For most users "AI" probably just means "chatbot" - and that's not compelling, because they can already access a chatbot, why would they want one in every product they use?

The more advanced features / workflows that LLMs can enable are kind of opaque if your points of reference are the ChatGPT web interface and summaries of search results on google.com - one reason that "agent" or "harness" have become useful jargon is that it distinguishes the tool we use and what it can do from the tech that backs it.

It's funny, because you can both believe that these entities are bleeding money on every token and also believe that "financial engineering" will bail them out when they IPO despite this fact.

The fundamentals of running a business that sells products or services for more than the cost to produce them seem increasingly decoupled from the financial success of the company and its owners.

Is this true? Americans elect leaders who won't even acknowledge the issue is real. We have at times managed to gather some momentum towards using government to address the issues through incentives and regulation - even as recent as the Biden administration - then reactionaries gain power and dismantle the efforts.

The "environmental movement" was not focused on the personal responsibility angle, it's just that the American political system rejected proposals to do any meaningful government interventions because long term thinking is never rewarded.

Of course as for the poor OP... is this a majority of what working translators are paid to do?

I suspect a lot of translation is just grunt work - technical and business documents. The lack of a cohesive voice with considered style is perhaps not really much of an issue in those. The expectations are just much lower; text that conveys the basic meaning is a much lower bar to clear.

She's probably better than a bot at that stuff, at least for now, but my concern is that it won't be "enough" better for businesses to justify her continued employment. And this is my general feeling about this stuff across society, in basically all domains.

> Compared with conventional water-harvesting materials, the textile showed a three- to 10-fold improvement at scale.

Technology Connections has a video on this general technique with a demo from a typical commercially available unit [0]

The "in a jacket" angle is novel... there's no blower. Even though this desiccant may be "3 to 10" times more effective, the passive nature is going to presumably make the rate of extraction quite poor compared to units with a blower to keep moist air moving over the substance.

Based on the wording, this improvement is due to some kind of gradient where moisture is collected on the surface of the jacket/textile, then channeled towards some internal chamber where the desiccant is constantly being heated to extract moisture - without the need to heat the exposed textile to extract water from that portion.

Of course increasing the rate of collection doesn't matter much on its own! You can't drink a damp textile. What takes energy is the removal of the moisture from the desiccant - and how much energy that requires is a detail suspiciously absent from the article (presumably because the efficiency isn't improved versus other desiccants).

So personally, I have trouble imagining this is as efficient as the blower-based commercial units, which are... far less efficient than "normal" compression cycle dehumidifiers (in the above video, real world testing shows the "normal" dehumidifier is 5 times more efficient than the desiccant one).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzClLWL-Eys

The AUR helpers actually make it easier to integrate the review step into your workflow IMO; they actively prompt to review and let you know when a change is present since you last accepted the risk.

But "AUR considered harmful" is not a novel take. Everybody using it should understand the risk here, it's really just one step removed from curl/bash'ing something you found on StackOverflow.

This is different though. The attackers of the AUR don't have access to do anything to upstream and any malicious dependency they add would have to be either 1) already built as an official package or 2) also taken from the AUR... in which case the person building it would need to audit the dependency as well.

So you have two "AUR hygiene" principals at play: One, know what software you're even installing, and Two, know that the PKGBUILD does what it says on the tin. If you neglect either of these and YOLO then it's kind of on you.

Arch users should really know that the AUR is something to approach with a massive amount of caution. It's better than "curl bash" from some rando web site, but that's only due to the fact that you can easily audit and diff the payload of the install recipe yourself.

They say their models are too dangerous for the public, so they can nerf the GA versions while allowing only their preferred megacorp or nation state partners access to the real secret good versions.

We can hope the Chinese open weight models will catch up, but if/when they really reach parity with proprietary frontier models you can bet they'll stop releasing their weights too. They don't do this stuff out of the kindness of their hearts.

It's tough to imagine what might possibly derail this.

A year ago I had no use for any LLM-driven tools, and today I can do my entire job without writing a single line of code.

If that happened in a year, what can we expect in 5? I have no idea what my job might even look like by then.

But it's just one signal out of many, and more isn't somehow inherently better beyond a certain point.

I think comparing them to IBM is reasonable, just maybe not... today's IBM.

IBM was an absolute hardware and software behemoth leading up to the PC / early Internet era, after which they pivoted from making groundbreaking real things to providing "enterprise support."

They also outlasted almost all of their contemporaries with that pivot, for better or worse.

I'm perfectly capable of hating this shit even while my employment situation demands that I use it.

If you're working somewhere that's pushing this stuff, there's never been a better time to dust off your copy of the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual."

It would've been pretty clear to anybody that there was no real case here, but the way these rural areas work is that they never expect any attention or pushback. They're used to their little corrupt fiefdoms slipping under the radar. These people in rural TN also live in a bubble of others with the same politics, and they surely overestimated the power of their ideology to win the day.

So it's not really that any precedent was needed, because speech like this is not a crime - full stop.

The scary thing however is that for every case you see like this that goes viral, gets national attention, and has a victim who is aware of his rights and wins... how many small town sheriffs are out there getting away with it?

It's easy to just lock up people for similar trumped up charges and expect that nobody with resources will ever notice or care.

Oh boo hoo. The official in question here isn't some rank and file rando, it's the sheriff who the taxpayers in question duly elected.

I guarantee you they'll elect him again. $91 per resident is a small price to pay for a guy who's willing to arrest their political enemies.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

I think this may depend on the sorts of work you do. For those of us who mostly live in web using established frameworks, that's about when I came to conclude they could do everything and do it well.

I can have opencode discover third party APIs and generate fully working solutions that are well integrated into an existing long-lived codebase. I still review the MRs by hand but I only ever discover spec errors or style issues, not defects in the code itself. This was a big change from ~summer 2025.

This is a really well defined space though with strong conventions. If you're doing something more interesting YMMV.

The years leading up to and immediately following successful acquisition were tenuous and it seemed like they were destined to become a global pariah if not a failed state. And yet now, they are a regional power.

So if anything maybe Iran just missed its window. Now with the US seemingly ready to enter a forever war with no defined objectives other than nuclear deterrence it's presumably too late, but maybe a more competent regime could have pulled it off in time.

Hah, I was trying to parse this too.

Charitably perhaps they're being vague on exactly what's different because they're still under NDA.