Watch for the AI bubble crash in 2026.

It's not that much of a change, though. The USA has only ever paid lip-service to its "allies" and always seen Europe as competitors. It's not a shift from "friend" to "enemy", just from "competitor" to "enemy".

This quote from the summary about two engineers with an AI assistant being more productive than ten engineers without one just doesn't add up. I have done vibe coding both on hobby projects and at work, and it doesn't make me anywhere near that productive. I spend so much time asking it to re-do what it did wrong or manually fixing its bugs myself that I wind up only a little ahead in productivity. Not even double my usual pace.
Maybe if I am starting from scratch working on a relatively simple tool, it doubles my productivity. But it nowhere near quintuples it, and most of my work isn't nearly as AI-friendly as that kind of project.

My current employer has been pushing the team to be more productive, with everyone encouraged to use AI as much as possible, and the result has been rushed-out buggy code with security holes and questionable design decisions. Despite the fact that the team's productivity has obviously not made a 5x jump, they still refuse to hire more people. At least in our case, this has nothing to do with AI making us so much more productive, and everything to do with leadership being cheap and not wanting to shell out for the talent that they obviously need in order to produce at the pace they want.

I realize that my individual lived experience is not data. Ok, fine, so I can't prove my claims. But I still stand by them, because I have used the best AI tools available and they don't come even close to what people are claiming. I still think that the recent economic mudpit caused by the high interest rates (made in response to high inflation) has much more to do with the lack of jobs than these AI tools.

This guy either socially engineered his way through a line, analyzed a weakness in the line, or time-traveled from the '90's not realizing we've set up an incompetent but totalizing police-state control grid to interpose every tiny aspect of our lives.

To be fair, "pay on board" is less applicable to airplanes than trains because seatbelts are important in turbulence.

That said, the lack of capacity is widely acknowledged to be a feature of wildly incompetent management.

We just heard they've started a new project to rewrite the air traffic control system for the umpteenth time (and billions and billions later) to hopefully allow for more frequent landings and departures. I fear it won't be specified for AI-assist takeoffs and landings and will be obsolete before it's done.

Better make some more 8" floppies.

It's good to have a second engine but it sure sounds like Gecko isn't long for this world.

Do you live in a city?

There is also the fact that we very recently experienced global hyperinflation, followed by extremely high interest rates to tame it. The natural (and intended) effect was mass downsizing and layoffs, which we did, in fact see. So we are sitting in the valley of that effect right now.

It's popular to put "AI into every headline, but there there are other things simultaneously going on in the world that are significant contributors to the current low demand for workers in various industries, including tech. This is just part of the normal cycle and hiring will go up again when conditions change.

Of course, that is cold comfort to current debt-ridden and jobless graduates right now. But the world does not run on compassion.

If you think being a CS RCG is bad, try being a 55 year old coder who spent the last 30 years honing the craft, only to be laid off into a market where those skills are just no longer needed at all.

It's so weird that when I was a kid the Left had "Save the Whales!!" bumper stickers and now it's the Right-Conservationists.

They even dedicated Star Trek IV to the cause.

Maybe if the whale killers get reinstated we'll at least get case law to prohibit permitting denials for Integral Fast Reactors and that can at least clean up the Boomers' nuclear waste to protect the ecosystem long term.

In my lifetime you could open a bank account with just a name, ditto for renting an apartment, and pay for everything in cash.

This guy is screwed unless he's only a guest of a patron.

Crime was lower and people were more responsible back then too.

All this control grid surveillance still hasn't caught the Building 7 people.

Maybe it's possible to decide a course of action was a bad idea and reverse it?

The third option is.....labor automation!

Walk with me on this....

Humans have been exploiting and oppressing each other since before recorded history. And this has been true in very capitalist economies as well as very communist ones. It's basically a universal truth. Furthermore, it was way, way worse in the past.

What changed? Has humanity become more moral in the past few thousand years. I find that very, very unlikely and not well supported by evidence. But tech level has changed tremendously in the past few thousand years, creating more luxury for more people than ever before in history.

So, I contend that there is no sweet spot of an economic or legal model that will resolve the problems faced by capitalist and socialist societies. Humans will just keep on humaning. But more breakthroughs in labor automation have the potential to be significant game changers. Once people can have the things they need in abundance without having force others to labor to produce it, the incentives, targets, and dynamics all change.

Of course, all the human evils will still be there, but just as we have seen a huge reduction in slavery during the rise of labor-saving technology, it is at least possible that we will continue to see a reduction in "slavery" (or wage-slavery or lesser forms of oppression) as we automate more and more of our labor.

I would roll AI into the labor-automation category as well. It's all driven by corporate greed of course but that doesn't mean that absolutely no good will come of it.

> Apple builds the handset, the OS and the store

Remember, when iPhone came out there was no App Store.

That was a separate business that came later, competition was prohibited, and by prohibiting competition rents were extracted.

This is called "illegal tying" in the law.

They're gonna install malware on your device but heaven forbid your website sets the wrong cookie, then they're fining you 6% of annual revenue.

When did East Germany win?

It's over.

l think this comment wins the thread.