My Wife: “I’m just warning you, I haven’t shaved in a few days.”

Me: “Oh no! Anyway…”

Found the IBM loyalist.

Smith Corona Linux.

“One of his disciples, the one whom Jesus loved (AKA me), was reclining at his side.”

– The Gospel According to John

The Evangelicals Creed

“I believe in God, the Father Almighty maker of heaven and Earth. And in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord. Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, never did or said anything important, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried…”

This drawdown has sparked a debate about the “Magnificent Seven” member: Is Microsoft stock a falling knife, or has the market overreacted, presenting a rare opportunity to buy a preeminent artificial intelligence (AI) stock at a discount?

First, “the market” overreacts about everything. Not surprising given that stock price volitility is mostly driven by speculation.

Second, who writes this crap? Anyone who thinks of Microsoft as an “AI stock” is clueless. The majority of Microsoft’s revenue comes from “services”, a big chunk of which is derived from subscriptions for Azure, Office 365, and other hosted solutions.

Microsoft has been racing to cram “AI” into as many areas as possible. Probably in an attempt to justify their substantial R&D and capital expenditures. But calling them an “AI stock” is insane considering “AI” is not their core business or even a profitable part of their business.

“If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.” – Psalm 66:18

“Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, or his ear dull, that it cannot hear; but your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear.” – Isaiah 59:1-2

“If one turns away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer is an abomination.” – Proverbs 28:9

"When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil. – Isaiah 1:15-16

For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.” – 1 Peter 3:12

Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered. – Proverbs 21:13

“The Lord is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayer of the righteous.” – Proverbs 15:29

He’s got a pretty solid basis for that claim.

Same. It’s cheap, It tastes like mostly water, but at least it’s ice cold.

A US security guarantee isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

Walmart acquired Vizio with the express purpose of using TV’s to serve ads. In fact, that is exactly what they said they were going to do.

No surprises here.

I have to appreciate the fact that my country (US) squandered years of opportunity to repair relations with Cuba and turn them into an ally, all for the sake of a ridiculous cold war era grudge.

Imagine working that hard to bring about Christ’s return only to get a “yeah… I don’t know you, buddy. Sorry.” from Jesus.

Art of the deal.

To a point. I completely revamped the off site backups when I ditched Veeam. Four (out of probably ten) VM’s were able to be backed up off-site successfully in PBS. I think I restored two of those because they were newer than what I had locally. The rest never made it off-site, probably due to the local PBS VM choking on disk write conflicts.

You: Buys candy bar.

Membership Card Issuer: “Sorry, but we’re not going to pay for your candy bar. You should have asked us before you bought it.”

You: “Why?? I was starving so it was necessary.”

Membership Card Issuer: “Nope. Still should had asked first.”

Next time rolls around…

You: “Hey, can I buy a candy bar? I’m really hungry but I remember you told me to ask first.”

Membership Card Issuer: “Hmmmm… nope. Sorry.”

You: “WTF. Why?”

Membership Card Issuer: “You don’t need it.”

You: “Uh, yeah. I do need it. I’m starving!”

Membership Card Issuer: “You’re fine. You should walk it off. That will be $20,000.”

Accuracy level is impressive.

Whelp, if you can see what I’m thinking on my face, I guess I might as well say it out loud.

Still I wonder what the future holds and suppose it’s still too early to know how this will all turn out. I will admit that I’m more in the naysayers camp, but perhaps that’s from a fear of losing my livelihood?

It’s all just conjecture at this point. I vividly remember how “the cloud” was allegedly going to help organizations eliminate the IT department, dramatically lower operating costs, and basically put every system admin out of a job.

It succeeded at none of those things. It did help some organizations shift costs from CapEx to OpEx. But it also effectively made data centers available to organizations (and individuals) who didn’t have access to that kind of technology before. It didn’t live up to the hype but it has had a major impact.

Personally, I figure a lot of these “AI” companies are going to fold. There’s just not any value in cramming LLM’s into every product. Not to mention we’ve spent the better part of 30+ years trying to get away from users having to type when they want the computer to do something. Moving back away from a “point- and-click” interface, which has hardly reached its general best state, could be a steep uphill battle.

Again, all conjecture.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

“We’re talking 10 to 20 — to even 100 — times as productive as I’ve ever been in my career,” Steve Yegge, a veteran coder who built his own tool for running swarms of coding agents, told me. “It’s like we’ve been walking our whole lives,” he says, but now they have been given a ride, “and it’s fast as [expletive].” Like many of his peers, though, Yegge can’t quite figure out what it means for the future of his profession. For decades, being a software developer meant mastering coding languages, but now a language technology itself is upending the very nature of the job.

Hate to tell them this but if the LLM’s available today are really somehow making you 10 x as productive, then you suck at your job. I suppose the opinion tracks though. I have worked with way too many devs who can pump out lines of bug filled, poor performing code at a rapid pace while seeming to have no idea how it works or how to fix it. These are the same people who are now gleefully hacking together a bunch of LLM generated code that they still don’t know how to read.

You still have to understand the complexities and nuances of the tools that your using because the LLM you’re generating code with does not and it will come back to bite you in the ass.