DesertCreosote

It depends on how it’s built. Anyone vibecoding without a plan will run into this very quickly. However, if a project is planned out in advance, broken down into multiple milestones, with measurable goals and thorough testing at each milestone before moving forward, the LLM can create surprisingly well-structured and solid code which fits the overall structure.

Basically, the more thought, planning, and structure is worked out before anybody runs even a single prompt, the better your results will be. And continual testing with the goal of finding every single weak point will give even better results. But planning it out ahead of time and doing all that testing takes a lot of time and human effort, and nobody vibecoding slop apps is doing that.

I’ve been thinking about it, and I actually think legislators are underpaid. I think they should get a million dollars a year while in office, plus a very generous pension starting when they’re no longer in office, plus full healthcare for life for them and their family. I want them to be extremely well compensated so they can focus on their extremely important work.

The catch is that they must divest themselves from everything when they enter office (fully, they can’t just put it in a trust), and they’re considered a public servant from that point until they die. They can’t go work a “regular” job again, they can’t own a business, they can’t go do consulting after they leave. Any money from book deals or speaking engagements goes to the U.S. Treasury. Any “favors in kind”/“you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” deals are considered to be a form of payment, as is conducting business through a family member or associate. They are allowed to work in governmental positions, to volunteer, or to do other work for the public good but not for any additional compensation.

If they break the rules, they must repay every penny ever paid to them, with interest. This debt can’t be discharged with bankruptcy, and passes to family members upon the death of the legislator if it can be shown that they were aware of the rules being broken and didn’t report it.

50% of the repayment goes to a whistleblower as a reward for their honesty, so there’s an extremely strong incentive for everyone around them to closely watch everything they’re doing to make sure they’re not skirting the rules.

Basically, pay them enough that they have no rational need for corruption, and then an extremely punitive penalty to try to ensure their incentives remain aligned in the correct direction. It certainly wouldn’t solve everything, but I think it’d at least be better than what we have now. And if we capped their wage at the federal minimum, they’d either increase it to a point where they’re getting what they get now (causing severe inflation), only rich people could ever have a hope of being a legislator, or we’d get even more corruption.

My city does both Flock and Motorola. Motorola does also have a shared national network, they’re just a lot quieter about it than Flock.

I work for a different large ISP who provides modems and routers to our customers, but not this specific feature (being a bit vague because I know at one point mentioning the company’s name on social media would result in the post being reviewed by the social media team/referred to security for anything discussing internal processes, and while Lemmy probably isn’t on their radar I’d rather not risk it).

The amount of data we can see if you’re using our routers is pretty crazy, and most people have no idea. We can see exactly what you have on your network and what it’s doing. If you’re just using the modem and not the router, we have much more limited visibility. We don’t have the capacity to monitor everything everyone is doing all the time, so if you’re using your own equipment (and you’re not using our DNS service), it’s unlikely we have much data on your activity. Storage in the scale needed to store what everyone is doing gets expensive.

I’ve always used my own equipment, and I make sure everyone in my family has their own equipment as well. I would absolutely advise against using your ISP’s equipment if your goal is privacy.

“Enby” is commonly used instead of “NB,” because “NB” has a long history of being shorthand for “non-Black.” It’s not wrong to use NB as shorthand for nonbinary, but it has the potential to cause confusion so people often avoid it. 🙂

Oh, they absolutely might still try. And if they do, they’ll probably irreversibly destroy some or all of the existing monument, which seems fitting for this administration.

But at least it doesn’t seem possible that we’ll ever end up with Trump’s head up there, no matter how much he might want it, and it does make me a little happy to know that he can’t get everything he wants.

This has already been looked into, because he said he wanted to be on Mount Rushmore during his first term, and a bill was introduced last year to add him.

No matter how much he may want it, it’s not possible; there’s not enough rock left on the mountain, and what’s there is too fragile to support it.

The New York Times actually had a good article last year with 3D visualizations showing exactly why it can’t happen: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/27/us/mount-rushmore-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.vFA.N4J6.i9vauCc4EdSZ

So at least there’s that.

My degree was in economics (though I didn’t stay in the field and moved into information security instead). Econ 101 is basically a bunch of thought experiments that are designed to get people thinking about very broad economic concepts, but it’s all very, very abstract and largely doesn’t apply to anything connected to reality.

In higher levels, it starts to resemble reality, though my professors constantly reinforced the lesson that there are multiple ways to interpret data and that no matter how complicated you make the model you’re using, it’s still a massive oversimplification of the real world.

Unfortunately, people take intro micro/macro and think that’s what economists actually think when in reality they’re essentially learning about the very, very general oversimplifications. The amount of math it takes to start going through the actual models gets overwhelming, and it’s unlikely a first or second year undergrad would be able to handle it unless they’d already taken calc 1 and 2, and ideally some additional statistics classes.

