You being an outside observer of my country, what do you think the mid-term (next ~decade) looks like if the US is somehow able to flush the toilet and do a complete 180 from a policy and administration perspective? I imagine even if people we need are welcomed back with open arms, they're not going to want to come. I sure wouldn't want to go back to a bar where the bouncer kicked the shit out of me!
Just curious, it's hard to see things clearly from inside the carnival.
As an outsider as well, I think the damage done will be hard to reverse in just a decade. You lost trust of your closest allies. Even after the current presidential term, why would we (Europeans, Canadians, ..) invest in ties with the US, when the _next next_ president can be an entire shitshow again?
The American people have shown that they are okay voting for the same nationalistic rhetoric twice. If it was just once, maybe it's a fluke. Now it seems more like a pattern hinting at the mindset of ~50% of Americans.
Also, if I want to be really pessimistic, I'd look at history, at some point Roman turned on Roman (Caesar crossing the Rubicon) after years/decades of political turmoil. The things happening today in Minnesota etc could be preludes a similar Rubicon crossing moment that will shatter the republic..
The problem is that America returned power to a doubly-impeached, 34x convicted felon, where there were circulated photos of the boxes of unlawfully retained government documents he's stored in his bathroom and on the stage of a ballroom, and who was already known to hate all useful international institutions and who was already distainful anyone else's sovreignty.
That he added to this after the second election with the tariffs, visible corruption, sucking up to murderers, endangering our (by which, as a non-American, I mean every other nation's) security both directly and indirectly with both suggestions of military force against allies and also of refusing to aid allies when called for, plus all the ICE stuff we can see… that costs the US a lot of trust even if you can't reasonably blame the US electorate directly for failing to see that so clearly ahead of the actual vote.
All the second paragraph stuff though? That the electorate should've know from before the reelection? That should've had him in prison for the rest of his life, possibly even due to the stuff we heard about selling state secrets and under 18 U.S.C. § 794 getting on death row (which I disaprove of as a principle and call for the abolition of, but you in the US do have it), not returned to the oval office.
Not an applicable quote to parent. Everyone made a choice, but not participating is definitionally a different choice than participating and going along with a specific option.
That was a great argument up until the guy who led an insurrection was allowed to run for president again. At that point, if you're apathetic, you're supporting what's coming.
Edit: The Royal You, not the person I'm replying to.
As an outsider not in academia, your system has poisoned your well.
We trusted in you to do the Right Thing, yet a significant sub-system of your culture has entirely successfully undermined your 'Checks and Balances' - a sub-system which has clearly been in action since at least the eighties.
Currently I wouldn't dare to enter the US, while I'm sure I would be relatively safe in China.
And: even before Trump the TSA had elements of despotism. All the while I never heard of Europeans being treated like shit in China -- simply the better hosts!
I keep mentioning that to people when they bring up a quite anti-China narrative (or paranoia). Most people in the western hemisphere are way more likely to be negatively impacted by the US than China.
Europeans, Canadians etc are less likely to travel to China so of course Chinese media spying would be less immediately detrimental than the spying of US companies. But even when traveling to China, it's less likely you'll be treated poorly than when traveling to the US.
We in the US have been so propagandized against China that even relatively progressive people that are completely against the Trump admin think China is an authoritarian hellscape. And while China is obviously not a utopia, I'd be hard pressed to find a metric there that hasn't surpassed our own.
China has no free speech and will start flexing its imperial muscle more now that the US is climbing down from the world stage.
China is alright if you keep your head down and you're not of the wrong ethnicity, locked up in a work camp and not allowed to have kids, or too openly gay or trans and so on.
The history of civilization over the past 5,000 years proves that China has never been an empire of foreign aggression. On the contrary, look at the 300-year-old modern history of the United States. Take off the tinted glasses of racism and savor it for yourself!
China has literally has been an empire most of it's history. It's like the 3rd biggest country on the planet. Just Tibet itself is huge and was absorbed into China not so long ago.
US is regressing on trans rights, abortion, etc. Free speech is under threat with the president “attacking” media institutions. You have daylight murder by federal agents followed by propaganda campaigns to blame the victims themselves or on the Democratic Party to create more political friction.
