I love how Microsoft has to plan an initiative for four months to say that they will be paying their electricity bills.

but it could also be an awesome weapon.

I guess if you had hundreds of full-size space power plants and decided to beam all the power to the same place at once, then maybe? But for a given one, think "the sun", not "a laser cutter". The beam is very wide and diffuse.

Yes, I'm sure its spread out but I still wouldn't want to be standing under it.

Why not? It's less damaging than standing out in the sun. Why are you afraid of IR?

so at least the beam could be seen and people avoid it?

You seem to be thinking that this is like some sort of point laser with incredible intensity. It's not. It's an extremely wide beam of "normal" levels of light intensity.

I was expecting it to be inefficient, but after looking into the, the efficiencies are a lot higher than I expected them to be, esp. given that they have a choice about what solar farm to beam to, so can avoid adverse weather. Looks like they could probably get like 50% laser efficiency, 40% system, with a ~500m spot. And 1064-1070nm is 90% clear in good weather.

Solar power in space gets ~40% more W/m2 than on the surface, has zero blocking by clouds, no night, passive solar tracking, no land cost, only one-off permitting costs, low mount costs (minimal structural loading), no weather damage, no dust, and they can beam to wherever they can sell the power for the highest price. Historically it was right-out because of high launch costs, but launch costs are plunging, and could get very low indeed. Also, space solar tech has advanced dramatically in terms of W/kg in the past few decades, and is likely to advance a lot more if this is pursued at scale.

Of course you have radiation, no maintenance, micrometeoroids, launch packing/stress/deployment, beaming, thermal management, and a whole host of other things - one can absolutely not say it'll be cost effective. But at this point, I don't think we can assert any more that it won't be cost effective, either. It's probably about the right time to start working towards giving it a shot.

There's also some fun things you can do with this, like on-demand spot-warming of specific areas and the like. Not visible lighting, mind you, since this is IR (the Soviets once did a small-scale experiment with mirrors to light a town with something like 1% of the sun's light from space)

Vibe coding has nothing to do with who the user is and everything to do with how it's used.

AI-Assisted Coding: You look at every line of every diff suggested by the AI
Vibe Coding: You accept all lines suggested by the AI without looking at them.

You can have been a programmer for 60 years and still vibe code.

That's not "further reading", and it's not "news", it's what he said two months ago, while this is what he's doing today.

Vibe coding is such a weird experience. Claude 4 Opus combined with modern Cursor or Claude Code agents is so powerful these days. You can actually handle sizable projects now without the model losing its way. I've been vibe coding a rather complex Shopify store (Shopify is easy if you plan to do things the way they thought of but a nightmare if you want to do anything outside their workflow), and it's a trip having Claude use all sort of tools and services that I've never even heard of before, and something perfectly functional comes out.

The risk you face with that is that even if your system is popular in the country and most people support the unions, anyone who fights against them can become a hero to those who disagree. So there's always a potential risk - it's best to codify these things into law.

Tesla, early on during the "unionization drive" (which was actually just a tiny handful of people, used as a wedge by outside unions, rather than a real grassroot effort), despite all the headwinds from all the unions trying to block service to them (to the point of even trying to block customers from receiving license plates), still did quite well on sales, with Q4 '24 seeing Tesla with 17,64% of market share (vs. Q4 '23 at 12,28%) and absolute sales rising YoY from 4026 to 5107. It wasn't until 2025 as Musk became increasingly in the media as a far-right firebrand (esp. after the "Nazi Salute" incident) that Tesla's Swedish sales really started to crash.

IF Metall continued its strike for 600 days, before finally giving up. If you really want to mandate minimum conditions, why not just legislate them?

"Fascism is LEFT wing, and always was"

The 14 principle characteristics of Fascism, as laid out by Eco:

1) "The cult of tradition," characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.

2) "The rejection of modernism," which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.

3) "The cult of action for action's sake," which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.

4) "Disagreement is treason" – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.

5) "Fear of difference," which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.

6) "Appeal to a frustrated middle class," fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.

7) "Obsession with a plot" and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society. Eco also cites Pat Robertson's book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.

8) Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak." On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

9) "Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy" because "life is permanent warfare" – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to not build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.

10) "Contempt for the weak," which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.

11) "Everybody is educated to become a hero," which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, "[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."

12) "Machismo," which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold "both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality."

13) "Selective populism" – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of "no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people".

14) "Newspeak" – fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.

If that sounds like "the left" to you rather than Trumpism, well, that's.... certainly a take.

Fascism was (correctly) described as a far right-wing movement before, during, and after WWII. It's not "history rewritten", it has been viewed as far-right the entire time. There were some "populist, appeal-to-the-masses" elements early on - for example, among the Nazis, most championed by Ernst Röhm - but this was quite thoroughly suppressed by the Night of the Long Knives, which murdered Röhm and all his supporters. Röhm's followers' modern analogy is the "Trump Democrats", people who supported both Bernie and Trump, people who both hate the rich AND hate immigrants / minorities & perceived "liberal elites" and/or "know-it all scientists". But they never had any real chance within the party.

I still have a Vic-20 in my garage. Maybe I should get it back out!

What I want is an AI Razor, not Razer, that will shave AI off of all the places where it's grown.

...but the inevitable firing of this person when bad things happen and this person failed to stop them, will allow OpenAI to say "see! Look! We're doing something about how terrible we are!"

Yeah, one of the things I like about Claude (and Gemini 3 as opposed to 2.5) is that they really clamped down on the use of "Oh, now I've got it! This is absolutely the FINAL fix to the problem, we've totally solved it now! Here, let me write out FIX_FINAL_SOLVED.md" with some half-arse solution. And yep, the answer to going in circles is usually either "nuke the chat" or "switch models".

Yeah, when thinking of the typical air fryer market, think "working mom with kids who wants to serve something nicer than a microwave dinner, but doesn't have the time for much prep or waiting". You can get those mailard reactions that microwaving doesn't really get you, nice crisping and browning of the surface that you normally get from an oven, without having to wait for an oven to preheat. I don't think anyone disputes that an oven will do a better job, but the air fryer does a better job than a microwave, which is what it's really competing against. They're also marketed as easy-clean, which again is a nod to their target audience.

How costs build up is really staggering. I'm getting into the business of importing 3d filament. In Iceland, it currently sells for like $35/kg minimum. The actual value of the plastic is like $1. The factory's total cost, all costs included, is like $1,50. If it's not name brand, e.g. they're not dumping money on marketing, they sell it for $3 for the cheapest stuff. Sea freight adds another dollar or two. Taxes here add 24%. But you're still at like $5/kg. The rest is all middlemen, warehousing, air freight for secondary legs from intermediary hubs, and all the markup and taxes on those things.

With me importing direct from the factory, sea freight only, I can get rid of most of those costs. Warehousing is the biggest unavoidable cost. If I want to maintain an average inventory of like 700kg, it adds something like $5/kg to the cost. Scanning in goods and dispatching user orders (not counting shipping) together adds like $2,50. And then add 24% tax (minus the taxes on the imported goods). There's still good margin, but it's amazing how quickly costs inflate.