IHeartBadCode

Go in reverse of so much that’s come before the court should be grounds for most of them coming under impeachment.

Like that should kind of be a rule. If any court made up of at least 40% the prior overturns case law more than 50 years old absent a constitutional amendment or Federal law laying the foundation for such an overturn, should be brought before the Congress on impeachment inquiry.

Like the whole way they’ve redefined the 2nd within the last ten years that overturned 200 years of prior understanding, that alone should have most of them barred from federal office for the rest of their lives. And how they redefined it without so much as a Federal law to point to or a hint of a Constitutional amendment suggesting the way they’ve made it now.

A literal garbage court sits the bench. What’s worse is that one day the lean in the court will change and Republicans will cry about judges legislating from the bench.

HVAC suffers from loss over distance. Large distances like what’s between the western US deserts and the eastern seaboard would suffer large losses to heat via HVAC.

HVDC can solve this, but that requires an investment into this kind of infrastructure. Moving the batteries is using a preexisting infrastructure because the assumption is that new infrastructure won’t be upgraded. We will build new so long as a ROI has quick turn around, another assumption here being that long term profit planning won’t happen so everything needs to be planned to have profiting within two or less years. But we won’t build new if usage of that new happens a decade later.

We could totally send the electrons over, but sending the batteries over is adding a bunch of assumptions that people won’t want to do massive investments in basic infrastructure to facilitate that, so we’ve got run with what we have that can ensure profits in a fairly rapid pace before investors bore of it or the next election cycle tosses everything in chaos.

Gustafson said in a statement following her defeat. “What we have to say about giving birth and everything related to it is secondary to whatever the men of the Republican Party want.”

Any woman in support of the GOP is asking for this outcome in the end. Subjugation at the heel of their man. Someone elsewhere had mentioned Uncle Tom’s, folks who kowtow to those who would enslave them in desperate acts for a glimmer of affection. Fundamentalist see people as pawns, not friends, not allies, not equals, but as tools to further their agenda. That’s why towards the end, Uncle Tom was flogged to death by the very people whom he sought to curry a modicum of favor.

Similar story is Phil Valentine, mocked the COVID virus, derided any notion of a vaccine. Did exactly as his Republican peers did and said. Wanted nothing more than to kiss up to Trump and had bigger aspirations in the political sphere than his talk radio show provided. Got sick from COVID, spent the remainder of his life suffering to catch a breath alone in a hospital. There was a big moment of silence and remembrance on the radio the next day, by the end of the week it was “Phil who?” The people who he sought to have elevate his status in life forgot about him the second his situation turned unfavorable to their agenda.

Today, outside of his family, the majority of people who remember him are the exact people he mocked and taunted on his radio show. And it’s not a remembrance of who he was that those people remember him, it’s a cautionary tale. One doesn’t get “into the group” with fundamentalist. You simply exist in the group until your utility runs out and then you are removed from the group as demonstration of the group’s resolve.

Another thing is that Uncle Tom was eventually flogged to death by the people whose admiration he so desperately sought to win.

Fundamentalist only see things in measures of what helps them obtain what they want. Once the utility of someone is over, they have zero compunction with turning on the person that helped them and riving them to nothingness as demonstration.

I think the two of you are focusing on either end of this and not really seeing the bigger picture.

China absolutely (stole / acquired) all the technology they have for solar, EV, and grid based storage. They have literally innovated 0% in this particular industry. I don’t think there’s any debating this aspect.

At the same time, China has pour billions into domestic production of solar panels, lithium and sodium batteries, vehicle production, and grid based storage solutions the likes that no other country has even remotely attempted. They recent demonstrated cheap sodium based 10MWh storage systems that can be built using seawater sodium. Something that California makes a shit ton of in their desalination plants, that they currently just shove the salt off as waste byproduct.

Like, if we wanted to, that kind of thing that China just demonstrated, we could be building GWh level storage systems for 10% the cost of a 1 GWh nuclear facility strictly off a byproduct that California distinctly doesn’t want and is literally paying people to take away. They could literally flip a cost into a revenue stream, but we don’t because “reasons”. We could literally have large batteries charged in Utah, and then use rail to move the sodium based batteries into the Eastern sections of the US, using literally the same infrastructure that we use today to move the tons of coal we move around for the TWh of power we generate. We could be doing this today. But we don’t because many nations just buy the arguments politicians feed them, or “it’s complicated”. And then there’s China demonstrating at small scale that it’s doable. So instead we say “oh well it wouldn’t scale” or “oh well you stole all that tech” because apparently our pride is more important than climate change.

The thing is, yes China has not committed to educating their population into novel development of these technologies. But at the same time they are deploying this stuff at rates every other developed nation has said they’d like to try and do that one day off in the future. Or can’t do right now because their hands are tied.

