Marcel Niggli

The story behind the rise of USB-A is wild. In 1990, an Intel engineer named Ajay Bhatt couldn't get his wife's printer to work for their daughter's school project. A printer. In his own house. He was a senior architect at the world's biggest chip company, and he couldn't make a printer talk to a PC without rebooting three times and opening the case. He pitched the idea of a universal connector to his managers. They didn't just pass. They told him nobody would want it. Bhatt switched teams, found a manager who said yes, and spent the next four years convincing Compaq, IBM, Microsoft, NEC, and Nortel to sit in the same room and agree on a single plug. Seven companies that competed on everything else agreed to share one connector. The USB 1.0 standard shipped in January 1996. Almost nobody used it. Windows 95 barely supported it. USB was basically dead on arrival. Then Steve Jobs did something nobody expected. He shipped the 1998 iMac as USB-only. No serial port, no parallel port, no floppy drive. Just USB. Apple, the company that fought standards harder than anyone, single-handedly forced an entire industry onto Bhatt's connector. Intel owned the patents. They made the entire thing royalty-free. Any manufacturer on earth could build a USB-A port for pennies. By 2009, 6 billion USB products were in the market, with 2 billion more shipping every year. Making the connector reversible would have doubled the cost, so Bhatt kept it one-sided to keep adoption cheap. "In hindsight, we blew it," he said years later. The most cursed design decision in consumer electronics, and it was a deliberate trade. USB-A killed serial ports, parallel ports, PS/2 connectors, game ports, and eventually the floppy disk. One rectangle replaced an entire generation of cables. The connector is 30 years old and as of 2024, Type-A still accounted for 46% of all USB device shipments. Billions of ports in airplane seatbacks, hotel nightstands, hospital beds, and office walls. The EU mandated USB-C on all new devices in December 2024. The installed base of USB-A will take 20 years to turn over. One guy's printer problem became the most successful connector standard in computing history. And now the rest of us carry a bag of dongles everywhere we go because of it.

Potentially the most gangster interview response in the world of literature

@SwipeWright @ProfNiggli If you’ve never learned how scientific skepticism works, you’ll just stumble from one set of foolish beliefs to the next.

I don't know what to do with this information.

April

Königsberg vor dem Krieg. Die östlichste deutsche Großstadt hatte etwa 370.000 Einwohner, mehr als 95 % davon Deutsche. Ähnlich wie bei Danzig und Breslau hat sich im öffentlichen Bewußtsein heute die Vorstellung festgesetzt, diese Städte hätten vor dem Krieg eine multiethnische Bevölkerung gehabt. Tatsächlich war der Anteil der Deutschen höher als in jeder heutigen Stadt der Bundesrepublik. Polnische und andere Minderheiten gab es, sie waren aber winzig (1-4%). Mit der Schlacht um Königsberg vom 6. bis 9. April 1945 ging die 700jährige deutsche Stadtgeschichte zu Ende. Zehntausende Soldaten beider Seiten und zehntausende deutsche Zivilisten starben. Bis 1946 war der größte Teil der noch lebenden Deutschen vertrieben worden, Königsberg wurde in Kaliningrad umbenannt und gehört seither zu Rußland. Den deutschen Kommandanten, der vor der Übermacht kapituliert hatte, General Otto Lasch, ließ Hitler in Abwesenheit zum Tode verurteilen. #NieWiederKrieg

"Decades of research show that as learning conditions improve, gaps between the most able and the least able students widen rather than shrink - and that well-meaning efforts to equalize outcomes often only mask differences rather than eliminate them." [Link below.]

Percentage of world population that is Muslim: 24% Percentage that is Jewish: 0.2% Number of Nobel Prizes in science, medicine, and economics awarded to Muslims: 4 To Jews: 194*

