There's the real question, isn't it? At one point, companies were attempting to provide customers with what they wanted, or at the very least, what they said they wanted. Now, especially in tech circles, companies are altering existing products and creating new products that end users are screaming bloody murder angry over, and telling us we should love it. It's more than just bad marketing, it's outright hostility toward customers. And then this motherfucker comes along and asks why we're not impressed when they keep shoveling shit at us we don't want, we've told them we don't want, we keep giving them "backlash over, and they're selling as a way to replace us all at our jobs and in large segments of what we do outside of our jobs as well.

Fuck this guy sideways. Sick to god damned death of the tech leadership not just being out of touch with the userbase, but outright hostile toward us and then surprised when we don't worship their every hostile move.

Bullshit. I live in the western US and have regularly driven through some of the least-populated areas of the country, but I've never seen an area you can go 500 miles without encountering any infrastructure. You might be able to accomplish it if you take careful note of where the truck stops are and go out of your way to avoid them, but on any realistic route you'll encounter truck stops -- if not towns -- at least every 150 miles.

As for charging infrastructure, if you stay on the interstates I don't think there's anywhere in the country you can go more than 100 miles without finding a Tesla Supercharger. Those aren't designed for truck charging, but this demonstrates that building out the infrastructure isn't that hard.

Proctorio sounds like alt-dimension Cornholio. Can you imagine if those two met up?

I AM CORNHOLIO! I NEED TP FOR MY BUNGHOLE!

I AM PROCTOIO! I NEED LUBRICANT FOR MY FIST!

ARE YOU THREATENING ME?

TP WON'T SAVE YOU NOW!

It's already happening. Our online world started breaking down minds well before the algorithms started shoveling political shit at us in favor of one candidate or another, usually whichever one increased engagement / enragement. If we hadn't let our minds begin to soften, we would have seen through the ever increasing cloud of bullshit surrounding online discourse and seen the ways it is manipulated to provide a few more pennies to the companies behind the technology that allowed that discourse to take place. Arguing with strangers, where some came into a conversation with the best of intentions, and some came in specifically to fuck with people, left people in a semi-shellshocked state of not knowing which part of which argument was real, and which part was completely fictional. As time has moved on, we're now at a point where no two people really believe in the same version of reality, and the divide between us continues to widen. We've let the algorithms dictate public discourse. First via online discourse, and then by letting "news" stations grab headlines from that online discourse, even when those stations know full good and well that their reaching their hands into a festering septic system and pulling out massive wads of half-rotted shit.

The "war" against the machines was lost a little bit at a time. And nobody seems at all interested in pulling us back a bit from that loss and reassessing. In fact, it seems we're rushing ever faster toward the very thing that's causing us to fall apart.

Game of Thrones wasn't a movie, it was a television show where the creators gave up on the concept part way through and then bum-rushed the finish line. But, to your point, *EVERYBODY* was critical of that, including the people that were actually involved in the scene.

They certainly seem to have completely missed Article I. You know, the part that says that the legislature makes the laws? Even if you think restricting AI regulation to the federal government is a good idea, the right way to do it isn't with an executive order to set up a DOJ task force aimed at litigating state AI regulations out of existence based on complex legal theories about interstate commerce. The right way is for Congress to pass a law barring states from regulating AI. This is simpler, cheaper and should invoke public debate about the issue, which is how things are supposed to be done in constitutional republics.

I don't even think Trump is taking this route because he and his advisors don't believe they have the votes for it. I think they're doing it this way because they don't even consider governing through legislation rather than through executive power. Granted that Congress is fairly dysfunctional, but they actually can and do make laws... and the way to fix the dysfunction is to work the system.

That would be the oligarch level folks, waiting for their government handouts while the rest of us get hollowed out in the fall.

In the end? Into the pockets of the already uber-wealthy. The FED may not state that as their outright goal, but that's where it's going to go. And, when the economy inevitably "corrects," they'll find a way to grab great gobs of money out of the hands of the middle class to help extend that ever-escalating money mountain of the already wealthy so that they don't suffer any losses while the rest of us struggle to survive. That's always the end result of these economy-wide pump and dumps. Pump, pump, pump some more, and when the bottom finally falls out, throw taxpayer money at the top as a parachute so they can gently glide down over the refuse of the finances of the rest of society.

