They did something right fifty years ago. Now? No. They're doing nearly everything wrong.

Top-two elections coupled with rigged ballots so voters can't really choose, and no one can prove anything (and it's against the law to try). Government program after government program that fails to solve basic problems because the money seems to up and disappear, and when the public calls for an audit the person doing the stealing gets to say "No."

187,084 homeless in California in 2024. 181,934 homeless in California in 2025 after 2024 spending of more than $2.5 billion (with a B) on homeless programs. They would have done better if they had just given every homeless person $13,363. It's the same expenditure.

Instead they spent $485,437 per person helped (5,150). The median household income in California in 2024 was $100K. So they spent four times the median household per person helped. Those are bad results.

They're driving out businesses. They're destroying the infrastructure that let them build the economic juggernaut of agriculture and tech (reservoirs left dry, water management mishandled deliberately, forest mismanagement contrary to decades of evidence).

Generally speaking, I've liked their food and consumer product safety regulations, and most of those have been emulating Europe, but most of the rest they've gotten wrong. They're still rich because of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, but they're driving away tech, and while Hollywood has a long way to tumble, it's on its way to doing that to itself.

If you dig through, they do have a repo, licensed under the AGPL, of course. No software, though, just markdown files.

> That is because it is Google themselves who is propagating ADV. And once activated, this malevolent process has exactly one goal: to block you from running software by developers who haven’t been approved centrally by Google.

The rest of the article is a claim that Google's new terms of service amount to "malware is any software we [Google] don't like."

It seems like Google is aiming for its own walled garden.

It has some good effects on the their models, like Claude seeking cooperation first. But the people behind the company have a typical "unconstrained" (in the Sowell vision sense) perspective that assumes that they know better, so they are righteous for attempting to control things (users, paying customers, their model outputs, their tool chain, the supposed deity they assume they will produce... etc.)

Reddit

Twitter

Facebook

4chan

Call of Duty chat logs

Every public marketing site

SlashDot

UseNet

...

Verdict: Yes idiotspeak was part of the training set, but no, it was not inadvertent. There's a smattering of Shakespeare in there, at least.

They even called their printers "Pylons" if recall (a nod to StarCraft's Protoss). The manufacturing tech has far broader implications than the application they were putting it toward.

My worry is that Eric bought them solely to get launch-for-compute in his pocket. Given his track record of "steal and when you get caught just have the lawyers 'clean all that up'" and "we didn't intend to unleash evil on the world, 'but it happened'" aren't encouraging. I always hope the golden goose doesn't get carved to pieces, but it usually happens.

That's a different problem that what you're arguing against.

That dwarfs all other launch capabilities on Earth, including all governments. Short and medium term value may be shaky if you evaluate SpaceX as a typical business.

Compute in orbit is "stupid" only to those who don't think it through. Their biggest initial customer for that feature will be Google, and through Google, Apple; two of the highest value tech companies on Earth. Seems like a fascinating flywheel to me.

One of the things many fountain pen users complain about with Pilot is that their converters don't work like other fountain pens. But in each case there are specific design choices that shine. Their cartridges have wider openings than standard ink cartridges. In part this makes their cartridges and converters proprietary, but the wider mouth and the hinged lid on the cartridges makes for better ink flow.

The CON-40, often criticized for low ink capacity, fits their smaller pens, and has small agitators in the converter, allowing every last drop to get to the feed, and making cleaning easier. The CON-70, generally liked for its capacity, also has a unique feature of a metal tube that runs the length of the converter. This tube, which could have simply been a rod to hold the rubber stopper that enables pump filling, is a tube so that you can actually hold a blunt syringe to the tube mouth and squirt water straight to the back of the converter allowing you to clean it out properly.

I love using well-designed products, and their writing instruments are among my favorites.

You're wealthy, or the definition will change to include you. The spice must flow.