My friend sold wallstreet.com for $1.03 Million, and all I got was a lousy T-shirt.
My T-shirt said: My friend sold wallstreet.com for $1.03 Million, and all I got was a lousy T-shirt.
100% true.
Someone made a profit from AI.
This is right on schedule matching up with the end of the dotcom era. Though back then everybody IPOd as soon as possible. Now it’s just a bunch of Enron-esque circular deals with Theranos-levels of impossibility, so I guess one or two people will get rich, and a few companies will be left holding the bag.
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each reported hundreds of billions in RPO (remaining performance obligations) — signed contracts for cloud computing services that can’t yet be filled and haven’t yet hit the books. Collectively, the big three cloud providers reported a $1.1 trillion backlog of revenue.
So the companies that owe that trillion dollars are a trillion dollars in debt? What happens when this trillion dollar backlog just doesn’t happen because the companies that booked it disappear because they can’t service their trillion dollar debt? Sounds like it’s time to head for the door…
KPMG, one of the world’s largest auditors of public and private companies, negotiated lower fees from its own accountant by arguing that AI will make it cheaper to do the work, according to people familiar with the matter. The Big Four firm told its auditor, Grant Thornton UK, it should pass on cost savings from the rollout of AI and threatened to find a new accountant if it did not agree to a significant fee reduction, the people said.
The discussions last year came amid an industry-wide debate about the impact of new technology on audit firms’ business and traditional pricing models. Firms have invested heavily in AI to speed up the planning of audits and automate routine tasks, but it is not yet clear if this will generate savings that are passed on to clients.
Grant Thornton is auditor to KPMG International, the UK-based umbrella organisation that co-ordinates the work of KPMG’s independent, locally owned partnerships around the world. Talks with Grant Thornton were led by Michaela Peisger, a longtime audit partner and executive from KPMG’s German member firm, who became KPMG International’s chief financial officer at the beginning of 2025.
..it should pass on cost savings from the rollout of AI and threatened to find a new accountant if it did not agree to a significant fee reduction..
I estimate KPMG customers pulling this same excuse against KPMG, by the end of this sentence.
Come to think of it, why do we even need human auditors at KPMG again?
Yes, KPMG. Be careful what you fuck others over for. You just might earn it.
Auditing is about establishing the truth about the situation within the company. Which is why AI should never be allowed to be used in the context of auditing. Or at the very least the auditors should never rely on the AI-generated results provided by the company. What’s stopping companies from telling AI to generate a set of data that would make them pass an audit, hiding the real facts? Auditors should rely on facts, not confabulations, and should dig as deep as necessary to uncover all the dirt that’s hiding under the surface.
The answer to all these uniform issues is just have the Olympics return to form.
Have everyone compete nude.
By that logic all these ski jumpers should just get castrated if they were really serious
On Friday, the regulators released a preliminary decision that TikTok’s infinite scroll, auto-play features and recommendation algorithm amount to an “addictive design” that violated European Union laws for online safety. The service poses potential harm to the “physical and mental well-being” of users, including minors and vulnerable adults, the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive branch, said in a statement.
The findings suggest TikTok must overhaul the core features that made it a global phenomenon, or risk major fines. European officials said it was the first time that a legal standard for social media addictiveness had been applied anywhere in the world. “TikTok needs to change the basic design of its service,” the European Commission said in a statement.
If you think addictive design isn’t a thing, I suggest you visit Las Vegas and walk through any casino gaming floor. You’ll find it a disorienting experience beyond anything you’ll encounter elsewhere. Flashing lights, constant noise, lack of reference points to tell where you are. Hells, even the carpets are custom designs for the casino featuring abstract patterns in contrasting colors that confuse your sense of direction. And to top it off, mirrors everywhere that reflect the floor and make the space seem larger than it is. All of it’s designed very deliberately to achieve an effect: leave you confused about where you are, what direction you need to go to get somewhere, even what time it is. The goal: keep you wandering the gaming floor for as long as possible so you have the greatest chance of getting attracted to the games and starting to play and the greatest chance of not realizing how long you’ve been there or how much you’ve truly spent playing.
