Michael Westergaard

They’re the Cisco from the Dot-com bubble. They are a real business, they made all the money selling shovels in the gold rush. They will survive, but tank on the stock market. In 20 years, it might return to current highs, but an investor buying in today should expect to make no returns for that period. In 2-5 years, their market will be over-saturated by product shipped in the heat of the bubble being sold in bankruptcy auctions as their customers fail. People still need shovels, but not as many, and with no gold to dig up, the ones sold the past 5 years will take over much of the market. Unless they can make another transition like they did gaming -> Bitcoin mining -> AI. It’s hard to imagine they could move to something bigger, but it was also not obvious how they would survive the end of the crypto bubble.

The difference is that in Europe we have rule of law and don't allow them to define politics. Notice how Denmark isn't known as a Nazi state? Or the Netherlands? Or the UK? They all had/have right-wing parties that grew big, but never went all Hitlery on their neighbors because the right-wingers were kept in check. Germany, France, and Poland too. Nah, dude, we are superior to the US who immediately went 110% in on the 1930s playbook once they got the chance.

huh, hadn't heard even the enterprise gpus were that bad. then nvidia might be better off after the bubble bursts – obviously still doing less business, but at least not competing against themselves from 3 years ago.

the point of a hardware wallet is that – assuming the crypto works – the only way to steal your magic internet money is to steal your wallet: the secret key(s) never leave it as the wallet signs transactions for you. a password manager is on your computer, so a keylogger or otherwise spyware allows an attacker to steal the secret key. a tpm module can in principle aid with that, but bitcoiners trust nobody. the best way to securely store your hardware wallet, according to bitcoiner lore, is underneath a bird bath in your garden.

You can’t #spell strawberry without arrr – unless yer a #LLM

Yeah, they better shut it down – it cannot even answer the hard-hitting questions…

It’s also illegal in the EU (and, I think, California)

Also for debit cards? (The OP is incorrect; this is for debit cards, not credit cards.) There's a huge difference – credit cards can work off-line as they do not need to check the account balance, but debit cards needed an internet connection to check the amount to be deducted is available. They very likely handle debit cards the same way: by just allowing people to spend for a week without checking the balance. It used to be possible using Danish debit cards as well but was removed for security reasons (financial security, not security security).

Credit card payments are not (newly) able to do this. Debit cards are now newly able to do this ("betalingskort" = "debit card"). Credit cards could (in most cases) already do this as you buy on credit. Debit cards always check the bank balance and therefore needed an internet connection.

The Zuckerberg one is no good - looks much more human than the original.

I agree with the sentiment, but it is over-simplifying a bit. Russian science was recovering in the 2010s. In 2012 I, along with the leader of my group, were hired to participate in a new research group at the HSE in Moscow. This was funded by new research grants set up to get Russian research up-to-speed. The grant funded Western scientists (who would spend some time in Russia), Russian scientists (professors, post-docs, graduate students, and under-graduates), equipment (to bring them mostly up-to-date), and travel grants (for international conferences), as well as general overhead. The purpose was to bring the Russian scientists up-to-date with Western research. Today, we know that was part of the Fortress Russia strategy to protect against sanctions expected to follow after attacking Ukraine, but that was not clear at the time, and it actually worked – at least for a bit. The Russian group grew and did contribute international research and they were in the running for hosting one of the larger conferences in the field. Given more time (years, not decades), they could have caught mostly up. That was one group in a quite niche field, but it was a general strategy. So, Russia is still fucked but 1) it is possible to recover if there is a desire to, and 2) Russia is not just fucked because of Stalin, but also because of Putin (and likely others in-between I know less about). Will that transfer to the US? Who knows? (I quit the position in 2013, before shooting down the Dutch plane and attacking Ukraine, for personal reasons.)

Oh, that's great. More shit moving around so nothing is in the space you'd expect it to be and everything is unaligned. Countdown till some genius uses that with inline elements in a reasonably narrow space, to they can overflow to entirely new lines as well. Maybe even cause an entire page reflow… No more point-and-click, time for hunt-and-seek.

My bad. I didn't mean for this to sound like it was a topic of discussion. It was a summary of peer-reviewed literature on the topic.

