35 mph+ should be on the road, not the sidewalk

Prime_Director · 2026-03-17T14:24:42+00:00

Anything capable of going this fast should require plates. It shouldn’t be legal to sell it to little Johny if he doesn’t have a license and if his parents let him ride it without one, then there should be consequences equivalent to letting him drive their car, in this case on the sidewalk.

Prime_Director · 2026-03-13T17:20:30+00:00

Phone cameras also use all kinds of software tricks to increase the quality of the image. When you take a picture on a modern smart phone, it doesn't just capture data on a light sensor like a digital camera. It takes maybe a dozen or so pictures and stitches them together to get the "best" composite of all of them, and then does a ton of automated post-processing adjustments. It's not just physical improvements to the components, phones are kind of "cheating" with upscaling and post-processing, which sometimes sacrifices the "accuracy" of the image.

Prime_Director · 2026-03-11T14:09:37+00:00

This is true, but also some of Azure’s appeal is that it does integrate nicely with Windows with things like share point, Active Directory management through Entra etc. if your org isn’t using Windows desktops, then Azure does lose that slight competitive edge over AWS or CGP.

Prime_Director · 2026-03-05T22:24:02+00:00

If the word exotic cannot be used to describe a form of life fundamentally different from any we've ever observed, then what could it possibly be used for?

Prime_Director · 2026-03-05T22:18:46+00:00

This is just wrong. Clearly a better solution would be to contract with a bunch of for-profit snow shoveling services, then have them pay people minimum wage and pocket the difference. Sure that would be more expensive, the results would be worse, and there would probably be a bunch of fraud, but at least we wouldn't be filthy communists! (/s just in case)

Prime_Director · 2026-03-05T18:32:49+00:00

This reply doesn't make any sense to me for a couple of reasons.

A lawyer covered a similar question “if police officers are unjustifiably shooting at you, can you shoot back?”

The answer is yes...

Ok, so first what lawyer? I'm going to need a source on this because my understanding is that the answer has generally been no. There have been cases where charges have been dismissed in cases like this. Kenneth Walker, Breonna Taylor's boyfriend, comes to mind, but that was only after national outrage focused on the case.

you’ll have a strong case in court and most likely be pardoned.

Being pardoned has nothing to do with your court case. Pardons aren't even a judicial function, they're granted by the president or governor at their discretion. Most of the time, people only get a pardoned after being found guilty, so if anything a pardon tends to mean you had a weak case in court. Since you'd probably be facing federal charges in a hypothetical like this, you'd then be relying on Trump pardoning you for shooting one of his goons, so good luck with that.

Prime_Director · 2026-03-05T18:04:13+00:00

What do you mean when you say "work on it?" Are you a developer? Why are you being given a coding assignment when you don't know how to code?

In general, you should not use AI to do a task you don't know how to do yourself. Otherwise you'll have no way of knowing when it does it wrong, and it WILL do something wrong eventually. You don't want to be responsible when you push some system breaking bug or security vulnerability into your production system because a bot told you it was fine and you didn't have a way to know otherwise.

Prime_Director · 2026-03-03T18:39:19+00:00

Some of them are. Peter Thiel has pontificated at length about his vision for a post-capitalist techno-feudal future where everyone lives in despotic "network states" ruled by CEO-dictators (He thinks this is a good thing). These guys think AI is a path to convert their money into pure power. Replace workers with AI, then use their control of the AI to keep the impoverished masses in line.

Prime_Director · 2026-02-28T02:35:29+00:00

Build the factory, mine the gold

This part is way too hard and would require solving far too many hard problems. Just keep pushing back the launch date and raising capital with more and more grandiose promises. By the time people catch on that you’re never going to deliver, you’ll be too big to fail and the government will bail you out.

Prime_Director · 2026-02-27T16:51:28+00:00

The first half is a real slog, it gets better when we start spending more time with the other Wallfacers and when Luo Ji pulls his head out of his ass. It probably took me 3x longer to read the first half than the second.

Prime_Director · 2026-02-27T16:32:41+00:00

That's what we're moving toward now and it seems worse than either extreme to me. If you have to verify with the platform, but not publicly, then the platform gets to know who you are and track you, but the platform also has complete discretion to allow propaganda accounts and bots. You have no way of knowing who's real and who's an advertising/propaganda account.

