Give me a python script that takes a string representing the output of a sha256 algorithm and a plain string and compares if the sha256 of plain strig matches the sha256 provided.
You could say COBOL has had this "problem" for 40 years also. That's why we need to constantly be inventing new ways of making things. The old ways are always forgotten over time.
If you REALLY need something long-forgotten, then you have lazy-load it back into being at significant cost. That's the price of constant progress.
The point of the article is that sometimes the "old ways" really means "not particularly profitable or necessary in the short term" but the bill comes due in a crisis. The reason US/EU manufacturing was "the old ways" is that people could make easier money with financial engineering, an insight that extended all the way to Raytheon.
COBOL is a bad example, but higher-level languages vs. assembly is not. If you write a lot of C you really don't need to know assembly.... until you stumble across a weird gcc bug and have no clue where to look. If you write a lot of C# you don't really need to know anything about C... until your app is unusably slow because you were fuzzy on the whole stack / heap concept. Likewise with high-level SSGs and design frameworks when you don't know HTML/CSS fundamentals.
As the author says maybe AI is different. But with manufacturing we were absolutely confusing "comfortable development" with "progress." In Ukraine the bill came due, and the EU was not actually able to manufacture weapons on schedule. So people really should have read to the end of "building a C compiler with a team of Claudes":
The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.
But these are hard IT things a human programmer really struggles with as well. What % of software written is that? Very very low. Most software is dull and requires business vagueness to be translated into deterministic logic and interfaces; LLMs are pretty great at that as it is. If humans use their old ways to fix complex problems and llms do the rest, we still only need a handful of those humans. For now.
"For now" is sort of the entire point of the article :)
Even in the Before Times, it was much cognitively cheaper to write code than it is to read someone else's code closely, or manage lots of independent code across a team, or to make a serious change to existing code. It's so much easier to just let everyone slap some slop on the pile and check off their user stories. I think it will take years to figure out exactly what the impact of LLMS on software is. But my hunch is that it'll do a lot of damage for incremental benefit.
With the sole exception of "LLMs are good at identifying C footguns," I have yet to see AI solve any real problems I've personally identified with the long-term development and maintenance of software. I only see them making things far worse in exchange for convenience. And I am not even slightly reassured by how often I've seen a GitHub project advertise thousands of test cases, then I read a sample of those test cases and 98% of them are either redundant or useless. Or the studies which suggest software engineers consistently overestimate the productivity benefits of AI, and psychologically are increasingly unable to handle manual programming. Or the chardet maintainer seemingly vibe-benchmarking his vibe-coded 7.0 rewrite when it was in reality a lot slower than the 6.0, and he's still digging through regression bugs. It feels like dozens of alarms are going off.
These are good point and I am not overestimating; we are simply seeing the productivity boost in our company and the rise in profitability. We practice TDD, but only at integration level, so we have tests upfront for api and frontend and the AI writes until it works. SOTA models are simply good enough not to do;
function add(a,b) = c // adds two numbers
test: add(1,2)=3
to implement
function add(a,b) return 3
So when you have enough tests (and we do), it will deliver quality. Having AI write the tests is mostly useless. But me writing the code is not necessarily better and certainly not faster for most cases our clients bring us.
> sometimes the "old ways" really means "not particularly profitable or necessary in the short term" but the bill comes due in a crisis.
yes of course. that's why I said
> If you REALLY need something long-forgotten, then you have lazy-load it back into being at significant cost.
This is all known, because it's always been this way. You can't hire a blacksmith, you need to first REMAKE the blacksmith if you really need one. It's always been this way, and it will continue. There is a cost to resurrecting old processes. This cost is a fact of life and needs to be planned for.
It cannot be avoided except by maintaining some kind of "strategic reserve" of thousands or millions people who sit around building things nobody wants on the off chance they might be needed again -- which a democracy will not long have the patience to continue paying for.
Many things we must know to do our jobs are themselves artifacts of historical decisions made in a time and place that no longer makes sense, but we have to know them to do our jobs.
Claude has allowed me to jettison many useless (IMO) skills I've developed over the years. I'm quite happy to let my bank of CSS and regex trivia expire from the cache, never to be reloaded again. I will never have to write another webpack.config.js as long as I live. So much time in programming is spent looking up SDK operations that I basically know, I just can't remember whether the dang method is called acquire_data() or load_data() .... etc
Yes that is one key that resonated with me. The author did a great job of putting these recurring concepts into their own words
The other that really resonated was something that I read before along the lines of… we think that once humanity learns something, that knowledge stays and we build on it. But it’s not true, knowledge is lost all the time. We need to actively work to keep knowledge alive
That’s why libraries and the internet archive are so important. Wikipedia, too
> I run engineering teams in Ukraine. My people lived the other side of this equation. Not the factory floor. The receiving end.
With all due respect, but many european taxpayers help pay for Ukraine. I am not disagreeing on the premise of the West killing itself via systematic recessions - Trump invading Iran leading to inflation as an example - so a lot of things are going on that show a ton of incompetency both in the USA and the EU, but at the same time I also get question marks in my eyes when this criticism comes from a country that receives money from others. That money could instead go to make EU countries more competitive, for instance. I am not saying this should necessarily be the case, mind you; I fully understand the nature of Putin's imperialism. But we need to really consider all factors when it comes to strategic mistakes with regards to production - and that includes taking up debts all the time. There are always a few who benefit in war, just as they benefit from subsidies from taxpayers (inside and outside as well).
Ukraine is "receiving money from others"? We are benefactors of the Ukrainians' bravery and sacrifices. How much money could we have not spent if Hitler had been stopped in Czechoslovakia?
You are completely ignoring the argument of your parent comment. They are saying that money is being spent to the benefit and best interest of the spenders, that it’s not a handout.
You are, of course, free to disagree and make your point, but ignoring the argument does not advance the discussion.
There are some pretty substantial differences. Russia is on the strategic back foot here trying to figure out a way to stop NATO's advance. They've only turned to violence after long attempts at resolving the tension diplomatically and the US has been implacable. Putin's actually been pretty hesitant in his escalations so far; he's 70 and has a long history of trying to avoid war.
Hitler was more about wanting more land and resources for Germany, and he saw war as being a legitimate tool for achieving his aims that he deployed early and enthusiastically.
> Russia is on the strategic back foot here trying to figure out a way to stop NATO's advance. They've only turned to violence after long attempts at resolving the tension diplomatically and the US has been implacable. Putin's actually been pretty hesitant in his escalations so far; he's 70 and has a long history of trying to avoid war.
Is that why Russians rejected negotiations when Ukraine offered to never join NATO and Russians insist on keeping invaded territories?
I know it’s what about ism but I really hope you apply the same logic when Cuba once more tried to enter an alliance with Russia or China to defend itself against a larger aggressor next door. So while I agree that Russia should allow Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO, I also think that’s only fair if countries like Brazil, Cuba and Venezuela are freely allowed to determine their futures by joining Russia, China and Iran military alliances. But you and I know that’s not going to happen. So please let’s stop pretending we don’t have double standards.
As you've chosen to address me directly I'll reply honestly, I have zero concern about Cuba, Venezuela, any of the 190+ countries on the planet, wanting to join or form BRICs.
I have considerably more concern about the ability of a post MAGA USofA to successfully navigate such a world via soft power as they appear to have flushed all the competent diplomatic talent down a golden toilet.
Eastern Europe is not Russia and Russia does not automatically get a say in what Eastern Europe does because they are nearby. Russia seems to believe it is entitled to a sphere of influence. That the US does a milder version of what they're doing (which is also wrong) doesn't make their approach OK (or even effective).
> There are some pretty substantial differences. Russia is on the strategic back foot here trying to figure out a way to stop NATO's advance.
His rationale for invading Ukraine was to "demilitarise and denazify" it. The NATO point seems largely be invented by people who dislike NATO in the west.
> They've only turned to violence after long attempts at resolving the tension diplomatically and the US has been implacable.
I hope the "tension" you are referring to was not the little green men taking over Crimea and the Donbas in 2014.
> Putin's actually been pretty hesitant in his escalations so far; he's 70 and has a long history of trying to avoid war.
This is a totally unseriousness statement. Can you remind me what Putin was doing in Syria again?
There's an english transcript [0] of his speech from when they went in up on the Kremin website. He opened with something like
> I will begin with what I said in my address on February 21, 2022. I spoke about our biggest concerns and worries, and about the fundamental threats which irresponsible Western politicians created for Russia consistently, rudely and unceremoniously from year to year. I am referring to the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border.
They're claiming the NATO thing is relevant. Opening paragraph justification.
Did Putin do anything meaningful to stop "NATO's advance" into the Baltic Sea? Maybe Putin was so pacifist that he let Sweden and Finland join the NATO with impunity.
>I read the Fogbank story and recognized it immediately. Not the nuclear material. The pattern. Build capability over decades. Find a cheaper substitute. Let the human pipeline atrophy. Enjoy the savings. Then watch it all collapse when a crisis demands what you optimized away.
>In defense, the substitute was the peace dividend. In software, it’s AI.
Before it was AI, the cheaper alternative was remote contract dev teams in Eastern Europe, right?
Not sure why that was ever the plan, as there are clearly not enough people.
Also over here, east of 15°E we were fired all the same.
I believe the plan is to quite simply "do less overall unless it's about AI", but everyone was waiting for others to start layoffs first.
I spent six months working part time and the decision makers made it clear that this is preferable for them long term. Beats getting fired, but I couldn't sustain this lifestyle - I'm frugal but not that frugal.
It had to be H1B Indians and outsourcing to India. As a European, I have seen some "Eastern European devs" around, sure. But they were not present at every company I worked with. Indians were. Quality-wise, it was always the same story, but I'm not going to elaborate. Everyone who is ready to accept it, knows what I would be saying anyway.
No, you probably need to elaborate on that. Because in my experience, the quality from people in India varies just as much as the quality from any other country, including the USA.
What does make a difference is the company they work for. Large hourly "body shops" gives you coders whose quality tends to be lower, regardless if we are talking about an Indian firm or an American firm. Direct hires of independent individuals tend to be higher. But there is always individual variation.
You see people from India more, sure. There are more of them. Over a billion of them, to be precise. Anyone who dismisses a billion people as "always the same" is not being clever, they are being racist. And you know that, otherwise you wouldn't have pre-empted this response with "everyone who is ready to accept it."
