I mean... you could also try modernizing the environment.

The system as it currently exists is incredibly archaic. Even the stuff that works is aging out.

https://www.aviationtoday.com/...

"...The FAA has been forced to spend the majority of its roughly $3 billion annual equipment budget simply keeping obsolete systems alive. In some facilities, controllers still rely on technology that uses floppy disks. (Yes, you read that right â" floppy disks.)

Replacement parts for certain components are no longer manufactured, pushing the agency into the surreal position of hunting for spares on secondary markets like eBay. This is not a charming anecdote about bureaucratic inertia. It is a structural failure with cascading consequences for airlines, lessors, manufacturers, and avionics suppliers.

The fragility of the system became impossible to ignore last spring, when technical failures twice knocked out radar serving the airspace around Newark Liberty International Airport.

The outages triggered thousands of delays and cancellations at one of the countryâ(TM)s most critical hubs. While redundancy is built into ATC architecture, there have been repeated incidents where both primary and backup systems failed simultaneously, including at the Philadelphia facility that manages traffic into and out of Newark. Safety was preserved, but operational confidence took another hit."

https://fortune.com/2025/02/01...

"Some FAA systems are a half-century old, as aging tech suffers from lack of replacement parts and support service... ...The report from the Government Accountability Office found that the FAA has trouble with upkeep on its equipment, which needs modernization, while airspace demand has seen dramatic growth since the introduction of those systems.

Specifically, according to the FAA officials, aging systems have been difficult to maintain due to the unavailability of parts and retirement of technicians with expertise in maintaining the aging systems,â the report said.

It found that 37% of the FAAâ(TM)s 138 air traffic control systems were deemed unsustainable, meaning replacements come sparingly and there is a significant lack of funding available to modernize the technology.

For example, the Airport Surface Detection Equipment Model-X, which debuted in the early 2000s, tracks movement on the runway. But spare parts for this device are âoeextremely limited and may require expensive special engineering.â

Additionally, beacon replacement antennas are no longer available as they are on average two decades old. And 25-year-old landing systems used to help aircraft on its final approach now lack manufacturing support."

https://www.gao.gov/products/g...

"The Federal Aviation Administration relies on information systems to help air traffic controllers keep the airspace safe and efficient. Last year, FAA determined that 51 of its 138 systems are unsustainable, citing outdated functionality, a lack of spare parts, and more.

Over half of these unsustainable systems are especially concerning, but FAA has been slow to modernize. Some system modernization projects won't be complete for another 10-13 years. FAA also doesn't have plans to modernize other systems in needâ"3 of which are at least 30 years old."

Doing ATC at a major commercial airport stressful... now throw in the random possiblity of an ATC zero (https://ifr-magazine.com/system/atc-zero/) due to a critical subsystem failure. This doesn't even take into account hostile actors or nation-states deliberatly attacking infrastructure or messing with local airspace.

It doesn't help that age limits on recruitment dramatically narrows the pool of eligible applicants:

https://www.local3news.com/reg...

"In the US, air traffic controllers are required to retire at the age of 56, and the FAA wonâ(TM)t hire anyone older than age 31, because they want candidates to have at least a 25-year career path."

Leaving aside possible reasons for a declining birthrate (increased cost, greater opportunity cost, social trends, decreased community availabilty for things like child care, mismatch in education between partners, student debt), let's ask a different question:

Is the decrease in fertility actually a permanent reduction in births on average for women in the United States, or are we seeing a temporary statistical impact due to shifting of when women are having children?

From the article:

"One possibility, according to economist Martha Bailey, head of the California Center for Population Research at the University of California, Los Angeles, is that U.S. women are delaying motherhood and will have more children later in life.

"We're seeing big drops in fertility rates for young women, teenagers and women in their 20s," Bailey said. "What's not yet clear is whether or not those same women will go on to have children later on."

A CDC study published in March of last year found fertility rates rising among women in their 30s and 40s, though not fast enough to offset drops among younger women."

I find it also interesting (but also noting that correlation is not causation) that the peak in births also coincided with the beginning of the great recession: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

A different article (from the govfacts.org site, which is not associated with the government - do your own research on whether they are an objective source: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com...) dives a bit deeper, and interestingly shows that birthrates have fallen below replacement rates before:

https://govfacts.org/long-term...

"After World War II, America experienced a baby boom that peaked around 3.5 children per woman in the early 1960s. This explosion of births reflected returning servicemen starting families, pent-up demand from Depression and wartime delays, economic prosperity, and cultural expectations that strongly favored large families.

The boom was followed by a sharp âoebaby bustâ that brought the rate to 1.7 by 1976, according to CBS reporting on historical trends. This decline coincided with the introduction of the birth control pill, changing womenâ(TM)s roles, and evolving cultural attitudes toward family size.

