Also, we're not a "homogeneous population", you can stop with your pro-racism stereotypes. Immigrants are 20% of our population.

Being big is an advantage, not a disadvantage. It means that the costs to develop a system are spread across a much larger population. Everything we have had to be developed on a comparably minuscule budget.

And I want to be clear in the above: I fully acknowledge the irony, in that the US tech industry has been a powerhouse. There seems to be a massive disconnect in the US between tech innovation and tech infrastructure. The US is a world-leader in the former. It's consistently a deep laggard on the latter. The reasons why the US has so much trouble getting its act together on infrastructure and systems are complex, but it is remarkable to see, as someone who has spent their life in a mix of the US and Iceland. And it's not just Iceland that has it's act together on these sort of things - it's most of the developed world, and even surprising amounts of the developing world.

, with the most sophisticated banking system

Any American who believes this should try living overseas for a year or two. The US banking system is insanely backwards. Numerous aspects of the US medical and government systems as well. It's hard to explain it to you unless you experience it.

Checks are just one symptom (in Iceland, 15 years ago bank tellers would look at you weird and have to get the manager if you had a personal check, and 10 years ago, stopped taking them altogether). For like 15-20 years, we've had free instant bank-to-bank money transfers (no third party involved), everyone on the same service, to the point that if someone is collecting money for a gift for a coworker's birthday, it's always been, they just send an email with their bank details, instead of going around and collecting cash. All your bills - all of them - just show up in your bank's inbox. On and on.

I mentioned the medical system. Let me give a random example. In the US, you go to a doctor and they determine you need a prescription. They or their receptionist have to ask what pharmacy you want it at. It gets routed through SecureScripts (before that, it was all phone based!), and depending, you may also need to also call into the pharmacy before you go there - and if you need it "transferred", it's a multihour process. Here? The doctor just jots it into their computer, that's it. You can literally just walk out of the doctor's office into the pharmacy next door (or any other pharmacy), tell them your name, and they go grab your order.

Everything is connected. Everything is interoperable. All keyed to your kennitala (ID number) . And the kennitala is only a key, not a password. The fact that a SSN in the US is treated as both a key and a password is insane, from a security standpoint; by contrast, you can just post your kennitala online, it's fine. We have multiple actual authentication methods. The most convenient is the Auðkenni system. Our SIM cards store credentials in a separate cryptographic chip. When we need 2FA, for any business or government agency (all on the same system), it sends a special SMS that the phone routes to the SIM card to process, and then (at the OS level) pops up an authentication dialogue, so we have universal 2FA, linked to our kennitala, in all of our phones. It's been this way for like 15+ years.

Or let's talk taxes. You all know what it's like in America, so let's explain what it's like in Iceland. I get an email letting me know it's tax time. I go to the tax office website. I get 2FA login via my phone. My tax forms are right there. They're already filled out, with all of the information already collected. For like 90% of the population, it's just click through, verify it's correct, and submit. Some people may have some things that weren't logged, such as overseas investments or whatnot, but for most people, it's like a five minute process.

On and on. It's been so weird seeing America getting things 1-2 decades after us and acting like, "wow, we're leading in banking technology!", etc. No, you're an aged dinosaur, way behind the rest of the world because none of your systems work together and you're so slow to adapt to change.

There are good reasons not to have the government "pick winners", but this isn't a good example. This is a historically-incompetent and utterly-corrupt administration picking winners, and that's guaranteed to go badly. What actually works reasonably well is government grants to the National Science Foundation, and letting the NSF evaluate grant proposals and dole out the money on scientific merit.

There's your problem: Javascript.

I'm actually serious. LLMs in their current incarnation need a lot of guardrails, and I think they do much better with a very strict, statically-typed language.

If I did have to write Javascript and I wanted to use an LLM I would focus hardcore on extremely thorough and extensive unit tests, because that's the only way to provide the necessary guardrails. And I would closely scrutinize all test changes made... or maybe just mark the test code as read-only so the AI can't modify the tests.

