So instead of having a one person chat window on one pc talking to an agent in the cloud... you did the natural thing and put the chat window into the cloud with the agent so anybody could chat with it.

This is not revolutionary. I question if it's even that evolutionary as it's something that probably should've been that way from the start.

The REAL problem here is you're going to make the code more and more complex as more ideas get introduced. I'm the majority coder on 2 systems that I'm responsible for and I'm already starting to lose track of fine details as I've been ordered to add features at faster rates and interfacing with different APIs and subsystems that I don't have time to fully learn and rely on the AI to generate the code for and now have to go back to the AI and ask it to summarize certain code paths that I "wrote" and, at the time, that I stepped through and verified worked (along with unit tests). But because I didn't, personally, write the line, let alone structure it (even though I guided the design) it's not seared into my memory compared to if I had.

The further this goes on, the more this is not a program I'm intimately involved with... but a database of functionality that I need an AI to query... let alone update features for.

I don't think this is a good thing.

The only slim hope I have here is if a handful of more active Democratic progressives get elected to Congress, they can effect some needed changes to rules, controls, and laws used to check the executive branch. The Tea Party and Freedom Caucus showed what a small group of determined (if crazy) Republicans can do to disrupt Congress -- I think a similar approach, if made by people with a noble cause, could start the ball rolling on positive changes.

Trump and his Republicans bootlickers have spent the last 10 years highlighting all of the weak points and seams in our government, so fixing and securing them shouldn't be impossible.

But yeah, probably not.

I'm Gen X. I'm white. Both are important to my point.

So when dealing with white people over the age of 70, the vast majority are huge Trump supporters and watch Fox News all day to see how the Democrats are "trying to destroy America". All of these older supporters think he's been great and truly are incapable of understanding why anybody rational doesn't see that Trump has been great.

With my generation, the schools have always been integrated. I have always lived in integrated neighborhoods. Maybe I went to majority white schools and lived in majority white neighborhoods, but neither prevented black people from going to those schools or living in those neighborhoods. Gen X is really the first generation of truly integrated America. I went to a pretty large high school and I would estimate that at a minimum 80% of my living white former classmates are huge Trump supporters who vehemently hate all Democrats. Yes, plenty of people who voted for Trump remain 100% committed to him.

As a Californian, I definitely would NOT have voted for this had I been given the opportunity.

And yeah, we LITERALLY have campaign ads running now to the extent of, "Pedophile murderers are being released to the streets ... and Candidate X voted for it THREE TIMES!!!!"

I think this is likely correct. Earlier in the year my investment club had its monthly meeting and at the time Trump was making another threat about Greenland. I told them that I expected that every year that Trumps remains in office, I expect him to make a threat about taking/invading Greenland, probably in January. At the time, I think there was a lot of talk about the Epstein files. I don't expect the US to actually invade Greenland, but the talk of doing so is hugely distracting to Americans and it makes them stop looking elsewhere.

That one was yet another case of Ridley having a script, deciding it was good enough to start building sets and working on effects, and then constantly changing the script all the way up through editing. Whole subplots got dropped, characters who appeared in promo material just never showed up in the movie, character motivations stopped making sense, plot points were retroactively changed, etc. Prometheus suffered from the same problem, if not to an even greater degree. It's like those movies where everybody cries "studio interference!" ... only in Ridley's case, he's the one who interferes constantly with his own movies.

From TFS:

Even though it seems like this should be obvious, it absolutely hasn't been tested yet. I guarantee you that Trump will pardon himself and his entire family, for any past or possible future crimes, before he leaves office.

Given the current makeup of SCOTUS and their previous ruling about presidential immunity, I think we can guess how that decision will go.

And yet even with all of that they lost in 2024. Golly, what a conundrum.

I like the idea of "mystery ballots" though. Sounds fun.

This has nothing to do with people ineligible to vote, but I'm sure you know that.

The question is - what about brown-skinned people or people with a "funny accent" who are eligible to vote, but who don't want to risk getting harassed or detained for hours or days without cause (or, god-forbid, shot in the head for exercising their Constitutional rights)? How many of them will decide that voting is just not worth the risk?

Using ICE and other forms of federal threat is about creating chilling effects to change the political makeup of who is voting, not preventing illegal votes from being cast. It's basically gerrymandering via jackbooted thugs.

It's like all of corporate America and industry is in "Bet the farm mode". Hey, let's radically shift the entire company's structure and hierarchy in a year based on an interview I saw another CEO give on YouTube last week.

I can sort of explain this away for non-tech companies like media companies but tech companies themselves should have a basic understanding of engineering principles (or one would think). Select a team or form a team with the dev principles you want and run them for a few months and see what happens. Then use what they learned to extrapolate across the whole company. But this kind of logic is something you'd find with cargo cultists...

I wrote a compiler for an ObjC-like language (with less brackets), which can produce binaries for any of {Mac, Windows, Linux, WASM, Arm A9 (Zynq), m68k or 6502} running on any of {Mac, Windows, Linux}. So you can produce a dev-signed Mac binary on a Linux box. I’m just going through extending that output range to mobile {Android, iOS} and I’ll release it as open source.

The compiler docs for the language (xc) are at https://compile-xc.org/ - feel free to browse.

I didn’t think getting the signing working for Mac/iOS was terribly hard.

He has. For a long time. The problem is, apparently he doesn't like to pay them, and they're not aware of that before the fact.

I hadn't even thought about this but now their resistance to enabling contactless or allowing other payment apps makes a lot more sense. Scumbags.

I like WinCo and shop there when I can (also far enough away to be a special trip). The stores sometimes have a K-Mart feel to them (poor upkeep, minimal customer support, that kind of thing) but they are very often cheaper and carry less popular products, and their deli and bulk foods offer a lot of unique stuff. Produce is usually better than Walmart but less consistently good than Kroger (which sucks at everything else).

That said, I can't imagine Walmart dropping credit cards. Too many people have abandoned every other way to pay these days.

Does this mean they will finally enable contactless credit cards on their POS terminals? They've refused to do it for years, requiring people to insert the chip into the reader, as an attempt to push people into using the Walmart app for payments.

Drives me fucking insane. Half the terminals have screwed up chip contacts in them requiring gymnastics to get it to read the chip and it's so much slower than contactless processing. I've started intentionally failing the chip read twice so I can just swipe my card instead. Pretty sure it costs Walmart extra processing fees and is actually faster.