I don’t have any skin in the game with this, and I don’t use WP. It appears Matt needs help right now. I don’t think he’s reacting rationally based on what he’s posting online or allegedly inside his former organization. I don’t know him, but it’s hard seeing people in a difficult time who need help.
Using ChatGPT.com for coding tasks has to be a joke in 2026, right? I assumed everyone is using Codex/Claude Code/OpenCode/Pi by now if you’re using these tools.
Yeah! Seems like that's the assumption in this ongoing discussion, so I thought my point of view would be interesting. I'm not saying I'm doing it the right way, possibly I'm being very stupid, but the point here is that it's not just the "normies" who don't know what Sol is.
Lots of large enterprises and organizations have security policies that make it very hard to self-install these tools and haven’t figured out they should add them to their approved software list yet. Federal government in particular is still very slow
I have a hard time seeing how Meta is betting people will trust them to serve as their AI agent provider. Based on their track record data privacy and tracking, why would I trust them with my most sensitive data? That’s a hard sell.
I think for most people there is a big gulf between information posted to social and their entire email inbox, their credit card details, passwords, etc.
For this kind of tool to be useful it basically has to be able to impersonate you digitally. I know I personally have zero trust for Meta to do this securely and without exploiting me, whereas Google I feel a lot better about here. After all Google has made a business out of safeguarding data with gmail, drive, etc. Same with Microsoft and Apple. Meta, OpenAI, not so much.
I still have a Facebook account to stay connected with my family and friends. However, I have no trust in Meta to handle my health or financial information, as I am quite certain they will sell or use it for marketing purposes.
On the other hand, I’m always surprised how little many seem to care about data privacy.
I worked one place where I had a team of 4 offshore devs replace my two good people. Three months of some of the worst quality work I’ve ever seen. And I was responsible for it on paper.
Decided fuck it, promoted one of them to manager and gave him a project to finish in 3 months, leading the other 3.
In that three months I redid that entire project, did their current project and a week of another one. All in a 25 hour week calendar.
People already look me like crazy when I still review all the code changes AI does, and not even using the agent directly. And make it do things differently if it is unmaintainable slop. Their argument is that are you really going to modify the code by hand in the future?
As a Canadian, we are mostly just laughing about how childish he is. As a Canadian business owner who has American customers, I’m far more concerned about his temper tantrums relating to trade, however so far they have not impacted my sector.
The difference being that in the movie Idiocracy the President didn't assume he knew everything and was willing to listen to people who knew more than him.
This trolling and misdirection are not in the movie. Also, both are clearly effective, and a discourse that warps economic impact on US midterms voters within identities, reduces the chance of exposing the bad consequences and risks of power-politics. So this is quite well timed, and the outrageous quotient is I think also well calibrated.
Charles Chaplin understood it, so please y'all catch up ASAP.
I always felt that film was lazy in how it presents its premise.
Maybe there's naunces I'm missing because I'm not American, but it made me feel a bit gross in the same way a lot of pop culture around 'chavs' in the UK made me feel a bit gross. I don't think always refraining from punching down is a good rule in comedy, but I struggle to find much comedy in things which are nothing but punching down.
Admittedly it's been a long time since I watched it but isn't the introduction sequence straight-up apologia for the theories behind eugenics? The idea 'what if society got massively more stupid' isn't a bad one for a film but 'the rabbit-like hordes of the stupid outgroup ourbred our elite ingroup to extinction' rubs me the wrong way.
Maybe I'm being unfair to the film because of the fanbase as well. I've always seen it as a mild red flag when someone says it's their favourite comedy, but it's hardly the film's fault it got popular on places like reddit.
> Maybe I'm being unfair to the film because of the fanbase as well. I've always seen it as a mild red flag when someone says it's their favourite comedy, but it's hardly the film's fault it got popular on places like reddit.
This is circular reasoning: You don't like the film because of the fanbase which you don't like because they like the film.
