> I found it interesting that not even this article thinks about it that the US mainland ever can be attacked
It can be, but it would be very, very difficult for anything short of lobbing ICBMs around. You'd have to have a fleet of ships that would be detected as soon as they set sail, and then protect that fleet for the entire voyage, which would also be extremely difficult for any adversary.
Getting boots on US soil would be even tougher.
Drones are an option, but cross-ocean ones are not an easy problem to solve.
We abrogated getting traffic to our websites to Google long ago. Mostly because Google was so good at it that the alternatives became significantly less useful.
Now that Google is focusing on becoming 'self contained', so to speak, we should find a better way to drive traffic to websites. Ideally one that's not under the control of a single corporation.
AI has made my work about 5-8x quicker, just because I'm able to have it cover a lot of the grunt work (update 42 if statements in 32 different files) that took time, but no particular skill.
I think the use cases where AI makes an economic improvement to the status quo for a business are rare, but they do exist, and they can be a significant improvement.
It's like the early days of the dotcom boom and bust - people thought the internet was good for every use case under the sun, including shipping people a single candy bar at a loss. After the dotcom bust, a lot of that went by the wayside, but there was a tremendous economic advantage to the businesses that were more useful when available on the internet.
I think that's incredibly optimistic to the point of unrealism.
Github, outages and all, is a known commodity with a reputation they can make money off of.
Any replacement would have to offer not just compelling feature improvements and uptime, but to have a history long enough to make it trustworthy to migrate to.
And uptime? Easy when you have a small number of customers. Much, much more difficult at a million+ customers (although Microsoft has really dropped the ball).
Github is an ecosystem and its biggest moat is the number of people that use it.
To make a replacement, not only do you have to improve on support for every major use case at a technical level (no easy task, to put it mildly), you also have to make it so compelling to use that Github users will abandon Github en masse.
Someone with an LLM assisted IDE has the theoretical potential to improve on all major Github features. But to make their replacement compelling enough to get folks to leave Github? Not a chance.
The bit about how semiconductors could only have been made in America because only America had the specific combination of freedom of speech, irreverence, pragmatism over dogmatism, meritocracy and welcoming outsiders is definitely an interesting idea, although how true that is?
"It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste LLM stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it."
I picked up a Crumpler Brazillion Dollar Home bag about a decade back to carry all my photography gear, as there were no other bags on the market that would allow you to pack a large format monorail camera in them.
That bag is built like a tank. Still ticking along, a little scuffed up, but zero issues. If you're carting around a few thousand dollars worth of delicate gear, it definitely offers some serious peace of mind.
It's not so much the owner's financial situation, but rather that it'd be cheaper to build new homes than to retrofit a ten floor+ building's plumbing.
You'd also have to install a bunch of showers, which could be a significant problem on its own.
And then there's the increased amount of sewage, which the building might not be able to handle - even the local sewers might not be equipped to handle the uh... Load a large commercial building would generate with 24/7 occupancy vs 8/5 occupancy.
The reason you don't see folks converting commercial spaces into residential isn't because it's not wildly profitable, but because building new purpose-built residential buildings would be cheaper than a conversion for anything other than one or two floors.
Funny how it sounds when you go to the logical conclusion of that statement - "Consumers should be forced to pay the highest prices possible for cars."
It can be, but it would be very, very difficult for anything short of lobbing ICBMs around. You'd have to have a fleet of ships that would be detected as soon as they set sail, and then protect that fleet for the entire voyage, which would also be extremely difficult for any adversary.
Getting boots on US soil would be even tougher.
Drones are an option, but cross-ocean ones are not an easy problem to solve.