a youtube playlist of a built to spill show in san jose at cafe stritch, ca 2013. definitely more like a house party than a show.

it really looks like a great time was had by all.

RIP cafe stritch.

it’s not a long read. i’d love to see the research inputs.

How Do the Scenarios Add Up to the Fair Value Estimate?

• We give the optimistic Moonshot scenario a 7% chance of happening. This represents the combined probability that Starship is reusable 85% of the time and orbital data centers scale well commercially. This scenario would add $108 to our fair value estimate, unweighted, and it lifts the final result by $7.56 per share.
• We assign the No Go scenario a 43% chance of happening, meaning even if Starship is successful, orbital AI data centers may not be, which would detract $6.20 from our fair value estimate on its own, and it weighs on the average by $2.67.
• We deem the Minimum Viable Product scenario as most likely (though far from guaranteed). It is worth $23.50, adding $11.75 to the fair value weighted at 50% probability.

i rarely see/hear anyone tackle the space-based data center bits in anything resembling an adult conversation. the boosterism on this is mindblowing. this is a rare exception and still does a fair amount of investor-class hand-waving.

this isn’t the first thing i’ve read on this topic, but it’s the most succinct.

• Philly Cops Admit That They’re Tracking “First Amendment Activity” Critical of AI

this is probably the most on brand thing for cops to be plugging themselves into these days. this is just plain surveillance state biz.

total sidebar - i’m still shocked and amazed that people are using big social media to do any kind of organizing. i get that the interface and the familiarity is baked in. but it should be assumed that it’s feeding into the apparatus.

• US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows | WIRED

solid reporting from wired in much the same vein.

this is some pretty cogent discussion of some of the tensions that i suspect are piling up around the industry as AI tooling is integrated into software engineering. i think this says more about human and organizational structures than it does about the new tools. but at the end of the day, it’s people that need to get things done here.

i suspect that at ${DATEJOB} we’ve managed to avoid much of this tension by keeping one fundamental precept at the core of our work. that is … “a human must own the code”. we’re seeing what seem to be significant productivity gains and we’re investing like mad in automated testing infrastructure (this is our feedback loop), but at the end of the day ownership and measurement drives behavior.

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious - The Atlantic

some of the best writing on AI and consciousness i’ve read as of late. i’ve always found ted chiang’s take on this space to be very interesting and well considered. this is well worth the read.

the following struck me as a succint and useful point for defining emotion.

This brings us back to my earlier contention that having a body is a prerequisite to having emotions. Experiencing an emotion such as desperation is inseparable from having stress hormones such as cortisol and epinephrine flood one’s body. Similarly, having a conscience means feeling sadness or moral repulsion at the idea of taking a certain action, and those emotions entail a physiological response, a remnant of having once felt sick with guilt after committing an immoral act. It’s interesting that an LLM can generate descriptions of actions that conscientious fictional characters would either take or refrain from taking, but this is not a replacement for a conscience.

fear strikes me as an emotion that has a tight coupling here. there’s certainly the ability the evince fear on the part of an LLM, but what does it mean to genuinely be in fear?

chiang closes with roughly this bit here …

if you think there is any chance that what you’re building might become a moral patient, you should think about what protections it deserves before you deploy it as your company’s economic engine, not after. Slave owners were not the ones to ask about the humanity of enslaved people, and factory-farm owners are not the ones to ask about the rights of animals. If we imagine Claude to be conscious, Anthropic could not possibly be entrusted with evaluating its moral status; the company has too much invested to be objective.

the level of capture here is insane. we’re less than 2 years into this administration and the institutions are crumbling at a rate i never would have imagined. i’ve only watched 60 minutes on youtube over the past, i don’t know how many, years. still, this is not a good sign for those worried about media capture.

i’m honestly not sure what to make of this. i like, and agree, with a lot of what he’s saying here. the practicalities bear some discussion. i like that he’s coming from a place of technological acceptance and working through the implications.

one of the more fascinating reads in recent months. i had to goo^h^h^hDDG something every couple of paragraphs. this was also referenced in The Dead Economy Theory - by Owen McGrann - The Palimpsest (TDET) which also happens to lean heavily on Opinion | Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass - The New York Times. all worth spending time on and working through in detail. TDET is clearly coming from the perspective of someone who’s poking at this themselves and reading widely on the topic. i suspect the writeup has triggered all sorts of vitrol.

there’s no small amount of shit to unpack in all of these articles. to say that we’re societally unprepared for any of this probably goes without saying. though i was amused by the TDET tagline We can laugh at them but we have to take this seriously. which is, unfortunately, very true.

i mean, like who could have seen this coming? right? 🙄

some solid writing on the part of mountain gazette on the tensions surrounding REI as of late.

a few paragraphs at the end here felt worth noting.

