I would imagine there are countless cases where a mundane task requires human input in assembly, warehousing, … effectively Chinas whole export oriented economy. “Dark factories,” and the like, should only become easier. That’s not how the US orients itself, though.

From what I understand, China is also doing phenomenal on batteries and renewable energy sources. That’s going to make the cost of conducting research on Chinese infrastructure cheaper. Cheaper means more accessible, which accelerates innovation—right? I imagine this effect will become more evident over time.

Well, I’d argue that it’s similar to raping someone who is unconscious. Because the act of removing a condom is, in effect, a manner of violating personal autonomy without their knowledge. With aggregated rape, presuming that means forceful, the victim knows what’s happening.

I’d even stick by this assessment because, should the victim become aware during the act and express discontent — it can then become aggravated rape, as well. Hell, even if the victim doesn’t express anything… because a victim could notice the initial form, then become too scared to directly address the matter. That ought count as both forms still, right?

I would be in favor of distinguishing between the two forms, legally, if it meant that perpetrators can get hit with both charges at the same time.

Not to mention they’ve completely setup the infrastructure and legislature to perform IP theft at scale. Ref their Amazon Basics

I think I get where you’re coming from, but it’s still rape. You could categorize it, sure, but it should still have rape in the name just like aggravated rape does. Point being that some losers like to call it stealthing. But we already had to word for that stuff, “rape.”

Rape describes the action which took place. Deceit describes the manner in which it took place.

Honestly, I’ve had a rather interesting experience with AI. I was very adverse to LLM usage at first. Later I sort of figured out that I was more adverse to the energy around AI than I am AI itself.

I knew the models sucked at large tasks. Trying to get an edge on the matter though, I started asking myself, how can I get the model to perform better? I figured I could pass over the AI hate stage and get right into the AI professional stage… at least a head start.

So I began experimenting with local LLMs, LLM harnesses, and various governance tools like jai. I decided against Claude Code and Cortex because they’re provider specific — instead using OpenCode so that I can use whichever model I desire. Then I began building out a SKILL.md repository for tightly scoped tasks like change-review, security-analysis, refactor, architecture-review, grill-me, feature-design, …

I’m still thinking through some of the project needs. I want something that lets an agent work, while treating the agent as a kind of helpful adversary. You should be able to configure workloads that designate models, context, available tooling, skills, permissions, session length, inference level, acceptance criteria, and human-review stages. It would also allow for session switching, model switching, agent deliverable handoff to another agent, … not to mention, your VCS should know and respond appropriately if an agent ever pushes code. Don’t trust it by default.

These workloads should be version controllable, benchmarked, …

Anyway, a lot of that is speculative. Just where I’m at now, controlling context and skills manually, I’m already seeing much better results.

And no, I don’t have the AI do everything. I just find smarter ways to decompose “everything” into much smaller tasks that are easier to review and scrutinize.

But also, I push for local model usage in my organization. I don’t want my success to mean success for the AI companies. Fuck the AI companies.

I told my boss this:

• Right now the AI race has a lot of similarities to the dotcom bubble. The subject is packed with risky loans based on huge debts. Those huge debts are expecting to be paid as AI becomes profitable, but AI companies are largely loosing money.
• All those loans and infrastructure create the burden of sunk costs leading to a desperate need to succeed.
• The people feeling that desperation are the same people who own the largest marketing, news, and social media networks in the world.
• As a result, there’s a lot of hype around AI. A lot of “kool-aid,” and everyone wants you to drink it. If you drink the kool-aid, that means you’re also bought into the problem. You also need it to succeed, thus making their problem into your problem.

I explained to him that mature, professional use of AI is going to wind up following a similar path to data engineering. It’ll start with bullshit standards, “prompt engineers” and the like, but eventually SE disciplines are going to define who makes best use of AI. You’re going to have niche use cases for daemon AIs, local LLMs, and remote models. You’ll have stronger frameworks around session management, context management, agent permissions, …

It’s not going to be like this forever, “dump all your shit into our web upload and let the AI figure everything out in one go.” It’s going to become more fragmented, bounded, dare I say deterministic… orchestratable.

