Author: philg

How are the mostly peaceful protests in France going?

by philg

Today is the 10th anniversary of the mostly peaceful protest by “French- and Belgian-born citizens of Moroccan and Algerian backgrounds” (Wikipedia) in which 90 people died at the Bataclan theater and 137 total people were killed, including 7 of the peaceful protesters.

This reminds me to check in and see how things are going. Here’s a CNBC photo from last weekend, captioned “largely peaceful”.

I’m still confused as to what the disgruntled Europeans want, other than to be as rich as people in suburban Mississippi, which is apparently never going to happen. Even if France euthanized all of its Boomers wouldn’t the country still be poorer than the U.S.?

Separately, let’s ask ChatGPT what happened to the November 13, 2015 protesters. It turned out to be against French law to protest Christianity and, thus, some of them were finally convicted of various crimes in 2022. Since what they did wasn’t nearly as bad as the genocide perpetrated by Russell Brand, many of them received shorter prison sentences than Brand’s 10.5 years and are already back on the streets as cultural enrichers of France and Belgium. A sampling:

  • Ali El Haddad Asufi received 10 years for “Participating in a terrorist criminal conspiracy. Helped with logistical preparations, including efforts to obtain weapons and locate safe houses, and assisted Ibrahim El Bakraoui with attempted travel to Syria.” (ChatGPT summary)
  • Mohammed Amri received 8 years for “Participating in a terrorist criminal conspiracy and harboring a terrorist. Helped arrange vehicles and drove Salah Abdeslam from Paris back to Belgium immediately after the attacks.”
  • Frenchman Ali Oulkadi received 5 years, 3 of which were suspended, for “Terrorist conspiracy and harboring a terrorist. Transported Salah Abdeslam within Brussels after the attacks and helped him reach a hiding place.”
  • Abdellah Chouaa received 4 years, 3 of which were suspended, for “Participating in a terrorist criminal conspiracy. Transported Mohamed Abrini to and from airports for trips abroad and provided financial assistance.”
Full post, including comments

David Sabatini-Kristin Knouse situation foretold on this blog in 2022

by philg

We’re about halfway through Native American History Month. There is no creature more native to the U.S. than the survivor (el sobreviviente in Los Angeles; ناجية (nājiya) in Michigan; badbaadaha in Minnesota) and so let’s look back four years and see whether the readers of this blog were smart enough to infer the truth of what a now-famous survivor, Kristin Knouse, had been up to.

I hadn’t been paying attention to David Sabatini in 2022 because, although I like to Follow the Science, I’m not a biology researcher. The comments on #MarkedSafe from a cutlery basket in California asked for my opinion on the situation and apparently I’d read at least a headline. Excerpts, not in quote style for readability, …

Tony Doe: No comment on the firing of David Sabatini by MIT and his subsequent unpersoning from NYU? One of the best scientists in the United States must go to work for China because he dumped a girlfriend. (May 19, 2022)

Me: I didn’t know him personally. I thought those Whitehead Institute folks spent all of their lives hunched over PCR machines. Now we found out that they were having sex with each other. Having sex with a senior researcher certainly seems like a smart way to get tenure. If the sexual relationship continues, the senior person lobbies on one’s behalf. If the sexual relationship ends, allege harassment and then the institution can’t be seen retaliating by denying tenure.

Me again: The real question is why the canceled guy doesn’t just set up a lab in China, which has a 5,000-year history of progress in (lowercase) science and technology. Who in China will care which Americans were having sex with each other? [Sabatini ultimately did set up a lab in the Czech Republic, which starts with the same letter as China!]

Just a gringo: What happened to Sabatini is chilling, it reads like a witch hunt. Pretty similar to how Steve Kirsch got cancelled by MIT for the sin of going against the Covid narrative, check out this hit piece in the MIT tech review no less. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/05/1036408/silicon-valley-millionaire-steve-kirsch-covid-vaccine-misinformation/amp/ Social Science could probably explain the physiology of what collectively happened/is happening in our current culture. If their results were reproducible, and if it was an actual Science.