Narrower roads rarely lead to more crashes and generally reduce speed and crashes, especially in urban areas with very few caveats (one being shared road with bicycles):

• mdpi.com/2071-1050/17/2/628
• journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3141/2023-08
• nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/Part-III-Section-1-Citation-2_-Hamidi-and-Ewing.pdf

Increasing the number of lanes unambiguously increase traffic:

• sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1361920901000098
• aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Faer.101.6.2616

Reducing the number of lanes reduces crashes and keeps traffic at worst little more congested than before (i.e., overall reduced), just with fewer lanes:

• journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3141/1784-11?download=true
• pedbikeinfo.org/downloads/WhitePaper_RoadDiets_PBIC.pdf

Which part of the assumptions or methods used do you disagree with?

Reducing number of lanes reduces traffic, and making roads narrower increases security. Reducing lanes makes going by car less attractive, increasing the number of people that seek alternatives (bike, public transport, or alternative routes), reducing overall traffic. People get too comfortable with wide lanes, leading to less attentive drivers and more accidents. Narrower roads are much safer because they *feel* less safe.

This is either outdated, wrong, or misleading. After the 1980s it should also include margarine.

You cannot publish it like that. That would be highly irresponsible. Name it Naked Teams Roulette, then publish.

I don't know how it works exactly, but it's almost certainly a (slightly) modernized version of this terminal which was taken out of service in 2007: dr.dk/nyheder/penge/fluesmaekkeren-sendes-paa-pension That terminal allowed shops to accept payment from debit cards while off-line, with banks guaranteeing the transaction up to an amount (that was lower than an online cleared transaction which was only limited to your account balance – people literally buy cars with the card). The entire thing that is happening now is that the guarantee that was decommissioned in 2007 is back.

Exchange is not the issue (for that). The issue is they are very strict and it's very hard to not get on their shitlist. In addition to SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, which are all mandatory these days, you need to make sure that your IP is not on a blacklist (and most cheap cloud providers that allow port 25 traffic are), and that your domain isn't (if you sent mails with invalid DMARC/SPF/DKIM or you don't have DMARC in a strict mode and somebody used your domain to send spam, it is on a blacklist). They often employ graylisting (deny mails the first time around, only accepting on re-send) and nebulous anti-spam rules (proprietary SpamAssassin-like checks – nebulous to prevent spammers from working around them). It's hard, very hard, to run a working mail server. It makes the 90s/00s with sendmail config woes seem nice in comparison. You cannot just boot up a Postfix and expect to be able to send mail. For the most part, this is fair. Each of the rules is there to prevent spam and makes sense. The unfortunate fact is that it simultaneously makes it very hard for self-hosters/small companies to send legitimate mail. Because their mail looks exactly like spam. I had a domain blacklisted at Google due to slightly wrong DMARC + DKIM setting; took a good 2 weeks to get it removed despite all checks saying it was fine. mxtoolbox is only the beginning (it found no issue with my blacklisted domain); mail-tester is better, being on Google Postmaster is a must, and a DMARC monitor is close to a necessity. BIMI often helps because it's so extremely expensive.

But inflation is sky-rocketing, so maybe they are just staying at the same level

I know I remember 6 * 8 = 48 as "both end in 8." That rule doesn't work for 8 * 6, making that a harder operation.

The best part is it’s not 100% symmetrical along the diagonal

Italian, Chinese, and Japanese cuisines may be more popular, but the more interesting finding in that figure is that the three are also the more picky eaters (they are all almost at the far right columns).

Not so sure the US is above China anymore. I'd also include Ukraine somewhere on the list. If counted as part of Europe, Europe might be above the US.

Gad vide hvor tæt det er på et rigtigt filsystem (de siger NFS, men også at det er krypteret) og hvor meget der blot er en rebranded s3fs-fuse…

Whoever thought that giving #Eclipse two systems for installing and updating components (the Eclipse Marketplace and the Software Update Sites) was in any way a good idea should be taken out back and shot. Then revived, waterboarded, and shot again. It's fine to have the store as a idiot-GUI for discovering and installing extensions, but for all that is good and holy (which explicitly excludes Eclipse for aforementioned reasons), make "Check for Updates" actually check for updates like a normal person, instead of only checking for *some* updates.

You really don't have to; it already sees a lot of coverage. Aside from the one Patrick Boyle video somebody else posted, Patrick also made one a month or two ago just about the index fraud: youtube.com/watch?v=8rS3fTbC7TE Here's another one with roughly the same contents: youtube.com/watch?v=iOyFja87uyw Here's a stick-figure animation that covers both the index scam and why SpaceX is a bad investment in the first place: youtube.com/watch?v=-X6YzlY_8tM Just share the last one, short enough and generally understandable that most people will want to murder Elon.

