chasing

If life was perfectly predictable then, yes, insurance wouldn't have much of a point. But alas.

We all pay in a bit and those of us unlucky enough to need a huge amount of help can have access to the resources they need. Hopefully that will never be you! But as they say: The reward for a long life is to get to experience the decay of your own body. Good health is temporary for all of us.

That said, you're right: Single-payer would be a huge improvement. Let's do that.

But just say it! Bypass the middleman who's just going to make it blurrier or more long-winded.

It'd be like putting an Indian scammer call center in charge of the telephone network because there are some dropped calls. Or electing a guy who spent a career committing fraud at every turn President because the price of eggs went up a bit. Or solving the problems of the American healthcare system by putting a guy in charge who...

Oh, wait. We're definitely going to do the crypto thing. Dammit.

This seems like a much saner breakdown of the US into mega-regions. Feels much more intuitive and doesn't involve wacky stuff like grouping Philadelphia; the Oklahoma panhandle; and Mooseknuckle, Ontario together.

If we had a functioning regulatory environment... Haha. Nevermind. We vote for our leaders based on how loudly they promise to hurt trans kids.

The question to me is whether we will lets these companies do completely undermine the financial side of the marketplace of ideas that people simple stop spending time writing (if everything’s just going to get chewed to hell by a monster our corporation) or Will writing and create content only in very private and possible purely offline scenarios that these AI companies have less access to.

In a sane world, I would expect guidance and legislation that would bridge the gap and attempt to create an equitable solution so we could have amazing AI tools without crushing by original creators. But we do not live in a sane world.

Why not all three?

Scammers don’t like informed and empowered consumers.

Authoritarians don’t like informed and empowered citizens.

It’s a match-match.

But, yes, I guess it still exists. So props?

But I still more-or-less have to think like a software engineer. That's not going to go away. I have to make sure the code remains clean and well-organized -- which, for example, LLMs can help with, but I have to make precision requests and (most importantly) know specifically what I mean by "clean and well-organized." And I always read through and review any generated code and often tweak the output because at the end of the day I am responsible for the code base and I need to verify quality and I need to be able to answer questions and do all of the usual soft-skill engineering stuff. Etc. Etc.

So do whatever fits your need. I think LLMs are a massive multiplier because I can focus on the actual engineering stuff and automate away a bunch of the boring shit.

But when I read stuff like:

"I lost all my trust in LLMs, so I wouldn't give them a big feature again. I'll do very small things like refactoring or a very small-scoped feature."

I feel like I'm hearing something like, "I decided to build a house! So I hired some house builders and told them to build me a house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms and they wound up building something that was not at all what I wanted! Why didn't they know I really liked high ceilings?"

But space colonization is cool and poor people are yickie.

"Hey, it'd be a shame if somethin', uh, happened to that nice bit of expertise ya got there, y'know. A darn shame."

It's just wild to me that people aren't simply arrested when this kind of thing occurs. It's not Trump's money. It's not Republican money. He has a narrowly defined role and anything outside of that is illegal.

It's not exactly surprising, though, given half the government is run by the weakest and most deranged major political party in American history. The simple fact that the GOP has been steamrolled by this guy is the best evidence of the fact that since the 1970s they've been on a steep downward slide to become a party completely devoid of political talent, governing philosophy, or spine.

Even if this gang of dipshits were trying to do good, they don't have the capacity to be able to understand complex situations and make accurate and nuanced choices. An example of this situation being RFK Jr.

Normal people need to be screaming this from the hills. A healthy country in a competitive world cannot be run by grifters and morons. There's no "both sides" here.

They’re doing the propaganda leg work, I guess.

But it remains shocking to me just how lazy and un-thought-through so many of these dudes’ actual ideas are. Just hollow to the point of collapsing at the slightest interrogation.

When people actually want to solve large problems they want information and input. They move with deliberation and precision so they can accomplish the goal without creating unnecessary harm or stress. They communicate. I know: Techbro doofuses will be, like, "I know everything already, just do it all right now YOLO!" But that's not how the world works.

There is no evidence that these major actions are being taken with any amount of care. They're erratic. They're often illegal. They're clearly creating destructive side-effects. Instead of engaging with real information, the administration seeks to destroy it. Musk, in my opinion, has big ideas he thinks are good but no mechanism to actually implement them in a good way. Trump is just an ignorant, self-serving man. He neither knows nor cares except to the degree that something can make him feel powerful in the moment.

Innovate.

It’s not necessary to turn your company into a toxic disaster to compete.