wilkommen

Back in the day, bad software experiences were largely due to hardware constraints and software developers pushing the boundaries of the field. Now, we are writing software that is essentially identical to thousands of apps that have come before, with hardware that is better than ever, and yet the software quality is declining anyway. So to the extent that things were bad before, they were bad for understandable and possibly unavoidable reasons given the nascent state of the field, but now things are bad for totally pointless and lame reasons. The declining quality of software in 2026 is a reflection of the decline of our entire industry, and possibly also of the decline of the west.

While I believe that the decline of the west started with the Reagan Revolution, that decline didn't show up in our consumer technology until about 2010. The best car motors, and the best version of Windows (Windows XP) were released in the mid-aughts.

There's another way of handling it - remind your son that his grandmother would love to see him, and if he doesn't want to go, let him. Maybe from his perspective he doesn't feel very loved by his grandmother. If he did, he would probably want to go. Problem solved. No demand is made on the child to either do something he doesn't want to do, or to feel some way he doesn't actually feel.

As our economy becomes more and more riddled with nonsense jobs that provide no economic value, it becomes increasingly important for the people in those jobs to create the impression of value (this is their only product), and that's what meetings are largely for. Excessive pointless meetings are not broccoli, even if meeting-attenders see higher wage growth than their peers. Excessive meetings are a symptom of an economy that's becoming more and more disconnected from the real world and from creation of real economic value.

I think a linear battlefield is one in which there is a "front line", which was a given for prior wars but maybe not as much anymore. Future wars might see adversarial forces mixed among each other spatially more than in the past.

The arguments in this article seem very similar in spirit to the ones mad in "The Sling and the Stone" book by Thomas X. Hammes.

This is just a way to keep the AI bubble going. The American people will not benefit from having a "stake" in AI companies. Doing so will serve only to expand the amount of capital available to AI companies for them to waste on a technology that will never live up to expectations. The US govt taking a "stake" in OpenAI and its competitors will only grant those organizations more power to further misallocate the nation's capital for their own enrichment. Instead of taking a stake, the US govt should use copyright and antitrust law to dismantle these companies and their backers in big tech, and shut this wasteful Ponzi scheme down, so that AI can find a role in the economy that suits its actual capabilities.

I agree that regulatory pressure is a market force (I wish more people understood this), but I disagree that capital intensive things that must be done right can only be done by big organizations - quite the opposite. If the regulatory environment is strong and effective, small organizations can thrive even in pharma and aviation. If an industry is comprised solely of huge organizations, then when one becomes corrupted (like Boeing has, see the 737 MAX debacle) it becomes impossible to terminate that organization. Organizations that are too big to fail are too big to be regulated.

The root cause of the dynamic you're highlighting here is wealth inequality. The more unequal the distribution of wealth in a society, the more concentrated wealth becomes geographically, because as wealth inequality grows, society begins to reorganize into a system which serves ever more lopsidedly to the needs of the wealth holders. The wealth holders, being few, and being social creatures like the rest of us, tend to congregate in fewer and fewer geographical areas. They have the money, so anyone who wants money must live near them to get some. So rents skyrocket in the geographical areas surrounding the wealth holders, which they ironically benefit from, as it creates a smaller amount of land that they need to buy in order to own all the economically significant land in the country, which only intensifies the cost-of-living crisis. Housing regulation cannot fix this, not only because housing regulators can become captured by the wealthy, but also because the root cause of the phenomenon is not addressable by housing policy.

Couldn't they have just mandated that Polestar cars in the US must not be able to connect to the internet? That would pretty much negate any potential foreign threat related to "connected cars". Just make them... not connected.

I have had the chance recently to meet my boss's boss and my boss's boss's boss at my current job and it is amazing how in this era of robber-baron capitalism we seem to be promoting exclusively the most unserious, irresponsible, and magical-thinking among us. The fish does seem to be rotting from the head. And it's not just some companies or institutions, it seems to be all of them. At least during the gilded age, the robber barons were serious people. I'd rather have Vanderbilt or Carnegie as my economic royalty than Mark Zuckerberg or Peter Thiel. Vanderbilt and Carnegie may have been evil, but at least they had their heads on straight.

How is China reducing the consumption of transport fuels? Is that driven by changes in individuals' fuel consumption patterns or by a change on the industrial side?

Good companies go bad because the American financial system and thus the companies that live within that system are geared for "shareholder returns" as the primary objective of existence for the corporation. If the objective of the corporation was simply to protect its continued existence, more akin to a nation-state or a club, then it would be possible to have a wider variety of corporations which each behave differently and behave more according to their own internal rules and principles instead of behaving according to the demands of external shareholders who only want money, even if it distorts or kills the company in the long run.

Yeah Pearl Jam did take a huge career hit trying to fight them, and that's admirable, but they shouldn't have had to do that. Why should artists carry the burden of having to sacrifice their careers to fight an illegal monopoly? That's the role of government. You may as well say that fans are to blame for going to ticketmaster-promoted concerts and buying tickets on ticketmaster because they were enabling ticketmaster. Both fans and artists are being harmed by the ticketmaster monopoly.