My high school had a few unusual traditions around graduation time.

The first related to our director, a man who gave his 100% on official school business and then gave another 100% on all of his hobby projects around the school. It wasn’t that we had something like an apiary or a pond biotope. We had an apiary and a pond biotope and a herd of goats and a tiny vineyard (in an area mostly unsuitable for wine) and a shelter for emotionally disturbed aras. In a public school. And all that besides him being a highly respected director and teacher who epitomized the definition of “strict but fair”.

So at some point the students started to express their gratitude by giving the school presents upon graduation, usually themed around the director. The gym sported a Jurassic Park sign, except with the name of the school and with the profile of the T-Rex replaced with that of the director. In another year someone had contacts with the roads office and got something that looked like an official city limits sign made, except that it identified the school along with “administrative region <director’s name>”. Very cool; he took that one with him when he retired.

Another tradition is somewhat common in the region: The “chaos day”, effectively a formalized graduation prank. At my school, it worked like this: The evening before, the students were given a copy of the keys to the school and free access to the school grounds to prepare. The next day they had to prevent the teachers from entering the building; if a teacher got in, school would resume as per normal. The teachers had a fairly good track record. Many graduating classes failed to account for the fact that the teachers had bolt cutters. One time they didn’t account for an obscure window at the back of the school, which happened to be an emergency exit and had an external lock.

My year didn’t take any chances. I come from a fairly rural area so we had farmers in class and those farmers had forklifts and hay bales. By the time school was supposed to start, all entrances to the building had solid walls of hay in front of them. We also immediately cashiered any teacher who entered the school grounds and forced them into party activities. I have fond memories of hearing my class teacher horribly butcher Oh my darling, Clementine before wandering off to listen to the school band play Hurra, hurra, die Schule brennt.

If the show had been made in Germany it would’ve been called Just Send Saul A Fax.

Oh yeah, same here except with a self-hosted LLM. I had a log file with thousands of warnings and errors coming from several components. Major refactor of a codebase in the cleanup phase. I wanted to have those sorted by severity, component, and exception (if present). Nothing fancy.

So, hoping I could get a quick solution, I passed it to the LLM. It returned an error. Turns out that a 14 megabyte text file exceeds the context size. That server with several datacenter GPUs sure looks like a great investment now.

So I just threw together a script that applied a few regexes. That worked, no surprise.

I’ve been to the park with a dog with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain
When I make passwords, I can remember his name
'Cause there ain’t no one for to give me no pain

That’s true; I didn’t touch on those points but I very much agree. (Yes, while I occasionally use it. It’s easy to ignore the implications of what you’re doing for a moment.)

There are things LLMs are genuinely useful for.

Transforming text is one. To give examples, a friend of mine works in advertising and they routinely ask a LLM to turn a spec sheet into a draft for ad copy; another person I know works as a translator and also uses DeepL as a first pass to take care of routine work. Yeah, you can get mentally lazy doing that but it can be useful for taking care of boilerplate stuff.

Another one is fuzzy data lookup. I occasionally use LLMs to search for things where I don’t know how to turn them into concise search terms. A vague description can be enough to get an LLM onto the right track and I can continue from there using traditional means.

Mind you, all of that should be done sparingly and with the awareness that the LLM can convincingly lie to you at any time. Nothing it returns is useful as anything but a draft that needs revision and any information must be verified. If you simply rely on its answer you will get something reasonably useful much of the time, you will get mentally lazy, and sometimes you will act on complete bullshit without knowing it.

Dude somehow owns a smartwatch where the step count and sleep tracker need to be operated manually. He might be too busy fiddling with that thing to get anything done.

I wonder if he has to manually blink the turn signal on his car.

Speaking as someone who is currently planning to move a community away from Discord to something self-hosted, it’s not as easily said as done.

Apart from the need to run your own infrastructure, competing software is typically finicky and comes with caveats. Plus you have to worry about discoverability if you want to attract new users.

It’s doable, sure, but it requires a lot of planning and work. Honestly, it’s probably going to take us months to get our own service fully up and running.

Those investments should definitely come with strings attached. But there’s a lot you need to invest into.

