US is out of control on KYC as well. If you're a nomad, as in you don't have a permanent physical address, you cannot have a bank account. You cannot have credit cards. And now you cannot even have a mail handling service, because the new USPS requirements include ID showing a permanent residential address.
Sure this doesn't affect most people, but it affects at least two groups: the very poor, and the perpetual travelers (which includes retired folks who bought RVs and live/drive around the country full time).
Before anyone comments with, "I'm a nomad and I have X bank/credit card", I'll just say that within one year you won't. Every one of those services is legally required to collect your permanent address info. They haven't all done it yet, but they are increasingly becoming compliant. The various services which previously enabled nomad life are becoming blocked by the financial verification services.
The usual (bad) suggestion is, "just use a family member's address". This is a bad idea for many reasons, not the least of which is how the sloppy credit and data aggregation agencies will comingle yours and your family's data, resulting in all kinds of problems later.
Re: Apartment
You can't rent an apartment in Texas without proving your ID, passing a credit check, and potentially overcoming other obstacles. And you can't stay in a hotel for more then 30 days at a time (without separate bookings). You can't check into a hotel without proving your ID and the IDs of everyone staying with you.
Re: Public Spaces
Few and far between in many US cities.
Re: Police, security, fences
I'm not sure where in the US you are, but lots of developed areas of Texas are like what you describe. Worse, you've got the occasional Proud American property owner who is just itching to be a manly man and brandish his gun.
Of all the billionaires in the world, what percent of them did something like this, vs the percent who reached that number from investments (and by investments I mean assets they possessed which ballooned in value)?
I'm betting it is a tiny fraction. Most modern "wealth" is all based on investment games.
The new rich have warped concepts about how they "earned" their wealth.
Very, very rarely does someone actually build or provide something so significant that it results in them profiting enough to become that wealthy.
Instead, they (possibly unknowingly) play a complex game that essentially defines complex rules that result in outsized rewards while obscuring the real process of gaining those rewards.
Most of this revolves around magic numbers. The best example is "valuation". Valuation in theory is reasonable. But after just a couple of iterations of mixing leverage with hype and gambling (with other people's money, of course), there is now enough artificial wealth to invest in new ventures to get some % ownership. And based on the amount paid and the percent received, the venture now has this official value. There's no legitimacy behind this calculation other than the fact that everyone agrees to play this game.
Now that your startup has a nice big valuation, you go through several successive rounds of funding - where each round serves two purposes: 1. give you more cash to burn so you can move faster than regulatory bodies can keep up (Uber) or enough spare cash that you can slow the regulatory processes by throwing lawyers at it, and 2: pay the previous investors a nice reward.
Repeat this process several times, eventually resulting in an IPO where you dump all this false value on the general public (or nowadays, all the pension funds and government-forced personal investment accounts). In other words, the last buyers pay for all of the false value. Then they wait for a reward that often doesn't come.
Ironically, part of why this system spawned and has worked so well is that once large, publicly traded companies became fixated on quarterly EPS numbers (so the execs can hit their bonus targets), those companies became slow and useless for innovation. But they had magic money with which they could buy up startups who are actually trying new things.
This entire system is astounding in its perversion compared to how business worked 40+ years ago.
I started teaching 1-on-1 on Preply (computer science, programming, and even career guidance). I work with students from age 8 to 40. I've given over 200 hours of teaching there.
But recently I got my TEFL certification. Now I teach English in Bangkok. My students are high school, and they are fantastic people. Honestly I'm happier than I would have imagined. I only wish I had more time with each student, because they're all great in one way or another. To be more transparent, my school is one where students have to be top performers and compete to get in. So I'm not dealing with students who were like me when I was young ;).
I earn a fraction of what I earned in tech in the past, but it's enough to live with a modest buffer - and still actually enjoy life. I wish I had done this long ago.
Before I took this job, I spent a week teaching "computing" to grades 1-6. For various reason that wasn't a good situation and I left, but even those kids were pretty great. It's humbling to see what some motivated 6 year olds are capable of creating.
You are exactly right. Regardless of whether AI is better than a human or not is irrelevant if the bad, unqualified corporate leaders are making rash silver bullet decisions that cost workers jobs.
The problem is much broader though - consolidation of wealth and power have enabled, frankly, idiots to be able to control how the world works - from politics to business. Greed and stupidity is eating the world.
