StephenHerlihyy

I had heard of that but it wasn’t until you posted the link that I actually read through it.

My question after actually reading it though is simple - how does it prevent fraud? Like you just need GPS and a selfie to verify. No bank account required! Since the nominal case is undocumented you don’t have ground truth to check against. What is stopping someone from using an eSIM, OpenClaw, and an emulator from self-deporting thousands of virtual persona at $2600 profit

It just seems poorly considered. I don’t know if they really thought this through.

Honestly understanding and applying 3d transformations should be a new LLM benchmark. Three.js, OpenSCAD, even Nano Banano prompts. The moment you add that extra dimension any semblance of ‘intelligence’ goes right out the window. Every model out there seems to spin themselves in circles trying to logic through it with no success.

At what point does the cost of reimplementation shrink below the benefits of obfuscation? Consider a new CVE in Linux. Well maybe my Linux is not the same as the public one. Maybe I just set a swarm of AI agents on making me a drop in replacement that is different but with an identical interface. Same-same but different. Right now writing your own OS to replace the entirety of Linux would be costly and error prone. Foolish. But will it always? What happens when Claude Code Infinute Opus can 1-shot a perfect reimagining in 24 hours? Or 30 minutes? Do all my servers have the same copy or are they all slightly different implementations of the same thing? I dunno.

This is sort of where I think he is going with it. Run the compute part super cold (-60C) in a dielectric fluid. Maybe even at a low pressure. It boils off, gets collected, and is then condensed into something way hotter. Like boiling water hot. This is sent through a high temperature radiator for heat dispersion (because Stefan-Boltzmann has a damned 4), and then pumped back into the common storage area. Cycle indefinitely. Beyond the simple space whatever non-sense, there is a nugget of a good idea in there. Cold things are going to have less internal resistance - so they will produce less waste heat. If you can keep them at a constant temperature via submerged cooling they are also going to suffer less thermal stress due to heat fluctuations. So the vacuum of space becomes the perfect insulator. You can’t have humans getting into them anyways because then you have to reheat and recool, causing stress on the system. Just have to accept your slow component losses. Microsoft and IBM have been working the same basic concept for a while (decade plus), Elon is just throwing ‘Space!!’ into the equation because of who he is. I think it’s 50% hype and 50% this is where the industry is going regardless. I always assumed they would just find an abandoned mine or something. But the always-cold, thermally-stable, no-humans-allowed data center is coming. We are hitting the point where the upfront cost of doing it is overshadowed by the tail cost savings.

What amazes me the most is the speed at which things are advancing. Go back a year or even a year before that and all these incremental improvements have compounded. Things that used to require real effort to consistently solve, either with RAGs, context/prompt engineering, have become… trivial. I totally agree with your point that each step along the way doesn’t necessarily change that much. But in the aggregate it’s sort of insane how fast everything is moving.

I don’t use OpenAI too much, but I follow a similar work flow. Use Opus for design/architecture work. Move it to Sonnet for implementation and build out. Then finally over to Gemini for review, QC and standards check. There is an absolute gain in using different models. Each has their own style and way of solving the problem just like a human team. It’s kind of awesome and crazy and a bit scary all at once.

That’s fair enough. Part of it is the Trump effect. I tend to dive pretty deep into things when they catch my interest. A lot of time we write things off as crazy simply because we don’t understand the context behind the presumption of insanity. So I try to look under the surface so to speak. I want to know why someone feels the way they do, even if their thesis is a little confused. Almost like: “I see you are very passionate about this, let me figure out why.”

I try to make the world make sense. Communication is a skill and many otherwise smart people simply fail to invest in it. Curiousity I suppose.

The lack of public awareness is honestly the biggest issue. I’ve got nothing personally against Canada or the Canadian people. And I certainly don’t think Trump’s approach has benefitted the situation. But I also recognize that his grievance have a level of merit. I can critique a government without blaming a people, right? I disagree with how the Canadian government has been handling itself. I think there is a way to resolve these issues, but I think first Canada has to at least acknowledge they exist. Whenever there is discussion like this people love to flood in, eager to defend our neighbor to the north and stick it to Trump. These issues have persisted through many administrations. You ask why Congress doesn’t stop Trump from his actions? It’s because the political consensus in Washington is that they are needed. I have no doubt whoever comes next will blame Trump and declare a new era of friendship and peace. But these issues will be at the core of any new agreement between the countries. People disagree, countries argue. It’s temporary. America wants Canada to succeed and Canada benefits from America’s success. They are just renorming the relationship a bit, which team dynamics tells us takes us back to the storming phase. Give it time and we’ll be rolling along again.

And then waiting 4 years to actually ban his company from operating in Canada.

