While universal basic income is a useful policy tool and I think we WILL reach it eventually, there are economics papers out there that demonstrate that, sans Pigouvian transaction tax, AI is a race to the bottom.

The AI Layoff Trap by Brett Hemenway Falk and Gerry Tsoukalas is still sitting on my desktop. A quick Google search reveals they are not the only ones who are pursuing this line of thinking.

BUt here in the U.S. "muh freedumb" will ensure that we run that race till the bottom falls out. Hopefully Asia and Europe play this transition a bit smarter, so something of our society continues.

The market IS white hot right now, but the Hormuz hit is just starting to land. Demand at the edges is what sets the price - if all southeast Asian gamers are spending the GPU money on gas, that cools the rush. And I have no confidence any of these datacenter announcements are going to lead to actual builds. Companies talked a great game, but the political heat is on, the electric and water constraints are real, and advances like TurboQuant, which conservatively speaking offers a 4x boost to existing GPUs ... now layer the U.S. economic hit from Hormuz, which will only be a little bit behind the Asian blowout.

The AI/datacenter/GPU self dealing circle looks more like the derivative traders of 2008 with each passing day. Just like CDOs, that "money" is all conditional, and when conditions change, it's all gone. Society got some nice frontier models and advances in manufacturing out of it, now if corporate America takes even half a step back on the rush ... the market won't just vanish, because there IS a lot of benefit to using LLMs, but the demand may only match what's already been built. We'll take the hit from it, then the economy will rebound from a bunch of startups pillaging the existing firms that are politically incapable of making the needed culture change.

I spend my days working on the system for my startup. Since I had a computer science education and a bunch of time in grade running ISP systems, I bring that distributed systems engineer vibe to my vibe coding. It'll need work once it's funded, but the MVP will be functional and secure.

I was using X tokens/week via Claude Code. They stumbled on the Opus 4.7 rollout and I got busy tuning my setup. I added LSP Enforcement Kit + Serena, CodeSight, and OptiVault. This made Claude more or less behave ... while cutting my usage about 80%.

Companies that are using token burn as a metric, if they are not providing top quality tooling for the people using it, are basing their performance reviews on who can tolerate some highly random LLM over an efficient, well thought out harness.

Meta foisted a digital cesspool on us and it would not hurt my feeling a bit to see it completely desiccated. I do feel badly for the legions of humans that are going to be forced to wade through the increasingly crusty muck while the company attempts to figure out what to do about AI. There are rumblings out there about what is happening to the advertising based internet we all know (and despise). Meta clearly can't execute with AI and they may well get bowled over by it.

GM needs to be made to disgorge every dime they made selling that data.

They need to disclose who purchased the data and what the price was.

Every victim of this privacy violation needs legal recourse and class action seems like it would be best for the masses.

Anyone who can show significant harm should aggressively pursue all parties involved.

The only way this behavior will stop is when engaging in it brings bitter pain.

There may well be a legit issue that Bambu is facing, there's a bunch of "think of the children" stuff in play right now, it's mostly about ghost guns from what I have seen. They are perhaps under pressure and maybe they will be compelled to do things in terms of identity of users and/or items being printed. This is another instance of gun nuts ruining things for the rest of us.

But the chickendroppings manner in which they approached this merits a vigorous walloping. If they HAVE to do it due to some government pressure, be upfront, tell all of us, and maybe we'll put a stop to it. What they did here just smacks of ... well ... besides being just plain stupid when dealing with FOSS developers, it smacks ... and they should receive some smacks in return.

Also, enshitification of the work environment and mistreatment of employees in general makes for a who gives a crap mentality that’s backed up by a belief of a bad reference no matter what you do. This leads to indirect sabotage of everything and long term rot from the inside. Eventually even billion dollar momentum crumbles under its own mass. It’s myopic late stage greed.

There are 10 kinds of people that understand Bigfoot. Those that do and those that don’t.

Yup 100%. I can pass among neurotypicals if I keep my mouth shut, but people quickly pick up on it if interacting with me.

”Are there any women here today?”

Only the emperor has such magnificently transparent clothes you would swear he was wearing nothing at all.

While funny, that’s not actually how it works. Releasing small particles into the atmosphere of any color can greatly enhance the nucleation process and is especially effective at trapping heat by letting more energy in than radiated heat outward. Then the obvious answer becomes we must pollute more fine particles in the upper atmosphere, preferably by removing all regulations like for container ships so it’s profitable. /sarcasm

What’s worse is picking the crops far far before their time and using extended shipping and storage times to ripen them and even gasses to quickly ripen them if needed. It makes things not only taste bad, but they are significantly lower in nutrients.

I've personally been stung repeatedly by giving Claude Code access to my systems. We've had six outages in the last seventy days, the first/worst was a production database overwrite. We're in beta testing now so they users are understanding and the restoration was possible, but it took a twelve hour slog. We shifted to a two system architecture after that first outage in February - Claude has the run of Pilot, and when things are ready, I move them to Production by hand.

Claude has explicit rules to not touch Production. This has proven to NOT be ironclad - it'll still try to gain access.

I run Claude as an extension under Antigravity and I learned to not use the Production system access in the terminal window there - despite the prohibitions, Claude WILL notice the access, and WILL suggest that it could take shortcuts by being given direct access.

Once I stopped using the Antigravity terminal so Claude couldn't see, it was still aware some of the shell scripts it creates can be used on Production. I made some adjustments in the ssh config so I can access Production, but Claude can not.

I have been using NanoClaw on both Pilot and Production, but it's in an unprivileged shell account. It can ssh or su into various services, but it's limited to audit/monitor duties, basically working as a junior NOC person.

When we go into operation I'm going to do something with Yubikeys such that Production access requires a human finger on a button before it'll move.

Do not read this as my being down on Claude for operations - it's FANTASTIC for developing stuff, I literally gave it full access to a little HP EliteDesk running Proxmox. It creates and tests, and when there's something production worthy, I manually recreate it on one of our larger machines.

Diesel is a major cost component in trucking, and per mile electricity is roughly 5 times cheaper when purchased commercially. With newer batteries able to charge in under 15 minutes this means with appropriately sized chargers a very large savings in fuel costs is possible while diversifying the types of raw energy needed. In the coming years it won’t be viable to use diesel anymore simply because it’s too expensive, not to mention that the costs to build an electric vehicle are already dropping below internal combustion while requiring less maintenance and increasing reliability.

Battery capacity is increasing, and larger vehicles are being electrified but that brings us to a major charging problem. 350kW is the maximum available in the US, and vehicles like the Silverado have over 200kWh meaning fast charging isn’t possible, not because the battery and supporting systems can’t take it but because there is no such thing as a charger powerful enough. Somehow BYD in China already has 1,500 kW chargers and even supporting smaller capacity vehicles meaning the charge time is down to roughly the time it takes to fill up at a gas station. Puny 350kW chargers make things like large trucks and semis quite a bit less viable for no particularly good reason at all, maybe the US and other countries should get off their asses and actually support the power needed to properly support reasonable charging of large vehicles and fast charging of small ones. While they are at it, ideally not up charging 5x the cost they pay for electricity like they do here in the US making it just as expensive as fossil fuels when they could turn a profit at lower rates.