Former Republican here aka Rino. It’s easily explained; the GOP ceased to exist when they all fell in line with Trump first term. Trump threatened to to form his own party with his massive following and make the GOP the third choice on the ballot. Trumpism is not conservative in any sense; it’s jingoistic nationalism to benefit Trumps interest.
Not to veer too far off-topic but are former-Republican and RINO mutually exclusive? How can one simultaneously be a Republican (in name or otherwise) while calling themself a former Republican?
Either you've stopped voting Republican (in which case you're no longer RINO) or you still are (in which case you're a current Republican)...
From your reply it sounds like you're still voting Republican, just not for the candidates that you classify as "MAGA"? In which case I guess that's a (current) RINO...
Assuming my assumption is correct, I hope you're just recognizing the fact that MAGA didn't get where it is today without massive help from non-MAGA Republicans (in Congress as well as outside), in numerous ways. So you're not going to see the outcome you're waiting for if that's the case.
Exactly. I remember hearing "tax and spend Democrats" as a slur back in the 90s/00s, but seeing the GOP spend without taxing during those years showed what it was really all about...
Before Trump the GOP was fiscally conservative - when the democrats were in power!
That explains a large part of why democrats were able to lower the debt - the republicans in congress wouldn't go along with efforts to raise the debt.
The GOP is basically universally bad at fiscal policy. They spend big, mostly on warmongering and industry. Not developing industry, no no, siphoning government funds to the private sector, where I assume they have many friends.
They increase the deficit because they increase spending and then "cut" taxes. Often they don't effectively "cut" taxes for you and me: the tax burden for many Americans is raised, except for a select few who get tax cuts.
This was happening well before Trump, into Reagan. The only reason this works at all is because they get to say "oh we cut taxes!". But tax burden is very complicated, and nobody is analyzing that for the common voter.
Yes, in the 1970s-1980s the GOP came up with the idea of "starve the beast" [1] which allowed them describe unfunded tax cuts and deficit spending as "fiscally conservative", like a parent taking away a child's allowance.
Complete nonsense in practice, obviously - but political gold! Voters get all the same public services, lower taxes, and to think they're being responsible with money. And if you're a 65-year-old legislator, you'll be dead and buried before the consequences start to bite.
Running up massive debt and deficits is also a way to kill appetite for D priorities that require new spending.
The best way to make sense of the GOP is in it's opposition to wealth redistribution. Primarily downward wealth redistribution. That's their north star.
Upward redistribution is mostly OK though, they consider it just giving rich people their own money back
> So if I'm e.g. coding a SwiftUI app for navigation, I'd take 9B of basic coding and reasoning, add 10B of swift/swiftUI, add 5B of GIS/geography knowledge and another 5B of frontend app design knowledge. My model doesn't need to know a single line of python.
Tell me you don’t know how llm work without telling me you don’t know how llm work. That’s not how they work!
I'm not actually describing a specific how, I'm describing a goal. The goal is models that are made for specific work, not general work. My model doesn't need to know a single line of python, but if it's a coding model perhaps giving it some python is the best way to make it smarter. Ok. Great - give it python! But first maybe check if giving it C++ is actually better than giving it python. Because for my purposes it doesn't need to know C++ or Python, and I have a fixed parameter budget. Find me the ratio of Swift:C++:Python that gets me the best Swift coding agent in my parameter budget, and then train that.
And then ideally, make it pluggable so I can pick what I want from off the shelf components, but if that's not possible - then just train up as many variants as you can so we can all pick the best variant for our current need.
I dodged layoffs for 20 years, then got caught about 2024. Kinda sucked because I was over employed and had quit my other two jobs to focus on that one because it was the highest paying. Karma is real! I just said “VIP and manager, I appreciate my time here and so long”. They replied graciously clearly appreciating me taking the high road. Felt like I got some karma back in that situation. Been working one job since.
It’s trivial to use a cellular connection to control a fpv drone, near real time. I’m really surprised there hasn’t been occurrences of extortion (ie protection rackets) and targeted assassinations via air droppable explosives like we see in Ukraine war. Burner phones enable this.
