One of these topics is how (in many countries) the government become the enemy of it's people - the politicians are aligning willingly (or with help of corruption) towards the rich elites (oligarchy). And they are building a failed state, two tier state - a system where the law only applies to the weak and the strong (plus politicians) can roam unchecked.

In theory the government is hired by sofereign to govern the country to the benefit of the people. In practice government can do just about any bad deed and there is noone to stop them. If you ever lived in 2nd or 3rd world country this is nothing new but the 1st world democracies have enjoyed wonderful egalitarian libral state for many decades and many of them are turning into authoritarian states. Or worse.

This doesn't conclude all my observations but I will stop myself here to see what other people think

The physical casette /CD is obsolete, most people don't even have music stored on their internal storage and just stream things. And if you don't have the cassette /CD inside you don't need the form factor. You could probably stream via a smartwatch or in the future directly to the buds.

Homes are not #1 best investment asset and they shouldn't be but the world works better if people own homes they live in. It's a matter of not having the most significant part of your life being exposed to the market volatility. Plus it nicely aligns incentives of the neighbourhood.

Go and check areas that are mostly rental and see how maintenance (of both homes and infrastructure) is forgotten on the altair of rentmaxxing.

Of course if you're at $400k at FAANG, your best investment isn't realestate but for majority of middle class and working class buying your own home, taking a good care of it and passing it to your grandchildren is a very good investment. Also the society benefits.

The easiest way to solve the unafordability without putting everyone into negative equity is WFH. Land is only expensive near where traditionally the good jobs are. Just allow people to move to a low cost area, build there and WFH

grok works, chatgpt still fails

[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/69932b20-3eb8-8003-9d9c-b4bba53033... [2] https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk_f32dd53d-7b36-4fa2-b3...

[1] 2026-02-15 https://chatgpt.com/share/6992e17b-9b28-8003-9da9-38533f257d...

[2] 2026-02-16 https://chatgpt.com/share/6992e135-c610-8003-9272-55058134d4...

[3] 2026-02-15 https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk_97e9717b-c2de-47e8-a4...

[4] 2026-02-16 https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk_b161bb03-4bed-4785-98...

We tried a few things yesterday and it was always telling you to walk. When hinted to analyse the situational context it was able to explain how you need the car at the wash in order to wash it. But then something was not computing.

~ Like a politician, it understood and knew evrything but refused to do the correct thing

If you view the PRs, they bundle multiple fixes together, at least according to the commit messages. The next hurdle will be to guardrail agents so that they only implement one task and don't cheat by modifying the CI piepeline

CEO stated "We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor"

instead of

"by dividing agents into planners and workers we managed to get them busy for weeks creating thousands of commits to the main branch, resolving merge conflicts along the way. The repo is 1M+ lines of code but the code does not work (yet)"

[0] https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents

[1] https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2011776630440558799

[2] https://x.com/mntruell/status/2011562190286045552

[3]https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1qd541a/ceo_of...

I was once in a team developing a billing system that was counting how many times NSA invokated APIS to snoop on ATnT subscribers. The whole thing was very decoupled and dynamicly set up it took us developer very long time to figure out what this is used for. But the PM knew exactly what they did from the start.

Focus on your own stuff. Avoid politics, avoid social media, avoid HCOL cities, avoid career ladder. Do your 9-5 each day, log off and invest time in a hobby, family, farm etc.

please talk to your grandparents about the topic and report back to us.

Rather than renting for 5k (600k over 10y).

How is housing expensive??

As of 2022, the average cost of raising a child to age 17 is $310605 [1] [2]. That does not include all the unpaid parenting time which is probably another 40h per week between the parents. So we're talking 18+ years worth of unpaid time invested (or sunk) into your child. And when they go to work the government gets to tax them and keep all of it.

Financially speaking we've invested $500k (equiv) into each child and the government gets to keep all the return.

For the government and capitalist system it's much cheaper to import "ready" adults from abroad after someone else bore the cost.

The tax system and incentives need to be re-arranged if we want people to have children. Even the biggest proponent (Musk) isn't doing anything to help out. Surely his employees have no time for parenting after these 60h weeks.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/09041... [2] https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-true-cost-of-raising-a-child

WFH is the biggest equalizer of geographic opportunity, decreases physical disability impact, decreases carbon footprint, improves meritocracy, decreases opportinities for bullying and mobbing and other power play. Increases chances of mothers being able to work. You name it, this ticks all boxes.

Why haven't they already??

If (only as a test excercise) for 5 years we mandated the employer to bare the commute cost we would quickly see if RTO / WFH makes more economical sense.

Due to nonlinearity of the rocket equation some assumptions are really really really off [a] [b]. V2 only has 2500m/s deltaV [5] and the launch vehicle's delta-v needed to achieve low Earth orbit starts around 9.4 km/s [6] (the actual delta-v is typically 1.5–2.0 km/s more for atmospheric drag and gravity drag). [7] Therefore V2 only deliveres (2500/9400)^2 (7% or 1/14 of the needed kinetic energy)

Trouble is we only get to convert 1-4% of the launch mass into payload in LEO with chemical engines. And that's for large rockets with economies of scale.

Sputnik (rocket) Mass: 267,000 kg Payload to LEO 500kg [3]

The smallest orbital rocket is the Japanese SS-520 with the following characteristics: It can launch 3 kg to orbit in 4.4 minutes. It's a modified sounding rocket with three solid-propellant steps. It's only 9.54 m long, 0.52 m dia., and has a mass of 2.6T @ liftoff [google]. The SS-520 rocket cost less than $5 million [google]

Bolting a 2nd stage on top of V2 was tried in [2] programme and with both stages at ~0.7 reliability things only work half the time. Not commercially viable.

Is there a market for small & cheap rockets? [8] What about dual purpose ? W54 "Davy Crockett" Atomic Projectile was the smallest nuke designed to maintain fission and could be carried around in a backpack! The final weapon was 10.862 inches (275.9 mm) in diameter, 15.716 inches (399.2 mm) in length and 50.9 pounds (23.1 kg). I guess this could be worked with. With the current risk of global war everyone should be mass producing a small launcher. However this way we still only get 1cubesat into orbit per $1m, not what the autor aimed at.

To get below $1000/kg into orbit we will need a bigger boat. And that's what SpaceX is doing.

(sorry to not have these in the nice order)

[8] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/36261/why-isnt-the...

[a] assume that our bigger, more complicated (two-stage), and higher tech (LH2/LOX instead of Ethanol/LOX), launcher costs ten times as much as the V2

[b] If our mass produced LH2/LOX launcher equals the performance of the Delta 6925 by placing 3900 kg in LEO, the cost to LEO is US$333/kg; if we achieve better throw-weight, this figure goes down accordingly. If we build the thing so cheap, dumb, and heavy that its payload is only 1000 kg--one metric ton--the cost rises to US$1300/kg, which is still a factor of ten lower than the comparable cost to LEO for Ariane, Atlas, Delta, and Titan.

[1] So yes, a stripped-down stretch-tank engine-augmented two-stage V2-derived rocket, massing 351 tons as opposed to the 12.5 tons in the original, would be able to reach orbit*. :)

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTV-G-4_Bumper

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_(rocket)

[1] https://www.quora.com/If-boosters-were-strapped-on-the-V2-ro...

[5] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/59879/how-much-del... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_orbital_energy

Most other vendord are only a marketing shell whereas everything is outsourced to a galaxy of suppliers. Tesla has full vertical integration and captures value of the whole chain including dealerships. Plus Teslas are have performance of supercar and can demand much higher margins.