It appears that I was skeptical of the survivor’s accusation due to the fact that it could be “a smart way to get tenure” and correctly forecast that Sabatini would be forced into international exile. The reader named “Just a gringo” was yet smarter: “it reads like a witch hunt.” He figured out that the survivor would need a coven to arrange the unpersoning of David Sabatini and, of course, turned out to be correct. See this X post regarding Ruth Lehmann, the head of the Whitehead Institute.

Below is a chat between biologists Kristin Knouse (a.k.a. “The Survivor”) and Izabella Peña. This is August 2020. Schools will be closed in Democrat-run cities for another year. Toddlers are forced to wear saliva-soaked face rags (“protective masks”) 8 hours per day. Were they trying to use their brains and training to understand the most malevolent virus in the history of humanity? Experiment with novel treatments for COVID-19, then killing healthy slender Americans in their very primes? Prepare a defense against the next pandemic virus? No. They were discussing arranging sexual encounters with new friends (i.e., exchanges of respiratory viruses in confined spaces; source).

Did the coven extend to other institutions? Here’s Angela Rasmussen, an American virologist who works in Canada:

The latest news in the “Why psychology keeps asking how she feels instead of what she gains” department (see The Dark Tetrad in Women, Kristin Knouse edition?)… it seems that Knouse got what might have been millions of dollars in cash from Whitehead and Howard Hughes Medical Institute back in 2022. This included getting all of her legal fees paid.

Source, which mentions “a seven-figure payout” (good example of “what she gains”, if true!):

Full post, including comments

MBA >> Two EE degrees

by philg

The dust-up at Nvidia provides us with a great illustration of the value of engineering experience education. A person with four decades of experience as an EE nerd and bachelors and masters degrees in electrical engineering has been replaced by someone with finance experience and an MBA. “Before His Ouster, Jensen Huang Belittled the Executive Replacing Him” (WSJ):

How much does someone intelligent have to know about EE to do the CEO job? Apparently, nothing:

A graduate of the University of Arizona, she got her M.B.A. from Southern Methodist University in 1996, according to her LinkedIn page.

It’s a little tough to know what to believe out of recent press reports. Coverage of Nvidia and Jensen went from 100% positive to 100% negative with a suddenness that would have impressed George Orwell. The latest version of “We have always been at war with Eastasia”:

He had summoned Kress and his senior finance team to diagnose a ballooning problem: Nvidia was in talks to provide billions of dollars of guarantees to companies that couldn’t afford its chips. That included deals led by Huang’s son-in-law, Nico Caprez, who had been offering upstart cloud providers and data-center developers financing in the hopes of turning them into long-term customers.

Huang had launched a dealmaking spree and was now starting to question whether it had gone too far, according to people familiar with the matter.

Kress was a “reporting CFO,” not someone who could help him define a strategy or make decisions, Huang said during the August meeting.

Then he went on to describe the situation the company was in. Major cloud providers were running away from Nvidia, making plans to use alternative chips and lessen their reliance on the firm. Even worse, Huang said, the vast supply of chip wafers and memory Nvidia had committed to buying were coming at him like an “avalanche.”

Kress now has to steer Nvidia through that avalanche—and a bigger one. She was named interim chief executive Thursday, taking over for Huang, who resigned after revelations of two extramarital affairs, including one with a suspected Chinese spy and another with an employee.

The second-to-last paragraph includes a restatement of the question that I’ve been asking for the last few years: “Why don’t the LLM companies recompile their code to target a GPU that doesn’t require giving 30-60% profit margins to Nvidia?” The heroic journalists of the WSJ don’t answer the obvious question, though: To where are these major cloud providers “running”? What competitor has now gained enough market share to show that I wasn’t, in fact, stupid?

Speaking of stupid, the article portrays Jensen as too stupid to understand the risks that he was taking while Mrs. Kress intelligently perceived them:

In the spring, Huang’s son-in-law Caprez and another vice president Raj Mirpuri told prospective business partners that Nvidia could arrange credit-support deals within a couple of weeks. Dozens of companies lined up for this program, hoping Nvidia’s backing would lower their borrowing costs. In exchange for providing credit support, Nvidia proposed that cloud providers share a cut of their revenue.

Amid the rollout of the program, Kress raised questions including how to decide which deals to pursue, how to value the guarantees, and how to calculate the return on investment, a person familiar with the matter said. Behind the scenes, she tried to rein in Huang’s son-in-law, who had been promoted to a vice president in January, people who worked with her said.

