Guess he sees things as:

One man, one vote.

And Teump has the only vote.

Lincoln was a Free Soiler. He may have had a moral aversion to slavery, but it was secondary to his economic concerns. He believed that slavery could continue in the South but should not be extended into the western territories, primarily because it limited economic opportunities for white laborers, who would otherwise have to compete with enslaved workers.

From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.

The politics of the era were far more complicated than the simplified narrative of a uniformly radical abolitionist North confronting a uniformly pro-secession South. This oversimplification is largely an artifact of neo-Confederate historical revisionism. In reality, the North was deeply racist by modern standards, support for Southern secession was far from universal, and many secession conventions were marked by severe democratic irregularities, including voter intimidation.

The current coalescence of anti-science attitudes and neo-Confederate interpretations of the Civil War is not accidental. Both reflect a willingness to supplant scholarship with narratives that are more “correct” ideologically. This tendency is universal—everyone does it to some degree—but in these cases, it is profoundly anti-intellectual: inconvenient evidence is simply ignored or dismissed. As in the antebellum South, this lack of critical thought is being exploited to entrench an economic elite. It keeps people focused on fears over vaccinations or immigrant labor while policies serving elite interests are quietly enacted.

It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.

I tried to use a chat tool to write a bash script that would prompt for username and file system, for a quota change.

Was total garbage.

I'm not a coder; just a stupid admin but how are folks using these tools for programming?

The goal is to be the last man alive, sitting on a pile of 8 billion plus skulls.

There is no other definition of 'a winner'.

“We designed, engineered, and constructed our thermal test unit in a period of about 10 months. It’s possible — after all, the first nuclear reactor ever was built in eight months, in 1943,” he added.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/02...

There's now a push to deregulate building nuclear power plants (with gov't partnership).

US is hoping to have 5 companies post zero-power criticallity within a year of starting this program back in July.

A company reaching this point in 4 months is pretty quick development.

Make me wonder how long before MicroSoft Atomics is a thing?

Just finished building a Nobara Linux game system for my wife. She's been supporting Windows for decades and with Win11, she is so over it.

It probably makes more sense given their scale for them to have their own power generation -- solar, wind, and battery storage, maybe gas turbines for extended periods of low renewable availability.

In fact, you could take it further. You could designate town-sized areas for multiple companies' data centers, served by an electricity source (possibly nuclear) and water reclamation and recycling centers providing zero carbon emissions and minimal environmental impact. It would be served by a compact, robust, and completely sepate electrical grid of its own, reducing costs for the data centers and isolating residential customers from the impact of their elecrical use. It would also economically concentrate data centers for businesses providing services they need,reducing costs and increasing profits all around.

Need to get Drew Carey to narrate this.

"where everything is made up and the points don't matter."

Can't find it but there was an SNL skit where Steve Martin gets a free large screen tv installed, as part of big brother surveillance (late '70s - early '90s I think). That pretty much brought home dangers of cameras on tvs, to teenage me.

My Quadra 650 has 128 MB of RAM.

Currently available at:

            Apple Canton Road, Hong Kong
            Apple Ginza, Tokyo
            Apple Jing’an, Shanghai
            Apple Marché Saint-Germain, Paris
            Apple Myeongdong, Seoul
            Apple Orchard Road, Singapore
            Apple Piazza Liberty, Milan
            Apple Regent Street, London
            Apple SoHo, New York City
            Apple Xinyi A13, Taipei

Wee Wee Men!