Worth noting this dynamic when people overgeneralize “local government good, federal government bad”, a tendency that has been present and growing for at least 50 years.

The theory that local government is more accountable and responsive seems to be pretty deeply broken, what actually seems to happen is that localities lack a critical mass of attention and focus for real responsiveness and accountability.

Or the American character in general does.

For me it’s mostly media apps - Fireworks CS 6, Reason 10, maybe some version of Garage Band. There’s alternatives but these apps hit a sweet spot that I could camp out on for decades if the tech treadmill didn’t like to make software an exercise in seeing shifting shapes in the clouds.

There’s already a solid case that AI profits or revenue should be significantly taxed for public goods whether or not there are employment impacts. The models simply do not exist without vast amounts of training data much of it acquired by murky or clearly problematic methods (even before you start to get into how technical developments mean the letter of the law doesn’t cover the spirit of the situation). The source of that data is more or less everyone. Some benefit should go to everyone.

I thought the recommended honeymoon reading was Knuth’s _Surreal Numbers_

I also have a suspicion that people’s microdistributions of talents is underappreciated. Some people are good architects and average at algorithms. Some people are unusually good at debugging or QA. Some can spin out whole systems at an impressive speed that may not be a great long term fit for the larger system.

And most businesses aren’t managed in a way that’s interested in adapting to the microshapes of personnel.

nah, as someone who's driving Claude daily by corporate mandate, AI just shits acceptable mediocrity over everything, and my microtalents don't fit into the org anywhere anymore.

They've been replaced by Markdown files asking Claude to burn tokens on doing something deterministic tools already do faster and better, like checking variable names for typoes (I wish I was making this up).

Who said anything about a corporate context? :)

with the advantage that you can discover this by reading citations.

Yes, but it takes a lot of time to find a lie and very little time to conceive a lie. It's a losing battle as the percentage of honest citations drops (and it doesn't need to be a big drop to have a big impact.. think if the reliability of planes dropped 1%).

A fascinating everyday arms race I had no idea was playing out around me.

Here’s a fun read on that arms race

The acquired immune system: a vantage from beneath

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15539148/

Basically saying our immune systems ensure that microbes get ever more devious

However there’s ways that we counter that, like mucus that basically slowly feeds and tames your bacteria. Doesn’t work on viruses though

Everything I hear is about bacterias though. I wish we found more about viruses.

viruses and transposons are a major source of creativity in life. the adaptive immune system of jawed vertebrates like us, which defends against viruses, only exists because the RAG transposon inserted itself into the gonads of our fish ancestors 500 million years ago

Origin of immunoglobulins and T cell receptors: A candidate gene for invasion by the RAG transposon

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40614193/

Bacteria is plural, bacterium is singular.

The enlightenment and its values underly a huge portion of what’s published, both inside scholarly tradition and in popular work.

Ans the enlightenment is at heart civil libertarian, pro-social, and liberal.

Models trained on that work will reflect that approach.

How does the PWA work offline with HTMX? The “hit the server for fresh markup fragments” approach seems like it has to be abandoned here, however simplifying it is for online apps.

It seems like the wrong tool for the job to me, but I was curious and thought about it a little:

After initial page load, a service worker could intercept all the HTMX app's AJAX requests, but it could only work with what's already cached. Using a lot of tooling like workbox the developer could pre-cache the entire app. (Would that mean no dynamic responses?)

Alternatively, implement the entire HTMX app in JS, build the app once for the NodeJS/Deno backend and once for the front-end. After page load, the frontend could take over.

Or something like that. It's a bit convoluted as PWA solutions often are.

I would recommend you have a look at Swag: https://swag.mills.io

Buying up old books is legal. Digitizing and distilling them arguably is too. And also:

> paying extortion fees to the copyright-mongers

Yes yes, greedy fat cat publishing oligarchs treading on the poor put-upon scrappy AI underdogs. /s

Back in reality, the fraction of people who got into publishing books to get rich collecting rents is… not large. There’s so many other fields that are likely to reward participants with more wealth that it’s absurd — even with all the passion for the work in tech it’s probably relatively less pure.

And whatever the excesses of copyright have been, the whole bargain has always been on more pro-social foundations and stronger intellectual foundations than “extortion” sneers. It recognizes that incentives matter and work that’s valuable should be rewarded and incentivized.

A culture that takes a Robin Hood approach to low marginal cost billing points but fawns over the hypercapitalized distribution King Johns isn’t creating a freer or richer society or fighting the real cartel center, it’s indulging resentment and caricature.

> Back in reality, the fraction of people who got into publishing books to get rich collecting rents is… not large.

That's because the business is buying copyrights in bulk from those people. Copyright-mongers ≠ publishers or writers.

> Yes yes, greedy fat cat publishing oligarchs treading on the poor put-upon scrappy AI underdogs. /s

The fact that the copyright-mongers are oppressing someone you don't like this time should probably not change your opinion of them.