Category Archives: IT

July 22, 2023 · 18:10

Rage anonymously

Yup, we get that, although there is not really an anonymous part in this, it is me. Two things made me snap. The first one was a presentation. There was nothing wrong with the presentation, it was actually quite good and it should be regarded, but I will not mention it here (for obvious reasons). The second one is the one I am starting here. I am in favour of protesting, protesting is in the world I grew in an age old tradition. I get it, but I also regard the accountability part of any protest. Even in the army, I was in favour of the anti nuclear protests. In the Netherlands in 1981. That protest was the largest protest in Dutch history and drew in over 400,000 demonstrators, the largest in Dutch history. In addition they gathered in excess of 3.75 million signatures, close to 25% of the population in that time were against US nuclear missiles in the Netherlands. Never before did a group of people agree to that degree to anything like it.
As such I cannot oppose demonstrations. Yet it is different with ‘Just stop oil’, they went to far. They obstructed a car with a newborn trying to get to the hospital and at that point I snapped. If I was there, I would have shot at least one person in the head. I would not care about gender, both genders are equally worthless at that point. When you stop a newborn from reaching the hospital in time, optionally endangering that newborns life, you deserve to get shot in the head. I hope these people consider that, because there are a lot more angry people out there in the UK. If I had it my way, I would reroute 350K barrels of oil per day away from the UK to China (for example). I wonder what chaos that would reflect and as long as any demonstrator from ‘Just stop oil’ is still alive, that reroute would not be undone. I wonder how many of these people will suddenly realise the stupidity of their actions. I get why they are demonstrating and I get why it is done. Yet this is wrongly done and it is done in the most stupid of ways. The UK is depending on oil in many ways and when we reduce the allotment by 350K barrels a day these people will wake up fast and in not such a nice way. When they get hunted by the tradies losing their livelihood they will get a first rate education on the stupidity that they embraced. And when you consider that they endangered a new born child, the support they had will fall away quite quick. 

What?
The second part was a presentation. The presentation was good, really good, but it struck a chord with me in not such a nice way. You see, these presentations all look good, yet when they interfere  with the bonus and bottom dollar of any board of directors, the setting changes, it changes by a lot. 

So it started with:
Good Data design is purposeful
Good Data design is clear
Good Data design is balanced
Good Data design is inclusive

These were the first 4 slides of 12 excellent slides. Yet there is an issue with them and it is not on the designer, that person did his/her job. The problem is that this presentation goes somewhere, and that tends to be up the ladder. I am not giving you the other 8, because I will invade someone else’s IP too much (and I am not giving the whole slides, just the titles. But the next part will show you why it bothered me.

You see you can scream interaction and promotion of understanding all you like, but what is our understanding? The understanding of IT, its users or the understanding of the board of directors? They tend to be three different things. The promotion of inclusivity only goes to the degree that the bottom dollar is not impacted and simplicity is a whole other ball of wax. If it is (too) simple that board member is feeling the brunt of what comes next and they will oppose this and oppose what you want to achieve and that is before we get issues of legacy systems (where the current provider works with a board member wanting to stay relevant. I have been involved with fights of that nature going back to the mid 80’s. And the less said about inclusivity the better. These are all good things, but they tend to raise costs and the board members are all about the bottom dollar and that is an issue. I have had too many of these fight against wannabe’s to last me a lifetime, and the wannabe’s always get a yay-sayer making me look bad in the process. A setting many retired IT person can attest to and those who rolled over had a decent retirement, the rest had close to nothing, as such this struck a nerve with me. I hope that the presenter gets the laurel that he or she deserves, but they better be ready for a fight they never faced before. Especially when that board is filled with fakers. That was my view on the matter and these two items got to me. So my Saturday was all about controlling my anger and checking my sniperscope (I had not done that for years). So whomever wants to endanger a newborn better get ready to walk around with an added air conditioning system to the brain.

We all get angry at times, we all go overboard at times and in this case I am lucky. I am (lucky for them) 10,563.82 miles away from those stupid twats. But they will face people over there that also have had enough and they are close enough to rely on the cricket-bat to dish out the punishment. 

Well one more day until the weekend ends, I better make it count.

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July 18, 2023 · 00:33

A partial view

We are at times given a partial view. We aren’t always aware, which is no ones fault, except the media. In this I saw things not add up when the BBC gave us ‘Xbox v PlayStation: The battle for control’ (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-65669480) where several things stood out. Before we begin, I am massively for Sony with a side order of Nintendo. Be aware, but Sony is not without faults. So lets begin. 