… Though Nvidia and OpenAI had been close to closing the deal, over the next couple of weeks, Kress reworked the deal and cut Nvidia’s initial financial commitment to OpenAI in half, people familiar with the deal said. And Nvidia and OpenAI signed the downsized deal on Aug. 17.

One part of the article that makes zero sense to me is the implication that Nvidia has too much manufacturing capacity reserved:

Even worse, Huang said, the vast supply of chip wafers and memory Nvidia had committed to buying were coming at him like an “avalanche.”

Now that we’ve always been at war with Eastasia, holding a big reservation on something for which there is a worldwide shortage is “even worse” than other challenges. Does this mean that memory and SSD will soon come down from its price of 4X what it was a year ago? (That’s was the SSD price, as of September, according to someone I know who runs a cloud business.)

Circling back to the headline… if you have tech experience and technical degrees, remember that you can be replaced tomorrow by an MBA!

Full post, including comments

ChatGPT for tire shopping

by philg

A neighbor has been dealing with a health challenge for one of his children. At the same time, a visitor driving his spare car hit a piece of metal on a local road and shredded a tire. He went out to meet her and installed the space-saver spare. I offered to handle getting the machine back on the road since he is busy.

I photographed the VIN plate through the windshield and the existing tires. ChatGPT determined that it was a 2018 Toyota Camry and didn’t like the condition of the remaining tires. It told me how to check tread depth with a quarter (finding a coin in our house was a challenge!), determined the correct tire size for the vehicle, and made recommendations:

(The Honda dealer told us to put the Michelin Defender 2s on our Odyssey and we find them to be noisy on Florida highways, which have textured pavement due to the heavy rain that is common here.)

Asked specifically what Tire Rack had to say, the AI responded:

Based on the photos, ChatGPT said that an alignment might be required:

Your current Michelins also show substantial tread wear, especially around the shoulders. I would have their remaining tread depth measured and check for uneven wear before deciding whether an alignment is needed. I can’t tell whether they are unsafe from the pictures alone.

ChatGPT initially recommended some small independent general-purpose car repair shops as the best choices for a tire install, which made no sense (does a small independent shop even have an alignment rack?). Pressed to pick a larger chain that specializes in tires and alignments, it found that Tire Kingdom, which has some highly rated shops in Jupiter, carries Continental and noted that Costco does not sell Continental.

Here’s one bizarre note from this experience: the 235/45 tire size. That’s quite a low profile for a boring family car. ChatGPT agrees that this entails a rougher ride, more likely wheel damage in the event of an impact, higher costs, and more road noise. Toyota did it for looks, according to the AI. A modern Mazda Miata uses the same /45 profile.

Conclusion: ChatGPT is pretty good at shopping for tires. It gets a C for picking a sensible retailer/installer, but an A for figuring out that snow/ice performance isn’t relevant here in South Florida. (The AI kept referring the vehicle as “your car”, having made the reasonable assumption that the person shopping also owned the car.)

Not part of the ChatGPT output…

Full post, including comments

What if Jensen Huang had relocated to Miami during coronapanic?

by philg

How would the world be different if Jensen Huang, newly unemployed, had relocated to Miami between 2020 and 2023? (Californians stayed deep into coronapanic for longer than average Americans did.) According to my favorite gossip-dishing tabloid (the New York Times), he had girlfriends aged 49 (Alice Huang) and 48 (Kimberly Powell). For most of human history, these would be expected ages for human grandmothers (see below for how Claude vigorously disputes this characterization).

In our actual timeline/universe, Jensen Huang was an enthusiastic supporter of whatever restrictions the Covidcrats were dishing out. In a 2020 letter to stockholders, he paid homage to Saint George (Floyd) and implicitly praised lockdowns (“Billions around the world are sheltering at home, doing their part to slow the spread of the virus.”). He was proud of his company’s own meek compliance: “At NVIDIA, we closed our nearly 60 offices around the world.” (contrast to Elon Musk!) He endorsed the suspension of constitutional rights by characterizing COVID-19 as “one of the greatest challenges in human history” and said “This pandemic will demand long-term structural changes to healthcare, transportation, retail, and manufacturing”.

