I was always more of a fan of the Pennsylvania Railtoad than the competing New Youk Central.
It knows and demands blood.

I was always more of a fan of the Pennsylvania Railtoad than the competing New Youk Central.
It knows and demands blood.



This will go great with the “i eat solder” shirt Mastodon bullied influenced me into buying.
Fedi people have the best taste in clothing.


One huge issue is that LLMs do weird and stupid things differently than how humans do them.
If you’ve developed an eye for reading human-made changes, you’re not necessarily going to recognize new and surprising failure modes as easily. It’s literally harder than regular code review.
Humans with modern tooling, for example, rarely hallucinate field/class/method/object names because non-spicy autocomplete keeps them on the rails. LLMs seem much more willing to decide the menu bar is .menuBar and not .topMenu, probably because their training corpus is full of the former.
Many things still fall back to VGA, like old projectors.


Trying to sell consumers on “scaling solves everything” is going to be a hard sell.
If we look at general purpose computation, which had decades of actual scaling-solves-everything growth, you had two influences that made the message resonate with customers:
Clear existing applications where more power made the experience straightforward better. Your spreadsheet took an hour to recalculate at 8MHz and 20 minutes at 25MHz. A lot of the “bigger model” stuff is plateauing with marginal or spotty gains. If I feed another 5 Internets of data to ChatGPT, will that summarized email be that much better?
New applications that could be demoed on specialised low capacity hardware and scaled down to consumers as more power became available. Think of early CGI on hardware costing tens of millions, and now you can run Blender on a $149 laptop. Since most commercial AI plays are hosted services, there’s not much opportunity to tease that way anymore.


I figured SDF were the sort of people who would consider uptime a badge of honour.
I should probably be on Hexbear but I didn’t know of its existence at the time. Very problematic, my Xibuck direct deposits keep bouncing.
Transhumanity would be exciting if they had cool visions. I’d be all over raising a creche of draconic children.
But no, it’s just rich people gluing a Palm Pilot to their cerebrllum or doing a dance to shoo away the reaper.


The difference was that Amazon knew how to make a profit, but was reinvesting into infrastructure plays and bigger fish.
If they had to, they could have been a modestly profitable bookshop in 2002. AWS and monster logistics might not have developed to put them in the 13-digit club though.
Does any AI-centric play have that fundamental fallback? The services that seem to be most effective at direct monetization, the coding tools, are typically running at huge losses. If they raised costs to cover, precious few firms will pay basically the salary of a senior dev for an emulation of an enthusiastic junior dev with an affinity for footguns.
The less enterprise-focused products-- parasocial toys, image and video gen, will likely try to dip into consumer subs and advertising, but can that generate the cash volumes these platforms demand?


All the best firms continvoucly morg these days.
The “default” mode for a USB keyboard allows submitting 6 keys + modifiers. Some boards define nontraditional input descriptors that allow more, but that mode is not guaranteed to work in places like the BIOS menu or naive KVM switches.
To avoid phantom keypresses when you hit three keys in a “square” on the matrix, a diode can be placed in series with each switch so current can’t go through an “indirect” route.


There’s also an execution problem.
Truly knowing your customer might produce very different outcomes than the current compliance checkbox approach.
“I know Fred just sold his old car. The idea he suddenly has $12k in cash is not suspicious” or “Jane’s been talking about going to Montreal for momths. We should not block her card when it lights up there.”. That’s real KYC, but it requires human connection and human judgement, which doesn’t scale and doesn’t provide the right paperwork for demonstrating compliance with arbitrary mandates.


I’m pretty sure it’s actually those shoulder pads.
Wouldn’t the vision of immortality make the problem even more immediate for them?
“Oh, Holden Bloodfeast XIII, born 2259 might die at 16 from cancer from the envitonmental catastrophe I’m sowing… Meh.” rings different from “my own lust for immortality will be turned into scavenging a wasteland I wrought?”
xbps-install -Su usually when a regular xbps-install <package> fails due to cert issues every few months
I will say there was a period around the turn of the century where everything got very “My This, My That, My Everything” branded. I think after e-Everything but before iEverything. It felt like living in a world designed by a three-year-old in the “My” phase.


One thing that dawned on me… maybe CSD and some of the “new” window management paradigms (tiling, card style, etc.) are symbiotic. If you aren’t using the title bar for manipulating the window on a regular basis, you feel free to ignore or outright scramble it.


It creates a clear heirarchy of information too. The system owns the title bar, so any operations there are system operations.
At one point browsers did something similar for security awareness-- real permission prompts, etc. were set a few pixels over into the main UI to establist that they were “real” and not part of the page content.
Most of the time, we’re not so starved for pixels that we have tp be stealing from the title bar.
Hell, we lived thtough 640x480 desktops without even the cheat of hamburger menus.
I hate that Qt6 dropped the Motif theme. You can get a Kvantum theme that’s vaguely close, but it’s different enough that you can tell the difference (the old one had deeper bevels) and I tend to prioritize Qt5 if I can use it.


Minotaurs have some potential for badass imagery. Reverse Centaur sounds intentionally clunky.
Use a shared external source of randomness, like one of the shortwave “numbers stations”, to seed an agreed upon algorithm that simulates shuffling a deck and dispensing the cards. You’re running the same code on the same data, so you could show the cards you had seen after each hand to confirm everyone is in sync.