pydry

Limiting by total income disincentivises companies to spend heavily to produce e.g. films, plays, video games, whatever.

I'm not sure we'd be any worse off as a society if, say, Disney wasnt incentivized to make 34 marvel movies.

There are things where we desperately need large scale investment (e.g. manufacturing, green energy) but big budget artistic productions is probably one area of the economy where we could easily live without it.

Indeed, the comparison isnt fair. The US is complicit in a genocide recognised by the UN and many of the US's own allies.

For anything that isnt generic I find the effectiveness drops off very quickly.

It's already 100x better at writing todo apps than the average senior developer but when I get it to try and achieve something unusual using a relatively obscure library it flails.

No, I think it's correct. One artefact of programming for decades is that I ended up thinking in code directly without "translating" from English first.

Thus the push to use LLMs has felt a little bit like being a fluent French speaker being told that all of the best French writers are using google translate to write French translated from English now.

In China the state rules the corporations and in the US the corporations rule the state.

Neither is a system worth fighting for. Swiss style democracy maybe but not autocracy and not oligarchy.

OTOH in Europe, US human rights policy was probably relevant in saving some dissenters in the former Eastern Bloc from torture or execution.

Yeah, a bit like how Russia saved Edward Snowden.

The US will use human rights as a club to beat its imperial rivals with but when it has deemed torture and arbitrary execution in the interests of its imperial power it has adopted them enthusiastically.

When US allies use these tools and worse they are excused.

There is basically nothing which US rivals do which the US wouldn't also do under similar circumstances.

Boomers are a scapegoat, used a bit like immigrants, minorities and AI as an excuse for attacks on the working class.

The US is an plutocratic oligarchy, not a boomerocracy:

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746

The candidates which would pursue popular policies tend to get nixed via underhanded political means before ascending to higher office. The oligarchy uses campaign financing and the media they own as a club to beat the two parties into submission and to stamp out any kind of populist opposition which wants to pursue policies which are oligarchy-unfriendly.

This includes any kind of reform which might interfere with the value of their property portfolios or redirect their streams of unearned rental income.

I talked to an NHS consultant and they said similar things about waste in the NHS - there is still waste, but by and large it's been honed into a very lean and efficient (albeit budget starved) machine.

This excludes corruption based inefficiencies like the PPE scandal.

Unless you’re claiming that AIs will suddenly (and very soon) stop improving

Most technologies level off sharply after bouts of boundless improvements.

In 1968 they thought we'd be flying to the moon by now but instead we're flying across the ocean in planes not that different from the 747 that existed back then.

I think if you won't even admit that AI greatly accelerated these trends, you're in some kind of denial

I think if you actually look at the data for these trends rather than asking AI what it thinks you might experience some cognitive dissonance.

There's no reason to believe that we would see a rapid coordinated decline in all of these things at the same time without AI

It's called hiked interest rates. The economy is not doing so great for several reasons but the main one is wars.

AI hype is still a million miles ahead and a million times dumber, especially thanks to online astroturfing.

Add it to the list:

- the downfall of junior devs

- bad hiring market

- layoffs in practically every sector

theres a ton of things where AI took credit for a trend that had already started before it started being even halfway capable.

for a lot of stuff it just made more sense to ask on the github project's issue tracker.

Well, yeah. I'm definitely more tolerant of bad web UX than the average boomer.

One big difference is that the US doesn't have much public record of using state espionage resources to steal industrial secrets to give domestic industry a leg up in the market, whereas CCP very much does.

Until very recently there would have been little point. What could China do that the US couldnt?

I'm sure the US will start to do it in the not too distant future though. China is slowly leapfrogging the US on several key technologies - e.g. robotics and drones.

The idea that the US's conscience might prevent it from engaging in state directed industrial espionage is comical.

90% of the time when I call a call center I need a human to fix an organisational bug - e.g. faulty billing or some other kind of mixup. AI cannot help with this.

If it's to do something normal you could do through the website there was no need for AI - a website or app suffices - provided it isnt terrible.

Capital definitely thinks it can save costs here but capital is getting increasingly delusional these days.

I don't rememeber that sentiment being expressed much in the past about programming.

