I'm going to fight pessimism with cynicism here: the Department of Defense is not going to let everything move to the cloud because they need compute at the edge for AI-enabled weapons and R&D. For example, Anduril's products, Eric Schdmit's secretive Bumblebee project, or startups like Scout AI. Communications and GPS are just too easy to jam and their answer is giving weapons more last-mile autonomy to operate in radio silence.
War aside, I also bet there's going to be a huge demand for edge-compute for other kinds of robotics: self-driving cars, delivery robots, factory robots, or general-purpose humanoids (Tesla Optimus, Boston Dynamics Atlas, 1X NEO, etc). Moving that kind of compute to the cloud is too laggy and unreliable. I know researchers who've tried it, the results were mixed.
Also, the engineers working on these platforms aren't going to reinvent the wheel every time they need to connect hardware together and they're going to use interoperable standards, like PCIe for storage or GPUs, DIMM slots for memory, ATX for power, etc. So I don't see general-purpose computing dying.
Their real goals are even worse than that. Some of these groups have admitted they're also about suppressing LGBT+ content.
As the Heritage Foundation admitted:
> Keeping trans content away from children is protecting kids.
No child should be conditioned to think that permanently damaging their healthy bodies to try to become something they can never be is even remotely a good idea.
Isn't it a stretch to round off "trans content" to "LGBT+ content"? I mean, from a pure logical point of view the statement is correct, because "trans content" is a subset of "LGBT+ content", and therefore "suppressing LGBT+ content" is technically correct, but it's at least misleading. The left's version of this would be something like "twitter is suppressing anti-immigration content!", and the actual example is some alt-right commenter saying that immigrants should be lynched. Immigrants being lynched is certainly an subset of "anti-immigration", but it's still misleading.
Hi, I've been openly queer for over 20 years. Using trans people as a wedge to pry apart the entire LGBTQ community is a tale as old as time. This isn't theoretical or a slippery slope argument; it's recent history. It's effective because it sounds "reasonable" on its face, but it's a ploy.
Just one of the many, many, many reasons that trans rights are human rights.
>This isn't theoretical or a slippery slope argument; it's recent history. It's effective because it sounds "reasonable" on its face, but it's a ploy.
It quite literally is the slippery slope argument. You just don't want to call it that because the term is almost always used in the context of a fallacy, and you think you're right. It's like "freedom fighters" vs "terrorists". Nobody calls themselves terrorists, even terrorists.
Moreover the "It's effective because it sounds "reasonable" on its face, but it's a ploy" argument works equally well for any side, eg. it's not hard to imagine someone on the right saying "today it's Jan 6th protesters and that might seem reasonable, but tomorrow it's anyone at unite the right protests, and when president AOC's in power it's anyone who's protesting against trans surgery for minors".
> Isn't it a stretch to round off "trans content" to "LGBT+ content"?
Not really. Do you think the people attempting to ban trans content are otherwise fine with kids being gay/lesbian/etc? Do you think they view gay/lesbian identities as legitimate, rather than unnatural perversion? It’s the same rhetoric in my experience, we’re all just deviants making choices. It seems like casual uninvested people just got used to gays being in the public eye and anti-gay people lost the ability to get anyone to care about that position. Turns out they’re just normal people trying to live their lives.
> Immigrants being lynched is certainly a subset of "anti-immigration", but it's still misleading
I don’t think your analogy works unless you believe that transgender people are uniquely extreme compared to other identities. If true, I think that more shows your prejudice than anything. Maybe if enough trans people end up in the public eye, casual uninvested people will stop thinking negatively about trans people generally too. Maybe one day they’re realize we’re just people trying to live our lives.
I mean, I don't disagree with the sentiment of keeping trans ideology away from kids, in exactly the way I'd want to protect them from any kind of religious indoctrination.
The idea that even a single person in the world is trans because of "trans ideology" is what's absolutely insane here.
If you think you could be convinced by anyone that you're not living out your true gender identity, I have news for you... Most people, children too, are not having those thoughts unless there's actually a journey waiting for them.
The idea that none of them are trans for that reason is what sound insane to me. Are you not aware of how much humans absorb from the messaging in their environment?
And FYI, I've seen it happen with one of my own family members - someone who so far as I can tell isn't 'a man in a woman's body', but rather just someone who never fit in and was always a bit of a social outcast.
Their struggle was never their bloody gender, it was their struggle to find a way to fit into the world.
