"I gotta be present." Me: Reenacting the Malcolm Reynolds too many responses meme.

Most of the derision I see for both of these companies takes the form of standard investment analysis for established firms, or simple hatred on ideological grounds. Tesla and SpaceX are like Apple when it was Jobs & Woz in their garage.

Orbital data centers, moon and asteroid mining, more launches, by two orders of magnitude, than any other commercial entity on the planet... SpaceX is going bigger. Yes they might go bust, but evaluating them as though they were Microsoft, GE, or Samsung just doesn't make a lot of sense yet.

> In the United States, SpaceX accounts for five of every six launches into space, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

That's why.

But they've gone full-tilt Bozo with 11. The ability to deliver such an experience to their advertisers and marketing resellers was the whole reason for its existence. That is, 11 is about what Microsoft can get from its users, not about letting them use their own computer. It is no longer a suitable personal computing OS.

Warts and usability issues are present in Tahoe, and I wish Apple hadn't made the choices they've made on the UX, but Tahoe remains closer to being something for the user than Windows is.

Linux is generally for the sake of operating a computer (I didn't forget the user, but Linux--sweeps hand--makes the assumption that it's users are developers). That's what's so surprising about the age verification push in some Linux distributions (and their attendant bans for disagreement in the mailing lists or on GitHub).

For Star Wars, they retconned it to mean he found the shortest possible route through dangerous space, so even for Han Solo's quote, it's still distance.

Please protect your supply-chain. Python projects in the wild, especially as relates to agents, give me the willies these days with the GitHub Actions compromise that's been rolling through the OpenClaw dependencies. (Last one I saw was Telnyx.)

How does this blend with something like wedow/ticket, or beads? Those are "short term" in-repo task lists that help shape context. I've been thinking that adding a good long-term memory was the next step. I'll have to kick the tires tomorrow.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y

Clojure is the most token efficient of the major languages. It's a pleasure to work in. The sample code base that Claude knows skews toward higher quality code than the large volumes of middling JS or Python (this is not about the language but about what gets shared in the open for training data).

You want binaries... Babashka.

CLI... sure.

Access to the entire Java ecosystem... also yes.

The one other virtue is that when I use Clojure to demonstrate some feature, no one at work is tempted to deploy it as is until they rewrite it for Node.

Or do these contracts already stipulate operation on custom hardened network connections?

That's a straw-man argument.

In the case of a woman coming into contact with some driver and volunteering location information like her home address, she has little to no information to make that judgement. Providing her just that bit of information, and allowing her to discriminate based on it, makes her safer. Ideally, she'd have way more information than just whether the driver is male or female. The reputation information helps, but isn't always reliable.

Deep breath in... There are two types of discrimination. Paraphrasing Thomas Sowell, let's call them Type I and Type II.

Type II discrimination is the evil awful kind we rightfully rail against. It is "treating people negatively, based on arbitrary aversions or animosities to individuals of a particular race or sex..."

Type I discrimination is of the broader sort; "an ability to discern differences in the qualities of people and things, choosing accordingly." We run our lives with this kind of discrimination: is this food safe to eat? is this activity safe to participate in? do I trust this person given what I know about them?

>> Ideally, Discrimination I, applied to people, would mean judging each person as an individual, regardless of what group that person is part of. But here, as in other contexts, the ideal is seldom found among human beings in the real world, even among people who espouse that ideal. If you are walking at night down a lonely street, and see up ahead a shadowy figure in an alley, do you judge that person as an individual or do you cross the street and pass on the other side? The shadowy figure in the alley could turn out to be a kindly neighbor, out walking his dog. But, when making such decisions, a mistake on your part could be costly, up to and including costing you your life. [1]

This kind of discrimination is what we're talking about. I'd venture that not only is it OK, it is necessary. In this case, men that have had no background check, and whose form of employment is as an Uber driver are more likely to harass women (or do worse) than a female driver. Allowing women to make a selection based on this likelihood means that female customers that are alone can make choices to still use the service while reducing the overall risk.

Mitigation of this risk in normal taxi services take the form of background checks, bonds, and a chain of responsibility running from employer to employee to customer. It places more risk on the employer deliberately. Uber deliberately chooses to avoid this risk and responsibility. That choice is baked into their business model. That means enabling this kind of discrimination from their customers is a required feature of the service.

[1] Discrimination and Disparities, by Thomas Sowell

This same thing that keeps on happening when we try to reinvent things "without all that stuff that just adds friction." As with software, one should understand the underlying reasons for constraints in the old system before building the second one.

Banking -> crypto and NFT "without all that stuff..." -> wash trading.

Taxi service -> Uber "without all that employer stuff..." -> drivers with no background checks and no interview process

I understand part of this is routing around the damage of monopoly maintenance (medallion system, for example), but let's fix that instead of taking away the protections in place.

Sorry for the rant. I know this is like asking water to run uphill.

Iran's religious leadership has been sponsoring terror throughout the world for the last 40 years. Jimmy Carter was duped by the British into causing the rise of Shia Islam there. Khamenei and his leadership had escape locations prepared in Venezuela. The U.S. rolled those up first, nabbing the leader of a criminal cartel (Maduro) in the process. Now Israel and the U.S. have taken out Iran's oppressive "supreme leader" at a moment in history when the Iranian people are struggling for their own freedom.

Khamenei was a bad guy. Maduro is a bad guy. They've put evil and harm out into the world and you're wringing your hands about it because it was Trump that stopped them?

"By G'Quan, I can't recall the last time I was in a fight like that. No moral ambiguity, no .. hopeless battle against ancient and overwhelming forces. They were the bad guys, as you say, we were the good guys. And they made a very satisfying thump when they hit the floor." -- G'Kar