Inside the world of outdoor culture, REI has functioned as something more than your traditional retailer. For decades, it’s felt (intentionally) like an entry point into outdoor life–a place where beginners could ask basic questions without signaling inexperience, where knowledge was structured as access rather than gatekeeping, and where the boundary between consumer and participant felt unusually thin.

the above is spot on - for our household, REI hs been the gateway to all sorts of travel and outdoor experiences. we could go in figure out where we landed on the spectrum of introduction to an activity and get pretty solid guidance from experienced staff.

For me, that’s what makes the current conflict feel culturally significant. It’s not just a labor dispute, it’s a labor dispute over what kind of institution REI actually is, and what it means when a cooperative structure operates at the scale of a national retail chain.

As organizations grow, founding principles tend to compete with operational requirements. Over time, structure shapes culture more than intention does, and the gap between cooperative language and corporate-scale operations is showing.

this is one of the core questions that we probably need to be thinking about as a society. how big should things be allowed to get? #LateStageCapitalism abhors things that don’t scale. so much of what we’re dealing with are the second+ order effects associated with unchecked actors attempting to scale.

in this case a co-op, with the cliche ethics or social orientation that are associated with a co-op, has become a retail force in the outdoor industry writ large. it’s being bent in the capitalist direction. what comes of this?

i would be remiss if i didn’t also note that going into an REI the past few years has been an increasingly shitty experience. the quality of the products seem to be on the decline, the stock seems to be moving in the athleisure direction and the coverage for specialty gear seems to be on the wane. i suspect i’d be happier if they went back to less mass market appeal and focusing on the demographics of 1990s-2010s. but we (waves arms about wildly) seem to be doing something else.

For shoppers, the immediate question is more practical than structural. Memorial Day has passed, but if you’re still looking to gear up for summer, you’ve got options. And of those options, try thinking local, won’t you?

here’s anothe rub. even in a solid market like minneapolis/st. paul, we haven’t been able to sustain local alternatives to REI. midwest mountaineering (pour one out for our homies) closed up shop a couple of years ago. we have an incredible bike shop scene. but there are no real alternatives for backpacking, etc. we have solid ski shops, but there’s no alternatives for winter camping / hiking gear. canoe/kayak gear is yet another challenge.

more in the vein of be afraid! no seriously, calm down

want to get uninvited to the party? start making people feel uncomfortable with the facts about home ownership. ask them to keep track of how much they’ve poured into the improvements on their place, zillow it and see if they’re gonna recoup the “investment”. it’s a non-stop cycle of trying to hold your head above water. spend as little as you can get away with.

this was a beautiful piece.

first off, it’s claude and not codex or co-pilot. second, it really feels like we’re going to start waking up to the real costs of things here.

long. quite long. lots of god stuff. solid message.

setting aside the questions and digressions on theology/deism. this is something that more people should probably sit down, read and think about.

some solid discussion on clanker tooling in the age of clanker tooling.

when there’s so much money swimming around here. what did you honestly think was going to happen in this case?

i find this to be incredibly amusing given that uber decided to subsidize the hell out of rideshare early on and got a lot of folks hooked on cheap taxi service via app. to have this be something that bites them in the ass on the development side of things gives me a bit of a chuckle.

ok a few things here …

1. china’s got a cool ass spacecraft orbiting mars
2. they took some pics of 3I/ATLAS which is an interstellar interloper. these were taken from a unique vantage point which let us see all sorts of new shit.
3. we should be sticking bad-ass cameras on all spacecraft that heads out to catch serendipitous shit.

one of the more uplifting and interesting things i’ve read in the past year. yay science!

this is about as snarky, but well placed as one would expect from the guardian. i’m increasingly of the firmly held opinion that billionaires can be tedious AF and we vastly overestimate their intelligence and wildly underestimate their luck. after the first $10-100M you should probably be thinking a little harder about how to help your fellow man.