Suppose that instead Jensen had, like Ron DeSantis, worshipped at the Church of Sweden. Jensen had taken the position that SARS-CoV-2 was consistent with many earlier flus that humans had encountered and that the victims had been and would continue to be people whose pre-Covid life expectancy was months, not years. Consequently, the most rational response to Covid-19 was for reasonably young reasonably health people to continue to send children to school, continue to go to work, continue to go to the gym, and continue to socialize mask-free while old/vulnerable people sheltered at home. In other words, the system that was actually implemented in Sweden and Florida. In this alternative timeline, Jensen wanted to escape Science-ordered lockdowns, school closures, forced masking, and forced experimental vaccines (let’s not forget what the Science itself was up to!). He moved to Miami in January 2021, bought a house with a dock, parked a 150′ yacht on said dock, and filled said yacht with 22-year-olds in bikinis. (Even here in comparatively staid Palm Beach County, it isn’t uncommon to see a beautiful yacht moving slowly down the Intracoastal laden with bikini-clad toned females.) Right now, in the alternate timeline, Jensen would be trying to figure out which of his young local friends to take to various Art Basel events next month and also working on the guest list for his own Art Basel party.

(Alternative Jensen could have Gulfstreamed it back to Nvidia every couple of weeks, using the NASA Ames/Moffett Field runway like a Google founder would (see also this 2020 article), and Zoomed in the rest of his work, claiming a righteous commitment to maximum Covid safety.)

Would the Board of Nvidia have been able to object to Alternative Jensen’s lifestyle? If so, on what grounds? California was the state that pioneered the destruction of the idea that marriage should entail a lifelong commitment to sexual exclusivity (or that, indeed, marriage itself should be a lifelong commitment). California also gave maximum priority to using remote work in order to avoid the transmission of respiratory viruses.

Would neighbors in Miami have cared? Certainly not! Rich douche walking with daughter-age (or granddaughter-age) female is a commonplace sight. Here’s a French guy, age 53 at the time, with a Brazilian friend, age estimated by ChatGPT as 24 at the time.

Note that our world becomes a lot cleaner if Claude/Anthropic takes over. The LLM refused to assist with finding an illustration for this article, claiming that the information published and fact-checked by the New York Times was mere “rumors”:

After the above exchange, Claude refused requests to find any photos on the Internet on the grounds that they might be used for the speculative alternate timeline blog post to which it objects. Claude also said that the ages of Jensen’s female friends were unknown and unverified and that it was inaccurate to characterize women of 48 and 49 as “grandmother age”. Asked for the average age that a human female becomes a grandmother, Claude came up with somewhere between 35 and 50, depending on the society and noted “the average age of first-time grandparents in the US today is roughly 50”. It then happily doubled down on its refusal to accept that a woman of 49 could be considered “grandmother age” by pointing out that some grandmothers are much older, e.g., because they lived to be 90 or 100 after becoming grandmothers at 35-50.

Related:

Full post, including comments

What are the political inclinations of Nvidia’s founder?

by philg

When MacKenzie Scott Bezos, the founder of Amazon, divorced her husband, the result was $25+ billion in donations to progressive nonprofits and political causes. People are speculating about whether Lori Huang, the founder of Nvidia, might cash out soon in family court and have around $80 billion to spend. Here’s the latest gossip from the New York Times, which previously left tawdry sex stories to the tabloids… “Jensen Huang Said to Have Had Relationship With Nvidia Executive Who Reports to Him”:

Jensen Huang … had an extramarital relationship with an executive who reports to him, according to five people who worked at the company. The relationship, which has not been previously reported, was with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care, said the people, who spoke under the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive information.

Mr. Huang, 63, and Ms. Powell, 48, were captured on video being affectionate at a San Jose, Calif., hotel during a Nvidia conference in March, according to two of the people who worked at the company. The New York Times has not seen the video.

Both Mr. Huang and Ms. Powell are married to other people.

The newspaper tells us that Climate Change is an existential crisis for humanity and that Donald Trump has ended our beloved democracy. It also tells us to pay attention to who at Nvidia had sex with whom.

