It appears that the administration is unhappy about not being funded.

I would take this opportunity to point out that housing in the Bay Area is in ludicrously short supply and has driven house prices to pretty stupid levels. YIMBY’s been banging on it, but…

“Trump put billionaires in charge of everything,” said progressive Congressman Greg Casar. “It’s a disaster.”

While his cabinet is wealthy, it mostly is not billionaires (though we’ll see where they wind up, since I understand that some of the policy they’re running, like making executive decisions on tariff exemptions, is pretty open to corruption).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kylemullins/2025/08/13/inside-the-richest-presidential-cabinet-ever/

I guess you could maybe count Elon Musk, who has…I dunno, I guess ~$300 billion at the time that he was running around the White House. But that’s just Musk, Trump, Lutnick, and McMahon that break the billionaire bar.

but these are “cattle car” prices, so we get cattle car service.

considers

To be fair, one could get business class/first class service. Not worth it for me, but that’d improve the experience a bit.

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I will say that cleaning does seem to make me feel upbeat afterwards too. I should probably do it more…

Tineye’s oldest match is here:

https://iamsuuuuuuupertired.tumblr.com/post/611573131181686784

I don’t have a Tumblr account, so I can’t view it.

investigates

If one wants to travel from San Francisco to New York City starting on Friday, November 14th, as a single adult:

¹ Assuming ~8 hours a day driving time and Google Maps’ estimate of 44 hours driving time. Does not include hotel fees and fuel.

For a lot of people, if they can’t fly, they’re probably going to be better off just skipping their travel.

Yeah. Frankly, if I were Newsom, I probably wouldn’t do this. I suppose that it’s possible that he’s had serious legal analysis done taking the Logan Act into consideration, maybe even wants Trump to send the Justice Department after him, though I don’t think that it’s the tack I’d take. I think he’d do better to highlight unpopular failings in Trump’s policy and then say “if you elect me President, I will do differently”.

I’m also not at all sure that the climate is what I’d bang on, as Newsom. Like, I think that most climate voters are probably already voting Democratic. I think that he’d do better to highlight areas in which Trump’s policies are causing a reduction in standard of living, where he’s got a better chance of picking up swing voters.

That being said, he’s a professional politician, and I’m not, and he probably has a team of people picking apart polls and with a better political science background than me, so…shrugs

I assume you’re referring to the Logan Act:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Act

The Logan Act (1 Stat. 613, 18 U.S.C. § 953,) is a United States federal law that criminalizes the negotiation of a dispute between the United States and a foreign government by an unauthorized American citizen. It is intended to prevent unauthorized negotiations from undermining the U.S. government’s position.[2]

§ 953. Private correspondence with foreign governments.

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

This section shall not abridge the right of a citizen to apply himself, or his agent, to any foreign government, or the agents thereof, for redress of any injury which he may have sustained from such government or any of its agents or subjects.

In United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., 299 U.S. 304 (1936), Justice Sutherland, writing for the Court, observed,

[T]he President alone has the power to speak or listen as a representative of the nation. He makes treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate, but he alone negotiates. Into the field of negotiation, the Senate cannot intrude; and Congress itself is powerless to invade it. As Marshall said in his great argument of March 7, 1800, in the House of Representatives, ‘The President is the sole organ of the nation in its external relations, and its sole representative with foreign nations.’

I think that there’s a good argument that we need a review of programs and to explicitly indicate their status in law regarding funding when there’s no budget ahead of time. Having all this worked out by courts at the last minute under extreme time pressure is a mess. Makes it much harder to plan.

Yes, ideally we’d never have shutdowns, but they do happen, and in the past few years we’ve had an unusually high number. Better to be prepared.

I’m kind of sympathetic to the idea that there should be some sort of fine associated with petty vandalism, but I’ve also seen a number of comments here and elsewhere that it’s unlikely that whatever she did actually required causing this much damage to remove it, and that if it did, the sculpture was poorly designed in the first place. One user on Reddit asked whether, if the city had decided to use dynamite to remove the eyes, she should be liable for all the damage caused by the dynamite. I think that that’s probably a fair point to make. The blame doesn’t need to be entirely on any one party here.

I could see fining her for whatever one might reasonably expect a competent removal to run from a properly-designed artwork, but not dumping costs on her from failures in those other areas.

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I mean, I don’t especially think that the GOP is going to fully change course on health care. And I doubt that the Democrats are going to block the budget until Trump leaves office (though that’d be one for the history books).

In my book, what matters for the Democrats is flipping the House in 2026. Whatever happens on the shutdown — forcing the Republicans to use the nuclear option so that they don’t need a supermajority in the Senate, the Republicans back down by conceding on health care, or the Democrats back down by conceding on health care, whatever, and how each side manages to set public perceptions around this — is aimed at shaping the midterms, which will matter.

In 2013, Glasgow City Council put forward plans for a £65,000 restoration project, which included a proposal to double the height of its plinth and raise it to more than six feet (1.8 metres) in height to “deter all but the most determined of vandals”.[12] Their planning application contained an estimate that the cost of removing traffic cones from the statue was £100 per callout, and that this could amount to £10,000 per year.

If the police are taking it down 100 times per year and people are putting a new one up 100 times per year, I’m kind of impressed with the determination on both sides.

Hmm. While I don’t know what their QA workflow is, my own experience is that working with QA people to design a QA procedure for a given feature tends to require familiarity with the feature in the context of real-world knowledge and possible problems, and that human-validating a feature isn’t usually something done at massive scale, where you’d get a lot of benefit from heavy automation.

It’s possible that one might be able to use LLMs to help write test code — reliability and security considerations there are normally less-critical than in front-line code. Worst case is getting a false positive, and if you can get more test cases covered, I imagine that might pay off.

Square does an MMO, among their other stuff. If they can train a model to produce AI-driven characters that act sufficiently like human players, where they can theoretically log training data from human players, that might be sufficient to populate an MMO “experimental” deployment so that they can see if anything breaks prior to moving code to production.

“Because I would love to be able to start up 10,000 instances of a game in the cloud, so there’s 10,000 copies of the game running, deploy an AI bot to spend all night testing that game, then in the morning we get a report. Because that would be transformational.”

I think that the problem is that you’re likely going to need more-advanced AI than an LLM, if you want them to just explore and try out new features.

One former Respawn employee who worked in a senior QA role told Business Insider that he believes one of the reasons he was among 100 colleagues laid off this past spring is because AI was reviewing and summarising feedback from play testers, a job he usually did.

We can do a reasonable job of summarizing human language with LLMs today. I think that that might be a viable application.

Eventually, I expect that advanced AI will. The same is true for many human professions. But I’m dubious that pure LLMs will be the route this takes. Too many limitations.

It’s possible that such an advanced AI might make use of or incorporate LLMs.

Ground level parking isn’t really all that expensive, not unless you have very high land values. It does cost far more if you want to put up a multistory parking garage; from past reading, that’s maybe $30k-$50k per spot (though I’d still personally favor a parking mandate in that case, as otherwise you get people turning the street into a parking lot, which is awful for everyone, and parking illegally all over).

In the picture shown, though, it looks like townhouse-type stuff, two stories, not high density housing, so the land value probably isn’t that insane, and they can do ground level parking instead of multistory parking.

At a meeting in April, xAI staff lawyer Lily Lim told employees that they would need to submit their biometric data to train the AI companion to be more human-like in its interactions with customers, according to a recording of the meeting review by the Journal.

Employees that were assigned as AI tutors were instructed to sign release forms granting xAI “a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, sub-licensable, royalty-free license” to use, reproduce, and distribute their faces and voices, as part of a confidential program code-named “Project Skippy.” The data would be used to train Ani, as well as Grok’s other AI companions.

Huh.

I wonder if xAI has transexual employees, and if so, how socially-conservative users feel about conversing with a composite AI incorporating said data sources.

Conscription makes sense for countries that have a critical need to be able to rapidly mobilize people.

If you can’t wait six months to train a lot of troops, might find yourself with a week or a few days of warning that you’re being invaded by a major power, then there’s no real replacement militarily. You have to have your people trained before that warning arrives, or you won’t have time to do any training.

Historically, say, Finland had a major concern about Russia invading. I’d say that in that case, it makes sense.

However, there is a cost to doing so. You lose months or years of potentially specialized labor to do so. That’s like a substantial tax on the population. You’d rather not do it if you have the opportunity to avoid it.

The US has been a long ways away from other major powers, and for a long time has maintained a decent (later, very powerful) professional navy (and, later, air force; these days, its peacetime army isn’t especially weak either). The US is pretty confident that if someone is going to invade the US, the existing, peacetime forces could buy at least six months of warning and delay to train up more forces from scratch if need be. It doesn’t believe that it will be in a position to need to mobilize very large numbers of infantry on short notice, so it doesn’t need to pay that price. In that case, avoiding conscription probably makes sense.

EDIT: Vice interviewed someone at Jane’s a while back, and their position was that the modern US’s existing forces would be able to repel an invasion even if it were composed of all of the other existing militaries in the world, leveraging geography and powerful peacetime naval and air forces, which is obviously going to be a highly-unlikely scenario, a theoretical mind game. Any plausible invading coalition is probably going to be much smaller.