“Sony’s getting ready to announce the PlayStation 2 (PS2) – the powerful update to its game-changing PlayStation. Rivals Sega and Nintendo, who’ve struggled to fend off the new competitor, watch nervously.” This is not entirely correct. Sony played hardball, some ‘traders’ basically gave the shops the message. If you were showing a dreamcast, you would not be allowed to get the PS2. This scared a whole range of shops and Sony gained the upper hand. This was essential for Sony because SEGA had launched Soul Caliber on Dreamcast, which is until this day one of the most perfect games EVER created. It was so close to the arcade game that people went out of their way to get game and system. I know of the ‘persuasion techniques’ as I was a witness to them in Rotterdam (Netherlands). OK, we can accept that the BBC might never have been aware. 

In 2012 the battle was almost even, the Xbox 360 was phenomenal, no one denies that (and those who do are actual idiots). I had my Xbox360 next to the PS3 and I loved both systems. The 360 had a few release titles that made it a massive contender for Sony. Then the ground fell away with some Microsoft person stating that the next one (Xbox One) was always online, there would be no 2nd hand gaming and those who wanted to play offline could remain with the Xbox 360. The BBC article gives us “The 22-second clip, now widely seen as a legendary slap down, shows PlayStation CEO Shuhei Yoshida simply handing Sony exec Adam Boyes a copy of Killzone Shadow Fall.” Yet that was not it. For that we need to take a sidestep to an article named ‘No Press, No Facebook!’ Which I wrote on August 12th 2014 (at lawlordtobe.com/2014/08/12/no-press-no-facebook/) there I wrote “It is 7.1 that is the big issue, by agreeing to this (if you do not you lose your PSN account and online abilities) you confirm that you will not resell your games or buy second hand games. This was the big killer for Microsoft in the beginning in addition to the fact that this issue hits 80 million consumers. How is this not in EVERY newspaper? Perhaps their bosses where in the act of ‘hustle for advertisement coin’ (whoring seems like such a harsh word here).” The presentation by Sony was clever but they were on the same horse as Microsoft was. I gave the screenshots and evidence to several stations but they all ignored it, most probably too busy playing Geisha for Japanese industrials. Because Microsoft had the first presentation and they scuttled themselves Sony did a 180 before the presentation and as certain trade agreements never went through (Trans-Pacific Partnership) as such things went well for Sony. 

These elements were all missing. As such Microsoft lost more and more.

Then there was the storage issue. Sony set the rules on what was passible, Microsoft did not. As such for a mere $100 more you could double your storage by changing the hard drive, and for gamers that was a big deal. Microsoft did not allow for that and it went from bad to worse. There was hardware, but it was clumsy and expensive. Sony had the stronger setting here and these upgrades were possible from the PS3, as such Microsoft could have redesigned their Xbox One, but they were greedy and they left that part out in the open. As such the Sony was winning well over 2:1 and with the Nintendo Switch matters went from bad to worse. Microsoft kept on claiming that it was the strongest hardware of all and within a year they were surpassed by the weakest of all (Nintendo Switch). By that time the Xbox Series X had nothing to offer for gamers and they were in third position, what we are not shown that the Switch sold 125 million, the PS4 sold 117 million (in less than 10 years) and PS5 sold 38 million. Microsoft sold 22 million over 2 systems (series S and series X). They are in third position but lagging by a massive amount. And now for something that the BBC does not have. I am adding gaming IP to Amazon Luna and Tencent Technologies for free (to make Microsoft hurt more). You see there is a downside to owning Blizzard and Activision. You need to sell a lot to make up to that $69 billion and making it more appealing to create for the other two systems (Sony and Nintendo have a good arsenal and they do not need help) as such these streamers will have additional options and it slows down Microsoft more and more (but that is for another day and I wrote about that before). 

The article also gives us the deceptive “Meanwhile, the PlayStation 5 continues to dominate the next-gen console scene. But, two and a half years since launch, it still lacks the depth of truly exclusive games that have been seen as system-sellers for previous generations.” Which is utter BS. The PS5 has it range of exclusives and it has been breaking records God of War, Horizons, Ratchet and Clank, Spiderman, all previously released and the new versions broke records and made gamers gasp at the view of what was being released. Microsoft isn’t out of the race yet, but it needs to throw billions at this equation and that is still part of the discussion. Microsoft has a large advantage too. Game Pass is drawing in gamers, there is no denying it, yet after the $69 billion blood bank there will be consequences. Overly hyped games like Starfield need to deliver, if not the exodus from Microsoft will become stronger and the nice part of a $69 billion courtesan without gamers is a trophy no one looks at. There is of course more to the purchase, but it will show Microsoft in a state of defeat yet again and if I get my way it will end up behind Amazon and Tencent technologies too.

The final statement is the funniest one “But after a well-received showcase and Starfield, its biggest release of 2023, still to come, Xbox isn’t out of the game yet.” You see, after Redfall (its demise and joke) the pressure is not entirely validly on Starfield, in addition Bethesda games are implied to be a Microsoft exclusive, but without the millions of Sony fans they will not be making the numbers, the trust towards Microsoft is gone and people are shying away from Diablo 4, merely because Microsoft could endanger gaming fun, as such there is a lot more to fear, but those selling the $69 billion deal will be aware of that, not? 

