morsecodist

This is kind of the point I am trying to make that sovereignty is somewhat of a spectrum and there are a lot of options for preserving parts of it.

I think the Westphalia thing is somewhat overblown there were lots of sovereignty analogs throughout human history all over the world before that.

> HK always was bound to become a part of China

Why so? Do you think Monaco should be part of France? Do you think Singapore should be part of Malaysia? A lot of big countries respect the sovereignty of neighboring smaller countries, although that is unfortunately becoming less true now.

It isn't about colonialism. I have never seen anyone seriously argue it should go back to the British. It is about a framework to ensure they maintain their rights. It would be great if that looked like expanded rights for all of China but it can also look like some degree of sovereignty, which was in place for quite some time.

I would never ask a question on stack overflow because half the time it seemed to be flagged a dupe or for some other reason and it brought you closer to being disallowed to ask. I actually have answered a good amount of stack overflow questions to get a higher score but the overzealous question shutdowns totally had a chilling effect.

I see this advice a lot in various forms. I think people are probably too conflict averse on average so there is some merit to it but there are limits. I feel like there are a lot of times in my life where just moving on or being diplomatic has been the right call.

The manager example is a good case study. There are a lot of examples here where there might be genuine repercussions for raising an issue with a manager. I wouldn't give this as blanket advice.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's a simple rule about whether or not you should raise an issue and it needs to be decided case by case.

This is such an interesting comment thread because people have such wildly different opinions and from my perspective the entire disagreement just comes from company size.

I am a "CTO" and I always put that in air quotes because I have one direct report and I spend the lion's share of my time doing IC work. I know what I do is not what people picture when they hear the title and I feel weird saying it. I use it because I do have to make the strategic technical decisions, there is no one else. When people are marketing technical B2B SaaS I am the one they are looking for.

From my perspective there just isn't nearly enough for me to do as a CTO to justify me not coding. If I were to hire someone just to manage them that would be an unjustifiable expense at this point. But I also get that as soon as we get to a reasonable size this would be totally unsustainable.

I am pretty skeptical of how useful "memory" is for these models. I often need to start over with fresh context to get LLMs out of a rut. Depending on what I am working on I often find ChatGPT's memory system has made answers worse because it sometimes assumes certain tasks are related when they aren't and I have not really gotten much value out of it.

I am even more skeptical on a conceptual level. The LLM memories aren't constructing a self-consistent and up to date model of facts. They seem to remember snippets from your chats, but even a perfect AI may not be able to get enough context from your chats to make useful memories. Things you talk about may be unrelated or they get stale but you might not know which memories your answers are coming from but if you did have to manage that manually it would kind of defeat the purpose of memories in the first place.

> When just a few years ago, having AI do these things was complete science fiction!

This is only because these projects only became consumer facing fairly recently. There was a lot of incremental progress in the academic language model space leading up to this. It wasn't as sudden as this makes it sound.

The deeper issue is that this future-looking analysis goes no deeper than drawing a line connecting a few points. COVID is a really interesting comparison, because in epidemiology the exponential model comes from us understanding disease transmission. It is also not actually exponential, as the population becomes saturated the transmission rate slows (it is worth noting that unbounded exponential growth doesn't really seem to exist in nature). Drawing an exponential line like this doesn't really add anything interesting. When you do a regression you need to pick the model that best represents your system.

This is made even worse because this uses benchmarks and coming up with good benchmarks is actually an important part of the AI problem. AI is really good at improving things we can measure so it makes total sense that it will crush any benchmark we throw at it eventually, but there will always be some difference between benchmarks and reality. I would argue that as you are trying to benchmark more subtle things it becomes much harder to make a benchmark. This is just a conjecture on my end but if something like this is possible it means you need to rule it out when modeling AI progress.

There are also economic incentives to always declare percent increases in progress at a regular schedule.

Will AI ever get this advanced? Maybe, maybe even as fast as the author says, but this just isn't a compelling case for it.

Any physical process can be interpreted as computation. Computation is in the eye of the beholder. Interpreting life as computation doesn't really add anything new we are just describing a model that we came up with.

In general, I think the dependency hate is overblown. People hear about problems with dependencies because dependencies are usually open source code used by a lot of people so it is public and relevant. You don't hear as much about problems in the random code of one particular company unless it ends up in a high profile leak. For example, something like the heartbleed bug was a huge deal and got a lot of press, but imagine how many issues we would be in if everyone was implementing their own SSL. Programmers often don't follow best practices when they do things on their own. That is how you end up with things like SQL injection attacks in 2025.

Dependencies do suck but it is because managing a lot of complicated code sucks. You need some way to find issues over time and keep things up to date. Dependencies and package managers at least offer us a path to deal with problems. If you are managing your own dependencies, which I imagine would mean vendoring, then you aren't going to keep these dependencies up to date. You aren't going to find out about exploits in the dependencies and apply them.

I am extremely skeptical of this mathematical model to predict history thing. There's just not enough history to do it and you bake in your biases when you go through the qualitative historical record and try to assign it to quantities. A lot of people analyze history and claim they figured it out and they've come to different conclusions and none of them have made reliable, specific conditions. If you say something bad will happen at some point in the future you'll probably be right but it's not enough to call it science.

Fair I stopped using Go pre-generics so I am pretty out of date. I just remember having this conversation about generics and at the time there was a large anti-generics group. Is it a lot better with generics? I was worried that a lot of the library code was already written pre-generics.

I find the way people talk about Go super weird. If people have criticisms people almost always respond that the language is just "fine" and people kind of shame you for wanting it. People say Go is simpler but having to write a for loop to get the list of keys of a map is not simpler.

This just makes it even more frustrating to me. Everything good about go is more about the tooling and ecosystem but the language itself is not very good. I wish this effort had been put into a better language.