No one is saying China is perfect in these threads, we’re just saying the US isn’t necessarily better. Two countries can be shitty simultaneously.
Two countries can be shitty but the US hasn’t yet put a million of its citizens in jail because of ethnicity. Maybe going there in the future. That won’t white wash what China is.
It would not be higher in total if you included the estimated number of Uyghurs detained in internment camps. Even considering that, there are a couple other factors that don't make the numbers you presented mean much.
One factor is that the U.S. is the 3rd largest by population and will always skew higher in total prisoners than many other countries.
The other factor which explains the relatively high incarceration rate within the country's population is the investment into policing and reporting. We can take a city like Shanghai for example. They had a population size of around ~24m+ in ~2018-2019 [1] but only had 50k cops [2] (I couldn't find citable numbers for today but the data isn't too outdated). New York City, in comparison, has a current current population size of around ~8m [3] with 33k cops [4].
The 2 countries bigger than the U.S., India and China, also historically have had less investment in law enforcement, especially in rural areas [5][6].
The point was that the US touts itself as a free country while having many perverse incentives and mechanisms oppressing part of its citizenry. There's a veneer on top of it of individual freedoms compared to a state like China but in reality it can be as brutal against its population as any totalitarian state, it's just that the power to subjugate and oppress isn't centralised and is more diffused through its institutions across history.
It's not too far in history that the US was deploying the National Guard to fire live ammo against protesters, American police has military-grade equipment deployed against their citizens, I think it makes it even harder that the oppressive power isn't centralised since to uproot this there are countless battles to be won for any change to happen. It's institutionalised, any big institution is really hard to change.
US is quickly heading the direction of China, but China is much much further along the path of authoritarian hellscape: no free speech at all, no freedom of the press, all social media is heavily censored, and the GFW allows government control of the Internet (yes, I know, VPNs exist, but they can be shut down and aren't even on the radar of the vast majority of the population.) All this was already the case in 2017 when I left China and it's even more controlled now (COVID only increased government controls). You don't see this as a foreigner, but as a Chinese you absolutely do. Trust me when I say it's still, even with the current wanna-be dictator and his white supremist minions, much worse than the US in terms of freedoms.
On the other hand, China doesn't suffer from the US' current bone-headed anti-Science and "climate change is a hoax" nonsense, and have a much clearer understanding of where they need to continue investing in order to become the world leader economically and even politically, which Trump in his stupidity is handing them on a silver platter. So in that sense they are far ahead.
China is also of course much smarter when it comes to foreign policy, though Trump has set such a low bar that even a monkey could do better.
I'd rather not live in either country, but if I had to choose, I'd pick the US and it's not even close.
> I never heard of Europeans being treated like shit in China -- simply the better hosts!
Yeah. Also lets not forget:
- Citizens from most EU countries can now enter China visa free. No ESTA and no other administrative crap. Generally no problem to enter and leave the country as long as you respect the law there.
- The Chinese authority are very cooperative when it is about granting some visting Visa to researchers. Most Chinese research centers and Universities have a some kind of direct link to an office that can bypass some of the procedures.
If you dig into my comment history, i've been pretty pro China (despite a ding i will do every time: China rural areas are decaying faster than in the west. I think the main contributor is the difference between contryside/rural pay (80-100€ when i was there) and city/industrial pay (700-800€ with no qualification at the time)).
I will still add a caveat with what you've said: China make/unmake rules pretty fast, and while not hidden, those are not easy to find and understand (especially when you take into account enforcement). When those rules touch on immigration policy or on societal stuff change, it can surprise you. As a westerner you should always be OK, but this is a country with no rule of law, you should always keep that in mind.
> As a westerner you should always be OK, but this is a country with no rule of law.
Let's be clear: I am not discussing nor defend China internal policies here. I honestly do not care and I am not pro China.
I am pointing a single fact: As a EU researcher, it is easier now to go to China than to go the US for conferences and collaboration. And we do feel more welcome there.
That single fact alone should terrify any US politician with a brain.