1) Multi-year delay in banning Huawei from 5G networks: https://www.ndp.ca/news/ndp-statement-huawei-ban-canadian-5g...

Took Canada 4-years longer than the rest of the Five Eyes alliance to ban them, prompting the Biden administration to threaten to terminate the agreement.

2) NORAD/Ballistic missile defense (Not just NATO): https://canadiandefencereview.com/norad-modernization-closin...

Canada chooses not to participate in the defense of North America from potential threats, deferring the cost and military response entirely to the United States.

3) Canadian Digital Services tax: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/ties-and-knots-bind-uni...

4) Lax enforcement of cartel money laundering: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/commentary/trump-and-fentany...

The roughly 100 organized crime groups operating in Canada (including three groups dedicated to supplying fentanyl) are partly drawn to loopholes and lax penalties that allow fentanyl-related money-laundering operations to flourish.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-money-laundering-pro...

5) Weak enforcement against counterfeit goods: https://macleans.ca/economy/why-canada-is-a-haven-for-knock-...

Canada remains the only G7 country on the 2025 USTR Watch List. The 2025 USTR Special 301 Report again expressed concerns with Canada's perceived lack of IP enforcement, particularly at the border and against online piracy.

6) Canada undercutting American efforts to de-risk from China: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/glob...

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/as-t...

I tried to avoid some of the more common ones, like NATO spending, trade dispute, etc. A lot of this stuff, like providing for the common defense, don't make it easy for cartels launder money, don't look the other way on counterfeit goods, aren't unreasonable demands.

Yes, Britain and France have aircraft carriers but they are old, small and likely to be sunk by modern hyper-sonics. Europe's inability to project power is well documented though. Most of the 2025 literature is more related to overland mobility in Europe, since that is the piece Europe is currently working to fix, but the European militaries are not designed for global engagement. Most American documents on the topic don't even really mention NATO's involvement against China. Here's some stuff to consider though. Here is a decent primer:

https://warontherocks.com/2024/04/two-theater-tragedy-a-relu...

I have many complaints about Trump's handling of foreign policy. Don't mistake my tone for approval of his approach. He is needlessly aggressive and domineering. We have tried the carrot approach though. Coalition of the willing. By and large I would say our allies are spiritually willing but physically unable to. If we use Canada for example, I don't think they need to jump at every demand, but things like stopping counterfeit sales (Pacific Mall), taking meaningful steps to stop cartel money laundering (Vancouver), actually meeting military commitments (Ukraine promises). A lot of it doesn't get reported because people don't really want to hear it. Like I said, Trump is not right in his handling of these issues, but Canada allows them to fester because its in their interest.

Honestly I would have done 20 years if I had been so lucky. My body had other plans however. I'm trying to get back into the embedded/defense space though. I was a low-level C/C++ programmer back in my early tech days and so it's been pretty neat coming back to it. Absolutely insane that these tiny little chips have so much raw compute power. I used to view under a millisecond as "good enough" but get to tinker with microseconds now.

Over the past 15 years the European economy has grown from 16.25 to 18.50 trillion per World Bank. In 2008 the combined economic strength of the EU was 110% of the United State's. Today it's ~65%. By and large the European economy completely missed the mark on the Internet/Web3.0 technology revolution. You certainly have bright spots like ASML, but those are the exception and not the rule. It's reindustrialization efforts are facing massive head wins from energy costs and China is absolutely wrecking their neo-colonial African holdings.

I hope the EU moves to a more Federalized model of governance - it would certainly benefit them. And I agree that it won't be easy. I am not sure California and Texas would agree to the model the United States has today. I can't even imagine what it would be like for Germany and France. But they have some serious issues to address. These are some foundational changes that are unlikely to happen in the next year or two.

I left technology about a decade ago to join the Military. It was an adjustment, but honestly was the greatest job I've ever had. Compared to tech where everything seemed high stress and had terrible work life balance, my military career was like playing on easy mode. Failure was impossible, no one wanted to stay a minute longer than they had to and everything was already on fire so putting it out was never really that urgent. It sounds crazy but I loved it. Now I am refreshed and pivoting back to tech with a fully funded Master's degree.

We spent the 4-years under Biden capturing foreign investment via high interest rates. Now we are trapping them here via poor conversion rates. In a geopolitical, macro-economic sense we are "Elon Musking". Overpromise and under deliver. Take their money by selling them on a dream and then string them along with promises of future results. We have their money and they have "Fully Self Driving" lane-merge warnings.

The opposition to American hegemony shifted from Europe (ie the USSR) to Asia (ie China). To that end, NATO lacks the capacity to meaningfully impact a conflict in the Pacific. The EU simply does not have the means to project power in that way nor do they have the ability to meaningfully implement economic policies that would effectively reduce Chinese growth.

