Red

Auditor, apparently, former infosec/tech/IP/AI lawyer and TPRM lead. I tweet only for myself. Tweets != legal advice. RT != endorsement. IANYL.

[David Hines @hradzka]

flipside of the popularity of LitRPGs, wherein the world works the way it is claimed to and effort is materially rewarded

[Ethan Brooks @alt_w_v_g]

My wife mentioned a nice private school over dinner this week
She said the campus was beautiful
I asked what's the tuition
She said we should look at it as an investment in him not a cost
I made a note
She said don't make a note
I said I always make notes
She said this isn't a deal
I said everything is a deal
She closed her eyes

She said we'd discuss it Saturday
I agreed

Saturday 7:02am
She came downstairs in her Saturday robe
Coffee in hand
I had my cargo shorts on

The dining room had been cleared
The projector was on
The analyst was at the head of the table
Quarter zip on, three iced coffees, a legal pad, and two laptops
He had been there since 6:44am

I texted him at 11:14pm Friday
The text said dining room 6:45am bring the model
He sent a thumbs up

My wife stopped in the doorway
She said what is this
I said you said you wanted to discuss it
She said this is not a discussion
I did not respond
She sat down anyway

The analyst stood
He said good morning ma'am
She did not respond
He sat back down
A printed deck in front of each seat
A fourth copy in case

Slide 1 Tuition Schedule
$38,500 per year
Thirteen years
$500,500 nominal
Before escalators
The school has raised tuition 4.2% per year for a decade
With escalators $648,000
My wife said okay
I said I'm not done

Slide 2 Opportunity Cost
Even before escalators
$38,500 invested annually
10% nominal return
S&P long-run average since 1928
By his eighteenth birthday $944,000
My wife said we can afford it
I said I know that's not the slide

Slide 3 Terminal Value at Age 65
$83 million
She was quiet

The analyst slid the sensitivity tables across the table
8% return $31 million
10% return $83 million
12% return $222 million
She did not look

She said this isn't about money
I said it's always about money
She said no it isn't
I said then what is it about
She did not answer

She said you can't put a dollar value on his teachers his classmates his environment
I said I can the analyst already did slide 6
He flipped to slide 6
She did not look

She said the school is the best in the city
I said best is a feeling
She said it produces the best students
I said the students were already the best before they got there

She said our son deserves it
I said our son deserves $83 million

My son walked in
He is five
Dinosaur pajamas
He looked at the projector
He looked at the open deck on the table
He looked at slide 3
He said are we modeling pre-tax or after-tax
The analyst opened a new tab
My wife looked at the ceiling

He said what's the discount rate
The analyst set down his pen
She closed her eyes

He said is this the same return assumption from the 529 conversation
The analyst stopped typing
He looked at me
I did not say anything

She stood up
Sat back down

He said dad can I help
I said yes
He pulled up a chair
The analyst handed him a printout
He started reading

My wife watched him read
She watched him for a long time

She said his name
He looked up
She said do you like school
He said the work is too easy and the kids don't ask questions

She did not respond
She looked at the ceiling
She walked out of the room

The analyst started packing up
He said should I follow up Monday sir
I said no follow up needed

He'll be fine

Sent from my iPhone

[Red @redroark]

💯 Every damn thing that is a pain in the ass but IT won’t dedicate resources to because it isn’t “revenue generating” is about to get the shit automated out of it by someone who is just a little ahead of their peers with AI.

[Rishabh Mukherjee @rishabhm]

I can share an interesting experience from last week. We have a person who is incharge of buying hardware, software and data sets. This might sound stupid but when you are buying 100s of servers, workstations and laptops a month, it's complicated. This dude used Claude to create an entire tracking and maintanence portal that inventoried everything. He even managed to integrate the portal with our monitoring software to display the status of every server vm. He then modified it to store invoices and so on. He's been at it for a couple of weeks and we've been able to identify wastage and needs.

