That's why Putin attacked in 2022, and didn't wait any longer to build a stronger military. He knew he was on the clock as Europe slowly switched to renewables his fossil fuel leverage got weaker.
Unrelated, but doomer version of me expects that China will wait for the US to exhaust it's cruise missile supply bombing Iran, then move over Taiwan. Hope I'm wrong about this.
China would have no need to wait for the US to exhaust its cruise missile supply before attacking Taiwan. The amount of firepower that China can muster from the mainland is enough to completely overwhelm any amount of conventional firepower that the US can bring to bear in the region. All US ships and airbases closer than (and including) Guam are toast in a serious war.
> The amount of firepower that China can muster from the mainland is enough to completely overwhelm any amount of conventional firepower that the US can bring
A lesson we learn again in 2026: one can’t seize and hold territory with air power alone.
China can almost certainly deny U.S. warships access to the Taiwan Strait. They can probably deny U.S. access to the South China Sea. But the U.S. (and Taiwan and Japan) can do the same back, similarly from a distance, and that’s the equilibrium currently keeping the peace.
Yes, even if China can deny the US access to the region, that doesn't mean that taking Taiwan would be a trivial endeavor. It would still be the largest and most complicated aquatic invasion in human history, executed by a relatively inexperienced military apparatus. It's far from a given that China would succeed in a direct invasion. All that we're saying here is that China isn't so afraid of US cruise missiles that the US exhausting them in Iran has any real affect on their planning.
Isn't this what Embedded Windows was always for, like for use in medical equipment, ATMs, POS, PLC, oscilloscopes, etc? Basically stuff that's supposed to be fire-and-forget, run 24/7 and that the user shouldn't be able to tinker with.
And also what group policies were for, that can disable the user from installing any software?
Am I wrong to assume that the fuckup was on your end, for using the wrong tool and not configuring it properly?
> Am I wrong to assume that the fuckup was on your end, for using the wrong tool and not configuring it properly?
Not at all. I agree that it should have been locked down and only privileged accounts should be allowed software update. But the system auto-booted into an Administrator account so it really wasn't a surprise that eventually someone would do something stupid.
I will say that this was for Windows NT retail, not Windows NT Embedded. At that point, getting an NT Embedded license practically required sacrificing your firstborn child. It was only when Microsoft got to Win XP Embedded that the license didn't look like it was written by a team of lawyers who already knew that they were perpetually in Hell.
Memories now of what we were given at the hospital long ago: our obstetrics ward was using Philips OBTraceVue software. The original FDA-approved system required Philips to package the OS and hardware all together, so we were given a bunch of generic Compaq desktops to run their fetal heartrate monitoring on.
The biggest annoying complaint was "we want to run our EHR software on it!" but because of the FDA requirements, we weren't allowed to install anything on the box. Yet somehow providing AV could be OK in some cases, and in other cases installing Citrix? And then we'd somehow find out someone managed to install the EHR client onto it anyways and it became a big old mess to have to have Philips come send a tech out of their own to reimage a PC we couldn't "legally" service.
It was a big messy pain for a while back in the day. Was happy when we finally got to upgrade to the newer IntelliSpace software on our own PCs in the ward. (Also got to meet a support engineer that came out rocking an Agilent badge, so that was super cool on its own right of history...)
> somehow providing AV could be OK in some cases, and in other cases installing Citrix?
The only way this could possibly have passed FDA scrutiny would be if the original manufacturer had validated this particular system configuration and approved it.
There's probably tons of stuff like this going on all over the place, but it manages to say under the radar, so no one notices it. But with the FDA's increased scrutiny on cybersecurity it will eventually disappear.
Back in like early aughts I remember seeing an ATM in Rome that had evidently crashed and was sitting at a DOS prompt. I was much younger then, but I remember thinking it wasn't terribly surprising, but it was also a bit of a wizard of oz moment.
Which "new" Outlook? I think there's like 3 versions of Outlook currently on the market. The Classic Win32 one they want you to stop using, the new Lite variant bundled for free with Windows 11, and the new Full Spec one that comes with Office 365, both of which are built on web technologies IIRC.
That one that comes with office 365. My work PC got auto updated with it and I switched back to the Win32 version within an hour because it was buggy and a huge resource hog. It's just an email client and calendar, there's no need to keep reinventing the wheel, especially if you're just gonna make it worse.
Forget developing countries, iPhone is a luxury even in some European countries, when rent is 500+ Euros and your take home pay is ~1000. After all the other bills you're not left with iPhone money, which is why 100-200 Euro models of Chinese brands are doing so well.