Only fair-weather #music fans with no real appreciation for the arts will consume music without the authentic rich sound of a #cassette tape.

Somebody posted a meme contrasting #techbros' love of #scifi vs their understanding of same. This video presents concrete examples of same. youtube.com/watch?v=QGIfTJx-VoI

Fact: you're #pissing wrong. Pissing a lot? Your #prostate is fucked and you're going to #die. Not pissing all that much? You need to #hydrate and you're going to die.

just have your butler open it and tell you

Business idea: give the FIFA (or Nobel) peace prize to Iran. The seething will be able to power the world until the Epstein Diversion War is over. With a bit of luck, a blood-pressure-induced heart attack might even end the war.

Frankly, unless there are concrete issues I have overlooked (a possibility), this sounds more like "I am angry at AI/LLMs, therefore this is bad." I can see many reasons using AI/LLMs can be good

• LLMs are good at drafting texts
• I assume that laws would still read by real lawyers before passing
• laws are adversarial, so "the other side of the aisle," is bound to comb thru the laws to find issues (with or without AI, doesn't matter, issues would still have to be cited from the original text, not the summary)
• MPs right now pass laws without reading them; having an AI produce a summary, even if imperfect, is better than that

The closest to a downside I could see is a malicious party submitting 100s or 1000s of AI-drafted laws to flood the field, but this is already a fact in banana republics like the US and not really a thing in democracies who have guardrails against that.

It's October 3rd

This isn't about lawyers but lawmakers.

You think you know where the joke is going, then it doesn’t… youtube.com/watch?v=Fx7eZItF8u0

I (finally) set up #federation on my #Ghost blog. This means you can get more but rarer words from me by following @michael.

First post, very meta, is about how I #shitcoded #MySQL + #S3 support into Ghost's #ActivityPub and got it running on my own #kubernetes cluster.

RE: https://westergaard.site/2026/10/ghost-with-self-hosted-activitypub/

Also the H/B/L-series? I was under the impression they became e-waste because they were no longe profitable for the newest LLMs, not because they burned out like a GeForce mining ether and being sold after half a year "as good as new."

Electricity is typically around 10-20% of a country's total energy consumption. It's great that a lot of electricity is moving to renewable, but even when 100% of electricity is renewable, that means the country is 15% of the way (20% is only reached in countries with high EV adoption).

Turns out, my Friday/Saturday hangovers were really more me starting getting sick. Which is impeccable timing, because I definitely deserved hangovers.

#GitHub: it's like #PorhHub, but for #gits.

don't worry, they'll retract them in 3 months on page 17 of a paper nobody reads when everybody has forgotten and it has no effect, and that will be JUST FINE WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT?

30 years old advertisement for 2FA (timed one-time passwords), colorized: youtube.com/watch?v=FRttIK0bX-s

A colleague was looking for a file that's missing from #Sharepoint. Why would anybody do that ever? Sharepoint is a store-and-forget trash bin with extra steps for auditing.

That's an over-simplification. Pensions were affordable when a large generation was paying for a small generation living for a short time. Now, a small generation is paying for a large generation (boomers) living forever. You do not save up for your own pension, you pay for that of your parents and grandparents. Boomers trying to get younger generations on-board with not cutting pensions is literal generation theft. Don't let them.

Not any card. Danish cards. Probably mostly a regulatory thing: Danish banks consent to the risk of 7 days of outstanding payments on debit cards, but foreign banks do not.

I'm pretty sure our old Solaris boxes had it back in 1999.

Cars have 4(ish) doors and 4(ish) wheels so they don't matter. Bikes have 2(ish) wheels and no doors. Houses have ~10 doors and no wheels. Nothing else has wheels or doors. There are likely not 5 times as many bikes as houses in the world. Ergo, doors.

That's it? There's no variety. There's only two sets of notes: "faces" and "birds." What's with all the birds? For several of the designs I was genuinely in doubt whether the form had erred out and shown me the same ones again. Anyway, I'm team faces > birds.

This post became relevant much faster than I anticipated.

#OpenAI is now loosening the definition of the "5x" ($100) and "20x" ($200) plans, seemingly removing free unlimited chat from Plus ($20), and introducing a new Max ($500) plan. Reports also suggest stealth reduction of usage limits.

Prepare for the first of what is likely to be several price increases until you end up paying what the actual cost is. Does your business plan survive this?

RE: https://westergaard.social/objects/3b0593dc-df4c-40cb-9158-45ddb62e9c19