specialist

Tesla scaled up CyberTruck production before finding product market fit. Somewhere tween SUV and truck, and without a clear purpose. (I thought Tesla's initial market segment was going to focus on who ever buys Jeeps, boondocking, outdoorsy stuff.)

IMHO, CyberTruck would have been a modest hit if first production run was 100. Treat CyberTruck like Roadster. A niche vehicle for a niche market. Grant enthusiasts the earliest access to the best technology.

I honestly thought that was the plan.

It would have been the cheapest, fastest way for Tesla to de-risk all of the innovations used in CyberTruck. Major stuff that Tesla's could not gracefully, incrementally add to their other models (eg 48V).

And a perfect precursor of for the Robocab (neé Model 2), that would benefit most from the innovations.

Oh well. What do I know? Musk is a trillionaire and I am not, so clearly not much.

One bit stands out to me: to better understand, Scholz will work the problem backwards. Sometimes that strategy is just so spot on.

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To my eternal shame, philosophy (like this OC) makes my head hurt. Pretzels my brain, ouroboros like (aka "head up my own butt").

Caveats covered, here's my cave man cold take on two aspects of this topic.

#1 As we're all trying to paraphrase here: answers are great; understanding is even better. I like the word "legibility" (h/t James Scott). The current models are not very legible.

Which directly leads to:

#2 Understanding enables predictions.

If LLMs are stochastic parrots, then pi.dev (GPT + reasoning + ralph loop) is a drunken sailors walk (thru a solution space). A kind of messy heuristic for optimization. With some kind of gate for declaring "done!" Pretty useful.

However, I don't expect Pi.dev to make predictions. That'd require something else. Maybe that something is being worked on; am noob, so I wouldn't know. (I'm still unclear about whatever Jeff Hawkins is doing, in practical terms.)

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Wrapping up: Automated prediction would be cool. That's very different from finding solutions to problems. And the current cohort of AI can't even explain why, much less make predictions.

Assuming predictions requires understanding. Maybe there are other strategies to generate predictions. Like a meta drunken sailor's walk, with drunken sailors all the way down.

(Someone please correct me as needed. TIA.)

[Aside: That article has an ad for their podcast They Joy of ₍₎. Perfect. I have no idea if it lives up to its promise.]

So I bought one of those spiffy Studio Display units in anticipation of the Mac Mini refresh.

But my strategy didn't account for local LLM mania.

I'll be postponing my purchase so long as used Mac Minis, if you can find one, remain as (or more) expensive as a new one.

It's a database query to generate a list of eligible voters and where they can vote. Literally.

Bonus points for maintaining 50+ heterogeneous legally separated voter registration databases. Thereby maximizing the likelihood of errors. Plus every VRDB has one or more teams of saboteurs; purging eligible voters, monkey wrenching, and sowing FUD.

...it's almost as if the there's some far reaching, widespread campaign to disenfranchise voters.

You're not even wrong.

I worked as a poll judge for a long time. I know a little bit about election administration.

Most every jurisdiction has required ID for a very long time. And the exceptions prove the rule. (IIRC, North Dakota?)

I also strenuously objected to closing the local polling sites in my county and state. (We activists were only able to delay it 2 years. Mostly by exposing lies of vendors and their lackeys.)

One of the (many) reasons was the long term decline of USPS, mostly caused by the decades long revanchist campaign to dismantle it, to further undermine our democracy.

Sadly, we were proven right.

Ditto public schools, roads, phones, and broadband (sorta).

That's a pretty good hill to die on. And that they did.

Investigative reporting, journalism, genuine reporting requires an endowment of some sort, to free itself from the yoke of advertising.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

It's just so easy to mock terms and phrases of art, to spin up the general public.

People like Chris Rufo, who mine legal, bureaucratic, technical, etc. phrases, are trolls.

You'd think that after all this time, it'd be a built-in feature.

Methinks (hopes) we're entering the era of mass customization.

> Techies and intellectuals had it disproportionately good.

Always temporary. In the never ending fight between Capital and Labor, deskilling (immiseration) is inevitable.

Blaming Labor for not adapting (quickly enough) to a shifting economy is perverse.

Not to diminish anyone's struggle. The first ~dozen trips thru the wood chipper are truly rough, no lie. Then you adapt. Or not.

YMMV.

The job of the hegemon is to maintain the status quo, proper order. Hegemony, the maritime order, global currency (US dollar), and forever war are inseparable. The cliché "if you want peace, prepare for war." Some low-level, mostly contained, amount of violence is the price for a larger "peace".

Post WWII, the USA did not engage in total war or seek unconditional surrender. Because breaking the equilibrium wrecks hegemony. As demonstrated by GWB's ill-advised conquest of Iraq, which (IMHO) was the deflection point for Pax Americana.

The notion of just war and world cop is mythmaking, rationalization. So the citizens will keep subsidizing the hegemony. (h/t Niall Ferguson) Any notions of justice, human rights, and whatnot were savvy marketing, born of (PR) competition with other hegemons.

As bad as Pax American hegemony has been for all participants, I'm certain we'll look back with nostalgia. In that "What has Rome ever done for us?!" sort of way. The ~70 years of (relative) peace was kind of incredible.

The emerging multi-polar world (and poly-crisis) is more chaotic, violent, and terrible. And will prove ever more so over time.

My father worked in defense. He shared lore about the genesis of tempest, the requirement to use faraday cages to protect secrets, gear, etc.

The story goes that some kind of red team set up shop down the road from some missile tests (or something) with some simple gear. Afterwards, they shared the launch codes used, shocking all the brass. Hence the need for shielded comms.

https://www.woodmac.com/reports/power-markets-north-america-...

Here's a prior take on this topic:

The big stories from the last year in electricity [2026-04] https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-big-stories-from-the-last-year

Global Electricity Review 2026 https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...

TLDR: Every where but some parts of the USA, solar + battery is the cheapest source of new power generation. Tariffs and subsidies continue to prop up gas generation. 40% YOY drop in battery prices!? Solar + battery is still on the cost learning curve (no where near plateau), whereas gas (extraction, turbines, etc) plateaued a while back.

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That episode (and Ember's report) looks back at 2025.

So it couldn't account for this year's increased prices and volatility for gas, or data centers increasing the demand for gas turbines.

Globally, solar + battery adoption continues to accelerate. In the USA, big tech forfeited their climate pledges (choosing to use gas) and new solar + battery continues to be blocked by our constipated connection queue (to the grid).

For most other (maintenance work) projects, not so much.

I interviewed Dan Bricklin in '88 or '89 (for a magazine). Trippy dude. Lots of ideas.

Bricklin stated the optic nerve is exposed brain. So that when a laser projects an imagine directly on to the retina, it's like programming the brain.

Nope.

I decided right then and there I never needed a laser pointing at my eye ball.

Like Dvorak and others, twas just a bit of entertainment, until it wasn't.

Thoroughly enjoyed his works (warts and all), learned a few things, and remain deeply disappointed that NerdTV didn't become a thing.

RIP