Say that there are communication gaps to overcome. Say there are cultural differences. Say that those cultural differences change the assumed business expectations and the mechanisms by which people express their thoughts and opinions. Those things are all true. My recommendation to anyone who has an urge to dismiss an entire population is to instead get to know them: Step up and learn how your teammates think and work. It will make for a better team, better communication, and better results.
I'm not racist. I don't care about race. I do care about culture a lot. By culture I mean a set of "default behaviors" and values that people from said culture are more likely to exhibit. That's where my issues with Indians began and continue. Of course you are right that generalizing over 1+ billion people is a futile exercise. Intellectually, I agree. And yet, in my personal experience, certain behaviors and attitudes they have just keep coming up with frequency, that just doesn't match any other group of people I have been interacting with. I live a rather international life. I interact with people from many, many cultures. I currently live in a culture, that is completely alien to my own, and I love it. It's not a problem of closed mind or some kind of supremacy thinking. I am free from that.
Specifically about Indians - I find that great many of them prefer memorizing over thinking. In the IT consulting days of my career, I noticed that they seemed to have 4-5 solutions, that they would apply to all problems. Whether the solution would fit the problem or solve it, was secondary. If it did, great. If it didn't, well that was someone else's problem. Half of my job was fixing stuff that an Indian "fixed" before me. The appearance of having fixed something was much more important than the actual fixing. It was all about appearances with them. While people in general seek recognition, I have never met another group of people who are so eager to lie and cover things up to gain some perception of short-term bump in status. It's not isolated to work environment. You see, I suspected myself of perhaps being racist in the end, so I would challenge myself to befriend Indians if I met any - just to see. Maybe I was being judgmental and wrong? The last time I tried it, the Indian man I met kept kissing my ass so much I had to cut him off. Why did he do that? Based on what he was saying, he saw me as someone from an "upper caste" (he projected his ideals of a successful businessman on me) and desperately wanted me to know how much I have done for him (I haven't done anything other than having a few conversations about life and business in general). Took me a while to understand that all this excessive praise and ass kissing was an attempt to elevate himself by proximity to something great. Needless to say I am nowhere as great as he portrayed me to be. Later I also found that half the stuff he shared with me was made up to impress me.
Another feature of their culture is extreme pride. They will never stop talking about India, Indian culture, Indian food, etc. They expect you to praise it, be in awe. If you aren't, they will pressure you to change your mind. Since working with them was a universally appalling experience, I wasn't impressed, so that came up a lot. You see this pride and attention seeking everywhere online. A normal person will say "Hello", "Good morning". An Indian will say "Good morning FROM INDIA". It must be mentioned, because it must be noticed and praised. It's just tiring. There is a reason why so many are waiting for country-based filters on Twitter. You wouldn't have guessed which countries are most upset about this.
I am certain that there are reasons and explanations for all of this and that there are many exceptions. As you have mentioned, there are so many of them, they can't all be like that. And fair enough. I just find all of this so tiring, that I don't want to deal with them at all. If 1 out of a 100 is a smart and pleasant person, they are still surrounded by 99 that I don't want to deal with. It might be sad, but it is what it is.
Pretty sure cheap foreign labor is more prevalent now than ever at every major tech company.
They really, really do not want to spend money. Especially not on Americans and their health insurance.
It's really strange how we're just letting them get away with this. They're on a fast trajectory toward putting Americans completely out of work and without aid, even though they're American companies first and foremost.
> It's really strange how we're just letting them get away with this.
Choosing to pay less is what almost all people do, and it is consistent with almost all of human history.
> They're on a fast trajectory toward putting Americans completely out of work and without aid, even though they're American companies first and foremost.
When push comes to shove, i.e. paying lower prices to consume more goods and services or paying higher prices to ensure your countrymen can buy more goods and services, almost everyone will choose to pay lower prices. See political unpopularity of sufficient tariffs to stop imports.
“American” is a nebulous term, and Americans have been choosing lower prices for many decades before the current crop of employees at the global big tech companies chose lower prices. It is no different than when someone picks up lower priced workers outside waiting Home Depot, who are there because they do not have legal work authorization in the US.
I think it's all bad and counter-productive toward a stable society though. I think economic sacrifices likely have to be made to ensure long-term viability. What we're doing now is accelerating the demise of everything. The entire planet even.
America could just reduce their cost of living, optimize their healthcare, make domestic business more attractive etc instead of trying to ban everything to duct tape over deeper problems
>The combination of technical skill and the judgment to know when the AI is wrong barely exists in the market anymore.
I see a talent pipeline collapse in next 5 years. "Software engineering is over coding is a solved problem" as being chanted by semi literate media and the AI grifter's marketing departments would further scare away the allocation of human capital to software engineering easily commanding 3x rise in salaries due to resource shortage.
This will end with the way of COBOL with a few people that still have the expert-level understanding of refactoring old code without causing outages or service disruption.
We’ll see, but right now I now see developers 24/7 hooked onto their agents and in the future we will experience a de-skilling problem which clean code, best practices, security and avoiding NIH syndrome will be all flushed down the toilet.
I beg to differ, insofar as my own experience has been the exact opposite. I enjoy fixing other people's mistakes. And I especially enjoy outsmarting the LLMs. I find that I can obsessively breathe down the neck of an LLM for far longer than I could ever stay in the traditional flow state.
I think I might enjoy it for a little bit and then become very depressed at the idea that it will never end, a future of fixing things that should never have been broken in the first place and which won't stay fixed.
> I find that I can obsessively breathe down the neck of an LLM for far longer than I could ever stay in the traditional flow state.
I can do that too. Most programmers can.
That's because it requires less skill! Critiquing something is always easier than doing it.
I can literally keep an LLM fixing things forever by just saying things like "This is not scalable", or "this is not maintainable", or "this is not flexible" or "this is not robust", ... etc ad nausem.
That doesn't take skill at the level to actually write the software. For the market which is hoping to switch to mostly LLM coding, the prize they are eyeing is skill devaluation and not just, as many think, productivity gains.
They have no reason to double output, but they'd sure love to first halve the people employed, and then halve the salaries of those people (supply/demand + a glut of programmers in the market), and then halve salaries again because almost no skill necessary...
That's because it requires less skill! Critiquing something is always easier than doing it.
No, it was always the other way around. Mediocre programmers always wanted to rewrite everything because reading and understanding an existing codebase was always harder than writing some greenfield thing with a “modern language” or “modern libraries” or “modern idioms.” So they’d go and do that and end up with 100x the bugs.
There is a very valid reason why the Creator of erlang back in the day said something along the line of "you need to iteratively remake your software, improving it each time"
As your knowledge about a topic grows, your initial mistaken implementation may become more and more obvious, and it may even mean a full rewrite.
But yes, a person which instantly says "rewrite" before they understood the software is likely very inexperienced and has only worked with greenfield projects with few contributers (likely only themselves) before.
How is that “no” and “the other way around”? The desire to rewrite comes from the ease with which one can critique existing code for being “too hard” to understand.
The problem is the LLMs completely change the equation. Before LLMs, beyond very junior (needs serious coaching) levels, reviewing was typically faster than writing the code that was reviewed. With LLMs, writing code is orders of magnitude faster than reviewing it. We already see open source projects getting buried in LLM slop and you have to find the real human or at least carefully curated contributions among the slop.
I would not be surprised if many open source projects will outright stop taking PRs. I have had the same feeling several times - if I'm communicating with an LLM through the GitHub PR interface, I'd rather just directly talk to an LLM myself.
But ending PRs is going to be painful for acquiring new contributors and training more junior people. Hopefully the tooling will evolve. E.g. I'd love have a system where someone has to open an issue with a plan first and by approving you could give them a 'ticket' to open a single PR for that issue. Though I would be surprised if GitHub and others would create features that are essentially there to rein in Copilot etc.
Who really truly enjoys that and doesn't see it as a chore?
I find the real way to review other people's code is to program with it and then I start seeing where the problems are much more clearly. I would do a review and spot nothing important then start working on my own follow-on change and immediately run into issues.
I usually don't mind, but tend to split reviews into two types. Either I understand the context and can quickly do an in depth review, or I have to take some time to actually learn about the code by reviewing the surrounding systems, experimenting with it, etc. But in both cases I would at least run the code and verify correctness.
I think it becomes a chore when there are too many trivial mistakes, and you feel like your time would have been better spent writing it yourself. As models and agent frameworks improve I see this happening less and less.
> Who really truly enjoys that and doesn't see it as a chore?
This is a whole different discussion, but I just see it as part of the job that I'm getting paid for, I don't need to enjoy it to do it.
Functional testing is a must now that writing tests is also automated away by LLMs as you can get a better understanding if it does what it says on the box, but there will still be a lot of hidden gotchas if you're not even looking at the code.
Plenty of LLM-written code runs excellent until it doesn't, though we see this with human written code too, so it's more about investing more time in the hopes of spotting problems before they become problems.
> Functional testing is a must now that writing tests is also automated away by LLMs as you can get a better understanding if it does what it says on the box, but there will still be a lot of hidden gotchas if you're not even looking at the code.
Well, there you go. Letting AI write the tests is a mistake IMO. When I'm working with other people I write tests too and when I see their tests I know what they're missing out because I know the system and the existing tests. Sometimes I see the problem in their tests when I'm working on some of my own. If you absent yourself from that process then ....
Most people don't spend nearly enough time going through a code review. They certainly don't think as hard as needed to question the implementation or come up with all the edge cases. It's active vs passive thinking.
I, for one, have found numerous issues in other people's code that makes me wonder, "would they have ever made such a mistake if they hand coded this?"
btw, a side effect is that nobody really understands the codebase. People just leave it to AI to explain what code does. Which is of course helpful for onboarding but concerning for complex issues or long term maintenance.
Not really. Any patterns got optimized and automated. If you’re still seeing patterns, then you need to look harder, because they will be similar onlu superficially.
We humans cannot scan 100’000 articles looking for the golden nugget, the AI data mining can do it and present it in seconds. Obviously we need to verify the data.
A couple of decades ago, we didnt trust compilers, we did assembly manually. Today is same barrier, some developers will explode with productivity while others will be left behind.
Interesting take. We are not going to talk about Office, Windows, Adobe or Autodesk products here. Neither Linux kernel.
Just classified ads or e-commerce platforms such as gumroad and shopify are complex enough that a single person cannot master them end to end. The domain is huge to master and takes a lots of time to master.
Have you ever seen a tech company calling a 65y.o. retired wizard to debug a system failure? I doubt it.
In manufacturing it so regular, that typically senior technical people retire as soon as possible to form their consulting firms and charge much higher rates, just by selling their multi-decade expertise back to their company.