It's easier to name the countries where iPhone ISN'T a luxury, as you can count them on very few hands.
How did you managed to get it to do that? When I gave it instructions to use Ghidra MCP to look for vulnerabilities in a windows driver on my local machine it refused saying it's not allowed to do pentest activities even if sandboxed to your own device.
Not who you were asking and not explicitly looking for vulnerabilities... I have gotten a ton of mileage from getting Claude to reverse engineer both firmware and applications with Ghidra and radare2. My usual prompt starts with "Here's the problem I'm having [insert problem]. @foo.exe is the _installer for the latest firmware update_. Extract the firmware and determine if there's a plausible path that could cause this problem. Document how you've extracted the firmware, how you've done the analysis, and the ultimate conclusions in @this-markdown-file.md"
I have gotten absolutely incredible results out of it. I have had a few hallucinations/incorrect analyses (hard to tell which it was), but in general the results have been fantastic.
The closest I've come to security vulnerabilities was a Bluetooth OBD-II reader. I gave Claude the APK and asked it to reverse engineer the BLE protocol so that I could use the device from Python. There was apparently a ton of obfuscation in the APK, with the actual BLE logic buried inside an obfuscated native code library instead of Java code. Claude eventually asked me to install the Android emulator so that it could use https://frida.re to do dynamic instrumentation instead of relying entirely on static analysis. The output was impressive.
Crazy how for a guy so obsessed with self image and legacy, Trump is leaving behind a world where he'll be known for making everything shit that it was before him. Amazing. How does this happen?
It is also exactly these same people of the USA whose thinking is going to matter for determining what happens next, not anyone else. It is immaterial what "everyone else outside the borders of the USA" thinks in the context of the country.
Yes. And for the context of this conversation, the people in the USA are what matters. It's not like this regime is going to give up just because other countries dislike them. Their core fan base think it's going gangbusters.
You can read his book, it's full of things he would do (even if he didn't write it). Typical sales tactics and nothing more sales than tactics even after the snake oil has been exposed.
Oh, yes, I agree. But I now know that they were written by a ghost writer so I'm not sure it it's completely accurate to credit him with all in the books. The ghost writer deff gives it its own flair. But, yes, when Trump was first elected, I've have friends tell me I don't get it, I am hating him because I was told to, I'm not looking past the noise, and I had to clarify to them that no, I have despised him since I read his book "The art of the deal" and came across with the idea he is a corrupt crook. I read it as recommendation and went in with the expectation to read something good, but was not impressed at all.
So, yes, all of this was painfully obvious. But here we are.
And compensation is based on revenue not profit. A top sales person brings in $5 million of revenue, but it's going to cost the company $7 million to deliver the goods/services. Sales person hit their top goal and will earn his bonuses while making the company worse off.
Trump net worth is $3 billion more than it was before he become a president. Likely more money was made via insider trading by his friends and family. So it's not like no one did benefit. Net loss for the country and the world is orders of magnitude higher though.
The more I see the stock market dropping due to idiotic mistakes that should've been very preventable, the more I think how beneficial it must be to be one of the insiders that accidentally let those idiotic things slip through.
Are we as small savers just idiots feeding this idiot machine?
I assume you mean low cost broad market index funds when you write 401k, but what other mechanism has offered financial security to so many other than having lots of productive and well networked kids that believe in helping you when you are old?
There is, of course, taxpayer funded retirement benefits, but that is just taking from others’ kids.
The pensions that are so underfunded (either due to corruption or bad math) they need repeated bailouts from federal taxpayers? Hope you’re in a sufficiently politically influential union.
If federal taxpayers are going to bail out old people, might as well be the whole stock market so it’s not just a few politically influential unions that get bailed out.
Union members not in an insufficiently influential union can have their benefits cut:
What do you think pension funds invest in if not the same things as my 401K?
Pensions are useful to individuals, because they support you until you die (while your 401K will either run out before you die, or will 'waste' money in the bank if you die before it runs out). But they aren't a magic money tree. They are the exact same formula. Money in, money out, it just gets distributed a little better.
I might be wrong, but it seems to me that Trump would prefer to be loved / respected / feared and remembered as the greatest US president in history over increasing his net worth.
My working theory is that Trump is best understood as an epically tragic character.
So desperate to be valued and liked, that he desperately grabs at anything and everything to get the acclaim that, under normal circumstances, would signify that.
His besetting character flaws foreclose any possibility of attaining the actual approval he seeks.
And so, with his misguided approaches to getting praise and love, the harder he tries the further they are from his reach.
