Ancapistani

> You have to be very sure that if push comes to shove, you won't ever be laid off, fired, company closes, etc

I’ve been remote-only since 2017. In that time I’ve had interruptions in employment three times - it’s not nearly as bleak as this makes it sound.

I’m using a Keychron K2 HE these days. It has Hall effect switches, so there is absolutely no clicky noise at all.

I can assure you, it is trivial to make effective explosives from easily-obtained ingredients.

I’m not a huge fan of it, but I do find it more convenient than BlueTooth alone.

For context, I drive a ‘91 GMC pickup, so neither cars nor car audio are super important to me. I still bought a CarPlay-enabled Android head unit because it’s less of a hassle to use.

It’s what approximately half of US voters think.

Because of a problem that all those rules and policies don’t solve, while introducing new ones and creating an entire bureaucracy dependent upon keeping them in place regardless of their efficacy?

The closest thing to it was repo companies sharing data.

This is very much a new thing.

The city's scope is smaller than Flock's - it's a city, not a multi-national corporation.

Yes, I'm aware of what "expectation of privacy" means. I've been a photographer for ~25 years.

> People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.

This isn't about recording in public - it's about building a comprehensive dataset containing the movement and association history of the entire US population. Not only is that without a warrant, it's being collected prior to any accusation being made.

My point wasn't that Flock allows this, but that it allows an entire class of surveillance that was previously not available.

If I'm a terrorist, I've not been a very good one to this point.

Well, in my precinct I'd estimate there are ~20 people at the polls to vote at any given time. Given the timestamp of a ballot, there are maybe 50 people it could have possibly been.

That's more than enough information to correlate voting behavior after a couple of election cycles with a high degree of confidence.

Oh, and ballots aren't just for one race generally. By looking at what races that ballot voted in and a list of people present, there's a very good chance you'd be able to narrow it down to an individual in a single visit.

While I would oppose a city setting up CCTV to be used the way Flock is used - that would be orders of magnitude less bad than Flock.

As it is, you can assume that at the very least, every time your vehicle has passed one of the >100k Flock cameras, there's a database entry and a photo that will never, ever be deleted. Your full travel history from this point forward is available for a nominal fee, and without any regard for your privacy.

More like his widow than his ex - he was unable to ever contact her, which is what made it cute rather than creepy.

While I wouldn't argue that academia is "crazy, stupid, closed-minded, and ignorant", I would absolutely argue that they are ideologically homogenous. The whole community is rife with political signaling and affinity groups.

A big part of that is the regulatory environment. For example - I have the interest and means to get my PPL. I'd love to do so, but the FAA considers ADHD to be a disqualifying medical condition.

> It's been years of development and you still can't trust it to get basic facts correct

There's the rub: AI is not an oracle. It's neither designed nor intended to provide accurate recall of all facts. It's closer to a reasoning engine than anything IMO.

Oh, and for the record: I don't trust people to get basic facts correct, either. It's already far better than the average human at trivia.

This is the direction I'm going.

For personal projects that I don't plan to share widely, I'm making it a point to not look at the code at all. So far - and to my surprise - I've not only found that this has result in no more bugs than before, but it seems to result in fewer bugs over time. Every time I find a bug or a regression, I add it to the specification. My SDLC requires that every specification have at least one associated test. Not every function, or every line, or anything like that - every specified feature. The end result has been that my projects have matured over time much faster than if I'd been more closely involved.

I've already toyed with writing some projects in Nim and Haskell for token efficiency. At some point I plan to put together a simple test project, then do a comparison of token efficiency with every language I can think of to find the one that I'm able to generate most quickly, correctly, and cheaply.

Your experiences must be much different from mine.

Three years ago, AI was barely able to provide sort-of reliable command completion.

Two years ago, it could extrapolate a single function from a docstring - but the docstring had to be so verbose that it wasn't practical to use in that way.

A year ago, I was tinkering with Devin to try to find a way to get it to reliably implement small, isolated features from verbose Jira tickets.

Six months ago, I started using AI to generate the majority of my code output. Most of my time was spent reviewing, and I was ecstatic to reach ~2x output because I could run the next task while reviewing the last.

Now, at work I'm managing a half dozen Claude Code instances, Devin sessions, and orchestrating a review loop between Claude, Devin, and CodeRabbit. It's not uncommon for me to be working on four or more discrete features at once. My output is approximately 15x my pre-AI baseline - and I've not sat down and written a line of code directly in six months.

At home I'm managing a Hermes agent that can spin up a whole fleet of purpose-tuned agents for whatever purpose I'd like. I've implemented spec-driven development a'la Acai, and extended it to the point that my agent creates specs from text or voice conversation, I review them, and it handles implementation end-to-end. The code itself is an almost disposable artifact - useful primarily to ensure no regressions have been introduced between rounds.

... I simply don't understand how you can assert that "it's been basically the same for 3 years". It absolutely has not.

Yeah, I agree - I get what the author is saying, but I also don't expect "translator" to be a practical career path in the future.

Even small, dumb, local models are excellent at translation already. Frontier models are on par or better than the human translations we've tested them against at work.

I'm not asking you to emigrate.

While my own views are likely closer to Musk's than I suspect yours are, I share those concerns. I don't think I'd be interested in moving there, at least not in the initial waves.

My optimistic view of the future looks more like "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" than "Total Recall".

Terrain is the best available protection on Mars from radiation, and is it's far easier to pressurize a structure excavated from bedrock than it is to pressurize a dome or similar.

Hyperloop and the Vegas Loop are projects used to justify the existence of the Boring Company. The Boring Company's tech is definitely relevant to extraterrestrial habitat creation.

Seasonality needn't be regular, only predictable.

It's common in many religious communities to not write the name of God out. I think it likely comes from the Jewish tradition.

"Bröther, may I have some öats?"

What would cause an increase in the number of open lower paid and/or service industry jobs while simultaneously reducing the number of openings in tech?

Every single one of those examples is both valid and - I believe, at least - misunderstood.

Musk has a singular goal as far as I can tell: to make humanity a multi-planetary species. All of those things are testing the boundaries of what's possible in areas that will or could be very important for building a permanent settlement on Mars.

I posit that while there's much room for debate around whether or not those projects are viable, as far as I can tell everything Musk has done has been in service of building the corporate framework, talent pool, skills, and technology necessary to colonize Mars.

I'd like to see _some_ evidence for this story.

Rather than going into detail, getting myself on yet another watchlist, and possibly inspiring someone to do something both criminal and counter-productive, I'll just quote Patton:

    Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man.

That's one of my favorite verses, specifically because it leaves determining what is in fact Caesar's as an exercise for the reader.

None of those even contain the string “terror”.