> That has always been the beauty of free markets - it's self healing and calibrating. You don't need a big powerful overseer to ensure things are right.

If by "self healing and calibrating" you mean 'evolve to a monopoly and strongarm everybody to do exactly what you want whilst removing all pressure on the quality of your product', then yes, that is the "beauty" of free markets.

That is the stable state of free markets. Antitrust regulation and enforcement only barely manages to eke out oligopolies and even then they are often rife with collusion and enshittification.

> evolve to a monopoly and strongarm everybody to do exactly what you want whilst removing all pressure on the quality of your product

This certainly isn't true of small businesses and the local mom-and-pop shops in your area.

For free markets to work, small businesses need the ability to thrive and starting one should be exceptionally easy.

What has unfortunately happened in a lot of developed countries, is that in order to regulate the very large companies you're upset about, governments have made it nearly impossible to start small businesses to act as competition. That makes it even easier for companies to consolidate and evolve into a monopoly, strong-arming everyone - the exact opposite effect of what those regulations were hoping to fix.

Are there small businesses in your area like the 1 or 5 person HVAC or cleaning or landscaping or breakfast company that you disdain as much as you disdain UnitedHealthCare?

Always the same nonsense. Simple question: do you think in a fully free market, without any governement intervention, those mom and pop shops would not be bought up or merge?

The truth is that consolidation is an attractor. If it hasn't happened yet in a market, it will. Economies of scale give an undisputed advantage. If there is anything I'm upset about, it is about deluding people by vilifying the only thing that prevents feudalism (and massive abuse of humanity for profit) from happening.

You and I are debating: do free markets naturally inevitably trend toward permanent monopolies, or does free-market competition constantly disrupt incumbents?

The reason why Silicon Valley is the hotbed of such innovations, large booming businesses is regulators haven't yet got their hands into software.

In comparison, more regulated industries like BioTech, Education, Finance, Oil, Gas, Infrastructure is a joke.

The Biden administration had started the ball rolling on shackling up AI and LLMs: regulating, enforcing, mandating bottlenecks. It would have been kneecapping ourselves - essentially placing on ourselves the very sanctions we now place on China! The U.S. wouldn't need China to invade Taiwan to bring down our economy, we would willingly do it to ourselves! The push to regulate AI through mandatory reporting thresholds and compliance bottlenecks for large compute runs is the exact type of barrier-to-entry that kneecaps open-source disruption and entrenches the current giants. Hopefully these illinformed suicidal tendencies are on pause, for now.

I CANNOT for the life of me, understand why we would think, placing any limit on our creativity and productivity is a smart decision but I digress.

> do you think in a fully free market, without any governement intervention, those mom and pop shops would not be bought up or merge?

Is there a regulation right now that stops BigHVAC from acquiring your local, community 1 to 5 person HVAC company?

We don't have to engage in hypotheticals. I already asked you "Are there small businesses in your area like the 1 or 5 person HVAC or cleaning or landscaping or breakfast company that you disdain as much as you disdain UnitedHealthCare?" and I don't have a response yet.

> The truth is that consolidation is an attractor. If it hasn't happened yet in a market, it will. Economies of scale give an undisputed advantage

Mathematically, probabilistically, a software engineer will make way more risk adjusted money working as an employee at the MAG7 than starting their own startup, yet, every month, we have software engineers joining and creating startups.

A similar mindset makes your HVAC tech start their own or continue to run their own even though mathematically, probabilistically, economies of scale would give them an undisputed advantage - but that, consolidation isn't free. An even remotely skilled operator understands that and what that entails.

The moment a big, consolidated HVAC company raises prices or provides terrible service, a smart technician can buy a van, print some flyers, and steal their customers. Free markets allow the mom-and-pop shop to constantly respawn. Infact, Gavin Newsom has managed to distort the HVAC market in California by making it really onerous to operate refrigerants that does make it pretty hard for mom-and-pop shop to constantly respawn. This is why you will notice a lot of PE picking off HVAC companies in California!

By your logic, the world would have stopped at Sears, Blockbuster, and IBM. Yet, the first two aren't even a thing in 2026 and I don't want to comment on the IBM of 2026.

There are even more examples than these that obliterates the tired "consolidation is an inevitable endpoint" argument. A reasonable person would immediately acknowledge that size does not guarantee survival in a market where innovation is permitted and the entry fee is low.