Sorry, it wasn't a criticism of what you said, i wanted to add a caveat because what you said was true in 99.9999% of cases, but as China laws application are arbitrary (and their laws change all the time), you still ought to be careful when going there.
I'm guessing my flawed use of an asterisk, resulting in a weird highlighting out of context, confused your interpretation of what I was saying, because I believe we're suggesting the same thing.
> what do you think the mid-term (next ~decade) looks like if the US is somehow able to flush the toilet and do a complete 180 from a policy and administration perspective?
I honestly do not know.
Academia works with networking between peers and moves where the money is.
In Academia, the relation between researchers and the 'names' in the domain matters a lot. But the money stream matters even more.
When relations are created, I do not see them 'ending' just because US decided to play the good guys again and open the money stream again.
It will help to restore some links yes, but will probably not cut any ties created with other countries.
Regarding general politics / economics, the damage has been done. The western world has now started to create a western world that's not centered around the US as it was the case before. It is yet to be seen if the US will again be or remain being part of the western world.
It's a bad development but necessary, sadly. We can only hope that Europe rises and comes out as a new strong center eventually, because we need one to counter all those powerful and evil actors in the world.
Something ironclad that can't be changed by an "executive order" in 30 minutes.
It has to make sure nothing like this will ever happen again, there can't be public officials who can just NOT show up to congressional hearings and if they do they can just blatantly, provably, lie - because there is no penalty for lying except a honour system.
Your supreme court has to have term limits with no reelection like the German equivalent and be comprised of different strata of folks, so that all of them aren't politically nominated.
The trust is gone and not easily fixed without something really drastic happening - barring a brutal civil war, I can't see a quick way out of this. Sorry.
The problem is that separating from the USA as idea has been floating around for some time. Thinking they have jurisprudence over allies, forcing allies into supporting stupid wars and operating global surveillance companies are not things that started with Trump.
Whenever the last maga dies will be the beginning of your country being trusted again. So at least a few decades. Just another administration won't do.
After the 2016 election, my advisor's entire research lab relocated to Europe except for two candidates who were nearly finished with a PhD and got co-advised.
The majority of us who moved became proficient in a foreign language. Some got permanent EU/UK/Swiss residency or even citizenship. This lab continues to attract researchers from the U.S. and then place them mostly into European and Asian universities or businesses. These folks are largely not going back to America short of forceful expulsion via European anti-immigration policy. I know other research group leaders who have done this same thing.
Someone I know in the U.S. has a PhD/grants/awards and wants to stay close to family/home (in a mid-sized city of a Republican-leaning state) yet hasn't been able to find a job or academic position in biological engineering after a few years of actively looking. The longer they work outside of their major, the harder it will be to secure an engineering/academic career later.
For too many in the U.S. (particularly where I grew up; a farm town) politics is a team sport and the hatred of the other team only intensifies as the government invests in higher education and research. They're willfully blind to the fact that cancer treatments, major agricultural advances (crop resilience, production efficiency, genetic modification), smartphones and fast internet access, trucking, and nearly every aspect of their lives which has vastly improved comes from social spending. Instead, it's stickers on gas pumps and chants at NASCAR races. Leftist voters are not as decisive at the voting booth as Republicans, and there's still right-wing momentum in many states across all levels of government, the judicial system, and the leadership of the largest companies.
I firmly disbelieve the U.S. can reverse course even after a decade. In my opinion, it would require immense structural and cultural change: breaking up the two-party system, rejecting money in politics, political/judicial age limits, a major push to disrupt clandestine foreign meddling, shifting the partisan balance of courts in a way that cannot later be weaponized, heavy investment in infrastructure and high-visibility patriotic (ideally non-partisan) programs similar to Eisenhower's, the sort of intense media regulation that would restore local journalism in small towns, paying teachers significantly more plus developing more public trust in the educational system, public research investment, high taxes, strong social programs, a rejection of the propaganda that America is the greatest country in the world; basically a shift toward being more like the countries that actually(*) have a high standard of living.
Who has the power to implement these sweeping changes? Would it be a conflict of their personal interests?
