mannanj

Whose vehicle though? I think you should look legally at the distinction between ownership and use. Do you need to register your friends vehicles if you drive them for a weekend and trigger an in-state registration requirement (i.e. California as one of the comments mentioned)

Can't logically be true right?

That's so cool. And +1 to Beeswax candles. I have a dream we will orient ourselves with greater agency and autonomy and after traditional careers die if we get a UBI and still choose to work we would orient ourselves around the sun naturally and have time in the day for social lives.

I had this too. Started after lay off in October.

What helped was a sleep and work system, oriented around being offline that was inspired by nature and from my earlier days in working in tech while car camping across the national parks.

Basically: the sun wins in terms of how all energy on the earth is structured, and expressed. All manners of cycles of organisms and living systems are in relation to its rise and fall, and even its particular color spectrum phases (whether thats night oriented or day). I call this our real circadian rhythm; it's used to being signaled by the light of the sun and maybe fire for millions of years and it isn't until recent centuries when we started tricking our biology with LEDs and lights. So the solution is simple. Orient yourself around the light of the sun and make sure it's the first and last major light source you see; blue limiting is the most important part BEFORE sunrise and AFTER CUT OFF ALL BLUE LIGHT. On my Mac I use a red light filter (using it now, it's 11:07pm ET and the sun went down about 2.5 hours ago). It's really hard to stay alert and chatting with an LLM when the only light sources are red and you keep them dim at that. Our ancestors would rest when the sun's at its peak (~1:05 pm today) and that's a good time to divide my own day productively as well. With intentional breaks diving the middle of the day with sunlight anchoring it, my nervous system is more relaxed, and by the evening time, it's also ready to transition out of anything blue-light assisted and most intellectual work and problem solving falls into this bucket. It's really hard to explain but it really works so simply. To enjoy the process a little more I made this fun sun clock, check it out at https://sunsignal.app

I thought these were examples

> Simply asking specific questions about health, about diseases, about diet, about social media addiction, about controversial topics like politics, etc release hostility from a handful of people. These people engage with ill will and not friendliness. And it is assumed by them that the asker (me usually) meant unwell

Specific instantiation: during COVID after vaccines had rolled out, I asked my social network on Facebook who had experience with Ivermectin. I have used it successfully myself, and even my vaccinated parents used it successfully when their recommended treatments and advice was not successful for managing pain and symptoms. I got a lot of hostile and ridicule and mockery along with being called a murderer, by people I knew, simply by asking questions. I wasn't recommending to take it. I received people making lots of assumptions about my vaccine status simply because I was asking questions, people lumping me in with conspiracy theorists and being anti-science and more.

Edit: I showed lots of curiosity and inquiry into what was said, though there wasn't an opportunity to engage in what was an agenda of prejudice and hostility that wasn't open in return and not willing to deviate from what the engager believes to be true.

> By law in VA, all cars that are garaged in state for longer than 90 days must pay the car tax.

This is a lie. The law is that someone must register and through that process pay the registration tax. However you can't register a vehicle you don't own.

So you are left with one thing: use tax. Is use tax applicable to you?

>in my former state, Virginia, it is tax evasion

I think this is untrue as well. I'm very familiar with Virginia and spent a lot of my life living there. What makes it tax evasion?

Let me first get our agreement on the word hostility: > a state of unfriendliness, antagonism, or ill will

Do you agree on this definition?

Assuming so, I hear you asking how can asking particular questions get you this? I'll assume you have good will and are willing to engage with friendliness.

Simply asking specific questions about health, about diseases, about diet, about social media addiction, about controversial topics like politics, etc release hostility from a handful of people. These people engage with ill will and not friendliness. And it is assumed by them that the asker (me usually) meant unwell - this hostility represents my intentions and assumptions as ill will assumptions. Oddly enough this usually is strongest from people with strong identity attachment to a particular belief or set of beliefs that when questioned releases so much dissonance their nervous system gets hijacked and without the emotional intellgience or mindfulness skills to pause before they engage what comes out is a slop of hostility and aggression most commonly being Ad Hominem or Straw Man attacks as I've mentioned. All when all I did was asked questions.

When someone demonstrates this without actually inquiring into ones assumptions or why they asked, thats a clear demonstration of hostility.

Do you need more examples?

it is not me who thinks the vehicles need to be re-registered, but those who are making the argument that you need to register a vehicle you dont own simply because you drove it in a state or garaged it there.

I address this below. Adding my personal interpretation onto it, I think it's fear-mongering and the only enforcement and successful litigation I've seen on it is when tax is actually not paid.

If you're worried, seek legal council and pay your use tax.

Consider also this Montana-route may require being brave because when you make a stand for something like privacy, which is under attack, you too may be attacked even if you are in the right legally.

I hear you bringing up 2 separate actions that can trigger a registration requirement.

1) Garaging a vehicle, for x days or more.

2) Driving a vehicle, for x days or more.

Have you looked into what the specifics are, and how they are triggered?

