American Hegemony or Pax Americana (post WWII until present) is the most peaceful period of human history, despite the myriad atrocities which have occurred during that period, from myriad different parties, including the USA itself
A big reason for that, as far as I can tell, is that if one side has the USA on its side, they're basically unattackable for many places since the USA is so over powered militarily and can project force anywhere
It stands to reason as the USA recedes from the world's stage it will get more violent as more nations stand at parity with their adversaries again. And we're certainly seeing wars cropping up lately as the US continues to undermine its traditional allies, bully adversaries, declare trade wars, and withdraw from agreements.
I do not disagree with that assessment, but maybe one can hope that at some point we evolve past this "us versus them" mentality that we inherited from the savannah? If so, it's worth pushing for it.
So many cults of personality these days between Musk, Trump, Altman, Neuman (WeWork guy)...
Maybe it started with Jobs, maybe it's always been a thing in other spaces (politics, religion...) and is now coming to business and these uber wealthy individuals who put their pants on two legs at a time
It also seemed to be like that 100-150 years ago, with all the big-name robber barons, oil/steel/rail tycoons and inventor-industrialists like Edison or Ford.
There are times when concentration of capital leads to a disproportionate influence of personal relationships and one-on-one deal-making. The same can be said of political or attention capital, not just wealth.
To be fair, that's also what Aristocracy always was, they were just less active in forcing their mad visions onto the world.
A) I barely get to do any coding these days anyways
B) Reading code is harder than writing it (and thus, easier to gloss over), and by the time I'm ready to write code I've already done all the hard work (I.E. even if vibe coding made me 50% faster, it's 50% of 5% of the overall software development life cycle in this more senior role)
C) I've never even copied code from Stack Overflow into my editor (maybe once or twice in a couple decades), I always type things myself because it literally forces you to walk through character by character in a field where changing one character can easily lead to 8 hour bug hunts
D) There's probably not much world where I can't ramp up fairly quickly on how to prompt well
E) It seems to me everyone is spending all their time comparing model X with model Y, creating prompt context files, running multiple agents in parallel... if the purported gains are to occur, eventually we should have tools that require less of all that, and I can just use those later tools when they're around instead of learning a bunch of stuff that will naturally be useless (This is like if you became a Backbone JS expert and were left stunned when people started using React)
F) And if those gains don't occur (and the gains certainly seem to be leveling off quick, the comments today look much like the comments a few years ago, and I've really not seen much one way or the other when comparing a variety of coworkers in terms of productivity beyond POCs, and the starts of small scope green field projects (although, those can be accomplished by non technical people in some instances which is neat)) then... well... I guess I'll just keep doing what I've been doing for the last couple decades, but I won't have wasted a bunch of time learning how to prompt Grok vs Copilot vs ChatGPT or what ever and I'll still have tons of information in my head about how everything works
The Erlang space vs the Elixir space (can't speak for agent based code generation here) would seem to give credence to this theory.
When I would explore Elixir forums with much larger communities there'd be myriad base level questions with code blocks written as if Elixir and Ruby were interchangable cause the syntax looks similar and thus missing out on many of the benefits of OTP.
But when you'd go to the Erlang community to ask a question, half the time the author of the book or library was one of the like... 20 people online at any given moment, and they'd respond directly. The quality of the discussions was of course much deeper and substantial much more consistently.
I have not tried to generate Elixir vs Erlang code but maybe it'd be a neat experiment to see if the quality seems better with Erlang
I feel it's kind of a moot point. GP's intention or train of thought doesn't change the downstream effects. Busy or not, they didn't go, and that's the bool the universe went with.
As others have already stated though it's really not GP's fault and they're not responsible for managing other's decisions. Could they have saved a person? Maybe. Or maybe the late father would have died a week later anyways.
Writing a giant unit test suite being the primary example that stuck out to me from that article really doesn't give a lot of credence to the question?
And yet, the conclusion seems to be as if the answer is yes?
Until AI can work organizationally as opposed to individually it'll necessarily be restricted in its abilities to produce gains beyond relatively marginal improvements (Saved 20 hours of developer time on unit tests) for a project that took X weeks/months/years to work it's way through Y number of people.
So sure, simple projects, simple asks, unit tests, projects handled by small teams of close knit coworkers who know the system in and out and already have the experience to differentiate between good code and bad? I could see that being reduced by 90%.
But, it doesn't seem to have done much for organizational efficiency here at BigCo and unit tests are pretty much the very tip of a project's iceberg here. I know a lot of people are using the AI agents, and I know a lot of people who aren't, and I worry for the younger engineers who I'm not sure have the chops to distinguish between good, bad, and irrelevant and thus leave in clearly extraneous code, and paragraphs in their documents. And as for the senior engineers with the chops, they seem to do okay with it although I can certainly tell you they're not doing ten times more than they were four years ago.
I kinda rambled at the end there, all that to say... organizational efficiency is the bug to solve.
(It's very difficult, I believe the 2D interfaces we've had for the last 40 years or whatever are not truly meeting the needs of the vast cathedrals of code we're working in, same thing for our organizations, our code reviews, everything man)
This was definitely a huge factor for me. Since it was on the skin I waited for a dermatologist when I should have gone to any doctor immediately, I'm sure it would have been fairly clear since I eventually was able to suss out that it was shingles on my own before I got to the dermatologist.
This administration does appear to be flaming out a bit at least. Seems like there's a chance the Dems take the House before the 2026 midterms. I think there's a chance Trump's term ends early.
I think the recent Tennessee election shows that even though things have soured, they haven't soured enough for sweeping changes in elections. Special elections are strange litmus tests to be basing anything on. Regardless of what polls may lead you to believe, there are still plenty of people that will not vote for the other party regardless of how "bad" their party's candidate is.
To regain control of both houses with enough margins to ensure impeachment & conviction would be an incredible swing. I just don't see it happening.
Texas just got its redrawn maps approved by SCOTUS. I'm still expecting SCOTUS to reject California's though when that case comes to them. The court will do its part in keeping the GOP in power.
TN shows that the Dems can't get their shit together and run an appropriate candidate in a Trump +22 seat. Instead they primaried their other candidates in a 28/25/24/23 split and chose a DSA candidate to lose the general. This is why I'm not optimistic about Dems winning the legislature, especially the Senate.
I've speculated for a while that what he does is so over the top and frequently self-destructive that I wonder if he's actually trying to get kicked out.
But while I agree that there's a chance, I think it's vanishingly small. I do hope that the dems can take the house in the midterms and put the brakes on the massive expansion in executive power.
The cynic in me things the Dems take the legislative branch next year, curtail executive power but are unable to undo anything and then win a massively nerfed executive position in 2028.
I'm with you. I also think it would not take long before we all found out that the Supreme Court only embraces limitless executive power when the office is held by their party. We've already seen evidence of that, Trump has succeeded using arguments that Biden failed with just a couple years ago. Right about the time 2028 rolls around, the Supreme Court will suddenly decide that they've gone too far and need to reel in an out-of-control executive branch.
The features were the ugliest icons I've ever seen and notification summaries that may be wrong.
Great.
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