Settlers of Catan board game publisher Asmodee has been left scratching their heads after the Robber somehow saddled them with over €900 million of debt. “Normally The Robber is content to take a single resource, but his most recent caper has left us with an enormous deficit,” says Asmodee. The newly independent Asmodee has said that they will be looking to expand their licensing deals in order to pay off the debt. “Embracer Group has a lot of intellectual property in their stable, so thankfully we’ll have plenty of fertile ground to till for a small fee.”

The Robber struck just minutes after the wake of the news that media holding corporation Embracer Group announced that it would split into multiple entities, with Asmodee becoming its own company focused on tabletop games. Spokespeople from the now splintered Embracer Group said they were shocked, just shocked, that the Robber would choose an auspicious day such as this to strike. “It’s unfortunate that this bad luck should hit when our other companies have experienced such a windfall. It appears that when the robber reached us, he was inclined to rid us of our debt.” They shook their heads ruefully. “Who can grasp the mind of a criminal who has been operating since the days of the Neanderthal?”

In a rare break of silence, the Robber denied any part in the sudden rearrangement of debt. “This is why we decided to leave society long ago,” their press release said, which was hammered into our doorframe with a rough-shaped nail. “I’ve never needed more than a little grain or lumber to get me by, with the occasional wool when my clothes need mending. The idea that I would have any need or want of money is ridiculous. Tend to your own houses.”

We would have published this article yesterday, but the Robber did not leave the area until early this morning.

The post Catan publisher Asmodee trying to figure out how the Robber put them €900 million in debt first appeared on The Only Edition.

KPMG argues the government makes its own problems as ossified probity and procurement processes only compound longstanding problems.

The post KPMG declares itself “out of scope” for federal probe into failed IT projects appeared first on The Mandarin.

The AI hype in the media obscures the fact that we're clearly in another goddamn venture capital bubble right now.

As the Wall Street Journal said earlier this month (article is paywalled), "... In a presentation earlier this month, the venture-capital firm Sequoia estimated that the AI industry spent $50 billion on the Nvidia chips used to train advanced AI models last year, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue."

On top of that, the industry is running at a loss on power consumption alone, never mind labour costs (which are quite high: those generative LLMs require extensive human curation of the input data they require for training).

So, we've been here before. Most recently with cryptocurrency/blockchain (which is still going on, albeit much less prominently as governments and police go after the most obvious thieves and con men like Sam Bankman Fried).

But there've been other internet-related bubbles before.

I was in on the ground floor of the dot-com boom from 1995-2000, and the hype back then was absolutely bonkers: that may be part of why I'm so thoroughly soured on the current wave of bilge and bullshit. (That, and it's clearly being pumped up by fascist-adjacent straight white males with an unadmitted political agenda, namely to shore up the structures of privilege and entitlement that keep them wealthy.)

The common feature of these bubbles is a shitload of hype and promises from hucksters who fail to deliver a viable product but suck up as much investment capital as they can. A handful of them survive: from dot-com 1.0, the stand-outs are Amazon and Google (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, et al came along much later—social media was a later, smaller bubble). Other survivors include Paypal, eBay, and Doubleclick (the latter being merged with Google to form a monstrous global advertising monopoly). The survivors tend to leave behind infrastructure: the failures leave behind t-shirts, second hand Aeron chairs, and motivational posters.

If I had more energy I'd be writing a snarky, satirical, 21st century Jetson's style short story right now to highlight the way this plays out. It'd be set in a future where all the dot-com 1.0 hype and promises actually delivered and laid the bedrock of our lives in 2025.

But of course, that's not the story. Instead, the story would explore the unanticipated drawbacks. Starting with "oops, the Amazon drone delivering your neighbour's new dishwasher just fell through your roof; but trades.com only shows you roofers who live in Boston, England, not Boston, MA".

In this shiny dotcom 1.0 future, shoppers always carry their laptop to the supermarket so they can use their CueCat scanner to scan product discount coupon codes off the packaging: they collect the money off vouchers using internet delivered over the supermarket wifi (which blasts them with ads they're forced to click through in return for bandwidth).