Adding to that tragedy is that a 180-degree U-turn is still within his reach. He could do it today, and probably get some of what he most deeply wants. But I think the most likely outcome is that he'll keep his current trajectory for the rest of his life.
> So desperate to be valued and liked, that he desperately grabs at anything and everything to get the acclaim
Like all billionaires, he is an empty void that can never be filled. To borrow a phrase, he is a hungry ghost.
After his first million he needed more, then after a billion he saw that it was not enough, then after becoming president... he is, was, and always will be an empty hole of a person who can never feel satiated and who can consequently never feel genuine happiness.
Earlier I said "all billionaires", and that wasn't fair.
To be clear, there are some who turn Capitalism into a religion (objectivists, and the like), and to them it can be moral. They at least seek to serve a moral good, even if I disagree about the means I can appreciate that their goal is still to make the world a better place.
Trump is not one though. He is utterly devoid of morality and seeks only to fill an endless black need for external validation.
I don’t think he’s interested in general approval. Having a fervent cultish minority support and being detested by others both seem to suit him. Hell, he seems to enjoy being able to paint himself a victimized underdog to his followers.
Interesting reading, but hard to have sympathy when he causes suffering for so many.
I also don't think changing his behavior is within reach. His narcissism prevents him from growth and, like the scorpion in the tale, he can't help but sting.
I don't think it's so clear cut. The problem is that his personality defects have allowed him to be influenced by people who are truly malevolent. Those people lurk more in the shadows and so avoid the condemnation that they deserve. Trump is their obvious useful idiot with the target painted on his head.
Well, you see a black man became president. And what's worse, he was a really good one, articulate, kind, humble, and emodied all the values we cherish. And that broke people so much they would rather burn everything down than build on what he did.
Don't forgot how long Trump and other republicans went on about "birth certificates" during Obama's first term.
The key insight is that Trump is doing what Trump supporters (and fascists in general) want most: punishing The Enemy/Other. Everything else (including gas and grocery prices, etc) is irrelevant. As long as "immigrants" (the "illegal" facade is done by now) and "liberals" are beaten to death by ICE, Trump supporters will honestly and proudly proclaim that he's doing a fantastic job as president.
Trump has been the protagonist of US politics for ten years. Maybe this "actually he really has this all planned out" idea was viable in 2017. But in 2026? We've got years and years and years of examples of how Trump makes decisions. He is not playing 4d chess.
I'm guessing that one reason we got Trump is that the Democrats presented two poor alternatives in a row.
It was clear that Biden was mentally slipping. Even if you were a fan of his general politics, 4 additional years of mental decline while in office was a scary prospect.
And then Kamala Harris was given very little time to sell herself to the voters.
I'm wondering if Trump would have won had the Democrats presented someone more appealing earlier in the campaign.
If you were worried about Biden’s mental decline but looked at Trumps behavior and statements as from someone mentally competent and not also slipping into dementia, then you just wanted Trumps politics and vibes your way into thinking it was ok.
I’m so excited for the future where nobody apparently voted for Trump and never backed him, the same way everyone mysteriously didn’t vote for GWB after his fuckups got too big to ignore
I believe Trump would have won 2020 had the COVID pandemic not happened. Things were very chaotic in 2020 America. Biden and his extensive experience in the federal government looked reassuring to a lot of Americans. Biden would have had a tougher time against Trump had 2020 been more like 2019. I believe Biden would have had a tougher time against Bernie Sanders in the primaries had COVID not happened, though a counterargument is that Super Tuesday happened on March 3, before shelter-in-place policies were in effect in California.
A big reason for Trump's success despite his polarizing nature is the polarizing effects of the platforms of our two parties, which distinguish themselves on "culture war" issues such as abortion, gun rights, immigration, LGBT+ rights, and race relations. There are many Americans who love the MAGA agenda, and there are also many Americans who are not in 100% agreement with MAGA but who'd never vote for a Democrat since they feel that a candidate with the opposite cultural views is anathema. If third parties were more viable in America, the latter group of voters could vote for a candidate that is more to their temperament instead of voting for whomever the GOP nominee is.
Had COVID not happened, Trump might not have gone batshit crazy with a vendetta against the entire concept of independent federal agencies. Actively rejecting the advice coming from Fauci et al would seem to be a large part of what sensitized him to the larger pattern rather than just writing each instance off as an interpersonal issue.
(by "Trump" and "him" I mean the person himself plus his symbiotic ecosystem of enablers and followers)
I'm not a politico, but IMHO Harris didn't have enough time to clarify her positions, and to address the points raised by her opposition.
