They're just thug gangs. What makes them weird is that they're government subsidized.

That means labor disputes with the government boss aren't resolved with a bullet, so you get collective action like that. (See also Dinkens & the NYPD.)

But it is a great time to clean house in that town! Get some professionals in quick, though - the former cops will figure out their extortion failed soon enough and need income, and they're not going to find anything honest that pays as well as being a badged thug.

Social media moving back to gas station bathrooms. And since there's no gas to buy, the threads are pretty sparse.

Russians are great folks, but never let them form a government.

I fly 200ish flights a year so figure 70-80 nights away.

2025 was 100% hotels but 2019 was about 80% Airbnbs.

Airbnb will never get my business back. Ever. The professional scammer hosts are so good at finding a way to nail me for a fee. Iâ(TM)ve taken perfect check out video and still had to spend hours fighting fees.

Airbnb allowed making guests do it.

They lost so much money to hotels theyâ(TM)re banning hosts from requiring it.

This is like Trump promising $5K if republicans win the midterms. It's just a PR stunt.

Imagine trying to reason out the tax implications of something like this. The privacy implications. Everything.

Elon: "I really wanted to, but lawyers wouldn't let me!"

No way to see that coming.

If I amputate your mustache and affix it to myself, am I wearing a fake mustache?

It sounds like you're saying no. I disagree. If I were wearing a wig made of human hair, my hair is still fake, even if my fake hair is made of real hair.

So we have to account for multiple possibilities - the robot could be wearing a real fake mustache, a fake fake mustache, or perhaps one day we'll see them extrude their own.

I predict it could cost as much as $150 Billion!

Do I hear $200B? We're making shit up - go large!

That assumes (a) there's a price tag on the item, (b) that price updates happen correctly and (c) the barcode/scanner/computer registers the right item.

I will not use them, but that's because of a quirk of our legal system that leaves customers exposed when they aren't with a cashier.

People have been arrested after the fact over self-checkout mistakes that never would have happened had there been a human cashier. The reason is that the cashier signals acceptance of the deal, takes the money, and concludes the transaction. If they make a scanning mistake, or the price is wrong, or the barcode was wrong, or whatever, that's on the store - they accepted payment and concluded the transaction. If you use their robot scanner, you are representing to the machine what you claim to be purchasing, and LP can later review cameras and call the cops if they disagree.

Florida, which apparently is more enthusiastic about self-checkout than elsewhere, has defense lawyers advertising in this lane. I'll deal with humans and nope out on that whole game, thanks.

It is Apple.

My day job is a (saas) app that's about 20 years old and has been worked on continuously by a team that has varied in size from about 5 to now about 15. It is complicated and connects to several external services. There are parts of the app that are too hairy for AI to reason about. But we have found, recently, that AI is surprisingly good at explaining how some rather complicated (but well written) parts of the app work.
The 2-3 really hairy parts of the app are written in an arbitrarily complicated way that I would never have used and long to rewrite - but they work. Nobody on the team is happy with it - and there is no corporate memory of anyone being happy working with these parts.
We have exceptional test coverage (>95% by lines), so it's just a matter of time before we decide to lay out an AI agent team to rewrite some of the horrible stuff in a way that is much more palatable to both human and agent. This is not something I would have suggested as possible 4-6 months ago.

I'm not sure how to answer that question. My flip answer is "the usual way." But nothing about software is the usual anymore.

100% of the code that .. makes up this project is code that I did not write. But I absolutely told AI what I wanted and in many cases *how* I wanted it. And any code that had "interesting" design elements is code that I reviewed and in some cases told AI to change. Where interesting refers to meaningful architectural decisions.

At this point it is a very light project - somewhat less that 10K lines of code. It is in its minimal viable product phase - and I imagine it will grow to be more than 15 or even 20K LOC. Eventually becoming projects on 3 distinct platforms and becoming substantially larger.

All of which is ridiculous. Fewer than 200 prompts so far, I'm sure. Maybe fewer than 100.

Sure, but the legal mess is chaos for later.

I'm talking about the many folks who have reason kicking them when they're down, right now.

I imagine a lot of Russian businesses are very focused on the particulars of their relationship with Yandex, monitoring systems are demanding attention for everything, and technical folks are scrambling and tired by now.

I also imagine there are a lot of well-rested folks, both Russian and not, who know of an opportunity to make it worse.

I've got a black swan for ya!
I just shipped software that AI wrote [practically] entirely that I would not have shipped otherwise. I don't think I'm the only one.

Someone so wrapped up in toxic incel bullshit they're losing the ability to hold a theory of mind about other people.

They like to throw out random statistics as totems to appear somewhat tethered to reality, which betrays some remaining awareness of how far gone they are. But they're decorative facts, little different from land acknowledgements or prefatory "I'm not a racist, but..." noises, for similar purposes.

But in general, they no longer treat people as humans, with their own complicated inner lives and desires and confusions and insecurities. No, everyone is locked in to little set-piece lives governed by their looks and genes, performing deterministic dramas that just happen to highlight the incels' own insecurities. A weird, pathetic self-induced solipsism in which being miserable is more comfortable than confronting their own egos and accepting that dealing with insecurity is just part of the human condition.

It is pointless to suggest this, but I will anyway: the fix is to actually talk to humans like you're one, too. Don't run some game you think you're supposed to play, don't put on a mask, don't puff up. Have a conversation, learn how they're different, what they care about, what makes them tick. If you don't treat (at least all) your interpersonal relations as conflicts to either win or lose, you might find you actually... enjoy their company, and they might find they enjoy yours.