One tech event in isolation indeed does not look like speedrunning. But you witness them taking milestone after milestone every year, that perspective becomes challenged. Now you can piss on every achievement and say that they are nowhere near yet, but with every step they are getting closer, and they are taking the steps at speeds no one thought possible even a few years ago.

China has a homegrown AI industry running on a homegrown tech stack, and they are leaving the US in the dust by now, all the while being about 100x cheaper. They have fleets of robotaxis and trucks roaming the streets and highways like it's no big deal. They are eating up the cheaper end of mobile and communications chips market. And so on. Better take note, Tortoise, because this Achilles don't give a damn about Zeno.

As to them buying lito from other countries, the US is working hard at putting a stop to it. Whether they succeed or not, China can not afford to get caught by surprise.

You don't get to the top of the stairs without taking, well, the stairs. Much more useful than to fixate on the current step, is to take note of direction and momentum. And when you keep an eye on the developments in the Chinese semiconductor industry, they momentum they have should have everyone in the West shit their pants.

This a thousand times.

China used to be happy to buy everything it needed from the West. But then the US spent decades screaming Bloody Murder China Is Teh Enemy and guess what, China listened, and figured they need to be able to cover their needs on their own. And the rest is pretty much history. China is now speedrunning every tech tree like there's no tomorrow, and with how the world and the US is going, they're most certainly right to do so.

Sing to the tune of Johnny Cash:

They are now...

Indeed the US has solved all of it's problems, and has become a paradise on Earth. Therefore any criticism must be the work of the Enemy. Especially if this criticism comes from the younger generation, who definitely have a future, like being able to afford to own homes and to have children.

If it is possible to walk into cameras on NATO bases like that, honestly they deserve it. This shit should be locked behind seven layers of impossible.

Not only marketing. A pox on UX.

My take is everyone who likes to talk about experience needs to be fired, and the software industry will be in a much better place.

Brother you have problems. I hope you find the help you need.

I'm sure it can be made worse with AI.

That's one way to put it, if quite the understatement.

Those who exported the US manufacturing base got insanely rich off of it, unfathomably rich. In doing this they were supported by bipartisan policy, and the government ran the PR campaign for them.

To add to what was already for all practical purposes selling the country for scrap, China was also smart enough to demand technology transfer as part of the deal. So not only were they handed the factories, the exporters taught them everything they knew about technology and manufacturing.

I cannot think of a single example in the whole written history that can hold a candle to the level of stupid this was. The US handed it's leadership role in the world to China on a silver platter, and all of DC and Wall Street cheered on on it, just so that a handful of rich assholes could become even more rich.

I cannot think of a single example in the whole written history that can hold a candle to the level of smart this was. Not in a thousand years does an opportunity like this present itself to anyone, and China recognized it and took it, and understood the level of greed and stupid in the US leadership, and bought the whole country for lunch money, kitchen sink included.

No. For everyone who can put two and two together it has always been obvious that:

1) Everything a country needs to function at war time is of strategic importance, and needs to be protected, defended, duplicated, and easily repaired, and

2) Everything a country needs to function at war time is going to be attacked. You can cry "civilian infrastructure" as much as you want, but the civilian economy supports, and is therefore largely indistinguishable from, the war economy. Damaging one means damaging another, means better chances of winning.

It was only corporations and politicians that wagered they can kick the can down the road, and not have to be the ones that will foot the bill. And they have indeed won that bet for decades, and now we have to face the fact that we have half a century of work to catch up with.

Or maybe, which is more likely, we will do our best to forget the problem, and carry on based on vibes as usual.

You might be on to something here. With the level of carefulness our elected officials are displaying in their use of AI, I'm sure we will be able to jailbreak the Epstein files out of some service sooner or later.

Isn't it just mighty convenient that our press and leaders are working hard to keep the evidence from being released. I wonder why that is.

But you can google pretty much any name, and there's an Epstein connection, if not good ol' island visits. And you can google pretty much any name, and find them not pushing for the release of the files, if not outright working to shut down the conversation.

In this kind of a situation, I consider everyone not actively pushing for the release guilty until proven otherwise. Guilty if not of outright rape and cannibalism, then enablement, obstruction of justice, and criminal negligence. The whole lot needs to be locked up forever, and our halls of power cleansed of the slime with industrial grade disinfectant.