ElevenLathe

Your AI token bill isn't a "benefit", it's just an expense, just like all the other software subscriptions your work pays for.

This seems really really easy to do even if your org isn't using AI at all. You certainly don't need to be "AI Native" to implement an MCP server for your webapp.

Like I said, I just tried that and my results say it's happening. GeoIP isn't perfect though, and US/CA telecom infra is hopelessly intermingled, so maybe it's just a technical limitation. I can say when I look from Austin, it's "Lake America", but if I look from Geneva it's "Lake Ontario (Lake America)".

I'm not so sure on the Turkmen Sea example. Google is (trying to) sidestep this issue as much as possible by making the name on the map depend on your physical location, language and localization settings, or both. They could easily make the Caspian Sea say Turkmen Sea only in Turkmenistan, and probably would if they wanted to keep doing business in Turkmenistan. This is already how it works for Lake Ontario: if I access from the US, it says "Lake America", but if I VPN to somewhere in Europe, it says "Lake Ontario (Lake America)".

In terms of lawyerly distinctions, I would actually argue that there is still no legal basis to the rename. The president has directed the federal executive branch to refer to Lake Ontario as Lake America, but...that's it. It literally doesn't and can't apply to Google. No law has been passed, and even if there had been it's pretty clear that it's a 1st Amendment issue to compel private entities to refer to things in particular ways -- it would be a slam dunk even on this Supreme Court. Their decision to do it is a voluntary act meant to curry favor with this administration, or at least to avoid pissing it off. This isn't like the Indian laws that make it illegal to publish a map that shows Kashmir as part of Pakistan, it's just a memo to the federal bureaucracy. Yes, this doesn't really matter because there are punishments that are within the power of the president (like cancelling contracts, or cooking up bogus DoJ investigations, or failing to resist antitrust enforcement, etc.) that they want to avoid. This just goes to illustrate that the rule of law in the United States is mostly a fantasy.

Spectrum is finite and must be shared. In the absence of a functioning world government, it makes sense to treat it as a national resource. And no, I don't think the FCC should be in the business of policing the content of what is broadcast on the public's spectrum, only that it is done in an orderly way.

That sounds a lot like "censor foreign media and domestic anti-regime media". I'm of the opinion that if foreigners can convince me and my countrymen of something just by posting, we probably didn't really need the convincing anyway. Even if it turns out my position on something was changed 180 degrees by foreign posters (even Chinese intelligence employing cutting edge propaganda AI, or whatever bogeyman you want to employ), then: Fine. Whatever. Persuasion of citizens in a democracy is just how a free society works.

Does this mean LA would be a feasible option for longer-cycle storage, IOW keeping a reserve topped up most of the year for those duldrums weeks with little solar or wind?

Does anyone know the current state of agent-assisted Smalltalk, Pharo or otherwise? Intuitively it seems like a match made in heaven, since the agent can directly manipulate the running program, but I also assume that there is very little training data available for Smalltalk.

It's strictly worse than the alternatives mentioned (cubes and real offices). Why not be negative?

I've been thinking about this a bit, and I think the only real answer is to have some alternate body of trustworthy people constituting an armed but unofficial Civil Guard (or whatever you want to call it) waiting in the wings to take over the maintenance of order when a sympathetic Sheriff or City Council fires the whole police apparatus at once. They would then be deputized/sworn in/officialized, and they could keep order and disarm the old cops while a permanent new force is set up. This is admittedly a dangerous situation to put one's local community in -- especially without backing from the Feds or the statehouse -- but I don't see a way around it.

The only alternative would be a whisper campaign to suss out the trustworthy pockets within the existing police apparatus, but that is probably even more dangerous. Imagine the police chief in your city going public with information that there is a left wing plot to overthrow order from within the police department!

Presumably the creditors would then own the DCs. The price to build them is a sunk cost (meaning: not actually a factor in determining what they are now worth), so they would either sell them off for their new value or else run them at market rates.

