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.

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

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.

I was born with hip dysplasia and spent six of my first nine months in a half body cast. I was in a state run orphanage, I was growing inside the cast, which left me with terrible scars on the front of my shins, and I was a "fussy" baby, so they "treated" me with phenobarbitol.

The experience left me faceblind and with some other developmental stuff that nicely compliments my otherwise mild autism. I am the squarest of square pegs, a misfit in every situation my whole entire life, except when I am blessedly alone.

I don't agonize about how I am, I enjoy intellectual pursuits, and my ability to focus on stuff in ways that neurotypicals can not. But if I had it to do all over again, I would very much like to have a bit more understanding from others, given that I had no say in how I came to be so different.

Small brains should develop normally, with limited screen time, until they are fully formed. Maybe that's late tweens, maybe it's sixteen, maybe we are going to learn that we need to treat dark pattern engagement magnet software just like we do slot machines.

These are awesome and I would absolutely embrace the upgradeability and open standards fully if they had the devices I use: a rugged laptop (rain, snow, drop, etc proof, covered ports, washable like my Getacs) with upgradable, fully Linux compatible hardware would be awesome. My trackpad and touch screen are both generic mice according to Linux.

Then, pls, make a phablet with optional LTE/baseband (or none, not a phone at all). Short range radios, but zero base band, otherwise a rugged, reliable, durable, upgradable phone-like form factor, super extra bonus points for interchangeable camera modules. Double extra bonus points for easily removed/swapped battery. Add a LoRa radio instead of LTE, why not?

There have been a few projects to make a good Linux phone and while the PinePhone is impressive engineering, it falls short of being a usable replacement for a flagship phone. There's a solid market for brick/tank phones and they have plenty of room to provide usable, all day battery capacity for a Linux device but the current collection from vendors like Blackview, as nice as they are with very useful features like thermal imagers or NIR illumination/sensors and excellent durability are all Android Certified and the Droidocalypse is going to effectively brick them all in September.

Any aggregation of radioactive elements is inherently dangerous, always, no matter what safeguards, simply as a material that is hazardous to health. Most radioactive hazards associated with fissile materials represent health risks with atypically, even for poisonous elements, pernicious qualities. Not many people would be sanguine with health-impacting quantities of fissile materials in their environment, unlike say, lead or arsenic, both quite awful but a whole different scale of awful.

Any intentional aggregation of fissile material is intrinsically a risk to human health and safety. Nuclear advocates (many of whom would qualify as frothing fanbois) dismiss such concerns claiming they know of a "safe" reactor design, some of which are quite clever and are, indeed, intrinsically quite safe when operated correctly. Such fanbois will sometimes make the entirely valid point that the rate of death from even older reactor designs is way below the mortality rate induced by burning coal (true) and that nuclear power is much less carbon intensive than fossil fuels (also true).

There are compelling arguments about a diversity of sources, above the reliability of fissile power, about the longevity of investments, and about immunity to a range of possible weather (storms, extended rain) or geopolitical constraints (international fuel shipments), all of which (and more) have merit and should be considered carefully.

I consider four counter arguments that should be considered when contemplating the relative merit of fissile power generation over other methods:

1) Current advanced nuclear power plants have a projected LCOE of $0.11/kWh (DOE) standard new at $0.118-$0.192/kWh (lazard) while solar currently runs $0.05-$0.06/kWh (lazard) and $0.086 (NREL) for battery-backed 24/7 solar, declining to $0.047/kWh by 2050 (NREL). The economic justification for nuclear power is weak in all but a few geographic locations occupied by humans.

2) Uranium is a finite resource, the cost of which is rising and currently $86.8/kg (tradingeconomics). The total proven proven reserves are sufficient for about 2 years of total human consumption in standard light water fission reactors. Breeders and advanced systems have significantly different total reserve values, but such systems come with significant risks, either in proliferation (breeders) or technological (advanced reactor designs). While it is an entertaining speculative argument to discuss technologies that might extend fuel supplies, solar panels and storage (PSH or grid-scale battery) are well proven and widely available today.