For the folks pointing at China as the enemy, fine. I’m not going to debate it. But there’s still things to learn from what they are doing with that stolen technology. Do we need to cozy up to them? Nah. But they’re showing off that grid based storage at scale and cheap is a thing even though people like France and the US say that such a thing is not possible at this time. They are showing LFP is viable if you’re willing to take an initial domestic loss to invest in the infrastructure, something the US citizens know but keep saying “well oil interest are holding us back”. No, there’s only a few dozen oil execs, there over a three hundred million non-oil execs. It’s a lack of will power.

Like most western nations keep coming up with excuses for delaying EV and green technology pushes and China keeps showing many of the excuses given to be false. And we know they’re false. We know the expectation of no less than $36k USD for an EV is some bullshit that car companies are pulling to offset all the baggage they have from leaving ICE. We know we could have charge stations every 100 miles on the Interstates, but we don’t because oil companies don’t want to lose their investments in the infrastructure they’ve got right now.

We know the reasons being given by our political and industry leaders are all bullshit. China is over there showing IRL how bullshit they are. Yeah, they stole everything they have, but at the same time all this “oh we couldn’t possibly do that here in the US” is shown for the BS it is, that we already know it to be, in China.

I mean, great, we’re all very smart people. Awesome. What good is that awesome smartness if we keep letting dumb fucks in politics pander off dumb excuses for why we don’t get to enjoy any of the stuff that awesome smartness provides? What good is being innovative if corporations keep handicapping that innovation to ensure they have a steady stream of revenue?

I mean yeah, let’s call China out of the bullshit they pull. But I mean, let’s not forget all the damn windows we’ve broken ourselves in our glass house here.

When the blind guy does the routing on the PCB.

you could never have a place that full of screens without ads being everywhere

I audibly laughed.

Remember those ads long ago from Microsoft where everything was a to the edge display? And your taxi cab window was also a display? And the sidewalk was a display? And some random piece of plastic was also a display? And your fucking desk, surprise, is also a display but also one you type on! And so on…

Good times.

I mean all of that looked cool I’m sure at the time, but all of that would be horrible to use, structurally unsound, and require device interactions unheard of.

Unfortunately, this patent is likely just an echo of a project that will never see the light of day

This patent is likely a “we would love to use this to sue someone remotely trying anything that might look like this, but isn’t someone who has a legal team that could convince a judge to send us home with our tails between our legs.” This kind of shit gets pulled by Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, et al all of the time. It’s to ensure their continued ability to keep new entries in the industry away.

This kind of highlights how AI isn’t the issue. The reason there’s not a robot that does your laundry and dishes is because the margin for such a robot wouldn’t make anyone insanely rich, just well off. Especially in say the consumer market. Getting rid of say 50% of your employees and making the other 50% “Prompt Engineers” without any pay increase provides an instant two fold increase in profit.

The issue is how much money can a particular tool make someone. Before Photoshop came around, the larger magazines used to have at least three dozen airbrush and cover artist on staff, not to mention the photographers, film processors, etc… Today, with Photoshop, those six to seven dozen jobs have been consolidated into maybe a dozen folks. Some head of the magazine got to keep churning out stories with 80% less staff. It wasn’t that Photoshop is good or bad, it was that someone saw dollar signs and ran with it.

Companies pay for technology with the expectation of paying it off down the road. So if 10 licenses of Photoshop cost $X, but they save Y number of employees * $r/yr rate of pay, then the licenses pay for themselves down the road. Consumer markets aren’t like that. If a consumer has $X and something costs more than that money on-hand, there’s just not a “pay for it down the road” for consumers. At least one that doesn’t come with a lot of headache and trouble down the road as well.

The thing is, companies are going to use any excuse they can to fire people, especially senior staff people. If the technology doesn’t work, oh well, they hire younger and newer folks back at greatly reduced pay compared to the folks who got laid off. AI is just the most recent MacGuffin in that shuffle and they’re willing to put ludicrous amounts of money into that thing because “down the road, one way or another, it’ll save us cash”. That’s why there’s no dish washing or laundry robot, there’s no serious money to be made from it. But over-hyped AI that could provide the same kind of massive layoff benefit that say Photoshop or CGI provided, these C-Staff folks can not shovel enough money into that fire.

Usually, there’s a coupon that lets you get a medium 1 topping pizza and a stuffed cheese bread (+1 free dip), for $7 each item. That said, I absolutely recommend making your own pizza dough if you have the time for it. Way better tasting pizza.

Oracle is just adopting the mafia mentality

What do you mean “just”? This has always been Oracle.

But, but, that would be … ˢᵒᶜⁱᵃˡⁱˢᵐ

GASP

How about cutting foreign defense spending

We could, but remember that a lot of that defense spending are people in the US’ job. About 2M would be on the block for chopping.

