Latest Posts (20 found)
ava's blog Today

showing up for my illnesses is hard

I’ve written about chronic illness being a second job before. I’m feeling it especially hard right now. I think of all the time spent in waiting rooms, all the time in appointments, the time spent getting to them and back home again. Getting referrals in time for the appointments. Inserting my insurance card at the doctor’s office or hospital once a quarter to be able to get prescriptions or referrals. Blood tests, stool tests, urine tests, MRIs, gastroscopies and colonoscopies, infusions. Ordering the meds to hopefully arrive on time. Eating a certain way not to trigger stuff. Exercising and stretching for mobility, help my bones and keep muscle mass. Injections every two weeks forever. A pill every day. Bad time? Another course of Prednisone. Pain. Rashes. Rage. Water retention. Muscle loss. Round cheeks. There’s always something to track, something new. Medication adjustment, new medication altogether, now this works against that but not for this, and so on. Breakthrough bleeding I have to bring up at the gynecologist. Good control over my spondyloarthritis with adalimumab, but struggling with the Crohn’s, which I’ll have to bring up to both my rheumatologist and gastroenterologist. That’ll likely mean another new medication and a split, since I used to be able to take one drug for both. One more thing to track, to get prescribed, to reorder and pick up in time, one more thing to jam into my leg. 2 years and I still struggle with injecting anything and drag it out for minutes, wailing to my wife that I don’t wanna do it. 2 years with a diagnosis and while it has been long enough, sometimes it just hits me all over again that this will never go away and I’ll always have to deal with that, and I just wanna cry. Sometimes, I just wanna give up and not go to the appointments, not take my meds, and avoid even thinking about it. Sometimes, I’d rather keep on living with some new issue and pain and procrastinate on it, than address it with doctors. It takes me a huge amount of energy to make the appointments, and sometimes I keep putting it off for weeks. On the day of, I keep thinking about not going. I haven’t missed a single one, because logically I know things won’t get better by avoidance, but the urge is still there. Being chronically ill and having a doctor’s appointment feels like you keep being a victim reporting similar crimes over and over again to the police, and you have no influence over whether you’re believed and whether they’ll catch the perp. You always walk in not knowing what to expect. I’m lucky to be believed. But I still hate feeling like the endless victim all the time that has something to complain about, whether new or the same old crime. I no longer want to be a victim! Even I get bored and annoyed by it. Again? You’re having issues again? Are your meds even doing anything? I don’t even wanna bring it up to people anymore or answer honestly when people ask. I’ll be in agonizing pain one week and fine the next, but I still do the same things (work, study, volunteering etc.) because the show must go on. You as an outsider can’t make sense of it and neither can I. I have no good explanation. I know it all sounds like complete bullshit. Most people have no concept of this type of chronic illness. Their family member or friend got a diagnosis like diabetes or high blood pressure and take their meds and are fine. They’re not getting resistant to meds, no days where it works and days where it inexplicably doesn’t. Maybe the best comparison is your friend on several antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds who still struggles every couple weeks. There’s still so much we don’t know about the brain, and the same goes for our immune system, autoimmune issues, allergies and the like. It’s even worse than my brain has me believe, and probably for my own good so I can mentally survive. Journaling and monthly reviews made me discover this. In my head, I had good weeks and months until a particular day, but then I look back on what I wrote down over the course of this year and I’ve forgotten 90% of illness flare ups. Demoralizing, but at least I can give the doctors better feedback. It’s tiring to do it all while it also feels like my body is simultaneously a the boxing ring at the same time and I lose and lose and lose before a win. I’m always fighting something on the side, there is always something I work around, mask, or make up for, a setback I hide. Chronic illness is like having a toddler with me at all times. The toddler is demanding varying levels of attention, rest, encouragement, and the balancing of body needs stats like a Sim. Too bad, I wanted to study, but my toddler demands me to nap with them! I wanted to exercise, but my toddler has the runs! The toddler has the worst stomach cramps and rages in a way that could make glass burst, gotta isolate them and calm them down! I’m sick of that toddler and having to justify its actions and working around its existence. I didn’t choose to have it, and no one else can watch over it than me. I just wanna leave it in the care of someone else for a while and forget about it. Reply via email Published 26 Apr, 2026

writing Writing
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Kev Quirk Today

Why Is Everything Proprietary These Days?

After 10 years of loyal service, the motorbike jacket that I wear most often gave up the ghost recently and ripped. Being a piece of protective clothing, a rip isn't a good thing, so I've been shopping around for a replacement. But you see, motorbike jackets are complex, heavy garments that are littered with protective pads. They used to come with back protectors too, but it was later decided that these were too expensive, so you had to buy one separately. No problem, they're standardised so you buy a good one and it can last you decades. There's just a big void in the back of the jacket with a number of velcro patches that any back protector will cling to. That's what I have in my old jacket, and I assumed it was still the same now. So today I bought myself a new jacket. It cost me £380 (on sale!) but you can't put a price on safety, right? I also have protective trousers that zip to my jacket all the way around my waist. But the zip on my new jacket isn't compatible with the zip on my old trousers (how the fuck can a ZIP be incompatible??) so I bought the matching trousers for the new jacket, costing another £300. So now I'm £650 lighter in the bank, but I have good quality motorbike clothing that should last me another decade. This evening I went to swap the back protector from my old jacket to the new, only to find that many manufacturers now have brand-specific pads for their clothing that sit in perfectly sculpted pockets. The specific back protector (which is a bit of rubber with some holes in it) for my jacket is fifty fucking pounds. So now I'm at £700. Fifty quid's worth of rubber, apparently Fuck that. I've bought a generic (but good quality) one, and I'll cut it to size. Whether it's phones, social networks, communication platforms, printer ink, laptop chargers, smart home systems, games consoles, coffee machines, electric toothbrush heads, camera batteries, or fucking motorbike jacket back protectors. Nothing is interchangeable. It seems that every day another piece of standardisation is being washed away, and we as consumers need to make our choices, invest, and stick to a brand. You can switch, but it's gonna cost ya! It's fucking ridiculous. Over and over again we get shafted, and there's not a single thing we can do about it. I'm so tempted to take the jacket back for a refund, but what do I do then? I need a jacket for riding. I'd be screwed. Fuck bike jacket manufacturers that do this. Fuck vendor lock-in. Fuck. This. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment .

business Business hardware Hardware
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Jim Nielsen Today