For three decades from 1980 to 2007, birth rates remained remarkably stable, fluctuating with economic cycles but staying near replacement level. During recessions, couples would delay childbearing; during expansions, they would catch up. This predictable pattern gave policymakers and economists confidence they understood fertility dynamics."

I did pull up the CDC historical data (unfortunately orphaned and no longer being updated) on US births for comparison:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-...

And indeed there are peaks in births in 1957 and 1961, and troughs from 1973-1975. What is interesting is in terms of peak fertility per woman was in 1957 at a rate of 122 births per 1000 women between the ages of 15 and 44. This fell to 65 births per 1000 women in 1976, rose to 68.4 by 1980, fell again to 65.4 by 1986, etc. In 1990 it peaked at 70.90, and in 2007 it peaked again at 69.30.

I have no idea how to translate these numbers to replacement figures, but assuming that the general trends are comparable, it seems like birthrates have actually been on a decline since 1957, by CDC measures. While 2007 may look like it was a peak, that's only a local maxima.

Lastly, we might want to factor in the fact that US population grew significantly in the last 60+ years. Taking a different look at the problem from perspective of the US Census:

https://www.census.gov/library...

This article trumps the highest population growth in the US in decades:

https://www.census.gov/newsroo...

"For Immediate Release: Thursday, December 19, 2024
Net International Migration Drives Highest U.S. Population Growth in Decades"

"...DEC. 19, 2024 â" The U.S. population grew by nearly 1.0% between 2023 and 2024, according to the new Vintage 2024 population estimates released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.

As the nationâ(TM)s population surpasses 340 million, this is the fastest annual population growth the nation has seen since 2001 â" a notable increase from the record low growth rate of 0.2% in 2021. The growth was primarily driven by rising net international migration...."

Could it be that we're seeing fewer births simply because we're approaching or have already hit a maximum point in the population we're able to support in the US?

Yeah, I read through those... and found that while it described a vulnerability, it was still light on actual exploit details.

Did they compromise the inward facing web interface, or an outward web interface? Did they do it through social engineering, or through malware running on devices on the internal network? Was the malware persistent or was it a drive-by instance running a portscanner in a browser instance?

Basically, the question I have is - would flashing say, openWRT on these devices been enough to prevent network intrusion, or were they already inside the gates to begin with?

The linked articles are remarkably light on details of how the routers were compromised. Were they breached from the internet side due to backdoors or poorly implemented services? Was it some sort of configuration default for remote administration that was just bulk abused? Or were the routers compromised from inside the network by malware running locally on machines, or on malware compromised pages? Was it due to remote code execution or was it due to default admin credentials or easily guessable passwords?

Kind of hard to defend against a threat if they won't tell you how the deed was done.

Can it clone proprietary software and turn it into an open source project?

If so, then I think the tradeoff is fair.

Tesla FSD car + Optimus robot actually sounds like the setup to an odd couple movie script...

That or a robotic vision quest buddy film.

The funny thing is, if Bezos really did put 100% of the money in himself, people would accuse him of trying to hog all the benefits of manufacturing automation, and shutting out investment by other parties.

I'm waiting for Larry Ellison to do just that, but with a fuckton of borrowed money, because... well, Larry Ellison.

https://www.wired.com/story/la...
https://www.thomasnet.com/insi...
https://slate.com/technology/2...

Part of the game is taking assets people think is worth money, and converting it into assets that are actually worth money...

https://www.forbes.com/profile...

J.B. Pritzker
$3.9B
Real Time Net Worth

        Jay Robert "J.B." Pritzker is the governor of Illinois; he unseated Republican incumbent Bruce Rauner as a Democratic candidate in 2018.
        An heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune, Pritzker ran private equity firm Pritzker Group with his brother Anthony until March 2017.
        His charitable foundation supports nonprofits primarily in Chicago, including the Ounce of Prevention Fund, which provides early-childhood education.
        His uncle Jay Pritzker (d. 1999) founded Hyatt Hotels and his father Donald (d. 1972) managed and developed the chain.
        His sister Penny Pritzker, also a billionaire, served as U.S. commerce secretary under Barack Obama from 2013 to early 2017.

Ironically factory towns would actually be better.

In a factory town, the housing is a recruitment incentive and benefit (that ironically keeps you trapped because the non-factory town alternative is so much more expensive). But at least then the objective is to keep the housing affordable and accessible to employees of the company, and the ecosystem that keeps them happy. Whereas it seems like everywhere else in the US (and in highly desirable places internationally) people have decided that a place to live is an asset, and that the price must always go up.

Compare the limitations on use between say, a 20-40 acre parcel of land in a rural area, and the limitations on use for a 5000 ft parcel. Then go further and take a look at municipalities that are barely a step removed from having an HOA looking over your shoulder about everything you do with regards to your house.

