makes me jealous of certain members of foreign intelligence services.

the rise of China is not the problem, is the opposite of a problem. the problem is the fall of America. the two did not need to be linked, but for foolish American policy choices.

one nice thing about being in Europe is you get to see all the surveillance Substack is putting you through.

i was trying to remember something, but i forgot what i was trying to remember.

absolutely.

maybe we should revert to stink.

the Supreme Court is playing a Jenga game, pulling away one protection at a time of the vague, lived “it’s a free country” experience many of us associate with America. at first nothing seems to happen.

if they don’t let you vote because you look like a libral, you can sue and a judge can tell you they should have let you vote but what can be done let the next voter sue.

that’s what the infamous gas centrifuges are need for. in melted uranium, the entropy of dilution will overwhelm the very slight tendency to stratify by weight. (if uranium did stratify in that way, all you’d have to do to enrich would be to melt and cream the lighter isotope. but it doesn’t work.)

if the best way to rob a bank is to own one (Bill Black), what about an insurance company?

no, much easier. to redilute it, you’d just melt it with natural uranium and mix. to enrich, you have to somehow distinguish atoms by mass, deploy some process that differentially affects chemically identical but slightly/differently-massed atoms. no need for that to melt and mix.

flirt with apocalypse but turn away before consummating then enjoy the ensuing relief.

By far the most common SMS message I send is “stop”.

www.theguardian.com/world/2024/n...

yes! to it's a kind of sculpting. start with a preliminary solution, hit your head against deficiencies, consider things you never would have thought of, rearrange. in the end you have an "architecture" like you really understood the problem + architected a solution. but that wasn't how it happened!

i find them sometimes useful as a kind of stack overflow 2, but a bit less useful than stack overflow 1. they invent API that would be convenient if it existed like they invent citations, so you have to double check more. i’ve never tried “vibe coding” in a meaningful way, though.

that so often "insane" vibe-coding prompts are "clone this popular app!" suggests that coding LLMs are better copy machines than architects of applications.

i ❤️ justice jackson.

i think democrats should rebrand themselves "queer commies for abundant housing, free health care, amazing education, and silly dance parties". personally i like it, and it's unlikely to be worse branding than "democrats".