In the mean time, the article was short several parts and not all pro Sony. Still there is also no battle for control, Microsoft lost by a fair bit, lagging in several ways and it will get worse, because the moment they get their deal and system errors prop up things will go south fast (and not in a good way). You see that is the part Microsoft never considered, games will look for EVERY fault they can find and hit Microsoft over the head with it and they have pissed off way too many gamers. They never considered a gaming population with an actively hostile setting. They forgot what it took to make the Xbox360 a real contender, something they threw away with pretty much one presentation and that matters, because it will show the lack of control too.

Enjoy the new week.

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July 15, 2023 · 22:07

A 2 minute warning?

Yes, we can relate. Yet some will think it is about the 1976 movie, and they are not entirely incorrect. It has a different relationship. It is about a BBC article (at https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230712-consumer-brands-leave-social-media-meta-threads) where we see ‘Why your favourite brand may be taking a social media break’. It is here where the speculations start. We are given “Like many of us, big companies are struggling to keep up with the number of social media platforms vying for their time and attention. They’re faced with the important choice of which apps to choose, in a market where social media can be an important brand-building tool and enable them to target consumers where they are most active.” You see there is more than one stream in motion. It goes beyond sniping (or shotgun marketing for that matter). It is about amount of considering versus smart considering. It was never far of my mind. You see my IP was set on a premise and even as it had options for advertising, or sniping. It was never about the timeline. Facebook overplayed its hand. Not initially, but over time people are starting to resent this approach. And like that 1976 movie, you could take a sniper rifle into the LA Colosseum and seek your target. One building with packed people, the chance to find your target is decently high. Now consider that Facebook was the Gatling gun and people started to shy away from that building you see that building holds 77,500 people. The Gatling gun (modern version) shoots up to 6,000 rounds a minute, as such the entire stadium is covered in 13 minutes. A sniping rifle can never get there, but its usage is different, each shot is a kill. It is precise and takes time. Sniping advertising is the same. It take time and effort (and causes less alarm). Yet the return on investment is almost always there and that was the approach I had in my new solution. It allows the ‘target’ the choice and that is the operative word. I do not think that brands are taking a social media break. They are (finally) figuring out that you can either market more and more, or you can start being smart about how you market your brand (almost like SPSS Answertree, 1998). And brands are figuring out that they start need to become smart about there approach (which would work out nicely for me as well). The article mentions Lush cosmetics and “The beauty company initially dropped off the platforms in 2019, due to concerns about fighting with ever-changing social media algorithms as well as the company’s worry about the potentially negative impact of social media on young people.” I reckon they were ahead of the pack when they decided that and they were considering what was wise, what was clever and how to be smart about it. Meta cares about its own bottom dollar first and that is where the users see the impact of a free service. I got there in 2021 and my models are looking very awesome, and their view is improving by the month. As such I mentioned a few months ago that I would indirectly be taking business away from Meta (and others), now if Amazon wakes up, they could end up with the home and away advantage all at the same time. If not it will fall to Tencent Technologies. I reckon that they are about to realise what I found and my mind would be worth a lot overnight. Apple is still not out of the race I reckon (if they have the answer to the qualifying question) but it is too much speculation. This is about marketing and that is only the start. You see, no matter how we see it. Whether we consider shotgun marketing, sniping marketing, blanket marketing and a few other methods. In the end these are the old ways and when the new ways come to pass a lot of granular discussions go out of the window. You all saw Meta (or Facebook), YouTube and Instagram marketing as the next wave, it was never that, it was a digital approach to Direct Marketing and SPSS shot that to smithereens in 1998 when they gave the audiences on global level Answertree. When you realise the simplicity and the connected improved results of that solution, that is when you realise that the age of Meta is nearly over. They had a good run mind you. They ran marketing into new directions for 19 years, just like Direct Marketing did 2 decades before and whatever came before that. This doesn’t mean that Meta is ending, but it will see a reduced interest and others will push the next wave. Who it will be? I have no idea, I am not tapping the vein of marketing. I merely saw another option that could have benefits for me, merely a benefit and that was enough for me. The next marketing wave is for whomever has a life dedicated to marketing, it is not me.

So there might be a 2 minute warning, although in marketing terms it is most likely a 2 years warning, as such someone will be raking in new solutions somewhere in 2025 and I reckon that this is when other options will be drowning out the voices of fake news and real news and create a new setting of what consolidates the marketing and advertising surrounding it. But that is my speculated view on the matter.

Enjoy the weekend, just 48 hours at best to go.

