No, not the AI. Just the owner
of means of production like AI.
The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is, in my view, one of the fundamental problems of our time.
I'm CTO at a vertical SaaS company, paired with a product-focused CEO with deep domain expertise. The thesis doesn't match my experience.
For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. Our end users can't. Their current "system" is Excel. The big enterprises that employ them have thousands of devs, but two of them explicitly cloned our product and tried to poach their own users onto it. One gave up. The other's users tell us it's crap. We've lost zero paying subscribers to free internal alternatives.
I believe that agents are a multiplier on existing velocity, not an equalizer. We use agents heavily and ship faster than ever. We get a lot of feedback from users as to what the internal tech teams are shipping and based on this there's little evidence of any increase in velocity from them.
The bottleneck is still knowing what to build, not building. A lot of the value in our product is in decisions users don't even know we made for them. Domain expertise + tight feedback loop with users can't be replicated by an internal developer in an afternoon.
An PWA primarily for my wife and my daughter. They can order their hot chocolate and their coffee as if they were going to grab something at a fancy café downtown, but instead it's at home and I'm the barista. It is quite nice to have for when my wife comes back from work and want something specific, or when we are waiting for the visit of a few friend, they can order exactly the available beverages and everything is ready when they're here.
It was also a good playground for me to implement Web Push notifications (to never miss new orders).
It's a basic Nuxt 3 app with Appwrite as the backend with rough edges, but much enough for our household use !
According to the Financial Times, Roomba has sold more than 40 million robotic devices, most of them robotic vacuum cleaners.[a]
Many of those vacuum cleaners have cameras, can move around on their own, and are connected to the Internet. If they're taken offline, they stop working. Many have microphones too.
The new Chinese owner will get control of a network of tens of millions Internet-connected, autonomously mobile, camera/microphone-equipped robots already inside people's homes and offices.
More than 40 million is a lot. For comparison, the US has ~132 million households.
> There were unspoken rules, commandments passed down from teacher to student, year after year. The first commandment? Thou shalt begin with a proverb or a powerful opening statement. “Haste makes waste,” we would write, before launching into a tale about rushing to the market and forgetting the money. The second? Thou shalt demonstrate a wide vocabulary. You didn’t just ‘walk’; you ‘strode purposefully’, ‘trudged wearily’, or ‘ambled nonchalantly’. You didn’t just ‘see’ a thing; you ‘beheld a magnificent spectacle’. Our exercise books were filled with lists of these “wow words,” their synonyms and antonyms drilled into us like multiplication tables.
Well, this is very interesting, because I'm a native English speaker that studied writing in university, and the deeper I got into the world of literature, the further I was pushed towards simpler language and shorter sentences. It's all Hemingway now, and if I spot an adverb or, lord forbid, a "proceeded to," I feel the pain in my bones.
The way ChatGPT writes drives me insane. As for the author, clearly they're very good, but I prefer a much simpler style. I feel like the big boy SAT words should pop out of the page unaccompanied, just one per page at most.
> I even checked one of his responses in WhatsApp if it's AI by asking the Meta AI whether it's AI written, and Meta AI also agreed that it's AI written
I will never understand why some people apparently think asking a chat bot whether text was written by a chat bot is a reasonable approach to determining whether text was written by a chat bot.
IMO this is a policy change that can Break the Internet, as many archived/legacy sites on old-school certificates may not be able to afford the upfront tech or ongoing labor to transition from annual to effectively-monthly renewals, and will simply be shut down.
And, per other comments, this will make LE the only viable option to modernize, and thus much more of a central point of failure than before.
But Let's Encrypt is not responsible for this move, and did not vote on the ballot.
Permanent identifiers should not carry data. This is like the cardinal sin of data management. You always run into situations where the thing you thought, "surely this never changes, so it's safe to squeeze into the ID to save a lookup". Then people suddenly find out they have a new gender identity, and they need a last final digit in their ID numbers too.
Even if nothing changes, you can run into trouble. Norwegian PNs have your birth date (in DDMMYY format) as the first six digits. Surely that doesn't change, right? Well, wrong, since although the date doesn't change, your knowledge of it might. Immigrants who didn't know their exact date of birth got assigned 1. Jan by default... And then people with actual birthdays on 1 Jan got told, "sorry, you can't have that as birth date, we've run out of numbers in that series!"
Librarians in the analog age can be forgiven for cramming data into their identifiers, to save a lookup. When the lookup is in a physical card catalog, that's somewhat understandable (although you bet they could run into trouble over it too). But when you have a powerful database at your fingertips, use it! Don't make decisions you will regret just to shave off a couple of milliseconds!
Props to them for actually updating their status page as issues are happening rather than hours later. I was working with claude code and hit an API error, checked the status page and sure enough there was an outage.
This should be a given for any service that others rely on, but sadly this is seldom the case.
As somebody who's looked in to this a bit, the deeper I dug the more I ultimately moved toward the conclusion (reluctantly) that indeed big corporations are the baddies. I have an instinct to steel-math both sides, but not every issue has two compelling sides to it...
One example of them clearly being the baddies is them paying people to social media astroturf to defend the roundup pesticide online [2].
>What is the expected compensation for participants? Compensation varies based on experience level and agency placement. Annual salaries are expected to be in the approximate range of $150,000 to $200,000. Benefits include health insurance, retirement plans, paid time off, and eligibility for performance-based awards.
>Tech Force will primarily recruit early-career technologists
So "early-career" but they're going to get paid GS-14/15 pay[1] in DC? New grad engineers in DC are going to be GS-7/9 at best. This is either a blatant lie, or created by someone who has no idea of how federal pay works (or both).