I keep seeing versions of this soliloquy on here, sometimes multiple times every day. They make fine blog posts, it's something to say and something to read, but ultimately remind me more of piling into a Tiktok trend than anything else: everybody's doing it, so I will too!
End of the day, much like when photography went digital (and smartphones got good cameras), yes, there were a LOT more photos taken, but the relative proportion of outsized, lauded photographers remained fairly constant. The upshot is that WAY more people are exposed to the possibility of creating excellence than before, the downside is the market gets flooded with utility and mediocrity. Said excellence never goes away, and the same will apply to software.
The very idea that SaaS (or packaged software, or whatever) "will die" because "anybody" can prompt their way to a "personal tool" (as a mainstream exercise) is so far-fetched to me because the only people who will prompt their way to a tool ARE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS!
Professionals who need functionality will always pay for it.
Boomer dads who can barely work a DVR will always pay for it.
Business owners who need less friction and more reliability will always pay for it.
IMO, this "I'll just replace Salesforce with my own personal CRM for $200 for a month of Claude" thing is just a hobbyist's pipe dream lol -- not that there's anything wrong with it, some people will do it, but, man, there's a reason that Netflix is Netflix, and Plex isn't Netflix.
I suspect they might transparently fall back too; Opus 4.5 has been really reasonable lately, except right after it launched, and also surrounding any service interruptions / problems reported on status.claude.ai -- once those issues resolve, for a few hours the results feel very "Sonnet", and it starts making a lot more mistakes. When that happens, I'll usually just pause Claude and prompt Codex and Gemini with the same issue to see what comes out of the black hole.. then a bit later, Claude mysteriously regains its wits.
I just assume it went to the bar, got wasted, and needed time to sober up!
They don't ever fall back to cheaper models silently.
What Anthropic does do is poke the model to tell you to go to bed if you use it too long ("long conversation reminder") which distracts it from actually answering.
Sometimes they do have associations with things like the day of the year and might be lazier some months than others.
If they are real slime balls they can justify it by saying you see we use speculative decoding so we first use a smaller faster model model first and then then answer is enhanced by larger model blah blah ..... "FOr the best User experience"
I didn't believe such conspiracy theories, until one day I noticed Sonnet 4.5 (which I had been using for weeks to great success) perform much worse, very visibly so. A few hours later, Opus 4.5 was released.
It can go many different ways. You can be 110% invested over years building something (and getting paid for it) for somebody who is ultimately incapable of selling it. It fails, womp womp. You can be 10% invested in a pile of crap (and getting paid for it) for a company that's simply checking the boxes. It fails, womp womp. You can be 90% invested in an ill-conceived idea that actually turns out great (to spec), but ultimately fails, because it wasn't anything anybody EXCEPT the client asked for. Womp womp again! You can even do everything right, do great work for a client, launch it, it performs exactly as was expected, then 3 months later is wiped from the internet because the marketing campaign is over, and a new quarterly budget came in for the client, and then it's on to the next thing.
All of this stuff can be remarkably ephemeral, farts in the wind even, and all you can do is take pride in what you did when you did it, and then take on the next challenge.
Sounds depressing if you frame it up a certain way, but it's actually really freeing to just give in completely to the process and treat it like the weather: you're gonna get everything from sunshine to rain to snow to hurricanes, and none of it is in your control. Just enjoy it while it's good, and ride it out when it's not! There's always something new on the horizon.
It's interesting about text versus video -- I never ever look for video instruction for code, probably because I just came up on thick-ass books from the library and actual text on the computer in the 90's.
THAT SAID, a while back I stumbled across some Three.js video tutorials on YouTube by Wael Yasmina [0] that were so informative and crystal clear that it completely changed my opinion about learn-code-through-video. I guess it just depends on the subject matter and presentation. I'm way more open to it now, and find some odd videos on there that cover topics that never seem to come up in blog posts and searches. YMMV
YouTube is actually one of my very first places to go for new concepts. For example, one of the recent Advent of Code puzzles was solvable with "coordinate compression," a technique I had never heard of before. I didn't find much, and what I did find wasn't an especially high-quality presentation, but it did teach me a magical new concept that helped me to finish the puzzle.
