Mak'

…Nor is the trump admin actually using it to pay down the debt…

That’s the damning thing: Any savings are going towards tax cuts for the already-wealthy…

…Anyway, defunding the NOAA to pay off the national debt is like skipping a coffee, once, to pay down a mortgage on a house.

…and then going out and buying an expensive car.

That’s pretty much it. Trump—really, the folks who control him—is going to wall us off from the rest of the world, while the rest of the world continues moving forward. In power. In technology. In medicine.

You jest, but I would seriously consider the possibility that he’ll sue anyone selling the stock, and sue the government for not investing in it expressly.

I mean, god, the tantrums he’s thrown at having advertisers take breaks—because I don’t think any of them truly left—from Twitter should be proof enough of the possibility.

He said we are still waiting for the hype to become reality, in the form of something obvious and impossible to miss, like the world economy shooting up 10% across the board.

That’s such an odd turn of phrase. “We’re still waiting for the hype to become a reality…” and “…something obvious and impossible to miss…”

So, like, do I have to time to go to the bathroom and get a drink, before I sit down and start staring at the empty space, or…?

Don’t get me wrong. I work with this stuff every day at this point. My job is LLMs and model training pipelines and agentic frameworks. But, there is something… off, about saying the equivalent of “it’ll happen any day now…”

It may just, but making forward-looking decisions on something that doesn’t exist—may not come to pass—feels like madness.

I’ve basically given up hope of the bubble ever bursting, as the market lives in La La Land, where no amount of bad decision-making seems to make a dent in the momentum of “line must go up”.

Would it be cool for negative feedback to step in and correct the death spiral? Absolutely. But, I advise folks to not start holding their breath so soon…

Very bold move, in a tech climate in which CEOs declare generative AI to be the answer to everything, and in which shareholders expect line to go up faster…

I half expect to next read an article about his ouster.

OP asked for the worst thing you’ve seen Excel used for…

One has to have a conscience to be bothered by it…

To shreds, you say?

To shreds, you say?

I never know what to think when I come across a comment like this one—which does describe, even if only at a surface level, how an LLM works—with 50% downvotes. Like, are people angry at reality, is that it?

It may well be a matter of opinion whether Tesla, even operating at its highest potential, could now overtake the likes of BYD, which is getting extensive help from its government. But, it’s reasonably clear that Tesla’s chances get thinner with every bad decision of Musk’s.

He fucked with the engineering, chasing pennies on critical components, like the lidar. He fucked with the crown jewel of the company—its Supercharger network—by destroying the team, and thereby slowing down rollouts and critical maintenance. He ran his mouth off and chased away folks—like me—who would have otherwise bought, by espousing pants-on-head-crazy crypto-bro viewpoints. Hell, his idea of PR is a poop emoji auto-responder.

It’s just frustrating to see such a great concept—the ubiquitous electric car—be fucked up so badly by the person with the most means to succeed.

What’s hilariously tragic is that he could very likely have his full self-driving if he would just shut his shit-spewing asshole of a mouth for a hot second, and spend some of his ungodly billions on the problem.

There are incredibly bright people out there who can make this stuff a reality. But, it takes paying them well, not shit-talking or overruling them, and giving them the environment for success—e.g., not taking away the radar from the cars.

He just wants to talk a big game without spending any real effort or money on the problem. And, it’s just sad, because he could have his FSD and look like a genius.

Put simply: They’re being lied to. Consistently and perniciously.

The lie is that their vote is going to benefit them somehow. Or that it’s going to hurt someone else exclusively. And, sometimes, it’s both—that it’ll hurt someone else, while bringing a benefit.

In all three cases, the real truth—that they themselves will still suffer—is neatly hidden away.

I’ve recently switched from a Java-exclusive team to a Python-exclusive one, and this is the one thing I truly miss: An actively-maintained library for clear, extensible, fluent assertions. Being back to the likes of assertEquals is fine and all, but not as powerful or concise.

Yay! I can finally afford a hous-… and Blackrock just bought it out from underneath me…

I use ChatGPT and Copilot as search engines, particularly for programming concepts or technical documentation. The way I figure, since these AI companies are scraping the internet to train these models, it’s incredibly likely that they’ve picked up some bit of information that Google and DDG won’t surface because SEO.

I’m getting strong Hide the Pain Harold vibes.…

I just continue to be amazed that, instead of the old, tried-and-true method of giving people what they want—a solid, reliable car at a good price, and a stellar charging network in the places people want to be—a man of his means keeps trying weird gimmicks.

You know, I don’t actually know. Have been conditioned to avoid using them that I don’t even think about them.