There’s also been a massive shift in the last decade from theoretical models to much harder quantitative experimentation, so the field as a whole is trying to be less theory-driven and more data-driven. I sometimes wish I’d found the math more enjoyable, because it’s been very exciting to see some of the results coming from experimentation.

Lobachevsky also passed away in 1856, so I doubt he would be referred to as the colleague of anyone from the last hundred or so years before publication.

I did appreciate the reference to “Lobachevsky” by Tom Lehrer, though. (And who deserves the credit / And who deserves the blame? / Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name!)

Sounds perfect for a pie shop.

Menu:

• Priest
• Greengrocer
• General (served with and without his privates)
• Piccolo player
• Locksmith

Coming soon:

• Beadle
• Judge

You’re right, police officers don’t want to die from protestors. That’s why they wear body armor and have armored vehicles, and the National Guard gets deployed if those aren’t enough.

If you pull a gun on a police officer while they’re arresting someone, it’s very likely that you and everyone behind you in the line of fire are going to get shot, repeatedly.

By “the Bundy standoff,” I assume you mean the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by Ammon Bundy and his followers? The event that law enforcement took an extremely hands-off approach to because everyone involved was white, and still ended up with one of the participants dead?

If the people who took part in that occupation had been anything other than rich, white, and strongly religious, they would have had tanks rolling in to clear them out.

If you’re talking about the other Bundy standoff, where Ammon’s father Cliven decided he didn’t want to pay to graze his cattle on public lands, lost every court case, and prevented the government from seizing his cattle by showing up with an armed militia… I don’t think a rich white sovereign citizen faces the same level of consequences from their actions as everyone else does.

A lot of other people have posted some really good stuff in terms of coping, and I think most of them are completely correct; it’s not something you can control, so it’s out of your hands and not really worth worrying about. That said, knowing that has never helped me stop worrying about something before, so I figured I’d type this up in case it helps. 🙂

Nuclear weapons have been a particular interest of mine for years. I’ve read most of the books out there on them, and I’m very familiar with the strategy involved in how they would be deployed in a conflict. I’ve also been to Trinity Site at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico twice, where the first nuclear weapon was tested, so I’ve seen their impact in person (I also have plans to visit Japan, and also the testing sites in Nevada, but haven’t been able to make those work out yet).

If a nuclear war happens, it won’t be the end of everything. They are big, scary, and should an actual full-scale exchange take place hundreds of millions (perhaps even billions) of people will die. It would be an absolutely cataclysmic event.

But that wouldn’t end everything.

A lot of people talk about how we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world, which is hyperbolic. The Earth has seen much worse than a nuclear exchange, and it’ll be fine. Overall life will also be fine; plenty of plants and animals would get wiped out, because it would be a mass extinction event, but a huge amount of life would survive and be just fine.

What people mean is that human life would be destroyed, and yeah, fair enough, we’d definitely have a major regression in civilization. But it wouldn’t kill everyone (probably nowhere even close to everyone), and humanity would continue to exist. The impacts of the dust kicked up by the bombs would probably cause some global cooling temporarily, similarly to a couple huge volcanic eruptions at the same time would, and life would become pretty difficult, but it won’t wipe us out.

If you live in a major city in the United States, Europe, Russia, or China, none of this really matters to you. If a nuclear war happens, you might get 10-15 minutes notice, but probably the first you’ll know about it is when an intensely bright flash happens. If you’re close enough, you won’t even have a chance to understand what it is. If you’re a bit further away, you might survive the initial flash of radiation, but be killed by the blast wave, or by burns caused either by the intense amount of heat released or by the radiation itself. The exact radius for this is going to vary based on exactly what type of warheads are detonated in your area, but we’ll say if you’re within a couple miles you’ll likely be killed within a few days because of that.

If you’re outside that second zone, you’re going to probably be okay, at least for a while. You might have some burns you can recover from, your lifetime risk of cancer might be a lot higher depending on where you were, and you may have other injuries related to the bombing, but you’ll probably survive long enough to help with recovery. Congrats!

You asked what you can do to prepare. Well, honestly, not a lot. I’d recommend preparing the same way you should for basically any other large-scale disaster. Ignoring radiation (I’ll get to it in a minute), a nuclear bomb’s aftermath is going to be similar to an earthquake or large fire. Keep a few days or a week of bottled water on hand for each person in your household (and maybe a way to purify water longer-term), have food supplies, some basic medical gear, and emergency lighting/communications equipment. If you’re really concerned about nuclear war specifically, add in some iodine tablets for each member of the household. If you do this, you’ll be prepped not just for nuclear war, but also any of the other much more likely disasters that may occur in your lifetime.

