You know the extraction is more like 10000-to-1 than 1-to-1.
But in essence I do believe I could have had $100k more net worth if they hadn't monopolized all user-acquisition channels and if they hadn't helped bring about the many laws and regulations which made this possible.
I have no ill feelings towards them but I just don't want them in my state competing against me for limited resources using money which they acquired through an unjust scheme which I was coercively made a part of but which I never agreed to and have been protesting for almost a decade (on deaf ears).
It's not personal or even saying anything negative about their character or abilities. From my perspective it's just pure self-preservation. They either need to contribute more tax to make up for the injustice or they leave.
> In 2000 there were 17.3 million manufacturing jobs in the United States. The peak was 19.6 million, in June 1979.
The graph right above that clearly shows the peak was 22 million in 1979.
> From the early 1980s to 2000 the count stayed high, apart from the recessions. China joined the WTO in December 2001. By 2010 manufacturing employment was 11.5 million. In August 2026 it was 12.6 million.
The graph shows it was around 1997 when it went into a deep decline, and was still in that decline when China joined the WTO.
I feel free to curse at it precisely because I’m confident it doesn’t have feelings, and it’s like swearing out loud at an inanimate object like when a shoddy screwdriver breaks, or strips a screw, or whatever.
The problem isn’t the law. The problem is that wealthy companies can use lobbying, political donations, and influence to avoid or weaken enforcement. In other words, the problem is corruption.
If you or your software hacks a website, the law will hit you hard. But powerful AI companies have the money and influence to avoid the same consequences.
The US administration just needs to enforce existing laws equally. Do that, and AI companies will suddenly have a very strong incentive to take safety seriously.
> If the labs end up with only 1-2 models ahead of the others, while spending 10x more than last year, that can only go on for so long. There just isn’t enough money in the world!
intuitively (to me anyways) isn't this one big reason why the top companies are putting out signals to slow down frontier development? its getting to costly and hurting chances of turning a profit come ipo time?
Most people who write novels do so because there’s something (a story, an idea) that they want to communicate to other humans. Sure, you can write a novel for purely commercial purposes, but most people who write do so for the love of storytelling. Which is an inherently social and interpersonal activity.
Making the edge cases work, and lowering the cost of running it via good model choice, context management etc is in some cases really hard. That's valuable in a decent number of cases. I have a system that does something in financial markets - making sure it doesn't screw up, and doesn't cost a fortune to run, is the entire thing for me.
I have this nagging feeling with these kinds of agentic cloud products (and there seem to be so many these days): the promise is secure (as in isolated) workflows, but it’s unclear what that means when so many of the workflows themselves are privileged.
Or in other words: I often struggle to see the security value of a VM that I’m just going to load all of my sensitive credentials into anyways (since the agent needs them). The usability argument seems strong, but the security argument seems to hinge on me treating my local machine as a sort of bastion host, which I don’t think is generally true.
(This isn’t to denigrate the work itself: it seems very good. But it also seems like we’re still groping around a very weak definition of “security” for agentic workflows.)
Lars here. I run the Center for Land Economics with Greg (we wrote the OP blog post). We are not maximalist single taxers.
Henry George was obviously a Single Taxer, but "Georgism" has a generally broader meaning than that. Some Georgists are single taxers, but not all, including Greg and I.
When we talk to elected officials, we don't even talk about Henry George all that much (I did in the ACX article series because it all started with the progress and poverty book review). We mostly speak of "Land value return" and our focus is mostly on pragmatic revenue neutral tax shifts to LVT.
Declarative code has low cyclomatic complexity per unit of business logic. It also tends to have low state management demands (which the functional devotees will tell you is the root of all evil).
You can use a DSL or other abstraction so that you can declare what will happen in what circumstances, in a way that’s succinct and easily comprehensible. And all the repeatable loops and conditionals that make the declared thing happen in the appropriate circumstances are under the hood and needn’t be concern or be loaded into mental context by the person designing or updating the requirements.
It’s not the right solution to every problem, but when you can apply it effectively it’s a huge win.
However, agents and most SWEs are trained on imperative (wrapped in procedural/functional/OOP paradigms), and most will default to imperative because it’s familiar.
As I get deeper in my career I find myself gravitating toward a style that’s declarative where possible, falling back on functional, and then only when necessary imperative/procedural/OOP. It’s nice that many modern languages allow you to mix and match features of all those paradigms.
TL;DR: Mental load is the bane of programmers everywhere, and declarative programming minimizes mental load.
This is a solved problem in other jurisdictions. Effectively you can just allow seniors to defer their property taxes at low interest rates and it becomes a liability on the house when it is transferred on death.
I'm not super concerned about green energy, but i put solar panels on my roof and charge an ev because it's incredibly practical and a much better experience than the status quo.
> And I would note, we absolutely failed to solve liability for software hacks, so your priors should be that coordinating this liability regime will be very hard.
Yeah, that’s one of the places where it gets really complicated. There was that story out of… Australia, I think, where someone asked OpenClaw to get them a slot in a morning gym class and the LLM figured out an unauthenticated API call it could make to cancel other peoples’ registrations to free up slots in the class. Very likely that that violated Australian law, even though nothing was “hacked” per se.
