Mak'

…Nor is the trump admin actually using it to pay down the debt…

That’s the damning thing: Any savings are going towards tax cuts for the already-wealthy…

…Anyway, defunding the NOAA to pay off the national debt is like skipping a coffee, once, to pay down a mortgage on a house.

…and then going out and buying an expensive car.

That’s pretty much it. Trump—really, the folks who control him—is going to wall us off from the rest of the world, while the rest of the world continues moving forward. In power. In technology. In medicine.

He said we are still waiting for the hype to become reality, in the form of something obvious and impossible to miss, like the world economy shooting up 10% across the board.

That’s such an odd turn of phrase. “We’re still waiting for the hype to become a reality…” and “…something obvious and impossible to miss…”

So, like, do I have to time to go to the bathroom and get a drink, before I sit down and start staring at the empty space, or…?

Don’t get me wrong. I work with this stuff every day at this point. My job is LLMs and model training pipelines and agentic frameworks. But, there is something… off, about saying the equivalent of “it’ll happen any day now…”

It may just, but making forward-looking decisions on something that doesn’t exist—may not come to pass—feels like madness.

I’ve basically given up hope of the bubble ever bursting, as the market lives in La La Land, where no amount of bad decision-making seems to make a dent in the momentum of “line must go up”.

Would it be cool for negative feedback to step in and correct the death spiral? Absolutely. But, I advise folks to not start holding their breath so soon…

Very bold move, in a tech climate in which CEOs declare generative AI to be the answer to everything, and in which shareholders expect line to go up faster…

I half expect to next read an article about his ouster.

OP asked for the worst thing you’ve seen Excel used for…

One has to have a conscience to be bothered by it…

I never know what to think when I come across a comment like this one—which does describe, even if only at a surface level, how an LLM works—with 50% downvotes. Like, are people angry at reality, is that it?

It may well be a matter of opinion whether Tesla, even operating at its highest potential, could now overtake the likes of BYD, which is getting extensive help from its government. But, it’s reasonably clear that Tesla’s chances get thinner with every bad decision of Musk’s.

He fucked with the engineering, chasing pennies on critical components, like the lidar. He fucked with the crown jewel of the company—its Supercharger network—by destroying the team, and thereby slowing down rollouts and critical maintenance. He ran his mouth off and chased away folks—like me—who would have otherwise bought, by espousing pants-on-head-crazy crypto-bro viewpoints. Hell, his idea of PR is a poop emoji auto-responder.

It’s just frustrating to see such a great concept—the ubiquitous electric car—be fucked up so badly by the person with the most means to succeed.

What’s hilariously tragic is that he could very likely have his full self-driving if he would just shut his shit-spewing asshole of a mouth for a hot second, and spend some of his ungodly billions on the problem.

There are incredibly bright people out there who can make this stuff a reality. But, it takes paying them well, not shit-talking or overruling them, and giving them the environment for success—e.g., not taking away the radar from the cars.

He just wants to talk a big game without spending any real effort or money on the problem. And, it’s just sad, because he could have his FSD and look like a genius.

I just continue to be amazed that, instead of the old, tried-and-true method of giving people what they want—a solid, reliable car at a good price, and a stellar charging network in the places people want to be—a man of his means keeps trying weird gimmicks.

You know, I don’t actually know. Have been conditioned to avoid using them that I don’t even think about them.

Oh, I acknowledge that.

However, there are two things I get hung up on. One, can’t pay by check—Costco doesn’t accept checks. And, two, the traditional no-limits cards are generally Amex, which they don’t accept—only Visa.

So, yes, while nothing else you said was wrong per se, I’m still left to ponder just how the transaction would go down.

I know everyone’s general focus is on the cost of the thing and how ridiculous it seems, completely ignoring that it’s a Scotch that was aged longer than the overwhelming majority of us—me included—have been alive, and that there are some people for whom that taste is very much worth it.

Me, I’ve wrangled with exactly how you’re meant to pay for the thing and walk out the door with it. Am I bringing $27K—plus tax—worth of cash—three straps of hundos?—to Costco and having the cashier count it? Do I get pulled into the manager’s office instead? Or, do I put this on my Costco Citi Visa? Will they decline it, even if I have the credit limit? Can I sub in another Visa, since that’s all they take? Do I get walked out the door, or do I get a receipt for the checker to sharpie a line through?

Correction: If they’re voting Republican, they’re united on abortion. You can be a principled objector, but the moment you cast a vote for a Republican—particularly at the national level—you are, like it or not, casting a vote for everything that the party stands for and that includes ending abortion protections.

Seconded.

The problem is that there are a lot of low-information voters who get what little information they do have from sources that have no problem lying to them, be it their friends and coworkers, family and clergy, on up to “news” outlets like FoxNews and NewsMax.

They simply don’t know that the money that could be helping them is being siphoned off by the wealthiest. As far as they know, the reason they’re not getting help is because the Biden administration is giving out money for the construction of non-gendered, litterbox restrooms for trans furries. No points off for being outlandish, either. Whatever keeps them from discovering that it’s the billionaire class sucking up the money, and not the Democrats, LGBT, immigrants, etc.

I dare say he’s already breaking one of the ten: that of bearing false witness, by claiming in the general sense that teachers are raping kids, when he knows it’s not true.

My first temptation was to say that it might be an age thing, but then I know many people my age who still don’t care about plants.

For me, it’s like a switch flipped one day. When I was younger, I just didn’t really care, and the few times I was given a plant, it did not end well. Figured that I just had a brown thumb.

But, maybe 10-some-odd years ago, I got a peace lily, and, by then, something had changed. I wanted to see this plant thrive, and it brought me just a little bit of satisfaction to see it doing well. It doesn’t hurt that peace lilies will tell you when they need watered, and, as such are pretty easy to keep.

I’m still not the best plant dad, but I’d since gone on to buy about a dozen more and appreciate the bit of greenery around the house.

Hard agree. I played through the opening twice in my first sitting. Died both times. Put it down for a year and a half.

Finally decided to try again and picked it back up. Passed the opening sequence and got into the game proper. And, I can say that I had a pretty good time—excepting a key, bullshit timed mission that I barely passed.

They really did not need to gatekeep the game behind the poor design of the opening.