specialist

I borked my cherished 2019 trying to embiggen its CPU.

So I bought one of those spiffy Studio Display units in anticipation of the Mac Mini refresh.

But my strategy didn't account for local LLM mania.

I'll be postponing my purchase so long as used Mac Minis, if you can find one, remain as (or more) expensive as a new one.

Insult to injury is the additional administrative burden of voter registration.

It's a database query to generate a list of eligible voters and where they can vote. Literally.

Bonus points for maintaining 50+ heterogeneous legally separated voter registration databases. Thereby maximizing the likelihood of errors. Plus every VRDB has one or more teams of saboteurs; purging eligible voters, monkey wrenching, and sowing FUD.

...it's almost as if the there's some far reaching, widespread campaign to disenfranchise voters.

> if only those who oppose showing ID would drop their objections

You're not even wrong.

I worked as a poll judge for a long time. Most every jurisdiction has required ID for a very long time. And the exceptions prove the rule.

I also strenuously objected to closing the local polling sites in my county and state. (We activists were only able to delay it 2 years. Mostly by exposing lies of vendors and their lackeys.)

One of the (many) reasons was the long term decline of USPS, mostly caused by the decades long revanchist campaign to dismantle it, to further undermine our democracy.

Wait until you hear about the time we subsidized electrification for rural areas.

Ditto public schools, roads, phones, and broadband (sorta).

Inscrutable with a whiff of hostility! Love it!

Correct, fraudulent polling is merely electioneering, chicanery, fat rucking.

I don't understand your criticism. What did Helmuth say or do that was harmful?

I vaguely recall an editorial, mostly in response to GWB Admin's attacks upon and politicization of science, stating that SciAm can no longer remain neutral and must defend science (and knowledge, empiricism, humanism, etc).

That's a pretty good hill to die on. And that they did.

Investigative reporting, journalism, genuine reporting requires an endowment of some sort, to free itself from the yoke of advertising.

Yes and: I still think Stephensen's notion of phyles will prove the most prescient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

Like being quoted out of context.

It's just so easy to mock terms and phrases of art, to spin up the general public.

People like Chris Rufo, who mine legal, bureaucratic, technical, etc. phrases, are trolls.

My bro has a (weekly?) cron job to print a (test?) page, to prevent inkjet heads from drying out.

You'd think that after all this time, it'd be a built-in feature.

Yes and: the rules make the market. refs, adjudication, norms. markets free of rules is a tricky way to say might makes right.

Yup.

Methinks (hopes) we're entering the era of mass customization.

Another reason.

Official unemployment is low. Work force participation, another way to measure, continues to decrease.

> Techies and intellectuals had it disproportionately good.

Always temporary. In the never ending fight between Capital and Labor, deskilling (immiseration) is inevitable.

Blaming Labor for not adapting (quickly enough) to a shifting economy is perverse.

And a fortunate few profit off that suffering, and probably caused it.

For some of us, that's just another Tuesday.

Not to diminish anyone's struggle. The first ~dozen trips thru the wood chipper are truly rough, no lie. Then you adapt. Or not.

YMMV.

Yes and: UI churn is disruptive for the elders in my life.

My current view:

The job of the hegemon is to maintain the status quo, proper order. Hegemony, the maritime order, global currency (US dollar), and forever war are inseparable. The cliché "if you want peace, prepare for war." Some low-level, mostly contained, amount of violence is the price for a larger "peace".

Post WWII, the USA did not engage in total war or seek unconditional surrender. Because breaking the equilibrium wrecks hegemony. As demonstrated by GWB's ill-advised conquest of Iraq, which (IMHO) was the deflection point for Pax Americana.

The notion of just war and world cop is mythmaking, rationalization. So the citizens will keep subsidizing the hegemony. (h/t Niall Ferguson) Any notions of justice, human rights, and whatnot were savvy marketing, born of (PR) competition with other hegemons.

As bad as Pax American hegemony has been for all participants, I'm certain we'll look back with nostalgia. In that "What has Rome ever done for us?!" sort of way. The ~70 years of (relative) peace was kind of incredible.

The emerging multi-polar world (and poly-crisis) is more chaotic, violent, and terrible. And will prove ever more so over time.

Governments (the investing public) should be paid royalties.

Yup.

My father worked in defense. He shared lore about the genesis of tempest, the requirement to use faraday cages to protect secrets, gear, etc.

The story goes that some kind of red team set up shop down the road from some missile tests (or something) with some simple gear. Afterwards, they shared the launch codes used, shocking all the brass. Hence the need for shielded comms.

Regrettably, the authority you crave (linked reports) are paywalled.

https://www.woodmac.com/reports/power-markets-north-america-...

Here's a prior take on this topic:

The big stories from the last year in electricity [2026-04] https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-big-stories-from-the-last-year

Global Electricity Review 2026 https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...

TLDR: Every where but some parts of the USA, solar + battery is the cheapest source of new power generation. Tariffs and subsidies continue to prop up gas generation. 40% YOY drop in battery prices!? Solar + battery is still on the cost learning curve (no where near plateau), whereas gas (extraction, turbines, etc) plateaued a while back.

--

That episode (and Ember's report) looks back at 2025.

So it couldn't account for this year's increased prices and volatility for gas, or data centers increasing the demand for gas turbines.

Globally, solar + battery adoption continues to accelerate. In the USA, big tech forfeited their climate pledges (choosing to use gas) and new solar + battery continues to be blocked by our constipated connection queue (to the grid).

One of my projects is creating a direct manipulation user interface. It's been a blast.

For most other (maintenance work) projects, not so much.

Fantastic analogy. Bullseye.

At the HITlab?

I interviewed Dan Bricklin in '88 or '89 (for a magazine). Trippy dude. Lots of ideas.

Bricklin stated the optic nerve is exposed brain. So that when a laser projects an imagine directly on to the retina, it's like programming the brain.

Nope.

I decided right then and there I never needed a laser pointing at my eye ball.

He was a gossip, gadfly, observer, and tinkerer who also wrote well (for his audience).

Like Dvorak and others, twas just a bit of entertainment, until it wasn't.

Thoroughly enjoyed his works (warts and all), learned a few things, and remain deeply disappointed that NerdTV didn't become a thing.

RIP

Data needs a confidence score.

eg "Earth: mostly harmless."

Musk, Zuck, others do plenty of illegal, immoral, and antisocial acts. Maybe this specific instance is merely shady and underhanded.

The tax evasion label is a handy shibboleth for [b|t]illionaire cohort.

No ruleset can cover every edge case, eventuality. Is hacking the tax code honoring the spirit of the law? Is it fair, just, good citizenship?

IANAL but I think there's a legal term for abiding by the obvious intent of the ruleset, public good, social norms.

PS- A take cut for me is a tax hike for thee (and your children's children). All this neoliberal supply side voodoo economics nonsense a) does not grow the economy and b) creates deficits which condemn our children to lives of unending usury.

I prefer the notion of shared responsibility.

Yup. I'm most familiar with Jill Lepore and Quinn Slobodian (and others in their respective orbits). They're both historians who've written extensively about Musk and Muskism (et al). Wild stuff.

Apparently the plan is to use AI slop, mediated thru social medias, to defeat the woke mind virus, perpetuated by the Anti-Christ, in order to safe guard humanity's future.

I wish I was making this up.