spacephysics

I imagine part of the performance issue is their encryption flow? Their search is sub par even with the on-device search enabled, but besides that i’ve been a happy customer for a few years now. Catch all domain, multiple domains, their cli lets you download all messages and I setup a RAG flow to better search.

Regarding outages, this is the first one I’ve actually noticed and affected me. Obviously not great, but maybe I’ve been deluded in seeing GitHub‘s fiasco of what acceptable means.

You can just make the tool calls restricted/scoped to whatever the calling account has access to (or in this case the repo)

That way even if the LLM broke out of the system prompt the worst case would be similar to a 404 or 401.

Why are we giving these processes super user access? No reason to have the executing loop/chat turns/tool calls be scoped to anything but the narrowest permissions.

If the agent truly needs data/permutations across different accounts or repos, treat the tool calls like any other API that needs to do that kind of work pre-LLM

I think this seems purposeful, as there's 2 opposing forces at play: - Have a model that follows the users instructions - Have a model that follows the system prompt instructions more

For the 'safety' argument (Re: Fable), they need these models to have basically a 2-tier instruction system, but given LLMs aren't great with actual Logic unless they program it out to test, this runs afoul and we get one or the other.

Feels like optimizing for either precision or recall, but can't have both

Accountants can be expensive, especially if your books are messy, or have poor accounting practices from the start.

Systems like quickbooks, hubspot, payment processors all have tiers where yes on paper they make it easy to properly setup good accounting practices, but you’ll spend an additional 500/month+ to get those features.

Hiring an accountant to clean up the books and do quarterly book keeping is equally as expensive if not more.

Especially for small service based businesses, where margins can be tight, revenue can fluctuate heavily MoM, committing an additional $6k+ per year just to keep books organized is non-trivial.

As an experiment, i gave all our finance data for 2025 to an agent, and it did quite well after spot checking. There may be a middle ground where users can do exports, verify with “real” software, and have agents handle contextual classification to considerably cut down costs

I’d slightly disagree, the profile of people who go missing is as important as a random chance there is a coincidence. Former military officers, high-level scientists. These individuals have training, money, and live in areas where this tends not to happen.

A disappearance of someone from the above background, vs someone who is say in midwest rural America or near areas where human trafficking crimes occur at a higher rate than normal, matters.

Further, their research/knowledge of sensitive government material also implies they likely have some form of overwatch or at least minimal monitoring for foreign agent threats from our government (or had in the past). Its not uncommon for high ranking military officials to have some form of training in counter surveillance tradecraft for this exact reason.

The odds these events are due to a foreign adversary given the multiple wars and geopolitical tensions are not negligible

Bit tinfoil hat, but outside of the phone becoming thinner and other design benefits with integrated batteries, I largely think the intelligence community has an aligned interest to keep phone batteries from being hot-swappable like pre-iphone days.

Given the drafts vs final version of the bill/policy, looks like the battery now must be more easily replaced vs true camera-like battery hot swap.

Even with an iPhone turned off, NSA can still listen:

https://www.wired.com/2014/06/nsa-bug-iphone/

Unfortunately much of China’s perverse tactics (they’ve done this in a wide array of industries) is to steal patented tech and trade secrets from companies outside China, subsidize the manufacturing and development etc, then sell their product at an artificially low price which kills the original company and good faith competitors as they cannot compete with the artificially lower prices.

Then once the dust settles they’re the only company which can handle large order sizes required for supply chains to build downstream products, and the world becomes further reliant on them.

Security concerns and national defense aside, a prime example pre-ban was Huawei layer 1 infrastructure products which far exceeded feature density, and cost effectiveness than competitors due to the subsidies. They’ve done similar tactics with solar panels.

This doesn’t imply China or their state sponsored companies never create novel tech, but there’s a hugely perverse system whose purpose is to illegally undercut competition overseas with no real recourse from the victim countries outside of total company bans. And even then, people find a way around the bans and the damage is already done to the original companies.

Solar panels: https://www.marketplace.org/story/2021/12/09/chinas-state-sp...

Huawai: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/chinas-huawei-threat-us-na...

For your first point, on the off chance they have other equipment capable of surpassing MANPADS I’d prefer as a passenger they just fly around.

Second point, it’s not obvious if its for MANPAD reasons or it’s our own operation though we can speculate.

I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next 5-10 years the new and popular programming language is one built with the idea of optimizing how well LLM’s (or at that point world models) understand and can use it.

