> The rolodexes came from the now dispersed collection of former lab employee Ed Grothus, who operated a salvage company of lab cast-offs known as The Black Hole.
Many of my childhood science fair projects started at the black hole. You could always find something weird or interesting, and occasionally hot, while browsing through the place
Somewhere around 2004 I had an experience at the black hole that still amuses me.
I was digging through the store when I found a full pallet of computer punch cards. As a computer science undergrad, I thought, “ how cool, I want a bunch to use as bookmarks, or whatever”.
I went to haggle with Ed, and he outright refused to sell me any. He said he wouldn’t break up the pallet. I had to buy all or none…
That place is (was) a complete madhouse, in all the best possible ways. Piles and piles of crazy electronic bits, many custom builds, many of inscrutable purpose. It was like the prop room for 50s/60s pulp sci-fi movies.
> the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes
Seems like reasonable criteria. "Regular" unemployment is
# unemployed/# employed
where unemployed is they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available to work. But not much criteria in terms of what work people are finding.
100% agreed. Small, cheap, and hosted models. Luna (and open weight models and others) is ridiculously cheap @ $0.2/$1.2, easily accessible, and more than good enough for basic use cases (e.g. summarization, simple tool calling, etc.).
I just set up Tailscale as I've been hosting more personal apps off a small Hetzner VM and wanted a really simple personal networking solution. Works great, would recommend.
It's really excellent. I've been using Tailscale for a number of years, just for my home network and with a single user, and the service is excellent, and the free tier is incredibly generous.
I'm hoping that my Mullvad subscription (through Tailscale) contributes a little bit at least. Two excellent companies.
I like that there is Headscale as an open-source offering too. I don't use it, but the fact that it exists makes me a lot more comfortable (similar to Bitwarden etc).
> The slop-acalypse that so many of us fear, when people will stop looking at anything made by humans and only look at things made by machines—why hasn’t that happened yet?
Unfortunately, I'm pessimistic here. I don't think the slop-acalypse is held back by taste or an appreciation for "thickness". I think there's already very successful slop media in the world (e.g. see microdramas). In other words, it is happening, but like anything else, it's happening in a non-evenly distributed way.
> Although I’ve been saying “Claude”, I actually did most of the work in OpenCode with some of my favorite open weights models. Kimi K3 & K2.6, and DeepSeek v4 Pro & Flash.
Interesting, is Claude becoming the Kleenex of the agent world?
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