TheTaytay

Yes! This is very suspicious and feels like TikTok -inspired outrage. Imagine describing the current 2026 state of the world/USA to an environmental activist or heck - an activist of ANY sort in the past 50 years. Include all environmental and political concerns. And then ask them to guess where a lot of outrage airtime and protest time was going. Data centers would be WAY down the list. Even if you told them to only consider things that affect water or energy consumption or environmental concerns…

It’s gotten so bad that it almost makes SENSE to launch data centers in space at this point, just to avoid the insanity.

People literally live next to data centers RIGHT now and don’t know it or care.

Imagine what a good investment it would be for a competing nation-state to rally and funnel all anti-growth and and anti-energy-consumption propaganda into the hand-wringing American doom-scroller…

I wish this didn’t go out of fashion as much as it did. An environment that you perturb makes more sense in a lot of ways than a “tear it down and restart” model.

I like the idea of having a much easier way to integrate with all of the chat clients, especially with UI. I've been surprised there wasn't a way to do that more easily before (even pre AI agent revolution).

Two points of confusion that I wanted to bring up just so you know what it was like for me as a new reader: "Copilot" is unfortunately an extremely overloaded term right now. Not your fault, but I don't know about CopilotKit, so I was trying to figure out who really was behind this. (Is it Microsoft? etc) I also (like another poster) wondered if I needed your server in order to use this. I love the MIT license, but it wasn't clear to me if this was just a veneer over a closed-source thing or not. I saw in your response that there is a legit open source ability to use it, but that wasn't clear.

Thank you for coming in and replying to all of these comments with actionable, honest info!

I think working conditions have changed enough since then to make a request for non-biased studies a reasonable one. Most debates about unions seem to boil down to “I just know” or anecdotes. I would expect unions to fund research to show that working conditions are better in union shops, but not include the fact that some unionized shops can’t compete in a market with non union shops and might go out of business. (But have great working conditions until the last day) And vice-versa for pro industry research. Unions are adversarial, and feel necessary to people that view employment or employers through that lens. It’s possible that we can still credit unions with the status quo, but 1they have nowhere near the adoption of vaccines to make the analogy a good one. I’d rather debate “which employers/industries” need unions than debate whether they are objectively good in all circumstances.

It appears that you have a major bone to pick with Tailscale and direct replies to your concerns do not seem to matter. They have a good security track record and are extremely widely deployed. I don’t see the evidence for your assertions that it is bloated and insecure.

I’ve been looking for something like this!

Yes, these are good points!

My quick summary is that I don’t think only wealthy people/companies should have their voices heard. I just don’t think that attempting to squash lobbying or even “money in politics” is the means to achieve it.

I’ve called my congressman/senator a few times to speak for/against something, and it’s made me wish it was easier for citizenry to meaningfully band together. Im glad I had someone to call, but it was certainly not the access that a fancy political dinner would have afforded me.

I despise and fear corruption, and agree that there an overlap between lobbying and bribery/kickbacks. And I don’t think buying the sitting president’s meme-coin should purchase access. But of course we have (had) laws against such blatantly poisonous arrangements. And many legal arrangements are not much better.

So I don’t mean to say that all “lobbying” is good in all forms, but the term has become so conflated with other illegal or borderline activities, that it’s actually lost meaning, and is actively harming our ability to meaningfully discuss it. It wouldn’t surprise me if this conflation benefits the very criminals that we wish to shut down.

When someone uses ambiguous terms like “money in politics” or “lobbying” to mean everything from running a newspaper ad to slipping someone an envelope full of cash, we will see calls for blunt instrument fixes. Those fixes usually benefit incumbents and existing power structures, and often happen to make it illegal to amplify one’s speech. There are plenty of countries that have very little legal money in their political system, but they also don’t have elections that can be swayed in the first place.

We would see less money in politics if the government was weaker and could not sway an individual’s or company’s fortunes by millions of dollars at the stroke of a pen, or declare that encrypted communications are illegal, or decide that certain ethnic groups are no longer welcome. But since they can, many companies or individuals or civil liberties groups will do the math and purchase whatever insurance they can to increase the chance their side is heard, whether we agree with that side or not.

I wish I had better proposals to fix the things we agree are bad, because we probably agree on a lot of it. I am mainly trying to call out that saying someone or some group is “lobbying” is NOT the same thing as accusing someone of being inherently corrupt, and the fact that it “sounds” like it is just benefits the actually obvious corrupt criminals and disadvantages anyone else who would want to use money to advocate for a position.

Fair point, and I concede I oversimplified.

I certainly don’t think that this should be the only way to talk to a lawmaker! I should be able to schedule time to go meet with my representatives or his/her people. I should also be able to pay someone to do so on my behalf.

I’m not familiar with the Citizen’s Initiative approach! I’ll look into it, and agree we should have more organized and official ways of doing it. I have called my congressman and senator’s office a couple of times in the US, and it doesn’t feel very productive. I wish it was easier to organize a group to make our concerns known.

Speaking of the EU, I have been surprised to watch the ChatControl stuff keep resurfacing and be struck down over and over and over again. It feels very much like the “government” wants something that the citizens and their private companies do not. Perhaps it is a result of lobbying for it by private interests, but it seems like an effort by the current powers that be to overstep what people would otherwise want to “lobby against”.

Lots of pitchforks in these comments.

If you had read that the EFF was meeting with lawmakers in the US to convince them that there was no secure way to allow the government to break e2e encryption, or had read that academics were banding together to ask the government not to make open weight LLMs illegal, what would your reaction be? What if told you that those organizations had actually paid a consultant to help them navigate getting appointments with the lawmakers?

Lobbying can be bribery, and that’s bad. Paying a professional to talk to lawmakers about something that is in your best interest is definitely less bad.

The alternative that many people claim to want (no lobbying or money in politics legally) is a lot closer to what is happening in more authoritarian regimes. If there is no way to legally speak your mind or pay someone to do so, political purity and perfect congressional understanding of nuanced topics doesn’t magically appear.

I think it is as enforceable as other licenses are.

Right, but by that rationale, it’s also suspicious to say “no” when they ask if they can open your suitcase. Or decline to tell them where the key is. Or ask to speak to your lawyer first. Or refuse to tell them what is in the suitcase. Or lock the suitcase in the first place. And I want to live in a society where those behaviors are protected.

(1password has a “traveling” mode that wipes it of sensitive passwords before going across borders. Is that suspicious? Should it be criminalized?)

Agreed. This is the same crowd that is mad about free tiers going away on other dev-friendly hosting services…

Cool idea. I love range requests and other static-hosted client-navigable formats!

I think you have a point, and SCD type 2 feels like a workaround, but there is also something to be said for the ability to query every row as it was at any given version. I’m not saying that SCD type 2 is the best solution given there might be a more domain-specific way to do it, but I see it a lot like file-based version control. It’s convenient to be able to examine all files as they existed at any point in time, without having to “model” the ways in which those files might change directly into the domain of the individual files.

If you have something like dolt (not affiliated), a version controlled database, you wouldn’t have to slap change dates on anything OR create your historical table. The changes would be implicit in the version history.