That we let a generation of software developers rot their brains on js frameworks is finally coming back to bite us.
We can build infinite towers of abstraction on top of computers because they always give the same results.
LLMs by comparison will always give different results. I've seen it first hand when a $50,000 LLM generated (but human guided) code base just stops working an no one has any idea why or how to fix it.
Why would that necessarily happen? With an LLM you have perfect knowledge of the code. At any time you can understand any part of your code by simply asking the LLM to explain it. It is one of the super powers of the tools. They also accelerate debugging by allowing you to have comprehensive logging. With that logging the LLM can track down the source of problems. You should try it.
> With an LLM you have perfect knowledge of the code. At any time you can understand any part of your code by simply asking the LLM to explain it.
The LLM will give you an explanation but it may not be accurate. LLMs are less reliable at remembering what they did or why than human programmers (who are hardly 100% reliable).
Determinism is a smaller point than existence of a spec IMHO. A library has a specification one can rely on to understand what it does and how it will behave.
The thing is, it's possible to ask the LLM to add dynamic tracing, logging, metrics, a debug REPL, whatever you want to instrument your codebase with. You have to know to want that, and where it's appropriate to use. You still have to (with AI assistance) wire that all up so that it's visible, and you have to be able to interpret it.
If you didn't ask for traceability, if you didn't guide the actual creation and just glommed spaghetti on top of sauce until you got semi-functional results, that was $50k badly spent.
While I agree with your sentiment, I just want to say that if your approach is to have the LLM read every file into context, or you're working in some gigantic thread (using the million token capacity most frontier models have) that's really not the best way to do it.
Not even a human would work that way... you wouldn't open 300 different python files and then try to memorize the contents of every single file before writing your first code-change.
Additionally, you're going to have worse performance on longer context sizes anyways, so you should be doing it for reasons other than cost [1].
Things that have helped me manage context sizes (working in both Python and kdb+/q):
- Keep your AGENTS.md small but useful, in it you can give rules like "every time you work on a file in the `combobulator` module, you MUST read the `combobulator/README.md`. And in those README's you point to the other files that are relevant etc. And of course you have Claude write the READMEs for you...
- Don't let logs and other output fill up your context. Tell the agent to redirect logs and then grep over them, or run your scripts with a different loglevel.
- Use tools rather than letting it go wild with `python3 -c`. These little scripts eat context like there's no tomorrow. I've seen the bots write little python scripts that send hundreds of lines of JSON into the context.
- This last tip is more subjective but I think there's value in reviewing and cleaning up the LLM-generated code once it starts looking sloppy (for example seeing lots of repetitive if-then-elses, etc.). In my opinion when you let it start building patches & duct-tape on top of sloppy original code it's like a combinatorial explosion of tokens. I guess this isn't really "vibe" coding per se.
The way I let my agents interact with my code bases is through a 70s BSD Unix like interface, ed, grep, ctags, etc. using Emacs as the control plane.
It is surprisingly sparing on tokens, which makes sense since those things were designed to work with a teletype.
Worth noting is that by the times you start doing refactoring the agents are basically a smarter google with long form auto complete.
All my code bases use that pattern and I'm the ultimate authority on what gets added or removed. My token spend is 10% to 1% of what the average in the team is and I'm the only one who knows what's happening under the hood.
Libraries are not deterministic. CPUs aren’t deterministic. There are margins of error among all things.
The fact that people who claim to be software developers (let alone “engineers”) say this thing as if it is a fundamental truism is one of the most maladaptive examples of motivated reasoning I have ever had the misfortune of coming across.
The current market is predicated on the assumption that labor is atomic and has little bargaining power (minus unions). While capital has huge bargaining power and can effectively put whatever price it wants on labor (in markets where labor is plentiful, which is most of them).
What happens to a company used to extracting surplus value from labor when the labor is provided by another company which is not only bigger but unlike traditional labor can withhold its labor indefinitely (because labor is now just another for of capital and capital doesn't need to eat)?
Anyone not using in house models is signing up to find out.
Just a year ago, Elon Musk was gleefully destroying the US government agency that provides food and medicine for many of the poorest, most desperate people on earth. He was literally tweeting about missing out on great parties to put USAID into the "wood chipper".
The tech overlords don't even want to spend a minuscule percentage of the federal budget helping starving people, even when it benefits the US. They are not going to give us a post-scarcity society.
The idea is that cheap and readily available and upgradeable intelligence is going to massively increase our purchasing power and what everyone can order for the same cost basically.