And that's what a lot of transitioning actually is. Because human psychology works such that when we're not fitting in, when we feel insecure and out of place, a subconscious pressure emerges to reinvent ourselves due to the current formula not working for us.
It's offensive to me that you'd make such claims whilst clearly so naive about it.
I just think it's really dangerous to think you know better than another person about their internal struggles.
While you may think they are being affected by certain kinds of messaging, you also have to interrogate that you yourself are being affected by other kinds of messaging, shaping your view on how gender functions.
This is the exact same reasoning behind anti-gay laws around the world: That telling people it's OK to be gay will cause them to somehow "choose" to be gay, which to anyone who is actually either straight or gay is completely absurd - they couldn't change that aspect of themselves even if they wanted to.
OK, sure, there’s going to be confused and vulnerable people making mistakes. As I understand it, the detrans community is a tiny fraction of an already tiny fraction who ever in their life identified as trans.
This isn’t an actual risk to anybody, and I can’t believe I have to say that.
It’s weird to say in the same comment “it happens but as far as I know it’s rare” and “this isn’t an actual risk to anybody.”
I do wonder how many would detransition if it wasn’t too embarrassing for them or because they’re effectively stuck that way if they did bottom surgery. Certainly I’m sure there are many more that quietly do it and not be a part of a community around it - I know of one person who did.
I’m sure there are many reasons people transition. For instance, there used to be a subreddit that collected (many) trans people commenting on how much them transitioning or being the other gender turned them on (Reddit being Reddit, it was banned). Some might do it because it feels like a way to get a new start. Some might do it because it’ll get them attention. Some, I’m sure, do it because they genuinely feel like they have the wrong body.
All of those could (of course) be affected by social interactions, with only the last one being positive. Unfortunately it would be really hard for us to ever know the true statistics, as that sort of thing is hard for even the person experiencing it to suss out.
> It’s weird to say in the same comment “it happens but as far as I know it’s rare” and “this isn’t an actual risk to anybody.”
Orders of magnitude more people are maimed, disfigured, or outright killed by:
1. Guns.
2. Vehicles.
3. Alcohol.
Weirdly, suspiciously weirdly, the people that are vehemently for age-verification to protect potential trans-indoctrination victims from any risk of bodily harm are the very same people that are very much in favour of those three things. Or at least, show zero apparent interest in using age verification to block 2nd amendment nuts spreading their propaganda -- and I use the word very literally -- because the NRA is funded by Russia[1], or blocking young impressionable kids watching Nascar and being influenced to engage in dangerous speeding, or blocking alcohol advertising from ever being seen by a minor.
> I do wonder how many would detransition if it wasn’t too embarrassing for them
Well I wonder how many would transition in the first place if the culture (and law) allowed for gender fluidity without judgement or violence.
Also: not speaking for all queer people here, but if a person wants to detransition because they changed their mind/feel differently as they age/whatever the fuck reason, that’s fine!
I don't think it's necessarily the queer community someone detransitioning would have issues with. It's always embarrassing to go back on any big change, especially if it was something that was supposed to be permanent.
Do you believe that children are more impressionable than adults? There is a community of detrans people who talk openly about how they became trans because they were influenced by peers and authority figures in their lives.
Maybe we shouldn't hide the information then, so they can make their own decisions. Imagine blocking all the information about "am I actually trans or just peer pressured?" but not blocking the peer pressure.
Since you compare it to religious indoctrination: I wouldn't want my child to be indoctrinated into believing some religion, but I still want my children to learn about religion. Not because I think it's important, but because we live on a world where a lot of people DO consider that very important. We don't have to agree, but we should at least try to understand the people around us. The same way I don't think there is any harm in learning kids about trans people, and what might cause someone to decide something radical like trying to change their gender.
Can you explain what you mean with trans ideology? because AFAIK 'ideology' means a collection of beliefs or philosophies, and I don't really understand how that applies to a physiological condition, like it does in the case of religion.
Firey take there, but I know a few people who are trans and neck deep in the kool aid. They will tell you that 25-30% of population is trans, and just haven't been liberated/are in denial.
Look, it's cool to be trans, no problem. These women I know are good people and net contributors to society. But they are off the ideological deep-end, and would happily spend 3 hours at the family BBQ lecturing an impressionable 13 year old about how those weird body feelings are very likely gender dismorphia. They're just as drunk on their flavor of delusional social media as any other religious nut is crazy about God.