The "feudalism" that you apparently abhor is actually caused by government intervention. When governments heavily regulate industries (like education, healthcare, finance, infrastructure), they make compliance so expensive that only massive, consolidated corporations can afford the lawyers and lobbyists to survive. Regulation protects the consolidated giants from the mom-and-pop startups!

I must deal with reality though - your sentences suggest companies always consolidate and the only way is to counter that with regulation. You really believe in this and this does hold true in heavily regulated industries but then you need to ask why does the same not hold true for industries with low barriers to entry and permissionless innovation?

Here's a thought experiment: Before the AI boom, the MAG7 rivaled the GDP of entire nations and dominated global market caps. They certainly don't need AI and LLMs to stay happy - infact Google, who invented transformers, is now rivaled by OpenAI and a swarm of startups founded by the very engineers who left Big Tech to disrupt it. This isn't the only time this has happened in tech!

So why are they now rushing to outcompete each other, over multi billions of dollars, to the extent they are self-sacrificing staff to freeup capital to invest into compute?

Your reply leans on the observation that there are still small shops in the HVAC market specifically and that there are still markets without full consolidation.

Yes, there is a difference in markets and yes, the height of the barrier of entry makes a big difference in how fast consolidation happens. Yes, regulation can heighten the barrier of entry (but also lower, although less common).

You see instances, moments in time, and conclude that the systems don't evolve in a certain direction. I say that 'Big HVAC' will in the future outcompete all the small shops; that it hasn't happened yet says nothing. You said "a smart technician can buy a van, print some flyers, and steal their customers", but this is only true if they can do so more cost-effectively. Your example leans on the consolidated company doing their job terribly, rather than more efficiently than the small shops. It is true that a low barrier of entry reduces the leeway such a consolidated company has in treating their customers badly, but it is not a guarantee. People regularly do choose the big boys over smaller outfits for a variety of reasons (liability, chance of warranty, etc.).

> By your logic, the world would have stopped at Sears, Blockbuster, and IBM. Yet, the first two aren't even a thing in 2026 and I don't want to comment on the IBM of 2026.

You're naming companies in industries that have become even more consolidated than when those companies were the behemoths. Don't you see that "some big player existing" isn't a stable end state? I never said that being big guarantees survival. Big fish can be eaten by even bigger fish. Yes, there can be disruptors, but they very quickly gobble up the entirety of the previous players to become an even bigger player. It's about market share distribution as a whole. Companies simply have a constant incentive to cooperate, merge, and consolidate to extract higher profits from customers. That never goes away by itself. That is not immoral, but it is amoral. They are behaving rationally and in their self-interest.

Think about what price-fixing, cartels and generally 'market-distortion' is. It is nothing more than cooperation for mutual benefit between companies, which is why it keeps happening over and over and over and over again. It sucks for the customers and society, but for the companies it is fully rational.

You need to seriously think about what happens if all government regulation goes away. Don't handwave it. Really think about it. And I don't mean "they'll dump toxic waste on manatees to raise profits" (they will, but that is not the point). I specifically mean anti-trust regulation and regulation that impacts the barriers of entry to markets. Think about the evolution of players in the markets and what they would do to become fitter (increase profits). Do you really, really don't see consolidation happening? You talk about Silicon Valley as being untouched, but we've had years of the main startup strategy being to work towards being bought by one of the deep-pocketed tech giants. Consolidation was the explicit goal.

I guess the best way out of this would be to have a data driven visualization of the distribution of market share among producers and its evolution through time, to see to what extent such consolidation actually happens. Somebody should vibecode that. Maybe using a frontier AI model made by a local mom and pop shop (zero barrier of entry from government regulation there! :-P).

In the navy they call long-range underwater drones a "torpedo". It has been assumed to be a primary threat against ships for a century. Modern navies have many systems purpose-built to deal with that threat.

Plus these things have a range of about 50 miles. It's not like if you are a carrier floating in the pacific, you will be swarmed with a thousand torpedoes. To launch one requires a submarine, and while one may hide, it's not so easy to penetrate the defenses of a carrier group in the middle of the pacific.

Ukraine has had success against mostly unarmored and a few lightly armored Russian ships (and let's face it, these are small ships compared to carriers) in the black sea because the front lines are there and they can launch from a port, travel 5 miles, and hit one of these ships. That's a completely different situation.

> To launch one requires a submarine

Torpedoes cannot be launched from manned / unmanned surface vessels?

Wow.

Good job China isn't getting into water surface drone swarms.

Still, easy to see why close waters near Iran keep the US carrier groups away.

