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That’s the key. The world is a delicate fabric that changes over time.
It’s nice (or frustrating) reading opinions. Forecasting the future is tricky.
While the world and us humans waste our time arguing, conflicting or dreaming, earth and the universe can easily introduce earthquakes, meteors and other unforeseen events that will have more impact than human made events we already cannot completely forecast.
Self-driving cars are easy though, 12-year-olds make them in high school STEM classes. You just give it a light sensor so it can follow a strip of white tape down the middle of the "road" and let it go from one place to the other.
Oh, until it hits an obstruction.
Okay well you add some sort of bumper switch to it so if it hits an obstruction it stops and backs up, to find a route round it.
Ah right, well, let's see, that didn't work so well when the obstruction was much smaller and squashier than the car.
Let's have some sort of distance sensors that - ah bollocks, they pick up everything including objects beside the road, and stop the car.
Okay what about some sort of camera and machine vision system? Great, that lets it "see" the road ahead and steer or brake to avoid obstacles! But it turns out it now needs to understand a bit of physics, at least enough to stop it booting it wide open through a sharp bend and ending up shiny side down.
Right so now it will drive at a sensible speed through bends, use a camera to look for obstructions, LIDAR to look for obstructions too, and it can actually follow road markings quite well, and even pick up speed from signs.
Ah. It can't actually be used around other vehicles because it can't anticipate what they're going to do, and keeps getting into bad situations that it then needs to brake and swerve to avoid.
Oh well, turns out self-driving cars aren't easy after all.
> I can’t believe those who seriously try and say America’s value is in consuming.
as a case against outsourcing manufacturing really doesn't understand the value that societies create when they are on the forefront of innovation.
Maybe, just maybe, at a certain point physical labour is not the best way to use your working population, but instead, you know, services, innovation, etc?
America has been doing pretty good in that regard over the past few decades.
(For disclosure, I'm not from America, but still think this is a silly article)
They desperately do need to do that, though, because manufacturing alone isn’t going to grow their economy any further, as wages in China are already becoming high enough that they’re becoming less attractive to foreign investors.
They’re strategically well positioned to take over the west in the next few decades, but to argue that China is already leaving America et al behind in innovation is silly.
If you think that the US is corrupt when it comes to money, and that that’s the only innovation that the US is currently leading in, I heartily invite you to actually explore China.
(And I say this as someone who lives in South-East Asia)
Where is China leading?
> You could imagine building this exact same thing with humans. Educate them, get them to sit at a desk, read code, find vulns. Actually, I can only really imagine that in China, have you seen the current graduates from the American universities?
Imagine, sure.
But why didn't anyone? I don't think it is a question of quality, though China simply being more populous than the USA* means there are more people at any given competence in any given domain, but cost, both monetary and opportunity.
AI's cheap. It would still be cheap compared to a human even if it cost 3000 USD/month for the token limit we get from the 20/month subscription.
That's the danger.
* by about 4x: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=china%20population%2Fus...
That's why you may notice that in making AI, companies still use teams of highly motivated humans. Obviously they could have AIs holding the reigns of other AIs. Nothing technical is stopping them
1) They report increasingly using AI to improve the AI.
2) Apples to oranges. The best humans can still beat AI in *AI research, per unit time*, but the AI beat the typical team at *finding exploitable bugs, per line of source, per unit cost*.
https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-...
In another post he's quoting Curtis Yarvin. Can't say on here what should be said
This piece was some self-indulgent rambling that didn’t really have any connective threads.
As the rest of the article alludes to, America is a services economy [0]. An industrial economy obviously doesn't have anything to fear from AI because their jobs don't primarily involve pressing buttons on a keyboard to justify their paycheck. That probably explains most of the difference; for China I'd imagine more AI -> More prosperity.
> A human is about 20 petaflops. All of this installed compute is only about a million people.
The number of effective humans might only be around a few million people. Gauss and Euler did a bit more for society than the average 20 petaflops of human flesh. One of the lessons of history is that being able to reliably connect a few really good humans has a lot more potential than a moderate number of more easily confused ones.
There are a lot of smartest cow in the herd phenomenons out there. Even a few hundred thousand AIs would probably outnumber the senior politicians of the world and reducing the damage those politicians do would be a huge win. Gargantuan. Possibly species level impacts like we've never yet seen if a major power like China did it.
> Oh sorry sorry, in a preemptive strike they obviously would have hit us if we didn’t attack them first. Yes yes, defensive preemptive attack. It’s just bullying. It’s stupid.
