In the latter 1800 there wasn't enough gold to accommodate the vast increases in industrial production. Which was deflationary.

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

You can imagine every year the price per bushel of the wheat you grow drops and your mortgage stays the same. When your whole economy is like that no one wants to borrow or lend money and investment slows.

My heresy is that processor ISA's aren't memory safe and so it's sort of foolish to pretend a systems language is safe. I feel things like pointer tagging are more likely to provide real returns.

Also remember a conversation with someone at netscape about JS. The idea was partly as an interpreted language it could be safe unlike binaries. Considering binaries on pre 2000 hardware, running an arbitrary binary oof. But that it wasn't as easy as assumed.

My dad said his grandfather always had a teenager or two at the dinner table who had no where else to go. Not just Christmas but all year. My parents did the same with a friend of mine and one of my sisters friends.

Reminds me of trying to do IoT stuff in hospitals before IoT was a thing.

Send exactly one 205 byte packet. How do you really know? I can see it go out on a scope. And the other end receives a packet with bytes 0-56. Then another packet with bytes 142-204. Finally a packet a 200ms later with bytes 57-141.

FfffFFFFffff You!

If you were using TCP, then this is absolutely normal and expected behavior. It is a stream protocol, not packet/message based.

At the application layer you would not see the reordered bytes. However on the network you have IP beneath both UDP and TCP and network hardware is normally free to slice and reorder those IP packages however it wants.

It's not. Routers are expected to be allowed to slice IPv4 packets above 576 bytes. They can't slice IPv6 and they can't slice TCP.

However, malicious middleboxes insert themselves into your TCP connections, terminating a separate TCP connection on each side of the spyware and therefore completely rewriting TCP segment boundaries.

In less common scenarios, the same may be done by non malicious middleboxes - but it's almost always malicious ones. The party that attacked xmpp.is/jabber.ru terminated not only TCP but also TLS and issued itself a Let's Encrypt certificate.

Things like these make me cry

If only there was some sort of User Datagram Protocol where you could send specifically tuned packets like this.

Those who do not understand TCP are doomed to reimplement it with UDP.

The same is true of those who do understand it.

That first time you do sure is fun though.

Combination of he's vindictive and he's making an example of what happens when you don't preemptively pay him a bribe.

There is the other issue that AI generated anything has a value close to zero.

So what's my cut of something basically worthless? Doesn't seem lucrative in the long run.

What is value, even? A dollar bill is worth a dollar, but even that’s made up too. A crappy crayon drawing of stick people and a house is utterly priceless if your kid made it, worthless if it's some other kid. AI is forcing us to confront how squishy valuation is in the first place.

Prices are not fundamental truths. They’re numbers that happen to work. Ideally price > cost, but that’s not even reliably true once you factor in fixed costs, subsidies, taxes, rebates, etc. Boeing famously came out and said they couldn't figure out how much it actually cost to make a 747, back when they were still flying.

Here's a concrete example: You have a factory with $50k/month in fixed costs. Running it costs $5 per widget in materials and labor. You make 5,000 widgets.

Originally you sell them for $20. Revenue $100k, costs $75k, pocket a cool $25k every month. Awesome.

Then, a competitor shows up and drives the price down to $10. Now revenue is $50k. On paper you “lose money” vs your original model.

But if you shut the factory down, you still eat the full $50k fixed cost and make $0. If you keep running, each widget covers its $5 marginal cost and contributes $5 toward fixed costs. You break even instead of losing $50k.

That’s the key mistake in "AI output is worth zero." Zero marginal value does not imply zero economic value. The question is whether it covers marginal cost and contributes to something else you care about: fixed costs, distribution, lock-in, differentiation, complements, optionality.

We've faced this many times before so AI isn't special in this regard. It just makes the gap between marginal cost and perceived value impossible to ignore.

Was recently thinking we should change tax law to exclude ad spend as a business expense so it gets taxed.

> Thinking they wouldn’t choose the same path is revisionist.

Societies tend to not change how things work no matter who is in charge.

That is a myopic view of history.

Just look around yourself. No society is comparable to what it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, etc, in any country. If you think nothing changed in a society, you're just poorly informed.

> In July of 2025 I began developing flu-like symptoms. I began to feel feverish and would go to sleep with the most intense chills of my life (it felt like what I imagine being naked at the south pole feels like) and would wake up drenched in sweat.

Fuck man if this is you go to the ER.

We could use a planetary gear train with motor generators to make an infinite speed transmission.