bryanlarsen

Do you talk to students? Every student I've talked to has a passionate opinion about it in one direction, almost all hate.

Agreed on all three, but it's still less important than getting something done concretely IMO. They only need 4 senator defections to be filibuster proof, and 11 to be veto proof. It's highly doable.

The 3 agendas: investigations, performative legislation and bipartisan compromise legislation are going to be really hard to balance in the next 2 years. That's a lot of work in very little time. How well they do so will be how they're judged in 2 years time.

How about something much larger, like investigating Biden's second largest donor and throwing him in jail for 25 years for fraud?

Wait, SBF is already in jail.

Trump will veto all of that. Much of it should still be done as a performative measure as 2028 election prep, but only as a secondary priority to actually getting stuff done.

Now that it's obvious that being a Trump shoe-licker is harmful for electoral chances, Democrats should be able to assemble veto-proof majorities to pass compromise bills. Only a handful of Republican defectors are necessary. For example, impeaching Hegseth, a war powers resolution and passing the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act are obvious candidates. Those 2 will establish a pattern and they can proceed from there.

I wonder how much this is a factor of time. After significantly more than 1500 years of intensive human management, the ecology of Japan's countryside will have evolved for those conditions. America's ecology has not had a similar amount of time to adapt to the loss of the giant bison herds, et cetera.

All 3 have a way of embedding webviews. In my perhaps limited experience, all desire for custom visual components are either specious or for read-only presentation views. In my opinion all controls should be native, but if you ask for a fancy data presentation I have no qualms reaching for a webview.

It's always a good idea to remove fiddling whether it benefits your party or not. It's better to win fair without any question of undue gain. The electoral college is one source of fiddling. Gerrymandering and Citizens United are larger sources of fiddling; all 3 should be removed.

All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

But will it increase by 10000X, as I back of the envelope calculated it would require to justify Anthropic's $2T valuation in the face of quickly dropping token prices?

Kennedy probably also won the 1960 election due to electoral college shenanigans. Unlike the Senate which is clearly biased towards whichever party can win the small states, the bias the electoral college gives can benefit either party.

IMO, the top GUI framework crates for Rust are windows or native-windows-gui, objc2 or icrate for MacOS and gtk4-rs for Linux only. Actually for MacOS / iOS I'd use uniffi to embed the rust core in a SwiftUI app.

In 2026 IMO it's much better to use an LLM to keep 3 separate native front ends in sync than it is to try and use any sort of cross platform UI.

Anthropic's original $2T valuation implies they are going to almost 100X their revenue.

I am highly confident that Anthropic will 100X their token sales volume. I am also confident that token prices will continue dropping through the floor due to competition. So to 100X their revenue they will have to 1000X or 10000X their token sales. That seems a stretch.

Data centers use small amounts of cheap land.

Those numbers are saying that:

- the Cybertruck uses almost twice as much energy as your Niro EV

- the 40% efficient Prius uses about 2.5x as much energy as your 95% efficient Niro EV.

what seems off?

Driving is wasteful. Cybertrucks and Prius's use similar amounts of energy per mile. Cybertruck is 0.4-0.5 kWh/mile, the Prius is 0.6-0.7 kWh/mile.

Of course the Prius Prime on electricity is way more efficient than both, but it still uses a lot more energy than a house.

It's the makeup of the senate that ensures that farmers and rural folk are highly over-represented in Congress.

In presidential elections, the design of the electoral college works the other way around. It ensures that large swing states like Florida in the past and Texas today are over-represented. It means that getting 51% of the vote in Texas gets you all 40 votes.

Unlike electric cars, the price for a used F-150 lightning is still a substantial fraction of new price. There is still substantial demand.

Work trucks are a very different market than for passenger vehicles. Their usage is a lot more consistent and known. This means that electric works very well for some work trucks and very poorly for others.

The other aspect of work trucks is that they're generally purchased by very conservative businesses who don't want to buy the bleeding edge, they want several years of reliability data before committing. The F-150 Lightning was cancelled just as that data was starting to come in.

Of course, most F-150's are sold as passenger vehicles rather than work trucks. Along with almost all Cybertrucks.

A folded stainless exoskeleton without paint has the potential to make low volume car manufacturing much cheaper.

A press brake is generic and cheap. Molds for presses are cheap if the cost can be spread over many vehicles, but are expensive for low volume manufacturing.

Paint shops are similar. They're not expensive if you're running a lot of cars in the same color through it, but at low volumes with custom colors they are fabulously expensive.

Of course the final production Cybertruck didn't use the exoskeleton design so it was the worst of both worlds, but it does feel like the original design wasn't expected to sell well and was designed for low volume manufacturing.

You're mixing up two things.

There are potential paths to jettison the Senate filibuster rules. I hope they have the guts to do that.

OTOH, the 2/3rds needed to impeach is part of the constitution. Same with the 2/3rds needed to override a presidential veto.

Not every swing is a home run. You can win with a few home runs or a lot of singles.

The only guaranteed way to lose is if you stop swinging. And Tesla has stopped swinging. They haven't revealed a mass market consumer vehicle since 2019.

There is some incredible technology in the Cybercab that allows them to be built cheaply in high volume. Instead Ford looks like they are going to be the first Western consumer vehicle out of the gate with the unboxed production method with their Ford Fathom. Unsurprisingly, the Chinese are ahead here too.

The DSA only has 8 members in the house and 1 member in the senate (if you count Bernie). The Dem majorities are still majorities even if DSA members aren't counted.

Most of that is bot traffic.

Cloudflare's growth is capped to 100% of internet traffic. it's already at 20%.

The fate of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act will be highly instructive. It's a bill that's fabulous for renewable energy, good for affordability, good for fossil fuel interests, and could likely pass with a filibuster-proof and veto-proof majority if the Dems don't sabotage it.

Almost all of the interconnect backlog is renewables, so this helps renewables far more than it helps fossil interests, but some progressives want to sabotage the bill because it could theoretically help fossil fuel interests. Yet, there's no way a "better" bill would get past filibuster or Trump's veto.

We'll find out if Democrats let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough. Whether they're willing to compromise to get things done.

Maybe not. Montana's plan to sidestep it looks like it just might work.

Yeah, Schumer's and Jeffries' job involves herding cats and taking the blame to let members and presidential candidates look good.

They've got a unique opportunity over the next couple of years -- I'm willing to bet there are now a handful of Republican members that are willing to vote against Trump on specific bills to help their general election prospects. And they only need a handful to assemble a filibuster-proof or even veto-proof majority.

That'll involve pissing off the progressives, since bipartisan bills will necessarily be moderate. But don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact does not abolish the Electoral College.

They need a way to get onto counters, climb stairs, manipulate objects, et cetera. But all of the necessary capabilities do not need to be self-contained. Humans achieve their amazing flexibility through tool use, and so will robots. And in many cases those tools will be other robots. One robot could boost another onto the counter and then they both could get out of the way, unlike a robot large enough to reach up to the counter.

Much smaller robots will co-exist in a world with humans a lot more smoothly than anything human shaped & sized.