And I'm probably packing too much into one comment, but you can tell everyone knows this is stupid because the politicians consistently have to use lies instead of trying to argue things on the merits. As soon as people have to try and connect the actual facts to someone who isn't corrupt being better off the argument collapses. The worst people are the ones in the grip of that team-sports emotion where they just support "their side" despite the fact that a policy of war hurts the side engaging in it. The warmongers aren't even on the same side, they're their own lobby of psychopaths.
[0] A term which might be in for the "third world" euphemism treatment, but you never know.
> I know I know, that’s a socialist platitude or something, society that works. What they say right before they argue for a dumbass tax on billionaires or banning plastic straws. Don’t worry I still think most socialists are degrowth morons.
> "it is the Government's housing policy to provide public rental housing (PRH) to low-income families who cannot afford private rental accommodation"
> https://www.gov.hk/en/residents/housing/publichousing/index....
American goes abroad, sees socialist policies working well, then advocates to get rid of socialist policies in America.
From his other post:
> The government should never ever hand out money to anyone. Not poor people, not old people, and not corporations. This creates a society of beggars and lobbyists. You get what you incentivize [1].
What should I expect though? The author couldn't even fix minor bugs in Twitter, and coding is much closer to his specialty than solving social problems.
[1] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-...
From the outside it is really hard to comprehend. Was it FoxNews that poisoned the American mind or the social media brainwashing? How can a society allow a billionaire to cut programs in Africa that saved hundreds of thousands of lives that cost pennies when compared to any military adventures.
American culture has lost its near-monopoly on optimism. We're now almost as cynical as the Europeans. (:D)
That cynicism means civic disengagement, technological doomerism and general symptoms of depression. That collectively degrades the mostly bottom-up structures we've long relied on, requiring shifts to less-efficient (and hastily cobbled together) top-down command structures.
By what metric? You have to go through Scandinavia, Germany, Spain, and a few Eastern european countries before you get to the US on voter turnout. Not to mention labor unions striking as a form of political protest (eg Italian labor unions striking against the Gaza war). And depression prevalence also seems to be higher in the US. Did you mean worse than Europe instead of "almost as" bad?
https://www.pew.org/en/trend/archive/fall-2024/americans-dee...
The ad-powered social media addiction stopped brainwashing?
> This isn’t like when stuff is made in China. Those are basically American factories, just located in another country where you don’t have to negotiate with American labor.
I guess you do need to be socialist to formulate that first sentence in the active instead of passive voice or wonder how it even was possible that America could build American factories in other countries without negotiating with any labor (American or of the other country).
The part that is also missing is how China gladly took all the outsourced jobs, said "thanks guys!" and used them to become the rivaling power to the US it is today.
For some reason, there is this unbelievably thick air of paranoia in America where everyone is just waiting for the day when their job will go away. To a point where I think it should be classified as mass hysteria and looked into by public health authorities.
We should all introspect why so many of us perceive America as this very delicate thing that is hanging on with borrowed time and will fall apart at any moment. Because I don't think it's actually like this.
Compared with China?
https://msadvisory.com/china-social-security-system/
For example, if the local minimum wage in Shanghai is RMB 2,590 per month, the unemployment benefit would range between RMB 1,813 and RMB 2,072.
https://fdichina.com/blog/unemployment-insurance-in-china/
If you look at those with welfare the US are pretty bad.
Lots of money but badly distributed
I used to work at the American office of a Chinese company. Our counterparts in China earned about half as much as we did in the Bay Area (which is a top-tier salary in China and attracts the best people). On the surface there is really no reason for a Chinese tech company to set up an engineering office in the US. And yet many of them do.
One of my colleagues asked our manager whether he thinks our jobs in the US were stable because the teams in China cost so much less. The manager just said the talent quality is still a bit better in the Bay Area so it's worth it. That sounds like a tautology, but I think there's something deeper.
The problem in America is that a lot of companies have started thinking of talent as a "toll", a cost that you need to pay to get things done. If you think of it as a toll, then your objective becomes how to minimize it. I think that's wholly the wrong perspective.
That is not just an AI problem. AI is just worsening a problem in USA society.
For years in the USA losing your job was not that big of a deal, because there were lots of other jobs to do, and they paid well.
The paranoia comes from the fact that people are discovering they have not saved anything and the jobs they need to merely survive (not even prosper anymore) are less and more difficult to obtain.
Hence the perceived value of the job you have is greater, and losing it looks worse.
The American dream was Homer Simpson, a simpleton with a huge house to his name, supporting a family as the (mostly) single earner. Today Homer would not be able to buy his own house, nor support his family.
Being poor is expensive. You have to pay rent for a house that will never be yours, often replace cheap things that break more often than the more expensive ones.You need money to make money, and that reinforces how money is essentially a zero-sum game. For billionaires to make even more, someone else has to make less.
