softwaredoug

The US is returning to its pre WW2 norm. The postwar era was the exception. US democracy has long been tenuous or for the “right people”.

There basically is no election fraud

In 2020 Trump admin tried very hard to find some and there attempts were thrown out in court 59/60 cases

The only thing they won on involved a Pennsylvania judge extending mail in ballot deadline beyond their authority. Not a case of fraud.

Aren’t humans just “next motor action predictors”?

Drawing these random unrecorded lives makes me think a lot of Train Dreams a movie/book about a kind of unremarkable, random guy in the Northwest who sits witnessing history, dying with nobody remembering him.

My person was “orphaned at 34”

Great idea but it needs more testing.

You might enjoy reading the Hyperion Cantos which delves into this idea :)

I'm seeing reporting it gets 98.6% on ARC-AGI3[1] (previously like 30% with Fable)

https://venturebeat.com/technology/welcome-to-the-agi-era-op...

That’s possible

Though in this case the kid was walking all in a gated community.

FWIW - Virginia has a free range kid law. And does not have a minimum age for supervision.

They charged the mom with delinquency of a minor to get around this. Usually reserved for teenagers that commit crimes.

We don't really know all the facts, and we only get one side of the story here. So we all need to keep that in mind too.

In the US, if you are in a residential neighborhood with a lot of kids, its also fairly typical for them to be out finding their playmates.

I would say if you're in a neighborhood where there's just like 1-2 kids, it may not be that typical. The kids parents might do more scheduled playdates.

Unfortunately in the US there are people that get annoyed about kids playing. And they are also the same kind of person that escalates things to the authorities / complains a lot about trivial things.

There's a Netflix documentary about one such sad case https://www.netflix.com/title/82018736

Virginia also has a free range kid law.

And in particular, the conviction here was delinquency of a minor. That's usually used to convict parents of teenagers whose kids do serious crimes.

I caveat to say, we don't know the full details. But it all seems pretty weak sauce.

I feel even if CPS or cops got involved, they can just take the kid home, no need to escalate things to charging the mom.

That said, there may be details we don't know here. This particular article is written from one bent, and the officials didn't comment on the case as is common in child-related prosecutions.

Stranger kidnappings are basically unheard of. It's never been a safer time for kids in terms of crime like that.

It’s not dead if you actually write authentically in your own PoV.

I write mine all the time. Enough people seem to engage with it. Traffic seems fine.

I probably write less for capturing Google traffic, but instead as a signpost of something cool I worked on or learned. That I can send to people I meet as a reference. Impress my friends. Or refer to myself. Or show an agent (I often prefer writing blog articles to skills).

There’s a pretty massive competitive advantage to having your own voice that doesn’t sound like slop. IMO it’s never been a better time to be a messy, slightly unpolsihed human writing on the Web.

My biggest complaint is the device switching. I pick up my phone and hit play, my laptop starts playing the music

.. which in turn causes my AirPods to connect to my laptop

I have to go manually hunt to connect everything correctly Every. Single. Time.

I think there could be a version of our industry with people doing better work. And it’s worthwhile to study why we don’t have that industry.

Yes it’s incentives - but why these incentives exist and not others is an interesting question to study.

In the 2010s we pushed everyone to learn how to code and maybe lost some of our higher standards. Maybe we’re doing that now with AI?

Maybe broader social and economic incentives have had a lot of short term thinking of late? It’s hard to organize society or a company to go in one direction very long before incentives completely change everything. Who knows, maybe that’s a feature, not a bug.

It’s worth asking though why we have this software industry and not another one. I’m not convinced it’s for legitimate reasons.

Yes hashtag “Not all tech companies”

In the US we have tech companies complying with sketchy DHS subpoenas that don’t require warrants. We have DoJ targeting political enemies. We have FISA mass surveillance.

It’s naive to think politically motivated surveillance can’t happen in the UK and elsewhere. Or to assume that only the “right people” will be the ones able to break encryption.

You’re missing that many people do not live in single-family homes with easy plug-in charging. Especially in big cities.

That’s one reason electric cars are a bit of a luxury item right now.

> In several cases, the DHS has withdrawn a 1509 summons after it was challenged in court and before a judge could rule on its legality. That may be a deliberate strategy to avoid having a judge rule on the legality of the summons.

They have a toy, they’re increasingly abusing it, then trying to dodge from it being taken away.

The thing is nobody has to comply with 1509 summons, DHS has to go to court to enforce it. A lot of the fault is on a company that complies without just ignoring it.

His point is using LLMs to build software will lead to code so complex that it requires an Agent. Or that it will cause avoiding cleaning up the boilerplate because we can tolerate it now because of agents.

And thus this will all bias towards complexity and fragility..

Aside from Bun, which is owned by Anthropic, do we know of open source projects that allow AI where this has happened?

Sometimes these tradeoffs involve half a dozen over a few lines of code. And that’s where I’m hesitant to let an agent work. It’ll do fine with creating correct code. And you can somewhat constrain it to think about one other thing. But it loses track, ignores constraints, cheats, and do you layer complexity on top to prevent this? Or just look at a dozen lines of code to fix it?

Yes

One reason to pair is to observe how other people work. So I find it invaluable. Even if its how someone else uses an agent.

I also find it useful for educational purposes. In the olden days, that would mean a senior coaching a junior. That's still relevant for most non-trivial tasks, even those that involve an agent.

Pairing also helps two people share a mental model for some code. That becomes the kernel of shared team understanding. I still think that's relevant, even if we're collaborating on a PRD an agent uses.

And frankly, I still think its useful to ocassionally read / write code. And another human in the loop helps a lot with that.

This is the upshot

> Melissa Chavin, a London-based U.S. immigration lawyer, said she expects the pause to be temporary. “I don’t think that they’ll leave this indefinitely, especially for wealthier developed countries,” she said. Applicants from developing countries might find it harder to progress their applications under the new guidance, she added.

This comes after one judge ruled the 75 country travel ban was illegal[1]

My sense is they’re trying to get some of that travel ban back through other means

1 - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/distric...

The Elon X layoffs are instructive in the difference between Twitter run as a public company vs as private (or buried in another company's balance sheet)

In a public company, you need financial growth. You need 75% of employees to be developing towards a promising new future. In a private company, with no real growth goals, you can get by with 25% and keep things running and basically the same.

You can argue whether Twitter's extra 75% actually was effective at driving growth the stock market likes, but its hard to argue against needing more staff to drive at least a perception that investments are happening in bold new product directions.

Yes the average is currently 45%. But that’s been like that since Sept 2025, when Trump increased it 10% with section 232 tariffs. Here’s the executive order

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/full_text/html/202...

The new 50% tariffs don’t suddenly make Canadian lumber more expensive. It was already expensive.

This was all being negotiated together between Canada and US, but it’s not part of the new tariffs.

I’m not defending anything

I’m trying to encourage people to understand the facts in a forum dedicated to intellectual discussion.

The problem is that there’s a tradeoff between MANY objectives, not just performance

You want code that’s fast, correct, stable, memory efficient, secure, usable, and more

The reason code might be slow is about product tradeoffs. It’s certainly easy to have an LLM optimize performance only, but what do you sacrifice? Is that an acceptable tradeoff?

Maybe slow code is a good idea if it’s the only way to get correct and secure code?

This is on targeted industries, not on 50% of all trade. In particular, the largest industries are

Motor Vehicles, Alcohol, and Dairy per

https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-of-us-trade-tariffs-hitti...

This article lists the specific industries. Lumber is not one of them. It lists

Motor Vehicles, Alcohol, and Dairy as the largest industries.

https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-of-us-trade-tariffs-hitti...