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  • Took me a several click to get to the source: https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/4/3/real-time-federal-budget-tracker It has detailed budget breakdowns so it is decently convenient to explore.

    I have done a very brief scrolling, here are some interesting findings. All the following data are year-to-date, comparing 2024 to 2025, adjusted for inflation:

    Ups:

    • despite mass firing, spending on federal employee salary has slightly gone up (by 4 billion, from 79 to 83 billion), which I assume is either current admin paying themselves, severance, or sign-on bonus to hiring back their fired employee.
    • DoD and DVA spending has collectively gone up more than 20 billions.
    • Unclassified spending up aroubd 20 billion, from 70 billion to 89 billion, a near 30% incease, curious what those are.
    • Federal Highway, Railroad, and Transite are collectively up couple billion.
    • DOJ, DOE, DOC has surprisingly gone up in spending. DOJ in particular gone up 1 billion, from 7 billion to 8 billion.

    Downs:

    • NIH and CDC are either slightly down or remain the same. It is worth noting that NIH and CDC collectively account for around 20 billions total spending, the same amount as the increase in DoD and DVA spending.
    • Department of Education down 10 billion from 90 billion to 80 billion.
    • USAID gone down 2 billion, even though it only accounted for total of 6 billion of spending in 2024.
    • Homeland Security spending, surprisingly, down half a billion from 5.5 to 5.
    • USPS down 1 billion, from 14 billion to 13 billion.
  • The article states: "Republican Representative Harriet Hageman of Wyoming ... [states] a consistent rise in fatal truck crashes since its implementation."

    Whereas your statement is "[Requiring truck driver to speak English improves safety] is a fact".

    I am not saying what you said is necessarily wrong or the policy is necessarily harmful; but I feel we probably need more proof than "a republican representative said so", to assert a certain statement as "a fact".

    BTW, neither you nor the news article provided the relevant data, which IMHO doesn't really inspire confidence in your argument. Let alone all the potiential confounding variable others have mentioned.

  • I think it would be great if you can list some credible source before asserting a fact.

    Also I have a question, why do truck drivers speaking English makes the road more safe? As long as they understand the required knowledge, I don't see the language they speak matters in terms of safety, but that could just be my lack of understanding in this area.

  • My conspricy theory is that early LLMs have a hard time figuring out the logical relation between sentenses, hence do not generate good transitions between sentences.

    I think bullet point might be manually tuned up by the developers, but not inheritly present in the model; because we don't tend to see bullet points that much in normal human communications.

  • Functional programming doesn't have much to do with what people call "AI" nowadays, but it is still a valuable skill to write compositional code.

    Since you mention tooling, I am going to give a unconventional recommendation: rust, but try not to use mut keyword. Rust is a decently matrue language, widely used in the industry, and it actually support decently advanced functional features (e.g. https://varkor.github.io/blog/2019/03/28/idiomatic-monads-in-rust.html ).

    Another alternative is scala, which I don't know whether it is still very popular. But it certainly is one of the approachable "cool" language 7 years ago.

  • China blocks most IPs from foreign cloud providers like AWS or Digital Ocean. And if I am not mistaken, they can also block some VPN protocols (tor is not a VPN protocol, but it is very blocked, I don't know if tor bridge works), but I am not sure which exactly.

  • This is actually the case according to some vegan YouTuber. From what I understand (and according to these people) veganism is about harm reduction, so they shouldn't consume anything produced by exploitation or animal (including human) suffering.

    Not consuming animal product should be technically "plant-based" or "vegan diet".

    I do applaud their effort, and feel they are certainly stepping towards the right direction, but it would probably take a long time for society to accept this definition.

    On the other hand, I feel it is fine to have different definitions for the same word. I think even among the vegan community, there must be many definitions of animal suffering. I think it only matters that we are doing the best we can do.