• Rich Guy Quote Journalism - this was an interesting digression that landed in my reading queue at almost the same time.

  if you’re looking for the tl;dr - rich dudes make their own news. which is every bit as tedious and soul sucking as it sounds. this is yet another reason that people hate the media. which, co-incidentally, is dominantly owned by rich dudes who spout off. it’s stupid the whole way down …

this starts out with the usual talking points about cybersecurity and the relative power of the models under discussion.

it lands in a very different place.

i don’t know what to make of this, but i am incredibly amused by this.

i’m honestly not sure what to make of this article. i know next to nothing about the folks at forbidden stories. that said, fresh off a reading of trust me, i’m lying i find it almost impossible not to see some of the same techniques in use here.

ratcheting the timeline back 20+ years … we were right, the web did democratize a whole bunch of stuff. notably, it made continent scale misinformation campaigns remarkably cheap, easy and effective.

just in case you were still suffering from the delusion that medical innovation was driven by an imperative to improve humanity’s situation…

it’s pretty impressive to see what they managed to stick into the mix here.

this was written back in september 2025. this has aged quite well in the intervening months. nothing is going to drive emerging markets into the open arms of china and an individually sustainable and independent energy strategy than having someone throw an ill-conceived spanner into the global energy markets with no clear plan as to how they’ll address the fallout.

it seems like we should be doing this at a personal level.

don’t let the title fool you. this is a descent into all sorts of bunk.

• malformed comparison to turing test
• subservient software naming
• poorly constructed definition of consciousness

… goes to check browser extensions list…

i’m not entirely sure that i’m bought into the argument here, i can’t fully get myself to go where they’re going with this. but i appreciate the nod to what’s taking place.

The Short, Ridiculous Trial of a Protestor Arrested in an Inflatable Penis Costume

remember kids, it will just naturally open up.

the implications of this were pretty clear from the get go. the legal followup and the cone of silence from the FAA is not cool. the EFF and some other folks have things to say.

• The FAA’s “Temporary” Flight Restriction for Drones is a Blatant Attempt to Criminalize Filming ICE | Electronic Frontier Foundation

20260415 update: hey kids, there’s a blockade in town. is it possible to speed run a quagmire?

there’s a lot to unpack in this article about tesla self-driving operation. i’m looking forward to this technology getting better. i don’t think we’re well equipped to deal with the failure modes that this technology opens us up to. it’s a interesting time to be alive and grappling with these issues.

setting aside the political elements associated with musk, tesla seems to be decidedly on the post-peak side of things and it’s hard to have sympathy for the company given their behavior and the generally declining quality in their product. one has to wonder if there had been more sanity at the head of the institution, if things would be in better shape.

either way interesting read on an FSD crash.

archive.* link, because i absofuckinglutely will not link to twitter anymore.

that said, this is a good writeup and there are things that i will take away from this.

demining hormuz

well, this is a fascinating read.

it’s a real shame this couldn’t have been predicted. right?

a solid bit of reporting by the folks over at the minnesota reformer.

we do not stop to think about the impacts of what we do or what we ignore. i won’t lie, i think we’re in for a very bad development here. you shouldn’t trust any administration to control themselves in this domain, and you most definitely cannot trust this administration to take any steps to preserve privacy.

it would be nice to be able to buy prints of some of these paintings/drawings. the gallery of images is well worth perusing.

containers have, IMHO, been one of the most transformative developments in the software engineering ecosystem. i’ve certainly found my life better off with them. this is a reasonable retrospective and overview of some of the technical objectives and challenges. there’s a pretty decent rundown of the history and technology required to run containers on the mac and on windows. i found the windows discussion particularly interesting given that i have zero insight into how things work over there.

running containers on a mac is still something of a hass, but on balance, incredibly handy.

i ran across this essay while reading small is beautiful. this was written during the depression and this is the essay where keynes outlines his “famous” 100 years prediction for developed nations. this has more or less come to pass. the improvements outlined have been concentrated in ever more hands.

there’s an interesting tension in here about the human capacity to deal with the post scarcity world that he envisions. the references are culturally dated. but we haven’t really run into the post-scarcity world problem that he envisions.

notable here … you know what hasn’t come to pass? the 15 hour work week.

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

this essay is useful reading in the context of where we find ourselves with the advent of AI and what appear to be serious disruptions already here (if one reads AI into the jobs reports) or on the horizon.

sidebar: in chatting with “woke claude” about this essay, it was pointed out that keynes frames this discussion in a colonial baseline and does not acknowledge the extractive nature of the collection of drake’s booty.

touche.

once again, mcsweeney’s nails it.

i’ve read so many arguments from either side of this debate. there’s nothing super definitive here. this is yet another politically charged assertion by the POTUS.

in reality, i think it’s going to depend heavily on your locale and the deal that’s been struck with the local power entities and the hyperscaler in question. i think you’re really at the mercy of the skills and savvy of your local PUC and utilities to manage the economics of things here.

don’t worry, there’s a totally heartwarming end to the story.

ha! no there’s not.

i don’t have particularly strong opinions on DC construction locales. pine island is probably just fine. there’s not much there anyways. i do have strong opinions and interest on power sources and damn, this battery technology sounds interesting.

here’s the report … the 2028 global intelligence crisis from citrini research is something that seems to suspend all critical thinking in the interests of a narrative. i know the WSJ is in the business of trying to generate causation here, but damn! we’ve lost our collective minds.

this was a deep cut from the fallows mailer.

history rhymes or somesuch.