> Torpedoes cannot be launched from manned / unmanned surface vessels?

They're getting close enough to target the carriers without being sunk.. how exactly?

Relatively low cost, numbers and sheer persistance.

Post WWII US has always struggled with asymmetric wars that can't be solved with military dominance and rarely addressed on deeper issues.

This current Iran conflict is reminiscent of the Taliban in Afghanistan, who survived 20 years in a frozen conflict with the US before taking back control of the country when the US withdrew.

The betting is strong on Iran still standing when Trump gets bored and carried off stage.

> Post WWII US has always struggled with asymmetric wars that can't be solved with military dominance and rarely addressed on deeper issues.

I mean, yeah, we're talking about the part of the war that is unrelated to the weapon systems involved.

> we're talking about the part of the war that is unrelated to the weapon systems involved.

I'm talking about asymmetric strategies that can be used by a less armed actor to stand off and occassionally clearly best a better resourced actor.

You know, wooden wing hand carved swarms Vs floating fortress cities with orbiting overwatch.

The Taliban, NVA, and likely Iran will be future examples of mice left still standing after the biggest cat on the planet failed to move them on or wipe them out.

That's like equating a cruise missile with an aerial drone (which is nonsensical).

Now I'm not saying defense against UUVs is impossible, but plenty of defenses against torpedoes don't work against them.

Note also that part of the approach of drone warfare is sheer quantity. Stopping 1 may be trivial, stopping 5 may be doable, but stopping 20 simultaneous ones might already be too hard to do consistently and repeatedly.

A drone of this type and a cruise missile are literally the same type of thing, they just occupy different points on the capability spectrum.

You assert "plenty of defenses against torpedoes don't work against [UUV]". Based on what? What is this hypothetical property of a UUV that is superior to a torpedo?

A UUV with sufficient range and warhead is going to be big and heavy. Long-range torpedos weigh 2 tons each for a good reason. Calling something a "drone" or "UUV" does not imbue it with magic physics. It still has to cross some long span of water with enough speed and a large enough warhead and a guidance package capable of finding the target.

What kind of vessel are you going to use to bring these UUV within range of the target? 20 torpedos would be almost the entire magazine depth of an attack submarine. Surface combat ships carry even fewer.

You seem to be ignoring all evidence from how modern naval systems actually work when discussing your hypothetical UUVs.

> A drone of this type and a cruise missile are literally the same type of thing, they just occupy different points on the capability spectrum.

You have a "this type" in your mind. I do not. Even then you're wrong. A drone can loiter and is thus not "literally the same type of thing" as a cruise missile or torpedo.

> What is this hypothetical property of a UUV that is superior to a torpedo? [...] It still has to cross some long span of water with enough speed and a large enough warhead and a guidance package capable of finding the target.

The huge advantage of drones (besides relatively low cost) is not how they cover the distance, but their flexibility in getting to the target, striking with high precision. An underwater drone can technically even circle the target before striking it at its weakest point (although this isn't going to work well if the target is at full speed).

> What kind of vessel are you going to use to bring these UUV within range of the target?

Bigger UUVs. Note that 'within range of the target' is also much higher for UUVs versus torpedoes, easily 160km for UUVs. Note that ambushes with these UUVs may also be an option, if they can loiter or just lie on the sea floor.

Are you oblivious to the fact that cruise missiles can loiter? You are making a distinction without a difference.

All of this reads like you are not familiar with modern military capabilities.

Longer ranger UUVs is equivalent to "even bigger torpedoes". Do you not understand the subject matter? There is a lot of evidence in this post that you do not. You are making up magical scenarios where your UUVs have properties that can't be replicated by any other real system that is literally supposed to execute the same mission.

> Are you oblivious to the fact that cruise missiles can loiter?

At which point we more commonly call them drones or loitering munition. Even using a broad definition, 95% of what technically could fall under cruise missiles is of the traditional non-loitering kind. Same goes for torpedoes.

> Longer ranger UUVs is equivalent to "even bigger torpedoes".

The term UUV covers an enormously diverse set of devices, from fullblown autonomous nuclear subs to tiny industrial inspection drones.

Narrow-mindedly handwaving new technology into bins you're already familiar with and approaching them as such is exactly the type of cognitive failure that lies at the basis of the phrase "generals are always fighting the last war".

Since you are being willfully ignorant, haven't properly addressed the answers I gave you and are throwing out ad hominems I will not spend any more time on you.

And what platform do you imagine is launching these dozens of torp-- drones?

