Rob Fahey

There’s also no $250bn, but since most AI deals now seem to be pure speculative fiction they may as well get freaky with it; why NOT swap a machine god for imaginary money?

This was a timely reminder to donate and upgrade to supporting membership.

The key point here is that the NSF was trying to attach sweeping, baguely defined conditions not just to how its grant money would be used, but to *all other activities* of the foundation.

I've started dabbling in tmux + neovim as a dev environment and I'm halfway down a very deep rabbit hole of creators who insist that never using a mouse is the key to productivity with the only saving grace being the strong instinct to NEVER have facial hair like any of these people.

I built the PC purely for gaming, and the second I found a work/dev thing I wanted to use it for, I installed Linux. Still not a consumer-friendly desktop OS but honestly it's not bad, and as long as you're over a fairly low hurdle of technical knowledge it's a MUCH nicer experience than Win11.

Isn't it awful? I'd been out of the Windows ecosystem for ages and assumed the complaints about Windows 11 were the usual "new thing bad" stuff, but I have a PC running it now and my GOD it's bad. It feels like using one of those cheap phones full of preinstalled intrusive spyware from your network!

Have your seen their recent marketing stuff? It leans incredibly heavily into hardware manufacture / engineering - renders of phones being assembled etc. In part trying to distract from AI failures ofc, but it also feels like positioning to say "hey, that's not our business" when the bubble pops.

I assumed they just sucked at this and couldn't keep their promises for Siri functionality, but lately I'm starting to wonder how much of it is bungling and how much of it is down to a hefty dose of caution about letting GenAI get too intertwined in their core business.

(Normally when politicians go nuts for internal score settling it's due to being stuck in a bubble where that stuff plays very well and failing to see how badly it sits with the broader public... But Aso, I think, just does it for the love of the game.)

That's really the only kind of politics Aso has ever known, so it's pretty unsurprising. The closer to the levers of power he is, the more likely that the party descends into in-fighting and score-settling - all while being totally mystified that this somehow isn't delighting the electorate.

(I mean that literally - it sounds like local party meetings have been absolutely miserable for a lot of lawmakers in recent years, to the point where even more of them than usual are trying to make excuses to stay in Tokyo and skip constituency events.)

I'm not sure they were spooked by Takaichi last year, so much as by how mad their base was about the Abe Faction scandals; hence being willing to vote for the only guy in the room who clearly had scrupulously clean hands. Trying to stop their base from yelling at them is the common denominator.

Given the climate the LDP faces Koizumi may come to see this as a bullet dodged, but I bet this evening there’s a lot of anger at Hayashi in that camp - if he hadn’t split the first-round vote so much the vibes in the run-off would have been very different.

It strikes me that the instant second vote - no time for analysis, negotiation, or calming jangling nerves - favours knee-jerk responses. Lawmakers who'd spent weeks thinking about their first round choices saw Takaichi outperform polling in local chapter votes and had to make snap decisions.

VVD another perfect example of why watching this with any knowledge of European politics has been so tooth-grindingly frustrating - we've seen this exact scenario play out between centre-right parties and far-right challengers in a dozen countries and it never turns out any differently.

They'd definitely prefer not to, but it really depends what kind of agenda Takaichi decides to pursue. The coalition has been rocky for a while, and if she freezes them out over key issues in favour of trying to find votes from Ishin and Kokumin, it'll be hard to justify sticking with it.

I’ve spent too much time down in the weeds with the conspiracists, because I do wonder a little if some lawmakers saw this as a chance to take an awkward, divisive figure off the board by handing her a thoroughly poisoned chalice.

I’m not sure how exactly but I’m pretty sure Taylor Swift’s new album is to blame for this.

At a guess the next election is going to deliver an absolute mess of a Diet. No opposition party seems to have the capacity to look like a competent government-in-waiting, but the LDP is very likely to lose even more ground nonetheless. It’s a recipe for serious instability.

(The party that does actually lose their raison d'etre from this is Hoshuto, but they're already mid-collapse anyway so it probably doesn't make much difference.)

I agree, though I wouldn't underestimate just how bad some of these people are at the kind of strategic thinking required for minority government. I do think they'll try to maintain a cordon around Sanseito, at least at first, but wouldn't be too surprised if they break it quite often.

I don't think she'll try to work with Sanseito - Ishin is more likely. She's a boon to Sanseito though, even if she and her supporters seem to believe, naively, that her being in charge somehow negates Sanseito's raison d'etre.

Unless Takaichi as LDP leader can show a side of herself that's never been apparent in her career to date, this is going to be a disaster. Lots of very glum faces among the senior LDP faces up on stage right now; they no doubt suspect that the turkeys just voted for Christmas.

Takaichi wins, with Koizumi falling surprisingly short in the lawmaker votes - he didn't even win all of Hayashi's votes.

Probably in part down to lawmakers not wanting to ignore the constituency votes, but also a pretty clear sign of a party running scared of populist challenges from its right.

The expectation now would be that most of Hayashi's votes will transfer to Koizumi, while most of Motegi and Kobayashi's votes will transfer to Takaichi, which would give Koizumi a narrow win. It won't be quite so tidy - lots of personality factors and loyalties of various kinds are also in play.

Takaichi and Koizumi go into a runoff, as expected. Her popularity with the rank and file was key - she won over 40% of membership votes (Koizumi got 28%).

Weird upsets do happen in the runoffs, but note that Takaichi didn't even come second in her colleagues' votes - she was third behind Hayashi.

FWIW, I don't think it's a consistent pattern in every local party - some of them have leadership that's kept a much more firm grip on the culture of the organisation. I do wonder if that will be reflected to some degree in skewed leadership election results between districts.

Party membership votes don't count for much in the run-off, and it's hard to see lawmakers opting for her: even if they're nervous about the threat of Sanseito, she's by far the most likely candidate to collapse the fragile minority government arrangement and force a disastrous early election.

I've seen suggestions that declining membership is bad for Takaichi because it implies defections to Sanseito etc.; I'm not convinced. Anecdotally, I've heard of insiders bemoaning older, more moderate members abandoning party meetings increasingly dominated by Twitter-brained conspiracy theorists.

Takaichi is almost certain to make it to a run-off round, though, as she remains popular with local party members (who have skewed hard right since the pandemic). One striking figure is that there are ~140,000 less party members voting this time than a year ago - membership is in freefall.