There is no "apologia for eugenics" in the intro. You have to actively infer that as a logical consequence ("we need to prevent stupid people from procreating as much") of what is shown ("society becomes stupid when stupid people procreate more than intelligent people"). The reason it is only in the intro and is never revisited is that it is just the setup for the actual movie, not a message in itself (the whole sequence is in fact very dissimilar from the rest of the movie). A more accurate setup would be that we have a culture that selects for primitive behavior and is anti-intellectual, but that isn't as funny as showing Cletus fucking everything that moves.
I think it’s a joke, not an apologia. If one can’t read it as a joke, then that’s on them. It’s a piece of satire forming a work of political and social philosophy, and a middling straight-to-video movie.
I feel like I am not good at anticipating election results, but anyway, the people arguing that the midterms will be a referendum on the economy make sense to me.
Expensive gas and groceries are pretty unpopular. I guess some chunk of people will find a way to wholly blame Biden or whatever.
> I guess some chunk of people will find a way to wholly blame Biden or whatever.
Markwayne Mullin, DHS Secretary, just yesterday:
“You have a Biden administration that is failing the American people because they are allowing millions of people to come into this country illegally.”
20 months in to a 48 month term and they're still blaming the last guy, and phrasing it as if the last guy is still actively doing things other than having cancer.
The whole admin is a bunch of clowns. And unfortunately they benefit from a right wing media machine that reinforces the nonsense, and a general media environment that is more than willing to sanewash and downplay.
Dems are certainly less evil and marginally more competent, but they are still an unpopular shit show. Even with trump attacking America left and right and becoming deeply unpopular for it they're only a coin flip to win the senate. Vance is the single most likely person to become the next president.
Polls for the last few decades haven't really been all that accurate or good ("it's 50/50" - worthless).
You also seem to be ignoring all the systematic changes that have been made during Trump 2 in your prediction for such huge wins for the democrats. Things like the final destruction of the Voting Rights Act and the extreme Gerrymandering have gone mostly towards republicans. Also 32% of voters (or more) still don't really see a distinction against Donald Trump and The Almighty. Forgive me but I'm not convinced it'll be the bloodbath you think it's going to be. Democrats might have a minor edge in the house when all is said and done and literally nothing else to show for it.
Gerrymandering can help Republicans in the lower chamber† but it can't help in the Senate where they're most scared. Every voter in Texas gets to decide whether to pick Ken Paxton or James Talarico and perhaps more importantly if they can't stomach voting for somebody with a D next to their name, they can decide they were too busy that day to go vote at all so it's not really their fault.
† But it might not, if you turn five 7/3 R seats and two 9/1 D seats into six 6/4 and one 9/1 you risk a dummymander where too many of "your" voters vote the "wrong" way and you have seven Democrats elected even though you still took almost 50% of the vote in some districts and you drew the maps.
Now the trouble is that voters seem to be imagining that if the Democrats take the Legislature that's the whole ball of wax and it just isn't. If there's a narrow D majority in both parts of Congress you can expect that to stall the stupidest stuff from Trump which was subject to congressional oversight, but the useless "We need bipartisanship" mewling will start almost immediately from people who apparently were 100% fine with party-line Republican decisions or executive override.
Gerrymandering is backfiring on the GOP now. It involves reducing GOP margin in supposed safe districts while concentrating DEM voters in others. But if they get the estimate on GOP voters wrong this ends up creating more DEM districts. And this appears to be happening in some places, including 3 supposed GOP districts in Texas where the DEM candidate is leading.
When it became clear this was happening some gerrymandering attempts were aborted, for example in Indiana.
It’s called dummy-mandering, when you try to create more districts that are less safe with tighter margins, but you get the math wrong or sentiment changes by the time the election comes.
By attacking Iran, Trump fucked up the one thing that the average American voter will never forget, because they are reminded of it every day: the price of gas.
It does feel as though the best chance the US had to fix this in living memory would have been if Biden's response to the "United States v. Trump" verdict had been to immediately execute the Justices who said that's fine.
They're clearly OK with that, so it's not a problem that we can't ask them because they're dead, but the remaining Justices might now want to weigh in on whether it's OK to kill Supreme Court Justices if you're President, and might perhaps be expected to decide that's not OK and the earlier judgement was flawed.
