dualvariable

Am I the only one happy on a $20/month pro plan?

Yeah, every now and then you blow out the window limits. So you take a break and think about something else or go out and do something else...

The Republicans were successful with the Tea Party in taking over the House and the Presidency, that's a model which I'd argue is really proven to work in our two party system because we all just literally watched it play out in real-time.

Arguing against that, probably comes from a cynical neoliberal perspective where the Democratic Party can't change because the argument assumes that the Democratic Party can't change.

And the alternative is definitely outright fascism and the suspension of Democracy. They've told us what they're planning on doing, just like we knew they wanted to get rid of Roe vs. Wade, we just accepted the lies about it being settled law and a political football.

If you're not willing to vote against that, then you're comfortably middle class and don't think you'll be one of the ones that are going to be hurt.

I've voted against Trump 3 times and threw money behind trying to get Sanders the nomination in 2020 instead of Biden, so when all the horrible stuff has been going down this term I don't have to tie myself in knots with rationalizations about my actions.

GitHub doesn't allow me to put up my old repos for adoption by any old rando, or to allow randos to request to take over my repos if I don't respond for 2 weeks.

GitHub also actually protects against repojacking and tombstones username/reponame combinations (that exceed a certain minimum popularity) and never lets anyone ever use them again.

The utility of AUR is also really based around being able to reuse the same repo without having to re-vet every single time. This kind of attack, that forces you to re-vet on every single upgrade so that trust inherently can't be established, is also not GitHub's model at all.

And go has a software package manager that heavily uses GH for distribution, and is arguably more VCS decentralized, but isn't vulnerable to this kind of attack, because it inherts GH's threat model, and doesn't implement the kind of choices that AUR decided to deliberately build into their system.

> That's a stupid comparison because other countries have much less firearm ownership.

Okay, let's try being slightly less permissive in our firearm laws then, since you've just proven it works.

That's a semantic detail based on the choice of build from source over binary distribution.

This is also a terrible way to run a package build system in this day and age as well, if you like. I feel exactly the same way about it, and when I wrote that I understood what it was, so I didn't need that helpful correction (I first used the FreeBSD ports system sometime around the turn of the millennia).

> The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb because a vote for someone who loses isn't a wasted vote. It shows the others that there's a voter there who can be convinced if catered to, if they select a better candidate.

Tried that in 2000, voting for Nader as a protest vote against Clinton/Gore third way neoliberalism. I did that in a state where the electoral votes for Dems were 100% safe. Still just got blamed for Bush and there was zero self-reflection on the part of the Democratic Party.

...

I would urge everyone to stop fixating on the Presidential vote as the only fight to win and everything being win/lose based on that outcome. If the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the House exceeds 50% of Democrats in the House, then we can start thinking about a world where e.g. AOC might be the speaker of the House rather than Nancy Pelosi.

> It's a symptom of the terminal disease which has infected all layers of American society and has gotten it to where it's at: short-termism. Everyone just looks at the next quarter, the next election.

Yeah, and the Office of the President is 4-8 years and is just more short-termism, along with individualism / cult of personality / CEO-leadership. If you want to make lasting change in the DNC, start by flipping more and more House seats to progressive from neoliberal.

That is a terrible way to run a package repo in this day and age.

Maintainers need to have some level of vetting, and should own a repo or three for a while to establish a track record, before they get to blast out contributions to 100 of them without any review.

And all the American automakers pivoting away from EVs are just going to concede the world market to China.

AI for $20/month won't ever go away, but it won't be the absolute latest and greatest frontier model.

Most of us don't need a model that can prove the Riemann hypothesis or Goldbach's conjecture in order to get work done.

People latch onto consistency and hypocrisy as their filters.

The problem is that anyone trying to actually be better is usually inconsistent and hypocritical at some level as in that "you criticize society, yet you participate in it" comic.

If you attempt to filter out all traces of hypocrisy from your trusted sources, you wind up listening to the absolute worst people.

The people trying to do better are usually the ones struggling with conflicts and inconsistencies.

1918 isn't very relevant to modern living. And nobody wants to go back to the stagflation of the 1970s. And that scale is logarithmic.

Graph it without the logarithmic scale and draw a curve through the 1982-2018 data and the recent spike will explain why people are complaining about it.

If there's no jobs crisis, where are the productivity gains to offset all the massive datacenter spending?