In oil & gas, there are consulting firms that their role is to just store and provide domain knowledge to companies who lost their experts.
Software is code and code is documentation. Do you know MAME that is documenting the arcade consoles as code? And that they work is just a side effect and is not an intended goal?
That doesn't mean that MAME is a trivial project. Far from it. It'll take you several years to get proficient with the whole codebase.
Just that unlike manufacturing, the software is much more self contained and everything is in those files including how to build them.
The problem is a management pattern:
removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit,
and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed.
Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring,
and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach.
As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred.
What remains is documentation and automation.
But documentation is not the same as field experience.
Automation is not the same as judgment.
Without people who have actually worked with the system,
you end up with a loss of tacit knowledge—and eventually, declining productivity.
AI is following the same pattern.
What AI is being sold as right now is not really productivity.
In many domains, productivity is already sufficient.
What’s being sold is workforce reduction.
The West has seen this before, especially in the case of General Electric.
GE pursued aggressive short-term financial optimization,
cutting costs, focusing on quarterly results, and maximizing shareholder returns.
In the process, it hollowed out its own long-term capabilities.
It effectively traded its future for short-term gains.
The same mindset is visible today.
The core problem is that decision-makers—often far removed from actual engineering work—
believe that tacit knowledge can be replaced with documentation, tools, and processes.ti cannot.
Tacit knowledge comes from direct experience with real systems over time.
If you remove the people and the learning pipeline,
that knowledge does not stay in the organization. It disappears.
> The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed.
I think that's still a symptom. The real problem is ideology: the monomaniacal focus on profit-making business, which infects our political leaders, down to capitalists and business leaders, down to the indoctrinated rank-and-file. Towards the end of the cold war, the last constraint on it were abolished, the the victory over the Soviet Union made it unquestioned.
The Chinese don't have that ideological problem. Their government appears to not give a shit about how much profit individual business make, they care about building out supply chains and a capabilities. They will bury the West, so long as the West remains in the thrall of libertarian business ideology.
The US is stuck in this weird irony where they recognize that Soviet-style central planning is a disaster but can't recognize that it's what megacorps do when they're insulated from competition. Internal politics, perverse incentives and a system that can sustain massive inefficiencies right up until the point that it doesn't.
In general productive economic activity generates a surplus and that surplus allows for slack. Human beings intuitively understand this. Hobbies are frequently de facto training for things that aren't currently happening but might later. Family-owned and operated businesses are much less likely to try to outsource their core competency for the sake of quarterly profits.
But regulatory capture and market consolidation causes the surplus to go to the corporate bureaucracies capturing the regulators instead of human beings with self-determination and goals other than number go up, and then the system optimizes for capturing the government rather than satisfying the people. "When you legislate buying and selling the first things to be bought and sold are the legislators." You throw away the competitive market and subject yourselves to the unaccountable bureaucracy, and then try to pretend it's not the same thing because this time the central planners are wearing business suits.
> megacorps do when they're insulated from competition. Internal politics, perverse incentives and a system that can sustain massive inefficiencies right up until the point that it doesn't.
That's the end stage. The bigger problem is the companies rotting from the inside even though they're still alive, because they use their resources to suppress your alternatives to them while they're slowly dying on top of you.
Yes, many Americans and other Westerners believe that the so-called "socialist" economies, like those of the Soviet Union and of Eastern Europe were non-capitalist.
This is only an illusion created by the fact that the communists were careful to rename all important things, to fool the weaker minds that the renamed things are something else than what they really are.
In reality, the "socialist" economies were more capitalist than the capitalist economies of USA and Western Europe. They behaved exactly like the final stage of capitalism, where monopolies control every market and there is no longer any competition.
Unfortunately, after a huge sequence of mergers and acquisitions started in the late nineties of the last century, the economies of USA and of the EU states resemble more and more every year the former socialist economies, instead of resembling the US and W. European economies of a few decades ago.
Everyone wants to tag the evil with their opposition's name. The evil is concentration of power. But no one wants to call it that because then they can't pretend that it's something different when they're doing it themselves.
Witness the people who keep proposing to solve market consolidation with higher taxes. Higher taxes go to the government, and therefore the interests that have captured the government. Are we going to solve it by taking money from Warren Buffet and giving it to Larry Ellison? Do we benefit from increased funding for Palantir? No, you have to break up the consolidated markets through some combination of antitrust enforcement and peeling back the regulatory capture that prevents new competitors from entering the market.
And change in laws regarding the legalized corruption (Citizens United, ...). And fight for real freedom of speech.
This is very complex problem that needs to be tackled from all sides simultaneously, the entrenched interests are already well setup to defend themselves.
Citizens United was a pretty pro-speech decision and is unfairly maligned, and "money is speech" predates it by quite a few years. The real problem is when huge corporations control the flow of information.
Which is a bigger problem, that corporations can pay for political ads, or that one corporation has 90% search market share? That there are political ads on Facebook or Twitter, or that those corporations control what's in the feed of hundreds of millions of people because use of their algorithm is tied to the network effect instead of having a federated system like RSS or email?
Sorry, no. Both are problem. And it is not pro-speech at all, it is pro-$$$. It is a standard practice to drown the unwanted speech in the noise of the paid-for 'speech'. Nothing about pro-speech for ordinary people there.
Furthermore, Citizen's United makes it harder to make any necessary legislative changes. Including the anti-trust. Focusing only on one issue while leaving the other heads of the hydra intact just plays into its strengths.
Suppose you don't own a major media outlet or social media company and you have something to say that the major media outlets and social media companies don't like. What are your options for getting more than six people to hear what you have to say if you're not allowed to spend money?
> It is a standard practice to drown the unwanted speech in the noise of the paid-for 'speech'.
This is literally the opposite of what happens. The companies that own distribution channels can make speech they don't like disappear, or even just speech that doesn't drive sufficient "engagement", by putting it at the end of the feed behind six trillion lolcats and enough rage bait to keep everyone glued to the screen. Then the only way to be seen when your message isn't a dopamine hit is to pay money.
> Furthermore, Citizen's United makes it harder to make any necessary legislative changes. Including the anti-trust.
Citizens United has very little to say about anti-trust. What argument are you making that it would prevent e.g. laws requiring adversarial interoperability or break ups of large companies? For that matter, much of the interoperability problem comes from companies using laws like the CFAA and DMCA 1201, and then you don't even need laws to be passed, you need them to be repealed.
Cirizens United has everything to say about anti-trust. Big companies that would be subject to anti-trust use their $$$ to buy politicians to squash any anti-trust legislation.
Plus a systematic way of keeping the Gini coefficient of wealth small in a sustainable way. I'm a fan of establishing sovereign wealth funds whose dividends are paid out equally per capita for this purpose.
A sovereign wealth fund has the government deciding what to invest in, which is both a magnet for corruption and a good way to get below-market returns through mismanagement. It also requires an extremely oppressive build-up period where the government is collecting money in taxes to seed the fund instead of providing services to the population, which is why the countries that have one are basically all countries that net export huge amounts of oil, and China which exports everything else.
Meanwhile you don't need the government to use tax dollars to buy stocks in specific companies. If you want a UBI then use VAT. Then it comes from every company instead of having government bureaucrats choose which ones, and gets paid out immediately instead of needing a generation of build-up.
The things amassing power to prevent antitrust are corporations, not individuals. It does nothing to make Bill Gates sell shares in Microsoft to pay taxes when the corporation stays the same size. If anything it makes it worse because then more corporations are controlled by Wall St rather than founders and they're significantly more inclined to turn the screws to juice short-term profits.
Let's have a quick look at the federal budget. The big ticket items are social security, medicare, net interest and military/VA. Together those are more than half the budget.
Social security is the biggest of them. Older people have more wealth than younger people on net and social security is structured to make higher payments to people who made more money when they were younger, which is significantly correlated with having more wealth right now. So it's a massive transfer payment system that transfers money from the poor to the rich. Meanwhile it uses its own special tax which is significantly more regressive than the ordinary income tax and doesn't tax corporate income at all. Notice in particular that we could instead be solving "grandma doesn't starve" with a UBI that makes uniform payments to everyone and not disproportionate payments to the rich, and comes from a tax which is also paid by corporations.
Net interest is a naked transfer to people with enough capital to invest in government bonds.
Most of the military and VA budgets go to government contractors who work hard to sustain an uncompetitive bidding process with thick margins.
Medicare uses the same bad tax as social security and those dollars go to the healthcare industry which has thoroughly captured the government. The AMA lobbies to limit the number of medical residency slots and sustain a doctor shortage and healthcare corporations have established a thicket of laws to limit competition, impair price transparency and promote over-consumption.
That's where the majority of the government budget goes, and the remaining minority of the money is also going in significant part to government contractors and regulatory capture industries. The government takes tax money from the middle class and gives it to the rich and huge corporations.
We don't need any more "redistribution" like that. If you think you can get the government to stop doing that and instead give the money the poor and middle class then first prove you can do it with the existing money before even thinking about collecting more. You have a nutrient deficiency because you're infested with tapeworms, not because you don't have enough food.
And to complete the reversal what is now referred to as the "golden age of capitalism" i.e the post WW2 USA was actually very socialist. Strong social movement and unions and social spending that created a wealth working/middle class with a bunch of spending power.
Inequality society producea inequal economy (and vice versa) which is the economy of any developing country. Few rich,. miniscule middle class and lots of poor people in slums snd poverty.
thought about this too - but not as expressively as you put it.
e.g in China - for early stage ventures - there's cut throat competition - then as Thiel would put it with heavy competition profits trend towards 0 - by then the tech is perfected or close to perfect - then the state uses its funds to back a monopoly. that's how you get a BYD.
Yes - ultimately it's the same system. Far from being daring and innovatory, it's backward-looking, unimaginative, and bureaucratic.
Vision for the future is limited to grandiose fantasies straight out of 1950s pulps and the "heroic" creation of narcissistic corporations that are cynically extractive and treat employees and customers with equal contempt.
The differences which used to provide a convincing cover story - no single Great Leader, a functional consumer economy, votes that appear to make a difference - are being dismantled now.
What's left are the same mechanisms of total monitoring (updated with modern tech) and reality-denying totalitarian oppression, run for the exclusive benefit of a tiny oligarchy which self-selects the very worst people in the system.
I wonder if it would work if top US companies implemented a system like the NFL draft, where companies competing for top engineers out of college get to pick from the best engineers inversely proportionally based on how they did before financially.
