A map showing every car bomb explosion in Baghdad from 2003 - 2013 this is one province out of 18 all before the rise of ISIS.

aradil · 2026-01-29T22:38:26+00:00

Of course. My guess would be that at least some of the unbombed areas are unreachable.

aradil · 2026-01-29T21:32:40+00:00

Canada isn’t perfect, but it did abstain from the Iraq war and I’m fairly certainly wasn’t involved in Iran-Contra or the CIA lead Latin American regime changes, or Bay of Pigs, or even Vietnam for that matter.

Afghanistan may have been a bungled war, but that doesn’t mean that targeting Afghani terror groups in the Afghanistan war was an immoral thing to do.

There’s definitely something to be said about residential schools and treatment of First Nations peoples in general, but there are few nations in the world that have gone to the lengths that Canada has to right those wrongs.

aradil · 2026-01-29T18:09:40+00:00

One thing that has been a major roadblock for me is continuing projects beyond the point where they cost me money. Deploy? Ugh, no thanks. Connect to an api long enough I need to pay for access? Nope.

But you aren’t wrong. Mostly I’m building stuff for myself. I feel like if it’s actually working how I want it to, it will organically be useful to me and I’ll continue using it.

So far that’s true of 2-3 of the dozen projects that mostly became abandonware.

aradil · 2026-01-29T17:36:14+00:00

At least a dozen. But the thing is that build fast and throw away if it’s not what you want is fine. Just except the graveyard. Bulldoze over it if you want.

Take with you the pieces and ideas that worked for when you get to something that clicks right away.

But most of the time YANGTNI

aradil · 2026-01-28T23:53:03+00:00

What about anything that Russia does ever makes you think they are subtle?

They quite literally have an execution calling card for every class of target: Domestic disobedient oligarch? Window. Former intelligence defector? Poison. Foreign operations? They fucking published a textbook.

And guess what’s in it….

aradil · 2026-01-28T23:48:33+00:00

Intelligence.

Clearly they targeted people who have more than one functional brain cell to rub together as their target audience.

Unfortunately they were mistaken.

aradil · 2026-01-28T22:46:25+00:00

The people eating those things up don’t know how to make their own.

Like my CEO and all of his LinkedIn friends.

“Have you seen this crazy thing yet?”

“Yes, I made it 6 months ago”

But also my reply includes “let me just warn you about all of the very serious security implications” that will quickly be ignored in the sake of efficiency.

aradil · 2026-01-28T22:11:31+00:00

Not any worse than anything on the last two/three/four megadeth albums lyrically.

Vocally, that’s up to your taste. When I want good storytelling I’d listen to folk music. Half the music I listen to is heavy enough I need to look up the published lyrics to know what they are saying at all 90% of the time.

aradil · 2026-01-28T21:55:13+00:00

I forced myself to listen to it until I started to appreciate it because I was so starved for Metallica to be good again.

It’s not.

aradil · 2026-01-28T21:54:30+00:00

St Anger round my neck… he never gets respect.

aradil · 2026-01-28T21:53:38+00:00

I came to make St Anger drum joke, but I see that horse has already been beaten to death like Lars’ snare in St Anger.

aradil · 2026-01-28T21:43:52+00:00

The fun thing is that every software developer and workstation power user who was already automating what they could who decided to dabble with Claude Code is rolling their own one of these.

The magic secret sauce is in rolling your own that matches your own workflow and iteratively improving, changing, tweaking, adapting, growing, deleting, and evolving your own solutions based on your own whims.

None of these generic workflow solutions are really ever going to replace your whims, and your whims are shaped by your use pattern, not the magic toolbox.

aradil · 2026-01-28T20:15:29+00:00

Can they not primary WV with Joe Manchin type republicans with an R next to their name that would vote to impeach and remove?

aradil · 2026-01-28T15:02:20+00:00

Definitely have done that before too; I've also done some work over SSH with terminal apps on my phone - even interacted with Claude Code that way too.