3) National security policy: defense against external antagonist: any centralized civilian facility is a target and nuclear reactors, even intrinsically safe ones, are a particularly tempting target. While containment structures are designed to be robust against, for example, the impact of a large passenger aircraft, they are not robust against "bunker buster" style munitions. Consider the consequences of a relatively trivial drone impact with the Chernobyl sarcophagus. As these sorts of attacks are democratized by the proliferation of low cost, long range, difficult to attribute munitions they will inevitably become more common and the only practical mitigation is decentralization. While nanoreactors such as the Zeus (1-20 MW) might make targeting more difficult, they're still vastly more expensive than a few more drones making them juicy asymmetric targets for any NSAG and proliferate the next concern:

4) National security police: defense against extremist state takeover or occupation: "safe" nuclear reactors assume operation remains in the hands of moderately responsible, reasonable people, an assumption not supported by recent history. There is no fission design that does not rely on a concentration of fissile material, intrinsically radioactive. There is no such concentration that cannot be widely dispersed with a properly engineered application of conventional high explosives. Every nuclear reactor, anywhere in the world, is a pre-emplaced nuclear munition. To quote the (poor) AI transcription of Serhii Plokhy from the Economist's Intelligence podcast https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2026/04/24/an-explosion-still-echoing-chernobyl-at-40 "The taboo on the occupation and military attacks on nuclear sites that existed before 2022 had been broken. It is gone. Now, the war in Ukraine is the war of drones more and more. And the non-nuclear country. Can very easily go nuclear by attacking somebody's nuclear facilities like nuclear power plants." Chernobyl is occupied, Zaporizhzhia is occupied, the Ukrainians got close to taking Kursk; if an occupying force is forced out, might they be tempted to salt the earth they're forced to leave with fissile debris? Might one of the many political parties animated by an Armageddonist eschatology consider a nuclear reactor an inexpensive and readily available doomsday munition, a sort of clarion call to whatever deity they are waiting for? Even if they're wrong about the level of doom a conventional detonation of a fissile core might achieve, the consequences would be far more lasting and terrifying than a fuel depot or even grid-scale lithium battery fire.

I use one of the large banks named in this article.

Last weekend I had a question about a service, it's something I already use, I just needed one piece of information about it.

Their web "help" was just stone stupid - asked a formulaic question, then offered the same set of options as found at the top of the page for the service in questions. I got curious and poked around, it was literally nothing but a "no matter what question give one of half a dozen links" and then ask if the user was satisfied.

I tried Google. It's utterly broken now, so no joy there. I will admit the bank provides the service in question, beyond that it's a different flavor of dumb.

Perplexity has largely replaced Google for me, but no joy on this one. It offered a lot of well stated, but utterly irrelevant advice, given my question.

I finally called a friend who uses the same bank and same service, they walked me through it.

The sad thing here? This is a HUGE bank, they could afford to do this job right, and 98% of it WOULD work with bots. I guess they laid off the people who can, ya know, actually DO stuff, and we get this late 20th century IVR style "service" despite their massive spend on AI.

Corporate America's race to replace humans with AI is going to backlash. Why engage with gamey agents, when you can deploy your own, and wait for the desired result?

This process is going to repeat, like the Europeans arriving in the Americas, until all the humans are gone, and there's nothing left but bots that do an increasingly good job of acting like us. There will be little reservations, see the Fediverse for an example, where actual humans congregate. There will not be corporate friendly global flat spaces like Facebook and Twitter, there will be neighborhoods.

Much like the natives of the 16th century, we are going to lose people along the way. There are those whose brains are so warped by the internet already that they will simply remain entangled in the increasing unreality. There's even an Amazon series about this - The Feed is pretty well done, and it chronicles what happens to society as it (The Feed) takes over.

The same thing will happen economically, a return to local dealing, but it's going to partial and MUCH more painful.

The changes we have set off in the world today are not unlike those that precipitated the Great Dying 252 million years ago. We're at 420 ppm CO2 now but the permafrost is done for and after that the clathrates in the shallow seas are liable to let go, too. The current ice age is only 2.5 million years old and we've ended it. We may have triggered something akin to the Permian/Eocene Thermal Maximum.

There was some chance we could have headed this off, had we turned immediately and aggressively on the problem around the turn of the century. We have proven politically incapable of addressing this existential threat, and now that we might be mustering the will, the window may have closed.

We've had a good run, we anatomically modern humans, but this ending due to a lack of foresight is ... embarrassing .

Lots of shortsighted hot takes on this.

Anthropic is involved in litigation against our inebriated SecDef because Dario won't cosign for algorithmic warcrimes. The Strait of Hormuz is closed, Asia is going to hit a wall on liquid fuel and natgas. The U.S. AI datacenter build frenzy has hit a wall in the form of public disapproval, and under that an electrical components availability problem that the trouble in Asia will NOT improve.

If your hot take doesn't factor the geopolitical things into the mix, your are wasting poor defenseless electrons that accomplished nothing with their potential.

I would love to be a fly on the wall in the Anthropic C suite conference room why they work through this. They are mobbed with customers, running a subsidized customer acquisition strategy they can't just quit, and several legs of the table supporting this are wobbling.

I'm glad the heat has passed me by, I saw a little friction during the conversion, but Opus 4.7, unimpressive as it may be, is steadily trundling along doing work for me the last twelve hours.