psadauskas

That's not the "root", you can go at least one step further:

The wealthy CEOs and boardmembers found a way to make even more money, but know that it will make the people who are aware of it angry. So they, as a class, find other issues that they can enflame (or manufacture wholesale), through the manipulation of social media algorithms and legacy media, both of which they own and control. They would much rather have "ordinary people" angry about trans athletes or immigrants, than about the surveillance state they profit from, or stealing our data they profit from, etc...

Unfortunately, we humans are very easy to manipulate by making us angry. If "ordinary people don't make enough noises for any problems they see in life", its hardly our fault if we're too busy surviving in the current economy, and the elites are spending billions to make us angry about anything except the elites.

I've mostly stopped caring about using using proper capitalization, commas, grammar and spelling in my writing of comments, primarily as a signal that i'm not an llm.

I visit Maui fairly regularly, and its the same thing with local "Maui Gold" pineapple. It is a completely different fruit from the Dole crap you buy in supermarkets on the mainland. Whenever I'm there I'll eat pineapples until my tongue burns, and when I'm home I don't eat it at all.

I was using Claude until they banned Opencode, and now use GPT at my day job. I've been using Deepseek through Opencode Go on the $10/mo plan, and I honestly can't really tell much difference. Its just as capable, and makes the same kinds of dumb mistakes and the other two have been making since March. For the price, I'm more than happy with it.

I have almost all of the $400+ star wars sets (and lotr, and star trek, ...), but relatively limited shelf space.

They only stay on the shelf for a couple years before I take it apart, rinse the dust off, sort it into ziplock bags, and add it to a box in the closet. Then I pick an old one I disassembled before, but hasn't been seen in awhile, or remember having fun building it, and spend a weekend or week building it again.

My favorite part is building them, so I get to enjoy doing that several times per set, often while having the corresponding movie on in the background.

My router has a separate network for "appliances" (roku boxes, thermostats, etc) that has a very restrictive firewall that only allows internet access according to a manual allowlist.

Libertarianism is just Anarchism, but only for corporations. (Just like Capitalism is just Socialism for the rich.)

I am nothing but polite with my agents. I always ask, say "please" and "thank you", and never swear at it or call it names.

I'm hoping that when the robot apocalypse happens, they'll let me stay in the breeding harem, or worst case let me live a few extra minutes.

Right, I'm aware, and like I said, I expect those questions, and I have several examples I'm prepared for, and can tailor it to the interviewer. Like if it was a devops role, I could talk about when I took down production and what I learned from it. Or I could talk about when I failed to properly manage a junior if the role was more management-oriented and what I learned from it. Or when I badly architected a feature, and what I learned from it, and so on.

What I _wasn't_ prepared for was 4+ of those questions in a row, and _zero_ questions about my experience, or strengths, or anything else. The questions were more of the type "when did you stop beating your wife?". In retrospect, I think the interviewer already had someone they wanted to hire, but were forced into it by HR due diligence or something.

I had an interview many years ago, that wasn't nearly as traumatic, but the interviewer asked me about my failures like 4 different ways.

- Tell me about a time you made a professional mistake. - Tell me about your biggest failure. - Tell me when you last shipped a bug. - Tell me when you took down production.

Never asked me about my accomplishments, or the positives. I'm prepared for being asked about making mistakes, and have a few examples ready to give depending on the job I'm interviewing for, but to get asked so many times in a row was just deflating.

I'm glad I didn't get that job.

I've switched back and forth between Vivaldi and Firefox on Linux and MacOS for the last decade, and Vivaldi's UI feels much faster. Even on my 5yo laptop or 12yo gaming PC, I haven't noticed any real slowness with the UI, and I'm usually pretty sensitive to that.

Also in the US, when Unions were starting to get going, the "good" ones that stood on principles and tried to do right by their members had their leadership harassed and even murdered by oligarchs and the government. The corruptible ones were allowed to exist, and be corrupted as another means of control, and for the anti-union people to point at as proof that unions "don't work".

Reading up on this has been eye-opening, they didn't teach much about it in school, except maybe a paragraph in the history textbook about the Ludlow Massacre. They don't mention at all the IWW or other leftist unions from the 1910s and 20s. If they mention the Taft–Hartley Act, they don't talk about how it targeted "communist" union leaders, and left "capitalist" unions alone.

Someone should go point a webcam at his house. I'm sure he wouldn't have a problem with it.

If only the company behind VSCode, the company behind NPM and the company behind GitHub could get together and figure out a solution to this.

I first started noticing they were actually useful around Dec 2025, through about February. I got pretty good at using them, and was amazed at their utility, especially Claude and Codex. Then sometime in March, they got really frustratingly dumb. Things that they used to get right in one shot suddenly took several tried, and I had to watch them like a hawk because they constantly made stupid mistakes, not following instructions that previously worked. I had one try to fix a failing test like this:

    assert_eq x, true if x == true

Both Claude and Codex, both with the latest versions and the original versions that had been working.

Now I just use deepseek. It isn't any dumber, and it costs way less.

This will never change until we pass laws that make personal data a liability instead of an asset.

... nor the providers.

