I did Dungeon Crawler Carl - hilariously wrong
graph TD A[Carl] -->|Pet| B[Princess Donut] A -->|Enemy| C[Mordecai] A -->|Allies| D[Ellie] A -->|Allies| E[Katia] A -->|Enemy| F[The System] B -->|Rival| G[Bea] D -->|Friend| E E -->|Friend| A
495 karma · joined May 12, 2023
graph TD A[Carl] -->|Pet| B[Princess Donut] A -->|Enemy| C[Mordecai] A -->|Allies| D[Ellie] A -->|Allies| E[Katia] A -->|Enemy| F[The System] B -->|Rival| G[Bea] D -->|Friend| E E -->|Friend| A
What matters is outcomes, and the U.S. system—compared to other developed nations—does far less to redistribute wealth or fund robust public services. Other countries raise more revenue overall (often through broader-based taxes like VAT), and they spend it more equitably. So yes, technically progressive—but practically insufficient.
The U.S. tax system is less progressive than those in many other industrialized nations. European countries like Denmark and France have higher top marginal tax rates (above 50%), while the U.S. top federal rate is significantly lower. Additionally, U.S. taxes and transfers do less to reduce income inequality compared to peer countries.
Seems like a great start to me.
Alas, I'll never understand people who make average wages defending billionaire wealth hoarding.
Sure, PE firms want access to that $12T market, but let’s be real: this is about locking in long-term capital with limited transparency and even more fees. The risk/reward profile is completely different from stocks/bonds.
And it’s all being decided over a Zoom call between megafunds a week before Trump’s second inauguration. Not a great look. But unfortunately this is towards the bottom of the list of egregious shit that has happened in the last couple of months.
At safe levels fluoridation is a public health measure akin to fortifying foods with vitamins (e.g., iodine in salt or folic acid in flour something we do all the time).
on x? like... for marketers? do we really need ai to schedule tweets or auto-reply with “thanks for the follow”? feels like we’ve had that stuff for a decade already. just because it’s ai now doesn’t make it new or useful.
> gauging sentiment across swathes of the population on a given topic?
you mean gauging sentiment from a user base that’s gotten increasingly loud, extreme, and way less representative of the general public? that’s not insight, that’s just noise with extra steps.
> providing stuff like the “reader context” but attempt to pre-empt it so better info is shared to begin with?
in theory, sure. but that’s assuming the platform actually cares about curating good info and not just maximizing engagement. reader context is cool when it works, but it’s super inconsistent and often buried. ai preemptively “fixing” info sounds nice until you remember who’s training it and what incentives are driving it.
> twitter bots for different things / automated customer support / product recommendations etc.
yeah i mean, bots have been a thing on twitter forever—some useful, most annoying. ai-powered ones could be better, but the platform’s current vibe isn’t exactly welcoming for brands trying to do legit support or sales. good luck pitching your socks in a thread full of people arguing about conspiracy theories.
In 2021, the last full year before Musk's acquisition, Twitter generated $5.08 billion in revenue.
Under Musk's ownership, X's revenue has declined significantly. In 2024, X reported $2.7 billion in revenue, which is nearly half of its pre-acquisition level. For 2025, global ad revenue is projected to grow to $2.26 billion, marking its first annual increase since the acquisition.
So yes on paper, X is more profitable than Twitter was before the acquisition. Its 2024 adjusted EBITDA nearly doubled Twitter’s best year, despite a much smaller revenue base. But whether that profitability is sustainable or comes at too high a cost—strategically, reputationally, and culturally—remains an open question.
As for the idea that these laws were "previously unenforced," that's misleading. Falsifying business records has been prosecuted as a felony in New York many times before, including against other executives. What makes this case unique is the high-profile defendant, not some unprecedented application of the law.
And the claim that the prosecutor herself engaged in inflating asset prices is a distortion. Letitia James, as AG, pursued civil fraud claims against Trump for devaluing his assets for tax purposes while inflating them for loan applications—something Trump himself admitted to in depositions. That’s not the same as falsifying business records.
So no, this isn't some brand-new legal strategy being used against Trump; it's just a matter of finally holding a powerful person accountable under laws that have existed and been applied before.
But just as a major PBM reform bill was set to pass last December, Elon Musk fired off a series of tweets opposing it. Within hours, what had been near-unanimous support collapsed. Five days later, Musk tweeted, "What is a pharmacy benefit manager?"—as if he had only just learned about the issue.
This isn’t about whether Musk was right or wrong on PBMs (though evidence suggests reform would lower costs). The bigger issue is how a single billionaire’s influence can derail democratic processes that were functioning as intended. When a reform has broad bipartisan support, expert backing, and clear public benefits, yet can still be nuked by one well-placed tweet, that’s not just a policy failure—it’s a governance problem.
Tech billionaires reshaping policy via social media whims should concern anyone who cares about democratic accountability. If Musk can tank a bill that helps millions save on prescriptions, what else can be undone with a midnight tweetstorm?
Terraform data sources can read existing infrastructure, but they don't automatically trigger new resource creation based on real-time changes. That means your DNS records won't update unless you manually run terraform apply again, and they won’t be part of a single apply cycle. In contrast, a real programming language could handle this as a continuous process, responding to infrastructure changes in real-time.
So yes, you can query instances with a data source and use for_each—but unless you’re running Terraform repeatedly to catch changes, your DNS records won’t reflect real-time scaling events. That’s the exact limitation I’m talking about: Terraform isn’t imperative, it’s declarative, and it doesn’t react dynamically at runtime without external orchestration.
Terraform works well for many cases, but the fact that you had to “figure out how to do it properly” kind of proves the point—it’s not inherently designed for dynamically changing infrastructure within a single apply cycle. If it were, you wouldn’t need external coordination to handle something as simple as "create DNS records for all instances, even if the number changes at runtime."
At the end of the day, Terraform is great for declaring infrastructure, but it lacks the flexibility of programming infrastructure. If you’re happy with the trade-offs, great—but let’s not pretend those trade-offs don’t exist.
And sure, using a general-purpose language doesn’t magically eliminate coordination problems, but it does give you far more control. If I were using something like Pulumi or CDK, I wouldn’t need to hack around Terraform’s static graph by splitting state files and manually sequencing deployments. I could express logic directly in code—dynamically querying instance IDs, handling autoscaling changes, and updating DNS records inline, without requiring an entirely separate execution step.
So no, this isn't a "failure of process and understanding"—it's just recognizing that Terraform’s declarative model is great for static infrastructure but falls short when dealing with truly dynamic scenarios. If you think its workflow is fine, that’s cool—but don’t pretend it doesn’t have real limitations just because you've built processes to work around them.