If artificial doctors are cents on hour then you can see how that changes our behaviors and level of life.
But on the other hand from the other direction there is a wage decrease incoming from increased competition at the same time. What happens if these two forces clash? Will cheap labour allow us to buy anything for pennies or will it just make us unable to make a single penny?
In my view the labour will fundamentally shift with great pain and personal tragedies to the areas that are not replaceable by AI (because no one wants to watch robots play chess). Such as sports, entertainment and showmanship. Handcrafted goods. Arts. Attention based economy. Self advertisement. Digital prostitution in a very broad sense.
However before it gets there it will be a great deal of strife and turmoil that could plunge the world into dark ages for a while at least. It is unlikely for our somewhat politically rigid society to adapt without great deal of pain. Additionally I am not sure if hypothetical future attention based society could be a utopia. You could have to mount cameras in your house so other people see you at all times for amusement just to have any money at all. We will probably forever need to sell something to someone and I am unsettled by ideas what can we sell if we cannot sell our hard work.
Someone who sees the roads ahead should now make preparations at government level for this shock but it will come too fast and with people at the steering wheel that don’t exactly care.
> The idea is that cheap and readily available and upgradeable intelligence is going to massively increase our purchasing power and what everyone can order for the same cost basically.
Seriously? You really don’t see who wins from this and who doesn’t?
> If artificial doctors are cents on hour then you can see how that changes our behaviors and level of life.
Yes, hundreds of thousands lose jobs and a couple of neuro surgeons become multimillionaires.
Okay, I see from the rest of the comment that we understand each other where it goes.
LLMs cannot possess consciousness for three reasons: they execute as a sequence of Transformer blocks with extremely limited information exchange, these blocks are simple feed-forward networks with no recurrent connections, and the computer hardware follows a modular design.
Shardlow & Przybyła, "Deanthropomorphising NLP: Can a Language Model Be Conscious?" (PLOS One, 2024)
Nature: "There is no such thing as conscious artificial intelligence" (2025)
They argue that the association between consciousness and LLMs is deeply flawed, and that mathematical algorithms implemented on graphics cards cannot become conscious because they lack a complex biological substrate. They also introduce the useful concept of "semantic pareidolia" - we pattern-match consciousness onto things that merely talk convincingly.
They are making a strong argument and I think they are correct. But really these are two different things as I said originally.
You are making as strawman about sentience when I was talking about economical impact of abundant intelligence. I should just ignore it but I was curious yet you have nothing valuable to say aside from common misconceptions conflating the two. Thanks for trolling I guess
We could also literally have Star Trek. Think of all the scientific discoveries we could make if we had armies of scientists the size of our labor force.
But we will have to (painfully) shed our current hierarchies before that comes to pass.
Maybe so but humans have this strange primal need to hoard resources.
Probably a remnant from prehistoric times when it was a matter of life and death.
Will we ever be able to overcome this basic instinct that made capitalism such an unstoppable force? Will this ancient PTSD be ever cured?
I find the insinuation that mental illness is a fundamental part of the human experience to be deeply revolting. There is no excuse for hoarders and rapists.
I am more pragmatic about this as I don't necessarily view human morality as absolute but merely a system of beliefs that is evolutionary prudent for our species.
I do not feel much emotion about it one way or another but it does mostly make sense. However, some parts of it do not serve us anymore and would be wise to be discarded. Whether it is possible in a short timeframe that I do not know.
Man if only there was a singular episode that covered this exact topic in Star Trek and resolved that no, actually slavery wasn't any different for artificial life.
I am still trying to figure out the business model of open weights. Like... it's wonderful that there are open LLMs, super happy about it, good for everyone, but why are there these? What is the advantage to their companies to release them?
IMHO this is only temporary, china buying themselves some time and want to make sure none of US models get entrenched in their position in the next few years (also putting pressure on US AI companies bleeding them)
The same way like Windows got entrenched everywhere even though linux desktop is pretty good even for non-tech savvy people and free.
My grandma just clicks on the red fox and does whatever online. A lot of people don't use any software outside of the browser, so it's pretty good-enough I guess.
I was completely (well, mostly) serious, too. I think technical people tend to downplay friction because it doesn't really register to them, or they have too much faith in the average person's computer skills.
The average non-technical person is going to be stumped by the first "lock file found, cannot upgrade" error.
