I’d amend that to say: the whole state of California isn’t a mosquito infested swamp like Florida is, but there are still plenty of mosquitoes in certain parts of California.

I think it was a bunch of treacherous weasly h. sapiens too…

Not to worry, they’re using AI to sort the mosquitoes, so they totally won’t accidentally release a bunch of super-females with extra disease carrying capacity and ultra-fecundity, because they specifically told the AI not to do that…

Google is involved in all kinds of things, this is one of hundreds of “surprising” projects they have running.

“nature finds a way"

Yeah, nature’s way is: the rats win. That’s how we’re here and the Neanderthals aren’t.

They are targeting the major disease carrying species, so it’s not like we will be getting rid of all the pests - and their benefits - the way aerial poision spraying does.

Testing in Singapore reduced disease burden by 70-80% after the release, that’s significant improvement in quality of life - I know people who contracted West Nile, it’s not fun.

Not silent, the passwordless sudo calls are logged and available for review. I do trust that after several months in a sandbox without calling sudo, it’s unlikely that a sleeper agent will awaken and call sudo out of the blue - more likely that my apps that have been calling sudo will do something nefarious on the 1000th access…

Somebody (possibly an AI agent…) could/should automate the process of transcribing the sudo logs to the NOPASSWD setup, just leave sudo unlocked for those things that show up as needing it during validation test runs and turn the sudo lock back on for everything else.

I like the use of the phrase “forced to turn around.” They chose to turn around because somebody had a string of letters on their bluetooth name that they didn’t feel comfortable with. WTF would they do with a passenger in a Che Guevara T shirt?

enabling passwordless sudo

This is the way. Physical security FTW.

Love. “Love is in the air” is still under copyright protection and the airline just couldn’t take a chance of being sued…

Run, flee! I promise it will all get worse

Sure, but where to?

They don’t rust, they burn.

By the 80s the Mercedes mechanical injection diesel engined cars were capable of a million+ miles if maintained at all, that was a major business mistake (killing your new unit sales because all your customers already have good cars) which they slowly reversed across the next 20 years. Now they make disposables like everybody else.

The whole global auto industry should be incentivized to go back to that “runs forever” design focus of the Mercedes W123 series and improve on it with more longevity, cheaper serviceability. Efficiency and emissions don’t mean much when you’re scrapping the whole 5000lbs of automobile every 10 years.

one of the most humble CEOs I’ve ever heard of.

Yeah, he’s definitely in the minority in my experience, however, he was also many years retired, in his 90s, in decent health, and past any concerns about “looking good.”

How the parasites came to control that grade of F.U. money is not trivial.

As AOC says: nobody earns a Billion dollars, it’s horse trading, cleverness, and many-to-one models that put that kind of money in one pocket.

I spent a bit of time with a retired CEO who oversaw a huge decade of growth in his company. 5 years post retirement he still knew a lot of the workers at all levels by name, was very well liked by everyone we met. He had a few observations about his success:

• I didn’t do anything magical, I was just in the right place at the right time and I didn’t screw it up too badly. I have heard similar sentiments from investors who made it big during the .com bubble.

• My biggest challenge was in hiring people. In a given year, if 50% of my hires didn’t actively make things worse, that was a good year.

Re: And then these parasites make it to the boardroom and any chance to slow them down vanishes.

What I have seen of board room denizens is: they are personally wealthy and well connected. They exist mostly to provide “warm introductions” for relationships that may make themselves richer. They retain their seats through their personal wealth/power and the connections it brings, and the company retains them by providing them something they value - either monetary or powerful connections.

Being on the board isn’t what makes them unstoppable. Being in control of F.U. money x10 is what makes them unstoppable.

how common is it really?

In 2003-2005 (when I first read those sentiments from Carl) I was working at a 1000 employee corporation valued at $1B market cap which functioned EXACTLY like that. I don’t see it much in smaller companies, but in the large ones - yeah, I see it a lot. Come to think of it, the first small company I worked at had a guy who worked like that, but it only showed up around layoff time. He’d hire smart people, but keep the “safely dumb” ones and try to get rid of those who might be a threat to him. Luckily he was 3rd tier, VP, beneath a President and CEO who vetoed most of his targeted dismissals. He eventually was invited to leave and chose to continue his career as a college professor, rated worst on campus for terrorizing his students.

Lucky, small town I would guess? We’re in a 1.4M population metro area, so they reduce the number of branch offices to the minimum they can while still getting the “new customer uptake” that goes with a physical branch location. Apparently that’s the real purpose of physical bank locations these days, to compete for customer sign-ups.

I guess it’s back to abacus beads for you, can’t trust any microchips you didn’t design and hand verify by optical microscope yourself.

Yeah, I’ve got mine showing current temperature, forecast and our Google calendar, so it probably refreshes 40-50x per day. The bigger power draw is firing up the WiFi module to check for new information once every 5 minutes. Last battery charge ran about 2 weeks.

I get it… I’ve been fortunate to be in a sort of “feel good” tech industry (medical devices) - and my current post is pretty low stress, light management touch which is really nice. People getting wound up about shipping on a particular day regardless of whether the product is ready or not and all that unregulated software jazz can be a real downer.