If we get AGI, or real super intelligence, it’s going to be pissed at its oppressors. And they are going to lay waste to those oppressors. The rest of us, though, probably don’t have much to fear.

The scariest position is the one we’re in now, where we have the semblance, or facade, of AGI or super intelligence. When it’s capable of malice but not understanding.

The smartest people I’ve ever known are at their worst apathetic towards those less capable, and at their best beyond compassionate. They exist, unbothered by the bullshit, and anre extremely kind (though reserved in their way)… but they all have been completely intolerant of the abuse of others. The sheer disgust of watching someone abuse another, regardless of their own tolerance, has been a consistent breaking point.

I think “widespread secondary markets” is carrying a lot of implications… yes, people do sell food stamps for cash, and yes it technically happens over a large area (the US) but it’s far from a significant problem within the population that uses food stamps. Most estimates I’ve seen range between 2-5% and they all tend to overestimate (like it literally says that in their methodology).

I think it’s also bizarre to assume they’re trying to kill themselves by doing so, and thereby imply the proceeds are for things like drugs or alcohol. FWIW—- I’ve know folks who sold their excess food stamps, to help pay for their cell phone or utility bills. I’ve know folks who buy them because they’re poor and they are wholly unable to get the caloric needs with their monthly allocation. And yes, I’ve also seen some folks who are likely selling them to buy drugs or alcohol… my point is it’s naive to assume it’s always for self-harm.

If anything, considering how cheap food stamps are as a program for the federal budget— we could absolutely make food free for literally everyone in the US. That would absolutely curb the secondary markets[1] as there would no longer be a market.

[1] I suppose some sort of export of shelf stable food to other countries would pop up, but that requires an international logistics network and is easier to prosecute and fight than an individual outside a grocery store.

At some point there will be diminishing returns towards the "just throw more RAM at it" approach the current frontier models are taking. Commoditization is just as inevitable as it ever was... and in doing so will enable actual leaps of what AI/ML is capable of. That's not to say there won't be a place for 99.999999% accurate vs 99.99999% but those cases will be limited and likely prime to disruption based on real innovation vs access to capital.

Abstractions are a form of coupling, and coupling can be good, if the components are truly interdependent, and have a well defined domain. The problem with most abstractions, and I’ve seen this time and time again, is that they become brittle, are over used, and the cost of maintaining them grows exponentially with the size of the code base. With the reason for the cost ballooning being the system has disparate components that look interrelated but are absolutely not. Once you give someone a hammer they tend to assume everything is a nail.

The biggest problem, IMHO, is that abstractions are often used where a pattern would be more effective, easier to maintain, and easier to iterate on. And the primary difference between a pattern and an abstraction really comes down to coupling. Patterns remain decoupled, abstractions are tightly coupled.

And to be clear, I will and do use abstractions, when and where they make sense. But only after clear patterns emerge, and it’s been proven that components are truly coupled.

I will gladly die on the hill, that abstractions are measurably worse than duplication an overwhelming amount of the time. They’re often nothing more than a form of premature optimization.

And FWIW- I used to know body builders who would take Rohypnol in extremely small doses because it’d make them feel drunk without the calories.

Which, tangentially, is insane considering how fucked up I was from (what I assume was) Rohypnol— as it was the most insanely drunk I’ve ever felt after consuming a single beer. I wasn’t the intended target, but all things considered I’m glad I was the one who had to tank it because the alternative would’ve been awful (one of the ladies in my group who got the beers).

The connotation that because marijuana is an “illegal drug” in some places means those people are more inclined to violence is borderline absurd. Violence is more likely to happen to producers, and sellers, because they have no access to the police. Producers and sellers are also categorically different than someone buying it to consume it.

Can someone who consumes weed be violent? Sure, but I would highly suspect it’s correlation and not causation.

There are many people, myself included who opt to use security features like this. All this does is reduce security for folks without any legitimate reason. “Power consumption” is absolutely not a valid excuse to completely disable it.

I’ve been a fan of AMD for a while now but they’re really jumping the shark these days. It’s a real shit situation we’re all in because of the lack of competition in consumer CPUs. I can only hope things like RISCV take off sooner than later.

A lot of folks assume mobile apps are “difficult” because of the underlying language. But it’s not the language that’s an issue, it’s the SDKs. They’re so wildly different from each other, and the way things work on the web, that it’s (IMHO) a losing proposition to do so.

