ramesh31

>"We just let the LLMs rip and spend most of our time in the sleeping pods or the buffet. Six figures for days of relaxation. It truly is the good life."

There was a sweet spot in mid-2025 where this was actually the case; Claude Code early adopters could complete sprint work in their sleep while the rest of the world (management) hadn't caught on yet.

Now it's just "oh, this should take you guys a day, right?"

>"Better to just oppose all bailouts for all sectors, always."

This is exactly the line of thought that turned the Wall Street crash into the Great Depression, which we learned from and did not repeat in 2008. The answer lies somewhere in the middle.

The way Harold Bloom talked about him, there must really be something there. But I'm squeamish. What to do?

>"Their grandfathers never had it that definition, but they somehow think their grandfathers never struggled and otherwise had it a lot easier than their grandfathers really did."

I don't think it's that they think they never struggled. It's that the struggle resulted in something. Work hard, because it will probably earn you a promotion. Put a little extra on the mortgage every month, because you might be able to pay it off one day. Save a bit for your kids college, because then they'll be able to afford it. All of these things are practically quaint at this point. Some people can pull it off, but it's the exceptional case now, not the median as it once was. Increasingly you need a 90th percentile 21st century income to get a 50th percentile 20th century life.

>"Concretely it absorbed an excess of male heirs so they could live a comfy life and would not try an hostile takeover over their elder brothers' state."

That was often a consequence, but in general it provided an alternative pathway to male success in life and a means of advancing through a respected status hierarchy that did not depend on the traditional markers. Something sorely lacking today, when even outside the question of inheritance you are faced with the near impossibility of achieving the economically independent and socially valuable life that your grandfather or father had by simply working.

>"When AI wipes out programming jobs over the next few years, do you think we will see a revival in the number of young men going into monkhood?"

The church historically absorbed excess males in this way and gave them a dignified purpose in life, it's not a crazy thought at all.

>"I'm concerned about the long time viability of this move considering the current landscape of web development."

I owe Coyier and CSS Tricks a huge debt to getting my career started in the 2000s. It's loss will be tragic. But web development (as we knew it) has gone the way of elevator operators. Dead and gone. Good on the guys for getting their bag while it still had some value.

How can the numbers ever work? $15k pays my electric bill for a decade. I get that it amortizes beyond that, but it's a heck of a sunk cost that just doesn't make sense IMO.

>"Reading stuff like this continue to make advances and new releases is like a fever dream when everything else is all AI."

Do the advances mean anything though? Alan Kay is a personal hero of mine, I love the aesthetic of Smalltalk, and the dream-that-was once upon a time of such a system was a real missed opportunity for the evolution of programming environments. But is it anything more than a neat hobby at this point?

Multi-platinum global superstar pop music duo does a thing for money. More at 11.

>People vote with their feet. This shouldn't be a negative. Some people don't want to be over taxed and over regulated in places like CA and NY, so they move to states they see as fitting their needs/culture better.

Sure but the point being that that would incur an exit tax from most major countries, whereas the freedom of movement within the US creates this weird system where you can gain incredible wealth benefitting from the infrastructure and economy of one state, then just walk away and decide not to be taxed any longer. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just that that ends up screwing over the state in the long term.

A majority of California's budget problems come from trying to absorb what should be a federally handled expense. Medi-Cal is what Medicaid should be across the board. But they end up in the classic trap for US states, which is to say you have all of the problems of a major country but none of the stickiness to the tax base like one, making it impossible to sustain these things long term.

>The silver lining is that the talent didn't vanish and we have teams like Archetype working on Exodus, Stoic with The Banner Saga, or offshoots like Yellow Brick and Beamdog.

This is generally the case in the games industry. Great dev teams seem to function more like bands than companies. For however you feel about the latest iterations, the first Call of Duty was an absolute revelation to the FPS genre that we never would have gotten without the EA firing of the MoH team.