The big question then becomes: what is the market value of these things? Is it even positive? Creditors will eat the difference between that number and whatever they actually lent (less what they've been paid back so far, if anything).

It's like taking out a mortgage to buy a house, and then somehow dodging the payments by assigning the debt to the house itself.

The problem is that a house painting job is likely out of reach for most ex-S{R,W}E types. Nobody wants a flabby desk jockey with programming and sysadmin experience for their open blue collar position.

The trick will be for all of us to find work somebody actually wants us for. If we can't, some kind of make-it-look-like-an-accident suicide is probably one of the least bad options for our families if they rely on us as the sole breadwinner. They can grieve, but they will get some insurance money and hopefully survive to live a somewhat dignified life.

Where can I find a leftist cable news channel? Literally don't think they exist. MSNBC and CNN are as pro establishment as anything.

I would push back on this framing. Individuality obviously exists, and we were created in God's image, etc., but there isn't a way to avoid politics forming people into groups of some kind. Let me try to explain.

If we don't band together to help one another, we're stuck playing by the rigged existing rules of the game. Organizing (either in the traditional labor sense, or via super PACs and racism) allows us to change the rules in our own favor, because we can wield more power.

With that laid out, what kind of group should we organize? The bigger the group, the more power it has. But also: the more coherent and lockstep the group is in its actions, the more power it has, at any size. So the goal of all politics is to form the biggest coalition you can that still holds together.

Many socialists think, as a strategic question (not one of ideology), that the goal should be to organize the whole working class (everyone who must sell their labor in order to survive). This is the biggest group you can possibly have that still shares a common interest. The problem is obviously that this is an unwieldy group and it's really really hard to do, particularly in the face of almost infinite money trying to stop us. There are various thoughts on how to address this problem, the classic one being to organize whole shops or industries at once, and slowly building momentum that was, but fundamentally it is about putting together the biggest possible political grouping that coheres.

Right wingers have a different strategy, which is to use identity politics (racism, xenophobia, sectarianism, sectionalism, etc.) to organize a smaller coalition but in a very tight, coordinated way. The play is that a relatively small group of committed actors can use things like propaganda, violence, and dirty tricks to seize or maintain power.

Fundamentally the left and the right are trying to do the same thing, which is to put together a coalition that let's them change the status quo. If we protect our individuality too much, we get rolled by the other side. Establishment oriented people tend to miss this.

Because Congress allocated this money for one but not the other.

This is is exactly how I've been using AI for writing features: I write a spec. AI writes a test. I inspect/edit/give notes on the test until it's what I want and make sure it's red (to validate that my/the AI's assumptions are more or less correct). Then the AI edits the code only to make the tests pass. Then I do a sanity check on things and tidy them up to my liking. Cut a commit, work on next test.

TBH I feel like a dinosaur working this way, reading about others' more recent workflows. One merit it has is that it is a very cheap way to use AI, at least on the apps I work on, because Kimi K2.6 is more than adequate to give good results with this workflow.

"unitary executive" is just Modern Standard American for "Führerprinzip": all authority flows directly from Dear Leader down, all the way from the White House to the schoolteacher and the cop.

What's a "GW of battery storage capacity"? Do they mean gigawatt-hour? (sidenote: how scary that the DoE is the one making this error?)

I don't know enough about airline finance to understand if this is a simplification or not. Are engine users really billed by the kilonewton-hour or by something simpler like a service hour? It seems like kN-h would be a hard thing to meter to everyone's satisfaction and some simpler proxy would do just as well.

It would take a LOT of house cleaning in the DoD, making the current Hegseth purge look cute by comparison.

While there is arguably still some influence from democratic pressure on some areas of US Federal policy, foreign policy and warmaking (including financial warfare like this) are not among them. These have been insulated from public opinion since approximately the the 1940s. It took a massive organization against the draft to (arguably, possibly, maybe -- we'll never really know) shorten the Vietnam war (which, incidentally, was never declared a War by the democratically elected Congress), and that was the high water mark of democratic influence on the security state since WW2.