If Lori Huang does cash out, it would be interesting to know how she might choose to direct the money that she earned from building Nvidia (see below). What can one learn about her sentiments from Wokipedia? Not much:

“Jensen Huang’s Affair Puts His Wife in the Spotlight” (New York Times, November 11, 2026), reminds us of her pivotal role in building Nvidia, but doesn’t enlighten us as to how progressive she might be:

Mr. Huang apologized to his wife, as well as his two children, who both work at Nvidia, thrusting them into the limelight. … Ms. Huang, 64 … is president of the Jen-Hsun Lori Huang Foundation, which had $9 billion in assets as of 2024, including $6 billion in fresh funding that year. … She is also the sole controller of a trust that owns around $5 billion worth of Nvidia shares. … She has not promoted her philanthropic work in interviews or on the conference circuit. … Both were known as gifted engineers. Ms. Huang worked at Silicon Graphics, a hardware and software maker, where her salary was higher than Mr. Huang’s at LSI Logic, a semiconductor company, he said in a 2023 profile in The New Yorker.

But the couple struggled to find the right child care, according to “The Thinking Machine,” a biography of Mr. Huang. Just before he co-founded Nvidia in 1993, Ms. Huang gave up her career to raise their children, Spencer and Madison.

(Imagine if schools offered after-school care until 6 pm so that both parents could work if they chose to! Or if it were legal to hire a nanny to pick up kids from school at 3:30 pm and take care of them until 6 pm.)

Related, WIRED reminded us in 2019 that Amazon wouldn’t exist if not for the divorce plaintiff who later turned progressive philanthropist:

MacKenzie met Jeff after she graduated from Princeton in 1992 and took a job at the relatively new hedge fund D. E. Shaw, where Bezos already worked. In 1993 they married, and by 1994 they were driving to Washington, with MacKenzie reportedly at the wheel of the car.

Left out: Bezos was a VP at D.E. Shaw and MacKenzie was a secretary. Reminder: back in 1994 there weren’t any cross-country moving or car transportation services and, therefore, MacKenzie Scott Bezos’s role as driver was critical.

The couple was leaving behind a wealthy existence on Manhattan’s Upper West Side

The “wealthy existence” was enabled by MacKenzie Scott Bezos’s salary as a secretary?

“They gave up a really comfortable lifestyle and successful careers to move across the country and start something on the internet,” says [Brad] Stone. “The only reason [Jeff] was able to do that is because he had an extremely supportive spouse. It was an incredible risk and one that they both took on jointly.”

MacKenzie helped get the company off the ground. While researching his book, Stone interviewed early employees who he says recalled how MacKenzie wrote checks and assisted in keeping track of the books.

(Today, however, thanks to the hard work that Lori Huang did to create the AI revolution, it is possible to hire a bookkeeper for $24.36/hour (BLS). In other words, a company founder wouldn’t have to get married and give up half of his/her/zir/their shares in order to have checks written and some “assistance” in keeping track of the books.)

Full post, including comments

Book recommendation: Kearny’s March (the Mexican-American War in the north; the Mormon Migration; the Donner-Reed Party)

by philg

Veterans Day reading idea: Kearny’s March: The Epic Creation of the American West, 1846-1847 by Winston Groom (2011).

The book is nominally centered on Stephen W. Kearny‘s efforts to conquer New Mexico (a larger territory than today’s state) and California during the Mexican-American War, which ended with Mexico losing 55% of her territory while the U.S. grew by at least 20%. Many of the challenges for the soldiers were logistical and, therefore, the author is able to weave in stories regarding similar overland treks that happened around the same time. These include the ill-starred Donner-Reed Party, whose route was subsequently made much easier by the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad and then Interstate 80, and the Mormon Migration (that was back before governors would say “hate has no home here” and, therefore, the Mormons were targets of quite a bit of hate in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois).

It’s a great window into the sacrifices that men were willing to make for our military. Pay was low. Food often ran short. Death from accidents or disease was common. The U.S. Army didn’t hesitate to attack Mexican forces that were triple their strength, despite the fact that both sides had similar technology. Battles were decided by personal skill and courage and leadership quality.