Collective Speed Is Not the Summation of Individual Speed

I’ve been thinking about speed which is why Chris Coyier caught my attention in his latest piece discussing how AI might be 10✕ing the speed with which we code, but it’s not making our software 10✕ better: Faster individuals don’t make a fast company My mind immediately went to the 4✕100 relay at the Olympics. (Not sure which race that is? Watch the London 2012 one .) Imagine you were put in charge of winning the 4✕100 relay. All you gotta do is find the four faster sprinters in your country — right? I’m no track and field expert, but I doubt it’s that simple. In a relay race, the baton is arguably the most critical element. Passing it cleanly is vital because if you fumble it you’re easily behind a few meters or maybe even disqualified. So, one could argue, a sprinter’s ability to pass and receive the baton is more important than speed because all the speed in the world won’t help you overcome a dropped baton. (There are other considerations too, like which leg each runner takes, which sequence works best given individual pairings and rapport, and whether a slower veteran might perform better in the heat of the moment.) Faster runners won’t guarantee a faster team. And faster coders won’t guarantee a faster company. Like a relay race, it might be worth giving some thought to the relationships and interfaces between people. Reply via: Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

business Business
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Unsung Today

What deserves a second chance

To follow up from yesterday’s post , in Figma, object selection actually goes onto the undo stack. This is because in a professional tool with objects in multiple levels of hierarchy, it might take a while to construct a selection to work on – and since selection is always just one accidental click away from being completely cleared, undoable selection is extra protection. However, at the same time renaming a file – or changing settings like file access – is not undoable. This is in part because we didn’t feel people would understand they could cancel out their rename this way (Safari too used to have “reopen last tab” under ⌘Z, until it reverted to Chrome’s ⌘⇧T), but mostly because you could accidentally undo through a file rename during regular work if you were not careful, without noticing, and that felt like it’d have more profound consequences. In some ways, it helped me to think of these not as “ineligible for undo” but rather “living outside of time.” The moment a file is renamed, it will always have been named that way. (For the purposes of undo, at least. You can acknowledge anything you want on the version history screen.) I’m not saying these are universally correct choices – as a matter of fact, some users find undoable selection (at least initially) pretty confusing! – but mostly sharing these as examples of intentional thinking about what deserves undo, and what should be exempt from it and taken care of elsewhere. #details #flow #interface design #keyboard

design Design
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miguelgrinberg.com Today

How Bitwarden Encrypts and Decrypts Secrets

As part of my efforts in reducing my dependency on Big Tech, I have been researching how to self-host my password manager. One solution that looks very promising is Vaultwarden , an open source clone of the Bitwarden cloud server. An interesting aspect of this server is that it stores all the secrets in a standard SQLite database, so in addition to having the self-hosted password server I could keep a backup copy of the database on my machine and query it directly. But of course, the secrets are encrypted in this database, so they are useless unless I learn how to decrypt them, similar to how the Bitwarden clients do it. Speaking of the Bitwarden clients, while I was writing this article it came out that the official Bitwarden CLI client was compromised in a supply chain attack. This is a tool that I personally use and have on all my computers, so this feels like a wake up call to me. Luckily I did not install the compromised version myself, but I think there is an argument to be made about rolling your own secret management client instead of relying on the one all the hackers are after! In this article I'll share how the encryption of secrets works in Bitwarden and its Vaultwarden clone. I'll also include working Python code, in case you want to tinker with this and like myself, would be interested in building your own tooling to keep your secrets safe.

security Security python Python
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Gabriel Weinberg Yesterday

Start collecting an AI "token tax" now; figure out exactly what to do with the funds later

Large AI risks abound, including a massive wave of coming job displacement that will upend the lives of millions of people. Even if new AI jobs are ultimately created such that net job loss is minimal, many of the people who are displaced are unlikely to be the same people to get these new jobs, and the new jobs are unlikely to be created at exactly the same time the old jobs are lost. In other words, millions of displaced people will need our support, for example, to receive extended unemployment benefits while they retrain and look for new work. This support will cost real money. Meanwhile, the leading AI companies are already generating billions in revenue, with no signs of slowing down. There are many proposals that would pair a so-called “token tax” on AI usage with support for displaced workers. Every one I've seen, though, specifies disbursement mechanisms up front, such as direct payments based on specific triggers. But what shape that support should optimally take remains genuinely uncertain: the peak of displacement hasn't been reached, and we don't yet know which industries will be hit hardest, or on what timelines. Instead of trying to work any of this out up front, we can decouple the collection of the tax from how funds would be disbursed. We should start collecting an AI token tax now, and figure out exactly what to do with the funds later, holding them in a true lockbox outside general appropriations, with statutory protection limiting use of funds to supporting displaced workers in the future. We’d (at DuckDuckGo) be willing to support bills to this effect and ultimately pay a token tax, presumably collected by the leading AI companies on a usage basis, for example a 10% surcharge on token charges. That amount would roughly match the 10% employers pay in payroll taxes, which also further reduces the incentive to replace human workers with AI workers. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts or get the audio version .

ai AI business Business
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Unsung Yesterday

“The cheatsheet you won’t need.”

A fun bit of storytelling on the website for a git client Retcon : I don’t have personal experience with Retcon. I definitely struggled a lot with git’s syntax over the years, and have my own cheatsheet that looks similar to this. But what I really liked from this page was the elevation of undo to be the North Star. I think it’s very, very well deserved. To the best of my knowledge, undo in its modern form arrived in 1983 with Apple Lisa – Byte magazine called it a “ tremendous security blanket ” – and then over the next decade or so blossomed into its current state: an infinite, multi-level, lightning-fast safety hatch that works pretty much everywhere, always there in the bottom-left corner of your keyboard, so second-nature you might not even realize you’re invoking it. In early apps, before undo arrived, you had to be very careful about what you did and when you saved your work. Later on, undo worked on just one level, so you had to think a lot about how to spend it before things became irreversible. Today, undo just works . It truly became Back Space: The Next Generation. But any user-facing “just works” hand wave means a lot of people’s hard and invisible work behind the scenes. So if you’re reading this, and at some point in your career you worked on making undo better, my tip of the hat to you (and send me a message!). #errors #interface design #maintenance

git Git design Design
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Unsung Yesterday

“That’s how floating point errors and triangle numbers solved a mystery.”

Minecraft is so complex that it’s sometimes hard to know what is a bug and what is not. Here’s the logic of the game: The first is common in games. The second is – I believe! – a former bug that was grandfathered in as a design decision : people got used to it, started relying on it, and it became “too big to fix.” The retroactive explanation became that the boat is your shield and takes all the fall damage, which is a very Hollywood action movie way of looking at the world. So, only the third one is a bug… obviously. But why those specific numbers? Here’s a 16-minute video by Matt Parker at Stand-up Maths that tries to answer it: It’s an interesting video because it’s lighter on bug causes discussion, but heavier on math – and the moment you realize those numbers above are not random at all and coalesce into a nice formula, is genuinely a pretty fun moment. I thought this was interesting, and a little contribution to a larger debate about how hard it is to even agree what a bug really is (which I previously briefly talked about it ). #bugs #games #youtube If you fall from height, you receive fall damage. If you fall from height but you’re in a boat, there’s no fall damage. If you fall from height and you’re in a boat, but you fall from a distance of 12, 13, 49, 51, 111, 114, 198, 202, 310 or 315 blocks, there is fall damage and you die.

