ripe

From the article:

"As more baby boomers retire and sell their companies to private equity [...] the confluence of private equity and the silver tsunami will create an even wider gap between communities that own and control their services and those that do not. Some communities — New York, Miami, San Francisco — will gain more ownership, more wealth and more power. Others, like Mackinac Island, are drained of control, upside and civic influence. For Americans to have a say in their economic futures, they must make protecting local ownership a national priority."

From the article:

"The first telephones were hard enough to use without the added harassment of the teenage boys who worked as the earliest switchboard operators — and who were, per PBS, notoriously rude.

It was Alexander Graham Bell himself who came up with a solution: replacing the abrupt male operators with young women who were expected to be innately polite. He hired a woman named Emma Nutt away from her job at a telegraph office, and on this day, Sept. 1, in 1878, she became the world’s first female telephone operator."

Thank you for the pointer to the Bauer and Ulrich paper. I read an abstract (pasted below), but I don't have the paper itself.

"Dr. Donald H. Menzel is well known for his work in astronomy, but his cryptologic work has never received a thorough review. The present article describes how his interest in this area was first sparked and provides the details of the secret class he led in “Naval Communications” (really cryptanalysis) at Radcliffe College during World War II. This class served as a prototype and was copied elsewhere. A sketch of some of the classified work he carried out during the war, and after, as a consultant, is also included, along with a brief overview of Menzel's personality and other interests."

Ha! Too smart for its own good. Is it possible to ask it to pretend it hadn't seen the example before?

From the article:

“ Call it a “verification tax,” “botsitting” or “rework” — it’s the often arduous task of checking that A.I. output is accurate, safe and usable, and it is putting a very human bottleneck on A.I. automation.”

> What was that US robotics startup ... "human safe" cobot you were supposed to be able to program by just dragging its arm through the motions?

You're probably thinking of Rethink Robotics in Boston.

Its first model was the two-arm "Baxter", very popular at universities and research labs. The second model was the single-armed Sawyer, much more capable, with built-in vision, which sold several thousand units to small manufacturers.

Rethink Robotics was co-founded by Rodney Brooks. The robots were originally built in the Boston location, and later by a contract manufacturer in New Hampshire. In 2018, the company was unable to find a buyer and shut down operations. The brand and the remaining inventory was purchased by a German distributor, but eventually the robots were sunset, afaik.

Discussion then:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35305141

From the article:

"Directly beneath the Magic Kingdom is a sprawling network of tunnels. Initially designed to shepherd around Mickey and his friends, the system now also serves as one of the largest utility corridors ever created. Unlike the rest of America, where cables are typically dumped in ditches before being covered with dirt, the electrical lines that power Cinderella’s castle quite literally get the princess treatment.

Alongside water pipes, sewers, and animatronic control systems, these power lines lace the walls and ceilings of the utilidors, meaning they’re protected from weather and changes in the soil. They are also easy to monitor, catalog, and access if something needs fixing."

Tcl is certainly a bit weird and takes getting used to, but I have found it worth learning its idiosyncrasies, particularly because my applications use sqlite, which fits very naturally with Tcl.

From D. Richard Hipp [1]:

"SQLite is a TCL extension that has escaped into the wild.

"The design of SQLite was inspired by the design of TCL, both in the way it handles datatypes and in the formatting of its source code. The index use case for SQLite was in a Tcl/Tk application for an industrial company. From its inception, SQLite has always depended heavily on TCL. These days, SQLite no longer uses TCL internally and can be run separately from any TCL interpreter, and yet the SQLite development process still depends heavily on TCL."

[1] https://www.tcl-lang.org/community/tcl2017/assets/talk93/Pap...

Not a lawyer, but I just posted a link about former FTC chair Lina Khan saying earlier this month that the AI companies can be held responsible under current law.

"Former FTC chair Lina Khan wants the federal government to know that it doesn't need to wait for new laws to address AI threats. There are already laws and regulations on the books, including a 92-year-old Supreme Court precedent, that she argues could be used to hold AI companies and, in some circumstances, their executives accountable for their actions."

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/14/ex-ftc-boss...

From the press release:

Cognex will acquire RealSense for approximately $500 million, financed entirely from existing cash and investments on its balance sheet. Cognex also expects to provide a three-year $56.5 million cash retention program at target for RealSense employees, subject to performance modifiers, and to grant restricted stock units valued at approximately $50 million under Cognex's existing 2023 Stock Option and Incentive Plan dependent on the grant-date share price.

Not the person you're addressing, but writing by hand remains a very valuable tool. It's eminently practical and far from obsolete. [1]

[1] "There's actually some very important things going on during the embodied experience of writing by hand," says Ramesh Balasubramaniam, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Merced. "It has important cognitive benefits."

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529...

Great essay! Thanks for posting it. I didn't know that Kool-Aid involved points and rewards, never having seen it as a child.

The manager saying, "you've got to drink the Kool-Aid" was funny and made my day.

