They're commies in spirit only, they're looking to get paid MORE, but don't dare to call it capitalism. For example, "depends on paying artists a pittance" and "just put it online for free", so apparently they like getting paid. I can sympathize that streaming music decimated album sales, I get it, but that old model is gone, and it's not coming back. If someone is looking to make a living playing music, they'd better learn to write music a LOT of people want. Is that selling out? Yes, of course it is. If nobody is being coerced into buying music, and nobody wants their music, they’re going to hit the bottle of the barrel pretty fast. To make a living in music, they have to either write music others need (eg. soundtracks) or they need to play the popularity contest. Bands don't get popular sitting in their garage playing music, they need to let people know about their music and pray that it resonates with people. Today, streaming services are the way people discover music, it's the current game, they don't have to play the game, but they'd better make sure music is their hobby and not their job if they don't.

What profits? Last I checked nobody had climbed out of the red in the space yet.

"More people leaving New Zealand than entering as young flee high cost of living ... with departures accelerating and labour shortage feared"

I see, so the problem is definitely not that jobs in NZ are underpaying, nope, it's that the cost of living is too high. Since we're tossing all economic theory out the window, I would like to complain about the lack of workers willing to work for $1 a year for my company. It's obvious that we have a severe labor shortage rather than the fact that I'm not offering anything near a living wage.

As someone who wishes LLMs could code better, no, we are nowhere near there yet for anything non-trivial. The models vary, but when the number of distinct responsibilities hits ~20, the models start generating very poor logic. There's a reason why all the codegen tools have some central "toolkit" like Supabase. We are nowhere near the point where LLMs can take over all coding. I'd say for web dev tasks, they're getting close to 80% of the way there, but that last 20% is the hard parts and it will take 4x longer than the 80% easy-kill parts to take over. If you go down a few layers to performance-critical code, they're well under 30% of the way there. Another reason why this will not happen by 2026 is that coding is not the hardest part of software, figuring out what humans really want is.

Right now, LLMs can do a good amount of the low-value work that a good template or snippet library would cover. They're also decent at pinpointing bugs because they're very efficient spaghetti throwing machines, throwing entire boxes of noodles at the wall faster than humans. However, they're not very good at fixing bugs without causing regressions.

Want to see a model fall on its face? Ask any codegen tool to write you an inference engine for the H200 in PTX, you're not going to get very far. It output something that looks like PTX code, but it'll be, well, some novel form of pseudo-code that doesn't compile and is fundamentally broken.

Maybe AI will take over posting rankings after we're gone?

I can see it now, 2 AI agents in a pissing match where one claims Flugnarg is better because it used it to program the T2000 that wiped out 40,000,000 humans while the other AI agent claims the T2000 is a dumpster fire because it's written in Flugnarg and that the Z8000 it wrote in Nargflug is so much 733ter because it exterminated 40,000,000 humans 1 second faster than the T2000.

Personally, I think Flugnarg is more quantum stable than Nargflug, so it actually is better.

"Bitcoin will collapse when its ECC signature algorithms are compromised due to enough qubits"

Hey!!! That's supposed to be a secret!!! You're screwing up my short positions!!!

I'll one-up that. H1Bs should not be eligible for contract work. You must work for the company that sponsored you on company premises for tasks directly attributable to the company that sponsored you. If you really want to tighten the screws, H1B workers must be in the top 5% of salaries for the role both at the sponsoring company and industry-wide. I mean, in the end, it's about exceptional talent, not dollars, right? Or did the narrative change while I wasn't paying attention?

"almost certainly not the" is not the same as "impossible to fill". It is statistically impossible for Amazon to have 12,391 jobs that no American is qualified to do. So yes, if you fire 10K Americans, it is absolutely OK to say that you cannot have any H1Bs until you prove that every single one of the 12,391 H1Bs are legitimate roles that not a single one of the 200M+ working-age adults in the US is qualified to fill. Now, if the goal is to hire **cheap** labor, sorry, that's not what H1Bs are for. If the goal is to hire the best of the best, fantastic, that's what O1s are for. H1Bs are for labor shortages, and from what I can see, there is no labor shortage, just a lack of wanting to pay for labor. I've been in tech for a long time, out of the hundreds of H1Bs I've worked with, fewer than 5% I'd consider to be top-tier talent. The remaining 95% could easily be replaced with American workers. I've met 2 exceptionally brilliant H1Bs I can think of, meanwhile every O1 I've worked with has been exceptional. So drop the rhetoric, H1Bs are being used to displace American workers, if you need an exceptional individual, file an O1. If you need cheap labor, then you need to read up on supply and demand curves.

