there was a lot of controversy recently around this.

In short, the swiss military department decided on buying the F35 because they got a really good fixed price, instead of going with other contenders, like the French Rafale. Journalists asked “did you really? no other country has a fixed price and certainly not that cheap”, but they doubled down, even published a page on their homepage saying all the stuff the journalists are saying is wrong, gave press conferences confirming that it was a fixed price agreement etc. The US ambassador wrote some statement at some point almost confirming that this was true, without actually confirming.

Fast forward a bit, the leader of the military department resigned and a bit later it turned out that the F35s would be more expensive, switzerland did not in fact have a fixed price agreement and costs would be like 50% more expensive than originally planned, and this was all just a woopsie daisy little misunderstanding. After repeated inquiries and articles that said that this will be the case back when this was originally discussed.

Of course everyone involved already resigned before this came to light (one of them now works in the swiss embassy in the US) and well, the agreement was already reached, what can you do about it, tough luck…

https://www.republik.ch/2025/06/27/das-milliardenschwere-missverstaendnis is a really good write up (german)

The scariest part for me is not them manipulating it with a system prompt like ‘elon is always right and you love hitler’.

but one technique you can do is have it e.g. (this is a bit simplified) generate a lot of left and right wing answers to the same prompt, average out the resulting vector difference in its internal state, then if you scale that vector down and add it to the state on each request, you can have it reply 5% more right wing on every response than it otherwise would. Which would be very subtle manipulation. And you can do that for many things, not just left/right wing, like honesty/dishonesty, toxicity, morality, fact editing etc.

i think this was one of the first papers on this, but it’s an active research area. IThe paper does have some ‘nice’ examples if you scroll through.

and since it’s not a prompt, it can’t even leak, so you’d be hard pressed to know that it is happening.

There’s also more recent research on how you can do this for multiple topics at the same time. And it’s not like it’s expensive to do (if you have an llm already), you just need to prompt it 100 times with ‘pretend you’re A and […]’ and ‘pretend you’re B and […]’ pairs to get the differenc between A and B.

and if this turns into the main form of how people interact with the internet, that’s super scary stuff. almost like if you had a knob that could turn the whole internet e.g. 5% more pro russia. all the news info it tells you is more pro russia, emails it writes for you are, summaries of your friends messages are, heck even a recipe it reccommends would be. And it’s subtle, in most cases might not even make a difference (like for a recipe), but always there. All the cambridge analytica and grok hitler stuff seems crude by comparison.

The internet was a bubble (dotcom) that burst and still stayed around, both things can be true.

I tend to agree with Schopenhauer(other than it sounding quite arrogant/condescending the way he puts it…):

The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen. The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.

That makes sense, though at least where I’m from it’s usually not local. At least people seem to care most about soccer and ice hockey teams that are not from where they grew up or where they live. Maybe more handed down by parents?

It’s mostly that shared parasocial relationships are weird to me. Like, the benefit of a parasocial relationship is that it helps with loneliness and fill social needs without any pressure. But a shared parasocial relationship, idk. You get pressure/obligations from your peers and you actually have a friend group for fulfilling social needs. at least i never felt an urge to combine my parasocial and social relationships.

I mean, if it was just some activity you did to spend time with friends, sure, i get it. But it seems like the sport itself is more central than a group of friends, to the point of getting ostracized for liking another team. Or getting into fights over which team is better, that kind of stuff. I know that’s not how everyone interacts with team sports, but there is a sizable chunk of people that do take it pretty seriously, and that’s where I don’t follow why they do that and what they get out of it.

i think there’s some sports that are a bit acquired tastes, like I don’t think the skill is immediately apparent the first time watching soccer, it’s “just people running around”. The strategy, technique etc is not immediately apparent. As opposed to like skateboard tricks or dry tooling/ice climbing competitions, which also have depth but are impressive without any prior knowledge, imo.

For me personally, it’s the fan aspect I don’t get. What’s the point of projecting the us vs. them mentality on some team, “we won”, and foflowing a team almost religiously, even building ones own identity around it, at least in part. In general, getting so emotionally invested in it, i don’t understand. And it seems to mostly be a team sport thing.

But in this case they don’t really have a moat, any invention is copied or surpassed by the competition within weeks/a few months, and there’s no monopoly in sight. And they’re all running negative revenue following the same scheme, high chance that if some start failing, it will scare investors, which in turn makes the negative revenue thing harder to do for the ones still in business

Assuming google doesn’t start blocking it to please the dictator, of course.

“Seeing like a state”. It could be half the length without losing anything, but it’s a very interesting perspective on states and central planning that I haven’t thought about before and am enjoying.

that could be, or maybe I got lucky. In any case, I’m not complaining. i remember it was like 750 bucks for both machines, and with other brands it would have been 800-1200 for a single machine

Our super cheap Candy (Washer and a drier) has been going for 5 years now without issue 🤷 Though i’d buy a different brand if i had to again and wasn’t pressed for money, I am definitely surprised how well it’s doing.

