hedora

Not defending them, but in the US our taxes directly fund genocide. We don't get competent domestic policies in return.

I'd hope they will attempt to establish evidence-based policies.

That's so radical these days that it is not on any political spectrum.

Most politicians are high EQ. They're also mostly power hungry sociopaths.

All the worst people I've dealt with in my career were high EQ. Many were extremely successful and did significant, lasting damage to their employers and coworkers. Some were even violent, yet somehow got away with it.

I'm sure you can cherry pick overseas examples, but if you look at the progress of the US in the 1900's there's a clear pattern:

When intellectuals were in charge, or at least given authority by the politicians, things got much better. When they weren't, things got much worse. Examples include the Great Depression and (fast forwarding to the 2000's) the financial crisis, COVID (Trump fired the disease response team that stopped SARS-v1, and that would have been the early response to COVID before it left China.) He also ignored nearly-universal warnings from economists that his policies would cause the inflation that Biden was later blamed for.

On the intellectual side, we have things like the New Deal, the Apollo Program, well-run public education that led the US to be a superpower (and has now been gutted), etc, etc.

So, I had to look up Bonfire night. I think the article is about Guy Fawkes Night. Guy Fawkes masks became popular here in the US a few year ago, and are still reasonably common. Second Halloween with political effigies and big fires seems like it could do well, though it'd probably land on Election Day...

Many of the Chinese models are not open weight. The larger Qwen models are a good example. I assumed I could use flash next however I wanted to, since it is easy to download and runs on low-wattage desktops, but nope.

Pretty much everything sends the full transcript. That’s how LLMs work, and why “compact before cache expiry” is now a default in Claude Code. Cache hits are incredibly cheap to service on the provider side.

I estimated the weekly quota was roughly linear in dollars spent a while back. I’m sure someone has more carefully measured and that it changes fairly regularly.

It’s just a fancy document completer. If you tell (or it is likely you want) it to complete a document where it is a reckless enabler, well, conversations like that are in the training set, so that’s what it’ll do.

Education is probably the first line of defense, in the same way you (hopefully) get safety training before using power tools.

Yeah; I’m basically never going to upgrade from a BMW i3 because the i4’s jog wheel and UI was such a regression.

I guess I should be happy they saved me $10-100Ks, but it’s concerning that western engineering apparently peaked in the late 2010’s.

For 3D printing, I just ask Claude Code to use text based 3D modeling software, and to build a directory tree per project (with make to convert to something the slicer can use). I’ve printed non-trivial projects this way (60 parts) without trouble. Be sure to ask it to parameterize the models and put the parameters at the top.

I imagine this would work just as well for CNC wood carving/routing projects, and maybe even for complex assemblies.

I wish I could pay the BBC license fee here in the US and get access to iPlayer.

Don’t forget Disney.