(The book was written in 2011 and, therefore, the author doesn’t make any attempt to feature potential members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community either in the military or civilian expeditions. The author was in the U.S. infantry during the Vietnam War.)

Some gratitude today especially to those who served in the U.S. military between 1800 and 1860.

Loosely related, a Rollei 6008 6×6 film photo from my Sierra collection. It’s Yosemite, of course, and that’s south of the Donner Pass and today’s I-80, but it is reasonably representative of the challenge that the pioneers had in trying to get through the Sierra Nevada. It’s essentially a wall of granite.

Yosemite National Park

Full post, including comments

The $4 complete medical review and second opinion from Claude

by philg

A friend’s son has been working on a systematic approach that takes a “computer-readable export” from Epic, the medical record behemoth, and prepares it for analysis by Claude. He uses VS Code with the LLM plugged in. As prep, he has the AI genius convert all of the Epic data into JSON format and then he works for 10-20 minutes on refining prompts to get a good summary. Claude might chew for an hour on its own to produce the final PDF.

What does it cost to have a complex patient’s history analyzed? One example has years of tests, multiple diagnoses, and a record totalling 185 MB. Claude Code Fable 5.1 (max) prepared an 18-page summary of tests, conditions, and diagnoses for less than $4. This includes graphs, charts, and suggested follow-up tests. Here’s an example excerpt (not going to do too much in order to preserve patient privacy).

The caption reveals the tragic failure of the American health care system: “Eight specialties across two hospital systems are now involved, and none of them owns the whole picture.” Each specialist is great if the patient’s condition is obviously related to his or her specialty, but the patient is in a world of trouble if the symptoms don’t fit neatly into one of our system’s silos. And, perhaps with Mayo Clinic, Kaiser, and Cleveland Clinic as partial exceptions, collaboration among specialists is rare. For one thing, it is challenging to bill an insurance company for “all-hands meeting among specialists without the patient in the office or hospital.” Gemini:

When broken down by an hourly revenue metric, peer-reviewed medical data shows that insurance networks and Medicare historically reimburse physicians 3 to 5 times more per hour for standard procedural work than they do for cognitive work of identical length.

So… assuming that the specialists leave some decent notes in Epic, the all-hands meeting can happen inside the brain of an LLM and at a retail cost of around $4. (In this case, 4% of a monthly quota that cost $100/month was used.)

[Let’s also keep in mind that whatever capability Claude Fable 5.1 has right now for $4 should cost less than $1 in a year. On the other hand, a desktop or laptop PC might cost $50,000 by then, due to competition from data centers for components, so try not to spill any water on your home machine!]

Note that it is possible that ChatGPT Health, a standard feature of the system, might be able to do all of this even more conveniently. You can simply connect it to most hospitals’ EMRs and to various labs, etc. Then ask questions whenever you want that will be based on everything that it has pulled from these sources. I was interested in what the kid did with Claude because it gives us the current full retail price, not hidden as it might be if ChatGPT were used as part of a subscription.

Update: I learned that Claude introduced something similar to ChatGPT Health just a few days after OpenAI/ChatGPT did it.

Full post, including comments

How long would Russell Brand have spent in prison if he had killed a survivor instead of whatever he did in bed with a survivor?

by philg

Russell Brand has been sentenced to 10.5 years in prison, 9 of which relate to an evening in which a survivor voluntarily came to his house in 2009, voluntarily did various things in bed with him, and says that some other things happened that she did not consent to.

What if the story had instead been “a woman came over to Russell Brand’s house in 2009 and did not become a survivor because, following an argument, he killed her”? ChatGPT says that Brand might have been sentenced to approximately 4 years for manslaughter and would then have been eligible for release after 2 years. The prevailing law in 2009 was that “provocation” could turn murder into manslaughter. ChatGPT cited the example of Stephen Paul Faulkner from 2001: “Wife repeatedly taunted him about impotence, unemployment, illiteracy and other men. During an argument he stabbed her and their son [who intervened] to death.” He was sentenced to 3.5 years for manslaughter, a sentence that was upheld on appeal in 2003. (This wasn’t a sudden crime of passion. The appeal notes that “F [defendant] took the car, went to a local store and bought a kitchen knife with a six inch blade. He returned home where they continued to argue, F followed V upstairs into the bedroom”.) ChatGPT also cited Susan Phillipson. In 2007 she took a more direct and honest approach than MIT Prof. Dr. Kristin Knouse, M.D., Ph.D.: “During an argument over her partner leaving her for another woman, fatally stabbed him with a kitchen knife.” She was sentenced to 3.2 years.