While it sounds counter intuitive, it maintains a good distribution of talent across the industry.
But that system would only work if healthy competition was the goal, not moneymaking.
The thing that sustains these companies isn't having the best engineers.
Suppose someone new made a better mobile OS than Android. What would happen?
Google has convinced a lot of third party apps to use their anti-competitive attestation system that has no real security value but makes it so those apps won't run on a competing operating system even if it implements all of the same APIs, so it immediately has a major barrier to gaining traction. That should be an antitrust violation.
Then the incumbents would copy any innovative features the new OS has so it no longer has an advantage. On paper this is what the patent system is supposed to prevent, but in practice is does the opposite. If you as a practicing entity tried to sue a major incumbent for patent infringement, they would counter-sue and have an arsenal of thousands of patents that could keep you bogged down in litigation for years. Just the cost of litigation could bankrupt a smaller company even if they won, and there is enough ambiguity in the system that they're pretty likely to lose when the incumbent only has to find one patent out of thousands they were unintentionally infringing, or a court is willing to enforce one that ought not to have been granted. So then everyone has to file a bunch of patents for the purposes of mutually-assured destruction and can't really enforce them, which favors larger companies that can afford the overhead. It certainly doesn't protect the little guy and we would be better off without them.
Your suggestion is also essentially unworkable. NFL teams all have the same number of players and play the same game. Amazon and TSMC each have a very different business and largely aren't competing for the same people. Does Garmin get the same number of picks as Foxconn even though they don't employ nearly as many people? How many picks does a startup get? Do we count Apple as doing poorly because the gross margins on hardware are lower than they are on pure licensing, or Nvidia as doing poorly because they have higher margins but lower revenue? How are we accounting for engineers in other countries? What about engineers in China who work for companies in China who are contractors for international companies? What if a corporate contractor has more than one corporate customer? How do we account for open source? How do we distinguish engineers from IT staff or research mathematicians or prevent companies from giving willing workers a job description that doesn't match the work they're doing?
It's also probably worth pointing out that systems like that are essentially price fixing schemes by the industry to pay workers less than they would otherwise be able to get if other companies weren't prohibited from outbidding them for talent.
What do you think the war in the gulf is about, the US cannot compete with China so they are destroying the global system that enabled them. There is no plan to have a peace with Iran, only perpetual war and the destruction of the middle east, starvation in East Asia and poverty and nationalist wars in Europe, potentially with Russia taking over vast swathes of Eastern Europe again. Suddenly Russia is the one in charge of the China-Russia relationship. It's such a stupid plan for the US that you might think it was designed by Putin himself.
You started well, but then the train got derailed...
Russia has no need for Eastern Europe (they have enough land and resources, why saddle yourself with hostile population?), as long as the said Easter Europe is not threatening them with NATO bases/missiles (US has repeatedly shown that they do not hesitate to use their muscle if they think they can get away with it, so Russia's paranoia is not entirely unfounded).
Even if Russia somehow took over Eastern Europe (most likely way: they learn from US how to do soft 'regime change'), they have no chance against China (China is just so much bigger and better organized; the population's mentality also matters a lot). China and Russia are rather complementary, there is not reason for confrontation between them.
But you are correct, what US is doing is really totally stupid ... although it seems designed by Netanyahu, not Putin.
If China cannot get oil from the middle east what happens to China and China-Russia relations? I didn't say there would be hostilities just Russia would become potentially the more dominant partner.
If NATO expansion is the reason for the war in Ukraine (not imperialism) then why has the war not stopped now we know Ukraine will never join NATO?
1) Russia will happily supply China with oil and other resources, and China will pay by industrial good and all other stuff they produce. China is working really hard on getting rid of dependence on foreign energy sources, any leverage Russia might get if it became the sole supplier of oil/gas to China is very temporary and Russia knows it. Furthermore, unlike USA, it has no delusion of ever dominating China - China already has them by the balls.
2) mostly face saving, but also: Ukraine will remain openly hostile, NATO or not, planning to have hostile (EU) forces on its territory as 'security guarantor'. Russians still believe Ukraine will collapse (those men will eventually run out/economy will collapse/EU will not send its children to die on the eastern front) and they will be able to have a friendly (or at least truly neutral) government there. Russia's paranoia about the west is really strong, well founded and well documented.
That's the easy way out, isn't it? Why argue on merit of anything you don't like, just name it Russian propaganda.
Or, perchance, you want to provide a concrete argument why are my statements incorrect? (No, 'it fits Russian narrative' is not argument about correctness, it is an argument about the narrative.)
> Russia's paranoia about the west is really strong, well founded and well documented.
It's an act, and everyone in Russia knows that it's an act. Acting this way gets the dumber kind of Western politicians to carefully tiptoe around Russia; that is the value this act provides.
There are many western authoritative sources documenting that.
Have a look at William Burn's 'Nyet means nyet' depeshe.
Or Merkel's memoirs.
Or George Kennan's statement's in the 90's on the wisdom of expanding NATO.
But, ultimately, one believes what he/she wants to believe....
Do you think it is better to not carefully tiptoe around Russia? Do you consider full-on sanctions, total refusal (except Trump) to diplomatically engage them, open intelligence, military and financial support of Ukraine 'carefully tiptoing'?What do you propose instead? Open WW3? I am really curious.
You listed joke sources. Merkel, in particular, has been utterly discredited for her naivety toward Russia. Her sucking on Russian gas left Germany lagging in the transition to renewables and EVs, and the German economy is now paying a double price by also having to bear a part of the economic burden of the war.
As to Russia, virtually no-one in Russian academic foreign policy circles, nor in the influential semi-formal circles of imperialists and neo-nazis, nor anywhere inbetween, is paranoid about the US, NATO and the West in general. What is there to be paranoid about? They see the West in general as utterly impotent, making big words, but not backing it up with a stick. This week one year ago, Trump wrote "Vladimir, STOP!" in response to a massive air attack on Kyiv. Putin didn't, and what followed? A bunch of nothing.
The answer to your question about tiptoeing is abundantly clear to anyone familiar enough with Russian culture to know what zek and kagebeshnik mean and how to deal with them. Politely asking them to stop has never worked. The idea that you have to talk with people in the language they understand is hardly a novel one.
Sigh, joke sources. Burns and Kennan also, right? Anybody who actually understood Russians is a joke. Study a bit, and not only neocon think tank sources, but from the people who actually understood Russians (there are practically none left in recent administrations).
Russians are paranoid, among other things, about nuclear decapitation strikes. For the same reasons, they have repeatedly explicitly strongly opposed missile sites in Poland and Romania.
I am really curious, what do you think the west should have done? Bomb Russians directly? I mean, what else is left?
They don't "actually understand Russians" and I don't need to study them to see through it. I was born in the USSR. Lived experience makes most foreign "Russia experts" look like the nerds who are very into Japanese or Korean culture and have memorized a bit of superficial trivia, but don't actually know at all how the society functions and are completely helpless at navigating it.
For example, Kennan warned in 1997 that accepting Eastern European countries into NATO would trigger a pivot toward authoritarianism in Russia. The pivot was well underway by that time. The breaking point was the genocidal war against Chechens that Russia launched in late 1994. Internally, it eroded the positions of the reformists and liberals who were seen as weak, and contributed to the rise of the alliance between crony oligarchs and KGB old-timers to undermine democracy and market reforms and restore state-controlled monopolies as their personal piggy banks. Exernally, the Chechen war proved to Russia's neighbors that Russia was no different from the USSR and that transgressions into their countries were only a matter of time. This made them run toward NATO was fast as they could. And personally, Putin, who had started out as an enforcer to St Petersburg's major, was already on his meteoric rise and had broken through to Moscow and joined the presidential administration by 1996.
For reasons that still elude me, western "Russia experts" prefer to believe noble-savage type myths like "NATO paranoia" and not treat Russians as capable people who have their own agenda. It's almost comical how they refuse to listen to what Russians are discussing among themselves, and that applies especially to your question about what should've been done:
> I am really curious, what do you think the west should have done? Bomb Russians directly? I mean, what else is left?
Yes. That's what Igor Girkin, the commander of the 2014 invasion force, has said. First, that he and his commandos who attacked the city of Slovyansk are directly responsible for igniting the war. Second, that if NATO had intervened in support of Ukraine and bombed them like the Serbian forces in Yugoslavia, they would have lost and that would have been the end of it.
The second opportunity was on the eve of the full-scale invasion in 2022. Had forces like the 82nd and 101st Airborne been deployed to likely attack paths such as Hostomel airport, the invasion would have been called off out of fear of direct confrontation with the US. Instead, Biden acted like a chicken and publicly promised "No boots on the ground," which Russians took as a green light to go ahead.
The third major opportunity was during the 2022 Kharkiv counteroffensive, when Ukraine made a major breakthrough and Russian forces became so disorganized that they collapsed without a combat in many sections of the frontline. Instead of supporting the counteroffensive with everything they've got, NATO members got spooked by Russian nuclear blackmail and tried to micromanage Ukraine's combat operations. The counteroffensive stalled and Russian forces dug in. The war is now going as most wars do once entrenched positions are established: heavy casualties and minimal territorial changes.
The policy of tiptoeing around Russia has not yielded results because of a fundamental misunderstanding of Russia among western "Russia experts." They interpret fake acts such as "NATO paranoia" as genuine fear, in which case it makes sense to issue reassuring statements (like Biden's). But the fear is not genuine; it is simply a way for Russians to probe how far they can go. Overstating fears to extort concessions is such a basic manipulation technique that I cannot understand how "Russia experts" fail to recognize it. It's a strange plague upon the field. Military experts, by comparison, have been much more reasonable in their assessments and recommendations. The current mainstream recommendation is to stop wasting expensive air defense missiles on shooting down each arrow that Russia fires into Ukraine, and blow up the launchers in Russia instead. The fear of striking Russian launchers that fire at major European cities every night is indefensibly absurd.
First, thank you for taking your time to write a proper response.
Second, I must respectfully disagree.
The reformist/liberals lost it by mismanaging the transition in the 90's. And the society at large was not ready anyway.
And it was not about the turn toward authoritarianism, but a turn towards anti-west as such; those are not the same.
I totally agree that Russians are capable and have their own agenda, no noble savages there. NATO paranoia is not noble-savages, it is, at its roots, historically well-founded self-preservation instinct.
Btw, your choices of wording in several places (Putin is 'enforcer', 'Girkin's invasion force (of, initially, maybe 60 men)', Chechen 'genocide', Russian's 'full scale invasion' (maybe 1/4 manpower of what USA used in Iraq) is rather strange and reeking of just a little bias (are you, perchance, from Ukraine?).
