ixtli

Ban private vehicles tbh

Very good and well-written. I wish we would also acknowledge that the market, by disincentivizing spend on stuff like this, is performing well. It is optimizing. The reason it matters to acknowledge this up front is so that we can, as the article says, get to the rule below all this which is that the market is default. This is a clear and thorough example of how the profit motive does not lead to the life any of us want to live and so these markets should be contained within a superstructure that has motives other than profit.

If you only give 6mo then this is the opposite of a commitment to open source it’s a drug dealers tactic of giving the first taste for free.

I think this collapses a global, complex heirarchy of software engineering workers into a single monolith and serves only to advertise for frontier LLM providers. the point where you no longer need engineers is not going to be reached by making LLMs better and better.

I wish more people had casual exposure to professional translators. Its a deeply important, vanishingly small segment of the human population and has been this way for at least many thousands of years. Also, it will continue to be!

This is sort of missing the point-- people who dont deal with linguistics dont understand that there are multiple types of translation. There's word for word (which is what you're talking about) and sense for sense. If you let an LLM do all of your translation you're letting it interpret huge amounts of intent and context it doesnt (and probably cant) access. The ways in which this impacts the translation will forever be unknown to you and in the worst case lost forever.

So i guess in the end it just matters how important the work is.

Few willing to discuss this!

UBI without many other anti-capitalist reforms is just a subsidy paid directly to your landlord.

Marx showed this was an expression of one the central contradictions more than a century ago. Seriously it’s never too late to read about why our conditions only ever deteriorate under capitalism.

Transfer family always seemed like a bit of a ripoff for me and it seems like this avoids a large amount of that cost even if you’re not already running the BEAM.

Excellent essay. I see some of this is already happening imo

its so strange to see so many people who will never be handed 5 million dollars to write a vm jumping in front of criticism for one guy that did. sorry but when you become a public figure in this way you should expect to be subjected to a different sort of public scrutiny than, say, a rank and file employee who they pay.

i will begin to care about a CEOs feelings when they put the wellbeing of their employees before their own. not saying that the Deno CEO has done anything on the order of the raw aggression we see from other CEOs in our industry but, as they say, if you cant take the heat stay out of the kitchen.

They’re slowly redefining AGI so they can use it for more marketing. If you showed someone from 1960 our LLMs from and told them “this is AI” I think they’d be astounded but a little confused because “artificial intelligence” definitely carried a very clear meaning in literature and media. Now it is marketing terminology and we’re no closer to having a meaningful definition for the word intelligence.

Now do economic growth?

Ya a lot of people on this site are ideologically positioned in a way that required demonizing CA. I don’t have any skin in that game but it seems pretty clearly A Thing to me from the other side of the country.

I lived in Mexico for a while and while I really enjoyed it it’s horrible that you have to fear the tap water. It’s not humane

It actually makes me wanna move to CA.

This kinda makes me wanna move to CA. someone should take these list items and make a map of those fabs in the US so we can avoid moving near them.

And lets not forget that its only 22% of the total amount of people who live here. A large minority of potential voters are disenfranchised and do not vote. The government isnt just without a mandate it is extremely unpopular.

Very interesting way to put it. I would be less generous having lived here most of my whole life.

This is true in the US too. I know people who are disabled here who can not find a job because if they start making minimum wage they loose all their benefits.

I have a friend who, to explain it simply, worked medium high up in the CIA for 8-12 years during Bush and Obama. The only time he gets serious about talking about his time there is on this topic. Chinas cyber security is, according to him, light years ahead of the US to the point where its embarrassing.

Yes.

I think well meaning people in the west are looking for a silver lining and in the process overcomplicating a rather simple issue: the US government is cutting spending everywhere while its electorate demands even deeper cuts. The money has dried up and people are leaving.

(One of my best friends was a nuclear medicine phd who left his cancer research lab after covid to work at a VoiP company, so i too have anecdotes)

Sorry to hear you got priced out :( Unfortunately i am also quite pessimistic about the future of europe and the us, too.

Maybe. I would like to think that is true but i don't have much evidence.

I think what we can see provably is that China is investing in the development of STEM contributors at the primary school level through advanced degrees and the central government is directing the economy to spend huge amounts on the work that they do.

10k PhDs lost isn't a step in the direction of fixing anything, though. There is little to no evidence that the people leaving aren't the top performers, let alone the bottom.

People have really messed up views about hiring in general. I wish more people understood what you are saying here.

I think your comment is more a refutation of the top level than the person you're responding to. I think people are right to assume there is already a serious throughput issue with scientific research, especially so-called "basic" research in the US and seeing a mass exodus from the government is troubling because public funding is what, historically, generates the big breakthroughs.

What the person you're replying to was likely trying to say is that once you get into this size of layoffs its no longer about the individuals and their performances and a claim that all 10k of them are on one side of a theoretical "bell curve" (which btw i havent seen evidence can actually be measured) is big and needs evidence.

I believe the opposite is happening in China. I saw an article the other day ( https://fortune.com/2026/01/14/china-graduates-1-3-million-e... ) that showed how the amount of engineers being produced there is orders of magnitude greater than the US. Way above what you'd expect given the different sizes of population. Now, i realize an engineer isn't the same as a PhD but i think we're seeing a dramatic brain drain happening in the west.

It sounds like you're saying that this is a step in the direction of "fixing" academia. I don't see any evidence of that, all i see is fewer scientists receiving decreasing funding in a state where weve already been slashing basic research investment for generations. Also, there is no evidence that the ones that are leaving are the least productive. Intuitively it's likely the opposite: the ones who have the most potential will find work elsewhere and will be the first to leave.

EDIT: I would also like to say that i have never seen evidence that we can measure the performance of 10k PhDs in a single dimension at all. So a claim that this could be good for scientific research and development seems unprovable at best.