The logic, insofar as there is any, goes like this: the war has crashed the global oil market so hard that the administration needs the enemy's oil to keep gasoline prices from eating the midterms. They are unsanctioning the people they're bombing because the bombing is working too well at the thing they didn't want it to do. The sanctions were necessary to stop Iran funding the war, but the war made the sanctions too effective, so the sanctions had to be lifted to fund the war effort against the country that no longer needs sanctions because the oil revenues that sanctions were preventing are now required to prevent the economic damage caused by preventing those revenues, which is itself a consequence of the military campaign designed to make the sanctions unnecessary by making Iran the kind of country that doesn't need sanctioning, which it would be, if the sanctions hadn't been lifted to pay for making it that.

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Friday's press gaggle. Barely exaggerated: at 12:03 PM, President Trump told reporters he wanted a ceasefire with Iran. At 12:05 he declared victory. At 12:07 he announced he was sending Marines. At 12:08 he said no boots on the ground. At 12:11 he said he did not want a ceasefire. At 12:16 he declared victory again. At 12:17 he asked for a ceasefire. At 12:23 he told NATO they were cowards. At 12:29 he said Iran was begging for a ceasefire. At 12:31 he said everything was perfect. At 12:36 he said $500 oil was a good thing. At 12:37 he demanded Iran open Hormuz. At 12:39 he said Hormuz was never closed. At 12:41 he said the US was not at war with Iran. At 12:42 he declared victory in Iran.

By 3:43 PM he told CBS he doesn't want a ceasefire. By 5:13 PM - 13 minutes after futures markets closed for the weekend, in a coincidence that should be studied in every securities fraud textbook - he posted on Truth Social that the US is "getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts". The S&P reversed more than 1% in seconds. QQQ had already surged 1.1% in the 80 minutes before the announcement, with call options flowing in at a pace that suggests someone, somewhere, had an itinerary.

I got kind of tired of the omni-invincible Chuck Norris jokes especially after he became a bit of a right wing blowhard, but RIP.

(Did you know he had his own Atari 2600 game?)

No one's normal. It just looks that way from across the street.

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cute FB video (a delightful homebrew looking popup book to misheard lyrics)

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Oh cool, Afroman (of "And Then I Got High Fame") won his lawsuit about his Lemon Pound Cake video (and a few others) mocking the cops who raided his home on pretty trumped up charges.

"We understand many things imperfectly," Harlow conceded. "But however contentious a matter might be, my own counsel would always be to avoid taking a position that justifies barbarity."

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Latifa had always feared that civilization would be brought down by people with thirty-second attention spans, but now she was beginning to suspect that the greater danger came from those who could sit through three-hour vodcasts, robbed of the ordinary human reflexes that should have compelled them to switch to something new instead of marinating in the stream of inanities.

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He needed to spend an hour with a book, a game, or a TV show, just to lay down a clear memory that separated each day from the next, or he ended up back at his desk in the morning feeling like he'd never been away.

screw you, forbes readers

My buddy Scott is a highup Project Manager at Red Hat. We hang out on a tiny group chat.

Scott has a huge experience with Open Source (and did some pioneering work in containerization) and is on board with the idea that AI is the future of development. He's really worried that the good guys get busy, overcome their inertia and reservations, and learn the arts of leveraging AI to make good stuff (with efficient token/energy use) and learning how to defend things from the bad guys, who never seem to have the same kind of compunctions about using any tool they can find.

He's fighting a war on two fronts; he yells at me for bringing up stuff from the AI-skeptic side, both from absolutists who will push back against AI tooth and nail, as well as from middle of the road developers who find utility in these "Jr Programmer Level of companions" but keep bumping their head into the limitations and confusion that results as context windows get filled up and what not, as well as some of the infamous AI gaffes making the rounds.

The other front is against executives who are too gung-ho about it all - who say "just build it" without acknowledging how the problem is no longer the coding - we now are in an age of surplus programming/build potential - but deciding what to build that will provide sustainable value, as well as socializing and building community around what gets built.

One of Scott's favorite articles is "The AI Vampire":

Here were my takeaways:

* Yegge claims that a real corner was turned last November, in terms of what models like Claude Opus could do vs the earlier stuff. I'm currently nursing a theory that says, there might be a qualitative difference between those "$200/mo" models vs the "$20/mo" models that both the naysayers and the CEO types have been messing with, which has increased the skepticism in the first camp (as they run into limits) but with CEOs empowered enough to build cool stuff and not getting bothered by the MVP/prototype level of what they make. (I don't think Scott agrees with my analysis, but anyway) But Yegge says stuff like the long vaunted "10x Programmer" is now actually unlocked.

* Yegge points out that this AI-driven 10x mode is actually exhausting (hence the title of the piece) I'm guessing coding with AI takes a significant part of the fraction of doing it "by hand". It's a more concentrated set of demands and focus.

* and So we have a classic "where does the value go" situation. If the company tries to get 10x the work all the time, endless go-go-go mode, that's just a recipe for burnout. Conversely, if it's more like employees just put in 1/10 the effort, that's a plan to get swamped by competitors who are increasing their productivity. Yegge thinks its crucial we find a balance for the value capture.


And so I'm working but wondering what the rest of my career looks like - and where I am on the bellcurve of adoption...