Also, I wonder if the way she was chosen by the Democratic Party rubbed some people the wrong way enough for them to abstain from voting as a form of protest.
I interpreted the clause “two poor alternatives in a row” as Biden + Harris in the 2024 presidential election, and not Clinton + Harris, since Clinton was the 2016 nominee and Harris was the 2024 nominee after Biden dropped out, but the 2020 nominee was Biden, who did successfully defeat Trump that year.
In my opinion, Clinton’s and Harris’ losses had less to do with their gender and more to do with the candidates themselves:
1. Clinton was facing strong anti-establishment headwinds, and Clinton is a very establishment politician. Many people in 2016 were piping mad at establishment politicians. Trump was able to win the GOP nomination on a platform of “draining the swamp” and pursuing an aggressively right-wing agenda compared to more moderate Republicans, and Sanders, who also had an anti-establishment platform, proved to be a formidable opponent to Clinton. Despite Clinton’s loss, she was still able to win the popular vote. Perhaps had there been less anti-establishment sentiment, it would have been a Clinton vs Jeb Bush election, and I believe Clinton would have won that race.
2. Harris never won a presidential primary election. The only reason she ended up becoming the nominee is because Biden dropped out of the race after his disastrous debate performance against Trump, which occurred after the primaries. Since it was too late to have the voters decide on a replacement for Biden, the Democratic Party selected a replacement: Harris. She only had a few months to campaign, whereas Trump had virtually campaigned his entire time out of office.
3. Let’s not forget the Trump factor in 2024. During Biden’s entire presidency, Trump was able to consolidate his hold on the GOP and his voting base, and in some ways he even expanded his base. The conservative media was filled with defenses of January 6, and Trump was able to convince enough Americans that he and his supporters were persecuted in the aftermath of the 2020 election and January 6.
Look, after lurking through that submission about the Olympics a few days ago I get HN is divided on sex/gender identity, but I'm pretty sure that Joseph Biden is absolutely a man. "Cisgender", if you must.
His approval rating is at a historical low for any president at this point in their term, I think. People don't like ICE, pedophiles, or wars in the Middle East.
> I'm guessing that one reason we got Trump is that the Democrats presented two poor alternatives in a row.
Oh please.
Are you seriously comparing the disaster that is Mango Mussolini to the likes of (practically any) alternative candidate?
The sad reality is that the American people wanted Trump and _voted_ for him. TWICE! The rest of the world has come to terms with this and knows there is no going back to the old hegemony (put simply, the American people may vote for another Trump; we now know the USA can no longer be trusted as a good faith partner). The world has changed, and many in the USA who didn't vote for Trump have yet to realise this and still think they can go back.
Besides, if all candidates are crap, you vote for the one that will do least harm. And then look at reforming a political system which leaves voters with such a poor choice.
The same reason some use crime committed by illegal immigrants to push action, while ignoring the fact that citizens are more likely percentage-wise to commit those same crimes. It's confirmation bias at the least, and intellectual dishonesty at the worst, but either way, they want their worldview to be validated.
I know this is extremely off topic, but illegal immigrants are far more likely to commit crimes than citizens, not that this has anything to do with software bugs...
The only way your statement holds up is if you treat the act of existing while undocumented as a crime for this comparison, in which case sure - it's a tautology.
First of all, the link you provided mixes illegal migration with legal migration, a classic trick trying to downplay the effects of illegal immigration.
Second, it compares murder rates only, in the state of Texas, a state well known to have extreme amounts of legal guns. You can hardly generalise from this data.
> First of all, the link you provided mixes illegal migration with legal migration
No it doesn't. I chose that article specifically because it provides figures for native-born citizens, legal immigrants and illegal immigrants:
> Over the 10-year period from 2013 to 2022, the homicide conviction rate in Texas for illegal immigrants was 2.2 per 100,000, compared to 3.0 per 100,000 for native-born Americans. The homicide conviction rate for legal immigrants in Texas was 1.2 per 100,000.
I accept that the figures in other countries may not work out the same way as figures in the USA.
I probably won't comment further, since as you said this is very off-topic (I only meant to draw out an analogy as to why discussions about AI tend to be ideologically skewed), but every statistic I've seen shows far lower crime rates among illegal immigrants versus citizens (aside from the statutory crime of being in the country illegally).
That's why Putin attacked in 2022, and didn't wait any longer to build a stronger military. He knew he was on the clock as Europe slowly switched to renewables his fossil fuel leverage got weaker.
Unrelated, but doomer version of me expects that China will wait for the US to exhaust it's cruise missile supply bombing Iran, then move over Taiwan. Hope I'm wrong about this.
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