I disagree that that there was anything amicable during Biden years. Biden picked up exactly where Trump left off before him and he escalated tensions with stuff like CHIPS act, ban on Chinese EVs and so on. There’s been a continuation of policy here across administration since Obama’s pivot to Asia when the US decided that China was the main adversary. Things have been steadily escalating, and now they’re entering into an openly hostile territory.

You look like you were painted by Picasso.

I love how you don’t let facts influence your opinion.

I mean they want that, but it’s just not happening with the way the tech works right now. Unless you have a deep understanding of the problem you have the model solve, then you have no way to evaluate whether it solved it correctly or not. And it’s basically like an evil genie where it will interpret your request in a dumbest way possible by default. So, you get decent results when you already know what the shape of the solution should be, and you give the model concrete direction on the approach to take, algorithms to use, and so on. And that’s why the whole idea of deskilling workers or replacing them with automation is not really working out. You’d need genuine artificial intelligence for that and LLMs aren’t it.

Right, there’s nothing wrong with disagreement because it just means people have different perspectives. Discussing these perspectives in a civilized fashion creates a more complete understanding for everybody. That’s what debates are meant for, people present their positions and defend them, so that the counterparty can point out problems or inconsistencies. And through this process you build shared understanding of things.

But when debate happens in our media is just a spectacle of idiots yelling at one another and talking over each other incoherently. And that’s presented as providing different views. There’s no depth, no substance, and no actual debate happening. It’s just a bunch of people yelling I’m right.

And that’s a broader problem in the media too now where there’s no more investigative journalism. The media outlets simply parrot whatever the official narrative is, there’s no analysis, no historical context, and no push back. In a sense, the only real debate happening is the one between mainstream and social media. And, in a way, it’s kind of hilarious how regular people do a better job explaining things now than professional news outlets. Hence why social media is winning the debate.

I’ve been using opencode for actual projects at work. DeepSeek v4 can code up a lot of stuff fairly confidently. If you give it clear requirements, tell it to make a phased plan, use TDD, and commit after each phase, it tends to produce decent code. I just do code reviews against the diff and then tell it to fix anything I don’t like. It’s also great for spelunking through large codebaes. You can easily trace through how an endpoint works for example, get it to write stuff like sample curl queries, etc.

But the thing is that you don’t actually work all that much faster. You still have to review everything. You have to actually manually use the app and make sure it works functionally. Like you basically can’t trust anything it does. So, it makes my life easier. I don’t have to look up API docs, figure out how random libraries work, or having to write a bunch of boilerplate. But it doesn’t replace me, and it doesn’t actually result in me working significantly faster.

Oh it’s very much that. Every single study that’s come out on companies adopting AI shows that it makes no meaningful difference to productivity. So, it’s very clearly just an excuse to do layoffs.

It’s not going to happen overnight, but if they continue to ignore this then people become more and more disillusioned. A lot of people already have lost faith in mainstream outlets, so there could just be a collapse in public trust. And there’s a greater context for this too because the standard of living is collapsing at the same time. So, people see their lives get worse, they see the media talk about how great DOW is doing, and then they start connecting things and realizing they live in a house of mirrors.

I think the fact that these kinds of interviews are happening at all is significant. While they’re doing everything they can to suppress this, the public opinion is not really going along with the narrative. And that creates a dilemma for them. Either they continue to deny the genocide and continue losing credibility or they have to start discussing it however tepidly.

That’s the single best thing about the internet in my opinion as well.

Imagine how much longer they could’ve kept the whole thing going if not for social media. If people were only exposed to the mainstream news narrative, we wouldn’t even know there was a genocide going on right now.

at some point they’re going to have to realize the US is just using them

It’s also pretty funny how what they’re upset about is the fact that DPRK has the ability to defend itself and has credible deterrent. Nowhere is it even suggested that DPRK has any desire to attack the US.

👋

I recall somebody said that Tesla is much better understood as a meme stock company, and honestly that’s the best description of it that I’ve heard. The stock value is completely divorced from the actual product, it’s just hype. And as a result the company focuses on ensuring hype persists rather than making decent products.

It’s kind of funny how China was basically preparing their whole economy for exactly this moment. Countries will want solar panels, and then they’re going to need batteries to stabilize the grid, and EVs to get around. All this overcapacity the US has been screeching about is turning out to be very prudent indeed.

Unfortunately, our glorious leaders seem to think otherwise.

a must read on the subject https://november8ph.ca/psychological-warfare-in-the-strategy-of-imperialism-v-l-artemov/

Yeah, it was quite the experience. Literally the whole town was in a haze, and it went on for a while too. Was pretty awesome overall. Probably best fireworks display I’ve seen ever. And it’s really cool how it’s not really organized in any way. People just get their own and then launch them all together.