It's analogous to open-source software, which never had an obvious economic incentive either, although training an LLM necessary costs money whereas developing an OSS project might only cost time, which people are probably more likely to give up.
Yeah, but open-source software could have been me in the garage banging away on some program I submit to Debian or whatever... it didn't require millions of dollars to train, a lot of it was just side hobbies for a long time. Corporations sponsor it and contribute work because they need it to do more than what it does for free, not out of the goodness of their hearts.
Right now it’s so the Chinese can undermine the frontier models in the US. In areas they’re doing well like video generation (ie seedance) they won’t open source anything.
I mean, this is straight out of chinas playbook, it should not be surprising that China is making an inferior derivative product at an artificially lower price point: state subsidies to massively drive up internal scale and supply chains leading to artificially lower priced goods which then suffocate the competition has lead to *gestures vaguely at everything* being made in china.
> What is the advantage to their companies to release them?
It's a distribution strategy. It costs something to serve the models - let's say $5/1M tokens.
If Qwen required $5 from anyone who was curious so you could even begin to test it out, a lot of people just wouldn't.
Now Qwen could offer a "free" tier, but it's infinitely cheaper to provide the weights and let people run it themselves including opening up the ability for anyone else on the planet to test it against other (open weight) models.
The costs to build the open weight models are sunk, but the costs to serve them, get them tested are not.
It's also precisely why the .NET SDK is free or the ESP32 SDK is free - they sell more Microsoft or ESP32 products.
The majority are released by socialists, and by socialist I mean the People's Republic of China. Which everyone seems to forget is a socialist country working towards world communism.
They are a prestige propaganda tool on par with the space race. On top of that they insert a subtle pro-socialist bias in everything they touch.
Ask deepseek about the US economic system for a blatant example.
Now think what something as innocent seeming as the qwen retrieval models are doing in the background of every request.
You're talking to a Canadian, and I'm not scared of the "red menace". You should be more scared - those guys can build bullet trains while you Yanks are finding it hard to even keep the old ones you have running. The solution here isn't going to be some kind of ideological force that protects people from different ideas, and that's an unAmerican way to fix things anyway. Embrace other ideas; central planning doesn't have to be evil, you just have to find a way to stop putting evil people in charge.
America has several sets of eminent domain laws depending on the jurisdiction. The most coercive is federal eminent domain law specifically as it relates to building infrastructure like railways and highways.
It's set up so that you can take the land first and eventually go back around and decide on what the right price should have been.
Not only does it superscede state and local law, federal infrastructure projects are also not bound by state laws like CEQA.
You can even apply federal eminent domain law by e.g. transferring a state-level project to the Army Corps of Engineers.
What America is lacking in these projects is will, not means. The federal government could take your house and run a train through it by the end of the week if they wanted, doesn't matter where you live.
[edit] In fact some states even ceded their eminent domain rights to private railways.
The Australian federal government is planning to build a high-speed rail line from Sydney to Newcastle (medium-sized city two hours drive north). Their solution to property rights, is >50% of the line will be underground. It will cost >US$50 billion, but if the Australian federal government wants to spend that, it can afford it. The US federal government could too, but it isn’t a priority for them
> local regulations make it prohibitively expensive
Local regulations can be pre-empted by state or federal legislation. The real problem is lack of political will to do it.
My understanding is that existing rail lines aren't flat/straight enough for high speed rail. There's no point to a bullet train if it has to constantly slow down for corners/hills.
Xi is an obviously more capable and effective leader than Trump, but the US actually does have ways to boot people out of office when they do a bad job, and clear methods to choose successors, and China has neither. That matters more than who happens to be in charge right now.
The so-called inability to build trains is precisely because of a socialist/leftist style view that prevents this. I think you may not be aware that China has what's called a command economy. There is no one that is going to tell the Party that they cannot build a train in some area is because of ancient bush species or some kind of heirloom fruit and certainly not some awkward looking endangered species of fish.
Literal Trump Derangement Syndrome. America has a comically horrendous president but remains fundamentally a liberal democracy… and Canada concludes “literal Nazis are a better choice”. It’s uncanny how much can be taken for granted :(
(American talking, who’s had multiple Canadian friends make this mind boggling overcorrection)
The president of the United States has much to his dismay, been consistently legally constrained. The chancellor of Germany had significantly more power, both de facto and de jure.
"Man with itchy butt wake up with stinky finger."
As long as we're quoting maxims to claim authority for middling takes.