Or getting rid of insanely wasteful farm subsidies

I mean don’t stop there. Especially at just that point. Relax the restrictions for crop insurance. Reduce the barriers between farmers and grocers. Literally break up the giant grocery stores. Kroger’s is a fucking bitch ass. One of the reasons we have to pay massive subsidies is because there’s distinctly a lack of a free market in the farming and grocery business.

And while we’re at it. Tell John Deere to fuck off.

Refusing a subpoena by Congress isn’t what Bannon is hoping for. If you believe that Congress is investigating is outside their scope, it’s too political to be a lawful investigation, you still have to answer the subpoena and then testify under oath your belief as such. This was something pointed out in Watkins.

So the only way SCOTUS can overturn the conviction is finding some new ability to ignore a subpoena, which I’m not sure how they can justify a new power without it also coming off as SCOTUS removing Congressional power, a clear violation of the separation of power.

You can walk into a hearing and literally sit there and not answer. You can indicate that they’re full of themselves. Your 5th Amendment right overrides government oversight in personal matters. They were seeking Bannon’s involvement in the Jan. 6 attack, he literally could have gotten up there, gave them the middle finger, indicated his fifth amendment right, and sat there with arms crossed the rest of the time. And he totally could have had SCOTUS get him off scotfree with a Watkins argument, the end.

But if you DO NOT even fucking go, well you’ve just shot yourself in the foot. Because now, SCOTUS has to invent something to save your dumbass, and reasons to invent a new thing that could potentially backfire are based on how much it’s worth it to them to do such.

Literally guy could have done all kinds of things to make this easier for him. Just not showing was quite possibly the dumbest way to do it.

Maybe that’s faulty, as I haven’t tried it myself

Nah perfectly fine take. Each their own I say. I would absolutely say that where it is, not bothering with it is completely fine. You aren’t missing all that much really. At the end of the day it might have saved me ten-fifteen minutes here and there. Nothing that’s a tectonic shift in productivity.

Similar story, I had a junior dev put in a PR for SQL that gets lat and long and gives back distance. The request was using the Haversine formula but was using the km coefficient, rather than the one for miles.

I asked where they got it and they indicated AI. I sighed and pointed out why it was wrong and that we had PostGIS and that’s there is literally scalar functions available that will do the calculations way faster and they should use those.

There’s a clear over reliance on code generation. That said, it’s pretty good for things that I can eye scan and verify that’s what I would have typed anyway. But I’ve found it suggesting things I wouldn’t remotely permit to things that are “sort of” correct. I’ll let it pop on the latter case and go back and clean it up. But yeah, anyone blind trusting AI shouldn’t be allowed to make final commits.

In the tech industry (likely every industry but I wouldn’t know) we could make a 200 level course in college that covers tech that’s been over hyped. A few choice hits like:

• Crypto
• Blockchain
• Quantum
• Cloud
• WS-I
• LAMP
• XML
• P2P
• WORA
• OOP

Now some of those went on to become useful concepts, but all hardly lived up to the hype of transforming the industry forever. There’s just no shortage of people who lack any kind of set of morals that will, without any knowledge in the domain, jump on some train and hype it to get some quick cash before the thing derails in a fit of coming to terms with reality.

I mean, at least it’s been this way since I’ve been in the industry.

I had my fun with Copilot before I decided that it was making me stupider - it’s impressive, but not actually suitable for anything more than churning out boilerplate.

This. Many of these tools are good at incredibly basic boilerplate that’s just a hint outside of say a wizard. But to hear some of these AI grifters talk, this stuff is going to render programmers obsolete.

There’s a reality to these tools. That reality is they’re helpful at times, but they are hardly transformative at the levels the grifters go on about.

Tech vendors have also been falling over each other to tell the world how they are including GenAI in their offerings as the leading AI companies attract feverish attention from investors.

Because you can’t hype it up for investors if you call it what it actually is. Fancy auto complete. And don’t get me wrong, I love me some of the tools out there. But this stuff is being absolutely way over hyped.

It’s good to go into this stuff with realistic views. Will it do all your work? Absolutely not. But what it will do is do a lot of heavy lifting for you so that you can get more things that require your specific attention done.

The level of “sky is falling and we’re all going to be enslaved by AI” is literal bullshit to sell more stocks and create a bubble that will absolutely pop.

AI-generated artwork is detrimental to the creative industry and should be discouraged

Man you wouldn’t guess how airbrush artist felt when Photoshop came around.

Just a reminder that the last of the tax cuts under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 for citizens ends in 2025. The flat 21% rate for businesses tax cut will continue long after that point.

The Republicans are the ones who passed the TCJA with the whole point being that they would run on this plank hard in 2024. The reason the income tax on people are ending in 2025 was because the House and Senate (both controlled by Republicans at the time) couldn’t agree on a unified measure and decided to instead use reconciliation to move the TCJA through. And they’re planning exactly this same tactic if they win in November.

Because they don’t want a solution, they want a never ending problem.