gaming Gaming
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iDiallo Yesterday

The Satisfaction of a ChatGPT Plan

#NoFollowUpNecessary A couple weeks back, I was arguing that when people come up with ideas, the satisfaction is in the telling , not in building. And I was making this statement generally for idea sharing. But then, I also mentioned that people share their "ChatGPT plan" with me now. Rather than sharing the idea, they share the business plan on how to achieve the idea, entirely generated by AI. This resonated with several people who emailed me saying they have experienced the same thing. So someone they know has an idea, rather than risk the potential humiliation from being told their idea is bad, they share it with their favorite AI. Sycophancy being the default behavior, their idea is always validated. Even if not, the AI might suggest slight adjustment to the idea and make it valid. And at the end of a conversation with ChatGPT, the LLM, trying to be helpful, will always ask something in the line of: "Do you want me to create a step by step plan to achieve this?" The answer is always yes. Please tell me how I can make millions off my unique idea, and give me the details... make no mistakes. The plan that comes back is elaborate. You can even ask ChatGPT to expand on specific sections. Now, this plan is what ends up being shared. Every single time I receive those plans and read them, I notice something funny. When I ask a question about a section, my friends have no answers . They have to go back to the AI to get an answer. Why don't they have an answer? Because they are reading it for the first time with me. Basically, because the plan is long and elaborate, who has time to read it? The satisfaction is in the format and complexity, not in the execution of the plan. They had an idea, ChatGPT improved it, then it built a plan and solution for the problem. So their idea now has a solution, and the solution must be correct because AI came up with it. The problem is solved, we can file it in a cabinet. Executing it was never the issue. I'm sure there will be a psychological term for this. A term for getting a psychological reward from watching AI come up with a plan of execution for your ideas. This isn't specific to OpenAI's ChatGPT, it's a catch-all for all generative AI in the current market. Even when I'm doing research for a blog post, I'm often caught in the "Would you like me to expand further on this?" questions that can easily lure you into a rabbit hole. I guess AI providers are learning from social media. In social media, the goal isn't to socialize with friends and family anymore. Instead, they are trying to keep you engaged for as long as possible, to expose you to the maximum number of advertisements. With AI, the goal isn't to impart you with knowledge. Instead it's to give you the satisfaction of appearing knowledgeable by keeping you engaged with an AI while they expose you to ads and spend your tokens.

ai AI business Business
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Chris Coyier Yesterday

AI & Alignment

Raw coding speed isn’t the bottleneck. Alignment is the bottleneck. That seems to be a zeitgeist-y theme lately. If you’re using AI to code, maybe you’re feeling it. You can code more and faster . And clearly a boatload of other developers are doing that too. But software doesn’t seem to be exploding in quantity or quality broadly. Maybe it’s a little? But if AI is 10✕ing our coding, we’re certainly not seeing software get 10✕ better. Which is maybe why Andrew Murphy is saying: If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem – you have bigger problems . Your developers are producing PRs faster than ever. Great. Wonderful. Gold star. Someone get the confetti cannon. Now those PRs hit the review queue, and your reviewers haven’t tripled. Nobody tripled the reviewers. Nobody even  thought  about the reviewers, because the reviewers weren’t in the vendor’s slide deck. Or maybe you don’t even get to the “too many PRs” problem because nobody even knows quite what to build. Because you need team alignment to figure that out. You need research. You need stakeholder buy-in. You need a damn plan. And AI isn’t, for the most part, helping with those things. And those things are hard. Or maybe you are just ripping PRs and your code is evolving rapidly. AI doesn’t help you know… is this the right thing to do? Is it working? Does anybody care? That probably should have been part of the plan, and again, that’s the hard part. Maybe this is an industry-wide topic right now not just because it’s hitting the community feeling frequency just right, but because there is academic research supporting it . I can’t pretend to understand all that, but I appreciate it’s being looked at with mathematic rigor. We’re also seeing tooling react to this situation. I think it’s fair to say that AI is increasing the productivity of individuals. But Maggie Appleton pulls out the classic saying: but 9 women can’t have a baby in 1 month. Fasters individuals don’t make a fast company, unless they are perfectly aligned . Maggie showing off new GitHub software that is designed to acknowledge and help with alignment issues. I tend to agree that software itself can evolve to help. Just the fact that AI, in “planning mode” isn’t sharing that plan with a team, is weird, and an easy target to make better. I also think getting a bunch of humans in alignment is just a thing that takes time. It should be a bottleneck. I’ll forever think of Dave’s “Slow, like brisket.” Some things becomes good because they are done slowly, and it’s OK if software is one of them.

ai AI
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Dan Moore! Yesterday

Meetings are forcing functions

A recurring meeting serves as a powerful forcing function for long-running projects. Many organizations face a common challenge: a complex project that requires effort and perspectives from multiple people, moves through definition and execution phases, and unfolds over weeks, months, or years. But one where the tasks to accomplish the project are not anyone’s full-time job. Everyone has other obligations, fires to put out, and emails to answer. It’s easy for long-term strategic, high-impact work to sink to the bottom of everyone’s todo list. One effective solution is to schedule a standing meeting. Whether in person or video, it doesn’t matter. The key to making progress is maintaining an agenda and, critically, opening each meeting by reviewing the to-dos from the previous one. This creates pressure on everyone to make progress. When people know they’ll be asked “what’s the status of X that we talked about last wee?” at an upcoming meeting, it is easier, though not easy, to carve out time for that work amid the daily chaos. This approach works across organizational boundaries too. If you’re a consulting firm, a regular cadence of meetings with your client is especially valuable. You’re  motivated to deliver., but people on the client’s team may be less so. A meeting where you consistently show progress while they haven’t made any creates gentle but real accountability. If you’re managing a large, complex, multi-person effort, consider the standing meeting. As far as schedule, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly all have worked for me in the past. Pick whatever fits the urgency. Use a meeting as a forcing function to ensure people actually make time to move the project forward.

business Business agile Agile
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Kev Quirk 2 days ago