As an aside, I was a fed for >10 years and left last year for industry but stay in touch with friends still working federal jobs. Before this administration recruiting was extremely difficult and candidate quality was low. I've heard that it's nearly impossible now and in the last 18 months they've only been able to hire a single person. Federal jobs used to be considered stable, with good benefits, but low pay. Now they're unstable, the current administration is actively working to make benefits worse, and the pay is still really low.
Simplification of my digital self. Removed most of my online accounts. Removed all my VPS's. Removed most apps from my phone except core ones. Cancelled a lot of online subscriptions.
In the real world finally moved everything to USB-C. Gave all my old cables away. I have two chargers in my home and a handful of C to C cables. Everything connects to everything now.
Home is now downgraded to a dumb home. Lights work on physical toggles. No hubs or sensors anywhere. Heat and AC is with a dumb panel on the wall.
Thousands of systems, from Google to script kiddies to OpenAI to nigerian call scammers to cybersecurity firms, actively watch the certificate transparency logs for exactly this reason. Yawn.
We have the best mid-air collisions. Noone does it better, or so people tell me. We don't do sleepy silent disappearances over the Bermuda Triangle, that's SAD!! We blow em up, BIGLY, in someone else's airspace. A great PRESIDENT knows how to WIN at mid-air collisions. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
"The campaigns with the biggest apparent international reach were under the name of an organisation called Chance Letikva (Chance for Hope, in English) - registered in Israel and the US."
Chance Letikva is registered with the US IRS as a charity. They've filed a Form 990. Location is Brooklyn, NY. [1] Address is listed. It's a small house. It's also incorporated as CHANCE LETIKVA, INC. in New York State. Address matches. Names of officers not given. There's one name in the IRS filing, listed as the president.
Web site "https://chanceletikva.org" has been "suspended". Domain is still registered, via Namecheap.
Some on the ground digging and subpoenas should reveal who's behind this.
Tractors largely replaced human labour in farming about a hundred years ago. Should we have started taxing tractors?
I really have difficulties seeing AI as anything else than yet another type of machinery. If your argument is "but it's replacing ALMOST ALL human labour" - well, the same argument was valid for tractors a hundred years ago (when almost everyone was employed in agriculture).
I think that the real power of spaced repetition is not in flashcard applications like this. It is in behavior modification.
Let's take a real example to show how this works.
August 19, 2025. My wife called me in to help her decide what to do about a dentist that she thought was ripping her off. A couple of quick suggestions later, and she went to being mad at me about not having heard the problem through before trying to fix it badly. As soon as she was mad, I immediately connected with how stupid what I did was, and that this never goes well. But, of course, it was now too late.
Not a mistake I was going to make for a while. But, given my history, a mistake I was bound to make again.
I changed that. This time I stuck this into my spaced repetition system. Each time the prompt comes up, I remember that scene, holding in mind how it important it is to emotionally engage, not offer quick suggestions, and be sure to listen to the full problem in detail. It takes me less than 30 seconds. Reviewing this prompt, for my whole lifetime, will take less than 15 minutes of work. Just typing this up this time takes more work than I'll spend on it in the next several years.
This mistake hasn't happened since. Not once. And I believe it won't again in my life.
I have literally changed dozens of such behaviors. My wife says that it is like there is a whole new me. She can't believe the transformation.
All it took is looking at spaced repetition as general purpose structured reinforcement, and not as just a way to study flashcards.
One of the dark consequences of America losing its city-upon-a-hill aspirations is we're less able to effectively call out evil abroad. Jimmy Lai should not have been allowed to this quietly.
You should consider dropping that instinct. If you look into how corporations have behaved historically you'd assume evil until proven innocent. Especially US corps.
This is the cost of complacency. They were ahead for so long then the likes of Roborock just left them in the dirt. I remember the first time I tried one of the Roborock devices, and until then I have been a long time Roomba user (like, 20 years). I just couldn’t believe how much better it was. And iRobot just stubbornly refused to iterate on their fundamental products.
A decade of “personal cloud box” attempts has shown that the hard part isn’t the hardware, it’s the long-term social contract. Synology/WD/My Cloud/etc all eventually hit the same wall: once the company pivots or dies, you’re left with a sealed brick that you don’t fully control, holding the most irreplaceable thing you own: your data. If you’re going to charge an Apple-like premium on commodity mini-PC hardware, you really have to over-communicate what happens if Umbrel-the-company disappears or changes direction: how do I keep using this thing in 5–10 years without your cloud, your app store, your updates?
The interesting opportunity here isn’t selling a fancy N100 box, it’s turning “self-hosted everything” into something your non-technical friend could actually live with. That’s mostly about boring stuff: automatic off-site backup that isn’t tied to one vendor, painless replacement/restore if the hardware dies, and clear guarantees about what runs locally vs phoning home. If Umbrel leans into being forkable and portable across generic hardware, it has a shot at being trusted infrastructure instead of just another pretty NAS that people regret once the marketing site goes dark.
What really worries me is that I keep hearing "cooling is cheap and easy in space!" in a lot of these conversations, and it couldn't be farther from the truth. Cooling is _really_ hard and can't use efficient (i.e. advection-based air or water cooling) approaches and are limited to dramatically less efficient radiative cooling. It doesn't matter that space is cold because cooling is damned hard in a vacuum.
The article makes this point, but it's relatively far in and I felt it was worth making again.
With that said, my employer now appears to be in this business, so I guess if there's money there, we can build the satellites. (Note: opinions my own) I just don't see how it makes sense from a practical technical perspective.
Introducing a separate charge specifically targeting those of your customers who choose to self-host your hilariously fragile infrastructure is certainly a choice.. And one I assume is in no way tied to adoption/usage-based KPIs.
Of course, if you can just fence in your competition and charge admission, it'd be silly to invest time in building a superior product.
The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is, in my view, one of the fundamental problems of our time.