Poking some holes at this:

- Are you on the hook to register vehicles you don't own for actions (1) or (2)?

Consider two examples:

(a) you rent a vehicle,

(b) you drive or choose to house a friends' vehicle.

From what you've stated, logically, anytime you rent a vehicle or operate or house a friends', you now are asked to register it.

Do you think this is accurate? And if so, do you think it would hold in court of law?

Tax advantages are not tax evasion. Otherwise, why bother with doing anything that is tax advantaged if when anyone calls it tax evasion or accuses someone of a crime the accused just give up and takes guilt (assumption of guilt over innocence) paying whatever is asked?

Insurance is a bit tricky though I've heard it's simple. Most companies don't ask or inquire about where the cars registered, and neither do repair shops or parts of the claim process inquire into this. If you're uncomfortable with this, you can DYOR and check what happened for claims if a driver who's personally insured is driving a vehicle registered under an LLC/company. I think it isn't true that just because a vehicle is registered by a company, it cannot be used for personal purposes or that insurance companies would make claims more difficult (though check yourself and I'm happy to know what you find)

Here's a reminder that a Montana-LLC registered car is a legitimate privacy-preserving use case and not the tax-evasion that Straw Manners and Ad Hominem attackers make appear to be.

You can still pay your use tax and be a good citizen, and in fact, its probably a better demonstration of your duties as a citizen to protect the right to privacy and say to your local governments that have a history of abusing and selling vehicle registration data to 3rd parties that you do not tolerate that.

Happy to share more, the sites for Montana registration can be shady but the dirt legal one is great.

> As the person holding the money, it's my job to look at what is effective and what the act ingredients are in any given product.

I wish the industry, our health organizations, and most people in general acted as though this were true.

The environment we live in in general is increasingly hostile to people who ask those questions, do their own research, and take responsibility for their health in this way. I have first hand experience having reversed chronic health conditions myself by doing my own research. What have and do others say about it? Everything: every person on the sidelines watching who have formed opinions about how things are supposed to be, and how doctors and nurses and pharmacists are supposed to know better, attack and ridicule me and others like me and when we "look at what is effective and what the active ingredients are" we are gaslit and told we can't possible understand and know that and to leave it to the experts. Of course the definition of expert is only ever tribal and is a moving trojan horse for whatever best allows the agenda of an industry to establish its control over you.

Okay well which ones do you subscribe to? And I wonder what definition of engineer do you and OP subscribe to, because this conversation probably goes nowhere when everyone sees it as meaning separate things.

Here's one simple one we can probably agree on:

> An engineer is a professional who applies scientific and mathematical principles to design, build, and maintain machines, structures, systems, and software.

As a professional applying these principles to design, build and maintain systems, morals and ethics are not involved in the definition of a professional who does these things. If you want to involve that, use your adjectives and communication and writing skills to add the word ethical or responsible in front of the word engineer wherever you use it. Instead of making up new definitions to fit your egoic desires: i.e. say "Responsible engineers xysz" instead of "engineers xysz" and then trying to project onto everyone that they are wrong or don't understand what an engineer is if they don't automatically assume and engineer must be responsible to be called an engineer. (which imo is deceptive and self-serving in use of language)

I think you are mixing "engineering" with responsibility. You could literally take away "engineering" and put in any other word and it wouldn't mean much at all except just saying 'be responsible'.

Yes having more knowledge and accomplishment (experience) in anything in life lets you develop more confidence.

Ethicality is different from responsibility though, I think you conflated the two.

The same reason you can be pessimistic?

Maybe if you look for evidence to be pessimistic, you find that, and if you look for evidence to be optimistic you find that.

I'd rather choose the more positive, hopeful perspective than the negative, downer one. What about you?

I'd love to have this as a norm, as long as the AI doesn't lie and impersonate and deceive humans in speech by saying things as though it were the human like "I ate breakfast" or "I was saying this to my team" because clearly the AI did not do those things. That's lying, deception and harmful to a culture of truth and transparency.

Instead the humans who promoted and allowed the LLM content to post behind their human identity, didn't bother to update the LLM language and either do a) mark the post as AI generated or b) properly update those pronouns so it isn't an AI speaking through the humans point of view.

Consider this exaggerated example: Would it be ok for you if in a zoom meeting with your team someone was lip syncing an AI speaking on their behalf, both impersonating voice tonality, the words chosen, and even pretending to voice the humans thoughts themselves? Of course you wouldn't. So now extend this to the words people write in articles like this one where the "I said" perspective was used many times supposedly by an AI.

I think you are forgetting about the decency and dignity part of "respect".

Yes there's a quality component to the role of communication in how it respects other people.

There's also honesty, transparency, truth and vectors along the dimensions of "Are we claiming and presenting the truth or are we bending facts and creating impersonations and warping reality?" Most AI is used for the latter today: people are having AI's write their words and speech for them and then the AI says things as though it were the human like "I said xyz" when the AI is NOT the human who did those things. That's lying and deception and disrespect to the reader.