The Teledesic satellite network got funded and built out, so you now have 9600 baud global roaming data on your Microsoft Windows CE phone. Which has a fold-out QWERTY keyboard because nobody likes writing on a touch-sensitive screen with a stylus and multitouch was still-born. But your phone calls are secure, thanks to the mandatory built-in Clipper chip.

But Pets dot com just mailed you the third dead and decomposing Rottweiler of the month, instead of the cat food subscription you ordered: the SKUs for Rottie pups and Whiskas are cross-linked in their database, and freight shipping from China takes weeks.

In this gleaming, chromed, Jetsons style future, the Intel Itanium didn't fail, Macs still run on Power architecture, and Microsoft OS/2 4.0 runs everywhere on MIPS, Alpha, and SPARC workstations. Linux is nearly extinct thanks to restrictive embrace-and-extinguish commercial bootloader licensing terms ...

But don't ask about Apple. Oh dear. Oh no. You asked about Apple, didn't you? And why are all those workstations running OS/2?

Solaris never really took over the workstation market; NeXT ate Sun's lunch in the 90s. Today, UNIX research workstations are all featureless black cubes or monoliths and come bundled with Mathematica and FrameMaker. Cheaper RISC-based workstations are all the domain of Microsoft, as are PCs. Apple lives on in a strange twilight: Steve Jobs was unavailable in 1998 (he was tied up buying Oracle), and Apple was not-exactly-saved by buying Be and hiring on Jean-Louis Gassée as their CEO. He staunched the bleeding through strategic alliances, but in the end Gassée had no alternative but to sell Apple to IBM as Big Blue tried to push their Power Architecture down into the realm of business personal computing.

Macintosh® Powerbook™ is all that's left of the glory that was Apple: a range of black plastic PowerPC business laptops sold by Lenovo. Main value proposition: they run COBOL business applications real good. Meanwhile, the UK's Acorn Computers bought what was left of the NewtonOS intellectual property and continues to market the Newton Messagepad series as ruggedized retail and industrial data capture terminals in Europe, using the unique Graffiti text entry system from Palm Computing).

The world of MP3 music players is dominated by Archos. Video is ... well, video as such isn't allowed on the public internet because the MPAA hooked up with the cable TV corporations to force legislation mandating blockers inside all ISPs. Napster does not exist. Bittorrent does not exist. YouTube does not exist. But what passes for video on the internet today is 100% Macromedia Flash, so things could be worse.

So. What survivors from the glorious-future-that-wasn't would you like to memorialize in this shared fictional nightmare?

Jan Gampe took things to the next level by actually making this cross-stitch out of the pattern I previously posted online. The flowers really gave it an extra level of charm I think.

This quote is from a comment by an upset user on my blog, replying to one of my previous articles about curl.

Fact check: while curl is my hobby, I also work on curl as a full-time job. It is a business and I serve and communicate with many customers on a daily basis. curl provides service to way more than a billion people. I claim that every human being on the planet that is Internet-connected uses devices or services every day that run curl.

The pattern

curl in San Francisco

Meanwhile, another “curl craft” seen in the wild recently is this ad in San Francisco (photo by diego).

The full command line looks like:

curl --request PUT \
  --url https://api.stytch.com/v1/b2b/organizations/{ID} \
  -d '{
        "mfa_policy": "REQUIRED_FOR_ALL",
        "mfa_methods": "RESTRICTED",
        "allowed_mfa_methods": ["totp", "sms_otp"]
       }'

I would personally perhaps protest against the use of PUT for POSTing JSON, but nobody asked me.

A couple of weeks ago, I ran out of screen on the one external monitor my work-issued MacBook Air can run. So I switched to my five-year-old Windows desktop and plugged in another monitor. Love it. Productivity through the roof. But it means that I’m finally spending significant time in Windows 11, and gosh, is it janky.

There are some things that Windows does very well compared to macOS and Linux. All the games are there, for one thing, and Windows runs on all sorts of hardware without a lot of fiddling. You do not have to spend a thousand dollars minimum on a non-upgradable machine to use it. You also generally do not have to download a bunch of drivers or spend six hours in the command line hand-assembling the goddamn operating...

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