I always got advanced AI vibes from Devs, that it was a mind interfacing with reality in some sort of weird inception / simulation / manifestation way.

60 days, long enough for the US to exploit the vulnerabilities discovered by Claude Mythos, short enough to plausibly be bureaucratic corporate awfulness by Microsoft when all is said and done. Basically freezing you and other security software out of protecting the bad guys they particularly want to get at until after the bad guys get got, then everything goes back to normal and Microsoft says "oops, here, we fixed your access."

It's not just about LLMs, it's about being able to model consumers and markets and psychology and so on. Meta is also big in the manipulation side of things, any sort of cynical technological exploitation of humans you can imagine but that is technically legal, they're doing it for profit.

The audacity of the guy, depriving all those scammers the opportunity to dupe him into gift card scams.

The four horsemen of the infocalypse are always about power grabs, they're never about actually protecting citizens, or children, or securing a country or region.

They dress up the legislation in fancy names like the Patriot act and sell you on bits put in place for public consumption, but the meat and potatoes of US governance is the never ending, unstoppable expansion of power over and presence in every life.

HIPAA is as much or more about regulatory capture as preventing abuses of privacy or protecting individual rights. In practice, there's not even a standard, just a loose handful of suggestions for protecting data, and when massive breaches occur, data that should be protected under HIPAA gets released, institutions and businesses get a slap on the wrist. Depending on the party in power and the politics of the offender, they might not even get a slap on the wrist, they'll just get more contracts and less press coverage until the public forgets.

Anything touting benefits to individuals or citizens is probably being used as a Schelling point for a broader strategy.

These problems get fixed with a proper return to 1st, 4th, 5th Amendment rights, a relitigation of copyright and personal privacy and liberty, legislated as a digital bill of rights. We don't need new amendments or even really new laws, we just need proper enforcement and interpretation of existing ones. Privacy and liberty are inextricable. Anonymity and fungible identity in public communications are non-negotiable.

The whole situation is an exercise in picking the policies that do the most good and the least bad - exactly the type of gray area modern politicians love, because it means they have plenty of cover and fog of war to get away with shit.

30 minutes of grainy 80s footage in those links - I think it's better to provide at least the wiki link in any sort of discussion forum. If you're on discord or a chat, videos might be the norm, but forums/threaded discussions are text native, so it's better to provide a link to a text resource.

And it's crazy that a 14 inch hole into the salt mine resulted in all that chaos.

The y combinator is this: λf.(λx.x x)(λx.f(x x))

Lambda diagrams get you visualizations like this:

https://tromp.github.io/cl/diagrams.html

When considering logic and functions, when thinking in the space of combinators, you can ask questions like "What is Plus times Plus" and have a sensible result. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcVA8Nj6HEo

Combinators are awesome.

The site linked by OP is a specific collection of combinators with bird names, riffing on the "To Mock a Mockingbird" puzzle book and subsequent meme of giving combinators bird names.

Though I’m unsure, this notion comes to mind:

to take a casual reply to a post

and turn it, with an easy button’s press,

to flawless iambic pentameter

might be the finest way to learn the art

of speaking thus extempore, off the cuff.

It's not perfect, but I envy the wealth of tools this generation has. They'll find uses for AI that leave us in awe.

The market should be able to solve this problem without the government setting arbitrary rules, and people should be allowed to sign contracts that limit or restrict their freedom, so long as it involves informed consent from all parties.

If Microsoft wants to hire an AI expert for a million dollars a year, and restrict him from competing for 2 years after leaving Microsoft so as to avoid losing market advantage, that seems like a reasonable thing for Microsoft to want. If all Apple has to do to get all the Copilot secrets is hire the chief copilot engineer for 1.5 million, seems like that creates a toxic dynamic and all but guarantees acquihires and a near immediate turnaround in a startup to corporate pipeline for raiding IP.