Now, as for the radiation question. Most nuclear weapons are not made to spread large amounts of radiation around. They absolutely will release radiation, but it makes the reaction less efficient, reduces yield, and massively increases cost per bomb. I’m not saying here that it’s not something to worry about or be aware of, but it’s a smaller problem than Hollywood and mass media would have you believe it is. Avoid eating or drinking things that are from directly downwind of an explosion, and try to not let any ash or particles stay on you/breath them in, and you’ve done what you can. Most of radiation exposure management comes down to keeping particles out of your body, particularly the lungs. The longer you’re exposed to radiation, the more likely it is that it’ll do something bad to you. The best remedy is to keep it out of your body as much as you can, and put distance between it and you so the inverse-square law can help.

I hope this helps a bit. Overall, even with global tensions rising, I think the chance of nuclear war is very very low. We’ve been very very close to at least a limited exchange before, and pulled through, and despite everything going on I think the chances of an actual nuclear exchange remains incredibly slim. If you want to prepare, pretend it’s like another large-scale (and much likelier) disaster, and prep for that.

I’ve skipped over some things that weren’t really pertinent, like actual nuclear war theory, and simplified other things, so if you want me to expand on any of this let me know! Nuclear history has been one of my special interests for years and years, and I enjoy talking about it.

Do you have a better solution?

We know it’s rigged. We’ve known it’s rigged for decades. Until the system is changed so the states with tiny populations don’t have an outsized influence on things, it’s not going to get fixed.

Saying “peaceful protest isn’t enough” is also hand waving away what happens when protests aren’t peaceful. You’re essentially saying “people need to hurry up and volunteer to be brutally killed to change things,” and no matter how patriotic somebody may be that’s a pretty tough sell.

We’re not delusional. We see how bad it is. There are a lot of people protesting and taking action every single day across the country, but it’s harder to see a) because they don’t get much coverage from the media, and b) because while the total number of people protesting is quite large, they’re spread out across the entire nation and that’s hard to capture in a picture. Add into that the surveillance networks working to identify and punish those people, and there’s an additional chilling effect which reduces the overall visibility of those protests.

I didn’t assume you were saying she was the greediest person in the world. You said she should pay her staff more and charge her customers less, and I pointed out that she pays her staff more than anyone else would, and that the prices people pay for her seats and merch are often highly inflated by scalpers, not by her.
And even if she paid all her cash money to her staff and gave her products away for free, she would still be a billionaire off of her catalog and name.

You responded with a very dismissive comment about rapists, which was both insensitive towards victims of sexual assault and a complete failure to engage with the conversation. That’s why I said it was made in bad faith.

“He was a very gentle rapist”

That’s not exactly a good-faith argument. You said she should pay her staff more and charge less for tickets. I provided a counterpoint to that.

Going back to the original question that you were asked, should she have retired when she started to approach $1 billion in net worth?

I will point out that the ownership rights to her music, which she purchased with the money she made from The Eras Tour and now owns completely, is probably worth close to $1 billion in valuation alone. Even if her entire liquid net worth was taxed from her, she’d be a billionaire on paper just by virtue of her music catalog & the value of her name.

I’ve seen this viewpoint a lot lately, and while I absolutely agree that tickets to her shows are expensive, when my wife bought tickets to the Eras Tour she was able to get them on the primary market for about $300 each for very good seats. The secondary scalping market was selling the same seats for between $2,000-$4,000 depending on the show, and people were buying them at that price. From a supply and demand perspective, Taylor Swift was absolutely selling those tickets below their true market value.

As for paying her crew more, she also paid out $197 million in bonuses to her crew across the tour. That’s about 10% of tour revenue in bonuses. Not profits, revenue. I’ve been tangentially involved in the entertainment industry since college and have multiple friends directly involved, and I’ve never heard of any other performer giving that much in bonuses to their crew.

Additionally, she donated to food pantries in every city she performed in. While the amounts she donated to each food pantry have not been released, people have worked out that it was likely at least $20k/pantry, based on the number of meals the pantries said they would be able to provide with it. That’s at least $1 million across all the cities, which is obviously not enough, but is far more than most other entertainers do.

I know she gets a lot of flack because she’s so visible in our culture, but in terms of how bad billionaires are, she’s significantly better than a lot of others who fly under the radar. There are over 3,000 billionaires today, according to Forbes, and I’m pretty certain most of them made their money through much worse methods than singing songs and selling overpriced merch to fans. 😛

Yep. I switched to Kagi a bit over a year ago, which is paid search. And I pay for my email through Migadu; I thought about hosting it myself but honestly it seemed like more potential hassle than I wanted to deal with.

I’m guessing A Christmas Story (1983).

A central theme is the main character Ralphie really wants a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle for Christmas, but all the adults he expresses this to insist he’ll shoot his eye out.

Normally I would agree with you, but given how much they care about privacy (as indicated by what they write about and talk about on their podcast), I don’t think tracking is what they’re after in this specific case.

And they know that the signup won’t completely block AI, but it does help.