The difference between repair work and a wrecking crew has everything to do with the order of operations.

Identifying candidates is *not* the first step for someone serious about repairing the USA's political system. It's the design of elections and representation at issue that needs repair. Fielding candidates in a broken system is like dumping diesel into a regular car engine - get that right, first. For example, the overwhelming number of Green Parties around the world asked Jill Stein to stop running for reason. To promote the GPUSA is *not* to be in agreement with Green Parties worldwide; instead, it's a deliberate strategic error, hardly distinguishable from sabotage.

I'm all for more plurality. Even if I totally like a candidate in the two party system, I want a robust system with plans B and C and D for all of us next election, and my fellow citizens to have a shot at full representation. I want a system like Australia's in the USA where there are no primary elections, just ranked choice voting for the candidates - giving the voters more say, avoiding "split the vote" issues. Other reforms in a more proportional / parliamentary direction can follow.

Setting the rules of fair elections with decent choices needs serious work starting today, not election day.

There's a narrative on the right that fascism was a left wing form of government.,

But the reality is that both fascism and communism were extreme right wing forms of government.

Fascism openly so, but also communism. Remember what fascism actually cares about, maintaining order, obedience to authority, sacrificing for the glory of the state.

Communism was supposed to be about equality and the people controlling everything in a bottom up manner. But the moment you implement it on a national scale you end up with a small inner circle, and they either go fascist like the USSR, or a technocratic dictatorship like China.

There's a reason that when the USSR fell the one narrative you heard was about how much the government lied (because they were far right masquerading as far left). And there's a reason why it was so easy for Russia to go far right under Putin, because they were under far right rule in the USSR.

So yeah, demanding public ownership is pretty on brand for fascists.

I don't consider myself a DB guy but I've used postgres to model graphs with potentially millions of nodes, each with json fields, recursive queries and a bunch of other very complex code either written directly or through hibernate / spring. Postgres has handled it fine. It seems like a very capable database and any issue with performance issue I find tends to be bad code above it - inefficient queries, too many transactions, inadequate indexing or whatever.

Unless I had a genuine use case Postgres could not handle, or some kind of disaster / recovery mode it couldn't do, or certification it didn't have then I don't see any reason to choose anything else. Basically default to Postgres unless there are reasons not to. The costs of Oracle and the burden of checking compliance are so horrific that I just don't get why anyone would choose it unless they absolutely needed it.

I really hope that Waymo's cars aren't relying on their Nader-beepers to avoid killing people. They should be (and AFAIK are) relying instead on their video cameras, LIDARs, and other sensors to stop the car before it hits the wayward kid/technician.

Yes, they should have done it the right way instead!

Err, what was the right way? It's not obvious to me, given that Microsoft doesn't have design control over the hardware its software runs on.

At this point, my biggest fear is that she will -- and then call me over to debug the AI-generated codebase, when it inevitably doesn't work quite right.

That wasn't *all* I said, but it is apparently as far as you read. But let's stay there for now. You apparently disagree with this, whnich means that you think that LLMs are the only kind of AI that there is, and that language models can be trained to do things like design rocket engines.

That's what I just said.

Now you can have all the fun of maintaining 2 sets of credentials and 2 consoles for every single environment you run. The only upside is potentially you can play the two clouds off against each other if one of them offers a better deal on some service than the equivalent in the other.

Oracle the database wouldn't disappear even if the company did. Somebody would buy it and but if customers thought Oracle squeezed them hard, then the next owner is going to squeeze harder. Just like Broadcom did when it bought VMWare.

Postgres is very good. Is it "enterprise"? Probably not in the way Oracle is but it can scale vertically and horizontally with replications and shards (citus extension). It's an excellent database that is pleasant and unsurprising to work with and has a lot of useful features. I expect that a lot of customers who paid through the nose to use Oracle could have used Postgres if they chose to - not necessarily for the super massive deployments but mid tier things. Migrating away from it might be disruptive but if there is demand for it, then tools and companies will pop up to assist with the process.

Even if the malignant company that birthed this dollar sucking monstrosity dies, the eponymous database and things like Java & Solaris will be bought by someone else as a going concern. And probably with an even more evil licensing model. Witness what happened to VMWare when Broadcom bought it.

Not that I particularly care but I'm sure it will bite a lot of companies who'll suddenly wonder why they even needed a commercial database for the workload they used it for. At least there are open source versions of Java, but anyone caught on Oracle if the company collapsed or was sold off is royally fucked.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that OpenAI and its competitors are trying to do the right thing here and make their AIs as harm-free as possible.

Not everyone will be that responsible, however. Now that it has been demonstrated that a suitably sycophantic AI can compromise the psyches of significant numbers of people, it's only a matter of time before various bad actors start weaponizing their own AI models specifically to take advantage of that ability. "Pig butchering" will be one of the first job categories to be successfully replaced by AI. :/

Here's where the summary goes wrong:

Artificial Intelligence is in fact many kinds of technologies. People conflate LLMs with the whole thing because its the first kind of AI that an average person with no technical knowledge could use after a fashion.

But nobody is going to design a new rocket engine in ChatGPT. They're going to use some other kind of AI that work on problems on processes that the average person can't even conceive of -- like design optimization where there are potentially hundreds of parameters to tweak. Some of the underlying technology may have similarities -- like "neural nets" , which are just collections of mathematical matrices that encoded likelihoods underneath, not realistic models of biological neural systems. It shouldn't be surprising that a collection of matrices containing parameters describing weighted relations between features should have a wide variety of applications. That's just math; it's just sexier to call it "AI".

They tried to do Jesus, but passengers kept calling security about a hippy boarding the plane.