Taikonerd

Hi Maximilian -- nice to hear from you!

I'm sad to hear that about LLMs. I sometimes wonder if the software world is going to be "locked into" our existing languages, because it's what the LLMs can work with.

FWIW, I think the PRQL syntax is beautiful.

Sure, but they never intended to support everything you can do in SQL. For example, they say on the Roadmap page that they're only going to support SELECTs -- there won't be a PRQL way to do an INSERT, UPDATE, etc.

Google's "pipe syntax" is a similar idea: [0]

It's not as elegant as PRQL, because of course it's bolted onto the existing SQL syntax, rather than a redesign from scratch. But it has a big name behind it, and it's actually running in prod in Google Cloud... so it might have more momentum.

[0]: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/simpli...

Is this project stalling out? The last post on the "posts" page is from March 2023. But the last commit to the git repo was last week...

I've only listened to the French revolution, but it was absolutely electrifying. I would listen on my car ride home -- one day I burst through the door to my house and yelled "CHARLOTTE CORDAY MURDERED MARAT!!!" at my wife like it was breaking news.

True. Institutions like that have a lot of momentum, and they sometimes outlive their original rationale.

But on the other hand, Russian aggression is back in the headlines these days...

I would also say (d) make it clear to the Soviet Union that, if they invaded West Germany, it would not just be an intra-European war; it would be a world war.

> If you need granular control over every tiny aspect of your container orchestration — network policies, pod scheduling, resource quotas, multi-tenant isolation, custom admission controllers, autoscaling on custom metrics — Kubernetes gives you knobs for all of it.

> The problem is that 99% of teams don't need any of those knobs.

I keep hoping for a Docker Swarm revival. It's the right size for small-to-medium-size deployments with normal requirements.

IIUC, this was a finding when they ran the Polis experiments in Taiwan: when you map the arguments of the different sides, there are actually large areas of agreement. In other words, the median person who disagrees with you is a "potential common ground" guy, not a "planet Zargon" guy.

> The thing nobody's talking about is that none of this AI automation works without Backstage doing the boring work of tracking who owns what, how things build, and what depends on what.

Do you mean that Backstage has the metadata like what services call which other services, and AI needs that to make changes safely? Sounds helpful to both AI and human developers ;-)

This is awful news.

I mean, presumably some future Democratic administration will reinstate the rule. But with this precedent set, this might become a switch that turns on and off every time the political winds change. When Republicans are in power, the US will do nothing at all to fight climate change. When Democrats are in power, they will belatedly try to undo the damage.

And of course there will be knock-on effects from other countries. Why should (for example) Mexico do anything at all to fight global warming, when the US (which is much richer, and a much larger polluter) declines to help?

> Just adding another service is easy, but making them work seamlessly together is much harder.

This argument in favor of PaaS makes a lot of sense to me. A PaaS vendor might say, "sure, you could set up your own observability layer, configure storage for it, troubleshoot that one service that can't connect to the API's endpoint, etc. Or you could just check the "observability" box on our dashboard and boom, there it is."

I'm currently at a company that really likes setting everything up from scratch. And the amount of time my team has spent building out a platform, as opposed to providing business value, is really sobering.

Totally agree. But I mean: supposing that we had a voting system where minor parties were more viable and didn't play spoiler. What % of independents would register as Greens, or Libertarians, etc, in that system?

I often wonder: if there were more parties in America, how many of these independents would register with one of them?

In other words, if there's a record-high number of independents, how much of it is "market failure" where people want more options than the usual 2 parties?

I just want to highlight Undue Medical Debt[0], the NGO that helped implement this.

They have a fascinating model -- they can buy the right to collect medical debts for pennies on the dollar. That debt would normally be bought by debt-collection companies. But once Undue Medical Debt buys a person's debt, they just... forgive it.

This means they can retire someone's $5,000 debt for a cost in the low hundreds. That might be life-changing for a poor family.