I have also benefited so much from MIT OCW lectures. The quality of their teaching is so high that it showed me that when my children go to college, it will be worth it to send them to a much more expensive elite school.
This is just a half-baked thought, partially because I have no clue how major LLM providers track output metrics for tokens returned (in the context of, "Claude used Tailwind for this solution instead of XYZ"), but it seems to me like it would be a mutually-beneficial scenario for OpenAI, Anthropic, etc, to actively engage with large OSS project maintainers and sponsor/pay for "licensed"/"official" "expert" agents/sub-models that the main models can engage for higher-quality results when the tools are chosen.
Easier said than done obviously, and probably would become more expensive than it's worth, but imagine if the output was demonstrably better and exclusive deals were in place ("Claude Code has the expert Tailwind agent that's trained and maintained by Tailwind, Codex doesn't") -- it would create certain kinds of paying-subscriber mini-moats for specific LLMs.
I dunno. By the time I was done typing that I started to become skeptical of the idea but gonna hit "add comment" anyways lol
Man, I've been biting my tongue all day with regards to this thread and overall discussion.
I've been building a somewhat-novel, complex, greenfield desktop app for 6 months now, conceived and architected by a human (me), visually designed by a human (me), implementation heavily leaning on mostly Claude Code but with Codex and Gemini thrown in the mix for the grunt work. I have decades of experience, could have built it bespoke in like 1-2 years probably, but I wanted a real project to kick the tires on "the future of our profession".
TL;DR I started with 100% vibe code simply to test the limits of what was being promised. It was a functional toy that had a lot of problems. I started over and tried a CLI version. It needed a therapist. I started over and went back to visual UI. It worked but was too constrained. I started over again. After about 10 complete start-overs in blank folders, I had a better vision of what I wanted to make, and how to achieve it. Since then, I've been working day after day, screen after screen, building, refactoring, going feature by feature, bug after bug, exactly how I would if I was coding manually. Many times I've reached a point where it feels "feature complete", until I throw a bigger dataset at it, which brings it to its knees. Time to re-architect, re-think memory and storage and algorithms and libraries used. Code bloated, and I put it on a diet until it was trim and svelte. I've tried many different approaches to hard problems, some of which LLMs would suggest that truly surprised me in their efficacy, but only after I presented the issues with the previous implementation. There's a lot of conversation and back and forth with the machine, but we always end up getting there in the end. Opus 4.5 has been significantly better than previous Anthropic models. As I hit milestones, I manually audit code, rewrite things, reformat things, generally polish the turd.
I tell this story only because I'm 95% there to a real, legitimate product, with 90% of the way to go still. It's been half a year.
Vibe coding a simple app that you just want to use personally is cool; let the machine do it all, don't worry about under the hood, and I think a lot of people will be doing that kind of stuff more and more because it's so empowering and immediate.
Using these tools is also neat and amazing because they're a force multiplier for a single person or small group who really understand what needs done and what decisions need made.
These tools can build very complex, maintainable software if you can walk with them step by step and articulate the guidelines and guardrails, testing every feature, pushing back when it gets it wrong, growing with the codebase, getting in there manually whenever and wherever needed.
These tools CANNOT one-shot truly new stuff, but they can be slowly cajoled and massaged into eventually getting you to where you want to go; like, hard things are hard, and things that take time don't get done for a while. I have no moral compunctions or philosophical musings about utilizing these tools, but IMO there's still significant effort and coordination needed to make something really great using them (and literally minimal effort and no coordination needed to make something passable)
If you're solo, know what you want, and know what you're doing, I believe you might see 2x, 4x gains in time and efficiency using Claude Code and all of his magical agents, but if your project is more than a toy, I would bet that 2x or 4x is applied to a temporal period of years, not days or months!
I hate to say it (not a doom and gloom kind of dude) but to the general population, social media either is, or at the very least appears to be, one of the only ways up and out of the deep, terrifying economic chasm that our societies have been carving to separate the haves from the have-nots.