Your preferred response to Trump trying to unilaterally seize power when an election didn't go "the right way" is to have Biden execute Supreme Court justices when a case didn't get decided "the right way"? You think that's better?
It's justice. The only sensible way to respond to "We've decided that your Office is above the Law" is to kill the people who made that decision. Most likely the remaining Justices have you incarcerated for murder, because um, yeah, that "The law doesn't apply to Presidents" decision is clearly a terrible idea as you have now demonstrated.
It's not even that many deaths, Trump's decisions have directly killed far more people than that without them having any say in the matter - He isn't (and never will be) in jail for it because of course these assholes get to do whatever they want and a Democrat will maybe send them a stern letter
The response we saw would be appropriate for toddlers but the Justices aren't toddlers, they're adults, they knew perfectly well what they were doing and so the only way to deliver justice was to ensure their decision has consequences.
Such laws would be useful everywhere. First rule: whatever you decide, it's effective after 6 months. Second rule: you can't change first or second rule.
That's because the Democrats are controlled rather than true opposition. It still makes the party a better option than Republicans often times, in that they won't intentionally (but will sometimes accidentally) break things or start new fires, but they rarely (if ever) try to fix what's broken or put out existing fires.
What we really need is to sweep away the existing party duopoly, particularly by dropping the bullshit and actively harmful first-past-the-post electoral system which effectively mandates it.
Tariffs are very populist and both sides have some amount of support for them, so I don’t see them going away. If anything, the democrats are less libertarian than the republicans (historically, before Trump), so I just don’t see them liberalizing tariffs so much as going back to a more sane Obama-style normal.
The socialist wing of the Democratic Party is even less libertarian than the moderates, and it’s hard to call them controlled.
Tariffs as a concept are fine. They're one of the economic tools available to a nation.
What's particularly damaging about Trump's approach to tariffs is the uncertainty. The targets don't always make a lot of sense. They're done haphazardly through questionable paths, which means they're subject to legal challenges. They're changed on a whim when Trump decides he needs to make a splash, or when someone says something he doesn't like, or when he wants to blow up a negotiation, or whatever.
It all leads to a situation where business owners and investors can't really be sure what the tariff landscape is 6, 12, 18, 24 months into the future. Will the tariffs survive legal challenges? Who will Trump decide to tariff next? Which tariffs might be increased drastically next week?
That is not an environment that fosters investment and business growth.
Moderate, business-oriented Democrats and Republicans would all agree with you, BUT these are a group of people that both sides of the party are railing against so they have basically no influence at this point. Even Obama, people selectively remember him fondly (or not) for his compassion and mild socialism, not for his strong free trade stance.
> Yes, but it's also Trump and the GOP self-immolating. November is going to be a historic electoral wipeout.
> I expect the next administration will push through some laws limiting this sort of idiocy.
The problem is that the bar is now so low that basically anybody will win, by design.
They'll pass some surface level bullshit to treat symptoms, like how lakes can or cannot be renamed. But they'll fail to address any root, systemic issues that allowed this BS to unfold in the first place, paving the way for the other half of the Uniparty to resume power 4-8 years later.
Swiss democracy is doing just fine, it has frequent changing of power and lack of concentration of it built in much more robustly rather than US' pinky promises and wishful expectations. If only EU would be less pushy in bilateral talks and stop bullying it on internal matters and rather focus on its own rising internal... catastrophe(s) behind the doors.
Plus frequent public votes on actually important matters, the mark of adult smart population. Politicians globally will go out of their way to explain to you why Swiss model is bad for other places, but it boils down to who holds actual decision power and accountability.
They did vote to ban minarets, which was odd. Also, the Swiss are fairly conservative in the classical personal responsibility sense, which makes for good citizen voters. They do this through an aggressive policy of education and assimilation that emphasizes “Swissness.” Dropping Swiss style into other countries might not work out as well.