I don't see any solution. This is like a disease that will either eventually kill the body or take a long time to heal, leaving deep scars and forever changing humanity.
Maybe War Games was right - the only way to win is not to play. Therefore, find something you love (even if it doesn't pay well), and do that.
(I spent two years looking for a tech job. My 30 years of broad and meaningful experience is apparently not interesting to at least the 200 companies I applied to. So now I'm a teacher, and I'm quite happy.)
As a software engineer and solution provider, I do not feel threatened by this.
I do not fear that management will get tools like Mythos and then not need people like me. Most of the value I provide is in translating what the management/client _thinks_ they need into what is the real problem and solution.
That's not an insult to them, it's just pointing out that they see only their problem, and they imagine what would be the solution. They then ask for that solution. Quite often, what they want built isn't what they need. And I've seen so many problems, from so many domains and scenarios, that I can usually recognize the core need and propose (and build or direct building of) a solution which resolves that need AND has an eye toward the likely future needs.
Mythos may do an excellent job providing a high quality result based on what is asked of it. But the result will only be as good as the quality, clarity, and presentation of the request.
If I hire a home builder to build me a custom home, that builder is going to ask me a thousand questions - questions I had never even thought of. Mythos isn't going to ask all those questions - it's going to make the best choices it can without the consultant's level of interaction. And the buyer will get what they get. Sure, the buyer can then say, "oh, I don't want any hallways - just connected spaces." Then the house gets demolished and rebuilt to the new, clearer spec. Repeat, repeat repeat. Maybe eventually the buyer gets what they really want. More likely they give up before reaching that point, and they go and hire a real builder.
I'll sum it up like this: You can get great results with minimal effort if you don't really care too much about the details. But if you don't care much about the details, then your need probably wasn't very significant.
TONS of tools. Most written in Go. Several have API servers in addition to cli or TUI or web interfaces. The API interface to my apps makes LLM-driven development much faster.
https://github.com/michaelteter/docgen : create a single text file of your entire project, with a tree and some other useful bits. This is good for dropping into an LLM or research notebook instead of giving an LLM access to your actual project folder. It also can be put in your pre-commit script so you always have one single doc you can diff from one commit to the next.
md2pdf: markdown to PDF, relying on defaults and optional config files or cli args for formatting choices (such as page margins)
md2gslides: markdown, converted into slides, and using Google Slides API to generate the doc in my Google Drive. This saves me so much effort (I teach, so I make lesson plans/presentations all the time).
get-music: TUI app that lets me search Youtube and easily queue up to download one or more of the search results. Then I take the downloaded content, split out the audio, LLM process the video title, add metadata for music, and then provide an easy command interface for local searches and playback of downloaded content.
bookmarks: TUI for slurping all the URLs from my browser, LLM-tagging each url based on the tag list I provide with the prompt and url, and lots of features for managing priority, show/hide tags, etc. This was to help me stop worrying about having a hundred tabs open. Now I can just sweep them up into my own private, encrypted (sqlite) db.
ESL-Planner: Complete web app for building class plans for teaching English (based on params, such as student age range, skill level, specific teaching language (what we want to teach), etc. It's close to being ready to productize and release as SaaS, but I built it for myself initially.
Numerous other tools plus a guide doc listing all the tools and what they do. These resources are then made available to LLMs when I'm developing, saving me (and the LLM) the time of hand-crafting the same tooling over and over.
Unregulated capitalism eats everything, including eventually itself.
There are other greed-based systems which also eat themselves, but we live in the era of capitalism as the vehicle of self-destruction.
Many of us won’t be alive to see it, but it will result in the fall of the US. Maybe it will be 50 years from now, but I suspect sooner.
Once enough safeguards get systematically removed, the rate of growth of the beast becomes unstoppable.
Eventually the few who have not been crushed and who have the (illusion of) control will have to wall themselves off in heavily guarded compounds to prevent the masses of desperate poor from overrunning them. It will be like so many dystopian stories that have already been written.
I see no way to correct it now, at least not in the US. Moneyed interests clearly have control of the government. The few good civil servants and elected officials are increasingly under pressure to give up their principles and accept pay-to-play, lest they lose their jobs or what little power they had to do good.
This isn’t just a right wing problem (US right), because the same money flows to the left. At the end of the day, one side may indeed be more cruel, but they both support the same system.
