Still i think it'd be more in their interests to just keep lowering the merchant fees and then the rewards card issuers would have to keep whittling down their offerings Creating a bunch of different visa card types is going to be a mess

Seems like this could be a win for amex and discover really. I'm not going to want to carry a visa that risk being rejected because its the wrong type

I also suspect he won't be happy with doing it underground

Tritium is usually the bigger issue - it's got a pretty short halflife at 12 years and is used in a lot of weapon designs.

Look up Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions - there's a well defined language for talking about this.

If you meet the lower income requirements and have a 2013 or earlier to trade in, then Colorado has a $6000 credit for buying a used EV (starting in 2 weeks time) https://energyoffice.colorado....

I mean sort of yes, but they also have to have some money to begin with and nominally that fraction is based on an actual deposit. They can probably structure ways of looping that round on itself too which seems like it'd create some very risky exposure. But it's still considerably more concrete than being able to press a button and make a trillion dollars

Plus this isn't bank-style behavior. A regular bank can't magic up $1M out of thin air, much less $1T. I suppose a few banks are authorized to print paper currency and could conceivably do something on a small scale, but that takes a lot more effort to pull off covertly. Being able to create currency from absolutely nothing is firmly in the domain of central bank territory, there are really only a handful of entities round the world like the Federal Reserve or Bank of England that have amassed enough trust to do things close to that.

I'm less sure about that.

I'm finding Claude is really good at removing layers of abstraction - i just went through a stack of shipping code that created Fedex labels, there were multiple layers of abstraction on top of some code written years ago. I had the LLM go through and develop a spec for what each method needed to do, propose a clean interface and then rewrite the existing code into the new architecture.

Then I can have it find a common interface between my UPS and FedEx code and wrap those up and correct all the code that has ugly ups-specific hacks in it.

I don't think there's a magic bullet for technical debt, but with clear instructions it's very good at working through the kind of stuff that "I should get to someday"

Fair point, but i think procurement is a lot of the problem.

I've seen a few software contracts in private industry and if they are negotiated by people who couldn't build the thing in the first place, then they are almost universally shit because the people paying for it don't fully understand the requirements. I can build software and am in a good place to negotiate small projects because I understand what's involved. If you've never been involved in building a system on that scale then you aren't going to be able to even know what to ask for, then it's doubly bad because Oracle absolutely _has_ been involved in projects of that size and knows exactly how to protect itself.

Birmingham could have likely implemented this for less if they'd hired a bunch of developers and project managers to build it locally - and that would have the side effect of creating a good number of high paying jobs right in the community.

Especially in a wide far reaching project that's likely ill-defined. While I certainly don't mean to excuse Oracle's performance (and i have absolutely no knowledge of the system) with an overrun like this it's likely that parts of it weren't specified at all. I think the real travesty here is that city councils are being left to their own devices to make these kinds of contracts. Surely Birmingham's needs aren't meaningfully different from Glasgow and Manchester - if only there were an overarching government that could help develop one system for all large city councils to use.

Plus my utility in CO just cut the price of their 100% renewable offset by about 60% (because they are transitioning to 100% carbon free power, and they need to offset less now) and so my rate is actually lower than it was 2 years ago.

Even LLMs are great for just the morass of shitty business data. Like we get PDF orders from a bunch of our customers, they don't order enough or in a standard enough format to automate it properly but most of the time an LLM can digest that, match up the products and produce a result at least as well as a human can. There's just not much opportunity for it to go wrong, the product list is constrained, we also have it report out all the totals from the PDF so if the dollar amount doesn't add up we won't accept it. It's not solving the big business problems, but there are a lot of small problems where they can be really useful

Might actually solve the fentanyl crisis if it's more attractive to smuggle chips

This is pretty much a real life version of the "QA Engineer walks into a bar and orders -1 beers"