Then I told my boss, it would be better if he could frame his excitement around these future use cases… so we can skip the kool-aid stage and get right into the good stuff.

He agreed, until about a week passed. Then it was AI hype again.

Yeah. I’m currently in a situation where we picked up a new hire and she keeps dropping these problems on me. Whenever she runs into something she doesn’t understand, I get a Teams message:

Hi partofthevvvvvvvooooiiiicccceeeeee

It’s happening again 🤦‍♀️

The numbers don’t look right in SLT and the numbers matched yesterday, I don’t know…

They were fine yesterday, then they were all wrong all by themselves. Like magic.

Can you call real quick?

By this point, I’m already fucking irritated and I haven’t even responded yet.

• What do you mean by SLT? What the fuck is that, a dashboard?
• What are you comparing the numbers against to know they’re wrong?
• Did you create a minimal reproducible example in SQL, to demonstrate the issue?
• Did you halfsplit the problem by checking the Bronze tier data for the discrepancy?
• Did you open a ticket?
• And no, no I can’t fucking call. Please type the problem you’re actually having so that I can help you without spending three hours on the phone.

… she proceeds to create the ticket. MRE is a bunch of pseudocode referencing nonexistent tables with footnotes like, “this is the kind of tests we should check.” Oh, but you couldn’t be bothered to write the fucking test?

At a certain point, the ticket just falls into chaos:

• Her: The other team is comparing against their own dashboard, that’s how they know there’s a problem.
• Me: Please get the configuration options necessary to reproduce the calculations in their dashboard.
• Her: Here’s a list of the values they’re using to filter users.
• Me: That list counts 36. Your prior screenshot said the filter has 17 selections.
• Her: Jose said that’s the list of team members. The dashboard filters to team members.
• Me: Okay. I asked for the dashboard filters, not the team members.
• Her: Jose says they’re both the team members.
• Me: …

So after explaining (10x) that, to troubleshoot the dashboards discrepancy, we actually need the filter values from the dashboard… we end up on a 3 hour call, because none of this is fucking landing.

So here I am doing other people’s jobs while I’m already busy enough from my own. I get so burnt out sometimes.

Discipline is part of the recipe for brilliance. So often, I find myself hearing of people’s problems and I realize that the problem is a manifestation of your poor discipline. It’s not necessarily that you did something wrong, misconstrued requirements or misconfigured procedures, no… it’s that you didn’t actually try to read the error message, look at the docs, catalog your technical debt, make a phased rollout plan, decide on what tests you’ll need, write a well bounded scope, … no. These “brilliant” people are fully capable of doing this, they just aren’t disciplined enough

You just stuck your balls to the wall and said “boss, I think it’s cold outside.” How about you go open the fucking door and check?

/s… I got a little carried away there.

“I consent to protected sex” is not equivalent to “I consent to unprotected sex.”

Rape means here is no valid consent to the sexual act itself (or consent is obtained through force, coercion, incapacity, etc.).

The sexual act in question is unprotected sex. The man had no valid consent to the sexual act itself. Consent was not obtained. The woman’s bodily autonomy was violated.

He knew this when he tried to take it off. Otherwise he could have consentfully never used it.

IIRC, lime or something like that can be used as a carbon scrubber, but it’s not something that you’d want to do constantly and everywhere. Looked this up some time back.

Oh I’ve got some limes.

Soda lime.

Oh, well I can go get some of that.

Soda lime is a mixture of sodium hydroxide (NaOH) and calcium oxide (CaO).

Oh, so it’s not lime soda. It’s soda lime. Alright then… I’ve got some salt and milk.

best to ventilate to the outside and then run the exchanged air through a counterflow heat exchanger to preserve indoor temperature as much as possible.