What we call gender dysphoria is really just a cluster of symptoms around people's sense of their identity.
But identity as a whole is a very murky thing - if you ask me it's largely an adaptive abstraction that our minds invent.
The purpose of said adaption is to adopt a role which functions within the tribe/society for purposes of survival.
I think we way over-simplify the whole thing by making it about gender and gender roles.
And it's that over-simplification that I would label as the ideology. Because that's what ideologies do: they take the complex ambiguities of the world and try to cram them into a simplistic box.
It stopped being centered around gender dysphoria quite a while ago. Gender identity is where it's at now, and the idea that one does not need to be dysphoric to be trans is currently the most mainstream one.
Yes, you do not need to be dysphoric to be transgender, however. It is actually quite difficult to compare rates of gendery dysphoria to transgender identity, as transgender identity is inherently self-reported, but studies on gender dysphoria focus on diagnosed cases, not undiagnosed estimates. Therefore it is also not possible to assert that non-dysphoria is dominant among current transitioning people as you do.
Upvoted because I like the effort and I want more visibility on this subject.
But I also don’t want to step on the EFF’s toes. They’ve been doing good work on this area for decades and I’d prefer we work with them on policy details.
This is actually really nice. Web page feels pretty snappy, way more so than congress.gov. I've learned some interesting things just scrolling for a few minutes, like the "Energy Freedom Act" cutting appliance rebates or the constitutional amendment for a balanced budget (wtf).
I like this. My strategy to stay sane in US politics is to follow what the government is actually doing and avoid distractions from ragebait influencers or unhinged statements from politicians.
Thanks! The original goal of Govbase is to make US Policy impact easy to understand for citizens. For more government transparency so people know how their representatives are spending their time and who they're actually working for.
> is there a correlation between academic performance and classroom laptops?
Yes, here is Dr. Horvath's (the neuroscientist mentioned in the article) written testimony which cites some studies.
The table in Section 3 is particularly damning. It shows how a classroom intervention worsened or improved outcomes relative to the baseline. Note that the worst intervention is the "1-to-1 laptops row".
Unclear if they mixed interventions, I'd have to read the mentioned studies. If the interventions were done in isolation then that's basically a longitudinal study which is a pretty clear smoking gun.
I currently have it limited to this "epoch" date while I tweak the prompts, once I feel the prompt is done cooking I will be letting it go back to 2007. But, also, gotta keep the lights on somehow ;)
> Your manager sees you shipping faster, so the expectations adjust. You see yourself shipping faster, so your own expectations adjust. The baseline moves.
This problem has been going on a long time, Helen Keller wrote about this almost 100 years ago:
> The only point I want to make here is this: that it is about time for us to begin using our labor-saving machinery actually to save labor instead of using it to flood the nation haphazardly with surplus goods which clog the channels of trade.
I feel like most of the anxiety around LLMs is because (in the USA at least) our social safety net sucks.
I'd probably have way more fun debating LLMs if it wasn't tied to my ability to pay rent, have healthcare, or feel like a valued person contributing something to society. If we had universal healthcare and a federal job guarantee it would probably calm things down.
Don't let the hysteria and the astro-turfing get to you. Things are not nearly as close to what a bunch of hyper-excited project managers, average developers and labs propagandists like to say.
The more you use code agents, the clearer its limitations will appear to you.
Everyone selling them as some silver bullet is either trying to astroturf it, to ride the wave as a newly minted "expert/early adopter" or have no fucking clue about what they are talking.
What's more interesting is how the big names in our industry, the ones who already made their money as you say, have turned quickly since the end of 2025. I think even the most old school names can see that the writing is on the wall now.
Changed their opinion/public stance completely sometimes only months apart. For example "I love programming" to "if you aren't with AI you are behind" within maybe only 6 months time. Its almost like anyone with any public opinion in software is being paid to say it now and boost the AI hype.
War aside, I also bet there's going to be a huge demand for edge-compute for other kinds of robotics: self-driving cars, delivery robots, factory robots, or general-purpose humanoids (Tesla Optimus, Boston Dynamics Atlas, 1X NEO, etc). Moving that kind of compute to the cloud is too laggy and unreliable. I know researchers who've tried it, the results were mixed.
Also, the engineers working on these platforms aren't going to reinvent the wheel every time they need to connect hardware together and they're going to use interoperable standards, like PCIe for storage or GPUs, DIMM slots for memory, ATX for power, etc. So I don't see general-purpose computing dying.
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