To stay consistent with my point though, if we mandate that everyone must ID verify to access the internet, I think it's just as reasonable we mandate that all such antiques be forcibly modernized with some sort of 5G-connected ID scanner. For the children of course.

Though I think it's worth noting that age verification _without_ identity verification is basically as impracticable, and arguably more dangerous.

At the time it felt prescient; now it just feels too late.

When one owns property, they get benefits from it, but they also have the responsibility to maintain the property or else it wastes away. Sometimes this incurs costs you wouldn't get with leasing, and sometimes it makes ownership more expensive than renting. But still I think that responsibility is a virtue in itself. Not everything should be consumable.

  Worse, the burden [generating energy] increasingly falls on the buyer [data center developers]

It's as if trucking companies flooded the highways with so many trucks that people couldn't commute to work anymore.

Meta here is the heroin cartel. They're a publicly traded company, have offices all over the country, and have mountains of evidence sitting in moderately well secured cabinets. Why should the government go after users when it could more easily go after the producers?

An excellent rider to the KIDS act would be to mandate the installation of age (that is, identity) verification to all firearms in order to disable the safety.

  Claremore Data Center will house the backbone of the internet and supports all the functions that occur on the internet.

0: https://claremore.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/02-17-2026-...

Leaks of this data make it obvious to everyone how much a liability it is. Meta Execs have their data in this pile as well; soldiers and congresspeople are in Flock's database. How many senators do you think PornHub has an accurate taste profile for?

Of course there's harm that comes with leaking this data. But is the harm really greater than everyone being surveilled by everyone, everywhere?

Maybe it's conspiratorial, but it seems like the direction this is going is for the US to nationalize these companies. Somewhere between "too big to fail" and "national security."

The "flip" part of this phone is cute, but the point Commodore makes about using it to punctuate the experience of using the device is significant to me. The Nokia also has a little sliding cover (which I always preferred over the flips as a matter of taste) and indeed the tactile interaction adds something. If it's still always connected to the internet though, it's just a gimmick.

Sadly my cell provider at the time gave me a SIM which just wouldn't work with it, and nowadays it seems like they aren't even available to buy anymore. I'd be interested in this, but not at a 600$ price level. I want a phone which (a) is a phone and (b) is a 5g wifi hotspot on demand and (c) nothing else. After years of casual searching, I have concluded that such a product is either too niche or too countercultural to be allowed.

I was using Claude to work on a pet project which itself has a "generate with AI" feature. The default model the project uses was Gemini (because it was cheaper and more reliably produces the correct output format). Claude kept changing the default model to Opus when working on entirely unrelated parts, and I kept noticing it because Opus would mangle the output and break the rendered page. It also did this to the .env file in addition to the default.

And Vaultwarden is nice. I've used it at work, hosted it myself, and as a user of the password manager I can say it's basically indistinguishable. But I don't really pay Bitwarden for a password manager -- I pay them for a secure sync of a password manager I can share with family members who can't figure out a VPN.

Truly an exception though. I think generally the only people for whom ads are helpful are advertisers.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU4ByUbDKNc

To me this isn't some security flaw in android that allows users to do something. It's a fundamental flaw in having most of the world's population forced into using a device whose software, firmware, and hardware are gate kept by a handful of monopolistic companies. They want all your eggs in one basket, and they'll hold the basket for you.

For many people these things mediate a person's interaction with the world. That's not some super fantastic responsibility on Google's shoulders, but a humanist catastrophe caused in part by (and of course handsomely profitable for) Google.

Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, and 60 years later it's eating everyone's lunch.

I wouldn't say it's shady or even untoward. Simon writes prolifically and he seems quite genuinely interested in this. That he has attached his public persona, and what seems like basically all of his time from the last few years, to LLMs and their derivatives is still a vested interest. I wouldn't even say that's bad. Passion about technology is what drives many of us. But it still needs saying.

> This is reductive to the point of absurdity. What other statistical text prediction model can make tool calls to CLI apps and web searches?

It's just a fact that these things are statistical text prediction models. Sure, they're marvels, but they're not deterministic, nor are they reliable. They are like a slot machine with surprisingly good odds: pull the lever and you're almost guaranteed to get something, maybe a jackpot, maybe you'll lose those tokens. For many people it's cheap enough to just keep pulling the lever until they get what they want, or go bankrupt.