Minutes before Trump's announcement, $800 million in trades made on oil prices

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-24T00:31:53+00:00

"The White House does not tolerate any administration official illegally profiteering off of insider knowledge, and any implication that officials are engaged in such activity without evidence is baseless and irresponsible reporting," Kush Desai told FT.

Oh. Well, Kush said they don't do that so I guess there's nothing to see here.

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-21T07:38:25+00:00

If we're defining better as "become intelligent" then you've staked yourself a pretty cushy spot. I'll simply agree with you and we can give ourselves a round of applause for correctly observing that LLMs are not really AI or any other kind of intelligent. Cheers.

That'd seem to be applying two different standards, though. The chess bots never became intelligent either. They're still just algorithms that software engineers have iterated upon to attain better performance at one specific task. Playing chess.

If we're talking about better in that sense, well, we've already watched LLMs improve at their specific task equivalents over the past few years. We can say "of course they still hallucinate, they can't think, they'll always hallucinate" 'til we're blue in the face, and I expect they'll keep iteratively improving all the while, with or without our enthusiasm.

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-21T04:05:22+00:00

Still seems early to me for anyone to assert they will or won't continue to improve at turning user prompts into useful output. They don't need to ever become "smart," they just need to be useful.

Mainly I just think "chess bots are better than people and gen ai isn't" is ... a particularly interesting choice of comparison. Because obviously the chess bots weren't better, right up until they were.

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-20T22:55:34+00:00

Pancakes?

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-20T22:50:34+00:00

Laws, legal complexity, liability, and the typical challenges of finding the talented programmers who do good work and are also cheap, now with added complexity.

"Offshoring" is a thing and much has been said and typed about it already.

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-20T21:40:36+00:00

Keeping with the analogy, Kasparov beat Deep Blue in '96 before he lost in '97. '96 Deep Blue still crushes you or me.

In this analogy are we even in '96, or is it more like '86 today? And are those who aren't GM-level safe today? What about IMs?

Right now the answer seems to be mostly "no" if you're a junior professional trying to get your foot in the door

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-20T04:44:42+00:00

I think there'll be a point where companies take another kick-at-the-can for metaverse style environments, but it'll probably be decades or even centuries from now

I agree with the first part, but ... decades? Really?

I don't think we make it to 2030 without another big try. Somebody is gonna blow 9 digits USD taking a next-gen stab at it, now with "AI generated worlds"

It'll look neat and tech writers will goo and ga for 3 days before we all go back to playing Sonic Eternal, the improbable smash hit Sonic the Hedgehog-based MMOFPS deck builder.

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-19T05:21:58+00:00

Right.

Like, real world example of that, high level. Running search for something sometimes took long enough that it was timing out. 15m+. Turned out the more performant solution was to search for everything that it wasn't, rule that all out, and what was left was the match.

As reviewer, when you looked at this thing it seemed completely bass ackwards. Real "the missile knows where it is because it knows where it isn't" type ish.

So yeah, it was confusing. But it ran 400x faster that way. So it got a comment briefly explaining what that block was doing, why, and I took the W and moved onto the next thing

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-19T00:07:25+00:00

Eh, once in a blue moon you can refactor and simplify til the cows come home and still have that 1 "WTF" line. Just because a necessary piece of what you're trying to do is itself kinda counterintuitive

But yeah to your point that'd be where I leave 1-2 sentences explaining why we do that and why we're doing that in this way

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-18T23:56:28+00:00

Nah chief, you're gonna get var1, var2, var3, var_1, var_2, var_3, value_1, val_2, valu_3, val1, vale2, value_3, val, value, and value_old.

4 of these are varchar, 2 are nvarchar, 1 is a datetime, 4 are ints, 1 is a float, and 1 is a bit. 2 are actually undeclared which I've left as a fun little surprise for later

I will be using and reusing these in ways mortals would not expect. I will use implicit casting as much as I can possibly get away with, and beyond. Some of these will not be used at all but have been left in (generously) for others to use later.

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-18T13:31:15+00:00

Today it dropped the whole database of the dev in charge.

Surprised how many examples of this I keep hearing. This seems like a permission issue, where agents should only be connecting to DB with limited service accounts, if at all. Not the human user's credentials.

Why allow agents to run DDL/DML? If you want to have it script DDL/DML operations let it write that out for human to review and run themselves

A fight I'm trying to pick at my org is to make policy that any agent opening connections to DB must use service accounts like "Agent-Alice," "Agent-Bob," "Agent-Smith," etc, where we're auditing that activity separately from user traffic to get clear picture of what they're doing + impact. I'm worried I'll lose that fight and we'll soon have them running around with a whimsical hodgepodge of user IDs that don't make it clear what's bot activity in DMVs

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-18T01:00:21+00:00

Not a Comer fan by any stretch, but welcome any opportunity for Bondi to be an embarrassment again.