This is the thing everyone fails to understand about carrier warfare: anything you can use to attack the carrier can be outranged by the carrier because it can just employ the same weapons but from airplanes that fly closer to you.

Bigger UUVs, also called LUUV and XLUUVs.

> I have no idea but the article didn't really make any convincing arguments about it.

It did.

It pointed out that the bases from which the F-35s would have to operate in a war with China would be very vulnerable:

"The concentration of high-value equipment and personnel at each operating location makes the F-35’s basing problem qualitatively different from that of simpler aircraft. The loss is not just one jet but the capacity to generate sorties from that site."

It pointed out that you can't produce F-35s at scale, which fucks you in the long run:

"At over eighty million dollars per airframe, with Lockheed Martin delivering fewer than two hundred aircraft per year across all variants and all customers worldwide, there is no surge capacity waiting to be activated and no precedent for accelerating a program of this complexity on wartime timelines. When one side can produce weapons by the hundreds and thousands — missiles, loitering munitions, and one-way attack drones — while the other relies on small numbers of exquisite platforms, the advantage shifts toward the side with scale."

The key message of the article is simply this (which should not be "weird" to anyone):

"The corrective is not to abandon the F-35 but to redefine its role. A smaller fleet should be reserved for the missions that truly require its unique capabilities — penetrating advanced air defenses, gathering intelligence in contested environments, and orchestrating distributed networks of unmanned systems. The marginal procurement dollar should shift toward platforms that are cheaper to build, easier to replace, less dependent on vulnerable forward infrastructure, and expendable in ways that manned fighters are not."

I don't think that's the key message.

He says basing is a problem, but doesn't mention that we have answers to basing problems. He says F-35 production doesn't scale. Then he says F-35 production doesn't need to scale.

The F-35 is a multi-role jet. It wasn't built for what it's doing in Iran, it's just that it can do it. There are other older jets doing similar things in Iran just fine. Compared to past jets we lose fewer of them, so that has to be factored into the overall cost.

If we say, ok, let's just put fewer of them on this base to reduce concentration. They are still there. He didn't get rid of the F-35s, he didn't get rid of his argument that bases are vulnerable. So what is the point? Now if a successful attack gets through and takes out some F-35s....you now have less spare F-35s to do the critical mission you wanted, because you put fewer there to start with.

We have other solutions for this problem, but in peace time it's more efficient to concentrate things. The nature of escalation tends to mean you have some time to reorganize before the real battle comes.

We're still going to have F-35s _and_ drones _and_ missiles. If the enemy has anti-missile and anti-drone defenses, it won't necessarily be the drones and missiles taking those out.

> "At over eighty million dollars per airframe, with Lockheed Martin delivering fewer than two hundred aircraft per year across all variants and all customers worldwide, there is no surge capacity waiting to be activated and no precedent for accelerating a program of this complexity on wartime timelines. When one side can produce weapons by the hundreds and thousands — missiles, loitering munitions, and one-way attack drones — while the other relies on small numbers of exquisite platforms, the advantage shifts toward the side with scale."

The article gets this wrong as well, the f35 can be built at scale, no other fighter aircraft is produced in such high numbers, its also significantly cheaper on a per airframe basis vs Gen 4 aircraft and its more advanced. This article is nonsense and the author doesn't know what they are talking about.

> the f35 can be built at scale

Really? Can you indicate how many can be produced yearly?

It says right in the article ~200 a year. The base scenario in recent war games, the US lost 270 aircraft total, of which 206 were USAF. Japan lost 112, Taiwan's air force effectively ceased to exist. Across iterations, Air Force losses ranged from 168 to 372(mostly on the ground)in a fight with China over Taiwan. Those are substantial losses but assuming all the losses were f35(they were not) even at current non wartime production rates the United States could replace that in a few years time.

Also the war games showed that when LRASM supplies were depleted, the f35 became the primary anti ship and strike asset as it was one of the few aircraft that could fulfill the role and survive.

> The base scenario in recent war games

January 2023. Specifically focused on an invasion of Taiwan. And the analysis report hardly mentions drones. Not saying it isn't useful info, but it is in essence not much more than an educated (but outdated) guess. Using terms like "showed that" is thus highly unwarranted.

> Those are substantial losses but assuming all the losses were f35(they were not) even at current non wartime production rates the United States could replace that in a few years time.

You make that sound as if it is not that much, even though the losses (were theorized to have) occurred within a matter of weeks. If anything, it strengthens the point that F-35 production is going to be inadequate in a longer-lasting conflict.