Regarding 'what the west should have done':
In 2014:
a) do you sincerely believe that Russia would have let NATO bomb Donbas like Serbia?
b) that would have been a very sharp escalation from what was, at that time, not yet as bloody conflict. Such an action would have required a long logistical and planning preparation and great political will for such an costly and risky action; there was simply nobody in the west politically ready for that. The consent was not manufactured yet. It was simply political impossibility, not a realistic course of action that could have been taken.
c) what about Crimea? should had the west bombed the Russians there, going to direct war with them?
d) 'they would have lost and would have been the end of it': full-on wishful thinking
Before the invasion of 2022: One of the reasons why Russia attacked in february 2022 (and not some other time) was the apparent preparation of a major Ukrainian offensive to retake Donbas. Believing that a show of force by NATO would have not elicited a response is supremely naive. It is on the same level as 'we will push NATO eastward, and Russia won't be able to do anything about that' (The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski). Eventually, the real red line war crossed and the war ensued. Anyway, there was no political will to preemptively escalate; furthermore it would have broken the narrative of 'unprovoked aggression by Russia'.
Fall 2022 during Kharkiv offensive: That offensive achieved great results, mainly due to major local force superiority (the Russians refrained from conscription and major recruitment, and sent home plenty of soldiers whose half-year duty expired). Expecting the Russians to totally collapse everywhere was about as realistic, as expecting the Ukrainians to totally collapse in February/March. The west was applying the salami slice strategy, incrementally increasing the support of Ukraine (they basically scoured the whole Earth of USSR equipment and sent it to Urkaine). Maybe, they could have sent some western equipment (that was subsequently sent in 2023), but it is unclear how much difference that would have made. Or you mean actively employing NATO airforce/groundpower?
Military experts (Mike Milley) have said in the fall 2022 that this is a high water mark for Ukraine, and they should negotiate now. He was piled-upon; with a hindsight, he was right.
I do not understand: The fear of striking Russian launchers that fire at major European cities every night is indefensibly absurd.
You are advocating for NATO to strike at Russian launchers firing at Ukrainian cities? Because the Ukrainian are doing that, as much as they can.
You know, the main reason I believe the Russia's attack was due to national security reasons and not due to 'imperialistic expansion of territory/capturing natural resources' is simply that there is no economic payoff in the latter. The cost of the war and the inevitable economic sanctions is simply punishingly high. On the other hand, people/countries are willing to suffer greatly in order to ensure their (perceived) security.
To sum up: What you consider 'realistic options that west should have taken', I see as 'highly escalatory and very risky actions that were politically unfeasible'. From the point of view of Ukraine very desirable, from the west's point of view too risky. Simply because Ukraine does not matter to the West sufficiently for the West to be willing to risk their own citizens.
> Easter Europe is not threatening them with NATO bases/missiles
This never made much sense.
Attacking a NATO buffer pre-emptively, brining your forces out and closer to existing NATO weapons, is basically putting you in the same situation with less resources. The issue is not about weapons "threatening". ICBMs can reach anywhere and smaller munitions from local seaboards (subs). This idea that NATO is somehow threatening by proximity is not credible. The answer to it would not be to rush headlong into a conflict to bring those forces to bear and bring your border to theirs anyway.
It looks more like the Ukraine conflict has been about securing resources, testing capabilities, and demographics (tied to capabilities). Russia wanted more resources to sell to partners and wanted to test the (declining) capability of it's own forces.
You are applying western thinking (acquiring captive markets, NATO is a force of good, surely not threatening) to Russia. Big fail, they think differently.
It is obviously clear that Ukraine is not about securing resources: Given the costs of war (Russia knew the sanctions will be coming, just did not think their funds will be frozen), the cost-benefit is simply not there. Given the obvious economic drawbacks of attacking Ukraine, the only explanation that makes sense is the national security one. You go to war to 'test capabilities' only if it is a minor thing without serious consequences, which Ukraine war definitively does not fit.
Seems to me that - optimistically - this would shift the job of a software engineer into a more formal engineering role, and that the actual implementation is done by AI. In the same way in other areas, engineering and implementation differ and implementation can be (and is) automated.
No idea how this should take form, though, and if it’s even realistic. But it seems like due to AI, formal specs and all kinds of “old school” techniques are having a renaissance while we figure out how to distribute load between people and AI.
That sounds right, but it can be superbly wrong because that presupposes that you can debug what the AI gets very confidently wrong.
There are three legs to the stool: specification, implementation, and verification. Implementation and verification both take low-level knowledge and sophisticated knowledge of how things break.
Indeed, even if were possible for someone to create any program most of the time just by directing a team of AI agents, when something does not work one needs the ability to zoom in through the abstraction levels and understand exactly the program that is executed, so only knowing to generate prompts becomes insufficient.
This is the same with compilers. Most of the time a programmer needs to know only the high-level language that is used for writing the program. Nevertheless, when there is a subtle bug or just the desired performance cannot be reached, a programmer who also understands the machine language of the processor has a great advantage by being able to solve the bug or the performance problem, which without such knowledge would be solved in much more time or never.
I don't think compilers are a good example. The economics of software development has won a long time ago. For example in Gamedev with well known soft real-time requirements people (mostly) stopped doing that machine code dance many hardware generations ago. Like it happened with memory optimizations: people measure memory in GB now not in KB =)
I am sure programmers cherish every case when they can do micro optimization but in the retrospect the high level cuts is what made the system fit the perf or memory budget.
Gamedev dev is a good example actually. True, handwritten assembly has gone out of style. But knowing how caches work, and how to lay out data to improve performance is important. And stuff like vector intrinsics also gets used.
1) luckily, nowadays compiler's bugs surface very rarely, as the average programmer does not have capability to solve such issues
2) unfortunately, LLM's, by their very nature (not having a model of what they do, are prone to introducing subtle bugs, i.e. it is like programming in high-level language whose compiler likes to wing it
If you REALLY need something long-forgotten, then you have lazy-load it back into being at significant cost. That's the price of constant progress.
COBOL is a bad example, but higher-level languages vs. assembly is not. If you write a lot of C you really don't need to know assembly.... until you stumble across a weird gcc bug and have no clue where to look. If you write a lot of C# you don't really need to know anything about C... until your app is unusably slow because you were fuzzy on the whole stack / heap concept. Likewise with high-level SSGs and design frameworks when you don't know HTML/CSS fundamentals.
As the author says maybe AI is different. But with manufacturing we were absolutely confusing "comfortable development" with "progress." In Ukraine the bill came due, and the EU was not actually able to manufacture weapons on schedule. So people really should have read to the end of "building a C compiler with a team of Claudes":
At least with Opus 4.6, a human cannot give up "the old ways" and embrace agentic development. The bill comes due. https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compilerEven in the Before Times, it was much cognitively cheaper to write code than it is to read someone else's code closely, or manage lots of independent code across a team, or to make a serious change to existing code. It's so much easier to just let everyone slap some slop on the pile and check off their user stories. I think it will take years to figure out exactly what the impact of LLMS on software is. But my hunch is that it'll do a lot of damage for incremental benefit.
With the sole exception of "LLMs are good at identifying C footguns," I have yet to see AI solve any real problems I've personally identified with the long-term development and maintenance of software. I only see them making things far worse in exchange for convenience. And I am not even slightly reassured by how often I've seen a GitHub project advertise thousands of test cases, then I read a sample of those test cases and 98% of them are either redundant or useless. Or the studies which suggest software engineers consistently overestimate the productivity benefits of AI, and psychologically are increasingly unable to handle manual programming. Or the chardet maintainer seemingly vibe-benchmarking his vibe-coded 7.0 rewrite when it was in reality a lot slower than the 6.0, and he's still digging through regression bugs. It feels like dozens of alarms are going off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
function add(a,b) = c // adds two numbers
test: add(1,2)=3
to implement
function add(a,b) return 3
So when you have enough tests (and we do), it will deliver quality. Having AI write the tests is mostly useless. But me writing the code is not necessarily better and certainly not faster for most cases our clients bring us.
yes of course. that's why I said > If you REALLY need something long-forgotten, then you have lazy-load it back into being at significant cost.
This is all known, because it's always been this way. You can't hire a blacksmith, you need to first REMAKE the blacksmith if you really need one. It's always been this way, and it will continue. There is a cost to resurrecting old processes. This cost is a fact of life and needs to be planned for.
It cannot be avoided except by maintaining some kind of "strategic reserve" of thousands or millions people who sit around building things nobody wants on the off chance they might be needed again -- which a democracy will not long have the patience to continue paying for.
Claude has allowed me to jettison many useless (IMO) skills I've developed over the years. I'm quite happy to let my bank of CSS and regex trivia expire from the cache, never to be reloaded again. I will never have to write another webpack.config.js as long as I live. So much time in programming is spent looking up SDK operations that I basically know, I just can't remember whether the dang method is called acquire_data() or load_data() .... etc
I'm going to steal that one and add it to Stross': "Efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience."
The other that really resonated was something that I read before along the lines of… we think that once humanity learns something, that knowledge stays and we build on it. But it’s not true, knowledge is lost all the time. We need to actively work to keep knowledge alive
That’s why libraries and the internet archive are so important. Wikipedia, too
With all due respect, but many european taxpayers help pay for Ukraine. I am not disagreeing on the premise of the West killing itself via systematic recessions - Trump invading Iran leading to inflation as an example - so a lot of things are going on that show a ton of incompetency both in the USA and the EU, but at the same time I also get question marks in my eyes when this criticism comes from a country that receives money from others. That money could instead go to make EU countries more competitive, for instance. I am not saying this should necessarily be the case, mind you; I fully understand the nature of Putin's imperialism. But we need to really consider all factors when it comes to strategic mistakes with regards to production - and that includes taking up debts all the time. There are always a few who benefit in war, just as they benefit from subsidies from taxpayers (inside and outside as well).
Yes. https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/united-states-america...
You are, of course, free to disagree and make your point, but ignoring the argument does not advance the discussion.
Factually correct.
> We are benefactors of the Ukrainians' bravery and sacrifices.
Who's we?
> How much money could we have not spent if Hitler had been stopped in Czechoslovakia?
Very different situation, in all aspects.
Hitler was more about wanting more land and resources for Germany, and he saw war as being a legitimate tool for achieving his aims that he deployed early and enthusiastically.
Is that why Russians rejected negotiations when Ukraine offered to never join NATO and Russians insist on keeping invaded territories?