• Fabs cost a shitload of money and are slow to build. If you want to be able to be independent from Taiwan in ten years you should invest a couple dozen billion bucks in fabs right now. If you want a company to invest that money for you, you need to guarantee that they’ll see a good ROI, which means you probably sign a contract to buy tons of hardware that won’t be made for another decade.
• Fabs need a lot of land. If you want to start building ASAP you need to expedite assessments and acquire land quickly (and though eminent domain, if necessary). That ain’t cheap.
• If you want a qualified workforce available you need to not only invest in making training available but also in making it appealing enough that they’ll start training before the jobs are even there. Advertisement like that costs money, as do stipends.
• In fact, add research grants to the pool because you’ll want both basic research to be done in the field and skilled researchers to be available for cross-hiring by your companies.

You’ll need to keep (some amount of) the money flowing at least until the industry can be independently competitive on the world stage. Mishandling your burgeoning industry can mean that all that investment money and a large number of jobs suddenly go up in smoke.

Note: All of this assumes that you’ll buy your manufacturing equipment from established, potentially foreign companies like ASML and Zeiss. If you want to make that stuff domestically as well you can probably add another hundred billion bucks and a decade or two of very dedicated catch-up to the bill.

Tariffs are not the answer, they are part of a reasonable answer. By themselves they’re not going to being back the tech manufacturing industry. You also need incentives on multiple levels, government funding into relevant education, etc.

You also need time. All the money in the world won’t cause a world-class industry to spring up overnight; you need sustained investment over years, if not decades.

Has anyone ever seen them and an AI data center in the same room?

Blacksmith: I’m almost done with this sword, I just have to work out the Kinks.

Ray Davies: Can we take a break please?

Blacksmith: No. Another ten reps and then you do burpees!

It objectively is, same as OCR and fuzzy logic.

It’s just that when people hear “artificial intelligence”, they think of Lt. Cmdr. Data and not the actual field of research that machine learning is a legitimate part of.

You get issues every fifteen minutes? Damn.

Or you could go for a tiered scheme where the device is free if the owner’s income is below a certain level. There’s always options; whether or not they’re taken is another question.

Both options are potentially bad for low-income earners. If you force them to pay for a speed limiter they lost the money for that, which they might not able to afford. If you take away their license they will have difficulty getting around and might lose their job.

So from that perspective the speed limiter might be the less dangerous choice.

People manage to do that at the supermarket. Either that or they walk up to the cashier and ask: “Excuse me, what’s the most complex transaction I can possibly engage in with you?”

It’s always fun when they open up another register and wave everyone over because they can see that this one customer probably won’t be finished within the next five minutes.

To be fair, moving money between countries was not trivial before PayPal.

To use Europe as an example, SEPA became operative in 2008, about six years after PayPal first became available in Europe. Before that, all international money transfers had to go through SWIFT and the easiest way was probably to use a credit card (and good luck trying to send money to a someone who isn’t a company with that).

Even with SEPA (or for domestic transfers), PayPal offered superior comfort over entering the recipient’s IBAN into a homebanking software. Processing was faster, too.

Of course these days banks in Europe have to offer instant transfers, there’s a QR code standard to read invoice data into banking apps, and they’re working on a full-blown PayPal replacement to get the last comfort bits down as well. It’ll be interesting to see how that works out.

I could argue that experiencing the Groundhog Day bug builds character but… no. Nobody should have to deal with that.

Admittedly, a few tactics like filling your base with laser rifles to make attacking aliens spawn unarmed no longer work. But honestly, an experienced player treats base attacks like bonus levels anyway so it’s not like much of value was lost. Besides, you also now get all the loot from big missions and not just the first 128 items.

Also, UFO now actually remembers your difficulty setting and doesn’t revert you to Beginner after the first mission. That’s different but better. I probably should’ve mentioned that separately in my first comment.

OpenXcom for the first two X-Com games (UFO: Enemy Unknown and X-Com: Terror From The Deep). This reimplementation is insanely good.

• It fixes all known bugs of the original X-Com engine.
• It works on modern systems, including Linux, macOS, Windows, and even Android.
• It has support for modern resolutions and aspect ratios.
• It allows you to use soundtracks from other versions of the game (e.g. look at the website’s “Extras” tab).
• It has mod support including a basic mod manager. And some of those mods are damn good.
• It runs flawlessly.

There’s really no reason to play the original DOS versions anymore.