Nah, we spend as much time on the American civil war as on our own civil war. Which is basically nothing.

I think I heard about cavilers and Roundheads in primary school, and that’s it. No reason for the civil war, no discussion about what Cromwell did in Ireland.

You absolutely can’t use LLMs for anything big unless you learn to code.

Think of an LLM as a particularly shit builder. You give them a small job and maybe 70% of the time they’ll give you something that works. But it’s often not up to spec, so even if it kinda works you’ll have to tell them to correct it or fix it yourself.

The bigger the job is and the more complex the more ways they have to fuck it up. This means in order to use them, you have to break the problem down into small sub tasks, and check that the code is good enough for each one.

Can they be useful? Sometimes yes, it’s quicker to have an AI write code than for you to do it yourself, and if you want something very standard it will probably get it right or almost right.

But you can’t just say ‘write me an app’ and expect it to be useable.

Follow the money.

In Elon’s case, it’s all about losing money that was going directly to him. Particularly, the loss of ev subsidies.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-01/trump-takes-aim-at-musk-over-ev-mandate-and-subsidies

Musk will not rest until there is a free Tesla for everyone, paid for by the American government.

Privatize profits and socialize losses. It’s the American way.

The Anti-Defamation League notes that though the symbol is popular with white supremacists, imagery resembling the black sun features in many cultures, and that such imagery should always be analyzed in the context in which it appears, as it may not necessarily be intended to serve as a symbol of white supremacy or racism.

i just googled it. Apparently they’re just really into star wars, and didn’t realize about the Nazi symbol until it was too late.

Wow, I wonder if that’s the same billionaire Bill Ackerman who’s hedge fund owns forty percent of the New York property firm Seaport Entertainment Group?

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-ackmans-strategic-acquisition-seaport-230404410.html

How many millions do you think a rent freeze would cost him personally?

I mean think about how many thousands of middle managers you would have to kill to disrupt a large bureaucracy.

For a fraction of the same amount of deaths you could kill existing leaders, anyone that tries to replace them, and their rivals.

Commercial versions of these systems exist in the UK.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jun/06/shopper-facewatch-watchlist-39p-paracetamol-london

The Gdpr makes these things harder to do, but not automatically illegal.

Surely you have noticed that there is a lot of criticism of the GDPR and EU tech regulation.

Yeah, and some of it is even true.

The British imperial system invades other countries, makes them use pounds and feet, and then leaves.

So a random person on Reddit claimed there’s about 800 million possible uk mobile numbers, some people have multiple numbers so ballpark 80 million active phone numbers. This gives around a 1:10 chance of picking an active number at random. If there’s actual patterns in the numbers this could be even more likely.

What’s interesting is this won’t have been a realistic sounding number.

Company lines typically start 0300 or 0800 but mobiles are 07… Something.

So if it was just hallucinating, it did so badly.

Tariffs don’t work for service roles.

Anything where the output of the job isn’t physical, e.g. writing code, designing something, answering a phone, is super hard to track.

This is actually why the US seems to be running a trade deficit with so many countries. Companies like Google, Meta and Amazon take money from all over the world in exchange for services like advertising, and then it eventually gets spent on goods from other countries.

Is buddy really a problem?

I’d be more worried that someone thinks I’m treating them like a dog, than a man.