Without Claude, this would have been a maze of spreadsheets and a lot of manual labor. But we wouldn't have hired a developer for this. To me, this kind of software is the killer use case for AI. Enough to simplify your life, but not enough to justify hiring someone or buying a product.

Is the code great? Is it scalable? Is it good software engineering? No, no and no. But that's besides the point.

[Ryan Hurst @rmhrisk]

My father learned rocket chemistry on a subsistence farm using stump remover and sugar. No kits. No experts. Just trial, error, and the stubborn belief that if it's broken, you fix it with what you have.

He went on to have his name engraved on hardware that flew in orbit. Then he spent decades in our garage with a green chalkboard and his slide rule, trying to make sure I understood concepts like orbital decay, thrust, specific impulse, the rocket equation, and more, because he was convinced we were forgetting how to go to the moon.

He was right. And we're doing it again.

https://t.co/S4OR1CGR1h

[Red @redroark]

This was a really fun little test of color vision and also a really well designed test. What's My JND? 0.0099
Can you beat it? https://t.co/24QQqOCh1a

[Jovian Gautama 劉恆原 @jovvvian]

Don’t stop at fast food

Let’s get Adobe CEO to try canceling an Adobe subscription

[Red @redroark]

@politicalmath This week’s parsha!

[Tim Sweeney @TimSweeneyEpic]

Apple is the only company with a great proposal here: let parents, who buy the devices used by kids, set up kids accounts and decide what they're allowed to do, then pass those decisions to apps through parental controls -- without demanding anyone's identity papers.

[The Ringer @ringer]

Quarterbacks are judged on what they do in the biggest games, and there’s no bigger game than the Super Bowl. So @theStevenRuiz ranked all the 50 Super Bowl QB performances of the 21st century, from worst to … guess who.

https://t.co/g58v05CsUJ

[Grits n Football @goodbreffis]

WHAT IS THIS SORCERY?!

[Red @redroark]

@varadmehta All of them.

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

Russia supplied the hardware.
China published the playbook.
Iran just proved it works.

Starlink: 80% packet loss.

Expert monitoring Iranian internet for 20 years: “I have never seen such a thing in my life.”

The “LEO satellites are unjammable” consensus?

Dead.

Wall Street modeled Starlink as immune because satellites hop frequencies and move constantly. SpaceX patched SOFTWARE against Russian jamming in Ukraine.

This is HARDWARE.

Murmansk-BN. Krasukha-4. Delivered via IL-76 transports. 5,000 kilometer jamming range.

Two months ago, Chinese researchers published exactly how to black out Starlink over Taiwan: 935 coordinated ground-based jammers blanketing Ku-band frequencies.

Tehran was the field test.

40,000 terminals. Near-total degradation. Regime now executing anyone caught with a dish as “enemies of God.”

This is not about Iranian protests.

This is the authoritarian electronic warfare axis proving concept for Taiwan.

The $280 billion satellite communications market is repricing a risk that consensus said didn’t exist.

Defense stocks are about to enter a new cycle.

And somewhere in Beijing, someone is taking very detailed notes on what worked.

[Red @redroark]

Inside each city are two wolves, Philly edition:

[Red @redroark]

@MorlockP Oooh, which vacuum sealer do you recommend?

[Red @redroark]

I’ve been thinking about this exact point lately. I’m not sure it 100% discounts the possibility of an AI bubble, but it is a significant difference.

[Tren Griffin @trengriffin]

Satya: "Let's not forget that the .com bubble was also a telecoms bubble. Today is anything but dark fiber. It's not like any one is sitting there and saying, 'hey, I have all the GPUs wired up and nobody's using them.' I don't have a utilization problem." https://t.co/gJqIhODNO7

[Red @redroark]

@JHWeissmann I saw that post too this morning. I think we’ve definitely seen a huge democratization of traditional BBQ with pellet smokers. Definitely way more people who care about the year-round cost of brisket now than 5-10 years ago.

[Red @redroark]

@captgouda24 @scottlincicome Neat. I downloaded the paper to read after work.

[AshutoshShrivastava @ai_for_success]

Vibe coding is the future 🤣