If we need to spend just as much on salaries, while shelling out $700B/yr on AI, how does all that spending get paid for?

Hyperscalar capital spending for 2026 is going to be in the close neighborhood of $700B, which is over 2% of US GDP. That is about 3x the GDP spend of peak Apollo program in the 1960s, and about the same as the telecom/fiber buildout of the late 90s and the railroad buildout of the 19th century (both followed by a collapse). And there just isn't that much revenue coming into the system, and there aren't the productivity gains coming out of it. When 95% of corporate AI initiatives are still failing, the value proposition isn't there. And if you try to look at something like Microsoft's reported $37B in AI revenue a lot of that is really internal spend from leasing compute to OpenAI, which it partially owns. The real revenue coming into the AI industry is likely well under $100B this year, and the productivity gains to end consumers is likely much less. So if you think a few $10B/yr here or there is "serious dough", it just isn't enough to fill the gap. And OpenAI should burn through $14B this year, up by a factor of 3x over last year. Anthropic has a projected revenue for 2026 of $26B and is running around cash flow neutral, but that doesn't approach the $700B spending gap. And that is with accounting that depreciates GPUs on 5-6 year schedule instead of the more realistic 2-3 year schedule--so Anthropic may kick the can down the road a bit, but in 2-3 years they'll still be depreciating GPUs that they're throwing away and having to replace (of course this may be WHY Anthropic is leasing compute from xAI since then that accounting hit falls on xAI instead of Anthropic).

In 10 years, we probably will have $700B/yr in productivity gains and revenue from LLMs, but we're not going to be able to sustain $700B/yr in capital spending until we get there. And the problem is much worse than the fiber buildout of the late 90s. Fiber built out in 1998 was still usable 10 years later. The GPUs that are being built out today are going to be obsolete trash in 3 years.

> the vast majority of the market prefers solid near glued together phones so that's what companies make.

the vast majority of companies only make solid near-glued together phones, so that is all anyone buys.

if apple made a phone with replaceable batteries with a bit more thickness and some compromises on water resistance vs. cost, you'd actually see the consumer preferences play out.

> The folds do add functionality and I think there's an impulse that leads people to say they don't see the point of something just because they're not interested in it personally.

you're going to have to go through some real mental contortions to support foldable phones as consumer choice while treating repairability/replaceability as inherently not worth it because you like slim designs.

Because it is hiding the fact that there's very little external revenue coming into the AI sector compared to the costs. AI companies doing business with each other isn't net revenue into the sector. Treating the whole sector as a single entity isn't arbitrary.

If you were to treat all the hyperscalars as one company with one 10-K then Anthropic buying compute from SpaceX/xAI is an internal bookkeeping transfer between two departments. It isn't the same as top-line revenue into the AI companies. It is still mostly just financing money that Anthropic raised being transferred to SpaceX.

I didn't abandon it, it was run by a different team, and we were one consumer of it. When the organization switched from Jira to GH issues the Jira was kept running for years, but nobody got the information into GH issues. Eventually the Jira was shut down, certainly by the time the company got acquired.

This is the way we did it when we used JIRA.

For GH issues you can always navigate back to the PR discussion (which should have linked issues and other pointers in it) from the commit.

Of course when we switched to GH issues, we largely abandoned JIRA and years later the instance got turned off and deleted. Now all those JIRA tags are entirely useless.

IMO that actually argues for tight coupling between your issue tracker and your git repo. And what you really want is portability (which I don't see how you get other than with tight coupling). Ideally there would be open standardized formats, but as it is, github is the 800# gorilla that defines the format and as long as gitlab and other clones can slurp in github project metadata (or at least PRs) then that effectively gets you closer.

But any way... Fixed, immutable pointers to an Atlassian product that you might not be using in 5 years is not a good policy. I'd sooner accept the policy that the git commits needed to stand entirely on their own and all the information about the "why" of the change needed to be baked into the git commit or the comments in the source (I think that fails, though, since everyone is overly terse in git commits and summarizes issues and loses information--and the back-and-forth dialog in a PR discussion is useful because it contains more than just one person's voice summarizing the reason for the change).

I haven't had a NYTimes subscription since around 1991.

This thread has a whole bunch of Charlie Browns in it who are "shocked, shocked" to find that Lucy has pulled away the football once again...

