jellicle

> Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.

Imagine a town with two widget merchants. The two go out to dinner one night, and next week they both double their prices. Both widget merchants are pleased.

We are going to have an ever-increasing supply of stories along the lines of "used a LLM to write a contract; contract gave away the company to the counterparty; now trying to get a court to dissolve the contract".

Sure you'll have destroyed the company, but at least you'll have avoided bureaucracy.

So, HN has deleted this off the front page after about 20 minutes, and sure, they generally want to avoid "political" stories but the simple fact is that when a "political" story reaches a certain legal of magnitude it becomes the only thing of real importance. This is an issue of seismic importance for the tech world, or at the very least the US tech community, whether HN accepts that or not.

Trump to Bukele, 2025-04-14:

Trump: they demand you, they love you, they love what you do...

Bukele: {something about supporters}

Trump: you know what I want to do? Home-grown criminals are next. {louder, to his senior staff in the room} I said HOME-GROWNS are next. The home-growns. You've got to build about five more places.

Bukele, laughing: Yeah, that's fair! Alright.

{big burst of laughter from Trump's staff}

Trump: It's not big enough!

The problem is both US political parties would strongly oppose any attempt to "get people in the streets", making it very challenging for any such protesters.

Two or three very small opsec failures equals one massive opsec failure.

Yeah. The only lesson that would be learned from a bunch of tablets depicting agonizing death to those who approach would be "I'll make sure to send the low-paid workers in first before I go in".

If you've honestly never seen the types of leaders envisioned in this article you are very lucky indeed.

For a large majority of supervisors, if you give them carefully-worded, polite, respectful, private, accurate, truthful, ego-preserving feedback about something they're doing wrong, their response will range between "immediate firing" and "hold a grudge against you, fire you as soon as they can find a replacement". There is nothing that makes people as angry as accurately pointing out their flaws.

The way around this is in essence to get the leader to think it was their idea to make a change, which is possible in some cases but not in others.

The California school curriculum includes and has always included algebra.

The "rigorous supplier vetting" of any corporation consists of checking which supplier is charging the least.

The definition of "liberal" being used here by The Hill is "voting with the Democratic Party". Their definitional left end of the spectrum is "bills put up by the Democrats" and definitional right end of the spectrum is "bills put up by the Republicans". These are not actually meaningfully "liberal" and "conservative" as the terms are used elsewhere.

Harris is a party-line voter (pretty obviously, as an insider she's defining the party line in the first place). The Democratic Party isn't leftist and nor is Harris. It's routine in most democracies for elected representatives to be party-line voters.

Article writer does not understand how significant figures work or why they exist.

The idea that the human race will never exactly agree on what is "true" is correct and obvious.

The opinion expressed here that nothing has changed in the world recently about how truth and politics are handled is false. With the collapse of reasonable arbiters of "truth", such as network TV anchors, who were imperfect themselves but nevertheless served as a check on the falsehoods that a political party could put out, parties have discovered that 100% bullshit 100% of the time is a workable approach to politics, and some of them are pursuing that. That was never true before.

Based on other mass extinctions, we can expect ten+ million years of very low life diversity during this extinction that we're causing. So, for a period much longer than humans have been around (which you describe as "the interim"), we will experience only the dying. No human will experience any eventual recovery of biosphere diversity which may occur, long after we are gone.