Hacker News: cgcrob

New comment by cgcrob in "The HP-35: Consumer Electronics, an Origin Story"

cgcrob — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 19:00:17 +0000

Yeah the 15CE is nice.

I own, err, three. Use one, hedge the others on going up in value one day :)

New comment by cgcrob in "Framework's first desktop is a strange–but unique–mini ITX gaming PC"

cgcrob — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 22:25:20 +0000

I don’t think I’ve upgraded a desktop machine for about 10 years. I usually buy a 1-3 year old corporate desktop and use it for 2-4 years, buy another one and throw the old one on eBay.

I’m on a 10500 based Lenovo thing at the moment.

My needs are not immense though.

New comment by cgcrob in "The HP-35: Consumer Electronics, an Origin Story"

cgcrob — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 08:55:18 +0000

Still use my original 42S and 15C here all the time.

New comment by cgcrob in "The HP-35: Consumer Electronics, an Origin Story"

cgcrob — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 08:53:46 +0000

You need the historical context of the desktop calculator to really understand the pocket calculator.

Short summary: "I want that in my pocket"

New comment by cgcrob in "Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says"

cgcrob — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 17:34:46 +0000

Yep. Investors are shifting capital out of the market. Always happens. The little guys end up paying for the losses.

New comment by cgcrob in "Apple says it will add 20k jobs, spend $500B, produce AI servers in US"

cgcrob — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 14:05:34 +0000

Cynical take here, but I think realistic.

There's a lot of noise I can see behind the scenes on investor confidence. Noise as in "everything is fucked" sort of level of noise. Thus I expect this is being said to try and stop the AAPL stock collapsing in the upcoming recession that the analysts are predicting more than a tangible expansion and recruitment goal.

I also take issue with their being 20,000 people on the market who are still able to contribute something useful. They will be culled quickly and quietly down the line in the annual corporate lay offs.

It is not the time to make grand gestures unless you're trying to gain political favour, at which point any respect I have at least is gone.

Market opening today should be interesting...

New comment by cgcrob in "Cloudflare takes legal action over LaLiga's "disproportionate blocking efforts""

cgcrob — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 09:19:13 +0000

I get locked out occasionally when travelling outside EU as well. I've got to the point I will just avoid using services with CloudFlare in front of them.

Also the one time I reported abuse which was online banking phishing they just replied that they'd informed the upstream provider and nothing happened.

New comment by cgcrob in "AI-designed chips are so weird that 'humans cannot understand them'"

cgcrob — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 22:56:04 +0000

Relying on nuances of the abstraction and undefined or variable characteristics sounds like a very very bad idea to me.

The one thing you generally want for circuits is reproducibility.

New comment by cgcrob in "In memoriam"

cgcrob — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 22:54:05 +0000

There are no UK residents involved in the organisation or operation of it now even though we came up with it.

New comment by cgcrob in "In memoriam"

cgcrob — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 21:53:59 +0000

I am part of a small specialist online technical community. We just moved it over to a Hetzner box in Germany and someone there is paying for it instead of it being hosted in the UK.

What are you going to do Ofcom?

New comment by cgcrob in "Bybit sees over $4B 'bank run' after crypto's biggest hack"

cgcrob — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 18:05:51 +0000

Elegantly put.

The biggest lie that is told about crypto is that writing off a few thousand years of experience with money will make problems go away.

New comment by cgcrob in "It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds"

cgcrob — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 16:53:21 +0000

I think the impact is going to be far greater than that.

I have seen, at least here in the UK, some people speaking about moving entirely back to hardware that is controlled by the organisation. The case is there on a cost basis already but people are reluctant to admit this. If another magical guarantee expires such as a security one, then the reason can be shifted to that and the cost justification is collateral.

Getting out of PaaS systems is going to be horrible and expensive though. We never should have gone further than IaaS.

I suspect the idea of the cloud as it stands today may die fairly quickly.

New comment by cgcrob in "The Internet's longest-serving PC email system, still being updated"

cgcrob — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 21:52:47 +0000

Looked after a 1000 seat Pegasus and Mercury installation on Netware in the 90s. Surprised to hear it is still going!

New comment by cgcrob in "Strategic Wealth Accumulation Under Transformative AI Expectations"

cgcrob — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 06:49:36 +0000

They also forget the economic model that you have to pay $5000 for a real lawyer after the fact to undo the mess you got yourself in by trusting the output of the AI in the first place which made a nuanced mistake that the defending "meat" lawyer picked up in 30 seconds flat.

The proponents of AI systems seem to mostly misunderstand what you're paying for really. It's not writing letters.

New comment by cgcrob in "Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)"

cgcrob — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 22:18:21 +0000

I’m not ragging on the whole field. If I narrow it down too much they’ll know who I am and you will know who they are.

I’ll reduce it to a part of psychology.

New comment by cgcrob in "Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row"

cgcrob — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 16:11:15 +0000

Removed all my stuff from iCloud about a month ago in preparation for this.

New comment by cgcrob in "'What a lie': Danish astronaut responds to Musk"

cgcrob — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:14:42 +0000

Sorry but I exhibit far higher levels of clue than Musk.

New comment by cgcrob in "HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'"

cgcrob — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 13:21:20 +0000

Every time I talk to an MBA grad I hear stuff like this spoken about enthusiastically. I suspect that they moved the business ethics bit to the elective part of the course.

New comment by cgcrob in "'What a lie': Danish astronaut responds to Musk"

cgcrob — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 13:16:57 +0000

That won't happen because they are late on delivering it. The mission was supposed to be Feb but has been pushed back to late March 2025. If SpaceX don't screw it up further that is.

Musk is trying to talk over this.

New comment by cgcrob in "'What a lie': Danish astronaut responds to Musk"

cgcrob — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 13:14:39 +0000

I think it was fairly clear. The real issue is somewhere else. Perhaps your perception of bad is wrong.