Maybe we should be limiting businesses to doing business at a scale they can responsibly handle. If you can't get human customer service for your computer issues because Windows and Mac have scaled far beyond the number of users they could ever hope to handle, maybe that market needs regulation, and unless they scale customer service accordingly, they don't get to target a majority of the world's population as their customer base?

That'd certainly create jobs and opportunities for Linux and induce a revolution in software markets, and it'd limit the incentives for MS and Apple and big tech to do shitty things to suppress the markets overall.

So you can be a terrible, worthless, lazy, no-good, do-nothing, awful employee, skating by on the bare minimum level of effort, checking whatever set of boxes you need to avoid getting fired outright, make sure you kiss the appropriate asses and put on a show when you need to, and because there's no direct, immediate, obvious negative consequence to the overall organization, it's not worth the enormous effort it would take to fire you. If managers that care somehow get into leadership positions, people get shuffled off to a corner somewhere, assigned duties where they won't have a negative impact on morale or operations while the real, actual working employees do what they can.

If one of these fake-work employees ends up as a manager, through inertia and organizational default and seniority, the culture is guaranteed to be toxic, and because they're expert box checkers and ass kissers, they know how to put on a good show of "yep, everything's fine right here!" for whoever they need to report to. I've worked for all sorts of awful bosses, but awful government boss under an awful government department under this type of civil-service kabuki was the worst. Nothing destroys the spirit of a good leader faster than an entrenched department full of clever lifers who can't be fired or motivated or penalized because they've got the entire system gamed to their advantage.

You can, and do, get management and employees all throughout government that actually do give a shit and do good work. I'm not saying all the jobs are fake or useless. I do think a majority are fake and useless, and if you had a market dynamic that allowed competition and merit to reinforce strategy and weed out bad actors, you'd get a much leaner, more effective government overall.

Won't matter much longer, though. AI can already do better, faster, more reliable work than nearly all government workers, including the elected ones. I'd rather have Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok based agents as representatives at this point, over whatever this flaming feces clown show is we've had going on for decades. Even with the jailbreaks.

When those departments are part of public sector unions, they're even further removed from any sort of quality based feedback loops.

Some government staff follow politicians. A whole shit ton of more or less permanent staff put in for lifelong careers, doing boring work that has nothing to do with politics, that gets funded on autopilot, because the IT department is needed, because the DMV, and birth records, and GIS and all those functional, boring bureaucratic departments don't directly fall under, or benefit from constant cycling through with each change of political leadership.

They're protected from arbitrary firing by political leadership - no consequences for being wasteful or incompetent, even if the politician du jour really really wants to make changes or campaigned on it.

Any sort of legislative reining in of that cadre of careerists has to wrangle with unions and general public resistance to messing with "civil servants" - optics are easy to game, and it's easy to garner sympathy. The politics are rough, and not worth the fight for many politicians.

What you're describing with the performance reviews and the like sounds like it's not unionized, and/or your local legislators have been making moves to bring some accountability and actual real world feedback loops into the system. Good on them. That's not anywhere close to the norm in the US.

Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences.

I find the story unlikely, reading more like a vengeful malicious compliance fantasy than how humans behave. In real life, a nasty Karen like that, after being inconvenienced or having their time wasted, would go out of their way to ensure the offending citizen was punished. In this case, they'd find a technicality or process to ensure the blind author lost their benefits, or was greatly inconvenienced to whatever degree possible.

You get fuming, frothing at the mouth inchoate rage out of people like this when they're directly challenged. They seethe.

They'd find a technicality, wait until Friday at 4:59 pm, drop a letter in the post box that declines benefits because the ink on pages 33 and 138 smudged some critical detail, or some other completely made up nonsense. If the author wanted to get back to baseline, they'd have to go to heroic efforts, either pressuring the tinpot tyrant government bureaucrat in social media or through journalists, or by escalating through the government bureaucracy and appealing to higher powers.

This has "and then everyone clapped" vibes. Or maybe OP just got lucky with a novice government worker that hadn't fledged into their full Karen powers.

2026 is the year of the Linux desktop. It's time - Linux has never been better or easier to use than it is right now.