petilon

> The trouble for the US is that it is now very clear that the US president can just act like a crazy dictator, and that the mechanisms which were supposed to prevent that simply don't function.

This is true. A US president who has strong support from a majority of voters of his own party can act like a dictator. So if 51% of Republican voters (which may be just 25% of all voters) support him no matter what, then he can act like a dictator. This is because Republican members of Congress who are supposed to rein him in are worried that they will be voted out if they anger the 25% of voters who support the president.

The fact that 25% of voters can set the direction for the whole country is indeed a defect in the system that is not easily rectified.

But if Republicans are defeated by Democrats in the upcoming midterms then there is hope. That's how we are going to recover.

Trust won't come back immediately, but if the next 2 to 3 Presidents are "normal" then trust will come back slowly.

Trump is not emperor for life, fortunately. He'll be gone in a couple of years. With any luck the upcoming midterms will significantly limit his powers. America will recover from this dark period. Other countries have had dark periods too, like Germany, and recovered.

When Hitler was removed did another Hitler variant take control of Germany? No, Germany recovered from that dark period. The same will happen in the US. We will recover from this dark period. The comparison to Hitler is not baseless, btw. His own vice president once called Trump America's Hitler.

I think it will happen in about the same timeframe as SpaceX runs AI racks in space.

> You don't think the human race will be extended to Mars?

About the same probability as SpaceX running AI racks in space :)

That's if SpaceX AI doesn't hack into the systems that control this capability first. And this is why physical access is important, as depicted in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The same kind of analysts are saying extending human race to Mars is a dumb idea.

And extending the human race to Mars, and Hyperloop, and frontier AI model, and DOGE cutting $2 trillion per year in government spending...

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the hero defeats the hostile onboard computer by entering its logic core and manually disconnecting its memory modules.

That's hard to do if the AI rack is in space as SpaceX is planning to do. You can't disconnect. You can't shoot it.

> Microsoft are bundling a lot more into the platform and leaving less to the community.

This is a good thing. In Java everything has multiple community offerings, so before doing anything you have to evaluate the community offerings and decide which one to go with. If you go with the wrong one you may end up having to switch at some point, and that can be painful. This happens so often that most of the time spent when using Java is doing these evaluations and comparisons. With C# you just use the one built into .NET platform. Saves a ton of time.

> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads

No, the threat is bigger than that. If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference.

You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying SaaS (or e-commerce website) becomes interchangeable and commoditized.

For CPUs, Moore's law lasted more than 50 years. We don't know how long it will last for GPUs. I think Nvidia will keep improving performance, lowering power consumption and reducing heat generation for many years to come.

> They are still making billions from highly sticky enterprise customers

That's true. This lets Oracle coast for a while. But if they coast for too long SAP will overtake them.

Bloomberg and Economist seem to be doing OK, so it is possible.