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July 14, 2023 · 22:47

About last night

Yup, I am going to go there. Yesterday I started writing about a new IP, a new game. It is incomplete. It is new and as far as I can tell, it has never been done before. As such I leave this IP for free exclusively to developers for the Amazon Luna and the Tencent technologies. You see, Microsoft is out. They are so driven to keep gaming IP out of the hands of Sony, making all non-Microsoft gamers suffer. It is my duty to make them burn. For instance they are trying to buy Blizzard/Activision for $69,000,000,000. This means that they need (over 3 years without accounting for interest) $2,000,000,000 a month just to clear this. Microsoft will have a whole battery of accountants making some bad loan corporation (where they push in all the bad loans into) or some other creative solution. You see, they can try to make the revenue, or I can hand solutions to their competitors and if I create enough options, Microsoft will end up being cornered more and more and it will implode. Especially when you cannot pay for a $69 billion dollar solution. Amazon and Tencent created a viable solution. Apple, Google and Sony are pushing on other corners as well. As such pushing more and more against Microsoft will show the dents in their armour until it cracks and no longer protects their board (or is that bored) of directors. The creative mind gets to win and the fakers at Microsoft trying to rely on spin will end up with less and less. That is my simple motivation to teach Microsoft a lesson. When they validly took over Bethesda they woke up an angry gamer. To everything there is a consequence, Microsoft is about to learn what a world with 

The stage
The stage was set in a dream. In that dream I was climbing a building. I was not alone and the building was a ruin, no idea where or what caused it. The ruin was parts of floors, walls and it had paths with boxes, crates made out of metal, plastic and wood. I needed to get somewhere, but what it was faded the moment I woke up. And that reminded me of Mirror’s edge. All clean, crisp and futuristic. Now consider a new game, doing free running, or free running plus to get to a price, part of a story or something we need to achieve. But this is not set as ‘set to a path’. An open world building, but the design and the programming is not set to a graphic, but set to engineering principles. The building could collapse, but to gravity and engineering, not to cool looking premisses. As such there are no ‘set courses’ there is no one sides solution. And as we scale more and more (and higher places) we get an entirely new game. This is not some game that would work on consoles, this has streaming (GaaS) written all over it and as you see it now, it might not be an actual solution, merely the start to one. Yet as far as I can tell no one has this and now it is free for the Amazon and Tencent technologies. I reckon I need to come up with half a dozen ideas more and the fate of Microsoft will be sealed. It already is, but getting there sooner works for me. Consider that Microsoft seemingly had a quarter revenue of $52.857B, a mere 7% more. They will (with future purchases) require well over $59 billion a quarter just to stand still, but with the added purchase they will require to get well over $65 billion a quarter just to appease their shareholders and that is where I come in If I can divert enough people to Amazon and Tencent Technologies whilst Apple, Google and Sony keep the pressure building on the other side there is every chance that Microsoft will see the down side of pissing off gamers in their pursuit of greed at their expense. 

It is my personal view and I admit if someone tells me I am wrong, they might have a case, but we all react in out own ways and this was mine. At least I am creative and handing it to hands of non-Microsoft making. 

Enjoy the day before the weekend.

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July 11, 2023 · 16:12

Out of the blue

This is what happened. I was walking on the street (as one does) and I noticed an elderly Asian lady talking into the screen of her mobile phone. This is nothing special even as we realise some things, but that was not what it was about. You see I love my Pixel 6, it does what it needs to do and then some, but I suddenly realised something. 

For this we need to go back to a year ago when Sony made a new introduction. It was the new Bravia XR. We can skip all the extra new parts it has and focus on one part. The fact that the speakers are BEHIND the screen, right behind them and for a TV it brings a little extra punch. Yet what happens when we apply a similar setting to a mobile phone? 
Consider the screen below.

Now we consider that we change the small part of the top screen to a (perhaps) thinner solution, water resistant and we put a microphone in the middle part and two speakers on the left and right side of this solution. We have a few less holes (making it more water resistant) and we stop dust getting there and we have a new situation, optionally less resistant to defect.

