> I call on the Secretary-General to pledge that, within 180 days, the United Nations will remove all third-party tracking, analytics, testing and advertising scripts, and all tracking beacons, from its websites - the entire online estate, not a single flagship page.
I'm not defending the UN here, but I don't think that the Secretary General is the person who decided to put Google Tags on their website. I'd be shocked if he even vaguely knows what a Google Tag is.
> There is a surprisingly low threshold on what people are willing to pay for labor saving devices.
A lot of people gladly pay humans to launder their clothes, so the market is there. But the current iteration of wash/dry combo machines doesn’t solve the main issue. I don’t mind transferring my clothes from the washer to the dryer, because that takes 60 seconds. It’s folding and putting away the clothes that makes laundry a chore.
> don't have liquid cash to pile up on their yacht
I think a reasonable metric would be "you have 2 years to sell your assets and convert to cash (or something super liquid like treasuries)". This accounts for people who hold things like farm land or real estate that can't just be liquidated tomorrow. By this Metric, the values for many of the billionaires out there are real. Bill Gates, for example, hardly owns a significant stake in Microsoft anymore, but he does have lots of illiquid assets like farmland and real estate. Brin/Page/Bezos still have significant stakes in their companies, but the companies stand on their own at this point and I doubt that shares would go down a ton if any of them liquidated over the course of a year. Zuckerberg probably can't sell his meta shares without a reasonable decrease in value, so there'd be some haircut, but it's still an incredibly valuable company without him.
But Musk is at a different level. I can't imagine him selling his stakes in his companies without the stocks plummeting more than 50%.
Find me a university that bans AI usage on campus in CS courses. I don't mind if students have access to AI and use it to help study, but I want some kind of assurance that they are able to build things without using AI.
As a hiring manager, I will immediately prioritize hiring graduates of that school. I can teach someone who knows how to code how to use Claude Code. I find the other way around quite difficult.
I heard they do CS exams on air-gapped machines at UC Berkley. Use of AI to do CS homework is strongly discouraged, and if someone cheated, it shows up at the exam...
I guess if I were in school today, I would be accused of using AI on my homework, as I did very well on all of my projects and bombed my tests. My professors all recognized my hard work and gave me good grades, but I feel like that wouldn't go the same way today.
Well seems like this is de facto the way companies are hiring right now. Unemployment for new grads is much higher than for people who have been in the industry for a while.
I don't care if they can write bubble sort off the top of their head. I do care that when they were in class, they had to go through the exercise of implementing bubble sort in their algorithm, realizing that they had an off-by-one error, identifying the problem, and fixing it. School is like working out at the gym, and AI is like bringing a forklift to the squat rack.
Do scores on proctored exams have any correlation with job performance? Employers mostly care about ability to complete projects on time and get along with colleagues. How do you put that on an exam?
It’s not like we were building great quality products beforehand. Can we stop with the anti-AI sanctimony ? Some build great stuff, and some terrible, and software has predominantly been garbage for 15 years or more.
Yes. High value work where cost (mostly) doesn't matter. For example, if I need to look over a legal doc for possible mistakes (part of a workflow i have), it doesn't matter (in my case) whether it costs $0.01 or $10.00, since it's a somewhat infrequent event. So i'll pay $9.99 more, even if the model is only slightly better.
I'm surprised I never heard people talking about using -Pro variants, even though their rates ($125-175/M?) aren't drastically larger than old Opus ($75/M), which people seemed to use
How is a buyer supposed to trust that the scalper won't just run away with the money? And conversely, how is the scalper supposed to trust that buyers aren't just feigning interest and will back out at the last minute?
Even escrow systems don't necessarily bypass this because ultimately the buyer is likely spending on more than just the concert ticket. They're probably taking time off work, maybe traveling in from another city or country. So even if they might get their ticket money back if the seller backs out, by the time that happens, it's too late to get refunds on everything else.
And combined with the possibility of getting lower prices closer to the event (extra drops from the event, honest resellers who just can't make it, scalpers trying to cut their losses), even buyers wouldn't commit early to scalper prices.
Maybe limit total number of transfers among all tickets. Because it should be a small minority of legit transfers.
Scalpers should be less likely to take a chance their transfer will be denied, whereas to a legit customer and friend ticket is otherwise worthless and just a best effort anyway.
Or beyond the first X% of transfers you do more rigorous validation. Like asking for the original buyer to call in to confirm in realtime. Something not easily automated.
Not sure myself, it seems like some of the founders were kicked out in 2025 for "misuse of funds" according to the auditor of TDF / or the Foundation authorities?
Also found this in the annual report, sounds quite serious:
> In 2023, following a request by the Foundation Authorities in Berlin, given the size our foundation has grown into over the last decade, TDF was audited, and a report was sent back to Berlin. The Board of Directors is working with the authorities to implement the improvements suggested by the audit
Yikes. They set up the foundation in Berlin, Germany? A country well known for its braindead tax laws and bureaucracy, particularly when it comes to NGOs?
It's stated as conflict of interest, not some bureaucracy.
Things are still vague, due to some legal liability, probably. Sounds to me like for some grants/tenders received by the non-profit were contracted out to Collabora. Which in turn, profits from the base project.
