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Why fix one problem, when another problem also exists?

Classic false dilemma. You're trying to frame my comment as “we can only ever fix one problem” when it is, in fact, “we have constrained resources and urgent systemic failures and so prioritisation is important”.

For example, Budget 2026 did not address the €307 million structural shortfall in university funding. Is basic income for artists a better allocation than third-level education? Or capital expenditure on cancer care? Or NAS opex?

I specifically disagree with this allocation of funds as we live in country filled with specific solvable structural and life-limiting problems that should be solved before artist wellbeing.


That's beside the point? Gaining security by losing freedom was always on the table. What's interesting is the cultural shift toward not caring about losing freedom.

I think it is the point: there is a balance between freedom and safety.

For example, it is illegal to carry a loaded handgun onto a plane. Most people would agree that is an acceptable trade of freedom for safety.

There are places with even less safety and more “freedom” than the US so people who take an absolutist view towards freedom also need to justify why the freedoms that the US does not grant are not valuable.


> I think it is the point: there is a balance between freedom and safety.

Sometimes. But freedom and security are not always opposed.

It’s possible to trade freedom for security but it’s also possible that freedom creates security. Both can be true at the same time. Surveillance, not security, is what opposes freedom. Surveillance simply trades one form of insecurity for another at the cost of freedom.

> For example, it is illegal to carry a loaded handgun onto a plane. Most people would agree that is an acceptable trade of freedom for safety.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

2A seems to make the case that the freedom to bear arms creates security. Given how history played out it’s hard to argue against. I’m not arguing we should be able to take guns on planes but 2A is an example of freedom creating security.


Everything I want to do in public I can still do.

What "freedom" is lost? I gain security and lose no freedoms (unless you are doing something illegal).

When property crime is up 53%.. plenty of people are willing to lose "freedom" whatever you are referring to, in exchange for safety.


How about just general privacy? I mean do you really want someone / the government to be able to track everywhere you go?

- Going to your girlfriends place while the wife is at work

- Visiting a naughty shop

- Going into various companies for interviews while employed

With mass surveillance there is the risk of mass data leak. Would you be comfortable with a camera following you around at all times when you're in public? I wouldn't be.


The right to privacy, to not let the government have a master record of everywhere you've ever been and everything you've ever said just in case they decide to someday revoke free speech and due process, or decide it doesn't apply. Lately we have plenty of examples of how quickly that can happen.

The Stasi were "tough on crime" too, back when that was expensive. How quickly we forget. Well, you're welcome to find a panopticon to live it, but excuse other for not finding it a good tradeoff.

You were recorded smoking marijuana, an illegal drug at the federal level.

You were recorded walking into an abortion clinic, although face recognition identified as a resident of a state where abortion is illegal.


Well aren’t both of those things crimes? I’m not a fan of mass surveillance either but maybe pick a different example.

The second is clearly not. State governments don't have jurisdiction over their residents when they are out of state.

Read about Texas.

It's a crime to leave the state to get an abortion. They can prosecute when you return home.

There have been vigilante patrols in West Texas, watching the necessary routes out of the state. The law gives any resident the grounds to turn in their neighbor for planning to get an abortion.


Is "crime" one and the same as "wrong"?

The solution is to change the laws, not to stop enforcing them. Otherwise this is basically just giving up on the concept of having laws.

The point is to maintain pressure so that even when the law becomes unjust, people aren't immediately harmed.

Selective enforcement has always been the law of the land.

Joe Biden "created" jobs the way covid "created" job vacancies. Maybe time periods with worldwide upheaval should be taken with a little salt.

That doesn't make sense. Could you explain what you mean?

Here we're looking for a change in the slope of that job creation line


We're looking for a change in slope based on overarching economic policy as a means of comparing two political parties. A global disaster is not a policy.

So find the chart and look at the trend, and add annotations for administration start and end dates with consideration for lag, and then annotate the chart to indicate the partisan balance of Congress at that time.

When you cut revenue and increase expenses and the real problem here is disease in the world


I hope so. We're right on the cusp of having computers that actually are everything we ever wanted them to be, ever since scifi started describing devices that could do things for us. There's just a few pesky details left to iron out (who pays for it, insane power demand, opaque models, non-existent security, etc etc).

Things actually can "do what I mean, not what I say", now. Truly fascinating to see develop.


Ah yes. “Non-existent security” is only a pesky detail that will surely be ironed out.

It’s not a critical flaw in the entirety of the LLM ecosystem that now the computers themselves can be tricked into doing things by asking in just the right way. Anything in the context might be a prompt injection attack, and there isn’t really any reliable solution to that but let’s hook everything up to it, and also give it the tools to do anything and everything.

There is still a long way to go to securing these. Apple is, I think wisely, staying out of this arena until it’s solved, or at least less of a complete mess.


I think he was being sarcastic

Poe's Law strikes again

Yes, there are some flaws. The first airplanes also had some flaws, and crashed more often than they didn't. That doesn't change how incredible it is, while it's improving.

Maybe, just maybe, this thing that was, until recently, just research papers, is not actually a finished product right now? Incredibly hot take, I know.


I think the airplane analogy is apt because commercial air travel basically capped out at "good enough" in terms of performance (just below Mach 1) a long time ago and focused on cost. Everyone assumes AI is going to keep getting better, but what if we're nearing the performance ceiling of LLMs and the rest is just cost optimization?

Are there many of those current satellites running gpus and actually generating lots of heat?

Principally speaking, as much energy as satellite receives from solar panels it needs to send away - and often a lot of it is in the form of heat. So, the question is, how much energy is received in the first place. We currently have some quarter of megawatt of solar panels of ISS, so in principal - in principal - we know how to do this kind of scale per satellite. In practice we perhaps will have more smaller satellites which together aggregate the compute to the necessary lever and power to the corresponding level.

> We currently have some quarter of megawatt of solar panels of ISS

It's average outbut is like half of that though. So something the size of the space station, a massive thing which is largely solar panels and radiators, can do like 120kW sustained. Like 1-2 racks of GPUs, assuming you used the entire power budget on GPUs.

And we're going to build and launch millions of these.


> Also, they are restricted in how they use it, and defendents have rights and due process.

It's a nice sentiment, if true. ICE is out there, right now today, ignoring both individual rights as well as due process.


They were talking about western liberal democracies, though.

/s


This seems good? LFS isn't about building Linux the way Linux was built 40 years ago. It's about learning how to do today's Linux, from scratch. Steps that lead to a radically different build from most Linux distros are therefore off the mark, and not really educational to show how a modern Linux is built.

Lots of pearl clutching in here about it, tho


Byting at the bit?

I was a Just enjoyer for quite a while, until I tried mise. Mise does all the same things as just, but also has source/output tracking to avoid rerunning build jobs (like make), and also bundles runtimes like asdf. It's become my all-in-one task runner of choice.


What's that even mean



no one knows what it means, but it's provocative!!


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