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Comment Re:wow (Score 1) 37

Indeed. I pay $20 per month for Cursor, and it works great. Why should I pay 15 times that much to be Elon's beta tester?

My guess is you don't use Cursor very much if a $20 monthly subscription is enough for your needs. I still run into limits with Anthropic's $200 per month (I have 13% of my weekly allotment left with 13 hours left in the week), and I just use it as a hobbyist. Even though I am a very active hobbyist, I still can't imagine someone using these tools even 10 hours a week on just a $20 per month plan.

Comment Re:The data center in Utah that got forced through (Score 1) 108

26 atomic worth - assuming 14 kT each means 364 kT. This is 423 GWH of total boom. The Utah hyper data center is projected at 9 GW. 24 hours gives 216 GWH - Throw in full heat load for thermal generation based on light-water nuclear generation and you are likely adding over 600 GWH of heat load in total. It's not at crazy as it sounds. Meaning that the total load thermal load could well exceed that of 26 smallish nuclear weapons.

This does not count the massive firestorms associated with the bombs of course. But after a short while nothing would be left to burn anyway, so I think it's fair to neglect the firestorm in the thermal load calculation.

Comment Way Behind (Score 1) 95

It is insane that the EU hasn't done more to create local tech companies to reduce their reliance on the US. They need their own version of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (among others), just like China does. It's fine to leverage allies for certain parts of your economy, but the tech sector is right up their with military when it comes to industries where the EU shouldn't be depending on external allies so strongly. It's not like the EU has the same religious devotion to free markets that the US has which would make them hesitant to prop up their local tech companies for 10+ years until they could survive on their own.

I found an EU report from 2025 that suggested it would take $5 trillion to do this, which would be about 5% of the government revenue of all EU countries combined if done over a decade. Just like efforts to become less reliant on the US military complex, the EU should really get started.

Comment Re:Wait for the rug-pull (Score 1) 20

I wonder what they will do when the cost of AI increases? We all know that AI companies are selling their services at a loss. Often on a cost-of-compute- basis, but even more so when you factor in model training costs incurred with investor cash. And that is even before we account for how the shortages of relevant hardware and server space for running all of this are driving up the costs of memory, chips, etc. Or the fact that the energy crisis is only getting started, and will impact literally every part of the value chain for addressing the current and future demand.

In 1998, 1 Mbps of bandwidth cost $1200 per month. Today it is about 10 cents. The past never perfectly predicts the future, but I wouldn't be on the side who thinks AI won't be significantly cheaper in the near future. My Claude subscription costs be $200 per month today and gives me $2500-3000 worth of tokens per month. But in 5 years that same amount of usage will probably be a few hundred, and in ten years it will probably be $50.

Comment Re:Can't help but wonder ... (Score 1) 166

Are you implying that parents are more qualified to determine what's best for their children than the government? Keep talking like that, and you'll end up in a reeducation camp.

I'd say the government is far more capable of determining what's in the best interest of their children than the parents, but in its current state they don't leverage that capability or even have a desire to do so.

The chances that a parent has the same access to child psychologists, researchers, teacher's associations, and any other groups necessary to determine the child's best interests is laughable. The chances that a parent will base their decisions more from their own biases and ignorance than on careful research is high.

But the chances that the government in practice will do all of those things, and put in practices to effectively allow parents / teachers / etc to provide feedback on an individual child to make exceptions to broad rules, are also laughably low. So in practice it's far better to allow parents to make those decisions, even though I wouldn't consider it ideal.

Comment If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. (Score 3, Informative) 56

GOP is a mutual fund that tracks the stock profiles of Republicans, NANC tracks the Democrats.
Full discloure, I own just a little of each - I thought it would be interesting. There may well be similar funds - have not looked.

Since Kalsi is subject to US regulators, it is illegal for US citizens to use Kalshi for insider trading. Of course, congress does not necessarily play by the same rules as us peons.

Comment Re:Perfectly understandable. (Score 3, Insightful) 82

Problem is, if you repeat the question the LLM will give a different answer each time.

No it won't. It may change the wording, but not the answer. I just asked Gemini what the capital of the US was five times using Google, and got five unique responses. All of them said it was Washington DC though.