TL;DR: It's not just AI. Americans are getting poorer. Poor is scary. And they don't have any social net like more socialist countries.
That reason would be the constant proclamation of such by business leaders, and these days, especially by AI company executives.
Just yesterday Elon Musk was in the news again for making noise about the need for a Universal Basic Income, with the clear implication of massive job market disruption.
Yea, because they are not a democracy, so power concentration and automated violence is a plus, not a minus.
Are you both talking about the same group?
You lose your job, two years go by, time to sell you your house and move. Hiring is a total circus right now as well, being subjected to a five course hiring obstacle course is a lot of time that you're burning your savings and or missing other opportunities. Compare this to nearly any time since 2012 when it was at most three, and maybe ONE was a technical.
Most people do not save in America, and even when you are employed the health care system does not take great care of you. All of this "choice" is presented as capitalism working, but really it's a set of land mines where two large entities decide how much they want to take from you (the hospital, and the insurance company). Since the pricing is opaque and the amount the insurance company pays is capricious, vaya con dios.
The line feels like don't get sick, and your own country has thrown you to the wolves (they're in on it). Similar to unemployment, and the other "safety nets" not managed centrally or well. Massive delays, and your mortgage is due.
Also, you are paying for all of these safety nets all the time when you are making money, but it is deeply gated when you need it. Sorry for the paragraphs, but watching a friend go through this now and it's very wild.
If you're able to save more than 10%/m, you are very ahead of the game.
As for USA losing the Mandate of Heaven, even people from other countries seem sad to see it happening. Informally, two different groups of Portuguese people I've talked to in the last two weeks in Lisbon had a sentiment of "how could this have happened to such a great country?" Mostly due to the extreme news reports coming from the US, ICE, war, rhetoric etc.
It is the original sin of the American healthcare system.
America was on the road to socialism from the 1930s to the 1950s but it all went to shit and here we are: back in the Gilded Age.
Social benefits doesn’t have anything to do with socialism
One of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, where people are living 4-6 to the room.
This is simply expat navel gazing and little more.
What's more:
> "it is the Government's housing policy to provide public rental housing (PRH) to low-income families who cannot afford private rental accommodation"
> https://www.gov.hk/en/residents/housing/publichousing/index....
Sure, there's a wait-list, but it's available in principle to all of the needy.
Decades of capitalist cruelty has created a social environment so toxic it enabled a clique of conmen to rise to the top.
Now, American hard and soft power are both being dismantled at a rapid pace. Former allies and trade partners are working around the US instead of with it now. It's leadership position has been abandoned, for no good reason at all.
The internal rot is being projected onto the global stage and I don't think Americans quite understand the consequences yet.
To this day, capitalist leaning societies outcompete socialist leaning societies. Just don’t go saying that either has ever truly existed. Socialism and capitalism are utopian fantasies. People are messy and our systems are too.
Good? Things like crypto and the current usa administration should have thought us that completely free markets are ripe for corruption and insider trading. None of that produces anything, and merely concentrates and ties together power and capital.
> As it becomes regulated, the monopolies become entrenched, innovation slows, homogenization is enforced, and products undergo a diminution in quality as monopolies needn’t compete
All of that happens because we let the monopolies do the regulation, and limit and block any antitrust action.
When people talk about a "free" market, they mean "free as in fair".
When billionaires talk about "free" market they actually mean "free as in deregulated".
You don't get "fair" without regulation.
“Freer” markets (for some definition of free) are certainly possible. Deng liberalized China’s markets, and despite persistent and heavy state influence, it has much freer markets today than under Mao. This has been great for the Chinese economy and raised a billion people out of poverty. One could argue that this wouldn’t have happened without state direction, but you can’t ignore the effect of liberalization.
In the US, we have been gradually restricting the freedom of the productive parts of the economy, often by subsidizing scams that put legitimate competitors out of business, or allowing monopolies or private equity to destroy them despite rules intended to protect fair competition. At the same time, we have let scam industries off the leash, and they are free to basically commit open fraud with no controls. It’s a kind of freedom, I guess.
> When people talk about a "free" market, they mean "free as in fair".
> When billionaires talk about "free" market they actually mean "free as in deregulated".
> You don't get "fair" without regulation.
Correct in theory, but you have another definitional problem here.
When people talk about “regulation”, they mean protecting people and businesses against predatory behavior through fair legislation.
When modern politicians talk about “regulation” they mean handouts to friends, government guaranteed monopolies through regulatory moats, and rules designed to harm perceived opponents.
We have a real problem here and it’s going to take some serious effort to fix it before it becomes an issue of “who and whom.”