I do notice a lot more bugs these days, a lot more slop code and a lot more complaints about slop code.

Sources, sick imagination.

All of that evidence can be verified with a quick google.

That corruptionist was not "overwhelmingly popular".

In Crimea and the Donbass he undeniably was. Election figures confirm this. Again, a quick google would confirm this.

It was all orchestrated by Russia.

The source for this definitely IS imagination.

You can find tons of videos of russian hero's of that time, and they openly confirm now, that regular military was in Crimea, Donetsk , etc,

Of course. Just as many "patriotic western" soldiers ended up fighting for Ukraine, many "patriotic Russians" ended up fighting in the donbass.

If there is a large war, those countries will prioritize domestic consumption and the UK will immediately stop being able to produce weapons.

Domestic steel production is an essential element of being sovereign, as opposed to being the handpuppet of a larger power (like the US).

The productivity depends upon the requirements.

If slop is fine (and sometimes it is), the benefits are undeniable. If the dev was the kind that would have produced slop anyway - again, undeniable boost.

If the quality needs to be high I think it actually can slow you down, though.

Neither does nuclear power. This is why when half of the French nuclear power plants were down for unscheduled maintenance in 2022 they had to import German solar and wind energy and burn a ton of gas.

Gas, batteries, grid interconnects and pumped storage are the only things which can stabilise the grid to properly match supply with demand. There is far more money available for all of them if you don't have to spend 5x as much per kWh on nuclear power.

While the global warming denialist brigade did try to pin Spain's blackouts on too many solar panels it was actually caused by voltage control on the grid.

It started with a group of terrorist snipers in the Hotel Ukraina who fired randomly into a crowd of civilians. None of them were ever prosecuted. The attempt to pin it on the Berkut failed miserably.

One of them was identified by a Ukrainian war hero as Andriy Parubiy, far right nut and future speaker of the rada. Several of them identified themselves as Georgian mercenaries who were hired by Andriy Parubiy.

The goal of the terror attack was clearly to overthrow a democratically elected president that was overwhelmingly popular in Crimea and the donbass and install a puppet who could be relied upon to do the bidding of the west.

This was successful, and is what kicked off the civil war.

Victoria Nuland's phone call where she "picked" the puppet on behalf of the US state department was leaked. You can listen to it.

I'd encourage you to watch John Mearshimer's address to the European parliament because he addresses your narrative of imperial expansion and comprehensively refutes it, with clear, easy to understand evidence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1U3HDNQ24o

Unfortunately Europe seems to have lost its mind over this conflict. It will end very badly for them if they don't behave rationally towards Russia.

Just 6.5% of German electricity was generated through coal last year.

By contrast Poland was ~90% for years and only just slipped below 50%.

If I had to guess why Poland never got any criticism for that while Germany was routinely pilloried by certain flavors of propaganda I would hypothesize that it was because Poland weren't humiliating the nuclear industry by swapping them with solar panels and wind turbines at 1/5th the price.

Russia openly declares willingness to destroy europe

There is not a scintilla of evidence for this.

They're trying to keep the same violent and aggressive American dominated military alliance that is currently and actively trying to destroy Iran far away from their most vulnerable border.

They also tried to pursue the diplomatic route multiple times before invading and after invading and were always rebuffed.

it's not that either. it's the total value of all transactions.

if you paint a masterpiece worth millions and keep it in your closet it has negligible impact on GDP. only once it is sold does it have an effect.

I find it amusing that back when solar and wind were niche and expensive the coal + oil lobby would lobby for "let the free market decide what to build".

When solar + wind plunged in price they stopped saying it.

Now that the market has driven down the price of solar, wind and storage, market based mechanisms have become ideal for solving the problem of what to do with surplus electricity.

so, slop

I got this a lot when trying to use it to do online shopping.

I'd ask for "Can you find an X with Y and Z features?" and it'll say "have you tried searching for X at someshop, make sure to check for Y and Z"

and someshop will of course only stock X without Y and Z so the whole exercise was worse than pointless.

Or rather because they are always just of poor quality

Where did Anthropic say that they want to “end” software development.

https://digitalstrategy-ai.com/2026/01/23/claude-code-anthro...