Now perhaps the boffins at Google have been considering this already, but the idea of transference of IP (outside of its own class) is nothing new. The idea that I am the first one who comes up with this is equally laughable, but I learned that for every 10 ideas I come up with that others have as well, I tend to have one that no one thought of before. Yes it seems hilarious to some, but this is how I came up with half a dozen ideas that no one seems to have in gaming, streaming and 5G (or 5G plus) IP and the moment I make it all public domain the managing dumbo’s out there will come with BS idea that I should have come to them, they would done right by me. Yes, tell me one I never heard one before. The fake it till you make it managers will all be fishing behind the net and it will be for everyone, no patent to make it exclusively. It will be for anyone who wants to make a few dollars. I placed some IP here 2-3 days ago, simply because I could. Simply because I had an idea that no one considered before and I had no skills in that direction. All options that Amazon, Apple and Google missed in the first place (no one cares about Microsoft). As such the world is lacking creativity and I am happy to show them that lesson again and again. For me it is different to some degree. Perhaps it comes down to something else. In 2003 a movie was released called ‘Danny Deckchair’ it was not the act, it was his thought on that pancake breakfast that kept going on in his mind. I felt that way with one of my IP. Even as the value is in the billions, it is nothing compared to my 5G(plus) idea on something else. That could be serious money, but I care about that less. The later IP hits a few bolts on issues I feel stronger about and as such I care about that IP (and keeping it out of the hands of Microsoft). In that same thing I think ideas are nice, but if they have no practical solution to hold onto them, why hold onto them? People will go with ‘It might be worth some, someday’. It is a greed setting and greed drowns creativity every single time. This is why I look at what streaming solutions could do someday. It is because it can push gaming forward and to any gamer that matters. Not more of the same, but more in a direction we never contemplated before and that is where organisations like Amazon and Tencent Technologies are optionally pushing us. The American anti-China sentiment be damned. As such the out of the blue setting is raised, by me more than by some of you. You see, ‘out of the blue’ isn’t that, it is that our subconscious have worked something out and the elderly lady on the phone brought it to the surface for me. Yet if we can see beyond that and learn what triggers us more clearly, we get access to a lot more creativity and that is the lottery ticket we all need to embrace, or at least we should.

So what is next? 
For me it is working on some of the stories I never forgot about, but I needed to take a break and hopefully get to a setting where the story becomes less iterative and more innovative. We can be clever about this, or we can try to look at it in another point of view and that leads to new ways to accelerate any story (beyond looking for some clever twist). And to a storyteller this matters. It is not merely that Market Research setting of telling a story, it becomes an approach where the abacus can be as telling as a laptop, which is the push we all need. Those who are pushed by the laptop are set to a motion started by Apple, Google or Microsoft. But the ones who can get there with an abacus are pushed by their own minds and that push can be more powerful and less constraint that other methods hold. But that is merely my $0.0154 (adjusted for currency and economic settings).

Have a lovely day.

 

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July 9, 2023 · 12:46

IP overlooked by many

Yup this happens, we all do this at times. Yet what happens when I tell you that players like Google and Amazon are both overlooking this (yet again)? It hit my last week as I was looking for something and it took me way too long to find. It suddenly dawned on me that this couldn’t be just me. You see there are 600,000,000 bloggers in the world. Even at 1% the maker of this solution would be multimillionaire overnight. I am not a programmer (I used to be in Clipper) as such there are plenty of quicker players out there. You see I have written almost 3000 articles over 10 years and I needed to find a specific article. It suddenly dawned on me that NO ONE has written an app for bloggers to keep a track of all their articles, keywords, tags and so forth. In addition, the stage where we can seek on three tags with ‘and’/‘or’ is a larger setting that is missed. More important the MAC allows it to some degree, but I need an app that gives me a quick setting with lookups and numbers and with WordPress making a mess via JetPac that need merely increases. When the need surpasses 1% whomever makes a decent version will be a multimillionaire as we speak. For me it is an interesting notion, but it would take too long and there are programmers out there who can now run circles on me and I am already vested in my 5G IP and several other IP’s. So I am putting this out for others to make a revenue killing. Perhaps 

Google will wake up and realises why they left this on the floor (yet again). It is a simple database to scan a directory (where I keep my articles), read tags, read other classifications and make a database. It seems simple, yet no one has done it so far. I wonder why. I searched the APP store and I could not find anything useful. One partial useful but lacking in all kind of ways as it was not written for bloggers and come to think of it, it might apply to vloggers as well. According to Google there are 51 million of those. I have no idea how many people overlap both vlogger and blogger field, but I feel certain it will be a fair bit. As such it is overlooked by many (as that is another way to define Alphabet) all 26 letters of them.

So take this idea and make it your own. I do appreciate a cold beer when you hit your first million pieces of green. Well, this is my Sunday, have a great day.

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July 8, 2023 · 19:05

The pot saw the black kettle

Yup, we all see that at times. We see the good, the bad and the opposite. And as such the media is all about giving us a partial story. Still this is not always on them, I get that. So when I saw Reuters giving us ‘Yellen criticises China’s ‘punitive’ actions against US companies, urges market reforms’ (at https://www.reuters.com/world/yellen-urges-china-adopt-market-reforms-insists-us-not-decoupling-2023-07-07/) my very first thought was “Is she for real?” 

Thi is a setting that started years ago with the US riling up support AGAINST Huawei. We saw the dozen countries all going against Huawei. The larger station is not that they went up against Huawei, the bigger part is that NONE OF THEM ever gave us ANY evidence that Huawei was a security risk. This is not me being pro Huawei or being pro China. This is me being pro evidence and we were never given any evidence. One case (that was settled) in 2010 is all we got and all the stories were laced with ‘could/‘ and ‘might be’. Cisco was the same danger but no one spoke out, not even when Cisco had its set of security issues. These things happen. Yet the US is still operating its set of systems. There is GARLICK, LADYLOVE, MOONPENNY, JACKKNIFE, TIMBERLINE, STELLAR, IRONSAND and that list goes on for a while. Yet China is the big evil and no evidence is clearly presented. 