Which specific drone models are likely to be effective in a major air and naval conflict in and around the Taiwan Strait?

Sea Baby

Doubt it. The sea states tend to be higher around Taiwan.

There are semi- and fully submersible variants on the way, that can stay underwater for prolonged periods of time! Sea Baby is growing into quite a few different things over the months.

The submersible drones are quite slow, and require significant support from external sensor platforms. They're useful for defending or denying constrained areas but they can't do much to protect a Chinese invasion fleet near Taiwan.

It remains to be seen whether your assay is correct or not

Wargames for things that will never happen is not a good reason to build more planes now, in the real world.

There are over 1300 F35s in service, 500 in the US and the rest with various allies. It is the most successful weapons system in the last century.

And you want to build more of them? Because of a wargame?

Yeah, you're not producing 5000 a year.

But it's a bit irrelevant because we couldn't produce enough pilots either -- the training pyramid means you can only graduate so many new pilots each year, capped by the number of instructors at each level.

There is a similar problem with drone pilots -- it took Ukraine and Russia years to scale up and get to the current level of skill. However, training drone controllers is cheaper because the aircraft cost nothing.

> There is a similar problem with drone pilots -- it took Ukraine and Russia years to scale up and get to the current level of skill. However, training drone controllers is cheaper because the aircraft cost nothing.

Unlikely that pilots would work for drones in a fight with China over the pacific, the jamming and electronic warfare environment would make remote piloting nearly impossible, which is why CCA efforts are looking at onboard AI piloted aircraft. Even in Ukraine the EW environment is so harsh that FPV drones have resorted to using physical fiber optic cable connections so the drones cant be jammed out of the sky.

Any sort of drone that has the range, speed(shaheds only go ~180 km/h), and survivability to last in or near Chinese airspace is going to be expensive and complicated.

I'm using pilots in the loosest sense, it wouldn't be FPV. Regardless, there is a significant skill requirement.

The lesson from Ukraine and Iran is that 180km/h is fine if you have enough of them. If you have a Jetson Nano and comms link on each one they could be a real PITA to intercept.

Toward the end of WW2, even though the US and UK were turning German cities into rubble, the manufacture of german planes was still so great that empty planes sat around in warehouses because they could not find pilots to fly them.

That is why autonomous drones are very promising, because for manned flight, you will run out of pilots long, long, long, before you run out of planes. I don't think it's ever happened, that a nation with a large air force ran out of planes before running out of pilots.

So complaining about manufacturing capacity of planes is a bit goofy. I'd worry about surge capacity of things that are not gated by human operators. And only in the context of a regional war of choice overseas, since we'd just nuke anyone who tried to invade us at home.

Once you understand these constraints, you can better interpret why US production is allocated the way it is.

More than any other non wartime fighter in recient history. and if war breaks out we can produce a lot more once we gear up factories - as every other war needed-

That's a non-answer. You're comparing it within its category when the point of contention is specifically and explicitly that its production can't match that of drones etc. In a broader sense the entire category of manned fighter jets can't scale to keep up with drone production.

Ukraine produces thousands of drones a day, including interceptor drones.

A valid question is how the investment in drone warfare is best balanced with that in traditional warfare, but that is besides the point of the difference in scaling production.

The pacific theater is a way different combat environment then Ukraine. The ranges involved and china's IADS is just a whole different beast. The cheap drones that we have been seeing in Ukraine and Iran are just not as useful in a war against china. Cheap drones don't have the range or survivability to penetrate china's airspace or hit moving targets(most go to fixed gps coordinates), this is a job for stand off munitions and manned stealth aircraft. There's no current UAV or CCA that exists that has the capabilities needed to replace manned aircraft for the majority of missions that would need to be flown. Wargaming shows that the b21 and f47 as well as stand off munitions are the workhorses. Although something like a Barracuda-500 seems very interesting but again its like 10x the cost of the drones being used in the Ukraine theater and its production lines are just now being set up.

If the headline of the article was that fighter jets are bad in general instead of just F-35, i suspect the convo would be very different.

But still, even if you assume that was what the author meant, its still a confusing article. The status quo already is that we dont just use fighter jets.

They delivered 191 last year. So roughly 1.5 days per plane currently?

Yes, and surge requirements are generally quadruple of the normal runtime, but with lead-time. Still, no way we can train pilots at a rate of even 1 pilot every 1.5 days. And imagine the lead times on that!