I wouldn't call it theft, exactly. Presumably work did get done. If I'm reading it right, its just a terrible conflict of interest. The board uses donations to pay companies to work on LibreOffice. That seems totally fine. Some of the board were running/part of companies that rely and work on LibreOffice. That also seems mostly fine? You want your board to represent your community. Then, those same board members directed work towards their companies.
That's definitely a conflict of interest, but I wouldn't call it theft unless you prove the foundation was getting a bad deal. Could the foundation have gotten the work done better or cheaper hiring non-represented companies? That's the question you have to answer to call this theft.
It doesn't seem that is really what the foundation is arguing though, so I'm guessing it wasn't that bad. It seems more their argument is that this violates the non-profit laws they operate under.
> Some of the board were running/part of companies that rely and work on LibreOffice. That also seems mostly fine?
Those board members were elected by foundation members who also work for Collabora, so it was a privilege escalation from contributors to (controlling?) foundation board seats
> It doesn't seem that is really what the foundation is arguing though, so I'm guessing it wasn't that bad. It seems more their argument is that this violates the non-profit laws they operate under.
It may have been that bad. They don't really have to get into the messy arguments of "was this a fair price for this kind of contracting" because that kind of arrangement is inherently unethical, to the point that you can kind of assume it's embezzlement by default (which is why those non-profit laws are set that way).
It's a kind of corruption referred to as "self-dealing."
As directors of LibreOffice, they should be looking for the best deals for LibreOffice. Contractors (or any employee) are always (logically and reasonably) looking to do the least amount of work possible for the most compensation possible, so if as a director you use yourself as a contractor, your duty opposes your interests.
And if on the one hand you're being paid a flat salary (or no salary at all) for making decisions for LibreOffice; and on the other hand the worse the contracts you make with yourself are for LibreOffice, the more income you will receive, plunder is absolutely inevitable.
This is exacerbated even more with some nonprofit who is answering to an amorphous public who is funding it. They have no way of stopping you, other than withdrawing entirely.
I’m not sure I agree with your argument but all of it made sense until you started talking about Cuba.
Iran knows that the US population really really doesn’t want a ground invasion. Right now, we have lost a handful of lives from missiles hitting US bases, but it’s not the same as a ground war.
Cuba, however, would very much get a ground invasion if they start striking the US with missiles. It’s not even a question. And I also assume their leaders are not religious fanatics with any interest in martyrdom.
Iran also knows that Americans don't want high gas prices so they targeted Americans' wallets from the outset. If even a half-assed invasion attempt existed that so much as involved a single dock being damaged, the psychological damage to America would be intense. America hasn't really been invading in, what, 2 centuries? War is a thing that happens "over there", never at home. It's easy to dissociate and pretend it doesn't affect you. Once people realize they've poked a bear, regret sinks in fast.
Bad quarter for certain, but to keep things in perspective, the S&P is still up 13% over the past 12 months (likely 14% as soon as the market opens in 20 minutes). There's nothing magical about a "quarter". Had Q1 2025 ended 4 days later, it would have been significantly worse than this, but then the market went on to have a huge rally after that.
Well the thing is -- when you have rampant inflation, the cost of everything in USD goes up -- be it houses, eggs, or even stocks. So when you subtract out how much the value of the USD has gone down relative to other currencies it's basically another 10% drop.
Eggs are pretty cheap right now. Housing and healthcare are why Americans struggle with affordability. Food, gas, etc. are all just drops in the bucket.
Eggs may be cheaper than when they were during culling/avian flu, but food sure isn't. Where I am most grocery items are now 50-70% more expensive than last January. The milk I buy weekly at the grocery store has increased 67% since then. Beef is roughly 50% more, and I haven't even had steak since late 2024 at this point. That isn't sustainable.
Why did you go to 'eggs'? -- An avian flu issue, not an inflation issue. We're struggling not just because of healthcare or housing but because everything is being optimized/maximized for value extraction. Variable pricing, rampant plagiarism, counterfeiting, fraud in every industry, in every political office. the stocks are being propped up with the promise of value that has circular investing, monopolies are basically encouraged. Gas and food is relatively benign even with shrinkflation and petrol dollar (not for long) preference.
It's not the biggest expense, but adding another $100 a month to gas when Americans are already relying on debt to cover bills doesn't spell a good omen.
A year ago was exactly the market bottom due to tariff drama. 13% up from that isn't exactly a shining achievement.
Go back another couple months to when Trump took office and the total gains have been ~3.5%. A couple more random missile strikes and it'll go into the negative.
The only people making money in today's market are those with insider info about US economic and military actions (aka Trump and his associates).
Do bear in mind the context of that Buffett quote is to not blindly chase market sentiment and the numbers, neither directly nor inversely; Berkshire Hathaway's got quite the pile of cash right now.
I have a feeling Warren Buffet would accept that label, with a chuckle and a smirk!
But I also think Buffet wouldn't characterize the current environment as particularly fearful. We haven't seen a whole lot of panic aside from a couple 1-2% daily swings, which is nothing.
I'm not defending the UN here, but I don't think that the Secretary General is the person who decided to put Google Tags on their website. I'd be shocked if he even vaguely knows what a Google Tag is.
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