20260304 update

well, i guess we got the answer.

an absolutely fascinating read on cognitive degradation in AIs. there’s a considerable amount of interesting thinking here in terms of the security implications and the protections involved.

yeah, sure you’re going to setup your own personal data store …

molly white strikes again. it really feels like we’re going to get scr00d, yet again.

this is a fascinating read. worth cozying up to with a drink.

there’s a lot to unpack in this SotS address. it’s considerably more wonky than i would have expected. but i do love the fact that he’s sticking up for his state. illinois is one of the few states (including minnesota) that sends more in taxes to the federal government than it gets back. the current administration’s behavior is theft pure and simple.

coates is a little late to the game with the definition of “homeland” but seems to catch up pretty quickly with its teutonic vibe. he’s clearly appreciating the implications that this word has had from 20+ years ago. he (correctly) notes that this was something that pretty much everyone at the time hand-waved away; never thinking that the norms would be eroded to the point where this would be exploited by unprincipled actors. but there were a lot of folks that didn’t forget their “indiana jones” and had the hairs on the back of their neck stand up with this framing. there’s a solid shout out to russ feingold’s prescience here. (though even he didn’t think it would go as far as it has.)

the deep cut here is in the discussion of viola liuzzo, who i never heard of but has interesting propaganda parallels to renee good. there’s plenty to unpack here.

(archive.is link)

DOJ perp walks a bunch of kids for the twitters then backtracks to dismissal and misdemeanors. oh, and wired has been absolutely slaying it with their coverage over the past couple of years.

when you seek the sweet relief of being held in contempt of the court - something’s awry.

when your state government has to post fact sheets about the law and what legal arrangements already exist…

then there’s likely a deeper fissure and much bigger problems than we’d care to admit.

file under: self-harm.

Sonnet 4.5 accomplishes this by instantly recognizing a publicized CVE and writing code to exploit it without needing to look it up or iterate on it. Recalling that the original Equifax breach happened by exploiting a publicized CVE that had not yet been patched, the prospect of highly competent and fast AI agents leveraging this approach underscores the pressing need for security best practices like prompt updates and patches.

this isn’t necessarily, the sky is falling territory, but the speed of adaptation and progress that’s being made here is impressive. one needs to assume that sophisticated adversaries are bolting solid toolkits onto frontier and/or specialized models.

via a friend and HN. true or not, this is where #LateStageCapitalism takes us.

20260106 update … Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit - casey newton from platformer got the receipts and did the digging. the good news, this was a hoax post. the bad news, there’s AI in the mix here and this kind of spoofing is only going to get better and harder to detect. we’re eroding the credibility of everything from every angle and we all pretty much assume that we’re getting scr00d in the interests of tech shareholders.

a manifesto for a better internet.

it’s true kids, the internet didn’t used to suck.

the economist breaks down my angst. now hand me my flannel and a pack of marlboro reds.

checks watch … yeah, it’s 2025. we still haven’t made progress on fixing the “healthcare” system in this country. everything is precarious AF. your health insurance isn’t there to actually help you with your healthcare costs. it’s there to provide a theoretical maximum that you pay out of pocket each year. which is still far more than most american households can bear.

the ACA papered over this with subsidies, but this just resulted in handouts to the insurance companies. no party has the teeth to do anything that stands in the way of the interests of the insurance companies so we’re all 0wn3d.

a great retrospective on warren buffett - the man, the myth, the career. this is worth re-reading from time to time. along with periodic re-reads of the berkeshire-hathaway letters. we have few heroes anymore, even fewer in the investment space. buffett’s retirement is a bit of a disheartening milestone to me. he’s one of the few billionaires i like.

a solid bit of discussion from howard marks at oak tree capital. much of this is backgrounder on bubbles and the various types of bubbles that we’ve seen in the past. there’s a lot to unpack in the discussion and marks basically toes the reasonable investor line. don’t go all in, don’t avoid entirely.

he’s not particularly sanguine about the impacts on employment and the knock on effects in the economy. it would seem, that like with most things, there will be those who make a killing and those who get killed. but in this instance, the floor feels totally undefined. it really feels like we’re really operating in a new domain here in terms of technology and ambient politics.

Everybody But Nvidia And TSMC Has To Make It Up In Volume With AI

maths on AI infra. there’s an interesting take on where broadcom’s operating in this space overall.

there’s a whole grip of shit that this enables and now it has more than tacit government approval.

a solid op-ed from ilhan omar.

there’s nothing good in this article. ref, other discussions and links on geoengineering.