Wait, I’m not supposed to drink it?

What can I say? I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was. To catch them all is my real quest, to train them is my cause.

The guy was like 17/18yo though

The basic concept wasn’t “there and then left” though, like I feel as though you’re implying. Games came with extra content like maps and guides, sure, but regardless you always bought and owned the game. This has been the case with board games, card games, other physical games, and even digital games since until recently.

Would you suffer the same emotional trauma if you had a leaky roof and your physical game collection got damaged and was unplayable?

That would be pretty upsetting, yes. I owned those, though. I very well may own that roof, too. There’s a lot to be said, considering a leaky roof may even be my own responsibility. You can loose access to a downloaded digital game, however, while maintaining the console fine.

Why would your favourite game that was still saved on your console not be playable but putting a disc with the same data on it somehow would be?

Because of how the licensing framework operates with digital games. It’s no longer in your control to protect your access. Governance of your access isn’t owned by you anymore. When a game is designed to require purchase validation, which many are and they can be changed to retroactively, but the validation server goes offline, you can’t play it without modifying the system—assuming you can modify the system.

You’re getting a little too upset over the potential that you might not be able to play some games you deleted

Games have become inaccessible in the past and will continue to do so. Requiring all games be virtual pretty much ensures all games will, sooner rather than later.

It also goes without saying, it’s a lot easier to protect a disk collection than it is a console. Consoles have many more moving parts that can fail, for obvious reasons.

I don’t think it’s too far fetched to be upset by this.

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It’s not just that experience in and of itself. That is only one experience derived from the lifetime benefit of ownership. You own the things that you enjoy. Hell, I remember playing the Wii… then I remember finding exploits in the Wii, providing replay value… then I remember learning how the Wii works in interesting ways… then I remember hacking the Wii… then I remember discovering a world of community content for hacked wiis… then I remember sharing that with my dad… then I remember regifting that Wii to my mother in law decades later…

Prior generations had the same benefits, be it with cars or whatever. The standards for ownership have been pretty consistent for consumers in the consumer market for centuries if not thousands of years. Suddenly, everything is being locked up and licensed back on fragile infrastructure you don’t own. That’s not tech advancing. That’s you loosing shit.

Sooner or later, people won’t be able to get physical medium at all for the games they enjoy. Favorites will be predestined to be a faded memory, not something you can choose to cherish over time (in a box somewhere, of course). Thats fragile.

What about when life gets busy and you’re suddenly out of touch with modern games? Want to bust out an oldie and kill some time? Tough luck… you never owned those old favorites you’d poured money and time into… That’s where it’s headed. I don’t call that advancement.

I don’t want games that aren’t going to end up in my attic within the decade, so that I can rediscover them in another half decade, and spend several hours trying to boot the legacy hardware to play them.

That whole experience of actually owning your stuff is gone, if you go digital. It’s not just the theoretical risk that they turn the server off. It’s the constant dependency on Sony servers, licenses, accounts, and digital catalog. Those dependancies precede even being able to look at what titles you own.

Do you remember finding your old WII as a kid? Jailbreaking it years after it became irrelevant, and showing your dad that you loaded all his favorite childhood games onto it for him? Contra, Russian Attack, … my son will never have that experience.

This is funny. Was it too hard to automate everything with AI, that you now need to explore other avenues?

Spanish government

• is different government
• in different timezone
• founded in different year
• and is a different economy

I think you found a hack, actually.

Aren’t there a whole bunch of interesting battery designs that can be worked into the land if you design the house to use it?

Like… (1) design the house to have solar, (2) solar power puts tension on giant underground springs, (3) slowly unwind springs for the power.

Or, lift a weight through some kind of gravity generator. Power generates at night when the weight falls back down.

I don’t know… I’m just assuming there’s got to be pretty neat designs when you figure that you’ve got a giant plot of land and only need enough power for a home on top of it. Do we really need to rely on giant chemical battery manufacturers?