[0] https://unduemedicaldebt.org/

"Once you wanted revolution

Now you're the institution

How's it feel to be the man?

It's no fun to be the man."

- Ben Folds, "The Ascent of Stan" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caCuRqedslY

Agreed. I tried using Gemini's voice interface in their app. It went like this:

===

ME: "OK, so, I have a question about the economics of medicine. Uh..." [pauses to gather thoughts to ask question]

GEMINI: "Sure! Medical economics is the field of..."

===

And it's aggravated by the fact that all the LLMs love to give you page-long responses before it's your turn to talk again!

> We need to go back to a system where there are apprentices and masters

Apprenticeships are still around in the modern day -- including for white-collar jobs! Kelly Vedi writes a lot about this in her Substack: https://kellyvedi.substack.com/

> for lab-tech salary

This is something I don't understand. These companies make good profits -- why don't they pay their experts well?

My impression (and I'm not a scientist) is that the mucosal overgrowth comes from eating an obesogenic diet. (Some combination of too much sugar / salt / wrong types of fat?)

If you get the procedure and don't go back to an obesogenic diet, then it should be permanent.

Interesting link: a company called Fractyl Health is studying a surgical procedure they call "Revita," that they hope can keep weight off for patients after they discontinue GLP-1s.[0]

The premise, IIUC, is that obesity is driven partly by mucosal overgrowth on the duodenum. This thicker-than-expected layer of mucus is less porous, which leads your digestive system to underestimate the number of calories you've consumed. Revita basically re-surfaces the duodenum.

So, the idea is that you get to a lower weight with the GLP-1 drugs, and then Revita can hopefully reset your set point there.

Their first clinical trial is still in progress, but I think it's interesting to watch.

[0]: https://www.fractyl.com/our-platforms/revita/

If you're seeing this project for the first time, this link may help:

"Links to Explain Oils in 2025": https://oils.pub/blog/2025/12/links.html

Thank you for these pointers!

I feel like even people who don't care much about ideology care a great deal about how much they, personally, are going to be paid.

Especially if they amount they're going to be paid is going from $LOTS to zero.

IIUC, in the future, the SS tax isn't going to cover the benefits that SS will be obliged to pay out. So some analyses model the shortfall as coming out of the government's general budget.

So, yeah, it's "separate" spending in a sense, but it's not totally in its own sandbox.

I got interested enough in the national debt to do some research: is there a single-issue NGO that's working on the national debt? With a platform that you could imagine a Democrat or a Republican supporting?

I found the Concord Coalition [0], and their sister organization Concord Action [1].

I haven't done enough research to endorse them, but I'm just saying: they exist and this is their issue.

[0]: https://concordcoalition.org

[1]: https://concordaction.org/

IANA economist, but if there were a debt crisis, it would ultimately be about the psychology of the investors who would buy government debt. They want to be very, very confident that they will be paid back (which is why they're willing to accept a low interest rate).

If those investors are satisfied with a return to a late-80s fiscal posture, then great. But if they're worried that spending would just creep up again once the pressure is off, they might "demand" further cuts.

Yeah, it seems very unfair. If Party A has 60% of the seats in the state legislature, and Party B has 40%, then intuitively it feels like Party A should get 60% of what it wants. But as you said, Party A actually gets more like 100% of what it wants.

This is a thing where having more parties would really help. If there were (say) 4 parties, each with ~25% of the seats, then they would have to bargain with each other and form coalitions, which I think would be a really healthy process for democracy.

I really like this idea. And it lets ideas grow more organically: instead of a promising pilot program in (say) Maryland which then tries to go national, there can be a club which grows gradually. Another state joins the club in 2026, then another two in 2027, then...

> there was no central public health department

If only we had some sort of federal Center in charge of Disease Control... ;-)

But I agree with you that the CDC was weirdly passive during COVID. You'd think it would have been their moment to shine.