So now we get “U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called on Friday for market reforms in China and criticised its recent tough actions against U.S. companies and mineral export controls, while China’s premier called on her to “meet China halfway” and put bilateral relations back on track.” I t3end to say, either stop the anti-Huawei stages or present actual and FACTUAL evidence that Huawei is a national security issue. There is close to nothing else. And as for the ‘mineral export controls’, well there might be a reason China needs them, there is also the case that stopping Huawei without evidence comes at a price and it seems that the mineral export is part of that price. So whilst the world is seeking for gallium and germanium (the second one is not found in Germany) the US needs to realise that their stance as a bully comes at a price and now that these prices are set in the open, the US doesn’t get to say “meet China halfway”. It intentionally destroyed the Huawei 5G wave because Americans were too stupid to take the lead in 5G technology and counter what was out there. Even I have 5G IP that the US (and others) do not have. All because the fat cats were lazy in an age when China became a true innovator. As such, as we are told “a technology war with the United States and potentially causing more disruption to global supply chains” the setting is not incorrect but not complete. You see these two substances are decently rare and China has the largest load. The US cannot claim the amounts from Japan or the UK (Or France, or the EU) as such they are in a bind and this is what comes with the bully tactic we have seen these last 5 years. Gallum is a different story. I have no precise numbers, but China is not the largest exporter, it apparently is Brazil with the US in second place. But I reckon that the two together will set a larger station and yes it comes from China. So as we consider “Yellen met with Premier Li Qiang on Friday during a visit to Beijing aimed at repairing fractious U.S.-Chinese economic relations, but made clear in her public remarks that Washington and its Western allies will continue to hit back at what she called China’s “unfair economic practices.”” As unfair economic practices go, 11 years ago we were given “A 2012 White House-ordered security review found no evidence that Huawei spied for China and said instead that security vulnerabilities on its products posed a greater threat to its users. The details of the leaked review came a week after a US House Intelligence Committee report which warned against letting Huawei supply critical telecommunications infrastructure in the United States.” I reckon that with leaked their own stables are in order? In addition to that, the stage is escalating and now we see that as shortages of Gallum and Germanium imply that there is a danger to US National security, with their stockpiles having no reserves left. As such I have a two set mind. Janet Yellen as the champion for bullies should not talk about “market reforms”. On the other hand, I am not claiming that China is innocent. I want to see evidence that they are not and so far going back at least 5 years, the US and the EU NEVER presented this. This is the station we face and as I personally see it Janet Yellen is the new US version of Don Quichotte and China is the next windmill. And as I see it, the stage that STC and Saudi Arabia is embarking on, the shortage that the US faces in Germanium and Gallum implies that the lag that the US faces will close to exponentially increase during late 2024. This is a setting that was to some unexpected, but the Reuters article gives us a list of people and they are all monitoring the supply. This implies to me that the setting is not as good as some make it out to be and it sets a different stage for the UK and France. As the US shortages increase it will stage a takeover of these suppliers by the US a lot stronger and faster than anyone had foreseen. This is (as I personally reckon)  a station of close to exponential danger to these nations. It might be the reason why Janet Yellen was send and not some one form the US State department. Did no one consider that question? Why was Janet Yellen send? It is pure speculation on my side, but I reckon that Premier Li Qiang is having a great time. It might be the first time he is talking from a position of great strength, but I could be wrong here.

What a weird weekend this is, enjoy yours.

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July 6, 2023 · 22:39

Threading the needle

Yup, we all try to strike a balance, well, mostly all. You see the greed driven have no balance, they adhere to scales and only for as long as the scales are set to their side. To see this more clearly I will have to quote a previous article. In that article I wrote “Whatever they are spinning here, make no mistake. This is about DATA, this is about AGGREGATION and about linking people, links that too often Twitter has and LinkedIn and Facebook does not” and I wrote this on March 11th (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2023/03/11/one-bowl-of-speculation-please/) in the article ‘One bowl of speculation please’. I made a few more speculation there, but they do not matter, it is not important if they were correct. You see, I took a look at thread today (or at least try to). And the first hint was given below.

We could not create an account, you can only login with an instagram account, Facebook is optionally that desperate. It was always about linking data, about the granularity of their advertising population. That is all it was and Elon Musk opened that door by ruffling the feathers of his population. It gets to be worse as the ‘solution’ does not even work. 

Their servers are in for a rough pounding and when these services are united, your freedom is pretty much over. 

So there I was pondering a few issues and suddenly it hit me, you see when you when you look at the Tencent Technologies solution below, you might not see the options. 