As massive as this pump cycle is, it's gonna be a harsh reckoning when it comes around.

This.

My take on vibe coding is simple: Don't.

At least not the way most people understand it. I'm totally ok with having an AI do the tedious work. But only do it on stuff you could do yourself (i.e. you're just saving time). Because otherwise, you'll never be able to maintain it.

This, in general, is the whole problem: The entire "vibe coding" movement only worries about CREATING code. But in the real world, maintaining, updating, refactoring, reviewing, testing, bugfixing, etc. etc. are typically more effort than writing it in the first place.

It's also cultural. Chinese/Japanese/Korean culture values academic results over pretty much anything else. If you want to be the most popular person at school in Asia then get the best grades.

Compare to the West where when I was at school lots of the smart kids pretended to be dumb because they didn't want to call attention to themselves and get bullied.

Asian culture is massively supportive of working hard and studying so it's not a surprise that they excel in the knowledge economy.

Note while there are aspects of this I very much admire, it is not all sunshine and roses. If you cannot perform academically in these cultures you are basically thrown no the trash heap of life very early on. Children are under immense pressure in a way that sets many up to fail. Many people find the cultures very stifling as well if you have grown up in them and don't have the 'white privaledge' of being a tourist/expat there. Japanese and Korean performative work culture is also insane.

Yes, but the concent was given without nag massages. I suspect tge adjor part of the har towards rhe cookie regs has been caused by the constant nsging each time you visit a new website or clear you coolies

The fegulation should have reqiered browsers to send headers with the request rhat indicate which cookies the user accepts ( to be set in the browsers settings). That way the wbsiyes would know, and the users would be spared the constant nagiging about cookies

The above was already quite long, but allow me to add a bit :-)

I spent a few minutes looking for the state of the art in C++/Rust interop for contexts that don't have a nice intermediary like binder. It turns out that the situation isn't as bad as I thought. The CXX project enables automatic generation of bi-directional definitions between Rust and C++ and is being used at scale by the Chromium project and that seems to be going pretty well.

There's also a Google-funded Rust Foundation project to define a better solution, though I don't see what, if anything, has happened since it was announced last year. Hopefully that's because there's a small group working too hard to waste a lot of time talking about it.

The reason I went to look is that my new team (I left Google a couple of months ago) might need such a thing. I've been asked to define an API that would benefit from being implemented in Rust and usable from C++ and Rust.

Telling people that vaccines are bad, ensuring that any parent who wishes to refuse to vaccinate their children is fully supported in that decision, and working to make vaccines harder to get, more expensive and more painful (RFK Jr. wants to separate the MMR vaccine into three shots, each of which will still require three injections, so kids will have to get 9 shots to be fully vaccinated instead of three).

This is similar to their plan to fight inflation by imposing tariffs and forcing the Fed to lower interest rates in spite of rising inflation (note that this last part hasn't really happened yet -- the interest rate cuts have been measured, cautious and justified by economic conditions -- but Trump is working on it). Though to be fully fair, by making the tariffs arbitrary and capricious so that business leaders are completely unable to plan, Trump is also causing a contraction in US economic activity that might eventually generate significant unemployment, which actually does reduce inflation. I see no corresponding "silver lining" in the mumps plan, though.

And, ultimately, slavery was a far less efficient and effective economic system. One might think that keeping a big chunk of the populace poor is efficient, since you're not "wasting" a lot of production on providing them with unnecessary goods and services, but it's really not, at least not since the industrial revolution. I think the core reason that it's so inefficient is the same reason that Marxist communism is inefficient: From an economic perspective, both systems value the masses only for their physical labor, and fail to cultivate and take advantage of their brains, which also actually tends to reduce their labor output. Harnessing the distributed ingenuity of your workforce requires giving your workforce some reason to exercise ingenuity and some way to benefit from doing so.

It's going to be interesting (or maybe terrifying, or maybe just sad) to see what happens when we fully automate ingenuity, too, which will mean that the system no longer depends on or benefits from distributed ingenuity because the machines are smarter and think faster, just as the machines are already stronger and indefatigable.