a doozie to debug

The fee is meant to stop small employers from hiring foreign talent. Small startups canâ(TM)t afford to pay over $100,000 to hire programmers, scientists, and engineers who just got an advanced from an R1 university. But the magnificent seven companies can. This protects their oligopolies and ensures that they will make big donations to the GOP for decades to come in the same way oil companies have had a relationship with the GOP.

https://www.cs.wisc.edu/2025/0...

And DARPA has a whole program for it:

https://www.darpa.mil/research...

ust because a book is scarce or rare does not mean it is useful or desirable. There are big city book dealers that throw out dumpsters of books every day because they are of no use to anyone. The same is true of libraries: they have to unload old books to make space for new ones.

There have been myriad books published by small presses, or self published, in issues of a few hundred. The information in them may just be pulled from better books, be medical quackery, pseudoscience, alien autopsy insanity, etc. Nobody wants this crap no matter how rare it is.

The argument for why those outcomes are implausible is that the claims of the hazards of imminent "unaligned" superintelligent AI all trace back to the fearmongering of a portion of the Rationalist community and Eliezer Yudkowsky himself. They are based on nothing more concrete than Rationalist AI-doomer fear that this future catastrophe is plausible and imminent (that is, they *assume* the outcome is likely in the near future and take their wild musings on the possible consequences as proof that we must prevent that outcome at all costs). Seriously, read about Yudkowsky's AI-box "experiment". *All* "AI" (LLMs are not and never will be intelligent) "alignment" (LLMs cannot be either aligned with human goals or unaligned with them) "research" (there is no scientific method here, just wild speculation) is based on equally tenuous "evidence".

SpaceX was a pump and dump because Grok is garbage and space datacenters are bullshit. But Anthropic makes a product that is actually useful to a rapidly increasing pool of customers. Once they figure out how to make Claude stop hallucinating it's going to be incredible. And worth lots of money.

It's not a remotely level playing field. One soldier who took part in the Venezuela raid basically had orders in hand when he placed multiple bets on the timing of the raid, netting a ton of money. There have been many other examples of inside information being used to stack the odds.

This is absolutely not true. There are plenty of people in the financial side of a business that have information that is material but non-public, and trading based on that knowledge is illegal, including sudden cuts in spending, audit results prior to publication, and more. HR will be aware of major layoffs. Facilities might be aware of impending site closures before they're announced. All these things can be used for insider trading.

Lower-level people aren't usually pursued because they're small enough to fly under the radar. But that doesn't mean it's not illegal, and it doesn't mean it never happens.

Most popular subreddits are overrun with bots. r/politics and r/conservative are notorious hives of bots regurgitating talking points at each other. Discussions of Israel and China are always hit by bots spreading the same propaganda. And every little sub is getting hit by bots recycling old posts. If reddit is supposed to be a place for humans then the company sucks at it.

Keeping social media from harming kids requires curbing the use of dark patterns in software. It would have to apply to the operating systems, web sites, and thousands of apps on every app store. Few politicians are willing to fight tens of thousands of software and gambling companies. The lobbies that would create would make combined militarism contractors, the drug industry, and the oil industry look like ants.

If I need to know something and I search with Google it kind of sucks. Half of the articles are clickbait, written by non-experts or a shitty AI that was given a garbage prompt. When I go to the web site I immediately have to jump through as many as three popups about cookies. Then, ten seconds after I start reading, a full page popup appears compelling me to sign up for a mailing list. If I am on a mobile browser with an ad blocker the page may refuse to load. On desktop I might get a popup telling me to disable my ad blocker. After all that shit it turns out that the garbage article does not even answer my question. So I have to keep doing this with every link until I either find an answer or give up.

But if I ask Claude it will usually give me a great answer. Sometimes it gives an entire essay. The writing is much better than the garbage I would get from a Google search.

But lately I have taken to just looking it up in books. This month I bought a big Merriam Webster dictionary along with the Oxford dictionaries of economics, finance and banking, and politics and international relations. It's great! Entries are short because Oxford is not cooking up five+ paragraph articles to put ads into. The writers were experts. And they were human. I still resort to Claude at times, and it can be faster, but I like ink on paper.

They already have a planned rotation. There will be two crews, rotating every four hours. This isn't unlike existing long-haul flights, except that instead of the crews rotating at the same time, they will be on two-hour offsets. One pilot will stay for the first four hours, the other for the first two hours. A replacement will swap in at two hours and stay through the sixth hour, and then the other will swap at four hours and stay through the eighth hour, and so on. Qantas said that this will apply to all flights of 20 hours or more.

What the hell is that? Is that a salesman in PC-speak?

Ukraine goes out of its way to not target civilians. That is the opposite of terrorism.

Somehow I doubt that the Emirates are going to extradite a guy to a country that is currently moving drone and missile components from China to Iran where they are used to attack targets in Dubai.