all
Note that according to current polls, over 30% of the UK's population intends to vote Reform in the next election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election
It's a hell of a lot.
tal
joined 2 years ago
Article title:
Top US Army General Says He's Letting ChatGPT Make Military Decisions
Body text
“I’m asking to build, trying to build models to help all of us,” he said, adding that he’s using ChatGPT to help make military and personal decisions affecting the soldiers under his command.
These are not equivalent statements. You can take input from a subordinate, or from a military history work, doctrine manuals, or Google, or ChatGPT in making a decision without having them make that decision.
I'm not looking at what was proposed, but honestly, Trump's tariffs might exceed the effect of a carbon tax on shipping emissions, in terms of making shipping more-costly than would have otherwise been the case. Doesn't mean they reflect them exactly, mind
distance isn't a factor with tariffs, and it is with any fee
but...
kagis
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/imports-seen-well-below-average-for-rest-of-2025
U.S. imports seen well below average for rest of 2025
NRF says frontloading, tariffs to squeeze container volumes.
The fact that some of that is frontloading is fair, and that doesn't produce a longer-term reduction in shippings. Like, companies moved as much product as they could into warehouses prior to tariff enforcement going into force, to limit their impact. But over time, stocks in those warehouses are going to become exhausted, US tariffs at borders will start being passed on, and you'll have higher prices and less purchasing of products with a higher price elasticity of demand.
Monthly import volumes through major U.S container ports are expected to slip below the 2 million TEU mark through the remainder of the year, according to Global Port Tracker data report released today by the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates.
“This year’s peak season has come and gone, largely due to retailers frontloading imports ahead of reciprocal tariffs taking effect,” NRF Vice President for Supply Chain and Customs Policy Jonathan Gold said in a release. “New sectoral tariffs continue to be announced, but most retailers are well-stocked for the holiday season and doing as much as they can to shield their customers from the costs of tariffs for as long as they can.”
The trade group said October is forecast at 1.97 million TEUs, down 12.3% y/y, and November at 1.75 million TEUs, down 19.2%. December volume is forecast at 1.72 million TEUs, a decline of 19.4% and the slowest month since 1.62 million TEUs in March 2023.
This is the original article. Note that it is from 2013.
I mean, I'm serious. Like, it's a big CRM platform that people use and I understand has an ecosystem of software that integrates with it, is well-established.
It's like, someone may not like Photoshop. Frankly, I avoided it in favor of Gimp since the early 2000s, and I really don't like the fact that it's SaaS now.
But you can't just say "Photoshop sucks, artists use charcoal sticks now". You have to have that alternative, like Gimp. And even then, people are going to have some loss in experience and loss in integrated software (like plugins and stuff) in a switch.
I don't do CRM. But my understanding is that it does matter and that that ecosystem matters, and "just throw one's hands up in the air and tell people not to use a CRM platform" is probably not going to fly.
kagis
I thought that SugarCRM was open-source, but it looks like I'm a decade out-of-date
it started as an open-source project, but apparently the company founded around it took it proprietary. And I bet that it doesn't compare in size in terms of people with experience with it or software that integrates with it.
kagis
https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-ecosystem/
The Salesforce ecosystem is an absolute behemoth. Salesforce employs around 70,000 people and is the biggest employer in Silicon Valley. They also have a market cap of a quarter of a trillion – pretty impressive, right?
However, when you look at the Salesforce ecosystem, there are 15M people involved in Salesforce’s community who work as end users, in consultancies, and for app companies. The Salesforce economy is also predicted to generate revenues of six times that of Salesforce by 2026.
Like, you're not gonna move that overnight.
It could be that Salesforce sucks on a technical level as a platform. I don't know, haven't used it. But what I'm saying is that I suspect that for a lot of users, they aren't in a great position to plop in an existing replacement overnight.
EDIT: It sounds like there's a continuing open-source fork of SugarCRM, SuiteCRM. This is the first I've heard of it, though, so I kinda suspect that the userbase isn't massive.
Is there a comparable CRM alternative?
For cords, IIRC you can make them taste bad.
hits Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Cord-Protector-CritterCord-Protect-Hazardous/dp/B000EH2I5O
Maybe it'd be possible to make something similar for phone cases.
keep portable charging devices out of pets' reach
Realistically, I suspect that a smartphone battery is enough to start a fire. I doubt that there is any chance that every dog owner is going to keep smartphones out of pet reach.
I have, in the past, kind of wished that settings and characters could not be copyrighted. I realize that there's work that goes into creating each, but I think that we could still live in a world where those weren't protected and interesting stuff still gets created. If that were to happen, then I agree, it'd be necessary to make it very clear who created what, since the setting and characters alone wouldn't uniquely identify the source.
Like, there are things like Greek mythology or the Robin Hood collection of stories, very important works of art from our past, that were created by many different unaffiliated people. They just couldn't be created today with our modern stories, because the settings and characters would be copyrighted and most rightsholders don't just offer a blanket grant of rights to use them.
That's actually one unusual and notable thing H.P. Lovecraft did
if you've ever seen stuff in the Cthulhu Mythos, that's him. He encouraged anyone who wanted to do so to create stuff using his universe. One reason why we have that kind of collection of Lovecraftian stuff.
But you can't do that with, say, Star Wars or a lot of other beloved settings.
Nintendo shouldn’t be able to patent game mechanics
Those are patents, not copyrights. There are a bunch of different forms of intellectual property. Off the top of my head:
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Copyright
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Trademark
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Patent
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Moral (not very substantial in the US, but more-meaningful in France)
There is a class of products that consist of a hardware box that you ram your network traffic moving between different business locations in a company through that tries to accelerate this traffic. F5 is one manufacturer of them. One technique these use is to have private key material such that they can pretend to be the server at the other end of a TLS connection
that's most of the "encrypted" traffic that you see on the Internet. If you go to an "https" URL in your Web browser, you're talking TLS, using an encrypted connection. They can then decode the traffic and use various caching and other modification techniques on the decoded information to reduce the amount of traffic moving across the link and to reduce effective latency, avoid transferring duplicate information, etc. Once upon a time, when there was a lot less encrypted traffic in the world, you could just do this by working on cleartext data, but over time, network traffic have increasingly become encrypted. Many such techniques become impossible with encrypted traffic. So they have to be able to break the encryption on the traffic, to get at the cleartext material.
The problem is that to let this box impersonate such a server so that it can get at the unencrypted traffic, they have to have a private key that permits them to impersonate the real server. Having access to this key is also interesting to an attacker, because it would similarly let them impersonate the real server, which would let them view or modify network traffic in transit. If one could push new, malicious software up to control these boxes, one could steal these keys, which would be of interest to attackers in attacking other systems.
It sounds, to my brief skim, like attackers got control of the portion of F5's internal network that is involved with building and distributing software updates to these boxes.
The problem is that if you're a sysadmin at, say, General Dynamics (an American defense contractor which, from a quick search, apparently uses these products from F5), you may have properly secured your servers internal to the company in all ways...but then the network admin basically let another box, which wasn't properly secured, into the encrypted communications between your inter-office servers on the network. It could extract information from your encrypted communication streams, or modify it. God only knows what important data you've been shoveling across those connections, or what you've done with information that you trusted to remain unmodified while crossing such a connection. It's be a useful tool for an attacker to stick all sorts of new holes into customer networks that are harder to root out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/05/special-series/orban-le-pen-international-nationalism.html