At this point, we should just appreciate Ruby and move on. In the AI age, other languages are better choices. Ruby is my favorite language, but I build with Go now. Or rather, I guide my minions to build with Go. They write Go better than they would write Ruby (or Python... please die, Python).
I can't answer for others, but IMO, Ruby is the most elegant and expressive general purpose programming language that has reached a significant level of maturity and large audience.
If you write Ruby for a few years, and then you "go back" to other languages, you will groan. That's not to say that some other languages do not have things that we wish Ruby had, but often those other things would not really fit well with Ruby.
Nothing is perfect from every angle. But writing Ruby can be a joy for some of us.
As I keep saying, the problem isn't the tools - it's the humans who don't know what they don't know ----- and assume that what they don't know is insignificant ----- and just plow forward with their authority and/or money.
We can describe this without talking about technology - so pre-AI.
Imagine the owner of a construction company firing all the architects. After all, he's been the owner for 15 years. He has led the construction of dozens of projects. He's also rich, and being rich seems to be an ego-multiplier.
Why should he waste money on architects? Or more importantly, why should he allow them to constantly annoy him with pushbacks: "This could be a problem if the sustained wind is greater than ... ".
Those engineers obviously don't know the real world. Their elitist education has made them afraid to make bold decisions. Regulations are anti-progress!
Thankfully, that owner now has AI tools. He doesn't need those not-always-yes-people. He now has a perpetual yes-bot.
So where are we now? We're in the same place we always have been. People need to have the humility to recognize that despite their authority, influence, or wealth, they still need other people. And especially, they need other people to challenge their orders or their requests.
But I don't really see this situation self-correcting. There's now so much money concentrated amongst a few who will spray it over exactly the kind of people who do not want to listen to others that most activity in the future will be for naught. Yes, some unicorns will be fabricated, and some people will make a lot of money; but real value will not be created often.
Therefore, I implore the actual thoughtful creators: Do build things, but do not sell out. Look to the past. Create companies where every employee was valued, and every employee had some voice. Yes, use AI. But test and measure where it really helps. And be skeptical, just as you would if someone came to your door promising a black box that would double your profits.
The problem is not AI. The problem is still very human: the humans in charge don’t know what they don’t know, and they believe that whatever they imagine is true.
They also often believe that anything they can think of must be easy - just a matter of a worker spending a little time. Or maybe an AI can do it.
Management rarely learns from group failures, because they naturally assume that since the project was “easy”, it must be a problem with the workers.
CEOs routines run companies into the ground and the switch to a new company, fist full of cash on the way out. Once in a while, one of those repeat failures ascends into politics.
But for staring at walls, I like to do that in the sauna. My mind sorts out so much stuff in that hot room that is like magic. Showers used to be that way for me, before I cared about water use.
TLDR: regular sauna seems to have no effect on my resting HR. Extended high HR cardio definitely does.
I became a huge fan of sauna time (15-20 minutes at approx 175F/80C... I would prefer a bit warmer, but I had no control). It was like shower time, or meditation time (which I never took time for). Great thinking time. I'd use it after a workout, but I would also use it on days without a workout.
I've been tracking some stats via my Garmin watch for a few years, and I've identified some patterns - particularly regarding resting HR.
The most significant reducer of resting heart rate for me is running (5k). Periods where my training includes regular 5k runs cause my resting HR to drop by 5-8 bpm.
Most of my training is resistance, although in the last 6 months I've added in a lot more cardio. Stairs and rowing do not seem to noticeably reduce my resting HR. Running definitely does. But to be fair, maybe it's not the running but rather the active HR I'm sustaining. Despite trying to stay in the aerobic zone, running always pushes me to zones 4 and 5. So 50% of my 30 minutes of exercise will be in my max zone. With stairs or rowing, I can keep my HR in aerobic and threshold.
Some stats:
When I'm off my fitness routine, living life as a typical person, my resting HR is 65. When I'm on a resistance fitness routine, my resting HR is 58. When I'm also running, the rHR is 51.
If I eat a heavy meal too close to bedtime, my rHR is +15. If I drink a lot of alcohol before sleeping, rHR can be +20! Food + alcohol = WTF. Probably not good.
Most day to day apps and websites should be boring and usable, not truly unique or mind-blowing.
In fact, humans waste countless hours trying to figure out what is what and how things work, just because there's always some designer trying to do something nifty. And by "designer", I don't necessarily mean professionally trained designer - although the pros can be given to trying to make artistic rather than functional interfaces.