Posts by JamesTGrant

Nah, everyone knows EVERYTHING runs in eu-west-1 and us-east-1

I’m just impressed that around ChatGPT version 5.2 it started to get most jq expressions correct rather than confidently but wildly wrong.

I can imagine consciousness, but then I can also imagine flying a helicopter made of jelly and icecream. So probably humans are terrible at recognising behavioural traits appropriately, in each other, animals, ghosts, robots, aliens.

What is ‘folding laundry?’ I fold T shirts, and towels and sheets but the rest? Nope.

Also 90mins!!?

Jellys on jellys

I read the web page and the testimonials, it’s people saying that it helped the with a todo list. Or prioritising e-mails. One person had it write a website for his local sports club.

And… that’s it.

What is it allegedly for? (I know what it is - it’s the botnet of your dreams - a botnet with actual compute resource!)

No because it’s the public key that’s mashed. With asymmetrical encryption you can’t decode a payload using the public key which was used to encrypt it.

The generation of the public key from its private key is easy and not supposed to be hard. But changing even one bit of a public key makes the corresponding private key unusable and if you were to do a bitwise comparison between the original private key and the private key that corresponds to the modified public key then they would be very different.

Effectively, they don’t have the private key because they corrupted their public key and you cant derive the private key from the public key.

Hope that helps!!

Well, he’s obviously lying. It’s strange that he is seemingly permitted to mislead investors. His claims are bogus for at least the following reasons:

His robots will not learn from observation - they lack the hardware, compute, uplink bandwidth and software to do that. The ability to derive meaning through sequences of visual input is not there yet - by a long way, there is a big difference between ‘tell me what happens in this video sequence’ and interpretation of an environment and making appropriate real-time actions which modify said environment.

Humanoid robots are notoriously difficult to keep upright, even in flat plane environments.

The cost is impossible over the next few years. For reference, the parts cost of a lidr / optical sensory device with sufficient lightweight processing power is pretty high (see Apple Vision Pro - that’s ’just’ a headset and the parts cost is high). And you have a fully articulated robot with servos, motors, pneumatics, sensory sensors, batteries, onboard compute on top of that.

Not quite as ridiculous as his manned mission to Mars projections (which are so ridiculous that I think he uses it to gauge how moronic his audience is).

How’s his fully self driving car going? That’s following a fairly well defined set of rules and still doesn’t work reliably. Navigating and manipulating the ‘real world’ is very complex. They are nowhere near it, let alone a million robots in a year.

I’m sure they’ll deliver something, but it won’t be, or do, what he’s hyping. He is deliberately lying.

There’s a really good cafe/diner at Broomfield airport. Plastic baskets, made to order sandwiches/rolls. Get soup. And you sit outside next to the airfield and watch all the coming/going.

Access to the generator, but no access to the room where the plugs and switches for all the gear sit?

I wondered if the lack of maintainers might have something to do with the name. NGINX - ie: part of F5 (who make expensive but also excellent firewall products (or they did last time I knew anything about them!) why aren’t F5 paying? It’s a feeder product for them.

6 km/h? If you strap it to a bin lorry maybe.

40years ago… mmm.

Wanna invest in bonds from Enron or MCI?

How about Intel?

GE?

Meta will stuff up Facebook and Instagram soon enough. They’ll struggle to get revenue from WhatsApp. That leaves selling customer data and being an ad broker without owning the shop window.

They are inextricably linked to Mark Z.

I doubt Meta will be around in 20years, and certainly not 40. I hope.

MacOS with Brew and Linuxify…

How’s that no/low code thing working out?

It uses…. an API?!!?

1trillion USD is 10million x 100,000USD

There are less than 10 million Tesla cars sold globally, ever, combined.

Seems insane to me.

If I was the chairman of a company and someone said to me ‘if you fire this one person, you will save the company 1 trillion dollars’ the rational thing to do would be quite obvious. Or, if you don’t give this person 1 trillion dollars, they might decide to leave, I’d take my chances…

How’s low/no-code working out?

Coz this is worse - a proper tech debt injector.