ThinkPad T480 Initial Thoughts

Since my Framework had a coffee bath , I've been using a ThinkPad T480 that I picked up from eBay for £285 ($385). This has been my main laptop for a few days now, and I have some thoughts, so I thought I'd share them since I've read mixed reviews on these plucky little laptops - everything from: They're the best laptops in the world, EVARRRRR! They're overrated and overpriced - stop buying them! My opinion is that the T480 is somewhere in the middle of these 2 opinions. Let's just in... Like I said, I paid £285 for this laptop, which was listed as very good condition - refurbished" . And I agree - the condition of the laptop is very good, especially considering it's been a corporate laptop and is 8 years old at this point. It came with a 14" 1080p screen, 16GB RAM, a Core I5-8250U CPU (4 core, 8 thread @ 3.4GHz), a 256GB NVMe, and Windows 11 (which was promptly removed). I had a 1TB NVMe lying around, so I upgraded that first, and I've also bought a 32GB RAM upgrade costing an additional £70 ($95). The RAM upgrade hasn't been delivered yet, so these thoughts are based on 16GB RAM. My T480 (yes, those stickers needs to go) This laptop has bezels for days compared to my Framework, but that's to be expected. It's an old, utilitarian laptop - that didn't stop me getting a bit of a shock when I first cracked it open though. Now I've been using it a few days, the bezels don't bother me though. I've always liked ThinkPad keyboards, and this is no exception. It works great, and has lots of travel on the keys, which I always appreciate. It's not as nice as the keyboard on my Framework, but I think that's the best keyboard I've ever used, Macbook included. I'm not a fan of the textured finish that's all over this laptop though. It's on the case, on the keyboard, the trackpad, everywhere . It's like a slightly rubberised, gritty finish. It doesn't impact the functionality of the laptop, I'm just not a big fan of it. The keyboard is backlit too, which I appreciate. Honestly, I was expecting the battery to be crap on the T480, being second-hand. But I was so wrong! It came with an extended battery fitted, and on checking it over, it's only had 2 charge cycles, so it brand new. The battery will last all day, no problem at all. The other day I ran it for an entire working day, and at 15:00 it still had 61% charge left, with Ubuntu reporting another 6.5 hours of use remaining. That's incredible, in my opinion. Ubuntu runs perfectly on this - all drivers were discovered fine, and I managed to get the fingerprint reader working with just a little bit of DuckDuckGo-fu. Performance is good too. Everything feels snappy with no lag. Obviously it's not instant like on my Framework, but that thing is a powerhouse. Having said that, I could see myself using the T48 long-term without issue. I'm currently running Firefox, Spotify, Obsidian, VSCodium, and a few other bits. Here's how the Ubuntu System Monitor looks: So I'm using about half my RAM, and between 20-40% of the CPU. I don't need to upgrade the RAM, but it's nice to have the extra overhead in case I ever do need it. I'm not much of a gamer, but the T480 will consistently run Minecraft at 40ish FPS, which is fine, and honestly better than I expected. Overall I think the T480 was good value for money. It's in really good condition, performs well, and is almost as repairable as my Framework. I think this laptop still has years of life left in it, so will it sit in a drawer once the Framework is repaired? No, that would be a waste of both money, and a perfectly good laptop. My wife is currently using a 2014 X1 Carbon that I used for many years before switching to the Macbook M1 Air . The X1 is still going strong, but it's starting to struggle in its old age. Not to mention that my wife is still running Windows 10 on it! So once the Framework is repaired, I'll be giving this laptop to my wife where it should continue to provide solid service for years to come, all while being a nice upgrade for her. The X1 will get the latest version of Ubuntu installed on it, and will be put out to pasture as the spare laptop for the household. If you're on the fence about picking a T480 up, I'd say go for it. While they're no powerhouse, and won't win any beauty awards, they're a solid workhorse that still have many years of service left in them. I'm very happy with my purchase. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment .

hardware Hardware
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ava's blog 2 days ago

why i don't write the usual privacy stuff

When you search for privacy/data protection stuff, what you will usually come across are things like privacy guides , the privacy subreddit, interested tech-y privacy blogs and YouTube channels. They give you great advice and overviews over different kinds of alternative services or additional software you can use to protect yourself, and they rank them, rate them, give additional context and keep up with them in case anything changes. It's this stuff that initially got me interested in privacy, and I wouldn't know a lot of services if it wasn't for their work. I love that I can just refer people to those if they have any questions about specific alternatives, and they deserve their space in the privacy sphere. Anyway, this type of privacy material tends to do well online: It's easy to read, it gives you actionable steps to take, and immediately presents a solution. It says: You're still using Google services? Switch to the Proton Suite. You hate ads? Here are ad-blockers that also block trackers and popups and more. You "just" need to switch, or install more, and you're good. Crisis averted, you're safe/r. Meanwhile, more dry, theoretical, law-based stuff is harder to engage with and harder to write. The reason why I am not really interested in writing about privacy or data protection in the product-focused way isn't only because I am a law student and therefore more interested in law; it's because I prefer to talk more about why something is a problem (or a bad service), and I want to give people the tools to spot it, a legal justification for the bad gut feeling they have, and I don't want to end up just advertising products. The usual type of privacy content isn't always great at educating people on what the problem even is. This service is bad, this service is good (or at least better) is easy to believe at face value, especially when one is a big company and the other is smaller - but why is this bad, and why is this good? Okay, so one does more tracking and one does less tracking, but why is tracking bad? What stops this other service from also becoming "bad"? Nothing is really safe from enshittification, or bankruptcy, or losing their maintainer, or being steered by investors and existing under capitalism for profit. I'd feel bad having the majority of my posts in my area of interest to do the work of the sales department for these services, just for them to become another thing to move away from in a couple years. That is the downside of this sort of approach: You can install and switch all you want, but in the end, it puts a lot of responsibility onto the consumer and involves them in the never-ending arms race of avoiding something; whether that is not supporting an unethical company, or avoiding AI implementation, avoiding ads, avoiding trackers, avoiding becoming training data, etc. as both sides seek new loopholes and ways to get you to either comply and be subject to it anyway, or continue to be able to avoid it via another service or software. It's an unfair fight, where one side heavily depends on smaller companies or FOSS maintainers, and the other side are billion dollar companies that are having a monopoly on many things and have a huge influence on the most powerful government(s) of the world. Consumer choices are good and you should use yours to no longer support what doesn't align with your values, but they aren't everything, especially as the companies make it harder and harder for consumers to have this choice, or for that choice to even make a dent in their finances. That's where we need laws and consumer protections to hold them accountable and grant users who rely on these services better rights - even rights making migrating off of them easier, like the data portability aspect mandated by the GDPR. Indulging in the above sort of privacy content a lot can make you feel like you're outsmarting the Big Guys and you got it all under control while just the "normies" struggle who are just " too lazy to switch!11! ", but to me, that is a flimsy house of cards that can easily collapse. I say that while I too use these things - I am a Linux user, I have several browser extensions to reduce tracking and ads, I use forks like LibreWolf, I am a Proton user, I use a VPN, Signal, Matrix etc. - but I just want to be realistic about it and recognize that it just takes a little here and there for my products and services to vanish or get significantly worse, and that I don't want to foster a false sense of security. If you're like me and a millennial or older, you probably still remember all the past mass migrations between services. I also recognize how many people are left behind with this approach, or at least makes them rely on people around them who are knowledgeable in this stuff. In private, you have a choice, but you might be limited by your knowledge/awareness of alternatives, your understanding of tech, the complexity of the task, the network effect, or how willing the people around you or online are to help. Switching can be hard; transitioning cloud contents, or mail providers, and remembering to change your email address everywhere or at least implement a forwarding rule on the old one(s) can be a task that spans days or weeks next to all the other responsibilities you have. Then every now and then, you might wanna check in to see if your solution is still "good" or whether something changed. That's a lot more labor than just staying where you're at and where the majority is. Maybe you are the one to install a Linux distro for your grandparent, or an adblocker for your parents, and then you're on the hook when things break and have to take the time to sort it out, and they rely on your skills and time until their device is functional again. LibreWolf, for example, has broken many payment transactions for me in the past. At work, or in school or university, you probably don't have a choice at all. They force you into Microsoft and Google products or at least don't present alternative solutions in their setup guides. My work, for example, provides an MFA setup guide that only mentions Google Authenticator, even when any type of authenticator app would work. All of that is not ideal. Putting too much emphasis on switching one product out for another can sometimes produce this vibe of " If you're still using that proven-to-be-awful service, you consent to being exploited and tracked, and it's your fault for staying. " among privacy-interested people, but we can't let that run unchecked to basically mean that you can't expect better from platforms and the users deserve whatever is coming their way. Unless the laws make distinctions between company sizes, they apply to your sacred privacy-conscious competitor as well and might help to prevent them turning out "bad". I also think you'd want your friend, who cannot bring themselves to switch or delete a service, to still have at least some protections here and there, instead of pointing and laughing from your moral high ground. Your child deserves protections when they have to use Microsoft products on their school tablet or when they install TikTok to engage with their friends. They deserve to migrate as easily as possible. They deserve to have permanent deletions of their content. They deserve to not have their likeness uploaded to the platform used for advertising and AI deepfakes without their consent. They deserve to not be targeted by advertisers and political groups via the algorithm that attempts to radicalize them. They deserve not to have all their private data and especially location data leaked or sold, their DMs and art used for training data without consent, and so on. Even if they could switch/abstain and just don't do it. Switching from one service to another when both have the same profit goal and exist under the same system feels, and often is, a temporary bandaid. I don't wanna be a bandaid seller. I don't care about product names, I care for mechanisms, cash flow, dark patterns and settings options. I talk more about why things happen the way they do and make people aware that yes, this thing bothering you is very much illegal or should be handled differently. I write about what the root cause is (usually: attention economy, data brokerage business model etc.), and discuss (potential or actual) laws and other ways on how the root cause is contained, redirected or partially mitigated. We are also constantly hit with attempts by the US government to weaken and dissolve our EU consumer protections and that deserves more attention. I find that more productive and fitting to me/my style than being another " 50 privacy-focused services to consider " in a thousand, forced to make clickbait like " Is this service still safe in 2026??? ". Reply via email Published 25 Apr, 2026

