

While I am aware that it’s a common crypto shill term, I think by this point crypto has fallen out of the mainstream, so their usage of terms doesn’t really matter.

And as others have pointed out, the term FUD has been used at least since the birth of WWW/modern internet.

Isn’t the show unrelated to the books beyond the setting and some characters?

No, there isn’t.

I would love if there was, but beyond basic use cases, Excel is significantly ahead of the competition.

For what it’s worth, HEVC seems to have much better hardware support than AV1.

AV1 encodes are also extremely rare when it comes to unofficial content releases.

Because Snap has less resources for a long legal fight than Google, Amazon and so on…

Nah, American companies cannot be relied upon by definition. Even if the people running one are fine (and many are), they are still based in what is essentially a pro-crime, pro-corruption jurisdiction.

Dead Internet Company

While the US has always had oligarchic tendencies, from my experience living there for several years, the current wholistic debasement of governance and liberal democratic values is mostly self-inflicted by the population. It’s a choice.

A significant portion of the population are supportive of crime and corruption, another group simply don’t care and another group might understand that things are not going well, but they are too well off (on a relative global basis) to risk rocking the boat until it’s too late.

It’s not like the US is suffering from immense poverty with +50% of the country being illiterate (e.g. South Sudan) or has to deal with centuries of constant imperial attacks by a much larger neighbour or a multitude of truly challenging factors with respect to implementing good governance.

You mention the notion of productive outcomes. One can argue that by wholly ignoring the role of the public in the US becoming a full on chauvinistic oligarchy, one is moving away from productive outcomes. If an issue is related to the behaviour of the public, you won’t solve it by pretending the public had no role to play.

Happy to elaborate if you are interested. I know my reply was very high-level.

It sounds like he has way too much money and time on his hands.

This is definitely senior goons at Block engaging in some opportunistic PR.

has said he does not want the company’s A.I. to be used to surveil Americans or in autonomous weapons, saying this could “undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.”

This is how we know this is all PR bullshit (perhaps crafted ad-hoc, but still essentially a propaganda operation).

This was probably a requirement of some sort. I doubt the government would bother with something like this on their own initiative.

That being said, there are some really good sources for “unofficial” content in Ukraine. All the major international and local streaming content and major blu-ray (Rips/Remuxes) release in one spot and with speeds that allow streaming torrents (at least in Ukraine).

Some of the more niche content can be difficult to find (smaller country, local sites have requirement that Ukrainian dub/VO/subs must be included in addition to the original audio track), but you’re not going to find that content on mainstream US media sources.