Cloudtops only have access to credentials for my personal instances. Instances can be wiped and brought back up in about half an hour from a script. Any deployment to staging/prod is done with other tooling that doesn't run through AI, and only looks at checked-in code.

If my AI went completely haywire, it could hose my personal instances and a single cloudtop. It would take about 15 minutes to de-provision the old cloudtop and provision a new one. After that I'd kick off 45 minutes of git cloning, and in parallel run the scripts to wipe my personal instances and reset them to good. After an hour I'd be back to a clean workable state.

I've had to do this twice, but neither time was due to AI, both were due to bad updates my cloudtops got.

Clearly this is evidence that they can't be trusted as a bank, and should have those licenses revoked.

Oracle has been sitting on their heap of cash for a while now. They've had a lot of locked-in customers for a while. But as they started to bleed customers they looked for new revenue streams. I think the lawsuits filled that niche for a while

Eventually transforming themselves into an AWS clone became the plan, and last year there were all sorts of deals announced. But a lot of those deals were basically expectations, and Oracle didn't have a lot of guarantees that they were going to get the spend. They probably figured they had the OpenAI business and if that didn't pan out then they could offer database services to their existing customers. But to get any hope of any of that they need to lay out the cash upfront, to build the data centers and fill them.

But their existing customers hate them. Nobody will switch to Oracle willingly, certainly not for any kind of hosting. And Oracle bonds are Rated at BBB-, one step above junk status, so nobody wants to lend them money. They're shedding employees as fast as they can because they can't raise cash.

Ultimately, I expect them to renege on their datacenter contracts. But I think that'll probably be fine, because nobody was really going to use them anyway. The penalties are probably minor and Oracle will walk away from this whole thing without any of the obligations, and with a much smaller workforce that costs far less to maintain.

And then they'll go back to their rent-seeking. My guess is that in 2 or 3 years you'll see Oracle try to do a bunch of acquisitions of the modern tech stack to try to regain relevance and re-capture some of their lost market, and then go back to their old rent-seeking behavior.

I hear MongoDB recently lost their CEO; bet that makes them a good chunk cheaper......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpPE85Jogjw&t=17s

I'd call security too. Not my monkey, not my circus.

He wasn't very good at not getting caught. Half the time we caught him it was because he'd fall asleep watching videos and we'd find the laptop in his bed in the morning. Or some of the approaches just weren't very clever. At one point he took a computer from somewhere else in the house. He wasn't going to be able to put it back, so there was no way we wouldn't have found out.

This fit with his general problem-solving ability. He knew what he wanted, and he'd devise a way to get it, but he never thought things through after that. The consequences didn't matter; just like an addict looking for their next fix.

The addiction shifted a few times too. It wasn't always YouTube, but it was usually around technology (there was a short stint where it was about solving Rubik's Cubes, and maybe another around Lego).

We'd take devices and lock them up, but in the middle of the night while we were asleep he'd find a way. He'd plan it out during the day. He'd borrow his friends' school Chromebook, hide it in his room, download videos for offline viewing, and then wake up at 1:00 AM and binge watch.

We set up security cameras and would punish him when we caught him, but it didn't matter, because all he wanted was to watch videos, and no punishment mattered. He was going to watch them anyway. We locked devices in a safe, and during the day he'd figure out how to pull up security video and get an idea of the combination, and try every one close to that until he got in.

We considered locking him in his room at night, but rejected it because of safety and bathroom issues. Eventually we had to set up alarms around the house that would wake us up every time he got up. It took years of our sleep and mental health suffering, but we eventually broke him of it. Or he grew out of it. Who knows.

Technology is ubiquitous today. The schools require it. Society demands it. It's like if every house had a heroin dispenser. How would you prevent a junkie from getting their fix?

How do I do that?

Right now the next thing is to build neat stuff in my garage wood shop. One of the next things is going to be traveling in comfort. After that the next thing might be learning to fly a plane. But some day I'm going to be in a nursing home, and I don't want to suffer or be a burden on my family. The only real answer I see that gives me that kind of freedom (freedom from worrying) is to earn money now.

The billion dollar question is unnecessarily short-sighted and hedonistic. It advocates that you sell your future self short by doing what your present self wants. We are ever-changing bags of meat, and what you want in 10 years is almost certainly not going to be what you want now.

> and paying the same amount, split between the two companies.

So it's a bucket of crabs

A modern horse costs $3000 - $8000. Saffron at the grocery store costs $5 - $20 per gram, but you can get it for wholesale at $1000 - $5000 per pound.

So saffron is about the same affordability now, even though it's more common.

I'm concerned that there are people pushing on the code generation front, the code reviewing front, and the laziness front. Eventually they're going to all meet in the middle, and there will be a significant number of engineers who are using AI to write and review the code, rubber stamp it, and push it into prod, with disasterous results.

That said, I hardly think that foldable is the peak. I'd prefer a rollable phone that I can expand the screen on, with maybe an edge display.

And the price is the real kicker. For the vast majority of the Android population, a phone at a price point about $1000 is just a non-starter.

Once again, proving that Idiocracy (2006) was prophetic, and not just satire.

And that's why on our last trip we had 9 pounds of dog food for our service dog, in cold packs, in our carry-on. "But what if there's a problem with the flight, and we lose our luggage, and we can't get to a pet food store for the whole two weeks?"

Spoiler: The cold packs didn't last, the food spoiled, and we had to go to a pet store.

- Ménage à cinq

- Never Again II

If you're a decent software engineer, living in North Elbonia, making $20,000 / year, that's just enough to cover mortgage on a $100,000 house and live. In 30 years you've got a house and that's it.

Or you could move to the Silicon Valley and make $400,000 / year and that's just enough to cover mortgage on a $2,000,000 house and live. In 30 years you've got a house and that's it.

But when you sell your house, move back to North Elbonia, and buy a house there, you've got $1,900,000 banked. I'd take that deal.

I'd imagine that falls into the bucket of a boomer with a mortgage.