security Security data Data
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iDiallo 2 days ago

What Do You Charge For?

I've written about my journey to learn how to charge a fair price for building a website before. But even after landing on a strategy, there is still a question that remains unanswered. What should I charge for? Are you charging the price for the product itself? As in, the very cost for building a website? Or are you charging enough to make a living? This question applies to any field, whether you are a consultant, a mechanic, or a private chauffeur. I once worked with a company that built websites for non-profits. Their price tag? $35,000 for a standard WordPress site. Lucky for me, I got a first-hand view of their price breakdown because they were trying to expand their reach to smaller customers. They needed to figure out how to lower the price, so they invited me to the meeting. Every single person in the room was involved in building the website. The standard time frame to complete it was 6 weeks. So, the manager named each person, their title and how much time they spend on the project. There were the designers, the copy writers, the consultants that gathered the information. There were the sales people who started the process, the 2 developers that included me. Everyone at the table was indispensable. Then he gave a ball park estimate of salaries using glassdoor standards, and the price jumped to 35k. It was completely fair. "What if we have Ibrahim as the sole developer on this tier?" the director asked. "And we use only one designer, and we can reuse copy." The manager crunched the numbers and we were still going to charge 25k. "What if I don't get involved at all in this tier?" the manager removed the director's name from the list. He contributed only a couple of hours of work, yet the number went down to 22k. I originally thought $35k was an astronomical amount for a website, but their breakdown showed it didn't even include profit. The salary costs alone ate up the budget. The actual profit for the company came later, from managing the marketing campaign. This is Cost-Plus pricing. You add up what it costs to make the thing, and that becomes the price. It feels logical, but it relies entirely on your costs, not the value you provide. But then, there is another way. The market-based pricing. Take a car, for example. A vehicle costs $35k because that is what the market is willing to pay for that specific make and model. The materials and labor to build the car might be significantly cheaper, or on occasion even more expensive (Rivian) than the sticker price. The price is dictated by the buyer's perceived value, not just the manufacturer's receipt. This method became clearer to me after I started consulting. When I would get a new client, I initially tried to price based on the old model of calculating what I thought my time was worth from a salaried perspective. I later found that the recruiting company I worked with was charging clients $78 per hour for my services, while paying me $40. The market (or the recruiter's markup) was valuing my time at nearly double what I was charging myself. You know the mechanic is gonna charge you extra for that flat Then, there is the wild card method. I've been the unlucky guy who finds himself out of town with a flat tire. I stop at the first tire shop I can find, and the worker doesn't size up my car; he sizes me up. He decides how much to charge based on how desperate I look. In those misadventures, the price has ranged anywhere from $20 to $150. I'm usually in no position to argue when I'm stranded on the side of the road. But how do they decide on those numbers? Are they making a profit? Or are they just charging whatever they think fills their quota for the day? This is opportunistic pricing, highly effective for a quick buck, but I don't think you can build trust like that. All these methods for charging have their pros and cons. My goal isn't to tell you which number to pick, but to encourage you to decide how you pick that number. My advice, in the simplest terms, is this: Be consistent. Once you choose a method, it becomes your standard. Do not deviate. If you charge based on value today, but switch to charging based on your mood tomorrow, your clients will never trust your pricing. They will always wonder if they are getting the "real" price or just the price you felt like charging that morning. They will start looking for other consultants. Pick the method that works for you, stick to it, and let your clients know exactly where they stand. Personally, I apply a value based pricing with my clients, where the cost is tied to their specific needs and the time required to meet them. It's a method that requires trust and communication, but it can be the most fair and profitable for both parties when applied consistently. When they end up with an obscene bill , at the very least they are prepared.