Comment Re:Just build more roads (Score 1) 199

The Cypress Street Viaduct (the major double-decker that collapsed in the Loma Prieta quake) was built in 1957 by US contractors. Embarcadero was similarly built by US contractors in the 1960s. Russians had nothing to do with it. The only thing Russian about any of it is Embarcadero running near Russian Hill, which was named for a Russian cemetery near its peak.

Comment Re:Ah, right back at yah (Score 1) 91

Most of the deaths are explainable.

  • Amy Catherine Eskridge died by suicide in 2022. The cause of death was a single gunshot to the head. Her activities leading up to her death are suggestive of mental health struggles, though they're used by some people as evidence of a conspiracy leading to her death.
  • Michael David Hicks died in June 2023, age 59. He worked at JPL on comet and asteroid missions. No cause of death was released.
  • Frank Maiwald died in July 2024, age 61. He worked at JPL on planetary missions. No cause of death was released.
  • Anthony Chavez has been missing since May 2025. He was 78 when he disappeared. He left his wallet, keys, and cigarettes on a table at home, a common action right before a suicide.
  • Melissa Casias has been missing since June 2025. She was an administrative worker at Los Alamos and held no security clearance. She was last seen walking down a street. She had left her keys, wallet, purse, and both work and personal phones at home after telling colleagues that she was going to work from home. Shoes similar to those she was wearing were recently found in a nearby forest. This also lines up with a possible suicide.
  • Monica Reza has been missing since June 2025. She worked at JPL in California, and went missing during a hiking trip. Her hiking companion said she was there one minute and gone the next. A fall is a much more likely event than an abduction.
  • Steven Garcia has been missing since August 2025. He worked at the Kansas City National Security Campus in Albuquerque. He was last seen walking away from his phone carrying a gun and had left behind his wallet, phone, and keys. As with others above, this is a common behavior of suicidal people.
  • Nuno Lureiro was killed on his doorstep by the Brown University shooter in December 2025. Motive hasn't been established, but the shooter left a recording that he had planned both shootings for years.
  • Jason Thomas went missing in December 2025 for three months before his body was found in March 2026. He was last seen walking along railroad tracks, another frequent precursor for suicides. A cause of death doesn't seem to have been released so far, but law enforcement said that they don't suspect foul play.
  • Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Neil McCasland has been missing since February 2026. He was last seen on a neighborhood surveillance camera with hiking boots and a .38 revolver. He had left behind his wallet, phone, and wearable devices. Many suicides start the same way.
  • Carl Johann Grillmair was killed at his home in February 2026. He was a prominent astronomer and astrophysicist. A suspect has been arrested and has been charged in his murder, which may have happened after an argument.

One suicide (Eskridge), one likely suicide (McCasland), four possible suicides (Chavez, Casias, Garcia, and Thomas), two murders (Lureiro and Grillmair), two other deaths (Hicks and Maiwald), and one missing (Reza). Neither of the murders are linked. Reza may have simply fallen while hiking and been severely injured or killed. The two other deaths were both in the age range where sudden deaths start to become unfortunately common.

Comment Re:Once again, la Presidenta loses (Score 4, Informative) 133

Stage 3 smog alerts were year-round when I was a kid in the 1980s. They were more common in the summer, but they could happen any time the temperatures rose, and they were a fact of life at school in the spring and fall. I spent a lot of recess and PE time indoors for Stage 2 and 3 alerts. This page shows the number of days at different air qualities for Los Angeles going back to 1980. The highest number of good air quality days was 11 in 1983. For all but two of the remaining years, it was in single digits. The combined number of unhealthy, very unhealthy, and dangerous days usually covered a cumulative six months or so out of the year.

You can see the numbers shifting to the left starting in 1989. Both Republicans and Democrats in the state government (which was run by Republicans at the time) had authorized various government agencies to make changes that would affect smog levels. Since 2002, the number of moderate or good air days has covered at least half of the year, a huge reversal from the 1980s. The number of very unhealthy or dangerous air days has been in the single digits every year (bar one) since 2007, even reaching zero in 2010 and 2013 and only one in six of the other years.

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