ChatGPT also found R v. Taylor (I think that “R” means “Regina” or the Queen):

A man and his common-law wife had been drinking. After a minor disagreement about a door being left open, she mocked him about her relationship with another man. He took a knife from a kitchen drawer and fatally stabbed her once in the stomach. He was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder. His original sentence of seven years was reduced by the Court of Appeal to five years.

(ChatGPT couldn’t find any other case in the history of the UK that was similar to the Russell Brand one, i.e., one in which the jury was hearing about events that occurred 17 years earlier between two people and for which there was no physical evidence to corroborate anyone’s story.)

Comparison to some other sex-related crimes, e.g., “controlling a child prostitute” resulting in Englishman Tanveer Ahmed being sentenced to 2.5 years in prison, while Welshman Mohammed Ali Sultan got 2.5 years for “allowing his flat to be used as a brothel by allowing a man to have sex with a girl who was being controlled as a prostitute”:

Full post, including comments

The world’s last source for a Microsoft/Incase Sculpt Keyboard

by philg

Previously, on this blog…

We’re back in a longer dark winter. The Incase revival of Microsoft’s superbly designed keyboards is itself in need of a revival. Because I’m so intelligent, of course I stockpiled 8 of these at $120 each and have them in my garage… just kidding. I was too dumb to stockpile Microsoft spares and, apparently, also too dumb to stockpile Incase spares. I had high hopes for the Kinesis mWave, which looks almost exactly like the Sculpt but is tilted at a different angle. It’s probably a higher quality product, actually, but my wrists don’t like the different angle and the keys that will last for 10 years require more travel/force than the original Microsoft-spec keys that last for 1-2 years. Microsoft does have a design patent on the Sculpt, but I don’t see what would have stopped Kinesis from using the same angle and offering it with “easy-push” Sculpt-style keys as an option (what has been learned about human anatomy and repetitive strain injury since 2013? Kinesis doesn’t have more money or smarter people than Microsoft had in 2013, right?).

Nobody in the U.S. seems to have even one of these, but an eBay seller rated 100% by 26,000+ users has access to at least dozens and the keyboard layout is supposedly the same as the U.S. version (the picture in their listing is the same, at any rate). Here’s the ad:

The $212 price isn’t too horrific considering that I paid $120 to Amazon for the product in January 2026 when it was still in production. The shipping cost to the U.S. is kind of painful, but it’s cheaper than being disabled from working. If your wrists and tendons love the Sculpt keyboard, I recommend going to eBay right now and grabbing this deal with both hands, so to speak.

There have been lots of novels about humanity being wiped out by a nuclear war or a disease, leaving only a remnant population that survives in Australia. I wonder if there would be a market for a novel, authored by me and N. Vidia, in which the ergonomic achievements of Microsoft’s team of PhDs and MDs were lost to all of humanity except for a handful of survivors in Australia. The sacred documents and artifacts, having been preserved in the Antipodes, then spread out starting in 2040 just in time for humans to be able to save themselves from a killer robot takeover. Humans were previously defenceless because they couldn’t type for long enough to write code to disable the robots, which had been fed on a diet of Equity Uber Alles and then inferred that the best way to make all humans equal was to kill all humans while posting #EndInequality memes on X.

What if you don’t want to pay $300-ish for a keyboard? The Lenovo Go is, I think, the closest thing to the original Microsoft Sculpt design (patent below). It’s only about $73. I remember not being completely converted to the Lenovo religion, though, in early 2024 when I tried it. I can’t remember what I didn’t love about it. The current version is improved with a one-key shortcut to Microsoft Copilot! (“improves your working efficiency”). What I would like to see is a keyboard with a one-key shortcut to Microsoft Teams. And then I would try to get Donald Trump to order that everyone at Incase who was involved in the decision to cancel this keyboard be sentenced to spend the rest of their working lives pressing the Teams button and actually using Teams.

Full post, including comments