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The Jolly Teapot 2 days ago

Sidelining Safari

It was bound to happen . For months, I’ve done my best to prevent this, but eventually, my patience and tolerance weren’t enough. Here I am, writing a post about how I finally decided to ditch Safari as my main browser, and replace it with third-party options. This change was a slow process somehow — spanning a couple of weeks or so — but the gravitational forces of better options were very difficult to escape once I upgraded my work computer to Tahoe, and got to witness Liquid Glass, the mess of it all, and how right most critics were. Safari on Tahoe works fine, I guess, but so many little things feel wrong (it’s a theme with Tahoe and Liquid Glass ). For example, I can’t tell at first glance which tab is active , despite the enormous amount of screen real estate occupied by the address, tab, and bookmark bars. Meanwhile, the Safari extension situation is frustrating as always, and, in 2026, it is still impossible to use the search engine of your choice without requiring an extension that simply redirects search queries . For years, since the first version of Safari for Windows, I have been a loyal, if intermittent, user of Safari. Even today, in a work environment made of Google Workspace, Google Meet, Slack and others, I’ve resisted using the other usual suspects that are Blink-based browsers like Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, &c. I’ve dipped my toes in the water a few times, yes, but Safari remained my first choice. Habits, soft spot, call it whatever you want, but to me Safari was always the obvious, the default Mac browser, despite its flaws. Earlier this year, I gave Helium Browser a try: a newish, smartly named, Chromium-based browser, aimed at being light, fast, and stripped of all Google surveillance technologies. The trial was a success, and, after switching back to Safari for a fair fight, I realised that Helium was the most efficient browser to use for work. But the more I used Helium, the more I realised how much better it was than Safari, even the superior Sonoma version that runs on my personal computer. Helium is well-designed, and its set of features is exactly right for me, and, being a Chromium-based browser, it works with my web-related BBEdit scripts. *1 It was just a matter of time before admitting that sticking to Safari was not the best option any more, even for my personal use. My current JavaScript-off by default approach to web browsing surely didn’t help Safari’s case. Indeed, I was starting to get tired of opening private windows to reload tabs with JavaScript “turned back on” for sites requiring it. *2 It was fine until I realised how the same JS-off system was much more convenient to implement on Helium using uBlock Origin (an extension that comes with the browser). On Helium, this is how it works: JavaScript is turned off by default via uBlock Origin. When a site requires JS, I activate it temporarily for that site via uBlock Origin, and JS stays on, only on that tab, until I close it. For sites where I want JS on all the time, I can “lock” that setting and I don’t have to think about it again, or go into the browser’s settings, navigate to the list of sites where the extension is allowed or not, and so on. Quicker and easier than my Safari system. Another perk of not using Safari on my Mac — and therefore not being able to sync my favourites, history, and open tabs with my phone any more — is that I don’t have to stick to Safari on the iPhone either. I can now finally use the great Quiche Browser without feeling like I am missing out on the cross-device comfort I experienced with both instances of Safari. And you know what is great about Quiche Browser? You guessed it, I can add a handy JS on/off toggle onto the toolbar. With Safari and the way it makes extensions like StopTheScript work on iOS, the Private window or quick access to settings workaround I had on the Mac wasn’t manageable, making it pretty much impossible to browse the web with JavaScript turned on by default on the iPhone. *3 So what’s the catch with Helium? I am surprised to say that performance doesn’t seem to be an issue on my early 2020 MacBook Air, at least for now. It may be a little warmer than usual, yes, but I was expecting to hear the fan way more often than I do. Video streaming doesn’t appear to be easy on the CPU and/or memory, but it wasn’t great on Safari either. In fact, Kagi’s Orion — a WebKit-based browser — is seemingly worse than Helium on my computer when it comes to the vacuum cleaner sound effect. The main and only catch I can see so far is everything password-related. I use Apple Passwords, and I could solve 95% of my problems with the iCloud Passwords extension, but I want to use Helium with the services disabled, which prevents it from installing extensions. The Apple Passwords’ little shortcut that lives in the Mac menu bar is helping, but is not ideal. When I look at modern browsers like Helium or Orion on the Mac, and Quiche Browser on the iPhone, I can see a widening gap between those and Safari. These browsers — made by very small teams — are surprisingly good. Not sure I can say that about Safari any more. Using these apps, you can tell the developers behind them care about the product. How many people work on Safari at Apple? Are some members of the Safari team looking at this new generation of browsers? I hope they do, I hope they care. I hope one day they will give me good reasons to switch back to Safari. This is one thing I expect from Apple at WWDC. In the meantime, I’ll let you know how my honeymoon with Helium goes, or if I get sentimental and reunite with Safari sooner than expected. I wish Firefox and other Firefox-based web browsers would work with AppleScript.  ^ The extension StopTheScript is disabled by default on private windows, which is the quickest way to recreate a JS on/off toggle of sorts.  ^ How frustrating is it on the iPhone to access Safari extension settings? Go to the Settings app, scroll all the way down to Apps, scroll all the way down again to Safari, scroll until you find Extensions, click on the extension, and then you have the per-site settings. Madness.  ^ I wish Firefox and other Firefox-based web browsers would work with AppleScript.  ^ The extension StopTheScript is disabled by default on private windows, which is the quickest way to recreate a JS on/off toggle of sorts.  ^ How frustrating is it on the iPhone to access Safari extension settings? Go to the Settings app, scroll all the way down to Apps, scroll all the way down again to Safari, scroll until you find Extensions, click on the extension, and then you have the per-site settings. Madness.  ^

web-development Web Development javascript JavaScript
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Alex White's Blog 2 days ago

New Thinkpad Means Back to Mac OS

On Wednesday I picked up a new (to me) Thinkpad P14s Gen 4. I was excited to finally get off my System76 Pang12, a computer that works, but has a long list of hardware and reliability issues. Thinkpad in hand, I installed Ubuntu 25.10 and immediately put it to work with a night of trimming down my client request backlog. The computer was incredible! Amazing keyboard, vastly better trackpad, perfect 14” form factor and everything worked out of the box on Ubuntu. Heck, it even had a usable webcam! But like a majority of things in my life, something always goes wrong. I knew it was too perfect, and wondered what I was going to find that ruined the joy. How about complete system crashes when you plug/unplug the system? Yep, that’ll do it. I spent all of yesterday and this morning debugging. Multiple distress, a long list of kernel params, different chargers and tweaking bios settings. Nada. About 50% of the time when you unplug, Gnome will slowly start to lock up, then the system restarts. Looking at logs it’s caused by a . At first I thought it might be related to the WiFi chips (based on pre-crash logs). Disabled via bios and still crashes. I’ve tested RAM, SSD and battery, all good. I have a new battery coming Monday just in case, but fully expect it won’t help. I’m out $500 USD, and honestly, I’m done with Linux for now. I love Gnome and Fedora+Ubuntu, but it’ll be a few years before I buy a new laptop after throwing away money on the Thinkpad (and the Pang12 2 years ago). Back to Mac OS Tahoe it is. Liquid ass and all. I’m hopeful that the Thinkpad problems are just on Linux. My wife has been wanting a laptop and she’s not ready to jump off Windows making it the perfect computer for her.

hardware Hardware linux Linux
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Artyom's Chaotic Blog 2 days ago

s/sed/ed

Read on the website: ed is a stupid simple text editor. sed is a nice streaming text processing tool. Why would one even want to use ed for anything, let alone for text processing if there's sed?

open-source Open Source programming Programming
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Stratechery 2 days ago