Trump is an asshole, but the strategy hasn’t really changed in the last decade or so. Obama tried to isolate China with European help, Trump 1.0 tried to convince Europe to step up, Biden showed them we were willing to move on, and now Trump 2.0 is following through.

People fail to realize how anti-European this past decade has been, and not just under Trump. Europe had significant issue with the Inflation Reduction Act. Not to mention the war in Ukraine, which while illegal and entirely caused by Russia, was capitalized upon by American diplomats to the absolute benefite of the US at the expense of Europe.

The overarching plan has been evident for a while, Trump is just blatant about it. He lacks the decorum to make someone happy about being gifted a lemon. Past administrations have had much more tact in that regard.

America does not want direct conflict with China. China doesn’t want direct conflict with America either. It would be catastrophic for both honestly. Neither side would emerge cleanly victorious. Both would be limping away scarred by the experience. To that end America is just trying to let the underlying structural issues play out. China and Europe both have some structural issues that need addressed. America is gonna build up it’s own hemisphere and simply wait the rest of the world out.

Is it the best plan? Honestly it might be. The more I see of it, the more comfortable I am growing with it. I was more worried about it in the Biden days simply because I was still under the mindset of Europe being an important ally. America was undermining the European economy on multiple fronts and it seemed like we were alienating some of our closest allies. Ironically what I think a lot of people are feeling now.

The truth is though that Europe is dead weight. Their economy is anemic, their still too fragmented militarily and they have been actively undermining America’s effects to derisk supply chains from China. Trump’s broad tariffs would have been handled better under someone else, but the end result would have been the same out of simple necessity. Since COVID America has grown more dependent on China due to second order effects. Everytime we close a door someone else opens a window to let them back in. And it’s not just Europe, but Canada, South Korea, others too. Honestly Mexico has probably been our best ally in that regard.

If you follow the geopolitical sphere most of what’s happening is not new. Trump hasn’t really changed the plan - he’s just subtle like a brick to the face. He is loud and boastful about it where before it was clever and subtextual. That is really the only change. Geopoliticallt he tries to dominate while Biden and Obama would convince people something stupid was what they really wanted.

I don’t know if that helps the anxiety at all. I’ve felt it, I’ve been there. I’ve yet to see a better plan though. Honestly, the next decade is gonna be bumpy, but if you look at the long-term trajectory, America is gonna be well ahead of the rest of the world by the 2040s. We are easily in the best strategic position I would say. Once you really wrap your mind around the various aspects of it, it’s not a bad plan. It’s not Trump’s plan, it’s not Biden’s plan, this plan has roots going back over a decade. I’m sure at some point it was just a COA under discussion with multiple decision points and alternatives. Could it have worked itself out differently? Probably. But given where we are it’s probably the best plan for now.

I don’t know why anyone would still be trying to pull data off the open internet. Too much signal to noise. So much AI influence already baked into the corpus. You are just going to be reinforcing existing bias. I’m more worried about the day Amazon or Hugging Face take down their large data sets.

My biggest hope for Elon’s Mars plan is the chance to create a whole new Calendar system that makes sense. Like honestly. 7 days in a week? Random days per month? Uneven quarters? Who the hell decided to put the leap day in February! Clearly it should be at the beginning/end of the year. The western Calendar is nuts.

Why doesn’t every month have 30 days with the last day of the quarter having 31? Ohh leap year? December 32nd or January 0.

Little bit of both. Pi still uses a sort of unique boot sequence due to it’s heritage. Most devices will have the CPU load the bootloader and then have the OS bring up the GPU. Pi sort of inverts this, having the GPU leading the charge with the CPU held at reset until after the GPU has finished it’s boot sequence.

Once you get into the CPU though the Aarch64 registers become more standardized. You still have drivers and such to worry about and differing memory offsets for the peripherals - but since you have the kernel running it’s easier to kind of poke around until you find it. Pi 5 added someone complexity to this with the RP1 South Bridge which adds another layer of abstraction.

Hopefully that all makes sense. Basically the Pi itself is backwards while everything else should conform. It’s not Arm specific, but how the Pi does things.

McDonald's has an executive focused on beverages... which bringing it full circle is primarily Coke products.

It’s not about putting data centers into orbit. It’s about the cost-yield inversion to data centers cooling infrastructure that happens at terawatt scale. All things being equal - a chilled circuit performs better and produces less heat than a hot one. There is a high up front cost to pre-cooling but if you can get in the -60C range, and stay there, you can increase performance and cut energy costs.

When they say data centers in space - they mean data centers you can’t get to because they are flooded with ultra cold dielectric fluid and it costs tens of millions of dollars to bring them back up to human temperatures.