Statistically, of course, the overwhelming majority of people who try to secure the bag from social media either fail, succeed and burn out quickly, or succeed BIG and lose their souls. And given that it's just a new form of old entertainment, I'd wager that the percentage of those that break through versus those that don't is probably in line with what it always was (slim, or short-lived)
Meanwhile in the real world, wages are stagnant, institutions have crumbled, safety nets blown away like a fart in the wind; we've legalized and lionized gambling on every single aspect of life, geopolitics are in upheaval, businesses are tightening up more than they have in years, information went from a daily newspaper to a debilitating firehose, prices are through the roof, and we're all left to fend for ourselves.
What do we do?
Shuck and jive on socials. Place leveraged bets on ephemeral concepts and world events on Polymarket. Plow into memecoins, tokenize all physical assets. Play the lottery, hit the casino. On and on, while cost of living goes L-shaped.
I think for the vast majority of people, social media is both dead yet completely inescapable... but I have a nascent, vague feeling that while people are sick and tired of being algorithmically manipulated and want to bail, if pushed far enough, become hungry enough, they'll come right back and spin the wheel from the side of a creator out of desperation, feeding the machine that we all hate LOL
Anyways. More optimism, less doomerism! It ain't gotta be like this long-term!
I never been to Las Vegas, but social media makes me feel like entering a casino in John O’Briens Leaving Las Vegas (the book, not the film). Despite of all the glitz and glamour, just a desolate desert for those who have lost all the hope… And the way all these applications make you hooked works exactly like the coin machines in a Casino. Jean Pormanove was just a one poor soul, there’s literally thousands of them, somebody (or themselves) live-streaming the destruction of their bodies and soul. This is suppose to be fun?
I left long time ago. I kicked many things back then and are a lot happier now. I hope the culture is changing and SoMe ban for kids (I believe Australia is only the beginning) will cause a shift in global culture and in future IG, TikTok and rest of them are seen in similar light to tobacco today.
Yep, I have heard social media etc compared to one armed bandits. Not far off. The trouble like gambling is that I'm not interested in the game unless I win.
However, I don't consider Australia's social media ban a good thing as it is government trying to gatekeep the internet.
The press release says they're demonstrating this at CES 2026, which starts tomorrow (Jan 6, 2026) so I imagine we'll have some kind of verification one way or the other..
CSS can be difficult (not hard, "difficult" like how we would describe a persnickety, sometimes erratic person in our life) but I get the feeling that when haters rant about how bad or illogical it is, they never even bothered to grasp the first principal that CSS isn't much more than an articulation of the visual characteristics of a nested structure of boxes. That's it.
You have to be able to visualize, from outside-in, the Matryoshka doll of naked structural elements that make up the component, page section, or entire page you're styling, ensure (or hope and pray) they have sane identifiers (id, class, attributes, etc), then start to write out properties like you're writing a recipe.
This was the whole point of CSS Zen Garden [0] -- offer a static, common structure and challenge people to reskin the same thing 1000 different ways.
Now, I do recognize that I'm coming off a little dismissive of the complexity of CSS, and that's not my intent.. I'm one of those people who is a good graphic designer, good developer, and often conceive, design, implement and deliver projects end to end, so when I'm in Photoshop I'm also mentally laying out how these designs will be structured in HTML to then be able to be implemented.
Naming conventions between markup and styling are also important to be able to translate from bitmap to browser without losing context, and I know we're "post-Sass" by a lot of opinions, but I still find writing nested SCSS far more manageable and readable than plain CSS.
Break everything up into discrete components and files, name them well, use box-sizing: content-box to make sure your borders and padding get included in dimensional calculations, imagine in your mind the physical structure/skeleton of the markup, then fill out each part, piece by piece. Browser dev tools to inspect and modify styles in realtime is critical to playing around until you get what you want.
That said, IMO the only way to really get comfortable with all of that is to do actual projects, not just tutorials. There are 1001 ways to achieve most things in CSS, and the sheer scope of the spec is impossible to grasp without constantly looking up what property does what, but it really does just boil down to taming all the boxes on the page one by one.
edit: I actually meant box-sizing: border-box LOL and mistyped, so maybe I'm just proving everybody's hatred for CSS. I still stand by what I wrote though.
Just curious, it's hard to see things clearly from inside the carnival.
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