Make public votes elsewhere and you will see laws like those minarets passing left and right. This is what an actual democracy looks like - majority's opinion prevails, not only topic one likes to see happening.
Folks generally like to feel they are objective, but only to the point when something they don't favor is winning. I am guilty of same behavior, part of human nature I guess but its good to realize one's own fallacies
The swiss system mostly works because the people are disciplined, believe in lots of self responsibility, they actually have militias with mandatory participation (like America's 2nd amendment, but the first clause isn't flavor text), you have to join the volunteer fire brigade, etc... Immigrants who want to become swiss citizens...they do a spot check of your home cleanliness to make sure you are "swiss enough".
> Swiss democracy is doing just fine, it has frequent changing of power and lack of concentration of it built in much more robustly rather than US' pinky promises and wishful expectations.
Nothing there of that sort apart from maga-level typical claims 'they have nazi gold' which ain't true but it gives a fuzzy feeling of knowing a bit to some less educated folks.
Its most direct democracy globally having most free citizens (depends on viewpoint but I stand behind this claim firmly), bar none. They just don't need to shout about it all the time like US folks do, they simply just deliver, over 800 years and counting.
That’s just another way of saying “whoever you vote for, the government always gets in” if you limit terminology like that. The rise of the Reform and Brexit party undermines the argument of the Wikipedia page somewhat.
And what systemic problems have they addressed since then? I don't live there, but it seems that NHS is increasingly gutted by capital interests, with no end in sight.
At best, you get an illusion of progress. That's not progress.
As a Canadian I say: please don't apologize; we're actually enjoying this.
The US could retaliate in a lot of other ways that could be much more hurtful to us: higher tariffs, break collaboration treaties, etc. The fact that Trump is "fighting back" with something this lame is just funny. It is like watching a 5 year old throwing a tantrum.
Compare this reaction with dogs. When a rottweiler or Doberman is angry with you, it attacks and hurts you. When a chihuahua or terrier is angry at you, it just makes a lot of noise. Trump's reaction is like a chihuahua, it is not like a rottweiler.
Not sure what’s there to apologize about. Canada can still call it Lake Ontario right? Or I wonder if it matters whether it’s on American soil or not whether international bodies recognize it?
Why not choose to feel patriotic about the decision. It gives us recognition for what we've done with the body of water. Arguably the fact that you feel embarrassed or need to apologize shows the lack of patriotism you feel over the body of water, so I think this new name can help future people feel patriotic over it. There is a lot of power in a name.
That doesn't mean it should not be changed. How the lake existed back then and how it exists now is different so it is more deserving of a name change than other name changes that have happened.
"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it." - Mark Twain
This is my kind of patriotism, personally. I love America. I want America to succeed in the world. And I will call my government out when it is fucking it up.
Renaming Lake Ontario on a whim because Trump is no longer happy with the USMCA trade deal he himself made just a few years ago and the negotiations aren't going well because he keeps making crazy demands is squarely in "fucking it up" territory.
Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Ruben Ray Martinez would love to debate you...except they were US citizens who were executed by masked ICE thugs, so they're unable to speak at the moment.
We are absolutely being taken over by a gang / mafia style organization.
There was absolutely no reason for any of those 3 individuals to end up dead for the non-violent actions they took, and it has been repeatedly shown through video evidence that the federal government lied and continues to lie about the circumstances in all of those cases.
If the individuals would have acted civilly it would not have come to this. They are the only ones to blame for the consequences of their actions. And calling this actions non-violent is manipulative phrasing to make people think that the actions did not escalate the danger of the situation.
I’m sure everybody’s different, but I don’t particularly care about people’s karma scores when looking at discussion threads.
While no place is perfect, I think the HN community and moderators do a decent job of moderating threads and preventing flame wars while also supporting the sharing of different views.
With the rise of AI, there’s a noticeable uptick of bots attempting to submit articles and comments to HN. You rarely see this low-quality content make it to the front page. That’s a lot of thankless community work.
Simon, thanks for all the great work you do. I definitely appreciate your contributions to discussion threads here as well as your blog. I learned so much from you.
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