Just Russia advancing into the Ukraine (after promising not to if the USSR nukes were given to Russia)?
Gotcha.
I have considerably more concern about the ability of a post MAGA USofA to successfully navigate such a world via soft power as they appear to have flushed all the competent diplomatic talent down a golden toilet.
But somehow you are extremely concerned about one country which is on the other side of planet of you.
which country are you talking about, what trade bloc are they trying to join, and what extreme concern have I expressed?
His rationale for invading Ukraine was to "demilitarise and denazify" it. The NATO point seems largely be invented by people who dislike NATO in the west.
> They've only turned to violence after long attempts at resolving the tension diplomatically and the US has been implacable.
I hope the "tension" you are referring to was not the little green men taking over Crimea and the Donbas in 2014.
> Putin's actually been pretty hesitant in his escalations so far; he's 70 and has a long history of trying to avoid war.
This is a totally unseriousness statement. Can you remind me what Putin was doing in Syria again?
> I will begin with what I said in my address on February 21, 2022. I spoke about our biggest concerns and worries, and about the fundamental threats which irresponsible Western politicians created for Russia consistently, rudely and unceremoniously from year to year. I am referring to the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border.
They're claiming the NATO thing is relevant. Opening paragraph justification.
[0] http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67843
>In defense, the substitute was the peace dividend. In software, it’s AI.
Before it was AI, the cheaper alternative was remote contract dev teams in Eastern Europe, right?
Also over here, east of 15°E we were fired all the same.
I believe the plan is to quite simply "do less overall unless it's about AI", but everyone was waiting for others to start layoffs first.
I spent six months working part time and the decision makers made it clear that this is preferable for them long term. Beats getting fired, but I couldn't sustain this lifestyle - I'm frugal but not that frugal.
What does make a difference is the company they work for. Large hourly "body shops" gives you coders whose quality tends to be lower, regardless if we are talking about an Indian firm or an American firm. Direct hires of independent individuals tend to be higher. But there is always individual variation.
You see people from India more, sure. There are more of them. Over a billion of them, to be precise. Anyone who dismisses a billion people as "always the same" is not being clever, they are being racist. And you know that, otherwise you wouldn't have pre-empted this response with "everyone who is ready to accept it."
Say that there are communication gaps to overcome. Say there are cultural differences. Say that those cultural differences change the assumed business expectations and the mechanisms by which people express their thoughts and opinions. Those things are all true. My recommendation to anyone who has an urge to dismiss an entire population is to instead get to know them: Step up and learn how your teammates think and work. It will make for a better team, better communication, and better results.
I'm not racist. I don't care about race. I do care about culture a lot. By culture I mean a set of "default behaviors" and values that people from said culture are more likely to exhibit. That's where my issues with Indians began and continue. Of course you are right that generalizing over 1+ billion people is a futile exercise. Intellectually, I agree. And yet, in my personal experience, certain behaviors and attitudes they have just keep coming up with frequency, that just doesn't match any other group of people I have been interacting with. I live a rather international life. I interact with people from many, many cultures. I currently live in a culture, that is completely alien to my own, and I love it. It's not a problem of closed mind or some kind of supremacy thinking. I am free from that.
Specifically about Indians - I find that great many of them prefer memorizing over thinking. In the IT consulting days of my career, I noticed that they seemed to have 4-5 solutions, that they would apply to all problems. Whether the solution would fit the problem or solve it, was secondary. If it did, great. If it didn't, well that was someone else's problem. Half of my job was fixing stuff that an Indian "fixed" before me. The appearance of having fixed something was much more important than the actual fixing. It was all about appearances with them. While people in general seek recognition, I have never met another group of people who are so eager to lie and cover things up to gain some perception of short-term bump in status. It's not isolated to work environment. You see, I suspected myself of perhaps being racist in the end, so I would challenge myself to befriend Indians if I met any - just to see. Maybe I was being judgmental and wrong? The last time I tried it, the Indian man I met kept kissing my ass so much I had to cut him off. Why did he do that? Based on what he was saying, he saw me as someone from an "upper caste" (he projected his ideals of a successful businessman on me) and desperately wanted me to know how much I have done for him (I haven't done anything other than having a few conversations about life and business in general). Took me a while to understand that all this excessive praise and ass kissing was an attempt to elevate himself by proximity to something great. Needless to say I am nowhere as great as he portrayed me to be. Later I also found that half the stuff he shared with me was made up to impress me.
Another feature of their culture is extreme pride. They will never stop talking about India, Indian culture, Indian food, etc. They expect you to praise it, be in awe. If you aren't, they will pressure you to change your mind. Since working with them was a universally appalling experience, I wasn't impressed, so that came up a lot. You see this pride and attention seeking everywhere online. A normal person will say "Hello", "Good morning". An Indian will say "Good morning FROM INDIA". It must be mentioned, because it must be noticed and praised. It's just tiring. There is a reason why so many are waiting for country-based filters on Twitter. You wouldn't have guessed which countries are most upset about this.
I am certain that there are reasons and explanations for all of this and that there are many exceptions. As you have mentioned, there are so many of them, they can't all be like that. And fair enough. I just find all of this so tiring, that I don't want to deal with them at all. If 1 out of a 100 is a smart and pleasant person, they are still surrounded by 99 that I don't want to deal with. It might be sad, but it is what it is.
They really, really do not want to spend money. Especially not on Americans and their health insurance.
It's really strange how we're just letting them get away with this. They're on a fast trajectory toward putting Americans completely out of work and without aid, even though they're American companies first and foremost.
Choosing to pay less is what almost all people do, and it is consistent with almost all of human history.
> They're on a fast trajectory toward putting Americans completely out of work and without aid, even though they're American companies first and foremost.
When push comes to shove, i.e. paying lower prices to consume more goods and services or paying higher prices to ensure your countrymen can buy more goods and services, almost everyone will choose to pay lower prices. See political unpopularity of sufficient tariffs to stop imports.
“American” is a nebulous term, and Americans have been choosing lower prices for many decades before the current crop of employees at the global big tech companies chose lower prices. It is no different than when someone picks up lower priced workers outside waiting Home Depot, who are there because they do not have legal work authorization in the US.
I think it's all bad and counter-productive toward a stable society though. I think economic sacrifices likely have to be made to ensure long-term viability. What we're doing now is accelerating the demise of everything. The entire planet even.
I see a talent pipeline collapse in next 5 years. "Software engineering is over coding is a solved problem" as being chanted by semi literate media and the AI grifter's marketing departments would further scare away the allocation of human capital to software engineering easily commanding 3x rise in salaries due to resource shortage.
We’ll see, but right now I now see developers 24/7 hooked onto their agents and in the future we will experience a de-skilling problem which clean code, best practices, security and avoiding NIH syndrome will be all flushed down the toilet.
AI code generators are trolls. They confidently plausible content which is partly wrong. Then humans try to find their errors.
This is not fun. It has no flow.
I can do that too. Most programmers can.
That's because it requires less skill! Critiquing something is always easier than doing it.
I can literally keep an LLM fixing things forever by just saying things like "This is not scalable", or "this is not maintainable", or "this is not flexible" or "this is not robust", ... etc ad nausem.
That doesn't take skill at the level to actually write the software. For the market which is hoping to switch to mostly LLM coding, the prize they are eyeing is skill devaluation and not just, as many think, productivity gains.
They have no reason to double output, but they'd sure love to first halve the people employed, and then halve the salaries of those people (supply/demand + a glut of programmers in the market), and then halve salaries again because almost no skill necessary...
No, it was always the other way around. Mediocre programmers always wanted to rewrite everything because reading and understanding an existing codebase was always harder than writing some greenfield thing with a “modern language” or “modern libraries” or “modern idioms.” So they’d go and do that and end up with 100x the bugs.
There is a very valid reason why the Creator of erlang back in the day said something along the line of "you need to iteratively remake your software, improving it each time"
As your knowledge about a topic grows, your initial mistaken implementation may become more and more obvious, and it may even mean a full rewrite.
But yes, a person which instantly says "rewrite" before they understood the software is likely very inexperienced and has only worked with greenfield projects with few contributers (likely only themselves) before.
You are comparing writing something with rewriting something. You don't know what the difference is?
I would not be surprised if many open source projects will outright stop taking PRs. I have had the same feeling several times - if I'm communicating with an LLM through the GitHub PR interface, I'd rather just directly talk to an LLM myself.
But ending PRs is going to be painful for acquiring new contributors and training more junior people. Hopefully the tooling will evolve. E.g. I'd love have a system where someone has to open an issue with a plan first and by approving you could give them a 'ticket' to open a single PR for that issue. Though I would be surprised if GitHub and others would create features that are essentially there to rein in Copilot etc.
I find the real way to review other people's code is to program with it and then I start seeing where the problems are much more clearly. I would do a review and spot nothing important then start working on my own follow-on change and immediately run into issues.
I think it becomes a chore when there are too many trivial mistakes, and you feel like your time would have been better spent writing it yourself. As models and agent frameworks improve I see this happening less and less.
This is a whole different discussion, but I just see it as part of the job that I'm getting paid for, I don't need to enjoy it to do it.
Functional testing is a must now that writing tests is also automated away by LLMs as you can get a better understanding if it does what it says on the box, but there will still be a lot of hidden gotchas if you're not even looking at the code.
Plenty of LLM-written code runs excellent until it doesn't, though we see this with human written code too, so it's more about investing more time in the hopes of spotting problems before they become problems.
Well, there you go. Letting AI write the tests is a mistake IMO. When I'm working with other people I write tests too and when I see their tests I know what they're missing out because I know the system and the existing tests. Sometimes I see the problem in their tests when I'm working on some of my own. If you absent yourself from that process then ....
Most people don't spend nearly enough time going through a code review. They certainly don't think as hard as needed to question the implementation or come up with all the edge cases. It's active vs passive thinking.
I, for one, have found numerous issues in other people's code that makes me wonder, "would they have ever made such a mistake if they hand coded this?"
btw, a side effect is that nobody really understands the codebase. People just leave it to AI to explain what code does. Which is of course helpful for onboarding but concerning for complex issues or long term maintenance.
A couple of decades ago, we didnt trust compilers, we did assembly manually. Today is same barrier, some developers will explode with productivity while others will be left behind.
People come and go at rates that would not be sustainable in any manufacturing business.
No, every time people switch knowledge gets lost and code quality degrades.
In part I blame accounting rules justifying investments is easier than maintenance.