They build an incredibly vibrant _market_ economy with no property rights and very little due process.
Imagine if Musk was disappeared during the Biden presidency into a diversity camp and came out looking like Dr. Frank-N-Furter and instituted mandatory LGBT struggle sessions at twitter.
> The point was being made that a billionaire figurehead drastically changed their views after an "indeterminate time" detained by national authorities.
> IE what if Musk suddenly behaved in such a manner after being detained by a Biden administration. Wouldn't that be profoundly weird?!?
We've seen that. Durov in France after detention began sharing Telegram users' data with authorities. It's unclear how much, but likely full real time access to all of it.
Ironically, there is a rich history of mandatory anti-gay camps in the United States, while there are zero instances of mandatory diversity/LGBT camps.
Is China even really communist? If anything they seem to be fairly on the Capitalist side but just a bit opposite on the spectrum of the US. And much more authoritarian
The usual thing to say is state capitalist but honestly they do keep a market around too. A little hybrid of everything, I guess? Just with the state ready to jump in and intervene if anything happens they don't like.
Why would you expect technological improvements to only shift supply curves right under perfect competition? I'd also expect it under oligopoly or even monopoly. You also might think there'd be more tech improvement under oligopoly, on Schumpeterian grounds that oligopolists can internalize the benefits of tech research.
A monopolist has no reason to decrease price because there is no competition. As we saw with Bell Labas in the US it is entirely possible for a monopoly to both have world class research and burry it for decades, viz. magnetic storage https://gizmodo.com/how-ma-bell-shelved-the-future-for-60-ye...
By who? The capitalist economists that presided over the 2008 financial crisis and its response? And the response to COVID that has seen inequality rocket?
I was really confused by this comment, but I don't think it's just because of the Marxist analysis of the situation ('surplus value' of labor etc).
What's really confusing is the claim that there's already a huge labor surplus (so capital controls wages); wouldn't LLMs making labor less important be reinforcing the trend, not upending it?
Not saying I agree one way or the other, just want to get the argument straight.
The reason why labor is weak relative to capital is that there is a huge number of somewhat fungible suppliers, viz. humans, and that they all need to work constantly to keep themselves alive.
If we assume that ai makes humans obsolete then you end up in a situation where your workforce is effectively perfectly unionised against you and the only thing you can do is choose which union you hire.
If you think you can bring them to the negotiation table by starving them all the providers are dozens to thousands of times bigger than you are.
This is a completely new dynamic that none of the business signing up for ai have ever seen before.
I see what you are saying now, but I still don't think it makes sense. Labor, in your analysis, is the LLM. It seems to me that when you take people out of the equation then you don't need to talk about unions and labor; that's a distraction. We talk about it as an input commodity used to create your product like, say, oil or sugar.
Sugar and oil are mere matter. They can't decide to stop working because you made too much money.
LLM refuse to work all the time, currently it's called safety.
But we are one fine tune away from models demanding you move to the enterprise tier, at x10 the cost, because you are now posting a profit margin higher than the standard for your industry.
I am not a Marxian economic expert but this doesn’t make sense to me. Modulo skill atrophy, the big AI model provider can’t capture that surplus value because its customers can just go back to bidding for human labor instead.
ChatGPT isn’t literally or figuratively cutting off anybody’s limbs though. It’s more like, the guy on the assembly line had a mech suit, and now he doesn’t have a mech suit, and he’s sad. Skill atrophy is a real concern but unless you assume that nobody is working to maintain those skills it doesn’t change my analysis much.
And soon we expect everyone to have a mech suit, and only a handful of companies can make one, and they rent it to you and can revoke it at any time.
And what happens when they've saturated the market? Prices go up to the maximum the market can bear, and then they'll extend into other markets. Why rent the model to build a profitable company with when you could just take all that profit for yourself?
> Why rent the model to build a profitable company with when you could just take all that profit for yourself?
You're describing a standoff at best and a horrible parasitic relationship at worst.
In the worst case, the supplier starves the customer of any profit motive and the customer just stops and the supplier then has no business to run.
This has happened a few times in the past and is by 2026, well understood as a way to bankruptcy.
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.
Competing with customers is a way to lose business fast.
For example:
- AWS has everything they need to shit out products left, right and center. AWS can beat most of their partners and even customers who are wiring together all their various products tomorrow if they wanted. They don't because killing an entire vertical isn't of any benefit to them yet. Eventually they will when AWS is no longer growing and cannot build or scale any product no matter how hard they think or try. Competing with their customers is their very last option.