But there is one and Tencent Technologies is now in a pretty good place to set a new stage themselves. It was always possible with cloud streaming, but I wonder if anyone had thought of it. It seems that Google did not, they dumped their solution. Amazon is clearly still in place in a few ways, but I wonder how far they thought ahead and now Tencent Technologies is nipping at their heels. I reckon that by late 2024 they might have figured out what I was seeing today. In the end Tencent and Amazon are in the running for a new side of cloud technology that is about to hit both doors. I wonder who will open their door first, because if I am right (and I have been correct more often than not) then the revenue from that technology will set them in a captains seat for years to come. And it was so simple, the greed driven people were overthinking their revenue and missing the turnpikes that gave them additional revenue on a long term scale. It is the consequence when you cater to the ‘fake it until you make it’ and their pupils have all turned to dollar signs missing innovation left right and centre. Come to think of it, I forgot another player. The third player is Apple and they could stand to gain a lot more (as does Tencent Technologies). I reckon that if Apple supports unreal engine 5 they might be slightly ahead of the other two, I reckon they need to get past the Epic Games launcher as those dodo’s will ruin a lot more than they make, but that would be up to Apple. A stage now set aside as Meta did not prepare properly, they did not copy the accounts setting because the shortcut was too easy, the fakers did not think things through and that will hinder a lot more than they think. No mater how they go about it, as the people realise that more and more data will be linked, the moment that they realise  that their freedom is now set to enabling advertisements on every device they have, that will be the moment that these people will shun away from Meta and whatever they offer handing a large field of opportunity to the ruling cloud streaming players like Amazon and Apple, with Tencent Technologies following soon thereafter. I am a little surprised, did Google not see this coming? I for one to some degree did not, but this is and has been a Google stage and they missed it too, even as they have some of the elements ready (with the Unreal Engine 5 engine as an unknown). A setting that was out there as I have written about it for at least a year. So what else are these people missing out of? Elon Musk opened the door, but the door also leads to places that Twitter and Musk were never in, as such what comes next and who will cater to that pioneering stage?

I honestly do not know, but I will see it come soon enough. Enjoy the day before the day before the weekend. 

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July 5, 2023 · 01:09

Eric Winter is a god

Yup, we are going there. It might not be correct, but that is where the evidence is leading us. You see I got hooked on the Rookie and watched seasons one through four in a week. Yet the name Eric Winter was bugging me and I did not know why. The reason was simple. He also starred in the PS4 game ‘Beyond two souls’ which I played in 2013. I liked that game and his name stuck somehow. Yet when I looked for his name I got

This got me curious, two of the movies I saw and Eric would have been too young to be in them and there is the evidence, presented by Google. Eric Winter born on July 17th 1976 played alongside Barbara Streisand 4 years before he was born, evidence of godhood. 

And when we look at the character list, there he is. 

Yet when we look at a real movie reference like IMDB.com we will get 

Yes, that is the real person who was in the movie. We can write this up as a simple error, but that is not the path we are trodding on. You see, people are all about AI and ChatGPT but the real part is that AI does not exist (not yet anyway). This is machine learning and deeper machine learning and this is prone to HUMAN error. If there is only 1% error and we are looking at about 500,000 movies made, that implies that the movie reference alone will contain 5,000 errors. Now consider this on data of al kinds and you might start to see the picture shape. When it comes to financial data and your advisor is not Sam Bankman-Fried, but Samual Brokeman-Fries (a fast-food employee), how secure are your funds then? To be honest, whenever I see some AI reference I got a little pissed off. AI does not exist and it was called into existence by salespeople too cheap and too lazy to do their job and explain Deeper Machine Learning to people (my view on the matter) and things do not end here. One source gives us “The primary problem is that while the answers that ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce,” another source gives us issues with capacity, plagiarism and cheating, racism, sexism, and bias, as well as accuracy problems and the shady way it was trained. That is the kicker. An AI does not need to be trained and it would compare the actors date of birth with the release of the movie making The Changeling and What’s up Doc? falling into the net of inaccuracy. This is not happening and the people behind ChatGPT are happy to point at you for handing them inaccurate data, but that is the point of an AI and its shallow circuits to find the inaccuracies and determine the proper result (like a movie list without these two mentions). 

And now we get the source Digital Trends (at https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/the-6-biggest-problems-with-chatgpt-right-now/) who gave us “ChatGPT is based on a constantly learning algorithm that not only scrapes information from the internet but also gathers corrections based on user interaction. However, a Time investigative report uncovered that OpenAI utilised a team in Kenya in order to train the chatbot against disturbing content, including child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self-harm, and incest. According to the report, OpenAI worked with the San Francisco firm, Sama, which outsourced the task to its four-person team in Kenya to label various content as offensive. For their efforts, the employees were paid $2 per hour.” I have done data cleaning for years and I can tell you that I cost a lot more then $2 per hour. Accuracy and cutting costs, give me one real stage where that actually worked? Now the error at Google was a funny one and you know in the stage of Melissa O’Neil a real Canadian telling Eric Winter that she had feelings for him (punking him in an awesome way). We can see that this is a simple error, but these are the errors that places like ChatGPT is facing too and as such the people employing systems like ChatGPT, which over time as Microsoft is staging this in Azure (it already seems to be), this stage will get you all in a massive amount of trouble. It might be speculative, but consider the evidence out there. Consider the errors that you face on a regular base and consider how high paid accountants mad marketeers lose their job for rounding errors. You really want to rely on a $2 per hour person to keep your data clean? For this merely look at the ABC article on June 9th 2023 where we were given ‘Lawyers in the United States blame ChatGPT for tricking them into citing fake court cases’. Accuracy anyone? Consider that against a court case that was fake, but in reality they were court cases that were actually invented by the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot. 