Leaving aside the history of zoning as a method of excluding "undesirable" residents, zoning is an artificial, and inefficient (because code is a function of rulemaking, not of economics, and rooted in assumptions that may no longer be true) way of regulating land use.

For example, there's a lot of zoning and code regulation around needing adequate parking for residential developments which assumes some average number of cars which is pretty much always just incredibly wrong. In high cost of living areas without transit, the regulations understate the amount of parking needed because each unit has multiple residents (you need one or more roommates to get by, and everybody needs a car.) In high density areas designed to be walkable with a high density form of transit nearby, the regulations overstate the amount of parking needed per unit of housing.

The funny thing is... if you mix commercial and residential, often times you can balance the use of parking spots. During the day - the spots are used by commercial users. In the evening, those users leave, and the commuters who live in the mixed use development can then use those spots. Think about all the commercial/industrial parks - full during the day, and then empty (with the exception of box trucks in the evening) at night. Most of these companies are not going to be running second and third shifts, so those spaces are just unused 2/3rds of the day (so why all the Waymos decide to chill in my neighborhood instead of finding an empty stretch of street next to the storage yard a few streets over is just strange.)

I'm not going to go around telling people that capitalism is an unbridled good, but I will say that efforts to regulate how much money people make often backfire in unexpected ways. Consider if a single company owned the land, built housing, retail, commercial, industrial space, and also built high density transit and shopping plazas. They could afford to partially subsidize the transit during the early years while filling out the various developments, until they reach a level of density that makes it self-funding.

While they never fully realized the original premise, Disney's Reedy Creek improvement district could be considered an example of this type of development:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Actually... the electoral college (and number of representatives in the house) is based on census, and the census is based on all residents, US citizens and otherwise.

https://govfacts.org/elections...

"A 2020 analysis by the Pew Research Center, based on population projections, estimated that if undocumented immigrants were excluded from the 2020 apportionment count, three states would each lose a congressional seat they were otherwise expected to have.

California would have lost two seats instead of one, while Florida and Texas would have seen their gains reduced by one seat each. Conversely, three other statesâ"Alabama, Minnesota, and Ohioâ"would each have held on to a seat they were otherwise projected to lose.

A similar analysis by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), using 2013 population estimates, projected that a citizen-only count would cause a shift of seven seats among 11 states.

Under this scenario, California would lose four seats, while Texas, Florida, and New York would each lose one. These losses would be offset by single-seat gains for Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Virginia."

So states with large numbers of non-voting residents (as in non-citizens) can give the voting residents (as in the citizens) of those states, outsized power when voting (assuming everyone turns out to vote - which is a different issue.)

Not quite the illegal voter / replacement theory that right wing meme artists want to push, but it can impact the census, and thus, every ten years, the way that seats and electoral college votes are distributed.

From this perspective, if Trump wants to depopulate House seats and electoral college votes in blue states, it is absolutely to his advantage to drive people out of those states and into red ones. Next best thing after that is to keep people from migrating into blue states to begin with.

Consumers won't be able to afford it.

Governments and businesses will likely sign long term contracts with service organizations, if the past is any indication.

We'll all be interacting with these systems in one way or another. Possibly not directly, but at one or two levels removed. The technology keeps changing so I can be confident that what we think of as the primary methods of using these systems is probably not what will be the dominant form in a few years.

Would you give a human assistant the login and password to your inbox? Or would you set up a shadow inbox that mirrors your actual inbox so that you don't need to share your login and password?

In a similar vein, when testing automation code, do you just give it admin level prod credentials and then YOLO it, or do you create a test environment that shadows the data from prod, so that you have a way to validate what the automation code is doing without accidentally damaging prod?

Fundamental rules people! Least privileged access to do the work needed. Safeguards commensurate with the negative consequences of failures. In other words... basic risk management.

To give a slightly different example, would you let your self-installed, open source AI self driving interface (see comma.ai) drive you on the highway without sitting in the driver's seat with hands on the wheel, feet on the pedals, just because it managed to complete a test course with flying colors?

The example given with regards to the openclaw agent is like sitting in the back seat of that self driving car, then desperately trying to climb into the front seat when you realize the AI driver is about to drive you off a pier into the ocean.

There are three problems when dealing with legacy code.

1. Figuring out what the code does.
2. Figuring out what the code was supposed to do.
3. Figuring out what the code actually should be doing.

The three are often not the same. The code lies. The comments lie. The commit messages lie. The documentation lies. The managers lie. The users lie.

By lie, I mean, what they tell you, regardless of what they believe to be the truth, is not reality.