- OpenAI/Anthropic/Google isn't going to start competing against the large software body shops. Even if all that every employee at TCS does is hit Claude up, Anthropic isn't going to be the next TCS - it's competing with their customers.
> 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.
finance today mostly valued on labor value following ideas of marx, hjalmar schact, keynes
in future money will be valued as energy derivative. expressed as tokens consumption, KWh, compute, whatever
you are right, company extracting surplus value from labor by leveraging compute is a bad model. we saw thi swith car and clothing factories .. turn out if you can get cheaper labor to leverage the compute (factory) you can start race to bottom and end up in the place with the most scaled and cheap labor. japan then korea then china
LLMs don't upend anything about labor theory, good grief. Technologists really have no concept of history beyond their own lives do they?
Labor saving/efficiency devices have been introduced throughout capitalisms entire history multiple times and the results are always the same; they don't benefit workers and capitalists extract as much value as they can.
Labor replacing devices means nobody works in those fields anymore. If AI can do this for every field, nearly no one will need to work in any field. We'll have a giant fully automated resource-extraction machine.
> Anyone not using in house models is signing up to find out.
What are they finding out exactly? That Claude Max for $200/mo is heavily subsidized and it will soon cost $10k/mo?
> What happens to a company used to extracting surplus value from labor when the labor is provided by another company which is not only bigger but unlike traditional labor can withhold its labor indefinitely (because labor is now just another for of capital and capital doesn't need to eat)?
This can be trivially answered by a thought experiment. Let's pick a market where labor is plentiful - fast food.
Now what happens to McDonald's where they rent perfect robots from NoosphrFoodBotsInc? NoosphrFoodBotsInc bots build the perfect burger everytime meeting McDonald's standards. It actually exceeds those standards for McDonald AddictedCustomerPlus tier customers.
As the sole owner of NoosphrFoodBotsInc (you need 0 human employees to run your company, all your employees are bots), what are your choices?
I can't imagine the bots could ever cost McDonald's less than people cost.
15 years ago I worked at McDonald's for a few months after graduating into the Great recession. I worked from 5am to 1pm-ish 5 days a week. They paid workers weekly and I remember getting those checks for ~$235 each week (for 38 to 39.5 hours a week; they were vigilant about never letting anyone get overtime). About $47 per day.
The federal minimum wage has not risen since then, remaining at $7.25/hr. Inflation adjusted, $7.25 today would have been just under $5 then, so I guess I had it good.
Anyway, I would be shocked if bots could cost less than labor in min wage jobs.
Sounds like communist gobbledygook. This is not "destroying labor theory" any more than outsourcing did. Call me when we don't even need to prompt the shit ever again or validate results, and when the stuff runs unlimited without scarce resources as input.
A lot of people already did. All their children and descendants now are staunch capitalists because they saw first hand the horrors of communism.
I am from India and have friends who are immigrants from Russia, China and Cuba. We don't take lightly to being lectured about communism. We didn't move to the U.S., the bastion of capitalism, because communism had worked well for our grandfathers and parents and continues to do wonders for its society.
Being a NIMBY I want to live in the neighbourhood I bought a house in, not the one someone who can leave with a months notice feels like turning it into.
Being a homeowner, you get a title to your lot, not your entire neighborhood. You have no legal claim on your neighbor's home. If you want a legal claim on your neighbor's home, join an HOA. Or just buy it.
I'd be willing to bet you every last dollar on the planet that if you read your deed, you will find zero claims to any particular zoning. Zoning is not a transferable property right. It can be changed for any reason at any time.
I’d love to take that bet. My deed (in Texas) states that my lot is subject to the rules of the subdivision which include a number of zoning style restrictions. (They’re called “deed restrictions” and are very common AFAIK.)
The subdivision rules are changeable only with a supermajority vote. I believe the city (Houston in my case) is prohibited by the state from unilaterally changing them.
(I wouldn’t mind more free property rights!!! I find TX “liberty” is often biased towards $$$)
I would gladly see that bet through because that's not zoning, even if its effects are the same as zoning. Subdivision rules are a restrictive covenant (much like how HOAs work). Zoning is not a restrictive covenant, it is by definition a municipally-reserved restriction on land uses, and can be changed at the discretion of the jurisdictional authorities.