> I am sure people will take issue with this comment but look at the relative restraint of Russia in Ukraine [...] vs, say, WWII.

They have been bombing civilian infrastructure, abducting children, torturing and executing civilians and POWs, executing deserters or wannabe deserters the entire fucking Ukraine war. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russo-Ukrain...

Restraint, my unbleached asshole.

Civilian to military casualty ratio is 1:20 for Russia-Ukraine war and 2:1 for WWII. The difference is huge. Whether this is actual restraint I have no knowledge but if it quacks like a duck ...

The uncomfortable truth is that is absolutely restraint.

For the areas of Ukraine Russia controls, the Russians have distributed food and in some cases identifying documents.

From what I can tell Russia’s goal is to assimilate, not annihilation.

After all is said and done, I suspect some Ukrainians will become Russian citizens or be granted the opportunity to leave.

Or the war will continue forever

Russia is keeping their expensive equipment in the back since years now because they're afraid to lose it. They would be fire bombing cities if they could. Russia already used white phosphorous in this war. The only reason they're not killing more civilians with missiles and drones is because they can't build more of them.

> No one is fire-bombing cities yet

That was mainly the Americans, British, and the Germans, not the USSR.

Also, what makes you think they could in this war? Do you think they can send bombers over Ukranian cities and drop a shitton of ordnance?

The Russians aren't deploying nukes; that is the only actual 'restraint' to date.

Wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0BttoqSbeE

Russia has been attacking Ukrainian cities with missiles and drones since the beginning of the conflict. But Russia simply lacks the capacity to fire-bomb cities on a large scale. They only have a handful of operational heavy bombers left and no real ability to manufacture more so they're unwilling to risk them.

We are the horses, though.

At some point those became almost fully obsolete in a productive economical sense (they're just fancy toys now, basically). No 'raising the ambition' is ever going to change that. They are what they are and they can do what they can do.

I don't know about you, but if the something in "we'll find something to do" is becoming a toy for AI or very rich people, I'm not exactly hopeful about the future.

I try to not be fatalistic. As I was trying to argue, it's historically inaccurate and it doesn't actually change the outcome. Clinging to the past has never really worked that well.

As for rich people, they get richer and richer until people correct them. Sometimes violently. The current concentration of wealth in particularly the US seems more related to political changes since about the Reagan era than to any recent innovations related to technology.

> I try to not be fatalistic. As I was trying to argue, it's historically inaccurate and it doesn't actually change the outcome.

This is false. Being fatalistic and 'panicking' can definitely influence and thus change the outcome. Your logic is similar to what is (incorrectly) used to dismiss the Y2K-problem, for instance: Looking back it seems like there was no need to panic, but that is only because a lot of people recognized the urgency, worked their ass off and succeeded in preventing shit from going horribly wrong.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox

Your handwaving is doing harm by lulling people into a false sense of security. Your initial comment amounts to "Ah, it'll be fine, don't worry about it. We'll adapt, we always have.", even though you provide absolutely no arguments specific to this enormous force of insanely rapid change in an already incredibly unstable fragile world. We might adapt, but it will require serious thought rather than handwaving and leaning back; even then it might come with massive societal upheaval and a lot of suffering.

I'm wrong to not be fatalistic?! You lost me here.

A lot of people seem to be wasting a lot of energy insisting it is all going to end in tears because <fill in reasons>. All I'm doing here is pointing out that people like this come out of the woodwork with pretty much every big change in society and then people adapt and things are society fails to collapse.

I'm not arguing there won't be changes and that they won't be disruptive to some people. Because they will and people will need to adjust. But I am arguing that a lot of the dystopian outcomes are as unlikely to happen with this particular change as they have been with previous rounds of changes. I just don't see a basis for it. I do see a lot of people who want this to be true mainly because they are afraid of having to adapt.

> already incredibly unstable fragile world

There are a lot of people arguing that things are better than ever by most metrics you might want to apply for that. The reason you might feel stressed about the news is that dystopian headlines sell better and you are being influenced by those. That's also why the Y2K got a lot more attention than it deserved in the media and then a lot of people indeed freaked out over that. Of course a lot of that got caught up in people believing for other reasons we are all doomed and that the apocalypse was coming. And it made for amusing headlines. So, it got a lot more attention than it deserved. And then the clock ticked over and society failed to collapse.

You largely ignored what I said and displayed exactly the fallacious behavior I was pointing out. Again, Y2K was not a problem because people 'freaked out' (took the problem seriously). Similarly, AI will only not be a problem due to people that spend time and effort to mitigate its issues, not due to people like you pretending that because nothing went seriously wrong in the past, nothing automatically will this time (because you "just don't see the basis for it").