I disagree, that it's not tiring to hear - because it's deception and lying as it gets used and presented today. I believe it's dangerous to a culture of cooperation that I think cooperation requires trust and truth to support and preserve. I don't want articles to have AI's lying and saying "I did or said" when it was the human who did and said those things.

for example, in this article (if it was truly Claude written):

> Last year, Base UI tagged a beta and a lot of you asked if we are going to replace Radix with it. I said "the worst thing you can do for your production app is switch component libraries". I meant it, and it still holds. So instead of switching, we did the shadcn thing: we rebuilt every component for Base UI, kept the same abstraction, and let you choose. December brought npx shadcn create with both libraries. January brought full Base UI docs.

If an AI wrote this, why and how is it pretending to be a human and the humans on the team at that? That's impersonation, and it's a lie and deceptive. I personally don't want a culture where my AI agent is talking as though its me, when a pro-cooperative and honesty/truth preserving culture would instead say "My human said" or at least label correctly that this is an AI acting on behalf of a human.

This reminds me of a time in COVID-health response when certain scientists said their evidence was real evidence and yours was not.

"There's no evidence to prove xyz" then they would say, as your evidence was never as rigorous as theirs. And since they were proclaimed to be the only authorized scientists in the room, by authority of big governing bodies, they were right.

So people will see whatever evidence they want, and whine and complain to dig into their side as tribalistic creatures.

I remember hearing something about this. Reminds me of the many lies that political candidates make to garner interest and approval. Except who's holding them accountable - like there's not even a list anywhere tracking these lies.

So isn't this how all major US capitalist companies function now? They look at unethical behavior and fines as a cost-benefits equation. Hardly new that when people make lots of money from something, they pay off your leaders to let them off with a small fine.

Why are we still so obsessed about maintaining code when rewriting it is very low cost now?

Location: Alexandria, VA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: yes

Technologies: TypeScript, React, Next.js, Python, FastAPI, Java, Spring Boot, AWS, Cloudflare, agentic AI (Claude, Claude Code, MCP servers, agent harnesses, RAG)

Résumé/CV: https://mannan.is | https://www.linkedin.com/in/mannanjavid/

Email: hello@mannan.is

10+ years across fintech, healthcare, and national security, most recently Principal Engineer at Capital One (shipped features for 3M+ daily users, delivered a revenue-generating product in two months with a skeleton crew).

This past year I've been founding Spirit & Hammer, consulting & shipping AI products end-to-end: built the agent harness for a security startup, released Sun Signal (https://sunsignal.app) for circadian timing, and SkillGuard (https://skillguard.sh) to protect agent skills and harness environments from malicious injection.

I have a Mannan MCP server: https://mcp.mannanteam.workers.dev

Looking for senior/staff product or AI engineering roles. Full-time or contract.

Do you feel this is true for government agencies too?

If the goal was to extract more tax dollars and drop them into the laps of rich socialites and their bourgeoise friends, then it succeeded.

yeah. over here, most people are sick and hostile to each other and under some spell of propaganda where they think only others are under the spell while being falsely certain they themselves are not.

it leads to an environment where if you are one of the few asking questions, leading for change, trying to help others by criticizing popular leaders you get attacked by your fellow country men and women. it isn't a great place to talk and organize and ask questions in most environments.

im sure a few small, niche, safe spaces for curiosity and breaking from corruption and lies and deceit exist. they just feel to be fewer and farther between.

GPUs and computer hardware prices have been on the rise. I can see a twisted perspective where it’s stated that the US government needs to closely control computer hardware that can run particular LLMs, as a national security interest. At least that idea isn’t completely wild now seeing what we have been experiencing.

Remember those weird conspiracies we used to have about universal surveillance; tracking and so forth? Well if you think back to those and whatever might happen with GPUs and hardware, and LLM restrictions or the likely age gating//ID’ing that is to come from this, that’s a good guiding framework for how this will proceed and affect normal people.

I was in the process of learning how to register a car. I learned in Texas, Texas previously paid fines and that a statement was made Texas would no longer sell your vehicle registration data to 3rd parties. I heard California would do something similar, has paid fines and would supposedly reform.

I learned Montana as a state is very vehicle registration friendly and protects registrants privacy too. They don’t participate in hostile intrastate surveillance with other states, such as Texas and California and Virginia do.

Critics argue Montana registrations evade tax, and straw man you that there is no other legitimate use of a Montana registration. However they don’t tell you about the privacy implications and bad history of stewarding our data, the surveillance state linked to your registration and corruption from groups profiting off your state vehicle registration. They don’t tell you that in many of the states you can still register your vehicle in Montana and pay a use tax in any other state to pay them whatever supports the local roads. I suggest you look at Montana vehicle registrations. It better supports your and other Americans’ dignity when you act in a private preserving way and say enough is enough.

How soon until the digital distributions are owned by just a few cartels, and later when it’s suitable for them, they also modify digital movies to suit a political agenda without letting you know?

I see. That’s at least workable. Now you have a face and a group of people responsible for your suffering and problems.

And what are you going to do about it?