However, most people who ask that do it while pointing to people who are actually quite important producers, such as financiers. Be careful not to conflate "don't produce anything of value" with "do something I don't understand the importance of".

Of course there are people in every profession who get paid a lot more than they're worth. This is less true of manual labor jobs where the output is easy to see and measure, but it's true across the board. Even in manual labor jobs you can have people whose output is negative. They may pick X apples or whatever, but they might do it while making everyone around them work slower.

Just to complete the description of the "empty chair" tactic, this is why lawsuits typically name anyone and everyone who might possibly be blamed, including many who clearly aren't culpable. It's not because the plaintiff or the plaintiff's attorney actually thinks all of those extra targets really might be liable, it's so that the culpable parties can't try to shift the blame to an empty chair, forcing the plaintiff to explain why the empty chair isn't culpable (i.e., defend them). Of course this means that those clearly non-culpable parties might have to defend themselves, which sucks for them.

So... you didn't actually look at the size of WikiMedia Foundation's bank account.

WikiMedia absolutely has enough money to run Wikipedia indefinitely if they treated their current pile of money as an endowment and just used the income from it to support the site. They don't have "billions upon billions", but they do have almost $300M, and they spend about $3M per year on hosting, and probably about that much again on technical staff to run the site, so about $6M per year. That's 2% per year. Assuming they can get a 6% average return on their assets, they can fully fund Wikipedia forever, and then some.

So, what do they do with all of the donations instead, if the money isn't needed to run Wikipedia? It funds the foundation's grant programs. Of course, you might actually like their grant programs. I think some of their grants are great, myself, and if they were honest about what they're using it for I might be inclined to give. But they're not, and the fact that they continue lying to Wikipedia's user base really pisses me off, so I don't give and I strongly discourage everyone I can from giving, at every opportunity.

Me too, but it took a lot longer and I was a lot less thorough. I would skim a half-dozen links from the search result, the LLM reads a lot more, and a lot more thoroughly.

I do. I tell the LLM to always include links to its sources, and I check them. Not all of them, but enough to make sure the LLM is accurately representing them. Granted that other people might not do this, but those other people also wouldn't check more than the first hit from the search engine, which is basically the same problem. If you only read the top hit, you're trusting the search engine's ranking algorithm.

That seems like a potential risk. I have't actually seen that happening in any of the stuff I've looked at.

Adverts pay for the web. And also clutter it up. Both of these things are true. Without advertising, there would be very little content that isn't paywalled, and there would be far less content than there is. Slashdot wouldn't exist, for example. The key is to keep advertising sufficiently profitable that it can fund the web, but not so intrusive that it make the web awful.

How do we do that? The best idea I've seen is to use adblockers that selectively block the obnoxious ads. But not enough people do it, so that doesn't work either.

This. There seems to be a widespread assumption that random genetic changes are somehow less problematic than carefully-selected ones because they're "natural" or something. It's not like cosmic rays, mutagenic chemicals, transcription errors and other sources of random genetic mutation are somehow careful not to make harmful changes. Engineered changes might not be better than random mutations, but they're clearly not worse.

Er, I guess I couldn't decide whether to say "closer" or "more closely" and munged them together. :-)

If only there were a way to preview posts before submitting them...

I'm not seeing why "launch and loiter" is beneficial. If Mars transfer windows were only hours, or even days, long, I could see that it's useful to launch early so that you don't end up missing your window because of weather or ground equipment problems, but the transfer windows are weeks to months in duration.

It seems to me that this strategy is mainly driven by lack of confidence in New Glenn, which makes sense given that it's a completely unproven platform. Over the 8+ weeks of the 2026 launch window they could certainly get to space with a reliable platform. Something like Falcon 9 might have some delays due to weather or minor technical issues, but it's extremely unlikely it would miss the window entirely. But New Glenn might have weeks of delays, so launching early might make sense.

What would make even more sense is if NASA is concerned that New Glenn might fail catastrophically. Making the attempt a full year early might provide enough time to build and launch a replacement.

Does anyone who follows this more closer have a better explanation?

Well, he renamed it and made minor changes around the edges so he could claim that it was broken and he fixed it. And then, of course, proceeded to violate the agreement he signed.

Excellent post, just a couple of comments.

