sobchak, sobchak@programming.dev

US oil export terminals are operating near 100% capacity. The US can’t physically export more than they’re doing already. I think that’s the main reason for the WTI and Brent gap.

Seems like more people are getting involved in direct action (against ICE). Starting around the time of Bernie’s primary campaign in 2020, I’ve noticed the amount of people getting involved in mutual-aid-type stuff slowly growing. The US has been “helping” Ukraine with “lethal aid,” though it’s debatable that’s the best way to help, and it’s probably more about enriching arms manufacturers and making sure Ukraine is perpetually indebted to the US.

Fair enough. I was just trying to point out that the entire hardware industry, and pretty much the entire executive and investor class is doing the same stuff as Nvidia.

I had a friend who had a janitorial position. Cleaning a particularly stubborn toilet and dumped a bunch of bleach into the bowl. His coworker came in behind him and proceeded to piss in said boil, creating a toxic miasma that forced them to exit the restroom quickly and heavily ventilate it before returning.

Lol, I’ve done that before in my apartment. Guessing it’s the same thing as an ammonia-bleach reaction.

The more you buy, the more you save!

Would have to boycott pretty much all hardware. I don’t know of any large hardware manufacturer that’s not chasing the AI investment money and bribing the Trump admin.

I do try to give it a chance and use it every once and a while (most recently Claude Code; last year, Cursor), and it has been my experience that it personally decreases my productivity and quality. I found that even CoPilot’s autocomplete would introduce bugs if I decided to “trust” it and try to work too fast without meticulously reviewing every token generated. I have seen people I work with use AI to quickly create decent looking prototypes (i.e. bog standard, boring design), but I think this is still detrimental because they lose the full benefit of exploratory programming (and of course, the prototypes just have all kinds of faked data and functionality, glaring security problems, bad architecture). I’ve also experienced people submitting nonsense vibe-coded pull requests that would break tons of things they shouldn’t have even touched for the issue. I could see a less interested or overworked reviewer letting stuff like that through, which is why I think we’re seeing all these failures and bugs at these big tech companies. So for me, at least, I haven’t seen the benefit. Using CoPilot in VSCode actually caused me to go back to using nvim and lsp plugins :)

/rant

These are weird times. I feel like any developer who’s tried letting AI write code should recognize that it hurts productivity when you have chase down bugs in badly written code nobody on your team understands. For anything important, that will need to be maintained, less time would be spent designing, writing, and maintaining the code yourself. There are even studies showing AI hurts productivity. Yet, many developers seem to have bought the hype, and managers and investors doubly so.

AFAIK, few of these startups that tout heavy AI usage ever ship anything. The large companies that are forcing AI usage are progressively degrading their products.

Seems like the owner class is just going to keep on deluding themselves, companies are going to keep laying off, everybody is going to keep shipping shit that doesn’t work, if they ship anything at all, and investors are going to keep dumping money into businesses producing no value. The entire system has never felt so fake. At least during the dot-com bubble corporations weren’t doing mass layoffs to excite investors.

I feel like the owner class has got so powerful now, society has regressed to the point where we’re back to being ruled by dumb, delusional, psychopathic royalty imposing their will onto the masses. (Yeah, it’s kind of been that way for a long time, but it seems to be quickly getting worse).

He’s still using a Studio Ghibli pfp? I thought they asked OpenAI to stop using their style. These people are actively hostile to the idea of consent.

NNs are deterministic. Chatbot and image generator implementations just purposely add randomization to make them seem more intelligent.

It’s also using unicode emojis for Linux distros (that don’t really make sense) instead of their logos. The whole thing is likely AI generated.

I liked The Office, at least the earlier seasons. I do hate anything with a laugh track though. Always found them a bit creepy.

They already have been. I know that at least one water desalination plant was hit. Civilian fuel infrastructure has been hit. The US openly stated they’re going to try to cripple their industrial capacity. Seems the US has adopted Israel’s Dahiya doctrine which targets civilian infrastructure. I think Trump said once the US is done there will be nobody left to surrender…

“At some point I don’t think there will be anybody left, maybe to say ‘we surrender.’ They’re being decimated.” - Donald Trump

Haven’t used Mint in a while, but I think it’s mostly a function of the kernel. IIRC, there’s a nice GUI for selecting what kernel you want on Mint. Would probably only make a difference if you have new hardware and need a newer kernel.

I see an em-dash on a comment in MainActivity.kt on line 278, so I’m guessing it was used extensively. Also, a “→” character on 291.

Impossible. Signal said they have no choice but to use AWS for this kind of thing.

Will be selectively enforced and they’ll gradually tighten down over time.

I’ve seen some reporting that claims the US and Israel is bombing leftist opposition in Iran. And arming Kurdish militants. Seems like they just want Iran completely destabilized.

At the most basic level, the Trump admin likely has plans to make bank on it. Perhaps bribes or “deals” with oil companies, Israel, weapons manufacturers, etc.

Also, a part of the MAGA coalition consists of Zionists (the Evangelical Christians and Zionists Jews [both are death cults, IMO]), which makes it easier for Trump to do these things without too much opposition from MAGA. And, groups like AIPAC have been somewhat successful at tipping the scales of US elections against politicians that don’t support Israel.

MAGA is a cult (and consists of previously existing cults such as Evangelical Christianity). As Trump said, there’s nothing he could do to lose their support.

Many countries are supporting these wars, death, and destruction as well (e.g. France, Germany, U.K., many countries in the region, Israel).