Maybe they can address Youtube, Facebook and Twitter next… for the exact same reasons.
And facebooks algorithms and data sold to that forgotten comoany for targeted advertising that caused brexit aren’t illegal?
Everything not prohibited is compulsory.
Obama would have been impeached in 10 minutes had he told all the honkys to chill out.
Suddenly competition in the market is bad. How odd.
Sprawl is incredibly expensive to service. Suburbs are probably the most inefficient way to deal with housing ever invented, between having to deliver utilities, expand fire protection and policing, and just plain road maintenance, there’s a reason that we should eschew suburbs and sprawl in favor of density.
Not me…I gave up sharing walls with other people when I quit being a broke college student having to live in apartments.
I like having a nice big back yard fenced in for my dog to run around in, to hold crawfish boils and parties with my friends, to keep my large log burning offset smoker for BBQ....Big Green Egg XL for a lump charcoal grill…be able to plant a veggie garden, etc.
No thank you, I’d much rather have a garage to keep my bicycle and motorcycle and brewing equipment…a nice driveway, etc. and elbow room between myself and my fine neighbors who are all great.
And if nothing else, I didn’t spend a lifetime building a good audio system to not exercise the dB range from time to time....and not living in a cramped apartment I won’t annoy my neighbors....too much.
But hey thankfully in the US, it is a LARGE nation, and we’ve plenty of room and cities where people can live how they want to live....rural, small cities, regular cities and dense urban ones like NYC.
So, live like you want to live....and I will too. I’ll only draw the line when someone tries to fucking FORCE me into a living style.
Don’t forget the Tariff of Nottingham also shit his pants on live TV.
Big man, strong man, smelly man that had to end a press session early.
Imagine if Biden shit his pants on live TV like that.
He didn’t, but I’m happy to talk about how Trump did.
Crypto culture is dying. It wasn’t much of a culture to begin with, just a bunch of morons who were pumping thin air, but they were excited - they had dreams! They all hated wallstreet and institutions, which excluded them, or so they felt. They were going to show the world! Well, the world was impressed with the amount of money they poured into bitcon and their old enemies from the institiutions showed up and began to take over - and the whole thing became massively awash with husksters and lies and trainwrecks to the point that its synonomous with a scam now.
But the true belivers are going to hang on for the rest of their lives pumping crypto. The pumps may get smaller and smaller and the bags they hold may get heavier and heavier, but I don’t think they’ll give up until they’re in the grave and their grandchildren will be wondering why they inhereted a quadrillion snotcoins. So I don’t see a 100% destruction of bitcoin for at least a few decades.
It isn’t just RAM. Speculation is now in overdrive in just about all markets. Pick one.....precious metals, betting on whether the Squeaker of the House has no balls (spoiler: he doesn’t), the next election for dog catcher, etc. Too many people want quick riches without working for them. They see someone getting rewarded this way, so they figure they can do it too. See casinos as to why this not a life plan.
No you didn’t, don’t lie.
Your head is so far up your own ass that you can’t have a simple story about the republican administration doing something short without bleating about teh libruhls.
what did it offer that I can’t get conveniently from Wikipedia?
A source you can cite.
As a Canadian, I can tell you that your problems are far greater than Trumpism, or whatever Vance and the GOP have in mind for a somewhat less erratic but no less autocratic successor.
Canadians, and most of the rest of the Free World, no longer trust America. Even if you put Democrats and opponents of Trump in control of Congress next year, and even if the next President spends every moment that they are in office repairing the damage and trying to make peace with allies that have been attacked, abused, and even threatened with annexation of some or all of their territory, collectively we will all simply be going “That’s great, but what about the guy after this sensible fellow?”
Every Presidential election, America’s allies will feel like we’re just four years from another moron, maniac and/or menace. Treaties will be meaningless. Extending an olive branch or extending a missile will be impossible to tell apart.
The only way I could see America ever really convincing the rest of the world that it isn’t simply another election cycle away from becoming a nuclear-tipped rogue state would be wholesale constitutional renovation; reducing or completely eliminating most presidential powers, a sane electoral system, and so forth.
