I got a ~6k Dogecoin windfall a few years back. (Found the coins I bought in 2014 at <0.1c, sold at 25c)

I think I put like 1k into my more conventional investments, blew like $2k in indulgences (new GPU, collectibles), and set most of the rest aside for the revenuers.

They’ve got a guy at work whose job title is basically AI Evangelist. This is terrifying in that it’s a financial tech firm handling twelve figures a year of business-- the last place where people will put up with “plausible bullshit” in their products.

I grudgingly installed the Copilot plugin, but I’m not sure what it can do for me better than a snippet library.

I asked it to generate a test suite for a function, as a rudimentary exercise, so it was able to identify “yes, there are n return values, so write n test cases” and “You’re going to actually have to CALL the function under test”, but was unable to figure out how to build the object being fed in to trigger any of those cases; to do so would require grokking much of the code base. I didn’t need to burn half a barrel of oil for that.

I’d be hesitant to trust it with “summarize this obtuse spec document” when half the time said documents are self-contradictory or downright wrong. Again, plausible bullshit isn’t suitable.

Maybe the problem is that I’m too close to the specific problem. AI tooling might be better for open-ended or free-association “why not try glue on pizza” type discussions, but when you already know “send exactly 4-7-Q-unicorn emoji in this field or the transaction is converted from USD to KPW” having to coax the machine to come to that conclusion 100% of the time is harder than just doing it yourself.

I can see the marketing and sales people love it, maybe customer service too, click one button and take one coherent “here’s why it’s broken” sentence and turn it into 500 words of flowery says-nothing prose, but I demand better from my machine overlords.

Tell me when Stable Diffusion figures out that “Carrying battleaxe” doesn’t mean “katana randomly jutting out from forearms”, maybe at that point AI will be good enough for code.

But then ypu need the Proposition 65 warning stickers.

I expect the shattering will wound the movement. With Trump, they have a consensus leader and model. Everyone else will fight each other to fill the vacuum.

Since so much of Trump’s rationale is to get into a position where he’s out of legal jeopardy, U’m amazed nobody’s tried the plea deal switcharoo: end your candidacy and we’ll give you immunity. Come November 6th, the judge throws out the deal. I’m pretty sure there’s been at least one Law & Order doing that, although the President was played by a guest star in an orange wig.

Creativity as a muassively-multiplayer endeavour.

I might not be able to write/draw (insert famous large work) but perhaps I can correct one clunky sentence on page 279. And when thousands of people are free to do so without the original artist beung able to gatekeep, the work can move in exciting new directions.

“I’ll help you get that parasitic human off your back, but can you do me next?”

I always found it fascinating how the law is such a unique and cloistered ecosystem.

The sciences and arts encourage self-education and self-discovery. Constructive disruption is admired and moves the fields forward. Those who make it accessible and reachable are celebrated.

I love your phrasing “law-priests”. The law is the religion in a secular state. It has all the same trappings:

• The ranks and orders of clergy, where only they are fit to interpret the sacred scripts, with strong bias and penalty for trying to do so as an uneducated layman
• Adherence to doctrine and continuity (precedent) even as the environment it was established in no longer exists
• The constant urge to obfuscate and revel in exclusive language, to continue the air of mystery and impermeability.
• An overall attitude of fear and submission encouraged by the impenetrability. Even our richest and most powerful still fear the legal system for its caprice, and attempt to ward themselves from it with sigils and charms made of contracts.

Someone needs to nail up some theses to the door of the Supreme Court.

TBH, I sort of wonder the history of why they push the LGBT repression so hard in Russia.

In a place like the US, where you have culture war manifested through elections, it’s an easy way to score points with a specific and identified demographic/donor group. Demonize the gays and then you don’t have to lean on other voters who will ask about why the schools are failing and the economy is spiraling.

Does the Russian political system have such pressure groups?

I could sort of see it as part of a larger suite of “traditional values/restore past glory” messaging, but even there, it seems low on the checklist, and again, is there even meaningful campaigning where it pays dividends?

The immigration angle is bait and switch politicking. Has been for decades.

People feel economically stagnant and culturally disconnected.

Couldn’t be the capitalist machine grinding you to dust while gnawing away any sort of social institutions or greater visions than “line goes up”. It’s clearly Juan or Abdul who are scrabbling to send a few dollars or Euros to their family. Excluding them is gonna roll back the clock to when a single worker could get a no-degree factory job straight out of high school and raise a sitcom-style family of four, you know!

Next one that comes to the door, I’m telling him he can have $20 if he humanely escorts the Latrodectus Hesperus living in our cupboard out. Let’s see if he has any tricks up his sleeve other than poison.

Source?

I’m more willing to forgive not getting Baizhu for the promise of unlimited cheap energy…

Whatever else you can say, Hillary was not channeling a lot of enthusiasm outside of a very narrow group.

It felt like there were weeks in peak campaign season where she wasn’t touring or making speeches. What even was her signature issue? (Considering how she was associated with the abortive attempts towards universal health care during Bill’s term, that would have been a sensible focus, but I don’t recall it mentioned once)

The whole campaign reeked of “play to not lose” rather than “play to win”. She assumed she was the annointed favourite, guaranteed the win, and that’s not really going to excite uncommitted voters. Bernie, at least, generated buzz.

Yes, although I personally prefer “central planning enthusiast”.

I think we’re approaching the point where the word gets taken back by the community it was used to malign, if not there already. "