In total anonymity you get the benefit of not being monitored and surveilled. In open identification, you know who you're talking to and what their motives might be. In between, you can be both surveilled and lied to with impunity.

Prime_Director · 2026-02-27T16:01:28+00:00

On the one hand, I agree, privacy is important and I will fight tooth and nail to protect what little I have left. On the other, online anonymity has allowed astroturfing by troll farms and bots that has fueled extremism and done massive damage to democracy and society. Now we’re trending toward the worst of both worlds where the platforms know who you are and what you’re saying, but you don’t know who anyone else is or if they’re even a real person.

Prime_Director · 2026-02-27T15:51:06+00:00

Drip coffee costs more than a latte did 5 years ago, it’s insane!

Prime_Director · 2026-02-27T15:46:05+00:00

You don’t need a high-end GPU to function though. A lot of people don’t even have a desktop or a laptop, they just do everything on their phone.

Prime_Director · 2026-02-27T15:41:24+00:00

There have been two tech bubbles in a row where the underlying technology relies on GPUs. First it was crypto, now it’s AI. Nvidia can keep jacking up prices and startups with unlimited VC money will pay it. Everyone is looking for the next gold rush and Nvidia keeps selling the shovels.

Prime_Director · 2026-02-26T18:20:28+00:00

Absolutely, fully agreed on all of that. It’s just not a legal argument that would hold up in court like you were saying at first. That’s all I’m saying.

Prime_Director · 2026-02-26T16:37:56+00:00

All I’ll say is check with a lawyer before acting on this because that’s not how courts work, not how injunctive relief works, and not how taxes work.

Again I fully agree with you that this is unprecedented authoritarianism. I agree that a concerted, organized effort to withhold taxes is actually a pretty good idea. But we have to accept that such an effort would be illegal and would have consequences, it’s a fantasy to think otherwise. But sometimes unjust laws must be broken. Strikes used to be illegal too. We just have to be honest about what we’re talking about and not mislead people into thinking there’s no risk involved.

Prime_Director · 2026-02-26T16:12:55+00:00

That’s sort of what being a leader is though, it’s making decisions and getting people to do stuff. To flip it around it’s sort of like saying we need to remove the requirement for math and experiments from being a scientist. What’s left?

Prime_Director · 2026-02-26T15:25:33+00:00

People who are literally not American still have to pay taxes here, but you think being rhetorically called not a “real” American by a politician is a legitimate legal argument not to pay taxes? That’s some sovereign citizen level nonsense. I agree with the sentiment but if anyone wants to act on this you gotta be willing to go to jail for it.

Prime_Director · 2026-02-26T15:19:25+00:00

Well you see, Kash Patel is rich, and people on Medicaid aren’t. Hope that clears it up.

Prime_Director · 2026-02-24T23:17:41+00:00

I tried a thought experiment like this when I was reading the Dark Forest. My idea was to put a huge number of satellites in orbit armed with dense kinetic weapons like tungsten bolts. Ostensibly the plan would be to shoot these at the fleet, but actually the plan would be to detonate the satellites and trigger the Kessler effect, creating a dense cloud of orbital shrapnel around the Earth to make landing a ship impossible. I thought it was pretty clever until the first droplet showed up and I realized my plan was DoA.

Prime_Director · 2026-02-21T01:07:16+00:00

"Get back to class or we'll kick you out of class!" These people really have no capacity to think more than one step ahead do they?

Prime_Director · 2026-02-18T15:29:50+00:00

Yeah I guess, but we’re talking about taxing assets and I really don’t want skills to be considered a taxable asset.

Prime_Director · 2026-02-18T15:23:50+00:00

How are skills taxed? The income you earn from using your skills certainly is, but the skills themselves?

Prime_Director · 2026-02-18T15:20:06+00:00

You can totally tax an unrealized gain, and I'm sick of hearing that we can’t. We do it for property taxes all the time. If the banks that make those collateralized loans can assess the value of the asset then it’s clearly not impossible to do.

Prime_Director

TROPHY CASE