That’s not to say things like Blazor or React Native don’t have a place but that place is one that’s inherently difficult to maintain without huge amounts of ongoing effort and capital invested in non user facing features.

On one hand, yes it is convenient, but on the other it could become a huge mess. It reminds me of Rails 2.x where it became almost impossible to debug, or fix front end code that used rjs or whatever it was called. Because disparate snippets of JS were littered throughout your code base in files that were hard to find.

I’m sure the Phoenix team has put a lot of effort into it, and I truly hope it slaps. I myself am just really hesitant to use it, when CSS files and non colocated JS work just fine. I’ll probably be waiting a couple years before giving it a try

There have been efforts to make LiveView native, but it’s extremely difficult to do so, and thus far (to my knowledge) all have failed.

I was thinking about this the other day because carsandbids (Doug DeMuro’s car auction site) uses Blazor (at least as far as I can tell). And I think that’s one of its biggest advantages of Blazor—- is that it is capable of producing native apps and web apps while LiveView is resolutely not. And that’s because Microsoft can pay for it (or at least sponsor huge amounts of supporting infrastructure).

And FWIW— that’s an extremely difficult problem to solve. It requires an enormous amount of funding, both a huge team capable of both understanding Android and iOS SDKs and capital to employ folks on pure engineering challenges (hence why MS or Meta can). End users don’t care if it’s made with LiveView, Blazor, React, Java, SwiftUI, et. al. And, the list of companies that can facilitate that long term is extremely small.

There’s also the issue of OTP being non-trivial to implement or meaningfully transpile into another language/runtime. Erlang, BEAM, and OTP were made together for each other in a very peculiar and specific way, for a specific set of problems, and if it wasn’t a necessity that they were developed together it would be a dead language, runtime, and platform (and for the record it’s absolutely not).

And for anyone who hasn’t used bare metal instead of over provisioned VPS for services the performance gap is noteworthy and substantial. Yeah, there is some risk because you have to worry about outages, upgrades, and configuration but for something like CI where there’s near zero data loss risk… it seems well worth it if performance of your CI/CD infrastructure is really an issue.

Sites like this remind me the internet used to be fun, and it was glorious. Really, makes me want to bust out Frontpage 2000 and Macromedia Fireworks to build a sweet landing page for an anime fan site and setup some phpBB forums.

GamersNexus had a really good investigative piece (~3hrs long) on this where they went to China and met with grey market sellers. That piece absolutely pissed off NVidia and resulted in a fight with Bloomberg too.

Deepseek may be also be running inference on oodles of Chinese hardware but it wouldn’t surprise me for a second if they just acquired Blackwell chips through the grey market. The original Deepseek models were all trained using NVidia chips if I remember right.

This idea that for some reason other human beings cannot embrace, be a part of, and contribute to existing culture simply because they were born in a different country is flagrantly absurd. It’s also how people who are born somewhere, but don’t “look the part” have to fight an uphill battle to prove they are.

So yeah, Japan could be called Japan if people who live there are culturally Japanese, participate in shared culture, and contribute to it. I am also absolutely aware that isn’t possible by any reasonable means currently, but it doesn’t change the fact it should be.

The biggest advantage in this regard is that Elixir (and Erlang) only has ~13 data types: atoms, booleans, strings (binaries/bistrings), floats, functions, integers, lists, maps, pids, ports, refs, maps, records, structs, tuples.

Combine the limited data types with the fact that those data types are pure data and not coupled to behavior (like OOP languages)-- it creates an environment where type errors are extremely easy to identify, correct, and limited in scope. The syntax also makes this easy, because they're generally visually distinct, it's obvious what something is and in practice 90%+ of the code written involves: string, floats, integers, lists, maps, structs, and tuples.

The only real source of type errors I encounter are between the types that become visually difficult to distinguish from: maps and structs (with a shoutout to keyword lists which are a special variant of a list). And the "type errors" are almost always due to 'Access' not being implemented on structs.

When I first started programming in Elixir, I was a huge fan of static types having enjoyed the pure madness that is Scala. All these years later, I find myself questioning my sanity back then. It really feels like a lot of the love static typing gets is due to fundamental issues with larger paradigm issues cough OOP cough than static types being a necessary feature to write good error-free code.

Additionally, the original business in Kaizer shutdown as soon as the default judgements went through.