First, it's interesting that Nikkos said "a previous administration", without naming it. It was, of course, Trump 1.0.

Second, international treaties on refugees don't require a country to accept every refugee and there are multiple examples where nations have made agreements that modify which county must handle asylum claims. For example, the US-Canada Safe Third Country agreement specifies that asylum seekers must make their asylum claim in whichever country they arrive in first. If the US and Mexico had a similar agreement, then refugees could not enter from Mexico at all. Trump tried to get Mexico to sign a Safe Third Country agreement, but Mexico refused -- and it probably would have been invalid anyway, since Mexico might not satisfy the requirements of a "safe" country under the US law that authorizes the signing of Safe Third Country agreements.

Instead, Trump signed the "Migrant Protection Protocols" agreement with Mexico, which was the "remain in place" agreement. You said that no other country should be willing to put up with it, but Mexico did formally agree to it, though only to avoid tariffs. Of course, Mexico has declined to renew the protocols in Trump 2.0 (though Trump announced they had, which Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum immediately denied -- Trump's habit of unilaterally announcing that an agreement has been reached obviously doesn't really work).

Anyway, there are lots of reasons why countries might agree to various limitations on asylum processes to manage refugee volumes, and these agreements are often perfectly valid under international and national law. Trump, of course, doesn't care about legality, or humanity, only what he can get away with.

I once had an interesting conversation with an Android OEM. I sat down with them to discuss what security issues they'd like to see the Android security team work on. They asked me "When are you going to fix the USB hole?". I didn't know what they meant and asked for clarification. They explained that in some parts of the world, notably India and China, there were "free" charging stations set up in bus stops, train stations and other public areas. These charging stations allow the public to charge their phones, for free! There's just one catch. On a sign above the charging station there's a set of instructions that tells users how to go about activating the charging. The sign tells them to go into the Settings app, then "About Phone", then scroll down to the build number, tap it seven times, then... it walks them through enabling ADB and accepting the key of the "charging station" computer, which would then proceed to install malware -- and to start charging.

Huge numbers of people used these charging stations every day, to the point that the biggest problem users had (besides the malware) was that they were always occupied. No one had a problem with "activating" charging for their device.

90% of people are capable of following a list of instructions. 100% of people are capable of either following a list of instructions or getting someone nearby to do it for them.

Anyway, this OEM wanted us to disable ADB entirely, or allow them to, because their users were doing it, getting loaded up with malware, and then blaming the OEM for making a crappy phone. I, of course, told them that we were not going to disable ADB and we were not going to remove the compliance requirement that forces them to support ADB.

Unfortunately, the current change still doesn't fix the "USB hole", but it does offer a way to rate-limit malware installation via downloadables.

Anyway, if you really think your users can't follow instructions, or can't get someone else to do it for them, you can always just register for a developer account. As long as you don't distribute malware, people will be able to sideload your APKs without using ADB. If the $25 is too much for you, maybe share the cost with some buddies, or get one of the limited accounts, though your APKs will only be installable on a small number of devices. Except, of course, by people who can follow instructions, or get someone else to.

Yep. It allows them to stop malware. How terrible!

How did you learn this?

I suspect you actually do derive a lot of utility from AWS and Azure, you just don't realize how many of the services you use every day are running on them.

Oh, actually, I missed the most obvious flaw in this argument: The verification doesn't give Google any significant control! It does give them the real-world identities of registered developers, yes, but then what? It doesn't do anything to require registered developer to use the Play store or comply with any Play policies other than one: Don't distribute malware.

The real purpose here is malware rate-limiting. Right now, malware authors can pump out huge numbers of apps with small variations to defeat identification. Google may identify one malicious app and warn all of the user that have it installed, but the malware author has thrown out a hundred variations of that app and Google only twigged to one. What ID verification does is require the developer to tie each app to a unique government-issued ID. In countries where you can't just go get a hundred government IDs, this means teams of malware authors can make approximately one malicious APK per team member. In countries where they can go get a hundred unique government IDs per person (because the government is actively cooperating or because they have a cousin in the ID office) it doesn't help so much, but Google can then start working with the governments to crack down.

I don't know if you noticed in the announcement, but this program is starting in a small number of countries, with the cooperation of and at the request of the governments who are trying to defend their populace against waves of malware. This isn't an accident.