I can’t think of a complete start to finish, OS to mosfets, computer that is 100% manufactured in the United States.

Of course, getting a router SOC with firmware from the factory , soldering on the Ethernet ports and adding RAM and storage, installing an OS, throwing it in a case with a power supply into a box isn’t solving the problem of insecure foreign firmware but is meeting the “Made in US” demand.

So what counts and who gets exemptions will be telling.

If we are going to talk about how much the cost of public transportation such as trains or buses are covered by taxes it would only be fair to look at roads and personal vehicles too.

It actually is! It's a statistic that is tracked by the Census. It turns out, that the majority of road maintenance is paid directly by user fees: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur...

> If we are going to talk about how much the cost of public transportation such as trains or buses are covered by taxes it would only be fair to look at roads and personal vehicles too.

Absolutely! I agree that we should be pricing pollution and other negative externalities. But in addition, we should fairly price the all public services. And people who need public assistance should just get money.

And of course, we should be penalizing density pollution. There's no reason to build high-rise offices, and we should be demolishing them by now (except for historically-significant buildings).

If Starlink’s are about 2 tons each (the v3’s are going to be much larger) and they each have a roughly 5 year life span and the 10,000 currently are equally spread over that lifespan (so around 2,000 a year need to be replaced) that’s equivalent to around 10 tons per day of Starlink material breaking up in the atmosphere.

With the 1 million SpaceX datacenters Musk talks about and an original projected satellite Starlink swarm size of 40,000, that number balloons to something like 500 tons per day.

So while today it is only a fraction of the total amount of material breaking up in the atmosphere, the idea that multiple companies could have Starlink size satellite swarms with lifespans measured in a few years we start to easily dwarf what meteorites do.

I have the setting to only send that specific host’s identity configured or else I DoS myself with this many keys trying to sign into a computer sitting next to me on my desk through ssh.

Like I can’t imagine complaining about adding 5 lines to a config file whenever you set up a new service to ssh onto. And you can effectively copy and paste 90% of those 5 short lines, just needing to edit the hostname and key file locations.

10 billion a year supposedly for the past 5 years now.

It would have been really interesting to see what Oculus could have become without getting bought. I do think they were a little neat idea, not at all ready for Facebook sized projects.

When I was 20, I preordered a pixel 2 after watching the launch presentation from my university library. One of the "bonuses" for doing so was Google's new headset you put your phone in for a VR experience, along with a new controller.

This "Daydream" only lasted a few years (in software support), but it was a pretty good physical implementation of the "strap your phone to your face for budget VR" concept. I used it more than I'd care to admit for watching movies on a virtual big screen. It'd always give me a big headache between the eyes after an hour and a half, but it was fun every now and again.

A day at the fair.

It even convinced me to buy an Oculus CV1 when those were being heavily discounted!

I never ended up using the CV1 as much as my Daydream, which is saying something. The appeal of VR just isn't that great to me. It's something I find myself wanting to do maybe once or twice a year. Now, never, since the CV1 only ever worked well with Windows, and I can't be bothered to keep a Windows install exclusively for VR (I've tried and failed multiple times with the Linux runtimes).

Not nearly enough drive to deal with base stations, wires, or controllers. And even with the newest headsets that do away with all those, not worth the cash or effort to put on, or the space the headset takes up. Not for "once a month" trips to the fair.

It's insane to me that Meta dumped so much cash into VR. Their fever dream of working in VR gives me a sense of dread and migraine just thinking about it...

"Put on your headset and go into an office meeting!"

It really boggles the mind.

The problem with VR in general is that only children, Gen Alpha, are into it as a demographic. Meta failed to take this into account to reposition Meta VR as either their NES or Roblox into their marketing. They were marketing something only children appreciated to adults who couldn’t see the potential. All adults see is a giant bucket that they don’t want to put on their face.

- All The President's Men

Don't they screen to hire people who already know that?

There was a time when big tech widely hired dor entry-level jobs.

Also, cramming for the design portion of an interview, and doing it for real, and interacting with the architects/design documents are 2 very different things

The product is the stock price.

Viewed through that lens, keeping the hype going at all costs makes sense.

That's what meta(verse) was suppose to build.

you could do this forever!

And the tens of billions spent on AI at Meta... As a result, we're all using "Meta Code CLI" and "ChatBook" and "Geminizuck" right?

Seriously: while we're all on Claude Code using the Anthropic models and many are happy with Gemini and ChatGPT for other stuff, where is Meta's AI offering? I love their Segment Anything Models (SAM) but what the heck has Meta to answer to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI?

Meta stock is priced as a growth stock - not on its current financial returns but on what the market believes it will do in the future. It has been priced like this from the start because it has been growing since the start.

As soon as it stops being able to convince the market it is still growing, then the stock price drops to what the business's current financials dictate, which will be a huge drop. That huge drop has severe negative consequences for everyone involved in that decision. Spending tens of billions on the Metaverse project was better, even though it failed, because it created a growth story they could sell to the market.

So now that's gone they need another growth story. Given the current state of the tech world, that's probably AI-related. And they probably need their own models as part of it.

They can't just "survive the shift" because it's not really about survival. They need to be part of the shift, so that they can convince the market that they're still growing.

you realize 99% of those announced "investments" have yet to occur as recognizable transactions, correct?

Meanwhile, the barrel of $70b in metaverse waste was actually spent

"A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you're talking about some real money."

Facebook's core competency is copying other successful products. Sometimes it works.

But I mean you still have to pay for a Claude API with Moltclaw or whatever no?

And the second part about models, if model choice doesn’t matter, what do they do? If LogClaw injests my logs, applies your custom algorithm to automatically create intelligent alerts without me having to configure anything, what does the LLM do?

If the LLMs are necessary for this, then mode choice should matter no? Some 2 year old version of Mistral or OLLAMA or NanoGPT isn’t going to perform as well as OpenAI or Claude no?

The 1 seat per 50,000 from the article is a little obscene. I think switching to cube root apportionment and single at-large approval vote would be my preferred choice.

With cube root 1 billion citizens would result in a Congress with 1,000 members. A single national at-large district with party list approval voting would entirely eliminate the possibility of gerrymandering. But even multi-member State-wide districts with approval or ranked choice would still go a long way.

Of course that still leaves the Senate but at least for the House these reforms would be massive. I would eliminate the Presidency too but that’s whole other story.