To be clear: anyone can join Bluesky, regardless of their views. But if your posts are mainly, say, calling black people monkeys, calling trans people groomers, things of that nature, yeah, a lot of people are going to block you on sight. That's not "censorship", that's just people finding you to be an arse and having better things to do with their time online than be forced to listen to you. Everyone has a right to show anyone else the door; nobody has an obligation to face harassment.

If you feel the need to force other people to listen to your views regardless of whether they want to hear from you or not, you're the asshole.

Meanwhile, here's the reality of Bluesky user numbers (drag the range to the full range). Funny how everyone always wants to truncate the timeperiod for the "user base" to have a start date of that last big spike.

The simple fact is that with any site, most people who visit don't end up sticking around, and there's a dropoff rate. The persistance rate at Bluesky is actually unusually high**. The reason for the spikes is that Bluesky's users joined in waves; you can track each wave to specific events. Those two big spikes in new users were the US election date and the US inauguration date, respectively. You can find various other spikes related to for example various things that happened with Twitter.

** The typical retention rate for a new "consumer-social" app is 40-50% for 1 day, 20-30% for 1 week, and 10-15% for 1 month. Compare that to the Bluesky data. Again: persistence has been very high; the new-user join pattern has just been extremely "spiky".

The problem is that you can write that list slanted in the other direction just as adroitly.

You really cannot.

Okay, I'll bite that worm you've left dangling on that hook. Let's go down the list.

Sec. Def:

Biden: Gen. Lloyd Austin. 4-star U.S. Army General with 41 years of active military service. Former Commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, and Director of the Joint Staff. Oversaw the drawdown of 150,000 troops and massive logistical operations in Iraq.

Trump: Pete Hegseth. White-nationalist alcoholism-scandal-plagued weekend morning co-host for Fox & Friends, former Army National Guard major. Zero executive experience managing large military commands, defense procurement, or enterprise-scale organizations. Opened his tenure by leaking war plans to a journalist by writing about them on WhatsApp instead of secure messaging channels, and is currently losing a war which he promoted launching in Iran, with zero preparation for obvious threats like drones and Hormuz closure, while spending his time obsessing over testosterone levels and beards.

Department of Health and Human Services + Surgeon General:

Biden: Xavier Becerra: 24 years on key Congressional healthcare subcommittees; Attorney General of California overseeing the enforcement of public health and healthcare antitrust laws.
Vivek Murthy: MD/MBA from Yale, Harvard faculty member, practicing physician, and two-time U.S. Surgeon General with deep clinical and administrative credentials.

Trump: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Famous antivax-conspiracist brainworm-addled kook who eats roadkill, cuts of whale heads, measures raccoon penises, and swims in sewage. Zero medical degrees, zero public health degrees, zero experience running a hospital system or public health agency.
Nicole Saphier: Radiologist who's a strong advocate of Kennedy's conspiracy theories.

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services:

Biden: Chiquita Brooks-LaSure. 30-year veteran of healthcare policy and public administration. Former healthcare analyst at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), key drafter of federal health legislation on the House Ways & Means Committee, and senior official in the HHS Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight.

Trump: Dr. Mehmet Oz. Daytime television talk show host and former cardiothoracic surgeon, widely criticized by the medical community for promoting quack medicine and pseudoscientific wellness supplements on television.

Department of Education

Biden: Dr. Miguel Cardona. Public elementary school teacher, middle school principal, assistant superintendent, and State Commissioner of Education in Connecticut. Holds a Master’s degree in Bilingual Education and a Doctorate in Education.

Trump: Linda McMahon. Professional wrestling (WWE) executive and mega-donor. Most famous for fighting her husband Vince McMahon at WrestleMania X-Seven in 2009 before running for congress (twice unsuccessfully). Before getting into WWE, she earned an undergrad degree in French and worked as a secretary at a law office translating French documents.

Director of National Intelligence:

Biden: Avril Haines. Former Deputy Director of the CIA, former Deputy National Security Advisor, legal counsel to the National Security Council, and Georgetown/UChicago-trained national security legal expert with decades of experience inside the Intelligence Community.

Trump: Tulsi Gabbard. Former congresswoman and Army Reserve officer. Zero professional intelligence community experience, zero senior leadership roles in intelligence analysis or collection. Before her position she was most famously known for harboring sympathies for Russia and Assad.

Federal Bureau of Investigation:

Biden: Christopher A. Wray. Yale law grad; three decades of working as a US prosecutor and attorney general under both Democratic and Republican administrations, including heading the criminal division of George W. Bush's administration.