Right now it’s not worth the hassle. At terawatt scale it’s almost mandatory.

When you walk down that line it’s pretty close to putting them in space. No access. Super cold. No air. Tiny, insulated capsule. Thermal management hell. They’ll be buried in mines though, not launched into orbit.

It’s just corporate propaganda to simplify an otherwise insane situation.

A younger me would have had the same gusto. Age has taught me that attempting to improve the AC, in ways that my family can neither appreciate or understand, is merely going to lead to disaster.

Living in a cold room with an evil presence is better than roasting in hell with an angry wife.

Sure.

Tim Bray’s Grokipedia: https://grokipedia.com/page/Tim_Bray

Relevant text: Serving as the FTC's infrastructure expert, he testified on technical aspects such as service speed and user perceptions of responsiveness, assessing potential competitive harms from reduced incentives for innovation post-acquisition; his declaration, referenced in court filings, emphasized empirical metrics over speculative harms.[49][50]

[49] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/FTCReplytoMetaR...

[50] https://dpo-india.com/Resources/USA_Court_Judgements_Against...

Paragraph 756: Tim Bray, the FTC’s proffered infrastructure expert, opined that “[u]sers’ perceptions of how quickly an online product responds to requests is an important component of the quality of their experience,” and that the delay between a user request and an online product’s response is commonly referred to as latency. Ex. 288 at ¶ 98 (Bray Rep.). Mr. Krieger testified that Instagram saw a “significant latency reduction post-Instagration,” a term referring to Instagram’s migration to Meta’s data servers. Ex. 153 at 76:24-77:5, 287:3-20 (Krieger Dep. Tr.). He prepared a presentation in 2014 stating that there was a “75% latency reduction in our core ‘hot path’ in rendering feeds” after the integration.

I don’t really know who Tim Bray is and until now I had never been to Grokipedia. I don’t really like Grok - I tried Superheavy and it was slow, bloated and no better than Claude Opus.

But I have a bad habit of fact checking. It’s the engineer in me. You tell me something, I instinctively verify. In the linked article, sub-section, ‘References’, Mr. Bray opines about a reference not directly relating to the content cited. So I went to Grokipedia for the first time ever and checked.

Mr. Bray’s quote of a quote he quote couldn’t find is misleading. The sentence on Grokipedia includes 2 referencee of which he includes only the first. This first reference relates to his work with the FTC. The second part of the sentence relates to the second reference. Specifically on Grokipedia in the Tim Bray article linked reference number 50, paragraph 756 cleanly addresses the issue raised by Mr. Bray.

After that I stopped reading, still don’t know or care who Tim Bray is and don’t plan on using either Grokipedia or Grok in the near future.

Perhaps Mr. Bray’s did not fully explore the references or perhaps there was malice. I don’t know. Horseshoe theory applies. Pure pro- positions and pure anti- positions are idiotic and should be filtered accordingly. Filter thusly applied.

My understanding is that model are already merely a confederation of many smaller sub-models being used as "tools" to derive answers. I am surprised that it took us this long to solve the "AI + Microservices = GOLD!" equation.

What's fun is that I have had Anthropic's AI support give me blatantly false information. It tried to tell me that I could get a full year's worth of Claude Max for only $200 dollars. When I asked if that was true it quickly backtracked and acknowledged it's mistake. I figure someone more litigious will eventually try to capitalize.

Modules provide more than just speed. Compile time benefits are great and the article is right about build-time bloat being the bane of every developer. But modules serve a deeper purpose.

Explicit sub-unit encapsulation. True isolation. No more weird forward declarations, endlessly nested ifdef guards, or insane header dependency graphs. Things just exist as they are separate, atomic, deterministic and reliable.

Modules probably need a revision, and yes, adoption has been slow, but once you start using modules you will never go back. The clarity of explicitly declared interfaces and the freedom from header hell fundamentally changes how you think about organizing C++ code.

Start a new project with modules if you don’t believe me. Try them. That is the largest barrier right now - downstream use. They are not supported because they are not used and they are not used because they are not well supported. But once you use them you will start to eagerly await every new compiler release in hopes of them receiving the attention they deserve.

I would argue they need to go even further - warranty. I’ve seen vehicles 100% maintained by contractors need full engine or power train replacements after 5000 miles of light driving. Never been off road, never been deployed, just shuttling people around the base completely inoperatable after less than 2 years. When you buy a car the manufacturer has some stake in the game still - even the limited warranty ensures that a major failure will cost them and not you. Government contracting doesn’t work like this. They sell a product, sell you service and then sell you parts. If that part is bad you, the American taxpayer, then has to buy another one. There is no such thing as returns or lemon laws when it comes to government purchases. You get what you get and hope for the best.