For example:

Someone took a stab at writing some code in a modular fashion, or someone before you refactored it. There's a function - it says getXYZ, and it returns a value. Great! Then you dig deeper and discover that getXYZ sets several flags which are then used by the calls that come after getXYZ in the block you are looking at. You discover this only after shit starts breaking because you reordered several function calls during refactoring, none of which had the singular result of getXYZ as a dependency.

An even more straightforward example of that would be discovering a bunch of shit broke when you looked at and found that nobody used the result of getXYZ, and refactored out what looked like dead code. Again, because getXYZ, despite the pattern, actually had side effects.

At this point, now you have a problem. Is getXYZ actually supped to return a result that someone is supposed to use? Was that its original utility, and someone just jammed shit into it because it was faster than refactoring it into something else? Or was it even worse, and this was an incomplete refactor?

Nobody knows! Nobody can tell you! The commit history doesn't go back that far, and even if it did, nobody actually leaves coherent, useful commit messages!

And don't get me started on documentation and comments. Sometimes they can tell you how the system was supposed to behave at one point... but that's not how the system behaves now, and it isn't how all the users and managers believe the system is supposed to work because they've been using the current system for so long.

"Fixing" the code to follow what was supposed to be the correct design can cause all sorts of problems with downstream processes that rely on the current broken behavior. I'm going to steal Uncle Bob's example of finally fixing a typo in a dropdown menu and causing a bunch of UI macro code that looked for that typo to fail...

Often times modernization means essentially re-negotiating all the contracts and interfaces and process workflow with all the stakeholders to come up with a common understanding of what the code should be doing. That's like the best case scenario.

The worst case scenario is they say - use the old code for requirements, make it work exactly like that. Well, if the old code is shitty and illogical, and you need the new code to interface 1:1 with everything that plugged into that... well, guess what? You're going to get an architecture that is going to replicate shitty and illogical 1:1. The actual code might be great, but the process will be just as hard to understand, and probably eventually just as head scratchingly difficult to modify and maintain.

I wish our robot overlords the best of luck with this problem.

Thesis 1:

Cybersecurity companies are bloated and had a stock valuation premium created by insurance mandate (thou shalt contract with a cybersecurity company to keep your insurance premiums low) that will be going away.

Thesis 2:

People are freaking out, without basis, that #1 is true, when in fact the opposite is true - even with AI making code more secure, you will still need cybersecurity insurance, and the insurer is still going to mandate that you contract with an existing cybersecurity company in order to keep your premiums low, due to reinsurance rules. In fact, because of dumbshits using vibecoding, AND the use of automated tools to identify and chain vulnerabilities, domain specific expertise provided by a deep bench will be needed in the future.

Thesis 3:

Cybersecurity companies will be trimming headcount and employing more AI tools internally.

Thesis 4:

Instead of hiring a cybersecurity company, companies will staff their own cybersecurity departments.

Of all of these, I think #4 (companies growing their own cybersecurity departments) is the least likely. #3 is highly likely (there will be some reorganizing and continued adoption of automated tooling). And while #1 (companies will no longer be able to command a large premium) may be true in some cases, I think #2 (this is a giant overreaction, and the use of automated exploit chaining means you need more expertise in defense) is probably the most likely outcome. Building a system to ensure your code is foolproof just breeds bigger fools.

This is an interesting point (taxation, or licensing fees) that I'm not sure others have brought up before. However, it is a logical extension to the idea that once a review/ban platform is in place, you could then pay a "fee" to the right people to let you print the desired item.

Let's assume that they're not blatant enough to slap on something called a production tax. Instead let's assume they're going to pass an "Environmental Recycling and Recovery Fee" and a "Emissions Control Fee", because, California, which of course, are just another form of production tax.

But frankly they could just do that by slapping those fees on filament just like the music industry got a tax passed to tax recordable media.

"The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (AHRA) amended the United States copyright law by adding Chapter 10, "Digital Audio Recording Devices and Media". The act enabled the release of recordable digital formats such as Sony's Digital Audio Tape without fear of contributory infringement lawsuits. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I guess in the case you are proposing, then certain types of 3D printed shapes would be worth more than others? And who would define the prices, and who would get the revenue? I'm reminded of fraudulent music copyright takeovers on Youtube:

"The MediaMuv scam is not unique. YouTube scammers commonly claim a small percentage of song royalties, hoping to go undetected by targeting songs with multiple rights holders who likely arenâ(TM)t aware of how many royalties are being collected. However, MediaMuv was more âoebrazen,â Billboard reported, âoeoftenâ claiming âoe100 percent of royalties for master recordings or publishing.â

Through AdRev, MediaMuv collected royalties that belonged to other rights holders, who starting in 2017, began contacting MediaMuv and AdRev over MediaMuvâ(TM)s fake copyright claims that some believed were genuinely made in error."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

Whenever a faceless entity controls the collection and disbursement of money, that pile of money is vulnerable to fraud.