In short, the opinion of Americans is just not relevant to America's foreign policy decisions. Even a 100% anti-Zionist Congress would be unable to stop supporting the genocide.

Not sure I understand the confrontational tone. I agree with everything you've posted. By calling the uninsured poor, I just mean that the system is so bad for uninsured people that anybody who possibly has the means to get even the worst health insurance is likely to do so. There are exceptions I'm sure, but I've never met anyone who walked into a period of being uninsured without exhausting every possible resource available to them first.

For the most part, to be uninsured in the US is to be impoverished.

I think its surprising how short the memory can be for this stuff. Look how long passed between the British invading America and burning down our capital (1812) and us fighting on the same side in the Great War (1917): not even 4 generations. There are obviously counterexamples, but it's not a slam dunk that 10-ish years of Trumpism will sour the European memory on America forever. Maybe it will, maybe it wont. I would think material facts we don't know yet will be the biggest determining factor here, rather than the other way around.

I think the main mechanism is that uninsured patients will just never pay because:

1) they're poor and have no money

2) medical debts are easier to ignore than other debts that these people also have (because they're poor)

3) they're going to die much sooner than insured people

...and the hospital knows this. So the hospital charges some large multiple of what they charge insured patients so that, when they ultimately sell the debt to the debt collectors at a deep discount, they come out approximately even. If somebody is somehow enough of a sucker to pay the sticker amount, it's just a nice surprise. The other victims of this debt will either just die and never pay, negotiate with the hospital to pay much less, or negotiate with the debt collector for much less.

Would this all be simpler and better if the prices were the same for insured and uninsured people? Yes.

GTA Online has this feeling at times. I always find it a refreshing distraction when somebody comes into a public server with obvious hacks and starts spawning bizarre weapons, vehicles, giving out money, changing the weather or day/night cycle abruptly, teleporting everyone to the same location. It's easy to leave to another server when it gets boring or frustrating, but these are the times when I put out the call on Discord for other non-currently-online friends to join me!

I have similar fears. I honestly think that this may be the mechanism by which the global capital order falls into a version of late-Soviet decay and collapse -- a major boon to the oligarchs, just as it was in Russia.

Just as the production and service bureaucracy of the USSR ceased to care about the value of their work (so long as they technically fulfilled their plan), we are possibly headed for a world where all the "real economy" workers (in manufacturing, logistics, etc.) will be guided by the output knowledge workers and managers driving AI, who are being judged by yet more management using AI, who are ultimately judged by investors using AI and the whole thing gets disconnected from any actual ground truth -- just as planning did in the Soviet case.

When the whole thing collapses, somebody will be around to pick up the pieces (and valuable capital equipment, land, etc.) for pennies on the dollar. I suspect the kernel of whatever comes next will come from China, but also suspect it will bear more than a passing resemblance to Putin's Russia -- a small clique of rentier-gangster kingpins semi-legally seizing everything in sight and cobbling together an autocratic oligarchy that creaks along without meaningful challenge.

Any standard that claims the entire city of Chicago to be a border zone is an absurd standard, just laughably overreaching if it were ever put in front of a fair court.

> Be mad at the people/entities who created the legal loopholes and laws.

We are. It is their class that is in charge of the legal system. The loopholes exist for them because they are rich and rich people own the government. To pretend that there is a meaningful distinction between Mark Zuckerberg and Chuch Schumer just because one is "in government" and the other is a "private citizen" is absurd and naive. Chuck Schumer and the rest of the legislature work for Zuckerberg, et. al.

It's like saying "you can be mad at OJ's lawyer, but not OJ". OJ hired the lawyer, his actions are for OJ's benefit.

TBH this whole left-right thing is pretty new in the US. The political science term is "ideological alignment" (we didn't really have it for a long time due to our weird party system) if you want to read about it. This is changing now to an extent, but there was also a taboo for a long time against identifying as being a leftist, what with McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, etc.