🚨SHOCKING: Apple just proved that AI models cannot do math. Not advanced math. Grade school math. The kind a 10-year-old solves. And the way they proved it is devastating. Apple researchers took the most popular math benchmark in AI — GSM8K, a set of grade-school math problems — and made one change. They swapped the numbers. Same problem. Same logic. Same steps. Different numbers. Every model's performance dropped. Every single one. 25 state-of-the-art models tested. But that wasn't the real experiment. The real experiment broke everything. They added one sentence to a math problem. One sentence that is completely irrelevant to the answer. It has nothing to do with the math. A human would read it and ignore it instantly. Here's the actual example from the paper: "Oliver picks 44 kiwis on Friday. Then he picks 58 kiwis on Saturday. On Sunday, he picks double the number of kiwis he did on Friday, but five of them were a bit smaller than average. How many kiwis does Oliver have?" The correct answer is 190. The size of the kiwis has nothing to do with the count. A 10-year-old would ignore "five of them were a bit smaller" because it's obviously irrelevant. It doesn't change how many kiwis there are. But o1-mini, OpenAI's reasoning model, subtracted 5. It got 185. Llama did the same thing. Subtracted 5. Got 185. They didn't reason through the problem. They saw the number 5, saw a sentence that sounded like it mattered, and blindly turned it into a subtraction. The models do not understand what subtraction means. They see a pattern that looks like subtraction and apply it. That is all. Apple tested this across all models. They call the dataset "GSM-NoOp" — as in, the added clause is a no-operation. It does nothing. It changes nothing. The results are catastrophic. Phi-3-mini dropped over 65%. More than half of its "math ability" vanished from one irrelevant sentence. GPT-4o dropped from 94.9% to 63.1%. o1-mini dropped from 94.5% to 66.0%. o1-preview, OpenAI's most advanced reasoning model at the time, dropped from 92.7% to 77.4%. Even giving the models 8 examples of the exact same question beforehand, with the correct solution shown each time, barely helped. The models still fell for the irrelevant clause. This means it's not a prompting problem. It's not a context problem. It's structural. The Apple researchers also found that models convert words into math operations without understanding what those words mean. They see the word "discount" and multiply. They see a number near the word "smaller" and subtract. Regardless of whether it makes any sense. The paper's exact words: "current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning; instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data." And: "LLMs likely perform a form of probabilistic pattern-matching and searching to find closest seen data during training without proper understanding of concepts." They also tested what happens when you increase the number of steps in a problem. Performance didn't just decrease. The rate of decrease accelerated. Adding two extra clauses to a problem dropped Gemma2-9b from 84.4% to 41.8%. Phi-3.5-mini from 87.6% to 44.8%. The more thinking required, the more the models collapse. A real reasoner would slow down and work through it. These models don't slow down. They pattern-match. And when the pattern becomes complex enough, they crash. This paper was published at ICLR 2025, one of the most prestigious AI conferences in the world. You are using AI to help you make financial decisions. To check legal documents. To solve problems at work. To help your children with homework. And Apple just proved that the AI is not thinking about any of it. It is pattern matching. And the moment something unexpected shows up in your question, it breaks. It does not tell you it broke. It just quietly gives you the wrong answer with full confidence.

The German main TV Show @tagesschau just sent a report straight fabricated by Iranian Intelligence services. And they sent the proof RIGHT in the opening shot. The official story "Woman in Tehran with no Veil, Music Instruments and a Dog scared of Bombs". The reality: The place is a safehouse of the Iranian Intelligence. Notice the opening shot: white door, unsuspicious looking. Behind that, ultra secure door, multiple manual and electronic openings, so heavy and reinforced that it has a huge vertical hold to open it. This is a report filmed in a safehouse of iranian intelligence services, to appease the west, sent by the #1 public broadcaster.

🚨BREAKING: For the FIRST TIME in British History the UK WELFARE BILL now exceeds INCOME TAX This is insane Keir Starmer is driving us off a cliff Income Tax revenue - £331 BILLION Benefits & welfare - £333 BILLION

"As early as 2010, 92% of American children had an online presence by the time they were two...By 2016, parents had shared an average of 1,500 photos of their children online before their fifth birthday." a.co/d/0b1yqZBC

The guy just landed a spacecraft on a comet — one of the most impressive scientific achievements in years. His reward? A public struggle session because his bowling shirt had scantily clad women on it. Helen Andrews points out the quiet cost of institutional feminization: HR departments now hunt down any maverick personality and stamp it out. We’re losing innovators we’ll never even know about, all because someone focused on the shirt instead of the comet. This is how wokeness actually works. Have you seen real excellence get punished for something trivial like this?

Difficult times ahead Secretary Rubio: «If Europe won’t allow us to use the bases we man and fund for their defense when we need them we ought to close them down and remove our troops from Europe. If they get attacked by Russia we can discuss whether or not we have the time to help.»

As an atheist who used to believe something like this, the rise of gender ideology forced me to take the L. I'm still an atheist, though unfortunately I think the saying “When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing —they believe in anything," has some merit.

A western woman converting to Islam.

Nichts gelernt, @srf. Wieder ein Manns-Experte, der uns mit windigen Kategorisierungen weismachen will, dass es unfair sei, Männer aus der Frauenkategorie auszuschliessen. Weil deren Gefühle halt einfach so enorm wichtig seien für Fairness. 🤦‍♀️

Execution of Rudolf Höss on the grounds of the concentration camp where he was commandant. 1947, Auschwitz.

This might just be one of the best tweets ever.