2026.17: He Came, He Saw, He Cooked

Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery! As a reminder, each week, every Friday, we’re sending out this overview of content in the Stratechery bundle; highlighted links are free for everyone . Additionally, you have complete control over what we send to you. If you don’t want to receive This Week in Stratechery emails (there is no podcast), please uncheck the box in your delivery settings . On that note, here were a few of our favorites this week. This week’s Stratechery video is on Mythos, Muse, and the Opportunity Cost of Compute . The End of the Tim Cook Era. My son, who is old enough to be on a multi-day school trip to Washington D.C., messaged me in shock that Tim Cook would be stepping down as CEO of Apple this September: that, more than anything, made me realize just how long we have been in the Tim Cook era. He was Apple’s CEO longer than my son has been alive, and a year longer than Steve Jobs. That, needless to say, is worth reflection. — Ben Thompson On Stratechery, I wrote about Cook’s Impeccable Timing and, in an Update , why John Ternus makes sense as the next CEO On Sharp Text, Andrew wrote a fantastic reflection on how Cook’s competence was both correct and boring, and representative of the overall maturation of the tech industry. On Dithering, John and I published our instant reactions on Tuesday , and additional reflections on Friday . Can Cursor and SpaceX Join the Model Wars?  When I first heard the news that SpaceX was partnering with Cursor (with an option to buy Cursor outright for $60 billion), my first reaction was to throw up my hands at the logic and broader plan. Forget it Jake, it’s Elontown , etc. That noted, I loved it when Ben’s Daily Update on Wednesday explained why, in theory, there is an obvious synergy between Cursor and SpaceX . Furthermore, I’m reminded that more AI competition would be a good thing, and for that reason alone I’m rooting for a deal like this to work. We went deeper on the topic during the second segment of Friday’s Sharp Tech, including bear and bull cases, and an attempt to nail down SpaceX’s core business as the company prepares to IPO and seeks a $1.75 trillion valuation.  — Andrew Sharp The Various Fronts of Cold War 2.0.  Most of our shows cover lots of ground, but this week’s episode of Sharp China was especially dense with updates and takes . The big news is that Xi is now publicly calling for the re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz, while several reports indicate China may be providing weapons to the IRGC in the interim. Elsewhere, Beijing passed new laws to crack down on decoupling (Bill says these laws have interested parties “freaked out”), while the U.S. is considering legislation that would close global loopholes on the sale of advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China. My favorite part, though, was a segment on a cake controversy, a physical altercation between Pinduoduo staff and Shanghai regulators, and Xinhua reporting that provides a fascinating look at how the Chinese economy works in 2026.  — AS TSMC Earnings, New N3 Fabs, The Nvidia Ramp — TSMC’s earnings suggest that the company’s leadership is not truly bought into the AI growth story. Tim Cook’s Impeccable Timing — Tim Cook had an extraordinary run — and impeccable timing, both in terms of when he became CEO, and when he is stepping down. John Ternus and Apple’s Hardware-Defined Future, SpaceXAI and Cursor — The elevation of John Ternus suggests that Apple’s future is about hardware differentiation; then, the SpaceX-Cursor deal makes a lot of sense. An Interview with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian About the Agentic Moment — An interview with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian about Google’s cloud priorities, enterprise agent platform, and Google’s integration advantage. Tim Cook Personified Big Tech’s Maturity — For better and worse, Tim Cook’s Apple epitomized an era in which big tech companies grew up, took fewer risks, and took over the world. Tim Cook Steps Down How Tim Cook Changed Apple Itanium: Intel’s Great Successor South Korea Defied the Gods to Build its Steel Colossus Xi Wants the Strait of Hormuz Re-Opened; Cakes and An E-Commerce Crackdown; The Next Stage of Decoupling; The MATCH Act in Congress Play-In Chaos and Knueppel Slippage, Anyone But the Thunder, Title Picks and Awards Resolution Panic Rankings: Pistons Picking Up the Pieces, Rockets on the Ropes, Blazers Pinching Pennies, and More from the NBA Playoffs Tim Cook’s Exit and What Comes Next, A SpaceX Deal with Cursor, Q&A on Vibe Coding, TSMC, WhatsApp

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Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At 2 days ago