Do you always make things about yourself? Have you written a parser or interpreter? You should, it’s an interesting exercise. The idea is to add meta tracing to the interpreter (the c code) that allows hot paths to be compiled to machine code and be then executed instead of being interpreted.
That's an abrasive question but i dare say that we all do. It's our only constant point of reference.
> Have you written a parser or interpreter?
i have written many parsers, several parser generators, and a handful of programming languages. This article, however, covers a whole other level, way over my head (or well beyond any of my ambitions, in any case).
Pics or it didn't happen: fossil.wanderinghorse.net/r/cwal
Glad I was over working three full time jobs (remote w2) during that period. I stacked A LOT of cash during that those years that has appreciated nicely.
It doesn’t, I have one of these jobs on my resume and I simply don’t mention the others. Who would know if I don’t tell them? The IRS knows I had 3 w2s but they don’t know the dates of employment. It does so happen all three companies used the same large payroll management provider, so that company knows, but it would be pretty bad to share customer data wouldn’t it?
Hiring manager here. There are actually new tools from the background check and payroll providers to detect some of these past situations.
> It does so happen all three companies used the same large payroll management provider, so that company knows, but it would be pretty bad to share customer data wouldn’t it?
People like you are why several companies I know of have stopped hiring remote: Too many people trying the overemployed schtick and and making remote employees synonymous with people who are constantly distracted and divided.
This is a big turn off for me too. I don’t want to “figure it out for myself”. That’s why I became catholic as an adult.
With the fediverse I have an overwhelming fear of missing out if I pick the wrong communities. I feel like it needs aggregation which defeats the purpose.
At the very least these ai threads where we argue this ai topic will be of great historical interest as our profession either dies or mutates to something else!
This, I got married at 40 to a 36 year old. We both wanted kids and a family but for reasons it hadn’t worked out for either of us. This wasn’t a Disney romance by any means but we get along and we put in the work to make it work. We had two kids back to back and I can say without a doubt what we have built is greater than any one of us.
Trust there are some really great women in their thirties, they may not have been your first choice, you probably wouldn’t have been theirs either, but from where I sit it was worth it.
I think the modern idea that it is only OK to marry and have kids because you are in love is part of the problem.
Lots of cultures have arranged marriages that most people are happy with. There is nothing immoral about seeking someone you can live with in order to build a life together and to have an raise children with them.
its probably a safer path to happiness than the romantic one. I did that and it very definitely did not work out and I am now divorced. I do have two kids though and have been a single dad for the last few years (the younger one is about to turn 18 so that phase of my life is coming to an end).
It’s my personal belief that btc has been the currency of foreign influence operations ie for paying media figures to influence popular opinion and sentiments. I believe this can be most readily seen in the US right and maga. The messaging is all very consistent across YouTube, x, fox, news nation etc across weeks, months and years.
Brexit was a proof of concept, certainly it has spread.
The Bitcoin genesis is certainly unclear; a FLOSS project is proudly published by those who create it and certainly don't want to remain anonymous, but the super-value of BTC over time has been driven by substantial criminal activities, not exactly US nor pro-US. The first ones were indeed US "ally", the D-Company that sold drugs for BTC to arm Al-Qaeda by selling BTC for weapons and explosives, which the sellers were happy to accept because they could sell them for various nations' fiat currencies to D-Company customers, laundering it well and without having to carry around pallets of unmarked bills, which are easy to seize during travel. Yes, Al-Qaeda was pro-US kleptocracy, certainly not pro-American people, see https://css.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/c...
But then China also used them to smuggle Fentanyl into the US, and this late revenge against the East India companies that invaded it with opium so long ago, on the wrong subject (since it was the UK that started the Opium War and the US helped and was largely helped by China, which paid for e.g. the development of the railway networks in the US, a history forgotten by most), it proved that BTC as a tool is neutral. Its use by Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea confirms this.
So I suspend judgment, I don't trust the genesis, I read and encounter various problems https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html but I am not completely convinced by your analysis and honestly, I am very much in favor of the end of the banking system and the current financial model for the development of humanity, and it matters little who brings about this event; they are the enemy of my enemy in any case.