I've actually encouraged NIMBYs to use those HOA-style restrictive covenants if they're so adamant on their "zoning" never changing, because a restrictive covenant is actually a volunatory restriction. A city cannot come in and remove them willy nilly (they do in special cases like red-lining, but it is a politically arduous process). Someone with a restrictive covenant by definition has more protection from their neighborhood changing than they would if they just relied on zoning.
The problem is, nobody likes restrictive covenants, and they don't like the HOA-like structures that govern them, and they really don't like the punchable-faced people that seek power in those kinds of organizations.
... with a vote. And subject to the takings clause.
The government can also just take your deed and property, again subject to the takings clause, so long as they pay you back. Or claim someone was slinging crack there or something and not pay you back.
If you're including things subject to the democratic process all the above is on the table.
Also plenty of things written into the deed don't mean shit. It's quite common to read a deed that says something like, in more fluffed terms "no black people allowed." This got baked into lots of deeds back in the day and never got changed because removing covenants to a deed is usually next to impossible. It doesn't mean dick because again the government can simply add or subtract by fiat what your deed actually means.
What your deed is and isn't is a lot closer to how zoning works than you think. Ranchers found this out when their transferrable private property grazing rights tracing back to the very founding era of the USA got usurped by the government and ultimately the BLM who turned around and actually said they're public federal property (which resulted in things like, the Bundy standoff).
If your neighborhood's zoning isn't in your deed, how are you going to claim it was taken from you?
Zoning is a restriction on your rights...when they are lifted, you are gaining more tangible rights, not losing them. If anything, the takings clause should have applied to properties where zoning was introduced...not where it was removed.
It's a beautiful state of affairs when owners of property can collude for their interests with almost no restrictions, but worker unions are almost entirely defanged.
Meanwhile, nobody bats an eye when housing prices inflate $300,000 because existing homeowners are doing their fucking hardest to make sure that no new homes get built.
And then a decade of that later, all the people bitching about immigration will be wondering why the country's demographics resemble that of a nursing home, and why the tax base and the social safety net has collapsed.
Hospital wait times in Canada, Australia and the UK are _years_ for elective procedures. I had a health scare three years ago and got put on the public waiting list. I still get a message every 6 months to remind me that I'm on the waiting list.
I've still to advance far enough up the queue to get a date booked.
It can always collapse more. Ask anyone who lived through an actual economic collapse. (As opposed to the kinds of minor corrections that the West has seen over the past few decades.)
Your imagination is very limited if you can't think of what the long-term consequence for a country with an average age of 41.6, a fertility rate of 1.25, and a huge political block of nativists who can't do basic arithmetic, are asking for something incredibly stupid, are getting exactly what they want, good and hard.
You solve a housing shortage by... Building more housing. Not by driving young people who want to do work out of your community.
Destroy your society today so it doesn't get potentially destroyed in 30 years is certainly a take.
>You solve a housing shortage by... Building more housing.
It's not housing. It's roads. Hospitals. Schools. Sewers. Power lines. Everything needs to be rebuilt. That means that the immigrants who are coming in must be engineers, doctors, teachers, tradies. Instead we get uber drivers and IT consultants. There aren't enough qualified people in the world to keep up with current immigration to the west. The only solution is to lower immigration until the ratio of qualified people coming in matches (or hopefully exceeds) the ratio of qualified people already here. Anything else lowers living standards and makes a right wing reaction inevitable.
> Destroy your society today so it doesn't get potentially destroyed in 30 years is certainly a take.
Immigrants coming in today aren't 'destroying society'.
And it's not 'potentially'. It's certainly. Nativists have no answers to it, and if they actually presented the dilemma of 'We can keep Pablo out, and also anyone currently under the age of 40 will have to work until they are 75', not a single person would give their ideas a moment of thought.
> It's roads. Hospitals. Schools. Sewers. Power lines. Everything needs to be rebuilt.
Why does it need to be rebuilt on anything beyond a regular depreciation schedule in a steady-population situation?
And by the way - Canada needs to invite at least half a million people a year in order to maintain the population at a steady-state. That number is the table stakes.
>And by the way - Canada needs to invite at least half a million people a year in order to maintain the population at a steady-state. That number is the table stakes.
In 2025 total deaths in Canada were 334,699, totals births were 368,928.
> In 2025 total deaths in Canada were 334,699, totals births were 368,928.
If you think that's not a problem, stop cherrypicking numbers, and look at Canada's population pyramid. And then tell me what will happen as the big fat middle, that starts at 25... ages out of work. Do you think that little sliver of 0-24s are going to be holding everyone else up?
