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I mean, the story here is that the overwhelming amount of money going into our election is being spent by and for the Republican party. This isn't a "both sides" thing, it's that there's a party of and for rich people pushing policies to support rich people supported by rich people and funded by rich people. That's the story of American politics in 2026: the wealthy are trying to buy the government by spending ludicrous amounts of money to influence elections. That's the entire story. That should be the front page news, that should be the only thing we're talking about, but it's taken as something everyone "already knows," so we don't talk about it, and the NYT article is about crypto or some shit and not "THE GOP IS A CAPTURED INSTRUMENT OF WEALTH BEING LEVERAGED AGAINST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, AND WE HAVE THE RECEIPTS."

A few reasons! First, the field is absolutely fascinating - the complexity is incredible, and I'm really enjoying learning about it. It's also clearly "What's Next" - the synbio space in particular has a real "early computers/early internet" feel, in that the capabilities are becoming apparent, but the tooling & infrastructure's not quite there - it feels like it's about to take off in a big way, and that's exciting. On a broader level, I think climate change is an existential risk, and the biotech/synbio toolkit is the best bet I can see for how we both mitigate and repair the damage and shift our energy consumption patterns, so I want to be part of building it.

Go Slugs! The UCSC campus is still the most beautiful place I've ever lived. I'm sad I wasn't more of an outdoorsy person while I was there - it was just an incredible place.

It's understandable. Bald Eagles sound genuinely hilarious for a bird that big.

This is great - wonderful sense of presence, especially with the road noise mixed in. It would be really fantastic in VR.

(Also, 50 different cities and a couple stations for each? That's no small amount of work!)

> but it is hard to say that in the end, consumers are on the loosing end.

Consumers are actual humans with complex lives that often also include producing things. Every seller that Amazon drives out of business is a consumer (or consumers) that no longer has an income. That's how this harms consumers.

This is the cycle with Intel, though. They innovate, blow out the market, and then stagnate until AMD or someone else comes out with an architecture that's a category improvement on whatever Intel's offering.

This looks like they're turning every nob to 11 on the current architecture to try to get something that they can sell until they can come up with whatever will succeed the Core line.

You may never actually need all 100,000 pages, but you don't know in advance which pages you will need, and you'll definitely need that page when you need it.

Have any of them stood out to you? Is there anything you'd consider a reasonable consumer device right now?

At a previous gig, we had a lot of systems named after animals, and I'd joked about wiring our alerting system up to emit the animal sound for the system that was paging, but I think I'm actually going to do that at my next gig. Outside the land of software, engineers debug systems using sound all the time - I think we're underutilizing our senses and our pattern recognition.

>Clothes change much slower than software updates,

I change my clothes at least once a day and add to my wardrobe on a ~weekly to ~monthly basis. Having been party to large system upgrades at even a reasonably competent company, I'd be shocked to find out that any surveillance system anywhere is matching that velocity.