Trump: Kash Patel. Former congressional staffer, and podcaster. Zero track record in law enforcement. Has spent most of his time in office abusing its perks for himself and his girlfriend.

Department of Justice (AG):

Biden: Merrick Garland. Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (served 24 years on the federal bench). Former Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General who personally led the successful prosecution of the Oklahoma City bombers. Harvard College (valedictorian) and Harvard Law School (magna cum laude).

Trump: Matt Gaetz (first pick). Former congressman who was under active House Ethics investigation for sexual misconduct and illicit drug use; zero prosecutorial experience, zero judicial experience, zero executive law enforcement leadership.

Department of Transportation:

Biden: Pete Buttigieg & Polly Trottenberg. Buttigieg: Rhodes Scholar, Harvard graduate, municipal executive overseeing urban infrastructure redevelopment.
Trottenberg: 30-year veteran of transportation policy, former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation (managing one of the largest municipal transit grids on Earth), and senior federal transit policy director.

Trump: Sean Duffy. Former cast member on MTV's The Real World: Boston, former congressman, and Fox Business commentator. No professional background in civil engineering, transit systems, or logistics.

How many more of these do I need to do?

I'm sorry, but when you look at the current administration, are the people at the top people who scream to you "I reached my position because of my competence and skill"? It is the crowd that's constantly screaming about "DEI" that has been the most obsessed with promoting people based on appearance and personality over any actual competence whatsoever in the fields they're being put in charge of.

And for the record, the guy who led the X mob against this person - Nathan Cofnas - has stated that beyond "whistleblowing", his motivation is that Beyond whistleblowing, he states that after a 'revolution' removes professors like Arday, it will open opportunities for him to become 'head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard'. Are these the sort of people whose side you want to be on?

Also, people think they're so clever when they do this, when they generally don't actually work with modern models anyway. It just makes you look manipulative and unprofessional.

It's over an order of magnitude heavier than the largest of those (Helios).

There's a difference between an aircraft being built to lift itself and perhaps a tiny payload and be paperlight vs. an aircraft designed for actual commercial service carrying passengers.

The feet are needed to accelerate the plane to takeoff velocities in order to conserve battery mass.

Also, the big AI companies get a number of advantages, such as large batch sizes and being able to balance on-peak and off-peak workloads better.

Is most of your daily driving "a race"?

This is a midrange model. This is competitive midrange pricing. For my midrange work I've been using GLM-5.2 - Gemini 3.7 flash is a bit cheaper and a bit better on the benchmarks, so yeah, I'll probably switch so long as the prices stay low.

Sometimes you need a high-end model (Claude Fable, GPT 5.6 Sol, Kimi K3, etc). Sometimes a low-end model is fine (GPT 5.6 Luna, DeepSeek 4 Flash 0731, etc). Usually a midrange model is the best balance.

Investors are chasing a company that achieves some kind of AI singularity. Let's set aside the fact that there's no reason to believe there is anything but diminishing marginal returns by making marginal refinements to current frontier models. Let's imagine someone hits the jackpot and gets, not even AGI, but a system that's as far ahead of today's frontier model are ahead of 2020's GPT 2.0 in performance.

Globally AI revenues are 150 billion, against a cumulative burn rate of 450 billion. A model that is a generation ahead of others would almost certainly capture the lion's share of that revenue.

If AGI magically appears as a Sam Altman has promised investors it will, a hundred million is way too low. Add, maybe, another zero to the revenues.

Conservatively, a safer assumption is that frontier models will get marginally better based on refinements in training and reinforcement and the other bits and bobs that go into these systems. The nobody is winning the lion's share of anything, at least overnight. But you have to define "safe". By "safe" I mean unlikely to lose money. But some investors are clearly defining "safe" as "having the greatest chance of owning a piece of the biggest thing ever."

I'm not following this super-closely, but if Anthropic is pursuing adding multi-step model based reasoning to their system, that could be the basis of a generational leap in capability. But if that is an approach that looks like it has a chance of working, then their competitors are no doubt pursuing the same thing. In that case you'd expect the revenue pie to grow as the scope of model utilty increases, but that growth to be split among several competitors. This could credibly result in a revenue stream for some of them that is as big as the entire industry's revenue stream today. But there's going to be hell to pay on the data center impacts end of things.

There are to be three variants of the ES-300: an all-electric 200km version, a hybrid 30-seat 400km version, and a hybrid 25-seat 800km version. And the ES-300 airframe very much is not some existing airframe.

EV fires are rarer than ICE fires (and slower spreading as well), so given that the competition is fuel-based....

It is a perfectly cromulent statement. 1MW = power, $5 = a cost of energy. They are providing both power and (indirectly) energy.