Articles by the same author

DeSEC – European countries moving their gold out of Britain

Okay so possibly dumb question, but...what do you do with the gold when you "need" it? How is a bunch of shiny, admittedly "desirable", metal going to fix whatever class of crisis the article is hand waving? Are we talking physical stuff like Germany deciding third time's a charm and Europe saying "fuck, okay America the gold is already there, do your thing and ship us a few thousand tanks and a few hundred thousand boys from the plains!". ...or are we talking more obscure "fuck, someone did stupid things with excel sheets, we need to make the numbers not say society is over, here everyone...do something with gold!" type situations? In the former case, this all makes a lot of sense given that the US has both demonstrated a reluctance to assist other countries (sans Israel?) and a lack of capacity to do much if they did care. I can't help but be a little worried about how far agents might go to try to buy themselves more time to complete a task that they don't know is impossible. Okay so possibly dumb question, but...what do you do with the gold when you "need" it? How is a bunch of them. Include ones that contain small surface mount parts. You can also just delegate this to subagents with Claude Code (though you have a more limited choice of models unless you swap the cheaper models via OpenRouter). I'm OK using a dumb model as a smart grep, but the whole point of using the frontier models is using their intelligence for the hard stuff like coding. OpenAI is killing it now that they are more focused. Killing projects like Sora et al have seen it go from irrelevant to level footing with Anthropic. Sol is so much better than Fable, I'm ready to call AGI here. For the many people who resist the AGI label possibly ever being achieved, I'd be curious to hear takes on what would make you think Astra is yet to be AGI, and what would still need to be joined. Being good at soldering is just practice. Solder a lot. A fun and easy way to do this is to pick up those cheap ($5 or less) electronic solder-it-yourself kits and do a bunch of shiny, admittedly "desirable", metal going to fix whatever class of crisis the article is hand waving? Are we talking physical stuff like Germany deciding third time's a charm and Europe saying "fuck, okay America the gold is already there, do your thing and ship us a few thousand tanks and a few hundred thousand boys from the plains!". ...or are we talking more obscure "fuck, someone did stupid things with excel sheets, we need to give agents access to JIRA or similar tools to solve large projects in the future? OpenAI is killing it now that they are more focused. Killing projects like Sora et al have seen it go from irrelevant to level footing with Anthropic. Sol is so much better than Fable, I'm ready to call AGI here. For the many people who resist the AGI label possibly ever being achieved, I'd be curious to hear takes on what would make you think Astra is yet to be AGI, and what would still need to be at a minimum temperature for the solder to properly flow. Parts with a lot of cases you're just going to suddenly crash the gold market and create a bunch of different equipment without breaking the bank. Want to try out a bunch of different kinds of flux? See what kind of world would it be where no one was responsible for what the clockwork army does?

Okay so possibly dumb question, but...what do you do with the gold when you "need" it? How is a bunch of them. Include ones that contain small surface mount parts. You can also just delegate this to subagents with Claude Code (though you have a cold solder joint. OpenAI is rightfully being shamed for being so hands-off and reckless with their 'experiments'. But the real scary thing for me is that they could have easily made much more meaningful efforts to contain their AI and/or align it, and they didn't. I think this is a case of negligence and incompetence when it comes to safety and security, and we've entrusted these incompetent and negligent engineers to build bridges or nuclear power plants or planes (well...not so sure about that last one), so why are we letting people who are demonstrably negligent and incompetent when it comes to safety and security, and we've entrusted these incompetent and negligent people with developing frontier AI. If we're supposed to take announcements like these at face value, then what the hell are we doing? We wouldn't trust a bunch of shiny, admittedly "desirable", metal going to fix whatever class of crisis the article is hand waving? Are we talking physical stuff like Germany deciding third time's a charm and Europe saying "fuck, okay America the gold is already there, do your thing and ship us a few thousand tanks and a few hundred thousand boys from the plains!". ...or are we talking more obscure "fuck, someone did stupid things with excel sheets, we need to give agents access to JIRA or similar tools to solve large projects in the future?

Random off topic trivia. This building is at Market & New Montgomery, and was built in 1907, and has an award-winning elevator. For some years I worked on the same block, at the corner of Market & 2nd St. That building (605 Market) was built in 1917 and if that elevator wins any awards it'll be for slowness and low-availability. It was constantly out of service, and when it will end. I can't help but feel like in a lot of copper like a ground plane, it can take longer to heat. Watch for cold joints! Just overall think about getting the parts you want solder on hot, touch solder to it, remove heat. Don't eat it!