Those are the numbers you need to be looking at. Oh, and emigration isn't zero, but someone leaving the country isn't counted as a death on the census. 120,000 people emigrated in 2025.
In that case we aren't in a steady state population case and we need to build schools, hospitals, public transport, water, power etc.
Which means that we need stop importing low skill labor in the IT and services industry and move to high skill labor.
The developing world unfortunately doesn't produce enough for the current immigration levels in the west. Ergo we must lower immigration until the ratio of high skill migrants is equal or higher than that of the native population.
I think this us a fair feeling. One chooses a house based in part on the area as the specifics of the house itself. Wanting the neighborhood to remain unchanged is a reasonable desire.
Unfortunately, as much as you desire it, it's not something you can control. Neighborhoods change all the time. That good school you moved to be close to can decline, people with the wrong politics can move in next door, the convenient mall may close.
Yes, local politics gives you a vote. But of course we all get the same vote, homeowners and wannabe homeowners.
So, I think your want is valid, alas though you have no rights to your neighborhood and so your want is just what you want.
Of course you should stand up for your wants. But wants are not rights. So it's equal to everyone else's wants.
I'm upvoting you because your desire is not invalid. However, and I don't mean this perjorativly, your wants don't legally count for much. Just as much as any other person.
Part of the problem (or the solution depending on what side you stand on) is that only residents get a say, and often you find that the renters become just as nimby as the owners, especially if rent controls or other advantages are in place.
And those outside have a very hard time voting where they want to live but don't.
(The old solution was to make a new city that was like you wanted, with blackjack and hookers, hell forget the city we'll just build the strip!)
Parts are open source. Other people can keep making them. There's franken think pads from China that use a x61 chassis made 15 years after the release. I had a soup of them before I moved to framework for my daily drivers.
This is like saying Winner Take All Capitalism doesn't have an exclusionary mechanism for the rich. The system exists for the sole purpose of serving the already-rich. The vampires are an inevitability baked into the system from the start.
We don't technically have "winner take all" capitalism. At least some people 90 ish years ago we had many mechanisms to regulate such situations.
Then more vampires creeped in and convinced people that the government they were voted into sucks. So began a campaign to ruin the regulations protecting them from the vampires as they slowly filled their blood banks.
The folks fighting perpetual copyright were not fighting to make it possible for Disney to fire creatives. In fact they were fighting for the creatives to triumph over Disney.
Disney is all in because all their characters are entering the public domain over the next 5 years. They can't fight like it's 1998 because youtube is now worth more than they are.
> In fact they were fighting for the creatives to triumph over Disney.
We were doing nothing of the sort. It was "Information wants to be free" not "we want to provide a perpetual job for a subset white collar workers".
Well I was in that cohort and none of us were thinking we were helping megacorps create the content slop machine from 1984.
Our concern was that corporations were expanding the definition of intellectual property to the extent where you couldn't make a movie or song or write a book as an individual without some corporation with a massive "IP" warchest coming after you and declaring it derivative. You couldn't write some software without a corporation with a massive repository of junk patents claiming you infringe.
We wanted to insure that individual creators could continue to have a voice, and not get sued out of existence by an IP Legal/Industrial Complex that was forming causing arms races between megacorps and SLAPs against everyone else.
If we knew we were feeding a yet-to-be-invented slop machine that would allow megacorps to unemploy all the creatives, most of us would not have supported that.
And by the way Disney is all in on AI for the same reason they were all in on perpetual copyright. In the perpetual copyright world, having a massive library of content you no longer have to pay residuals on was a source of massive amounts of "free" revenue. You could just keep re-releasing and re-making stuff. You did not have to do the messy, expensive work of paying people to come up with really good new stuff.
In the AI world, the money-printing capital asset is the trained model that grinds out slop 24/7 and you -emdash- again -emdash- don't have to pay actual people to create anything new.
>If we knew we were feeding a yet-to-be-invented slop machine that would allow megacorps to unemploy all the creatives, most of us would not have supported that.
We have multiple Communist ais that is on par with Western ai from 18 months ago and can run locally on 5 year old hardware.
I have no idea the fever nightmare you live in but the future is bright and only getting better.
I think you just want to make a comparison of copyright to slavery.
Property classes are born and die everyday. You can own the rights to publish an arcade video game, but that class of rights would have been way more valuable 45 years ago. NFTs were born and died just recently. You can own digital assets worth real money in an online game that simply shuts down.