Right now LLMs are taking languages meant for humans to understand better via abstraction, what if the next language is designed for optimal LLM/world model understanding?

Or instead of an entirely new language, theres some form of compiling/transpiling from the model language to a human centric one like WASM for LLMs

As I understand it, it was in part about their Azure miss more about capital expenditure and market anxiety around their OpenAI investment ROI.

Also a portion of their Azure spend was some clever accounting they did if memory serves me

https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsofts-historic-plunge-why...

Too little, too late. Switched to Brave and haven’t been happier. Firefox lost the plot years ago.

I think it has a potential to raise a lot of the salaries of blue-collar positions in middle America, and then create demand for the trades over the next decade or so.

I find it unlikely that white collar positions will be switching drastically to blue collar unless they’re already on the fence about it or they’re not middle to high up in the white collar ladder (six figures+)

Despite how obtuse the current administration views are, this has been true for decades. The churn of new papers and hype around medicine/biotech is nothing new.

Says nothing about endemic reproducibility crisis of the social sciences.

Since student loans have been basically guaranteed (bankruptcies can’t erase student loan obligations, in an attempt to push rates lower) and tuition steeply rose, academic institutions’ ratio of administrators to students has skyrocketed to a bureaucratic mess, leading to a flywheel of higher education costs and incentivizing research for money’s sake over impact to the field.

Real impact would be reproducing notoriously iffy studies, but that doesn’t bring in the dollars.

Its just another layer of potential misdirection that BBC themselves, and many other news orgs, perpetuate. Im not surprised.

From first hand experience -> secondary sources -> journalist regurgitation -> editorial changes

This is just another layer. Doesn't make it right, but we could do the same analysis with articles that mainstream news publishes (and it has been done, GroundNews looks to be a productized version of this)

Its very interesting when I see people I know personally, or YouTubers with small audiences get even local news/newspaper coverage. If its something potentially damning, nearly all cases have pieces of misrepresentation that either go unaccounted for, or a revision months later after the reputational damage is done.

Many veterans see the same for war reporting, spins/details omitted or changed. Its just now BBC sees an existential threat with AI doing their job for them. Hopefully in a few years more accurately.

Defaulting to China stealing IP is a perfectly reasonable first step.

China is known for their countless theft of Europe and especially American IP, selling it for a quarter of the price, and destroying the original company nearly overnight.

Its so bad even NASA has begun to restrict hiring Chinese nationals (which is more national defense, however illegally killing American companies can be seen as a national defense threat as well)

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wd5qpekkvo.amp

https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-chinese-communist-party-us...

Agree, I think the high cost of full time hires for entry level software jobs (total comp + onboarding + mentoring) vs investing in AI and seeing if that gap can be filled is a far less risky choice at the current economic state.

6-12 months in, the AI bet doesnt pay off, then just stop spending money in it. cancel/dont renew contracts and move some teams around.

For full time entry hires, we typically dont see meaningful positive productivity (their cost is less than what they produce) for 6-8 months. Additionally, entry level takes time away from senior folks reducing their productivity. And if you need to cut payroll cost, its far more complicated, and worse for morale than just cutting AI spend.

So given the above, plus economy seemingly pre-recession (or have been according to some leading indicators) seems best to wait or hire very cautiously for next 6-8 months at least.

The fact something is profitable (even vices) does not mean it requires regulations, unless the regulation in mind is direct or indirect cap on profit margins?

Ah yes, the secret design of pistols which go off at the slightest bump (its a lottery, only 1 in 1,000 chance!)

Revoke contracts, investigate the leadership who accepted the contract, and hold Sig criminally liable given they have internal documents from years ago acknowledging the fact.

I agree its a popular excuse, however unlike the blockchain craze there’s legitimate use cases of productivity improvements with AI.

And if you can (in some cases) substantially increase productivity, then logically you can reduce team size and be as productive with less.

With the right prompting, you can cut a copywriting team in half easily.

My business has one copywriter/strategist, who I’ve automated the writing part by collecting transcripts and brand guidelines from client meetings. Now she can focus on much higher quality edits, work with other parts of the strategy pipeline, and ultimately more clients than before.

I can easily imagine a corp with 100 junior copywriters quickly reducing headcount

Unfortunately i think many of those jobs can also be attributed to general economic health post low interest rates.