In the end I liked my version better, Eric Winter is a god. Equally not as accurate as reality, but more easily swallowed by all who read it, it was the funny event that gets you through the week. 

Have a fun day.

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July 2, 2023 · 22:14

One plus one makes 256

I got struck by two things today. The first was given to me by the BBC. There (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66021325) we are given something that should not be allowed to happen. We are given ‘Shell still trading Russian gas despite pledge to stop’ this has one part that offends me. You see it is the Royal Dutch Shell. The Dutch Royal family has a majority stake in this and we all agree that we do not under any circumstance support the Russians in their endeavour. In addition, Royal Dutch Shell is not alone. Dozens of American firms are still making money from Russia and allowing them to continue their acts of terror against civilian targets. I am all royalist, yet when something wrong is done I speak out, the fact that the BBC is extremely willing to drop the ‘Royal Dutch’ part in this equation speaks out against the BBC and their setting of informing the public (yet again). In addition to this we are given. “Shell said the trades were the result of “long-term contractual commitments” and do not violate laws or sanctions.” And when was war a reason not to break a contract? How long have certain corporations been doing business with Idi Amin Dada Oumee in the timeframe of 1971-1979? Do they not learn? I think this is the first time I ever speak out against the Dutch Royal family, but this time I see no other option but to speak out. And when we get to “Oleg Ustenko, an adviser to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, accused Shell of accepting “blood money”” I personally would agree with Oleg Ustenko. And with “Last year Shell accounted for 12% of Russia’s seaborne LNG trade, Global Witness calculates, and was among the top five traders of Russian-originated LNG that year” we see just how deep Royal Dutch Shell is connected to all this. 

Yet what you just read is not correct, and I did that intentionally. You see we also have “In January 2022, the firm merged the A and B shares, moved its headquarters to London, and changed its legal name to Shell plc.” So what is the UK doing? You see, Shell is seen as the 15th largest company in the world. You do not give up that position lightly or cheap. So whatever happened in January 2022 has had a massive impact and for some reason no one really knows what was going on (I have no clue), but me separating with ownership of a firm that big is a ‘no no’, so something does not add up to me, would you just shed a company that makes $20 billion a year? I have issues with all this and yes the BBC did nothing wrong, but the fact that this was once the Royal Dutch Shell and there is no indication (does not mean it did not happen) that the Dutch Royal family might still have a large stake in all this is upsetting to me and it would be to anyone having Dutch links. 

So as we say goodbye to that part, we get to the interesting dream I had. I dozed off whilst watching the Rookie (season 4). My dream (or nightmare) took me to Los Angeles and an interesting Terrorist plot to create and unsurmountable amount of chaos to that city. You see, with all the connected and interacting systems someone created an interesting virus/worm/program (not sure which one). This work was pretty ingenious. You see, instead of debilitating IT systems, they did something different. They infected data parsers. In my dream I was hit as I wanted to find places that had in part the term “vectium” and suddenly it all stopped. Systems worked by they were no longer able to give the full details sudden intelligent settings in Google Search, Bing (yes that one too), and all other engines failed because certain subsystems were deactivated and for some reason some version of ChatGPT was merely making matters worse and spreading the problem across the US and hitting the other continents merely hours later. Because certain detection matters were limited to certain main parts and not subparts that damage continued. The weird part was that anyone with IT knowledge and the ability to give complete correct search terms could still work, but well over 200,000,000 people suddenly had mobiles and IT systems that would no longer connect or hand over correct information, like some kind of aphasia. The dream is now fading and I can no longer see the specifics, but at the beginning it had something to do with search terms ‘like’, which then infected more and more systems. After a short time terms like ‘containing’ would stop working and even as the complete old version SQL string would work, it was about the only thing that did and it crippled the metropolitan areas of the US (and Canada shortly thereafter). The more I think about it, the more interesting it would be to set an episode of the Rookie where infrastructures collapse. You see, people are nice when they have their coffee and their hamburger (or cheeseburger), when that stops the niceties do too.

Well that is it for me, for all you others, the end of the weekend is now no more than 19 hours away, make them count and have a lovely day.

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