Subsidies aren't universally a bad thing. This is silly thinking.

I can't say I've seen it on USB-C-esque cables (except maybe a thunderbolt cable a while back?) but I've seen some cables use a type of aluminum or mylar-looking foil between the outer rubber sleeve and the inner sleeves and wires.

The key difference between xAI and Anthropic/OAI/Google is that xAI has the least-likely path to existing as viable business in a decade.

That said, the economics of the entire AI industry are kinda made up at this point, so who really knows; it's quite possible that the players with the best odds of surviving the crash are those that can draw funding from their parent company's other businesses.

Having it be a ring has the nice side effect that anyone closing a ring on your site (or adding your site to it) gets an idea of how everyone in the ring met.

It's more of a fuzzy social thing than a "let's represent social relationships in the most semantically accurate way possible" thing, and for people, I think that knowing how everyone met eachother is a nice thing. You can plan gettogethers off of that. It also keeps people socially accountable; if someone in the group turns out to be a dick, they can just be skipped in the webring.

Working with them, the scope can be brought down, sometimes, though this obviously depends a lot on externalities like who the customer is and how much flex they're comfortable adding to the timeline, since that often becomes a factor.

Part of becoming a more mature developer involves being able to navigate these situations with PMs better, and dealing with the frustrations that can often bring (in my experience). I'm still working my way up this side of the job. Historically this stuff has been managed up really thoroughly by my immediate manager (a factor of both the manager's working style, the work being done, and the broader company structure), but my current company structure means that I have to get better at this stuff a lot more actively.

I brought the 10-12kLOC PR up as an example supporting my point of view. I don't encourage the behaviour. Most of my PRs these days fall under the 1500LoC mark, tops -- maybe a bit more if it's a tricky component that needs a ton of tests.

Is there no way to make this changeset smaller?

At work, I've usually written large patches. I used to be worse at it. I was mentored out of it, and while I still like my patches to be complete, I balance that with the available bandwidth of the team and what the team can reasonably actually process.

For perspective, my "large patches" were PRs on the order of 10-12kLOC for relatively big features. I consider those to be on the upper end of what is reasonably reviewable by a small, non-dedicated team, and towards the upper limit of the kind of PR where I can speak for nearly every line of code, what it does, and why it's there.

On the other hand, now, LLMs are part of the equation, and they can (and often do) write code in insane volumes. They arguably tend towards extreme verbosity, without even talking about docs/markdown files. While LLMs are part of the workflow, my company, and those my friends work at, have all instituted policies of the developer attaching their name to the code ultimately being responsible for the output (which IMO is a lazy strategy, but I can't think of a much better one under the circumstances).

I cannot, personally, fathom how you can stand behind a single changeset spanning 2000 files and a quarter-million lines of diff. Do you consider this sustainable?

At this point the code bases are very quickly getting away from us in the open source community and even in proprietary code bases, and these are important code bases. Often very complex, often legacy. Who ultimately still owns these? Who's really going to be accountable if things go wrong?

On the one hand, this solves the problem of smart glasses being too stealthy to tell when you're being filmed/broadcast in public by someone wearing them; where Meta's glasses look like Wayfarers, these look a lot more distinctive.

On the other hand, the reason these won't be too stealthy is because they look like those standard-issue glasses the US army was know to give out (upon looking it up: S9 glasses), and those have a reputation.

On the third, mutant, hand, I don't have a fashion sense and I really don't care about smart glasses as a technology, so maybe I'm the wrong person to judge this thing on is merits.

To the extent you can really call pointing their behaviour out as victimizing them, I would consider bad PR to be a fair tradeoff.

For what possible reasons? Are people going to be doing these things recreationally? Cause otherwise you're talking about scanning the entire world's population, including the very young, the very old, the mobility-impaired, and those without easy access to US-based facilities (i.e.... people who are part of the small fraction of the global population who do not live in the US), twice over, every 18 months.

What possible use could there be for doing this?

I recognize that the presser says the scanners will be deployed "around the world," but let's be real, this will probably be 80% US.

On migrant workers, much of the US economy is underpinned by the assumption that cheap manual labor is abundant, with the implicit assumption that this tier of labour isn’t going to try and clamour for workers rights (which is a whole other story, but whatever). It’s (part of) the reason the US continues to have globally extremely cheap gas even as the prices hit highs within a domestic frame of reference.

And restarting mining rather than trying to adapt the mining workforce better to a changing landscape is just going to make it hurt worse when the US has to catch up with the rest of the developed world on that front.

As a close outside observer, it feels more like one side of the US electorate is motivated by sore and a misplaced sense of being owed retribution more than anything else.

It's also a very thinly veiled metaphor for the ceaseless pursuit of industrialization in every aspect of life chipping away at the humanity and metaphorical magic of the human experience, and the perils of embarking on that endeavour to the exclusion of everything else.

Personally, I find some humour in this situation.

Fund managers and the like do, which covers a lot of passive investors, which is good until a company joins one of the major indices at which points funds may be obligated to buy in.

It's a deeply distressing moment, and I see it as a time to renew calls for consumer-protecting regulations and antitrust laws with more teeth in the markets where this kind of behaviour's currently flourishing.

The point of a company going public is not to just distribute possible profits among speculators, but to give the public a meaningful voice in company direction, in particular by offering escape hatches like being able to eject a CEO who's lost their mind and is no longer acting in the fiduciary best interest of the shareholders, which will so obviously happen here.

Who is this product for? How the hell did "data centres in space" make it into the prospectus at all?

More to the point, why is Morningstar being so generous with their interpretation of that line of business? It's plainly insane, and you don't need an advanced degree in physics to understand why.