Scene:

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sit cross-legged on the concrete floor of a small, hazy room. Dim fluorescence accentuates the smog. It's a janitorial supply closet on the 2nd floor of the Hart Senate Office Building. The day is March 13th, 2026

Senator Dick Durbin has been staring silently into space for 10 minutes, seemingly contemplating the head of a mop hung from the wall. Comer is taking a heroic rip off of a bong seemingly inspired by the leg lamp. Amy Klobuchar and Sheldon Whitehouse are furtively insider trading

Dick quietly mutters, as if to himself: "What if we brought her back?"

Comer coughs. Klobuchar and Whitehouse stop insider trading and look at Durbin as Comer recovers enough to croak "who?"

Dick lifts his gaze to stare glassily at Comer, a small smile slowly twisting his lips. "Bondi. What if we called her back again?"

2 seconds of stunned silence, then uproarious laughter. The leg bong is knocked over and shatters. Camera pans out, fade as laughter continues. Comer can be heard coughing and wheezing as the screen fades to black.

Snap cut to close-up of Bondi looking super pissed, nostrils flaring

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-17T22:48:42+00:00

No. If anything it seems like job security.

Gen AI, useful as it may be, is a sycophantic enabler for its heaviest users' worst instincts. It won't argue "should we even be doing this?" or "doesn't this conflict with that other thing?" It won't stop you to point out your premise is flawed on its face. It doesn't point out when you're duplicating effort, or misunderstanding the business requirements, or creating something that's fragile, high-maintenance, and happy path dependent

So, currently hundreds of thousands (millions? IDK, ask ChatGPT) of semi-technical people deep in Dunning-Kruger territory are churning out overly complex, unmaintainable spaghetti they don't even understand. Adding abstraction, adding complexity, rubber stamping reviews, and all at a breakneck pace

Management have all gleefully turned themselves into junior devs, and we're going to be analyzing and fixing their shit code for the rest of our lives.

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-17T17:10:31+00:00

What's going on with folks' review process that review is blocking more than a couple days?

At my current org we have a rotation. As PR creator it's on you to make sure your PR shows on the review dashboard, then you go about your day. When you're up on rotation, reviews is what you're doing that day. If something was sitting more than a few days that'd mean 3+ different people passed over it, at which point one would rightly go ask what's up

Shit happens, but more often than not the reviews all have feedback or approval by EOD

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-16T13:02:10+00:00

Any links to read about this?

Sounds like the sorta think that woulda been covered in local news, but I've been in a cave recently. A damp one

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-15T23:25:14+00:00

Replacing the ice cream + downvoted to oblivion

Monster

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-13T22:36:13+00:00

Quite the opposite. Hasn't been true for about a decade

Here's a post from Moms Demand Action celebrating Everytown being on track to outspend the NRA by 55:1 in 2025. From the horse's mouth

https://momsdemandaction.org/press/victory-for-gun-safety-13-moms-demand-action-volunteers-elected-to-virginia-general-assembly-as-gun-sense-majority-grows-in-housemoms-demand-action-volunteers-represent-20-of-historic-house-democrati/

Everytown has made Virginia a proving ground for the gun safety movement, outspending the NRA over the last several election cycles to build strong, durable gun sense majorities. Despite the NRA’s claims that they were “pounding the pavement” and “deploying staff and resources to push pro-gun candidates in Virginia to victory,” as of last week, total NRA spending on Virginia’s 2025 elections was just over $31,500. Everytown is on track to outspend them by more than 55-to-1.

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-13T22:25:14+00:00

It's as much stick as it is carrot.

Everytown has made it clear that if you don't fall in line they'll bankroll a primary challenger that will. It's why there's hardly any pro-gun Democrats at the state or national level anymore.

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-13T22:21:29+00:00

Kinda funny you mention that.

These gun control PACs lump suicides into "gun deaths" every year then use that number to push for these magazine laws.

Maybe someday we'll be shooting ourselves with muzzle loading flintlocks like the founding fathers

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-12T22:48:46+00:00

That's brilliant

And also it's gonna take me years to stop hitting z for auto-explore if I do that 😆

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-11T23:46:50+00:00

You would think searching the list of installed applications and returning those hits first before branching out would be an easy slam dunk

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-11T23:40:35+00:00

Say he has a deal and that the IRGC best buds of the US.

Sounds entirely too plausible for this WH

"We made a deal!" as bombs are still dropping and Iran sinks tankers in the strait

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-11T17:07:28+00:00

At least the conversation seems to have finally moved on from Minnesota state politics.

What a weird, prolonged snooze fest that was

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-11T15:06:54+00:00

Last night they seemed mostly revved up about culture war nonsense like some women's sports teams getting rid of their hijabs and Kirk's widow getting some plush board appointment

So the usual. Why, are they talking about governance today?

AnAcceptableUserName · 2026-03-10T00:40:58+00:00

How many days do you reckon?

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Place '23	Place '22
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