This is the key point that HN commenters frequently miss: We are not the transportation owners trading in horses for cars. We are the horses.

Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.

Your logic equates to "there will always be jobs for humans to do", which is naive. Remember that we're counting down in the number of things we do better than inorganic stuff. At some point our bodies (admittedly impressive when compared to other animals) will be surpassed in enough aspects that there isn't anything where we can provide enough value to live off.

Thanks for the downvote.

>will be surpassed in enough aspects that there isn't anything where we can provide enough value to live off.

Regardless of that. AI is here to stay. Nobody is going to revoke the constitutions and criminalize AI to prevent this from happening.

What's going to happen will happen.

> Regardless of that. AI is here to stay. Nobody is going to revoke the constitutions and criminalize AI to prevent this from happening.

> What's going to happen will happen.

Username checks out.

I agree, but that was not the point of contention.

I did not downvote you. I argued why your model of what the future will look like is wrong. That point still stands.

> If you disagree, please tell me for which task requiring intelligence you'd rather have an animal's wit than that of an LLM.

Navigating your way to a location without colliding with anything. Finding food in the woods. Such stuff that animals can do that we yet have AI be able to do.

Moving a complex system of muscles so that they can just stand upright is already very very complex, let alone intercepting a prey's movement mid-flight by just controlling all those muscles.

People way overestimate the actually intelligent part of LLMs vs simply being good at recalling context-related stuff from the training data.

Complexity does not require intelligence. Modern computers (even without AI) and technological systems do incredibly complex things and I'm quite sure you would not call those systems (again, without AI) intelligent.

There is a difference between a problem being complex and you try to find a solution to it (hard), vs a program being complex. The latter is trivial to execute, but that is entirely different from analysing it.

So are animals trivially executing a complex program or are they 'analyzing' a complex problem?

LLMs can (more often) successfully find solutions for far more complex problems than animals can. So where does that leave us?

Neither of those are based in intelligence, but rather in dexterity, agility and sensing capabilities. Try again, and this time please read the question carefully and answer in good faith rather than trying to (unsuccessfully) look for a loophole.

Dogs can be trained for a variety of tasks that require wit. Such as helping the blind navigate. And sniffing for illegal drugs.

Sniffing for illegal drugs requires wit? Right.

And 'trained' clearly means it is not something based in intelligence, but in repetition and conditioning.

Answer the actual question.

If you think being a guide dog doesn't require intelligence, you're delusional.

> answer the actual question

I literally did. You asked, which task that requires intelligence would I rather use an animal over an Llm. I'd much rather have a dog as my guide dog than an Llm. It can use it's innate intelligence to sense danger, navigate around obstacles it's never seen before, and even communicate with other humans through barking.

> trained clearly means it is not something based in intelligence, but in repetition and conditioning

I can't tell if you're trolling at this point. Llms are also trained and therefore are based on repetition and conditioning.

> If you think being a guide dog doesn't require intelligence, you're delusional.

I see you dropped "sniffing out drugs" as a task requiring intelligence, that's a start.

> It can use it's innate intelligence to sense danger

So sensing danger requires intelligence? Bacteria can sense danger.

> navigate around obstacles it's never seen before

Not intelligence, but dexterity. Only if it has to solve a puzzle does intelligence come into play. And dogs suck ass at solving puzzles. Some birds are somewhat decent at it, but still very far removed from what an LLM can do.

> communicate with other humans through barking

Yeah, Timmy fell down a well, right? Perfect example of 'intelligence' and something you'd prefer a dog over an LLM /s

> I can't tell if you're trolling at this point. Llms are also trained and therefore are based on repetition and conditioning.

That is a fair point, but remember that your training examples were "sniffing for drugs" and "being a guide dog", both of which are very much in-distribution training (guide dogs only do a very specific very small set of things and require a lot of training to even be able to do those).

But for the sake of argument, let's say that there are some tasks requiring intelligence where you would prefer a dog over an LLM. Answer me this: Roughly what percentage of distinct tasks requiring intelligence would you prefer to have a dog over an LLM? For each task, imagine that failure to complete the task will cause serious harm to your loved ones, so the stakes are high.

Keychron keyboards are absolutely amazing. And very affordable for what they are.

Sadly, haven't found anything close to what the G13 does with Keychron.

The code is what it does. The comments should contain what it's supposed to do.

