Eddie VanBogaert

The year is 2027. Every single Microsoft app is now called Copilot. CEO Satya Copilot takes the stage. Goes Full Ballmer demanding more pilots. Musical guest Twenty One Pilots begins to play.

This (extensive) blog post from 1997 notes the conspicuous absence of reporting on failed data warehousing projects. Which maybe should invite similar questions about all the corporate AI initiatives launched in recent years... marcdemarest.com/dwpoly.html

Full text of Incident Report with timetable is published here: status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i…

Had been wondering with last week's GCP outage how multiple regions were out concurrently when API mgmt and control planes are separate for each. Turns out, a policy check system deployed to each region got pushed some bad code that failed when metadata replicated globally.

The rankings' methodology is 50% latest month's CPI for the MSA vs 2mos ago + 50% latest month vs same period last year. But CPI was less volatile in 2024, meaning tenths of a percent factor heavily in the score, to say nothing of the (unpublished) region-level standard error.

Instead of uncritically giving free distribution to a credit score reaggregator's marketing, @BlockClubChi could've pulled the underlying data from BLS and found that Chicagoland CPI tracks pretty closely with other large metros.

@FrankCalabrese @AcpsParent Was the Tipp Co hired away or are they moonlighting?

@AcpsParent No, but she hired: 1) Daughter of the Lake County, Indiana Assessor 2) Sister of the the Ross Township, Indiana Assessor 3) The Porter County Assessor 4) Full-time employee of Tippecanoe County, Indiana Assessor's office 5) Another Lake County, Indiana assessment official

Cook County elected official Samantha Steele is raking in millions from Indiana's poorest communities like Gary with sloppy, 5-word invoices—sent to officials whose relatives she conveniently employs at the Cook County Board of Review. And the media stays silent. 🤔

Consulting means having to do the same org-mandated security training at every client, annually, until the end of time.

High balances on other commercial lines of credit are also variable rate. Because so much of CPM revenue is donor-restricted, higher interest costs squeeze quickly in unrestricted areas. Vocalo and the fellowship were among such items.

CPM's latest Form 990 does not include audited financials. But we know from prior releases that the biggest financial issue for CPM is not anyone's paycheck or even the donor base getting too soft. It's the debt: $22M in variable-rate bonds from 2005 for the Navy Pier studios.

Troubling to see Chicago Public Media scrambling financially, so soon after the WBEZ/Sun-Times acquisition was looking like an exemplary non-profit model for legacy metro dailies nationwide.

@waynebriqu37421 @aaron_renn I think the wider point holds, but almost in part because trend has bent a little lower on the distribution. Also hard to localize experience of national statistics, etc.

@waynebriqu37421 @aaron_renn $200K maybe not the best line. It was roughly 99.2%ile of SSA's Average Wage Index in 2000, and its CPI-adjusted buying power equates to roughly the same AWI %ile in 2022. But 90%ile of AWI in 2000 was ~$60K, which is about $100K adj, while 90%ile AWI for 2022 was nearly $120K.

The growth in the number of affluent people plays a big role in rising housing prices and other competitive challenges people face today. The city of Indianapolis had 6,000 households earning over $200K/year in 2000. It still had 6,000 in 2010. Today it's 26,500. The metro area went from 14,000 households earning over $200K/year in 2000. In 2012 it was 27,400. But today it's 86,000. At $200K/yr, you can afford a $600K home without violating the 3x income for affordability. While it's tougher today with higher interest rates, that income could probably get you close to a million dollar house. That's 86,000 households who could afford to buy a house between $600K-$1 million just in metro Indianapolis. And keep in mind, a lot of those people make much more than $200,000/year. When you look at the greater numbers of people with significant disposable income chasing "slots" that have not kept pace with growth (e.g., elite college undergrad admissions slots), this contributes towards the production of the home price inflation and other competitive pressures we've seen. Just as one small example. Last year my family took our son to ride the Nickle Plate Express Christmas train. It was a fun trip so we want to do it again this year. The tickets for this year just went on sale. I suggested we buy immediately, because realistically it is going to sell out earlier and earlier every year as more and more people who can easily afford the price move to Hamilton County. They are not going to expand the number of runs and seats to keep up with that. We see similar effects with concert and sports tickets, tourist spots like national parks getting overcrowded, etc. For some things we can add additional capacity. But for a lot of them we couldn't easily do it even if we wanted to. We can't just build another Yosemite Park to relieve crowding. These sorts of price increases, sellout events, over-crowding, etc. are only going to grow as we have more and more people with more and more money. This especially disadvantages those who are outside of the upper middle class, who are no longer competing against a relatively small number of rich people, but against a vast army of folks with a lot of disposable income at hand.

Busy day for some security folks yesterday — and wild that a Microsoft researcher chasing down a little bit of lag just happened to stumble upon these backdoors. arstechnica.com/security/2024/…

An exciting economic announcement for Purdue and West Lafayette, but I wonder what it means for ongoing local conflict over water resources in the region. wsj.com/tech/nvidia-pa…

Good on @PewResearch for testing this. Not against experimenting with new sourcing methods, or even paid participation, but more care is needed in controlling for self-selection effects and bogus responses. pewresearch.org/short-reads/20…

How can anyone in tech be expected to do anything today? Go take a nap.

@JohannesVink @mim_djo @dotyousra You can sit it on Blob Store and pretend!

@mim_djo @dotyousra When BigQuery runs on Azure I'll join!

The irony, DWH are getting more open, Lakehouse more closed :)

@ryxcommar Bringing all the R folks out of their grad school libraries and onto the main timeline with this one.

Wow, on second thought, R with Tidyverse is really cool. Guess I don't need Microsoft Excel anymore.

@davebangert Terrible. So embarrassing.

God, I hated these stunts when I reffed. Mostly it was from guys coaching fifth-graders in CYC games at Sacred Heart gym.