I agree that “inherently political” is usually a thought terminating cliche. What kinds of technologies are conditionally political?

The internet is a bad counterexample as it originated from a department of defense project and a number of other government programs that focused on communications and military applications.

Amazon’s AWS and core delivery business are fairly mature, and with consumer sentiment poor and non-AI tech contracting, having a growth vertical like Bedrock is good for shareholders. Without their own core tech, Amazon will be paying rent on AVs in a couple of years - or worse, they will lose all of the benefits or their logistics monopoly because an AV semi can afford to be inefficient

What is AV, autonomous vehicle or?

Autonomous vehicle, yes

Expecting “transparency” out of a government trying to protect national interests seems like a tall order. They have to withhold or obfuscate things to do that job.

I do this several times per week. You can ask Claude to hunt down duplication, brittle scripty code, overly defensive fallbacks, and footguns.

It's kind of dumb that we have to do this as a separate process, which introduces even more churn and review burden, rather than having this out of the box in the code generation process.

But think of the profits for the AI companies!

I don’t know about your co but at my job we very much have non SWE shipping their own (mostly garbage) apps

This article is good but it presupposes the norm of democracy and it presupposes (somehow) that the collapse of western democracy will not result in war. Both of these are fundamental misunderstandings, and while I love neither democracy nor war, the dissolution of the American economic system would result in both less democracy and more war.

It’s hard to square this with the post 2024 AI-investment economy. Interest rates have stayed higher longer than expected, while many, many companies (Vercel, Cursor, Wave-whatever that got bought out last year, whatever Alexandr Wang’s thing) got billion dollar valuations with no path to profitability and no revenue.

It seems that ROI has become more important in the last 5 years, but then again you have these Space or Rare Earth shitcos trading at -200x PE while all of their industrial promise is directly undermined by rising costs from AI.

The likely forecast for this year is either rate hikes combined with further labor market deterioration and consumption somehow going negative, or inflation eating up all of the (still non existent) profits from AI mega caps themselves.

It’s hard to see how this ends well without a lowered cost of capital or more interest in taking on capex risk, which seems frankly unlikely. The worst case scenario seems to be a lot of bad debt with nobody except for perhaps Berkshire or China who would be interested or capable when it comes to salvaging it. Armchair economist here, grain of salts a plenty.

I think this is essentially Heidegger’s commentary on technology but reengineered from first principles

It's also basically what was written about in that infamous manifesto.

I think I might be going through withdrawal because I feel like I rarely get that fun feeling anymore with coding :(

It can be gratifying to get shit done but I love the feeling of coming up with a great reusable component and then making an entire app out of it

A lot of times the act of specifying test criteria prevents developers from accidentally vibe coding themselves into a bad implementation. You can then read the tests and verify that it does what you want it to. You can read the code!

I’m not saying that it’s all hunky dory, but you use AI for straight up test driven development to catch edge cases and correct sloppy implementations before they even get coded by your giant chaos machine.