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Pardon power can serve no reasonable goal in a functioning democracy except to subvert justice.

https://pardonned.com/search/?president=obama-2&categories=d...

I haven’t looked into each case here, but I assume these are a bunch of non-violent drug offenders serving years and decade-long sentences. I see 30 years for “possession with intent to distribute”. That’s just crazy.

When the justice system is clearly broken, it’s ok to subvert it.


The parent’s wording does actually imply that subverting justice is a reasonable goal.

There's some value to "the President can correct some wrongs". There are genuine miscarriages of justice sometimes and it's kinda nice to have a release valve for them.

The recent presidential immunity decision just made the downsides way more likely.


It’s an alternative to coups and civil wars. The deal made in private conversations is something like “Give up power peacefully. Everybody gets pardoned and goes home to their families. Nobody needs to do anything crazy or violent out of desperation to avoid prison.”

Justice is a moving target mate. Should people who had a few pounds of reefer still be serving 30 year sentences? 90's adults would probably say yes. Today? Not so much. Part of being human is being open to the fact you were wrong. The Pardon is the release valve that lets the Chief Executive remove the targets the System has painted on people's backs in response to a clear shift in public conscience. The public in recent history, threw all prudence to the wind and put a con man in office. Surprise, surprise when a con man uses the office to do what con men do.

I was an early adopter and huge fanboy for AWS.

At some stage I realised AWS is extremely expensive, extremely slow, extremely ridiculously complex and also a parasitic attitude to open source.

I realised I should instead go all in on Linux on virtual machines on other platforms.

AWS I’m done.


Hard to convey these days how the 486 felt like an absolute quantum leap in computing power.

I built a 486 Compaq Novell server for the company I worked for and named it Godzilla - gives a sense of how the 486 was seen.


I feel like Hanselman is one of the few old generation Microsoft people. When he leaves it’ll be young people who don’t know Microsoft and have no understanding of or connection with Microsoft products.

Dave Cutler and Raymond Chen might like a word.

I don't know about his career in general, but Hanselman once spoke at a conference I was helping organize here in Thessaloniki, and he was great. Really knowledgeable and very down to earth.

Well yes of course.

In the old days of computing people liked to say “garbage in, garbage out”.


By that logic, LLMs would be essentially useless considering the amount of garbage that exists on the internet. And, honestly, for things like this they are. But they're not marketed as such, and _that_ is the problem.

Like the planet.

Meh. I’m no particular fan of Altman but there’s nothing in this article particularly surprising or terrible.

The whole AI safety thing has always seemed extreme to me and has turned out to be a storm in a teacup. All those prominent people who used to tell us how AI will end humanity seem to have stopped talking about it.

I get the sense that Altman is not particularly like-able person but Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both seem to have scored a 10/10 on their “is this guy a jerk” rating, it’s common for tech CEOs.

So, the article and headline are dramatic but not much really there.

I think all the AI safety obsessed people turn out to have been the ones off course.


>> LLM-assisted coding naturally flows towards small microservices

Only if you’re a sufficiently bad programmer to not tell it the architecture it must comply to that hopefully you have the skills to define.


Germany should ask for its gold in 3 years from now.

Knocking down ideas often comes with intros like “With all due respect”.

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