fallous

You can buy $100,000 of the best fishing equipment in the world, but if you don't know how to fish it won't do you much good. Of course, if your goal is to collect great fishing equipment then you have no need to fish... but then you shouldn't consider yourself a fisherman.

There are no Dixiecrats if you've hanged all the slave owners after the Civil War, and clearly Reconstruction is entirely different since you've purged most of the white population in the South (as well as some from the Union, since Delaware, Kentucky, and New Jersey still had slavery).

Your argument/timeline seems a bit confused in a couple of places. Our problem was "not stringing up all the slave owners after the Civil War," yet you then point out American industrialists (going back to the robber baron era) loved fascism. But the industrial parts of the US were the Northern states, not the South. Additionally you complain that the Democrats are no effective opposition but don't appear to consider that the Democratic Party would be even less effective if you had strung up all the slave owners after the Civil War given that it was that party which chose to secede from the Union in order to maintain slavery.

History indeed did not begin with the War on Terror, but I'm not sure you're entirely familiar with it.

Nukes launch Chuck Norris at their enemies.

Agreed that on first blush it looks like Chesterton's Fence but it may be more of a cargo culting situation.

Mutually Assured Distraction.

It's not a linear cognitive decline but more like hitting a wall (usually late 40s/early 50s). What's it like? Frustrating as Hell because you can remember your prior capabilities but have to deal with things like randomly forgetting words/names temporarily, decreased short-term memory abilities, etc.

Adding AI to an organization that is somehow making process decisions based on "vibes" isn't going to solve problems, it's simply going to add yet another problem generator to a dysfunctional system.

The question is does this eventually lead us back to genetic programming and can we adequately avoid the problems of over-fitting to specific hardware that tended to crop up in the past?

Yes, but as with outsourcing those who are making such decisions often lack the awareness, or even skills, to properly specify the requirements and be able to evaluate the results.

If the on-premise offshoring centers around the use of LLMs then I suggest the term "off-braining." :)

The investor being the customer rather than actual paying customers was something I noticed occurring in the late 90s in the startup and tech world. Between that shift in focus and the influx of naive money the Dot Bomb was inevitable.

Sadly the fallout from the Dotcom era wasn't a rejection of the asinine Business 2.0 mindset but instead an infection that spread across the entirety of finance.

Heh, I was at Netscape when the Sun-Netscape Alliance was created. Tip of the hat to a fellow gray beard. ;)

You just described the burden of outsourcing programming.

So many are desperately wishing to be the next Tom Wolfe rather than striving to find their own voice and style (as Wolfe did).