"The top two aren't very surprising: legal services and financial services. But then the list gets more interesting. Number 3? Auto dealers. Number 4? Consultants. Number 9 is restaurants. Number 10: Accountants. Number 13 is fabricated metal and miscellaneous manufacturing. Number 21? Dentists."

> saying it is "written by LLM" is not useful and misses the point.

It is useful to me. I see too much slop every day and would like to filter it out from my life. I appreciate the tip, and to me, that is the whole point.

> forward only the best, strongest arguments for any given position... A weak argument gives unnecessary purchase to unscrupulous haters who might use that weaker argument as a low-grade "straw man" to dismiss the whole position.

Excellent point. Thank you for writing such a cogent argument.

It is clear that the rich and powerful are making short-term decisions that are causing widespread and long-term harm. Decisions such as, AI-pilled investors demanding unsustainable productivity from companies, and CEOs in turn forcing employees to use agentic coding and laying the rest off.

Such decision-making is not new, of course, but LLM technology is helping grifters and con artists to turbo-charge it. Founders can raise money using cool demos that achieve the impossible. Investment analysts can back up their AI story with huge paper profits.

The result, as you summarized, is life and career displacement and missed opportunities for young people. It's just too abstract and diffuse of an impact to influence people with, and it also seems to be railing against the holy cow of Capitalism.

"Data centers bad!", or "AI is disrupting humanity and the end is nigh!" are much more punchy slogans.

Neki is a sharded Postgres implementation. It introduces one level of indirection between the application and the Postgres shards.

Found this from neki.dev.

For people like me who have no idea what this is, I looked it up:

DaVinci Resolve is a proprietary application for non-linear video editing, color correction, color grading, visual effects, and audio post-production. It is developed by the Australian company Blackmagic Design for macOS, Windows, iPadOS and Linux.

...

DaVinci Resolve has been used for the color grading and/or editing of feature films such as Alien: Covenant, Avatar, Best of Enemies, Deadpool 2, Jason Bourne, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, La La Land, Love & Mercy, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, Prometheus, Anora, Robin Hood, Spectre, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and X-Men: Apocalypse.

(Wikipedia)

> a lot of code doesn't need to be understood

Really? I am having difficulty thinking of any examples of code that doesn't need to be understood. If it isn't understood by someone, then how is it even working?

If you mean like a library you are using, where you aren't even reading the internals or might not even have access to it, OK, but that code is stull understood by its authors, surely?

Thank you for summarizing! TIL about the Falcopolis in Angola.

From the overview site:

Glass insulators were first produced in the 1850's for use with telegraph lines. As technology developed insulators were needed for telephone lines, electric power lines, and other applications. In the mid 1960's a few people began collecting these antique glass insulators. Today there are over 3,000 insulator collectors. Insulator clubs, local and national shows, and good reference books are available. Auctions of Vintage Insulators are available too.

From the article:

There’s good reason for a less-than-sunny outlook toward humanoids, experts, including Meige, argue.

Pretty good. Regarding Eliza, a version comes with Emacs, too. It's the "doctor" application. (The original Eliza was written as a generic engine running a pattern-matching "script").

A quibble: the creator of Eliza was Joseph Weizenbaum, not "Wizenbaum".

Article contains mostly aerial views of datacenters in the United States.

This artist was featured in an article in this LA-based magazine:

https://mymodernmet.com/manabu-kosaka-paper-sculptures/

Unfortunately, the interviewer doesn't explain exactly how the sculptures are made: what kind of glue, what kinds of mounting gear, etc.

From the article: (good photos, too)

In the fast-growing field of data annotation, workers in a small city in south India train A.I. to improve how it performs tasks traditionally done by people.

> empirically-minded work

Yeah, I understand that this testing-oriented constraint method is what AI coding enthusiasts are pitching. Sure, it's different from pure vibe-coding as originally defined, but nobody is seriously suggesting professionals should do pure vibe-coding anyway. It's a strawman. The word fits.

> LLMs are great with focused questions, up and down abstraction layers and across all kinds of concerns. Stack up these focused concerns into a rich understanding of what you are doing or writing.

I agree. This is much better advice than what the article tries to do, which is to give best practices around how to use or not use AI to code.

Insightful:

> the term “vibe-coding” suggests a kind of laissez-faire attitude where you don’t really care about the outcome and you’re just having fun. That’s what the phrase meant when it was coined, but the world has moved on. In many companies professional programmers are using AI in such a way that it’s impossible to imagine that they are also reading the resulting code in detail. This is what modern vibe-coding is. Deferring to the AI, not worrying about the individual lines of code, and keeping an eye on whether the code passes its tests and throws up any problems in production.

This way of working is the only one that justifies the trillion-dollar bet on the AI industry. I agree, this method should be called vibe-coding.

You're right that people have never devoted much time to digging into the details.

But also, I think the weather apps on phones today are a lot more likely to be used than the weather page in a newspaper used to be. So it's a new phenomenon.