blandcoffee

I appreciate the direction of this article, and commend the author on publishing work, but the first sentence in the first paragraph is exactly what they lament.

> A pattern I see is that people use AI to build something new, then they use AI to retrospectively summarize what they have already built into a design document. Reading a document like this isn’t just difficult—it is punishing.

On IOS 26.3.1 - settings > notifications > signal

Show previews is set to Never (Default).

I ask this with sincere curiosity - what does his current place of residence have to do with his message that programmers should avoid companies building infrastructure for the police state?

Do you think this might be tied to a person’s financial situation?

Grow up with a safety net, you’ll enjoy the process.

Grow up poor and/or with people depending on you and you focus on the end state?

You may be right, but I think China specifically has learned something from Russia.

Before invading Ukraine, Russia held assets across the world and they were frozen (some of it USD).

Now imagine you are a large holder of US treasuries, would you take some off the table and purchase this other asset (gold) that can ensure you're less susceptible to your enemies sanctions?

I think perhaps you may have misread the article.

Here are some items that stuck out to me:

> As for American gold holdings, they’re essentially pointless: Fort Knox is a legacy of the days when the U.S. promised to exchange gold for dollars on demand.

> More to the point, bitcoin was created to be an alternative to the dollar, not a support for it. Far from strengthening the dollar, having the U.S. purchase billions of dollars of assets that were created to be alternatives to the dollar would at best be economically pointless and at worst would actually weaken confidence in the dollar.

so why other than fort knox, are you advocating for this position?

In the article it says:

> Sacks said that he has sold his personal crypto holdings.

I went to his twitter account, that's exactly what he said, but that does not mean the same thing as divesting from companies that hold crypto.

[flagged]

> Finally, it is not sufficient to have an army of parachute ninjas large or smart to drop into all the agencies in the executive branch. Many institutions of power are outside the government proper. Ninjas will have to land on the roofs of these buildings too—mainly journalism, academia and social media.

The author is quoting Yarvin's substack here.

Say what you will about reducing the federal workforce - are people really ok with this line of thinking?

The idea of running the govt in 'founder mode' sounds reasonable on paper, until you realize there are established rules that outline the roles of each branch of govt in a democracy. We should be ok that these rules don't establish the most efficient govt, a worthy trade-off against the edge-cases.

> “We should treat Trump and members of his administration like Elon Musk as akin to Russian oligarchs,” Macfarlane wrote. “We need to impose meaningful costs on the U.S. for its economic aggression.”

The most meaningful cost you could impose in this situation is to establish a direction in which innovation within your borders rivals that of your aggressors, so you are not beholden to the government of their day.

Interesting - I genuinely want to understand your perspective here.

Are you saying following the laws to protect sensitive information is not worth it in this case, because it has been authorized by the party of the day?

Does anyone else find it odd, that this type of access would typically require training and/or a background check, yet here we are 12 days after this administration was sworn in?

Are there no checks and balances in place? Seems like one side that won the popular vote has taken the entire spectrum of action, regardless if they need to govern for an entire nation.