Even if you give them equal roles, self-documenting code versus commented code is like having data on one disk versus having data in a RAID array.

Remember: Redundancy is a feature. Mismatches are information. Consider this:

// Calculate the sum of one and one

sum = 1 + 2;

You don't have to know anything else to see that something is wrong here. It could be that the comment is outdated, which has no direct effects and is easily solved. It could be that this is a bug in the code. In any case it is information and a great starting point for looking into a possible problem (with a simple git blame). Again, without needing any context, knowledge of the project or external documentation.

My take on developers arguing for self-documenting code is that they are undisciplined or do not use their tools well. The arguments against copious inline comments are "but people don't update them" and "I can see less of the code".

> Redundancy is a feature. Mismatches are information. Consider this:

Respectfully, if someone wrote code like this, I wouldn't want to work with them. I mean next step is "I copy paste code instead of writing functions, and in the comment above I mention all the other copies, so that it's easy to check that they are all doing the same thing redundantly".

> The arguments against copious inline comments are "but people don't update them" and "I can see less of the code".

Well no, that's not my argument. I have been navigating code for 20 years and in good codebases, comments are rare and describe something "surprising". Good code is hardly surprising.

My problem with "literate programming" (which means "add a lot of comments in the implementation details") is that I find it hard to trust developers who genuinely cannot understand unsurprising code without comments. I am fine with a junior needing more time to learn, but after a few years if a developer cannot do it, it concerns me.

You did not engage with my main arguments. You should still do so.

1. Redundancy: "The code is what it does. The comments should contain what it's supposed to do. [...] You don't have to know anything else to see that something is wrong here." and specifically the concrete trivial (but effective) example.

2. "My take on developers arguing for self-documenting code is that they are undisciplined or do not use their tools well. The arguments against copious inline comments are "but people don't update them" and "I can see less of the code"."

> Respectfully, if someone wrote code like this, I wouldn't want to work with them. I mean next step is "I copy paste code [...]

This is an nonsensical slippery slope fallacy. In no way does that behavior follow from placing many comments in code. It also says nothing about the clearly demonstrated value of redundancy.

> I have been navigating code for 20 years and in good codebases, comments are rare and describe something "surprising".

Your definition of good here is circular. No argument on why they are good codebases. Did you measure how easy they were to maintain? How easy it was to onboard new developers? How many bugs it contained? Note also that correlation != causation: it might very well be that the good codebases you encountered were solo-projects by highly capable motivated developers and the comment-rich ones were complicated multi-developer projects with lots of developer churn.

> My problem with "literate programming" [...] is that I find it hard to trust developers who genuinely cannot understand unsurprising code without comments.

This is gatekeeping code by making it less understandable and essentially an admission that code with comments is easier to understand. I see the logic of this, but it is solving a problem in the wrong place. Developer competence should not be ascertained by intentionally making the code worse.

You talk as if you had scientific proof that literate programming is objectively better, and I was the weirdo contradicting it without bringing any scientific proof.

Fact is, you don't have any proof at all, you just have your intuition and experience. And I have mine.

> It also says nothing about the clearly demonstrated value of redundancy.

Clearly demonstrated, as in your example of "Calculate the sum of one and one"? I wouldn't call that a clear demonstration.

> This is gatekeeping code by making it less understandable

I don't feel like I am making it less understandable. My opinion is that a professional worker should have the required level of competence (otherwise they are not a professional in that field). In software engineering, we feed code to a compiler, and we trust that the compiler makes sure that the machine executes the code we write. The role of the software engineer is to understand that code.

Literate programming essentially says "I am incapable of writing code that is understandable, ever, so I always need to explain it in a natural language". Or "I am incapable of reading code, so I need it explained in a natural language". My experience is that good code is readable by competent software engineers without explaining everything. But not only that: code is more readable when it is more concise and not littered with comments.

> and essentially an admission that code with comments is easier to understand.

I disagree again. Code with comment is easier to understand for the people who cannot understand it without the comments. Now the question is, again: are those people competent to handle code professionally? Because if they don't understand the code without comments, many times they will just have to trust the comments. If they used the comments to actually understand the code, pretty quickly they would be competent enough to not require the comments. Which means that at the point where they need it, they are not yet professionals, but rather apprentices.

"Nearly odorless"?

I call bullshit.

Honestly just a fairly mild earthy smell. Nothing terrible. When I was a kid my dad could render the bathroom unapproachable for 15 minutes. But he drank whiskey and smoked.