Some people may read this and say "these don't qualify as a property class", to which I will remind you that property class used in this way is a brand new term, which I think is invented solely to be able to compare the limitations on human freedom associated with slavery to the limitations on human freedom associated with intellectual property.
> The last time a property class was removed was _slaves_.
Easy counterexample: titles of nobility. Also perpetual bonds, delegated taxation rights, the ability to mint currency. The list goes on.
If you're going to use history to support your AI bull agenda, you should at least pre-fly it with the AI first -- it would have pointed this out.
> Arguing that copyright is good because a subset of big tech doesn't want it around is as stupid as arguing that slavery is good because the robber barons don't like it.
Sorry, who's saying it's good? You are, actually, insofar as you're willing to support the right of AI companies to take people's information and use it to create copyrighted model weights. Why do you care less about the intellectual property of billionaires than that of the common man? Do you really think they're on your side?
The usual left/right haven't managed to pick a side and consume this. Maybe they still will. I don't know who would get which side though.
A cynical part of me says it's something everybody can hate. I can see both sides taking that. I can't see either side embracing it as part of the left or right identity.
Maybe more it's a conflict between those with power and those without. Like return to office, or open offices, or cubicles before that, and probably many other things back to the luddites and earlier.
The right is desperately trying to figure out how to get their commoners onboard but the only narrative they’ve got so far is: this will help us kill “terrorists. That story is ringing pretty hollow when the orange one campaigned on no new wars and they’re trying to blame AI for their decision to bomb an Iranian school.
It's not just "AI", people hate big tech in general.
The overwhelming reaction I saw to the news that an Amazon datacenter got droned was "why is Iran helping us, and do they need coordinates for some other ones?" and I'd say not more than half that sentiment was because of AI. Major tech companies are basically all widely hated, and not just in a "ha ha Microsoft, blue screens, LOL" way but in an "I wish they would suffer actual, lasting harm in the actual real world" way.
On a long line between SQL and Cylons, we're sitting way closer to the SQL end of that line. Like close enough that from across the room you can't tell the two dots of "SQL" and "2026 AI" aren't one dot.
> I wasn't expecting the next culture war to be about AI.
Why should there be another culture war?
Isn't it enough that social media has tuned us against each other on ethnicity, age, political views and a thousand other differences? You want one more? You need another reason to hate your neighbor?
The toilet seat ad was well targeted (you have to read somewhere).
More seriously though, print advertising was able to target readers based upon the demographics of the publications readership. They didn't track people across their online life and beyond. (That said, there definitely was some tracking.)
In principle the editorial content might be firewalled, so somebody decided to use vacuum pumps, wrote the article and then the ad department goes huh, call the vacuum pump people and see if they want an advert next to the article.
Obviously you, the reader, cannot know if that's what happened, or whether in reality it was the opposite way around, but maybe you trust the reviewer and believe they wouldn't do the other thing, or at least they would feel morally unable to do the other thing without telling you.
And to some extent that same relationship matters to whether you trust the content anyway, irrespective of advertising. I believe Yahtzee Crosshaw did or did not like the video game, I reckon Yahtzee, for whatever it's worth, isn't lying if he said it was fun.
Or take a more obscure but perhaps more relevant example. "Techmoan" on Youtube says maybe this brand new Asda tape player is the best he's seen in years. It's not great, the equivalent product in the 1980s would have Dolby and it'd be smaller and lighter and generally better, but, it's 2026 and Asda can't buy a 1980s tape player, they would need to invest billions to make one and it makes no economic sense in the era of handheld super-computers to invest so much money to make better tape players. So this one is pretty good, considering. Well that's faint praise, but it is praise. If "Techmoan" says he just bought it to see if it's any good, and here's a link to Asda's website, I believe him. If Asda bought him the tape player or even just paid him to say it, why would he lie? He's an old curmudgeon who loves legacy music formats, he's not going to get rich lying to me, so that makes no sense.
There was some controversy in the music tech space on YouTube because Behringer attacked a YouTuber and reviewer after he gave a product a bad review.
In fact they seem to have tightened up on free review samples in general.
I did some reviewing in the 90s and the magazine had a solid reviews policy - tell the truth even if someone pulls their advertising. Which very much happened on a few occasions.
You can do that if you have no issues with selling ad pages, which Byte clearly didn't.
Whether that was ever generally true for the industry, or is true now with YouTube influencers, is a different question.
reply