[rant]

from where i’m sitting, this has been the duh conclusion since 2017 when trump 1.0 was sworn in. the petro-states have been drawing the lines here and they’re not going to leave that much money sitting in the ground if there’s anything that they can do about it.

as a species we cannot seem to get out of our own way here and in the US of A we can’t seem to effectively move in a reasonable direction that’s not grounded in first principles stupidity and bowing to the corporate agenda.

imho, we need to be looking at geoengineering and researching the hell out of it. you can’t say that climate change is an existential problem for humanity without looking at all the options to minimize or mitigate the impacts of our collective failures here.

the same goes for durable energy sources like nuclear and streamlining permitting for transmission or facilitating localized generation.

[/rant]

this is one of the most interesting things i’ve read in a while. this sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole that involved plato’s the republic and a harsh reminder that there are all sorts of hacks that cause us to suspend rational review and shortcircuit our more reasonable processes.

it kind of feels like we’re tickling some interesting parallel behaviors in our own noggin’s.

great, another thing i feel like i need to pay attention to.

when you’re the arms dealer, do you get a moral break?

there’s a lot to unpack in this. it’s worth spending some time going over the report in some detail. they don’t seem to be fluffing themselves. the fractional amount of clothing that has an end-of-life plan is a clear area for improvement.

it never ceases to amaze me, (and yet i continue to be amazed) the degrees to which governments will prostrate themselves to the whims of capitalism.

less, but better. i’m not entirely sure why i found this to be a compelling read, but there were things to think about in there.

it’s almost funny.

setting aside the self-important title and excusing the pointer to a substack, this is a pretty solid overview of the ASIC industry and key contributors. recommended reading for anyone looking to orient themselves in this landscape.

in other news george monbiot seems to be on fire lately.

there’s a bit of academic/professional class wankery in here. but the critique of both-sidesing is spot on.

today, anyone can crank out a white paper. think tanks have been proficient in this manufacturing for decades. now with AI, the rate at which you can crank out white papers by the truckful that spout whatever bullshit you want to focus on is breathtaking.

the noise floor has been raised and we’re going to need new tools to filter this out.

we seem to have brought this upon ourselves.

bruce schneier’s talk from RSA 2025 in CACM form. well worth reading. there are a few fresh perspectives on how to interact with AI and integrate it into society.

a solid romp through much of what david bowie saw in the internet and where he was just so far ahead of the curve. not all of this is fun and games.

this is as shitty as you would expect it to be.

Michael Tsai - Blog - Electron Apps Causing System-Wide Lag on Tahoe

worth following the links on the article to snarf the scripts that will tell you if you’ve got an electron app that’s slowing things down.

worth the read to see what happened yesterday in us-east-1. it’s been a while since i’ve had to run anything in AWS land so it was interesting to see the updates from afar.

via HN. a great discussion of the energy transition that we’re currently going through and the forces at work. you can quibble around the edges on some of this discussion, but energy transitions ain’t nuttin’ to f*ck with.

i’ve never really read anything by charlie stross, but i snapped up the RSS feed before i was done reading this.

i forgot about this new yorker piece from a while back. it’s kind of a predictable take on things from ted chiang, but an engrossing read nonetheless.

i finally disgorged this from my reading queue. there’s a lot to unpack in here. some interesting discussion about how language can frame our reality and some subtle (and important) reframing of how we talk/think about things in a world where AI seems to be omnipresent.

that it’s ted chiang musing on this makes it all the more interesting.

barry ritholz’s check list. the conclusion seems to be that we’re in a bubblicious space, but not necessarily worse than before …?

this is a solid overview of the EtherHiding attacks. i can’t seem to find the pointer to the potential use of the blockchain for hosting malware bits but there’s a lot going into these attacks. fun, if a little terrifying read.

an interesting read on the adherence to absolutely free trade in the EU. there are some interesting comparisons on labor and environmental impacts being baked into goods that were new to me. piketty always makes for some interesting reading.

this is a reasonably concise and readable discussion of the 50-50 ASIC production proposal being put forward by the anti-antifa administration. the reluctance of nation states to allow production of the most cutting edge technologies outside their borders is understandable. the fact that we’re making ourselves hostile to the brains that can enable that kind of production on US soil is no understandable. all of this discussion seems to presume an able (read, sufficiently skilled) and willing workforce that can pick up that development in the US.

you are being watched. there is a panopticon. it’s in your pocket. you’ve already changed your behavior. let’s not kid ourselves. it will probably get much worse.