I feel bad for new grads.

Maybe we could get back to creating jobs and paying people and not giving all the money to a small number of sociopaths. Maybe.

Microsoft’s Apple and Linux marketing department working hard?

‘remeasurement of convertible interest rights’

Convertible from debt into un-negotiated debt?

Sounds like ‘I had a plan and now I don’t - I wonder if that’s gonna work out?’

‘One user paying y is costing us x. Where y is greater than x’. I’d suggest that’s not the fault of the user, that’s a poor business plan, or technical implementation, or both.

First thought - CA cert expiry

Second thought - advertising routes snafu

Well done Reg slooths - looks like Vodaphone disappeared themselves, look forward to the root-cause analysis!

Why 3 times a year? Because they are paid the ingress cost and the compute costs and they don’t want people to flick the setting on/off/on/off. They already knew this would create resource issues in Azure so they set the retention to 30days anyway. I guess they don’t do a good job of remembering which pictures are already processed and so are worried about thrashing the upload/compute each time it’s toggled on/off/on. I bet the database backend ‘delete user’s data’ request is heavy and slow so they want to protect the backend. It’s a crap UX and suggests there’s a crap architecture/implementation behind it.

Apple have had this feature on iOS for years - I suspect the difference is that the ‘people’ metadata is stored on the user-device on the Apple implementation and not some central creepy database (Microsoft implementation).

I wouldn’t go to a restaurant to get my car fixed, even if the food was excellent. Quite why people think that a firewall company would make a good cloud storage provider is… odd to me.

In other news, Gartner discovers that many tech startups exist in the hope of getting acquired by existing massive corporations.

Perhaps Intel could try attracting customers by making products that people wanna buy, for more than it costs them to make?

Or they could try making the software company dislike them a bit more and see how that goes.

Welp, the lift capability of a Chinook helicopter is about 10K Kg,

The shuttle is about 80K Kg.

Strap it up and off you go!

Or, build a Lego one in situ - that’d be flippin’ awesome and loads of people would visit it?

Mmmm

We want flexibility….

Except it takes a few years between design to manufacture, and then you need a fab slot, and assembly. Which means you need at LEAST 3 years between ‘I want to do this’ and ‘this’ being a real physical option.

At LEAST 3 years without changing your mind or ballsing up the Project Management…

But it’s an easy thing for the CEO of a software licensing company to say.

I’ve a solution - make the 1st 5 seconds of every video identical.

You’re welcome TicTok

I’ve yet to meet a single software engineer of any seniority who couldn’t govern someone a list of 5 things that’d help them be more efficient.

How about… just asking people that work on your stuff where the tech dept is and what things could be done to improve ‘efficiency’.

Serious question - is it that people ask the thing to do stuff and they don’t know what they are going to pay for the thing to do the stuff? And, if the thing fails to do the stuff then they have to ask it again and pay again?

They are going to replace their existing infrastructure with a whole new unfamiliar infrastructure. They are laying people off now because, in the future, they might not be needed because of the new infrastructure they don’t yet have and haven’t built.

If you insert the words AI-centric a few times almost anywhere in the first paragraph, that’s a fair rephrasing of the CEO’s statement. He is either lying or is completely ignorant.

Is he actually saying ‘we are pivoting to being an Agentic AI frontend and all the Fivrr people offering their services are going to be made irrelevant’. Because that’s a terrible business plan too.

If I was a shareholder I’d be selling or lobbying for his departure.

A lot of people are going to pay to find out about natural language ambiguity…

Let’s have Grandma for dinner…

Maybe they’ll call it DARPA Marching Powder

18months? Re-orgs are part of what management does - if not that then how else would they say ‘we are not achieving well now, but we’ll re-org, leverage some synergies and then it’ll all be better’.

After the re-org it’s all a bit chaotic as people are working out how to do things and who does what, so that’s more time, then another six months of waiting before the next re-org to respond to the needs of the business/market or ‘better align with strategic priorities’ etc etc.

In many places, company senior management regularly confuse activity for progress.