brookst

I think they’re saying there is more evidence of fraud in stamps because of the direct monetary value, where there is no evidence that our current registration-time voting controls need to be supplemented with additional friction at voting time, because what little evidence there is of voter fraud is mostly just lies: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/us/politics/nevada-voters...

Risk tolerance perhaps? But also our increased capabilities make it harder to keep things simple. Should it be radar-opaque? Of course! Capable of autonomous flight? Duh! Carrier landings? Well sure, that might be needed. Refuel midair? Obviously. Sigint to the gills? Seems useful…

This, and also they have to chase changes in model tuning and capabilities. I have a nice little meta-harness focused on product development (requiremwnts, acceptance criteria) for Claude code, and when major new models come it it’s weeks before I can find and fix constraints that are no longer necessary + constraints that have become necessary.

A register is the obvious choice, but of course then you get a gold rush and people squatting on XPZ and stuff without even having invented an opaque term behind it.

As long as we’re burying things for archaeologists to find, let it be known that AGI once stood for “adjusted gross income”, a measure used for income taxes.

That’s the good faith model.

In reality, Flock cameras are bought for “law enforcement”, using taxpayer dollars (therefore free to the people making decisions) and enable both feelings of omniscience and the ability to stalk exes.

So ROI is pretty good when the I comes from someone else and the R is and random act of spying that makes the operators feel powerful.

Cynical, I know, but not empty cynicism I hope. All evidence leads me that way.

I don’t know this “everyone” you speak of, and I don’t identify or cheerlead for one group of murderers the other, and I empathize with all of the many innocent victims.

But I agree that those with the power and the weapons do seem to only believe in simple, violent solutions.

There might be complex solutions to be had, but it will take different leaders, and that seems unlikely in the short term.

I should have qualified it as “in any conflict going back more than a generation or so” because you’re right: there are net new attacks that are simpler.

But if you’re attempted to draw a parallel between Hitler’s use of an ethnic minority as a nationalist punching bag and the situation in the Middle East, that I totally reject.

Yep. And these companies know it. I’ve been in the room with execs candidly saying their billion-dollar cash cows will be easily replicated by a teenager on a weekend.

The sane ones recognize that sales, service, and support have value. Is that teenager going to ensure 24/7 operation for a multinational?

The less sane ones think “if one teenager can build MS office, our thousands of SWEs can make thousands of, uh, help me out here…”

> Why do AI boosters always tell blatantly obvious lies

> Public discourse has degraded beyond reason

I rest your case.

Tangentially, I have a very nice laser cutter with terrible software (xtool p3). Their electron app is a nightmare of poor usability and unwanted “value adds”, while basic stuff like defining order or paths to cut is somewhere between opaque and broken. And the process of exporting DXF, importing to their software, positioning, setting per-path power and speed… such a PITA.

It took claude an hour or two to reverse the gcode dialect and camera controls. Now I just tell it what to cut, load the material, and claude sorts out where to place the work, power, speed, variations for corners and stuff, and cuts. If there’s difficulty I pop the work on a scanner and claude diagnoses and adjusts.

It is going to be very hard to control anything that’s in consumer hands, whether for good or bad reasons.

Well it sure is a good thing for Netanyahu that the terrorists have far too much power, eh?

If that’s the question, it truly is hopeless. Because whoever you think started it, they don’t see it that way. So there can be no shared understanding, ever. It’s just circular blame across centuries.

In the rare cases where adults have prevailed, the question has been “what will it take to end it”.

The simple reason is that if we allow litigating over ownership based on 30-year-old facts, nothing is ever settled. Maybe your house, with its 30 year mortgage paid off, actually belongs to someone else. Maybe that kid you shoved in 3rd grade comes back 40 years later and asserts their lifelong earnings were reduced by $100m because of the trauma.

The statute of limitations regime exists to provide stability. If you are harmed, you have some amount of time to make a claim.

Doing away with the statute of limitations would result in more injustice, not less.

That’s why there are contingency agreements. There are a lot of lawyers out there. If one of them thinks there’s a good chance he’ll win, they’ll take the case.

> Cost of litigation should be proportional to a reasonable settlement.

What you’re really saying is that attorneys’ fees should proportionate to claim size. But I don’t think that works. If I am bound and determined to take a dispute for a $3 refund all the way to the Supreme Court, why should me attorney be required to do all that work for $1 or whatever?

It is weird but I try to resist the conspiratorial take.

It may be as simple as:

* they believe they’re going to make trillions no matter what

* they’ve seen tobacco and what’s coming for oil companies and figure nobody will be able to say they hid the dangers

* they see a 100+ party prisoner’s dilemma and know that someone will defect so the optimal strategy is to defect

To me that seems a lot simpler.

Well, my apologies. For my part I’ve gotten tired of people handwaving “oh, none of that evidence matters, things are different now”.

Any audio?

Counterpoint: software has always had bugs. People are fallible.

Perhaps designing with assumptions that the entire stack is imperfect is the route to higher quality, along the lines of chaos monkey, which randomly kills processes on production boxes… which ensures resilience is real.

Even without AI our tech stack is so deep it’s hard to imagine every feature at every layer being provably correct.

Is it cheaper, with externalities priced in?

No idea what NT is and the post is jerkwalled.

The old model was that people who enjoyed creating made things. Copyright, starting around 1890, changed that to be about profit above all else. It’s telling that you can’t imagine writing a book if there isn’t the promise of money.

Well, did books exist before copyright?

I don’t understand the confusion of construction (via IP left) and output (supposedly only plagiarism).

If a dam is built with slave labor, that’s awful and people should be held accountable. It does not, however, affect whether it’s a dam or not.

If you have to twist things so far that intent doesn’t matter, something’s wrong.

And this obligation lasts… for the rest of their lives?

Yes. You implied that the caste system was somehow unique to India. Reality is that every country has its own way of sorting wealth to the most favored.

But why one factory? TSMC has fabs in Taiwan, China, Japan, and the US.

And there’s a supply chain, with packaging often separate from fab.

It seems like a reasonable objection but not a showstopper.

Which is ironic and funny given the other common use of those letters.

Not coincidentally, there’s a word for the consolidation of government and corporate power.