> and xAI is loosing money.

xAI is burning through a tremendous amount of money.

it is getting propped up right now through leasing compute to Anthropic, which isn't really AI sector profitability. even if the AI bubble doesn't collapse, Anthropic is unlikely to want to keep shovelling money at its competitor.

and right now the xAI+x business segment is getting propped up by a couple billion a year in sustainable revenue from social media, making it look better than it should.

the core SpaceX/Starlink business itself looks pretty amazing and could probably justify $600B-$1T valuations, having roughly comparable financials to something like Visa, particularly if you removed the Starship development costs. but to say xAI is a boat anchor is probably being overly charitable... like if your boat anchor was a supertanker that was sinking into the abyss.

The fact that so many people think the Fed will step in and magically keep the number up is why I'm pretty certain this is going to turn out like the late-20s.

The cynical nihilists have capitulated to the stock market always going up, that has to be flashing a very bearish warning sign.

> A redditor who's wife and her friend were on the flight said that the 16yo boy next to wife's friend admitted to naming his speaker "Bomb" long enough ago that he had forgotten he'd named it that. Wife's friend got to hear the questioning

That is also stated clearly in the comments.

Reddit really wants to run with the default speaker name theory, though.

It seems pretty obvious to me that this situation was being treated more like a disruptive passenger issue than an actual terrorist threat of a real bomb. So more like the Minneapolis plane diverted to Wisconsin the other day because of an unruly passenger. They took everyone and their devices through screening after deplaning, and it sounds like they found the teenager who owned the device. That was the point of turning around.

They probably do have to treat it seriously just in the unlikely chance it turns out to be some mentally unstable person's way of legitimately making a terroristic threat. But it also needs to be treated similarly to a drunk and violent person who needs to be duct taped to their seat until they can get handed off to the authorities.

For me, it is writing way too much to say too little.

The first bit is just a restatement of the "paradox of thrift":

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

If every business cuts headcount and costs, then you overall get a contraction in the economy and high unemployment and a recession. Everyone's spending is someone else's salary and revenues.

Couldn't get through the rest of it because it was a bunch of overly verbose human-slop writing.

I think the bigger issue right now is also just straightforward economic pressure caused by tariffs and high energy costs and inflation. If the affluent consumer starts to buckle, businesses may get caught in a downsizing spiral where they start posting lower profits, firing actual management, stock prices decline, and the affluent consumer retracts. No AI required to fuel that.

Right now with stocks hitting record highs, the affluent consumer is not changing their behavior at all and just spending even harder, which is keeping profits pumped up, and keeping stocks at record highs. At the margins, though, fewer and fewer people are participating in the economy, which is a trend that is going to be unsustainable.

I think AI is going to be most relevant in the debt collapse that it leaves behind, and in the excuses it gives to shed employees. This economy is going to hit a wall at some point, AI or not.

let me pour one out for all my homies in the marketing department...

Better than asking your backyard mechanic buddy who believes that you don't need anything other than 10W40 or something like that. You have always had to know who to trust and what level of work you need to do in order to get to an answer which is satisfactory. And in this case, Claude cited the manufacturer's bulletin which is the actual best source of truth that you're talking about.

I asked claude to dig up the current Ford Bulletin for the engine in my truck to tell me the recommended motor oil. And it found the updated recommendations properly. I wouldn't trust google AI because I know specifically that the recommendations changed, and I don't want whatever the published specs were when the engine was first manufactured, which is out of date (and found on lots of low quality blogs). I don't even trust claude, but it gave me the URL to click on to verify and summarized it well enough that I mostly trusted that it wasn't using the cited technical bulletin and not a bunch of random AI-slop web pages.

I notice that my allergies get worse, and a theory is that systemic low-grade inflammation and histamine response may be due to diet. I don't have a lot of other conditions, but people with autoimmune conditions (e.g. rheumatoid arthritis) might see it get better/worse with dietary changes.

When I'm eating beans+rice and a bit of protein that I cook myself, my allergies are a lot lower.

When I cheat and eat "crap" I tend to start sneezing and rubbing my eyes.

There are a lot of variables, though, and cheat foods tend to be highly processed, high in gluten, with a lot of additives and made with seed oils, and hidden sugars, and are much higher glycemic index with higher glycemic loading, amongst other things. Plus seasonal allergies are just variable day-to-day which is another confounding factor. So I don't really know what the X factor is. I get similar effects on an atkins-style high fat beef, butter and cheese kind of diet, because it also cuts out most of those things.

"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy"