Lottery system. No more elected positions, just random appointment based on lottery from pools of qualified volunteers that throw their hat in. Similarly for top appointment positions. Some lottery pools have requirements, like to be a supreme court justice, you have to have practiced law for X years. Top generals, you have to have served at or above a certain rank for X years and still be active duty. And so on.

No more campaigning, no more political parties, no more consolidation of power. You essentially just end up with a random assortment of minimally qualified citizen peers every term rotation. They generally don’t know each other, and so aren’t incentivized to cover up institutional corruption.

You could argue that random (but technically qualified) people could be crazy, or have wild values different from their peers. You could also argue they might not be the best choice for the job vs. peers. But look at your elected officials today. Are they anything like your peers? Are they truly the best, brightest picks? Do their values really represent common citizens?

My #1 pet peeve is when someone comes to me with a problem, and the solution is in the fucking console output or error message.

On a bad day, if I had unilateral power, I would fire those people on the spot.

Mayne pedantic, but:

Everyone seems to think CEOs are the problem. They are not. They report to and get broad instruction from the board. The board can fire the CEO. If you got rid of a CEO, the board will just hire a replacement.

Don’t they use super statically verifiable code for these kinds of applications? Like, Ada?

This is rhe same reason I will never buy a house on slab: gotta hammer up the floor, fix, repour and refloor if you ever need those pipes down below.

Cheaper & faster development by leveraging large libraries/frameworks, but inability to automatically drop most unused parts of those libraries/frameworks. You could in theory shrink Electron way down by yoinking out tons of browser features you’re not using, but there’s not much incentive to do it and it’d potentially require a lot of engineering work.

Try porting a very small bit of behavior into a new tiny library or module that is Typescript based and independently published. Enable the strictness checks in tsconfig - really, really resist the urge to use any, and enforce that any is disallowed in tsconfig. Familiarize yourself with its utility types that really trip new authors up. “Record” comes to mind here, and others that involve generics if you haven’t before worked with generics. Some of the type error messaging can be pretty obtuse - don’t be afraid to paste them into an LLM (or use Copilot enhanced Intellisense) to explain what it actually means. IMO the type violation messaging is a weak dev experience point for new authors, so don’t sweat it if you occasionally “struggle to make the squiggles go away”.

This is why I will never touch Javascript again. Long ago when I worked on web stuff, half my workflow was spent in the debugger tracing garbage to find where a typo was. The industry moved to Typescript, and now assuming the strictness checks are enabled, if some Typescript transpiles successfully, I can be 95% sure whatever fuckup I observe at runtime is a logic problem.

Weakly typed languages were an awful idea. But in general, if the compiler isn’t able to detect most runtime issues (like with C++ here), it’s not going to be the most productive language to use for building solutions compared to smarter alternatives.

The idea is to have water or molten salt cool the walls of the torus from outside, and those drive ordinary turbines like any other generator. The main issue is that particles fly out of the confined plasma donut and degrade the walls, whose dust flys into the plasma and reduces the fusion efficiency. They’re focusing on the hard part - dealing with the health of plasma sustainment and the durability of the confinement walls over time. Hot thing that stays hot can boil water or salt to drive regular turbines, that’s not the main engineering challenge. I get your frustration where it feels from news coverage that they’re not focusing on the right stuff, but what you’ll likely eventually see is that the time between “we figured out how to durably confine a healthy plasma” will quickly turn into “we have a huge energy output” much like inventors puttered around with flight for hundreds of years until a sustained powered flight design, however crappy, finally worked. From that point, it was only 15 years until the first transatlantic flight.

So you want to tax all companies a percent of their stock ownership every year? Good luck with that.

You’re falling intro a trollhill. The point is the ultra-wealthy pay very smart people to work out loopholes. If some internet retard can run around your ideas and keep you busy, a team of full time financial experts will have a field day. This is not an easy problem to solve. Pretending like it is leads to support for crappy subpar legislation that doesn’t work.

Lol have you not used o1/o3? They show the inner monologue too. Fun little pretend detail to keep you entertained while the model takes 30 seconds to respond.

Uh…yes it’s about the same, maybe slightly dumber than o3. Which is already mediocre.

I see Tiktok in the news, never downloaded it. Does that make me special?

I don’t get it. Why would DeepSeek supposedly get more downloads from the app store? It’s not like it’s any more interesting to consumers than other LLM apps. It was just notable for purportedly being cheaper to train. Something seems fishy.

My accounting team told me they would open more Panamanian shell companies for me, and the shares would get distributed across them. I’d retain full ownership, of course.

You’re thinking like one of the poors. Us ultra wealthy don’t get paid in dollars. We get paid in shares. And we don’t sell the shares, we take out long term low interest bank loans with the shares as collateral any time we absolutely need to use cash.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/invest-borrow-against-die-scott-114400643.html

Yes https://americorps.gov

I am for it only because it helps avoid politicization of the armed forces. When the military self-selects recruits, you risk the organization biasing towards people with a particular worldview. It intrinsicially also leads to a military comprised of people who love the idea of being a “military person”.

It’s much more reassuring knowing your armed forces, the people with the big guns, are your neighbors, rather than strangers with a particular ideology or biased loyalties.

AmeriCorps is exactly this, but it’s obviously not compulsory.

Americans and their silly performative outrage