Premium: How OpenAI Kills Oracle

Soundtrack — Brass Against — Karma Police   It was January 21, 2025. Per The Information , Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, had just flown to Washington DC from Florida, and had to borrow a coat “...so he wouldn’t freeze during an interview he did on the White House lawn, according to two people who were involved in the event.” He was there to announce a very big — some might even say huge — new project standing next to SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. “Together, these world-leading technology giants are announcing the formation of Stargate, so put that name down in your books, because I think you’re gonna hear a lot about it in the future. A new American company that will invest $500 billion at least in AI infrastructure in the United States and very, very quickly, moving very rapidly, creating over 100,000 American jobs almost immediately,” said President Donald Trump . After he was done, Ellison stepped to the podium. “The data centers are actually under construction, the first of them are under construction in Texas. Each building’s a half a million square feet, there are ten buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20.” Following Ellison, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son added that Stargate would “...immediately start deploying $100 billion dollars, with the goal of making $500 billion dollars within [the] next four years, within your town!” turning to Donald Trump with his hands extended. It was unclear what town he was referring to. Altman added that it would be “an exciting project” and that “...we’ll be able to do all the wonderful things that these guys talked about, but the fact that we get to do this in the United States is I think wonderful,” though it’s unclear what “the wonderful things” or “this” refers to. It’s been 15 months, and Stargate LLC has never been formed. SoftBank and OpenAI have contributed no capital to the project, other than SoftBank’s own acquisition of a former electric vehicle manufacturing plant in Lordstown, Ohio that it intends to turn into a data center parts manufacturing plant with Foxconn, which is best known for effectively abandoning a $10 billion factory in Wisconsin back in 2021 . Oh, and Project Freebird, a SoftBank-built project that exists to funnel money to its subsidiary SB Energy , though I can’t imagine how SoftBank actually funds it. No government money was ever involved, no funding ever left anyone’s bank account, no "initiative" ever existed, and OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank have, in my opinion, conspired to mislead the general public about the existence and validity of a project for marketing purposes.  The “data centers actually under construction” referred to a 1.2GW project in Abilene Texas that had been under construction since the middle of 2024 , and had originally been earmarked by Elon Musk and xAI, except Musk pulled out because he felt that Oracle was moving too slow . While Ellison said that there were ten buildings under construction with plans to expand to twenty, only eight were actually being built ( each holding around 50,000 GB200 GPUs across NVL72 racks ), with the extension up in the air until March 2026, when Microsoft agreed to lease 700MW — so another seven buildings — that were meant to go to OpenAI. These buildings will not make Oracle any money, as Oracle is, despite spending so much money, leasing whatever land it uses from Crusoe. As far as those eight buildings go, only two are actually online and generating revenue, though sources with direct knowledge of Oracle’s infrastructure have informed me that work is still being done on both buildings despite CNBC reporting that they were “ operational ” in September 2025.  Let’s break this down. Based on a presentation by landowner Lancium from May 2025 , the Stargate Abilene campus was meant to have 1.2GW of AI data centers online by year-end 2025. Based on reporting from DatacenterDynamics, the first 200MW of power was meant to be energized “ in 2025 .” As time dragged on, occupancy was meant to begin in the first half of 2025 , had “ potential to reach 1GW by 2025 ,” complete all 1.2GW of capacity by mid-2026 , be energized by mid-2026 , have 64,000 GPUs by the end of 2026 , as of September 30, 2025 had “ two buildings live ,” and as of December 12, 2025, Oracle co-CEO Clay Magouyurk said that Abilene was “on track” with “more than 96,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB200 delivered,” otherwise known as two buildings’ worth of GPUs.  Four months later on April 22, 2026, Oracle tweeted that “...in Abilene, 200MW is already operational, and delivery of the eight-building campus remains on schedule.” It is unclear if that’s 200MW of critical IT capacity or the total available power at the Abilene campus, and in any case, this is only enough power for two buildings, which means that Oracle is most decidedly not “on schedule.”  Sources familiar with Oracle infrastructure have confirmed that while construction has finished on building three, barely any actual tech has been installed. It also appears that while construction has begun on a power plant of some sort, it’s unclear whether it’s the 360.5MW gas power plant or 1GW substation. In any case, Abilene needs both to turn on the GPUs, if they ever get installed. Abilene is, for the most part, the only part of the Stargate project that’s anywhere near complete. I say that because the other data centers — Shackelford, Texas, Port Washington, Wisconsin, Doña Ana County, New Mexico, Saline, Michigan, and Milam County, Texas — are patches of land with a few steel beams, if that . To be explicit, every single Stargate data center is funded by Oracle and its respective financial backers. Oracle is taking on a massive amount of debt to build these data centers, working with a labyrinthine network of financiers and construction partners to pull together the capacity necessary to get paid for its five-year-long $300 billion compute deal with OpenAI .  Oracle has also, per Bloomberg , deliberately raised money using “ project financing ” loans that are repaid using the projected cashflow, allowing it to keep the massive amount of debt off of its balance sheet. This is remarkable — and offensive! — because it’s borrowing over $38 billion to fund construction of its Wisconsin and Shackelford data centers (the largest debt deal of its kind on record) and said debt will now effectively not exist despite its massive drag on Oracle’s cashflow, which sat at negative $24.7 billion in its last quarterly earnings . Based on estimates ($30 million in critical IT and $14 million in construction per megawatt) from TD Cowen’s Jerome Darling, the total cost of Oracle’s 7.1GW of data center capacity will be somewhere in the region of $340 billion to build. All of these data centers are being built for a single tenant — OpenAI — which expects, per The Information , to lose over $167 billion (assuming it hits annual revenues of over $100 billion) by the end of 2028, and as a result does not actually have the money to pay Oracle for its compute on an ongoing basis. In addition to its commitments to Oracle, OpenAI has also made commitments to spend $138 billion on Amazon over eight years , $250 billion on Microsoft Azure over an unspecific period , $20 billion with Cerebras over three years , $22.4 billion with CoreWeave over five years , and a non-specific amount with Google Cloud .  All of this is happening as Oracle’s core businesses plateau, even after Oracle reshuffled them in Q3 FY25 to represent Cloud, Software, Hardware and Services segments, the latter three of which have barely moved in the last 9 months as low-to-negative-margin cloud compute revenue grows.  In other words, Oracle’s only growth comes from a segment requiring hundreds of billions of dollars of compute.  To make matters worse, every single one of these data centers is behind schedule. Stargate Abilene was meant to be done at the beginning, middle, and now the end of this year, yet sources tell me there’s no way it’s finished before April 2027. Bloomberg also reported late last year that Oracle had delayed several data centers from 2027 to 2028 , but here in reality , every other Stargate data center is somewhere between a patch of dirt, a single steel beam , multiple steel beams , or less than half of a shell of a single building . Considering it’s taken two years for Stargate Abilene to build two buildings, I don’t see how it’s possible that these are built before the beginning of 2029. And at that point, where exactly will we be in the AI bubble? What GPUs will be available? What other kinds of silicon will exist? What will the demand be for AI compute? I don’t think that OpenAI exists for that long, and even if it does, it will have to raise at least $200 billion in the space of three years to possibly keep up with its commitments. I’m surprised that nobody ( outside of JustDario , at least) has raised the seriousness of this situation. Stargate, as it stands, will kill Oracle, outside of OpenAI becoming the literal most-profitable and highest-revenue-generating company of all time within the next two years. Even then, by the time that Abilene is built, its 450,000 GB200 GPUs will be two-years-old, and entirely obsolete far before its debts are repaid. A similar fate awaits whatever GPUs are put in the other Stargate data centers. Today’s newsletter is a thorough review and analysis of the ruinous excess of Stargate, a name that only really means “data centers being built for OpenAI in the hopes that OpenAI will pay for them.” Oracle is mortgaging its entire future on their construction, and even if it gets paid, I see no way that the cashflow from OpenAI’s compute spend can recover the cost before its GPU capex is rendered obsolete, let alone whether it can cover the debt associated with the buildout. I’m Larry Ellison — Welcome To Jackass. Welcome to the end of Oracle, or Sell The Compute To Who, Larry? Fucking Aquaman ? The total estimated cost of Oracle’s Stargate capacity is around $340 billion. OpenAI needs to make, in total, $852 billion in both revenue and funding through the end of 2030 to keep up with its compute costs with Oracle, Amazon, Google, CoreWeave and Microsoft. Oracle cannot afford to pay for the cost of construction and equipment out of cashflow, and has had to take on over $100 billion in debt and sell $20 billion in shares . Across a potential 7.1GW of planned Stargate capacity, Oracle stands to make around $75 billion in annual revenue. Abilene is expected to generate around $10 billion a year in revenue on completion for a project that will likely cost in excess of $58 billion. Stargate Abilene is extremely behind schedule, and likely won’t be finished until Q2 2027. Oracle estimated in 2024 that Abilene would cost it $2.14 billion a year in colocation and electricity fees. Oracle has spent over $5 billion in construction costs on the first two buildings of Abilene, with sources saying that it will likely spend over $10 billion to finish them, suggesting an overall cost of around $48-per-megawatt. Oracle’s remaining Stargate sites are barely under construction, and will likely not be finished before the end of 2028. Even if Oracle builds the data centers and OpenAI pays for them, the incredible upfront cost and NVIDIA’s yearly upgrade cycle will render much of the GPU capacity worthless within the next ten years.  And if OpenAI fails to pay, Larry Ellison likely has over $20 billion in personal loans collateralized by over $60 billion in Oracle shares, meaning that margin calls will follow with the collapse of Oracle's stock.

business Business shell Shell ai AI
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