But we all know none of that is going to happen. The American political system ossified decades ago, and is now just simply an oligarchy with no accountability to its citizens or to the people outside its borders that it would treat with. It is a nation of bad faith.
given that airdrop reduces your network MTTR why would you enable it ?
https://ripe91.ripe.net/programme/meeting-plan/sessions/15/3KJJLU/
1. It doesn’t require an infrastructure WiFi network. If you’re somewhere that has no network, it works. Other protocols don’t work at all without an infrastructure WiFi network unless they send all of the data over cellular (very slow).
2. It uses bandwidth more efficiently than infrastructure WiFi. Because both devices are talking directly to each other instead of sending data to an access point which then passes it on, peer-to-peer networking puts half as much traffic into the air.
Yeah, there’s some extra jitter from channel switching, so it would be great if WiFi chipset vendors addressed that by having radios that could simultaneously talk on two channels, but that’s an implementation detail.
Where do you imagine the literal millions of dollars it would take will come from?
Asked Gemini to come up with some numbers:
- Cost of the MS Teams add-on (ignoring the base license): 5€ per user per month
- Estimated number of public sector employees in the EU: 35 million
That gives you over 2 billion € to spend every year. Seems doable.
Capitalist efficiency is a myth beyond SMEs. From a certain size on upwards, it goes to hell. To be fair, soviet-type manufacturing efficiency is pretty much the same or worse and they also have worse product quality issues in general. But then I look at where Win11 stands now and it is clear that capitalism with monopolies in place can match soviet incompetence easily.
People use MS only because everyone else is using MS. That reduces training when one goes into a new org, and there are zillions of MS how-to videos because it’s ubiquitous. It would take a while for a competitor to gain similar.
Exactly. And that is why this is likely a landslide. Whatever the EU Commission is going to use will have contributions integrated upstream and there will be commercial support from many vendors. European IT is in no way inferior, people are just lazy and stick to what they know unless there are very good reasons not to. These very good reasons have manifested now.
Can the EU actually pull this off? There are some tools that MS has, which nobody else has:
1: AD/Entra. Maybe in the past, we had directory services and policy object servers that could scale up and out, but right now, AFAIK (and please correct me) AD/Entra are the only game in town if you have millions of users and need to handle AAA (authentication, authorization, auditing), of users, machines, and other objects, with GPOs and other policies attached. Yes, there is FreeIPA/IdM, and it works well, with replication, performance, and security. I’d assert it has a smaller attack profile than AD. However, it doesn’t scale as well as AD can. AD can figure out how to replicate itself, and handle all kinds of oddball conditions.
Note, this can’t be a cloud service. Ideally, authentication should either be on-prem, or at least hybrid, so even without network connectivity, people can log into their machines and do offline work, even if caching isn’t doable.
2: A unified file sharing protocol. NFS v3 doesn’t cut it for users. NFS v4 takes a well tuned environment to work. S3 is awesome for objects, but definitely not something you want to use as a VM storage backend. We need to have a protocol that allows for file sharing with the robustness of S3, but have additional commands for block I/O, so that can be as fast as possible. This would allow for things like versioning, object immutability, maybe even tiers of compression and encryption. However, as it stands now, SMB/CIFS is king, with nothing really dethroning it.
3: Something to replace Outlook/Exchange. A standardized mail, calendaring suite that has all the C-level features needed. This can be hard, as there are a lot of systems out there (Google WorkSpace, Zimbra, Zoho)… but feature-wise and usability-wise, MS comes out ahead, if only because people are familiar with it, and it does well enough.
4: SharePoint. Don’t laugh, but SharePoint and Confluence are unique programs. There are other Wiki programs that can do the job, but the ability to import things in and make workflows happen make those two commercial programs extremely useful, especially in maintaining documentation.
5: GitHub/GHE. If I have a F/OSS project, and forget about it, I am pretty much certain that 5-10 years from now, it will still be there and usable, perhaps someone finds it, forks it and makes it useful again. Other Git systems… not so much, and when stuff vanishes, that is history lost forever. This needs to have government support, and some sanity (so this doesn’t get turned into someone’s personal multi-terabyte storage of videos). Maybe more space if people “adopt” it. It also needs to span countries, just so if something happens in Europe, that source code would be available in the US.