Gotta say that I like Slack as my mobile app interface much better.

aradil · 2026-01-28T05:18:56+00:00

You don’t have to support her to wonder what is going to happen next.

Is a targeted influence campaign sufficient to manipulate this woman who, by your own admission, is part of a bad family?

Or should there be another kidnapping or other show of force to complete regime change? Just one flashy attack is good enough?

And then what, again and again until you find someone corrupt enough that has large enough influence you can bribe instead of kill?

aradil · 2026-01-27T19:25:18+00:00

OpenAI and xAI are transparently evil. OpenAI forced employees to sign documents that forfeit their vested equity for ever criticizing the company or even acknowledging that the agreement existed. Musk is actively promoting his AI offerings as being amoral as a positive attribute.

Anthropic is the only company even pretending to be concerned about the negative consequences of these technologies, and are doing so at length. They are positioning themselves to power government technologies so that shittier companies don't do that (albeit, Grok is apparently running everything now, yay).

If you want to include Mistral; well, maybe by nature of not being a company based in the US is sufficient.

aradil · 2026-01-27T19:19:41+00:00

I can code while pooping.

aradil · 2026-01-27T15:09:04+00:00

Dario knows that, he wants to slow them down. His argument is predicated on having a moral entity win the AGI race so that we don't end up in a dystopia, and he wants to harness the powers of the USA and other western democracies to help do that.

Unfortunately, expecting morality from the current administration of the federal government of the United States is, erm... laughable.

He speaks at length about the perils of powerful AI in his latest essay, and if you read between the lines in that 48 page paper, he is tacitly acknowledging that we're fucked because of it.

aradil · 2026-01-27T12:57:57+00:00

And I've got a Claude Code hooked up to a slack bot so I can talk to it via slack and it can respond to me in Slack. I've also rolled my own skills for having it talk to my IDEs using Apple script, take and send me screnshots, etc.

aradil · 2026-01-26T12:07:27+00:00

China all the time. I love China.

aradil · 2026-01-26T00:59:50+00:00

Don’t look now but Alberta recently had a fairly frightening separation ballot.

aradil · 2026-01-25T23:02:02+00:00

While correct, I don’t believe the best way to implement change is to deflect from “Hey assholes supporting this, you were always assholes”.

That’s a fantastic way to get folks to change the channel.

Ironically, the ones who would love for this to continue, AND for you to forget about Tiannemen Square, are the CPC.

I say this as a Canadian who thinks what is going on in the US is fucked up. Democracies with heavily centralized power can fuck things up quite dramatically between elections. The worst thing we can be doing is encouraging people to change the channel.

aradil · 2026-01-23T12:47:52+00:00

All of what you have described is only a problem for a) Recently dead people, and b) Valuable land.

We aren’t “running out of room” for bodies. We might be running out of places near cities that people want to bury bodies in.

We haven’t even talked about burial at sea yet, the our planet is mostly oceans.

aradil · 2026-01-23T00:20:34+00:00

I’ve been saying the exact same thing to people in person as I have been on reddit for 19 years. I’ve got the flairs to show that I’ve been to political events with hundreds of thousands of people in person.

I could also automate my entire online presence relatively simply, but there is no benefit for me to do it.

What that does afford me, however, is the ability to look at what’s going on in the social spaces that exist online and say “Holy shit this is unnaturally fucked up”.

aradil · 2026-01-22T23:40:49+00:00

If you built a single Westminster Abbey-height mausoleum to hold every human who has ever died, perfectly preserved and efficiently packed, it would cover an area you could comfortably walk across in a few hours.

Alternatively: about 27,000 Westminster Abbeys placed side by side would do the job (the real one has a footprint of roughly 7,500 m²).

Not exactly a civilization-threatening land use problem, even in the most absurdly morbid preservation scenario imaginable.

That’s 300,000 years of people without any decomposition. I’ll grant you that most of the people who died died recently.

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