"His" companies seem to do better when he's not around. SpaceX has been doing good things while he was distracted with the Cybertruck, then Twitter, then stealing an election, destroying the government agencies that had the audacity to investigate his companies, and now this lawsuit.

I don't think it makes me more efficient at writing code. Its because the act of coding is like 80% reading existing code, only rarely adding new code. You spend far more time moving around and exploring the code, and in vim the keys to do that are single keypresses, or sequences like `]p`. Every other non-modal editor requires you to hit chords like Ctrl-Shift-F to move around, because the "easy" keys are all taken up by "add this character to the buffer", 100% of the time.

I've been using https://github.com/choplin/code-review.nvim, which looks like a similar UI, but in the NeoVim interface. `<leader>rc` to comment on a line/selection, then `<leader>ry` to yank all comments into the clipboard to be pasted into a chat.

It leaves the comments as markdown files in ./.code-review, so I also have my `/review` agent set to output in the same format, so an LLM can be reviewing the same code I am, I can edit or dismiss the LLM's reviews, then send the whole thing back to the first agent to fix.

There are _already_ two classes:

Those who earn their living from their labor, and those whose income is derived simply by owning things they (often) didn't create themselves and charge for access.

Same with Maui Gold pineapples. I can't eat the Dole crap you get everywhere else. The ones at the markets in Maui are a completely different fruit, they're like candy. Whenever I go I eat them until my tongue burns from the citric acid.

This is what happens when you optimize your food supply for profit instead of being edible; varieties are selected for yield, longevity and shipping rather than flavor or nutrients. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.

The current iteration of the Supreme Court has made it pretty clear they're going to decide whatever partisan truth they want, and that pesky Bill of Rights will not stand in their way.

The head custodian at my elementary school (in the 80s) was a friendly guy that loved talking with the kids. He'd talk about his life, ask us if we did anything fun over the summer, and tell us where he went with his wife and kids. The school was in a small town in the rural midwest, not particularly affluent, but not poor either.

The elementary school where my kids went (in a much more wealthy district) doesn't even have a custodian that I'm aware of, just a 3rd-party cleaning service that hires immigrants for as cheap as possible, and I'm sure doesn't offer healthcare or even full-time work. They have too many highly-paid administrators to afford a custodian.

Fun story about that: In Ruby 2.x, the version GitHub originally launched with, every object implemented the method `id`, which returned the object id (in 3.x, it was renamed to `object_id`). Every object had this id, ActiveRecord models, strings, floats, integers, booleans, etc. Some objects had fixed object ids, like `true.object_id #=> 20`, `false.object_id #=> 0`, `123.object_id #=> 247 (2n+1)`. The `object_id` for `nil` is `4`.

Yehuda Katz was the first external user of GitHub after the cofounders, so his github user id is `4`.

The way Rails works, if you want to look up a user record, you do it by id:

    author = comment.author
    user = User.find(author.id)

Now, if there was some bug, and for some reason a comment had no author, `comment.author` would return `nil`, `nil.id` would return `4`, and the UI would show Yehuda as the author in the UI. People would ask, "Who is this Yehuda guy, and why is he commenting on my PRs?"

Just "adjusting for inflation" isn't good enough. Minimum wage was $4/hr. Now its $8. An elementary school custodian could afford a mortgage, a car, support a family of 4 and go on vacation on just that single income. They had healthcare and a pension. You could work over the summer and pay for a year of college at a state school.

Yes, the house now is more energy efficient. The car is safer. But if the price of everything went up 4x-10x, and the median income only went up 2x, AND you have to pay for more things that used to be included, then everything is more unaffordable, inflation be damned.

I'm spending a ton of tokens because it insists on manually correcting code that fails the linter, despite the instructions in the AGENTS.md to run the linter with autocorrect.

And also because the Plan agent generates a huge plan, asks me a couple yes/no questions with an obvious answer, and then regenerates the entire plan again. Then the Build agent gets confused anyway and does something else, and I have to round-trip about 5 times with that full context each time.

I'm familiar with it. The "banality of evil" in that book isn't about regular people, it was about the leadership of the Nazi party willing to go along with the Holocaust for personal power, then trying to get out of responsibility for it by claiming they were "just following orders". Those aren't regular people, those are sociopaths.

Regular people don't all independently decide to "do evil". There is banality in the ones that agree to go along with it, to save themselves from being ostracized or mildly inconvenienced. Do they perpetuate evil? For sure. But are they the villains responsible for it?

The "evildoers" are the tiny minority of sociopaths doing the convincing, because it nets them more personal power, and they don't care who they hurt along the way.

There is a huge amount of injustice in the world, morally speaking I should be out there fighting against it with everything I have. But I'm also the sole breadwinner for my family and I have a mortgage, so I mostly keep my head down and try to survive. Does that make me an evildoer? I sure hope not.

Human beings mostly are. People mostly support their neighbors, and selflessly help each other in times of crisis.

The problem is the 5% of us are sociopaths. We let them have all the money and power because they're the only ones that want it. Then we let them use that money and power to convince us that the "REAL" problem is the people with no money or power in the neighboring political region (the border having been drawn by a sociopath).

The US has over 128 military bases in 55 foreign countries.

Russia has 12, mostly in former Soviet countries. China has 3.