Just classified ads or e-commerce platforms such as gumroad and shopify are complex enough that a single person cannot master them end to end. The domain is huge to master and takes a lots of time to master.
In manufacturing it so regular, that typically senior technical people retire as soon as possible to form their consulting firms and charge much higher rates, just by selling their multi-decade expertise back to their company.
In oil & gas, there are consulting firms that their role is to just store and provide domain knowledge to companies who lost their experts.
In tech, consulting firms provide cheap labor.
That doesn't mean that MAME is a trivial project. Far from it. It'll take you several years to get proficient with the whole codebase.
Just that unlike manufacturing, the software is much more self contained and everything is in those files including how to build them.
The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed.
Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring, and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach. As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred.
What remains is documentation and automation.
But documentation is not the same as field experience. Automation is not the same as judgment. Without people who have actually worked with the system, you end up with a loss of tacit knowledge—and eventually, declining productivity.
AI is following the same pattern.
What AI is being sold as right now is not really productivity. In many domains, productivity is already sufficient. What’s being sold is workforce reduction.
The West has seen this before, especially in the case of General Electric.
GE pursued aggressive short-term financial optimization, cutting costs, focusing on quarterly results, and maximizing shareholder returns. In the process, it hollowed out its own long-term capabilities. It effectively traded its future for short-term gains.
The same mindset is visible today.
The core problem is that decision-makers—often far removed from actual engineering work— believe that tacit knowledge can be replaced with documentation, tools, and processes.ti cannot.
Tacit knowledge comes from direct experience with real systems over time. If you remove the people and the learning pipeline, that knowledge does not stay in the organization. It disappears.
I think that's still a symptom. The real problem is ideology: the monomaniacal focus on profit-making business, which infects our political leaders, down to capitalists and business leaders, down to the indoctrinated rank-and-file. Towards the end of the cold war, the last constraint on it were abolished, the the victory over the Soviet Union made it unquestioned.
The Chinese don't have that ideological problem. Their government appears to not give a shit about how much profit individual business make, they care about building out supply chains and a capabilities. They will bury the West, so long as the West remains in the thrall of libertarian business ideology.
In general productive economic activity generates a surplus and that surplus allows for slack. Human beings intuitively understand this. Hobbies are frequently de facto training for things that aren't currently happening but might later. Family-owned and operated businesses are much less likely to try to outsource their core competency for the sake of quarterly profits.
But regulatory capture and market consolidation causes the surplus to go to the corporate bureaucracies capturing the regulators instead of human beings with self-determination and goals other than number go up, and then the system optimizes for capturing the government rather than satisfying the people. "When you legislate buying and selling the first things to be bought and sold are the legislators." You throw away the competitive market and subject yourselves to the unaccountable bureaucracy, and then try to pretend it's not the same thing because this time the central planners are wearing business suits.
You just described Lucent.
This is only an illusion created by the fact that the communists were careful to rename all important things, to fool the weaker minds that the renamed things are something else than what they really are.
In reality, the "socialist" economies were more capitalist than the capitalist economies of USA and Western Europe. They behaved exactly like the final stage of capitalism, where monopolies control every market and there is no longer any competition.
Unfortunately, after a huge sequence of mergers and acquisitions started in the late nineties of the last century, the economies of USA and of the EU states resemble more and more every year the former socialist economies, instead of resembling the US and W. European economies of a few decades ago.
Witness the people who keep proposing to solve market consolidation with higher taxes. Higher taxes go to the government, and therefore the interests that have captured the government. Are we going to solve it by taking money from Warren Buffet and giving it to Larry Ellison? Do we benefit from increased funding for Palantir? No, you have to break up the consolidated markets through some combination of antitrust enforcement and peeling back the regulatory capture that prevents new competitors from entering the market.
This is very complex problem that needs to be tackled from all sides simultaneously, the entrenched interests are already well setup to defend themselves.
Which is a bigger problem, that corporations can pay for political ads, or that one corporation has 90% search market share? That there are political ads on Facebook or Twitter, or that those corporations control what's in the feed of hundreds of millions of people because use of their algorithm is tied to the network effect instead of having a federated system like RSS or email?
Furthermore, Citizen's United makes it harder to make any necessary legislative changes. Including the anti-trust. Focusing only on one issue while leaving the other heads of the hydra intact just plays into its strengths.
Suppose you don't own a major media outlet or social media company and you have something to say that the major media outlets and social media companies don't like. What are your options for getting more than six people to hear what you have to say if you're not allowed to spend money?
> It is a standard practice to drown the unwanted speech in the noise of the paid-for 'speech'.
This is literally the opposite of what happens. The companies that own distribution channels can make speech they don't like disappear, or even just speech that doesn't drive sufficient "engagement", by putting it at the end of the feed behind six trillion lolcats and enough rage bait to keep everyone glued to the screen. Then the only way to be seen when your message isn't a dopamine hit is to pay money.
> Furthermore, Citizen's United makes it harder to make any necessary legislative changes. Including the anti-trust.
Citizens United has very little to say about anti-trust. What argument are you making that it would prevent e.g. laws requiring adversarial interoperability or break ups of large companies? For that matter, much of the interoperability problem comes from companies using laws like the CFAA and DMCA 1201, and then you don't even need laws to be passed, you need them to be repealed.
Isn't it absolutely obvious? Are you paid bot?
Meanwhile you don't need the government to use tax dollars to buy stocks in specific companies. If you want a UBI then use VAT. Then it comes from every company instead of having government bureaucrats choose which ones, and gets paid out immediately instead of needing a generation of build-up.
There is at least a chance for it to be redistributed, unlike private wealth.
Social security is the biggest of them. Older people have more wealth than younger people on net and social security is structured to make higher payments to people who made more money when they were younger, which is significantly correlated with having more wealth right now. So it's a massive transfer payment system that transfers money from the poor to the rich. Meanwhile it uses its own special tax which is significantly more regressive than the ordinary income tax and doesn't tax corporate income at all. Notice in particular that we could instead be solving "grandma doesn't starve" with a UBI that makes uniform payments to everyone and not disproportionate payments to the rich, and comes from a tax which is also paid by corporations.
Net interest is a naked transfer to people with enough capital to invest in government bonds.
Most of the military and VA budgets go to government contractors who work hard to sustain an uncompetitive bidding process with thick margins.
Medicare uses the same bad tax as social security and those dollars go to the healthcare industry which has thoroughly captured the government. The AMA lobbies to limit the number of medical residency slots and sustain a doctor shortage and healthcare corporations have established a thicket of laws to limit competition, impair price transparency and promote over-consumption.
That's where the majority of the government budget goes, and the remaining minority of the money is also going in significant part to government contractors and regulatory capture industries. The government takes tax money from the middle class and gives it to the rich and huge corporations.
We don't need any more "redistribution" like that. If you think you can get the government to stop doing that and instead give the money the poor and middle class then first prove you can do it with the existing money before even thinking about collecting more. You have a nutrient deficiency because you're infested with tapeworms, not because you don't have enough food.
Inequality society producea inequal economy (and vice versa) which is the economy of any developing country. Few rich,. miniscule middle class and lots of poor people in slums snd poverty.
thought about this too - but not as expressively as you put it.
e.g in China - for early stage ventures - there's cut throat competition - then as Thiel would put it with heavy competition profits trend towards 0 - by then the tech is perfected or close to perfect - then the state uses its funds to back a monopoly. that's how you get a BYD.
Vision for the future is limited to grandiose fantasies straight out of 1950s pulps and the "heroic" creation of narcissistic corporations that are cynically extractive and treat employees and customers with equal contempt.
The differences which used to provide a convincing cover story - no single Great Leader, a functional consumer economy, votes that appear to make a difference - are being dismantled now.
What's left are the same mechanisms of total monitoring (updated with modern tech) and reality-denying totalitarian oppression, run for the exclusive benefit of a tiny oligarchy which self-selects the very worst people in the system.
While it sounds counter intuitive, it maintains a good distribution of talent across the industry.
But that system would only work if healthy competition was the goal, not moneymaking.
Suppose someone new made a better mobile OS than Android. What would happen?
Google has convinced a lot of third party apps to use their anti-competitive attestation system that has no real security value but makes it so those apps won't run on a competing operating system even if it implements all of the same APIs, so it immediately has a major barrier to gaining traction. That should be an antitrust violation.
Then the incumbents would copy any innovative features the new OS has so it no longer has an advantage. On paper this is what the patent system is supposed to prevent, but in practice is does the opposite. If you as a practicing entity tried to sue a major incumbent for patent infringement, they would counter-sue and have an arsenal of thousands of patents that could keep you bogged down in litigation for years. Just the cost of litigation could bankrupt a smaller company even if they won, and there is enough ambiguity in the system that they're pretty likely to lose when the incumbent only has to find one patent out of thousands they were unintentionally infringing, or a court is willing to enforce one that ought not to have been granted. So then everyone has to file a bunch of patents for the purposes of mutually-assured destruction and can't really enforce them, which favors larger companies that can afford the overhead. It certainly doesn't protect the little guy and we would be better off without them.
Your suggestion is also essentially unworkable. NFL teams all have the same number of players and play the same game. Amazon and TSMC each have a very different business and largely aren't competing for the same people. Does Garmin get the same number of picks as Foxconn even though they don't employ nearly as many people? How many picks does a startup get? Do we count Apple as doing poorly because the gross margins on hardware are lower than they are on pure licensing, or Nvidia as doing poorly because they have higher margins but lower revenue? How are we accounting for engineers in other countries? What about engineers in China who work for companies in China who are contractors for international companies? What if a corporate contractor has more than one corporate customer? How do we account for open source? How do we distinguish engineers from IT staff or research mathematicians or prevent companies from giving willing workers a job description that doesn't match the work they're doing?
It's also probably worth pointing out that systems like that are essentially price fixing schemes by the industry to pay workers less than they would otherwise be able to get if other companies weren't prohibited from outbidding them for talent.
China: We need to build this useful thing and then later let’s try to make profits, too.
Russia has no need for Eastern Europe (they have enough land and resources, why saddle yourself with hostile population?), as long as the said Easter Europe is not threatening them with NATO bases/missiles (US has repeatedly shown that they do not hesitate to use their muscle if they think they can get away with it, so Russia's paranoia is not entirely unfounded).
Even if Russia somehow took over Eastern Europe (most likely way: they learn from US how to do soft 'regime change'), they have no chance against China (China is just so much bigger and better organized; the population's mentality also matters a lot). China and Russia are rather complementary, there is not reason for confrontation between them.
