Zigurd

Starting in January, all of the committees in both the House and the Senate are under new management as would be all hearings they conduct. I also don't know anyone who's happy with Schumer and Jefferies.

You're being way too kind. He's a stock pumper with a cult who thinks he creates value. Tesla is a meme stock. FSD kills. A rocket that takes 22 refuelings to go beyond low Earth orbit is never going to the Moon much less Mars.

His politics is in fact odious as you point out, but that stain exists on a large part of the tech industry now. If anything Musk is an unoriginal follower of a bad tendency.

There are a lot of confounding factors in ecosystems at the edges of urban areas. I live in the Massachusetts exurbs, and have seen fluctuations in the population of deer, wild turkeys, and coyotes.

I've also seen some very well secured trash bins in Tokyo, so Japan clearly has wildlife even in urban areas that's very interested in the contents of trash bins.

I used to have a committee of four farm dogs visit my kitchen scrap pile every morning to sniff around. Now they are all in their separate invisible fence boundaries. So, more coyotes, fewer turkeys? I see more turkeys in some closer in suburbs and the neighborhoods of Boston.

A fugitive ice machine that escaped from Motel 6

That's disrespectful to a guy who made a nicer car and had a less destructive drug habit.

Why billionaire get lollipop to behave? Just set limits to pollution.

When do you think Elon's gas turbines will be taken off-line?

There's a pattern here: when an Elon Project is successful, he jumps in with Elon innovations, like cyber truck. The next example that will follow this pattern is building a rocket that's too big for orbital payloads, but takes 22 refueling flights to get beyond orbit.

Your point about the debt financing is important and under reported. Or at least the contradiction it entails is under reported: if data centers had such huge demand, they would have pricing power, and they would have superb credit ratings. Even a company like Oracle gets rated junk, so what are we to make of some crypto grifter pivoting to AI data centers? They appear to be counting on people not being able to find those two contradictory points.

Unlike for example electric vehicles, you don't see China showcasing big data centers. What's up with that if China is scoring some propaganda victory?

Build power generation with what? Gas turbines accelerating global warming? Nuclear that will come online in 20 years?

I'm convinced too few people know the history of the Cold War missile gap. To be fair let's take a more recent example of Iran being weeks away from a nuclear bomb for the past three decades.

Apple is watching everyone else set their cash and credit ratings on fire. In a couple of years this will be the biggest story in business strategy.

If data center providers actually had pricing power they wouldn't have junk bond ratings.

Vogtle had massive cost and time over runs because the modular design didn't deliver on efficiency, it did the opposite by having modules show up on site that needed rework. But the project management couldn't be allowed to factor that in because it would've shown everybody that you can't do this stuff on time and on budget.

Unless you can demonstrate that those problems are solved, there is no credibility to nuclear power. It doesn't need to be an endless discussion, the discussion has concluded that nuclear power is too expensive and too late to be relevant.

There's no inevitability to the use of gas turbines. How about a carbon tax?

There are two groups of these cheerleaders: the cowards who showed up to bend the knee and fund the ballroom. And the enthusiastic weirdos, the techno fascists, the EAs, the crypto grifters, etc.

The cowards got humiliated over and over because that's how a bully works. The others? F 'em.

Maybe allowing IPOs with tiny floats compared to absurd valuations to get expedited into the index wasn't such a great idea after all. This time wasn't different.

Too many tech leaders made themselves Trump's bitches for this to be credible.

That's the wrong conclusion to draw. Let's use the opportunity to get money out of politics. Money works. Ads work. Bots work. It's time to get rid of all that.

Both companies have bubble valuations. They trade on vibes. It is impossible to deny that Elon has levitated these valuations successfully across transitions that would've humbled other overvalued companies. But now the hi wire act has no net.

Chasing the success of Oracle

I should've provided more detail. The demo is really about a new app that uses AppFunctions to enable Google's agent to use data about a family group, and coordinate their actions mostly around taking care of an elderly family member.

The purpose of the demo is to show that you it's better to enable agents to access relevant data and actions in a controlled way than it is to do app specific integrations with, for example, a map and navigation app in order to plan group gatherings. Instead it's better to enable agents to access relevant data in a controlled way, and to leave coordination across apps to the agent.

In fewer words: if working with another app could be valuable, leave it up to the agent instead of doing the integration at the app level.

What do you use for a contact list?

Agents are great for that middle ground between just doing it manually and creating an automation to do it. Which strikes me as yet another reason AI is so well suited to software development tasks, but hard to find useful applications outside of software development.

That stopped when Jeff said "Alexa, buy me a newspaper."and Alexa replied "buying the Washington Post."

When I have demoed the use of agents, I usually do it with an agent combining multiple applications' results. Something like: "We're having a family gathering at grandma's. Which of us can stop in at the drugstore to pick up her prescriptions on the way without adding a lot to our travel time?"

Agents are great at moderately complex combinations of data and apps. If I had to do this every day or every week even, it might be worth creating a script suited for a task like that using some automation system. Agents are great at providing a disposable saw when it doesn't make sense to stop and sharpen the saw.

I'm not a doorDash user, but they've been doing it long enough to have an app that's probably highly polished. There's not going to be a lot of upside to speaking or typing an English language command to get what you want. Trying to do that is a waste of a well designed app and the agent's token budget.

Examples? Most of the comments I see on political threads tie them back to tech related policy. Abusing our allies affects the ability of US tech companies to make money outside the US. Misogynistic policies when women are most of the four year degree recipients, who would prefer to live in a state that respects their bodily autonomy, is bad policy for building the tech workforce.

Does anyone need convincing that a broad repudiation of all that is important to the tech industry? Or have we got butt hurt Thiel and Musk acolytes flagging news they don't want to see or discuss?

I'm thinking herd mentality because software development is where people actually pay for AI. Not that the Cursor acquisition will ever pay for itself.

The tech industry showed up to bend the knee to Trump. Parts of the tech industry helped get us to this place by funding Trump and Republicans. It is naïve to the point of being obtuse to deny that this could have a large negative impact on how people view the tech industry. One stick they've got to beat the tech industry with is denying permits for data centers. Is that good for tech? Is the fact that normal people hate tech now gotten adequate coverage in mainstream media?