The problem isn't the "rake“, all credit cards take a rake. It’s the size of the rake. If the 2 big app stores took a 5% rake, nobody would blink an eye. What's hard to justify is a 30% rake, that one doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The big boys do have a choice, they could slash the fees to 5%, and this would (most likely) all go away, but that's a sliver of pie, compared to the 1/3 of the pie they get now, so they're going to fight tooth and nail. The "security" stuff is misdirection, the answer is to cut the rake by 600%, but that's apparently too bitter of a pill to swallow.

No, it's my fault. I canceled them.

OMG THIS!!! A million times this!!! You have hit on every pet peeve of mine that has become a norm with the advent of the "everyone can code" movement. What used to be an elegant art form of writing bullet proof software to withstand the test of time has devolved into a "we'll clean it up later" enshitification of the craft. I used to see mind-blowing artisans at work, then came the StackOverflow cut-and-pasters, then the "duct tape 20 packages together" to print a string to stdout, and now the vibe coders with 3000-line PRs of AI slop.

Every sign points to a new COBOL-esque super cycle where graybeards get pulled in to scape away countless layers of machine-generated "code" in order to get a broken system back on track.

and the boys were already ten and eleven years old when I entered their life

I hope you got a good relationship with them! My son can't even talk yet. So, right now, he's just this cute thing that runs around and causes trou^H^H^H^Hgood things to happen.

Both US10912502B2 and US10945648B2 are piss-poor patents. There's nothing novel there; it's just rearranging components from other manufacturers into a use case based on refining an existing use case and patenting that remixed use case. I'm not delusional enough to imagine we'll wake up and ban utility patents, but I am crazy enough to think that if we're going to let these things stand, then we need to have a federally mandated cap on what holders can charge for an idea. If there's one thing I've learned in this life, it’s that ideas are worthless; execution is everything. So we should monetize ideas based on what value they have. For utility patents, it should be a minute amount. Like a cap of $0.0001 per unit or a 1-time fixed license of $1000. That would end this waste of resources and court time. When it costs more to hire a lawyer to sue than you can recover, the idiocracy will end.

Europe is suffering under the weight of poor policy choices:

1) Over-regulation

On paper, strict regulation protects consumers, the environment, and markets. But in a global economy, excessive red tape can stifle innovation and push industries abroad. Multiple studies from the European Commission note that fragmented regulations and bureaucratic compliance burdens weaken competitiveness compared to the U.S. and Asia.

2) Terrorism

Contrary to common perception, terrorism remains an ongoing challenge in Europe. According to Europol’s EU-TE-SAT 2025 report, between 2020 and 2024, the EU recorded over 200 terrorist incidents and over 2,000 terrorism-related arrests. In major urban centers, heavily armed counter-terror units are now a routine presence in train stations, airports, and large public gatherings.

3) Emigration

Over-regulation and terrorism don’t foster innovation or "joie de vivre“; it makes people want to look for a better life elsewhere. Europe’s innovation pipeline is under pressure and faces sustained emigration of highly skilled workers. North America continues to draw top European talent, particularly in AI, biotech, and finance. There may be a Trump blip in early 2025, but the regulation and security concerns still exist, so it will be a short-lived blip.

Well, some of that is for classes for people who can't see that default 3-pixel wide scrollbar on Windows 11 in high contrast dark mode. :-)

Fair. Just making fun of Windows 11.

Yeah, you're blessed to have one of each. Until they start conspiring against you, which you KNOW is going to happen.
ha!

Hopefully we'll raise them better than that. And let them see us honoring our parents.