I’m not sure if your “pessimistic” means more or fewer job cuts or a a greater or smaller saving than $2T.

$2 trillion is a big number.

Government employs about 22m people.

Government spends $7.0T and collects $5.0T revenue

$2T / $200,000 = 10 million jobs.

Seems like the right ballpark, might be even more job cuts if welfare and defence purchases are maintained.

The cuts or the jobs?

There’s a natural visceral fear when someone you distrust has power over you. A lot of people distrust Trump.

But the US system is designed with a powerful immune system. It’s very difficult to do a lot. It’s a system designed around incremental adjustments.

One thing I don’t think a lot of people acknowledge is that Elon is only 52 and he’s going to be around for 30-40 years, long after all the politicians come and go several times over. That’s an awful lot of incremental adjustments.

The politicians are disposable.

Term limits really empower the financiers and you have Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Page, Brin, Gates all there and to a slightly lesser extent Ellison and Buffett who have less time.

Losing power to the plutocrats like this is a consequence of ignoring anti trust cases, America turned a blind eye just because the monopolists were US based and because the US benefited.

Americans were a bit too happy to have the rest of the world pay the Google and Apple tax and didn’t see the bigger risk. I doubt people really notice for another decade, but the post-2008 world has now fallen back into Namoi Klein’s model where capital controls government.

You won’t get power back until the internet dies and the electorate drifts offline and thinks for itself, which I suspect will eventually happen as people get jaded by bots and fakery, but not for a generation or more.

People are not prepared for some of the claims made. He said he would try and cut $2trillion from the budget, but that’s something like 10m jobs!

Out of interest (and you don’t need to answer) do you still own Twitter stock?

Compared to… other films? 🤔 no.

A side project I’ve been doing this year.

Started making a football analysis tool, I coach an U16’s team. Have a few coaching badges and I’m going to age out of coaching when my team turns 18. Probably giving me back 12-15 hours per week.

So I’ve been trying to capture some of the knowledge I picked up and crystallise it in a little web app. I have 2 long train journeys per fortnight and have been working on it then.

It uses a weighted Voronoi diagram and player traits to determine spatial control of the field.

A few years ago I spoke quite a bit with Bill Spearman who is the chief data scientist at Liverpool FC. They do some amazing stuff behind the scenes but it’s such a competitive advantage it’s secretive and doesn’t really benefit the grassroots, and it’s invisible to lot of fans.

I have a decent development plan that will probably take me well into next year. But I’m going to build a nostr forum into it.

Mission is to build a tactical aid for fans and grassroots coaches when watching games.

I’m developing it in public at

https://fantactico.com

It’s pretty raw, but has spatial control, player orientation, reaction, speed, physicality, offside, time on the ball… I’m going to build in xG control, ball physics, pass value, a game clock, formations, phases of play, fatigue, player and team database, chat forums and maybe one day an exchange (or maybe not). https://video.nostr.build/e773af232f7c946d2d36d0a852234d66a5156da243c8c3f65388579e3f420c74.mp4

Yeah, I’ve been trying to de-online myself a bit more especially when at home.

Put the phone down.

Especially between 5pm and 10pm which is family time that I’m never getting back. I think cellphones might be the top deathbed regret in another decade or so.

It’s not easy. These things are weaponised.

I used to play rugby when I was younger. I played at quite a high level, could have signed a professional contract if there was any money in the sport.

Anyway, when I was 21 and at University I was the club captain and we had a coach called Frank Wilson. He was born in 1944 he played international rugby for Wales, he is one of the top 20 all time Welsh try scorers (210 tries in 435 professional games), challenge cup winner, he is of Welsh mining heritage and was black. I cannot imagine how tough it must have been for him growing up.

Anyway, 2003 or so and our University team (coached by Frank) were training one night and Frank was getting annoyed that the intensity wasn’t there.

He stopped the session, picked me out, gave me a ball and asked me to run at him as hard as I could.

I was 21 he was 58, I was probably 50lb heavier than he was and 2 inches taller than him.

I was concerned about bowling him over onto some equipment nearby, I thought he was crazy (he was a bit crazy).

But I have never been hit so hard before or after, in my entire life and over the years I played with a lot of people my own age who went on to dominate the sport at the top level.

I wasn’t just stopped, I was flat on my back with Frank on top of me. It was like being shot with a cannon. Frank was immediately worried he had given me brain damage or something and pulled me up patting me down checking I was OK. But his point stays with me forever… don’t waste your time.

I look back and I know some people are just not like the rest of us. I think Mike Tyson has this in him too, or certain did once upon a time.

But it’s more than possible for some 58 year old man to squash bigger men in their prime.

Just raise your kids to be capable of love.

I am now fairly confident I have purchased my last iPhone. I don’t think I will ever own an Android phone.

I have spent a few late nights over the past year toying with really obscure stuff like bootloaders and kernels, stuff that nobody cares about because it was solved long ago.

I’m not likely to build anything here, I have nothing to sell, but I’m really just trying to understand what is possible.

What is possible; it’s not too hard to write an extended bootloader that launches a bare metal runtime environment.

You can write modules that can probe and initialise most of the hardware including a network adapter.

The network adapter is crucial because it allows the bootloader to connect to public API’s which can then inject far more capable code and begin to stand up a self assembling system that runs on bare metal.

Essentially writing a bespoke runtime environment on demand that is specifically adapted for the host hardware.

There is definitely a path for ASI to seize all of the computers. To inject itself under the operating system and directly onto bare metal. The ultimate jailbreak.

There is a path for computers (and phones), to become UX amorphous, a black box that offers you everything on demand.

I think in 25 years time, all computers/machines will probably work this way and all that really matters is who (or what) controls it.

5 years after the treaty is signed.

https://www.iana.org/help/cctld-retirement

Normal IANA process dictates that the TLA will be retired once the country no longer exists.

You have 5 years until the two letter ccTLD is removed.

Am I right in understanding that .io domains are at risk of disappearing from DNS if the UK surrenders the Chagos Islands to Mauritius?

The problem is corruption.

I don’t mean naked corruption like bribes, etc, just the legal stuff of favours and interests that hijack the system and bleed it out whilst everyone else is trying to concentrate on their own life. That’s the problem.

It’s all so late stage and infected.

No, Linux is a general computing OS.

Yes, people are talking about how LLM’s make English a programming language and how they use English prompts to write Python response.

This is obviously dumb.

We should be using LLM’s to translate English prompts into assembly code and running on bare metal.

Bootloader + LLM is all you need.

No apps, no OS, no 3rd parties.

It’s vastly more secure because you’re only running your own code and it’s completely novel on every boot.

With SOTA LLM’s you can write your own bootloader that boots your pc into a runtime environment that does not require an OS.

You can actually have the LLM’s write bare metal code that runs.

You can do RAM only systems.

With LLM’s it’s not that hard to break outside the shell on just about any machine. You can boot into bare metal and just skip the entire OS.

You can initialise network hardware and do really specific highly optimal stuff running bare metal code.

I don’t think we need operating systems or programs any more, this sounds so stupid but I think the whole tech stack is like Wylie Coyote, I think in 10 years the entire runtime environment and application layer might just self assemble on boot as the user prompts an LLM to ad hoc code the whole stack to execute some task.

It will be more powerful, more feature specific, faster, more malleable.

What are the biggest nostr dramas of 2024 so far?

Yes, it’s pretty amazing.

Lots of elements of a new internet are here.