Companies now need to leave pre-revenue and turn a profit, or if you’re an established company you need to cut costs/increase margins from other economic headwinds (tariffs, inflation, gov policies etc)

A Junior dev (and most devs onboarding) will typically require 6-8 months to start being able to meaningfully contribute, then there’s a general oversight/mentorship for a few years after.

Yes they produce, however I think junior’s market salary plus the opportunity cost lost of the higher salaried mid and senior level in mentoring is a hard pill to swallow.

The team i work on is stretched very thin, and even after layoffs (which management agreed they went too far with) it’s pulling teeth to get another dev to build things companies are begging for and even willing to separately pay cash upfront for us to build

If you’re getting into the current job market as a junior, you’ll likely need to go heavy in the buzzword tech, accept a position from a smaller company that pays substantially less, then in 1-2 years job hop into a higher paying mid level role (not to say 1-2 years makes anyone mid level imo)

Especially given how the gov stats for unemployment rate and CPI have been changed over the years.

Example, if you dig into who we technically consider unemployed in that number, you’ll laugh.

Let’s say after 6 months of emails and ghost listings you take a break, you’re now considered “not in the labor force” which is the same category as retirees and full-time students. So that “improves” the unemployment rate

Not a hot take, but I think we’ve been in a recession/massive slowdown for much longer than the gov data shows

Willing to bet hedge funds have their own calculations of these metrics they keep secret as a market edge

I mean both sides are guilty. ‘08 saw us bail out banks and now the likes of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are GSE’s.

The difference with Intel vs the banks, is Intel has assets that take decade plus to procure (foundries), and not something easily replaceable.

I think the US messed up big time in terms of national defense by not having some Gov program that does semiconductor manufacturing owned 100% from the start by the DoD. Now we need to do some grey area purchase of a failing company.

Yeah, i heard the P320 was originally a non-striker system that they modified to become a striker system to try and save research/development costs from creating a striker system from the ground up, which led to these wildly low tolerances in the FCU and ultimately a poorly designed firearm.

I’ve heard of no issues from the P365 models. A knowledgeable firearm instructor I talked to mentioned the P320 and P365 are entirely different designs internally, and the P365 holds up to Sigs (previously) positive reputation

Check out this video, the FBI report got released a few weeks ago. This was a FOIA’d report from 2024 of a police officer who had the P320 holstered, doing normal movements (didnt drop the holstered firearm)

Unique case in that the FBI got the firearm still in the holster (it hadn’t been removed or the round cleared after the discharge)

This is what has led to the recent uptick in Sig scrutiny, then unfortunately the OP incident happened and it’s rightfully so made Sig’s situation much worse

https://youtu.be/LfnhTYeVHHE

Their report outlined here and the police officer’s account of the unintentional discharge occurred without dropping and while securely in the holster without any items intruding in the holster (i say that because it was a prior excuse Sig made for the unintentional discharge reports)

https://youtu.be/LfnhTYeVHHE

A week or so ago the FBI report investigating an incident of unintentional discharge back in 2024 was released via FOIA. This particular case was a police officer who had the firearm in the holster, and by just normal movement it went off. Multiple layers of the striker fire system safety’s failed, and fired the chambered round.

What was particularly beneficial/unique is the P320 was kept in the holster when given to the FBI to investigate, and only removed after their forensic team X-rayed it, giving us pretty solid case study of how it happens

This guy does a great job going through the report: https://youtu.be/LfnhTYeVHHE

This is one of those things that is high effort, low impact. Similar to recycling in some cities/towns where it just gets dumped in a landfill.

Instead we should be looking to nuclear power solutions for our energy needs, and not waste time with reducing website size if its purely a function of environmental impact.

Lots of their infrastructure for handling orders (iPads, software integration into their payment system) was done around Covid, and some have started to integrate in-person orders through the same “single unified system” creating a higher and higher cost to switch delivery systems.

AFAIK there’s no well-supported open source order/delivery management software. The companies that were ready during covid took all the extra, enormous demand for building delivery and order online systems built atop a typically antiquated order management system and have stuck around since

Sometimes i’ll get a cheaper delivery/food cost calling vs ordering online, but now some places are just raising their other prices to match online

Just don’t use Microsoft garbage wherever possible. Default opt-in is how it starts.

Jokingly, it’s not surprising given many of their short-term ancestors were prison guards or criminals.

Looks like the ruling gov still sees their citizens as such