Agreed, starlink is obviously advantageous from the global (and extra-global) perspective. Running cables is expensive. But so is launching satellites, and it’s hard to see how you reach a tipping point where satellites gets cheaper than the standard boring cable networking that supports the terrestrial internet
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
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.
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.
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.
I think you can understand that line of reasoning, but you can question its feasibility. You might not have any “star coders”, nor need them day-to-day, but I think the cost of not having one true expert, or having a completely vibe coded system that crashes in production will be extremely high.
Is it that incomprehensible that you might want to limit healthcare offerings to lawful residents only, or that the government might track metadata about how services are doing so, regardless of how they choose to take action on it?
I read the post. I don’t agree with the “people are born to do one thing” mindset. There’s a lot of possibilities out there for everyone. I do identify with this OP fellow somewhat, except that I usually don’t code for fun on nights and weekends (also sunday code sesh can be fun)
I don’t think anyone’s true calling is coding. That’s like saying you really like the act of writing, so much that you’d become a stenographer or a typist or something where you do zero higher level thinking and just absent mindedly press buttons.
Most people who are good at tech hate coding so much that they come up with elaborate abstractions so that they can avoid doing more of it.
I do literally enjoy working with AI sometimes, other times it is hell. But sometimes coding by hand is hell, too, usually when working on other people’s extremely hacky and procedural code.
This is a great reason not to identify too much with your work. I have enjoyed AI because it has reminded me that my real calling is art, and that I should be doing that at 8 pm, not coding