6: MDM/RMM tools. Intune has its issues, but the Holy Grail would be something that could manage Macs, Windows machines, and many Linux distributions, as well as iOS, and Android devices. This would be both cloud based as well as available on-prem. This functionality is critical to a business’s operations, and needs to be integrated into the OS. Ideally, for Linux, some parameter which can be inputted at install time to have the installer pause, go to a URL, pull code from there and then function like Autopilot or Apple’s ABM provisioning.
7: I hate to mention this, but an IRM. Something like MS Purview. DRM is ugly, but in this case, it can be the one thing that is the difference between exfiltration or no.
8: A VDI cloud connection broker, as well as a VDI system. Otherwise, you are paying for Omnissa, Microsoft W365 or AVD, Citrix, or something else, and those are not cheap. Having a VDI system that is inexpensive and works well with Proxmox can bring a critical security tier to a company.
9: Don’t laugh… a GPG keyserver combined with transparant GPG in mail apps and webmail. We have moved away from tried and true encryption to stuff based on “trust me”. Enough. We need to see about going back to the GPG standard.
Getting rid of Teams is a positive, but to break MS’s iron grip, there are a lot of other basic enterprise items which need to be made into vetted, maintained, open source projects.
Yes. However the social construct of laws has fallen apart. Laws are only for little people. It’s a free for all if you’re rich or powerful.
Even though this is still very preliminary, I think it reaffirms Cory Doctorow’s position that countries should repeal the DMCA-like laws that they were strong-armed into passing by the US government (which itself was bought and paid for by US corporations.)
if you can’t just record your own screen which requires no circumvention — because in the past the data was encrypted — that means to use anything anywhere ever you must know if it had previously been encrypted.
This is such bullshit.
“You can have it, you just can’t obtain it” is such a bad idea to ever have in law.
Per TFA, the plaintiff claims that the defendant used circumvention technology to download the stream. The defendant claims they didn’t — they just used screen-capture.
Yes, the plaintiff’s claim is based on copyright infringement, but through a violation of the DMCA, not through use of their content. I think the case will hinge on whether the plaintiff can prove this.
There is such a thing as fair use, and this case really doesn’t have anything to do with it. Why? Because the plaintiff is not suing the usage, just the manner in which they believe the content was acquired.
Sent from my die phone
Your bias is showing. You might want to re-read the headline.
NASA Will Finally Let Its Astronauts Bring iPhones To the Moon
iPhone? Check. Other phones? No check.
Only the user-generated headline & summary mentions iPhones, whereas the source material states
NASA astronauts will soon fly with the latest smartphones
.It looks like the submitter has a bias towards iPhones.
Lithium-ion batteries are doing so well at altitude that you can no longer put them in your check-in luggage, and that some airlines won’t even let you put them in the overhead compartment anymore.
Think of how easy it would be for a nation like Russia, the China or the US to blackmail foreign entities that own space datacentres. They can be attacked with far greater plausible deniability, and they’re not located in the rival nation’s territorial jurisdiction. Massive amount of value all in one place on an eminently predictable orbit that’s easy to toss a piece of quote-unquote “space debris” at.
Hmmmm. Microsoft did just fine with lying (even in court), and Enron would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for those pesky kids and their mangy brownouts.
Psychologists argue that a primary trait of a good CEO is psychopathy, since it requires a personality that has no remorse or compassion and a willingness to do whatever it takes.
My take is you are being dishonest, because you would have to be living under a rock to not know.
But here is one of the many, many, many references: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/3…
And here is the document at the DOJ site: https://www.justice.gov/epstei…
Note that this only states he wanted to go. We do not know currently whether he went, that is probably in the files still illegally held back by the DOJ.
I predict his prediction will come true right around the same time he arrives on Mars. I’m really looking forward to one of those.
Dear Mr Marszalek…
I have a wonderful business opportunity to offer you: NotARugPull dot something. Please let me know your budget and I will let you know what “something” will be.