Also you should be very picky about architecture, and have the LLM implement in smallish chunks, thoroughly vetting its output each time.

Is this a lot of work? Yes! It's a lot less work than doing it all yourself, but if you just give the AI a high-level problem description and turn it loose, you're probably going to end up with crap. Even worse in a language like JS that encourages crap anyway.

Don't worry. The current regime has plan in place to simply not deliver mailed ballots in states that have any chance of going against your desired outcome.

To paraphrase the apocryphal Stalin: Altering one ballot is a felony. Shitcanning a million ballots is a statistic.

It's high. I have a team of three reviewers, and I think their reviews are kind of thin. They do point out useful improvements, but I think more careful review could find more. That said, I also feel like the overall quality is actually higher.

I've also been coding professionally for a little over 35 years, and AI is a complete game-changer. It's going to take us a while to figure out just how much. I actually wonder if my focus on code quality is pointless. I put a lot of effort into ensuring that code is clean and readable for humans, but will that really matter? My current project is the realization of something I've been thinking about for 15 years... how to build a crypto API that guides users to use it correctly and safely. But will that actually matter, or will users just point an LLM at it that has more knowledge about what's safe and hygienic than I do?

Mostly I don't think about it. I'm building something I've wanted to build for a long time, doing it incredibly quickly, and having a great time at it. I'm going to do this for another 2-3 years, then retire. I expect to leave behind something that I'd have been immensely proud of a decade ago... an elegant design with a very high quality implementation.

But I'm not sure that it will be better in practice than something quick and dirty, because I'm not sure people are going to be writing code at all in a few years, and I don't know if the readability and maintainability characteristics I'm so careful about will even matter to its users.

Fair. In a competitive market those are the same things, but monopoly situations -- especially government-enforced monopolies, like patented drugs -- create curves that behave differently.

Where the curves cross is the highest profit the seller can get away with. This is precisely how the curves are defined.

I'm going full off-topic pedant here, but that's not right. If the demand curve is very flat (almost horizontal), then a large increase in price will create almost no drop in demand, which gives a huge gross-margin boost. Extreme example of this is Pharma Bro / Martin Shkreli bumping the price of Daraprim by like 50x, because people would pay anything to stay alive (which Shkreli brazenly bragged about).

The crossing of the two curves indicates the point of maximum product/units that could be sold, not maximum profit.

Central banks do a lot of useful things, but they don't give currency a value (they can, however manipulate the value others give it by printing it, destroying it, changing interest rates, changing the amount of reserve banks need and the multiple they can lend, etc). What gives a currency value is supply and demand- the fact other people want that currency. Which is also what sets international exchange rates.

There's also the fact you need it to pay taxes, which sets a base amount of demand. But beyond that it's all supply and demand when deciding how much value it has against other currencies or physical objects.

WHich is different from crypto how? You print it from doing large amounts of useless work on a computer that provides no value and is immediately thrown out. Or the new proof of stake algorithms, in which you print it by having previously printed it. I'll take cash, thanks.

That's a real shame, because I've always wondered what the prime factors of 35 might be.

I'm still holding out hope that they manage to figure this out during my lifetime.

To the degree that's true, it's nothing inherent in the processor generations. What's happened is that Moore's Law has slowed dramatically. If there were as much performance difference between a 2026 CPU and a 2020 CPU as there was between a 2006 CPU and a 2000 CPU, we'd still be feeling the need to upgrade regularly.

Consider, for example that between 2000 and 2006, clock speeds tripled, CPUs went from single to dual core, and instructions per clock went up. A 2006 flagship CPU was ~20X faster than a 2000 flagship CPU. From 2020 to 2026 we saw, what, 2X? And most of that gain came from increasing core counts and hybrid big/little cores, which means that most workloads don't realize the full benefit.

When machines are getting an order of magnitude faster every five years, you're going to be upgrading frequently. That hasn't been happening for a while. If we have some major shift in CPU tech that give us 10X faster machines by 2030, the upgrade treadmill will resume.

Fun fact: Paris was founded around 225 BC.