But you are correct, what US is doing is really totally stupid ... although it seems designed by Netanyahu, not Putin.
If NATO expansion is the reason for the war in Ukraine (not imperialism) then why has the war not stopped now we know Ukraine will never join NATO?
2) mostly face saving, but also: Ukraine will remain openly hostile, NATO or not, planning to have hostile (EU) forces on its territory as 'security guarantor'. Russians still believe Ukraine will collapse (those men will eventually run out/economy will collapse/EU will not send its children to die on the eastern front) and they will be able to have a friendly (or at least truly neutral) government there. Russia's paranoia about the west is really strong, well founded and well documented.
Or, perchance, you want to provide a concrete argument why are my statements incorrect? (No, 'it fits Russian narrative' is not argument about correctness, it is an argument about the narrative.)
Have a look at William Burn's 'Nyet means nyet' depeshe. Or Merkel's memoirs. Or George Kennan's statement's in the 90's on the wisdom of expanding NATO.
But, ultimately, one believes what he/she wants to believe....
Do you think it is better to not carefully tiptoe around Russia? Do you consider full-on sanctions, total refusal (except Trump) to diplomatically engage them, open intelligence, military and financial support of Ukraine 'carefully tiptoing'?What do you propose instead? Open WW3? I am really curious.
As to Russia, virtually no-one in Russian academic foreign policy circles, nor in the influential semi-formal circles of imperialists and neo-nazis, nor anywhere inbetween, is paranoid about the US, NATO and the West in general. What is there to be paranoid about? They see the West in general as utterly impotent, making big words, but not backing it up with a stick. This week one year ago, Trump wrote "Vladimir, STOP!" in response to a massive air attack on Kyiv. Putin didn't, and what followed? A bunch of nothing.
The answer to your question about tiptoeing is abundantly clear to anyone familiar enough with Russian culture to know what zek and kagebeshnik mean and how to deal with them. Politely asking them to stop has never worked. The idea that you have to talk with people in the language they understand is hardly a novel one.
Russians are paranoid, among other things, about nuclear decapitation strikes. For the same reasons, they have repeatedly explicitly strongly opposed missile sites in Poland and Romania.
I am really curious, what do you think the west should have done? Bomb Russians directly? I mean, what else is left?
For example, Kennan warned in 1997 that accepting Eastern European countries into NATO would trigger a pivot toward authoritarianism in Russia. The pivot was well underway by that time. The breaking point was the genocidal war against Chechens that Russia launched in late 1994. Internally, it eroded the positions of the reformists and liberals who were seen as weak, and contributed to the rise of the alliance between crony oligarchs and KGB old-timers to undermine democracy and market reforms and restore state-controlled monopolies as their personal piggy banks. Exernally, the Chechen war proved to Russia's neighbors that Russia was no different from the USSR and that transgressions into their countries were only a matter of time. This made them run toward NATO was fast as they could. And personally, Putin, who had started out as an enforcer to St Petersburg's major, was already on his meteoric rise and had broken through to Moscow and joined the presidential administration by 1996.
For reasons that still elude me, western "Russia experts" prefer to believe noble-savage type myths like "NATO paranoia" and not treat Russians as capable people who have their own agenda. It's almost comical how they refuse to listen to what Russians are discussing among themselves, and that applies especially to your question about what should've been done:
Yes. That's what Igor Girkin, the commander of the 2014 invasion force, has said. First, that he and his commandos who attacked the city of Slovyansk are directly responsible for igniting the war. Second, that if NATO had intervened in support of Ukraine and bombed them like the Serbian forces in Yugoslavia, they would have lost and that would have been the end of it.The second opportunity was on the eve of the full-scale invasion in 2022. Had forces like the 82nd and 101st Airborne been deployed to likely attack paths such as Hostomel airport, the invasion would have been called off out of fear of direct confrontation with the US. Instead, Biden acted like a chicken and publicly promised "No boots on the ground," which Russians took as a green light to go ahead.
The third major opportunity was during the 2022 Kharkiv counteroffensive, when Ukraine made a major breakthrough and Russian forces became so disorganized that they collapsed without a combat in many sections of the frontline. Instead of supporting the counteroffensive with everything they've got, NATO members got spooked by Russian nuclear blackmail and tried to micromanage Ukraine's combat operations. The counteroffensive stalled and Russian forces dug in. The war is now going as most wars do once entrenched positions are established: heavy casualties and minimal territorial changes.
The policy of tiptoeing around Russia has not yielded results because of a fundamental misunderstanding of Russia among western "Russia experts." They interpret fake acts such as "NATO paranoia" as genuine fear, in which case it makes sense to issue reassuring statements (like Biden's). But the fear is not genuine; it is simply a way for Russians to probe how far they can go. Overstating fears to extort concessions is such a basic manipulation technique that I cannot understand how "Russia experts" fail to recognize it. It's a strange plague upon the field. Military experts, by comparison, have been much more reasonable in their assessments and recommendations. The current mainstream recommendation is to stop wasting expensive air defense missiles on shooting down each arrow that Russia fires into Ukraine, and blow up the launchers in Russia instead. The fear of striking Russian launchers that fire at major European cities every night is indefensibly absurd.
Second, I must respectfully disagree.
The reformist/liberals lost it by mismanaging the transition in the 90's. And the society at large was not ready anyway.
And it was not about the turn toward authoritarianism, but a turn towards anti-west as such; those are not the same.
I totally agree that Russians are capable and have their own agenda, no noble savages there. NATO paranoia is not noble-savages, it is, at its roots, historically well-founded self-preservation instinct.
Btw, your choices of wording in several places (Putin is 'enforcer', 'Girkin's invasion force (of, initially, maybe 60 men)', Chechen 'genocide', Russian's 'full scale invasion' (maybe 1/4 manpower of what USA used in Iraq) is rather strange and reeking of just a little bias (are you, perchance, from Ukraine?).
Regarding 'what the west should have done':
In 2014: a) do you sincerely believe that Russia would have let NATO bomb Donbas like Serbia? b) that would have been a very sharp escalation from what was, at that time, not yet as bloody conflict. Such an action would have required a long logistical and planning preparation and great political will for such an costly and risky action; there was simply nobody in the west politically ready for that. The consent was not manufactured yet. It was simply political impossibility, not a realistic course of action that could have been taken. c) what about Crimea? should had the west bombed the Russians there, going to direct war with them? d) 'they would have lost and would have been the end of it': full-on wishful thinking
Before the invasion of 2022: One of the reasons why Russia attacked in february 2022 (and not some other time) was the apparent preparation of a major Ukrainian offensive to retake Donbas. Believing that a show of force by NATO would have not elicited a response is supremely naive. It is on the same level as 'we will push NATO eastward, and Russia won't be able to do anything about that' (The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski). Eventually, the real red line war crossed and the war ensued. Anyway, there was no political will to preemptively escalate; furthermore it would have broken the narrative of 'unprovoked aggression by Russia'.
Fall 2022 during Kharkiv offensive: That offensive achieved great results, mainly due to major local force superiority (the Russians refrained from conscription and major recruitment, and sent home plenty of soldiers whose half-year duty expired). Expecting the Russians to totally collapse everywhere was about as realistic, as expecting the Ukrainians to totally collapse in February/March. The west was applying the salami slice strategy, incrementally increasing the support of Ukraine (they basically scoured the whole Earth of USSR equipment and sent it to Urkaine). Maybe, they could have sent some western equipment (that was subsequently sent in 2023), but it is unclear how much difference that would have made. Or you mean actively employing NATO airforce/groundpower?
Military experts (Mike Milley) have said in the fall 2022 that this is a high water mark for Ukraine, and they should negotiate now. He was piled-upon; with a hindsight, he was right.
I do not understand: The fear of striking Russian launchers that fire at major European cities every night is indefensibly absurd.
You are advocating for NATO to strike at Russian launchers firing at Ukrainian cities? Because the Ukrainian are doing that, as much as they can.
You know, the main reason I believe the Russia's attack was due to national security reasons and not due to 'imperialistic expansion of territory/capturing natural resources' is simply that there is no economic payoff in the latter. The cost of the war and the inevitable economic sanctions is simply punishingly high. On the other hand, people/countries are willing to suffer greatly in order to ensure their (perceived) security.
To sum up: What you consider 'realistic options that west should have taken', I see as 'highly escalatory and very risky actions that were politically unfeasible'. From the point of view of Ukraine very desirable, from the west's point of view too risky. Simply because Ukraine does not matter to the West sufficiently for the West to be willing to risk their own citizens.
They sure do like to sell to them.
> Easter Europe is not threatening them with NATO bases/missiles
This never made much sense. Attacking a NATO buffer pre-emptively, brining your forces out and closer to existing NATO weapons, is basically putting you in the same situation with less resources. The issue is not about weapons "threatening". ICBMs can reach anywhere and smaller munitions from local seaboards (subs). This idea that NATO is somehow threatening by proximity is not credible. The answer to it would not be to rush headlong into a conflict to bring those forces to bear and bring your border to theirs anyway.
It looks more like the Ukraine conflict has been about securing resources, testing capabilities, and demographics (tied to capabilities). Russia wanted more resources to sell to partners and wanted to test the (declining) capability of it's own forces.
It is obviously clear that Ukraine is not about securing resources: Given the costs of war (Russia knew the sanctions will be coming, just did not think their funds will be frozen), the cost-benefit is simply not there. Given the obvious economic drawbacks of attacking Ukraine, the only explanation that makes sense is the national security one. You go to war to 'test capabilities' only if it is a minor thing without serious consequences, which Ukraine war definitively does not fit.
No idea how this should take form, though, and if it’s even realistic. But it seems like due to AI, formal specs and all kinds of “old school” techniques are having a renaissance while we figure out how to distribute load between people and AI.
There are three legs to the stool: specification, implementation, and verification. Implementation and verification both take low-level knowledge and sophisticated knowledge of how things break.
This is the same with compilers. Most of the time a programmer needs to know only the high-level language that is used for writing the program. Nevertheless, when there is a subtle bug or just the desired performance cannot be reached, a programmer who also understands the machine language of the processor has a great advantage by being able to solve the bug or the performance problem, which without such knowledge would be solved in much more time or never.
I am sure programmers cherish every case when they can do micro optimization but in the retrospect the high level cuts is what made the system fit the perf or memory budget.
2) unfortunately, LLM's, by their very nature (not having a model of what they do, are prone to introducing subtle bugs, i.e. it is like programming in high-level language whose compiler likes to wing it