The solution proposed in “After Capitalism” is (with democratically worker managed companies):

A flat-rate tax on the capital assets of all productive enterprises is collected by the central government, all of which is plowed back into the economy, assisting those firms needing funds for purposes of productive investment. These funds are dispersed throughout society, first to regions and communities on a per capita basis, then to public banks in accordance with past performance, then to those firms with profitable project proposals. Profitable projects that promise increased employment and/or further other democratically decided goals are favored over those that do not. At each level—national, regional, and local—legislatures decide what portion of the investment fund coming to them is to be set aside for public capital expenditures, then send down the remainder, no strings attached, to the next lower level. Associated with most banks are entrepreneurial divisions, which promote firm expansion and new firm creation. Large enterprises that operate regionally or nationally might need access to additional capital, in which case it would be appropriate for the network of local investment banks to be supplemented by regional and national investment banks.

That’s for taking care of the investment part that stocks/shares fulfill for a large part right now.

And for getting there:

Legislation giving workers the right to buy their company if they so choose. If workers so desire, a referendum is held to determine if the majority of workers want to democratize the company. If the referendum succeeds, a labor trust is formed, its directors selected democratically by the work-force, which, using funds derived from payroll deductions, purchase shares of the company on the stock market. In due time, the labor trust will come to own the majority of shares, at which time it takes full control via a leveraged buyout, that is, by borrowing the money to buy up the remaining shares.

Along with legislation that if a company is bailed out by the government, it gets nationalized and turned into a worker self managed company. If companies get sold, they can only be sold to the state (according to the value of current assets, not stock market cap or similar). And if a firm is not sold, it’s turned over to the workers if the founders death. If there’s multiple founders, each can sell their share to the state or workers separately.

For stocks specifically, there’s the Meidner plan, where every company with more than 50 employees is required to issue new shares each year equivalent to 20% of its profits, these shares will be held in a trust owned by the government, and in an estimated 35 years, most firms would become nationalized (of course along side all newly founded firms having to be worker owned).

Not saying I fully agree with all of Schweickharts proposals, but at least the book is a relatively concrete proposal for an alternative that can be discussed, and how to possibly get there, so I thought it merits sharing.

Plus kids will find a way. Our english teacher didn’t want us to say ‘shit’, but to use ‘sugar’ instead.

There was a lot of ‘bullsugar’ and similar in that class.

In general, anything that hijacks search shortcuts.

Oh you wanted to search for text on this one page? Let me show you a search bar for the whole website instead, with a search that’s strictly worse than the search engine that you came from in the first place.

Maybe a third of a used or import lathe or mill.

Machining is super expensive as a hobby to get started.

Which is why I’m slowly upgrading my cheap CNC router to be more rigid and capable, bit by bit. Machined stainles for the first time last week. though i’ll never get close to a ‘real’ machine, in hobby machining, everything is a finishing pass…

I only see two comments here with 1 downvote each, and those are by separate people. but maybe i don’t see what you see because of federation issues?

This can work, but with cryptography instead of the porn site connecting to a government service.

The swiss government wanted to introduce electronic id a few years back which was a complete clusterfuck, every party would get all your private data even if they just needed ‘older than 18’, it was supposed to be implemented by various private companies that then sell it to the individual states, not really with gov oversight, so you have like 20 companies all with all the data, each of which could be hacked at any point etc.

we forced a public vote on it in 2021 and rejected it with 65%.

the use cases are pretty valid, like online pharmacies, ordering booze online, though of course you never know what they would require it for in the future.

so now it’s 2025 and a new proposal, this time much more privacy focused, developed by the government, open source, seems like they did listen to a lot of the criticism.

this blogpost goes into a bit of details on why unlinkability matters and that one-time-pads are one potential solution. And the whitepaper with more detail.

i saw a presentation from the digital society on it earlier this year and from what i remember, you get a set of keys (and can create new ones if you run out) from which you can create derived keys that only contain relevant information. The other party can verify this directly, without a gov service. And since you use a new key each time, the porn site also cant crossreference with your booze site that you’re the same person, that kind of stuff. It all sounded pretty reasonable and like it would adress your points.

I’m super happy with my formbot Marathon IDEX, works perfectly fine with TPU (though i did have to adjust one screw guide in the extruder so it doesn’t eat the filament). it’s not very well known, since they don’t hand them out to influencers etc. The discord is pretty active and lots of helpful people there.

made with all standard components, regular Klipper firmware, so i know i can replace parts if anything ever breaks.

And IDEX in mirror/copy mode for printing multiple parts at twice the speed is great when you need it.

Selling fewer explosive vehicles seems like a good idea tbh.

I wonder a bit in how far the opposite is the plan. Like Klarna recently firing support staff for AI and then wanting to hire them back, but as gig workers.

A company laying off thousands of engineers wont be nice for the stock. Saying you’re doing it because you’ll replace them with awesome AI might even pump the stock and is an easy excuse.

if you can the hire them back cheaper later because the job market is shit because many devs lost their job, even better.

It just reminds of this case from the 30s where a factory owner replaced skilled workers that wanted to unionize with machines and unskilled workers. The quality was worse and they produced less in a given time, and the machines were scrapped 3 years later. But it stopped unionization dead in its tracks and skilled workers got lower salaries afterward, so it all worked out even though the machines were strictly worse.