Wow, that was... absolutely terrible.

None of them have built a competing product that gained meaningful traction against the U.S. incumbents

...and here I thought SAP was German.

There are estimated to be about 1000 ships in the shadow fleet, who are moving oil from sanctioned countries to other countries willing to buy it (think China and India, but also others). In order to operate, these all have insurance that's mostly backed by Russia, etc. Until recently nobody knew if the insurance would actually pay out. But over the last month we've seen Ukraine actually attack some tankers, and the US chased down a couple carrying Venezuelan oil (one even sailing under a Russian flag), and most recently India said they'd confiscated a shadow fleet tanker, and then deleted their announcement, but it's a big deal. With all this happening, the shadow fleet was already in danger of evaporating now that the threat of losing your ship is actually real, and the insurance payouts aren't really guaranteed. This news about the email server isn't going to move the needle that much, as it was already moving pretty fast in that direction.

Actually, I thought it was legal in the US to make your own firearm for personal use. You just can't sell it. So why would it be different if you 3D print it vs. fabricate it with some machine shop equipment?

The only truthful answer to that request from an LLM would be, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

Did you know all color photocopiers and printers sold have anti-counterfeiting technology? There are special patterns printed on bills that photocopiers and printers can detect and will refuse to print.

This is what leadership is supposed to look like. A cold hard look at the dirty laundry, and a commitment to make tough changes to make it better. No drama.

LLMs are specifically designed to generate text that looks like text it has seen before. Why would you expect it to generate something unique?

Try to think of this stuff from the point of view of a Silicon Valley CEO. You're responsible, above else, to make the share price goes up, and in particular to convince all your investors that the high price of the stock is justified because you're growing fast. You don't have a lot of income to justify this, but you used to be able to justify this with clicks, views, eyeballs, and the fact that you employ a lot of technical people.

The problem is that your company was growing based on borrowing money really cheaply, and it worked for decades. But the flow of low (or zero) interest capital you were funding your company with has dried up. Interest rates are higher, and the pool of investment capital that had flooded the markets for so long is moving to safer investments (because boomers are entering retirement) and because there's a lot of infrastructure spending eating up a lot of that investment, after the US slowed down outsourcing all manufacturing to China.

Now you have to stop spending so much. How do you cut spending but keep reassuring your investors and shareholders that you're still growing? Simple: Deus Ex Machina! Yes, we're laying off our tech people, but that's not because we're slowing down... it's because we're replacing them with AI. We're still producing as much output as we were before, but with fewer people. In fact, we're producing even more now!

Andrew Yang came from New York but he was definitely in the startup company scene. He hangs with these people. This is the kool-aid he's been drinking. But ask yourself... if it's all true and AI is so amazing, where are all the success stories? Where's the kid who created a competitor to Photoshop in his basement? Where's the actual vibe-coded AI-driven stock trading platform that some young finance guy created over a weekend? There are none and that's because it's all BS. If it were real, we'd be able to see the results.

It's not quite right to say that it removes all the ethical implications that people have. A regular beef cow grazes for it's whole life, other than getting some injections to prevent diseases, until they're slaughtered at the end. Cultured meat needs a constant supply of animal stem cells, so you're constantly bringing animals in for biopsies and subjecting them to these procedures. There are definitely people who think it's a worse quality of life for these animals than existing livestock.

"Growing it in a facility feels wrong to people in ways they struggle to articulate." I can articulate it just fine. This all happened around the same time as the Impossible Burger (a plant-based meat alternative) that was insanely high in salt and was considered the epitome of processed food. I think that the public just gets the two confused.

Really? The boomers invented the internet and decoded the human genome, and GenX popularized the web, the millennials gave us streaming music, and Gen Z gave us crypto bros and AI. I'm not sure I'm following your logic. I'm not sure who to give credit for Amazon, but that one was pretty cool.

The paradox is that all the evidence suggests that when your generation becomes their age, you'll act the same. Isn't that weird?

Years ago there was an article in Make Magazine explaining how to make a Tor node on a Raspberry Pi and use it for more secure browsing. I set it up just as a fun project, and a couple days later I realized that I couldn't access my bank (TD) from home (not going through Tor), but I could still access it from work. I wasn't hosting a hidden service and I wasn't even hosting an exit node. I can't remember if it was an entrance or a relay or both. But anyway, I took the node offline and a few days later I could access my bank again. I still think it's weird that TD was blocking my home IP just because I was running a relay or an entrance node, and specifically not running an exit node.

You are talking about the sociological shift we all experienced between modernism and post-modernism. Under the former, the common belief structure was that logic, reason, and science were the answer to the world's problems. It was born out of enlightenment thinking that goes back to the 1600's. The post-modernists, for better or worse, pointed out that a) modernism wasn't universally good and included creating things like nuclear weapons, and b) that modernism is only good for certain groups of people, and there are other groups (think people who do menial labor, or who believe in witchcraft) who end up being losers. You can follow that path of (ironically) reasoning all the way to 2016 and the coining of the new term "alternative facts," which itself was a pointed criticism of post-modernism, but also an embrace of the same nihilism that underlies the post-modernist movement. The way forward (backward) to modernism is to admit the shortcomings of modernism, and also to focus on catching the people who fall through the cracks when we apply modernist ideals. The majority of people suck at logic and reason and this is a democracy, so the majority are only going to choose modernism again if there's something in it for them. We have to show people that it's in their best interest to choose modernism, but we need to do it in a way that doesn't rely on logic or reason. Good luck with that.