It just seems every other day is wilder than the previous.

It sure is interesting watching this dystopian speedrun.

The US is investing in AI technology to try to preserve the empire and its capitalists as its economic power is starting to be eclipsed. This was basically an inevitable move. The rush to replace workers, speed run the production of a superintelligence singleton with barely a thought for safety or whether anyone even wants this, etc all flows from this basic impulse.

If they are successful, they are going to shrink their base of people that buy into this system domestically even further, so they need to bank on an ever shrinking locus of support. Autonomous weapons and mass surveillance are a necessity if your population has become restive and unreliable. However, I think unless they attain a certain level of capability, this will accelerate popular anger rather than suppress it. If they shoot protestors with robots, it could cause an explosion of popular anger rather than scaring people into submission.

What is the difference between this and celery?

Currently almost adding celery to my project, but maybe this is better.

"Though I suck at it, my go-to language for side-projects is always Rust"

Hmm, dont be so hard on yourself!

proceeds to call ls from rust

Ok nevermind, although I dont think rust is the issue here.

(Tony I'm joking, thanks for the article)

Exactly, Trump is the brainchild of American mindset. Not the cause, but the result.

And now that even the Americans see it themselves, it's too late. They will _never_ gain the same trust again.

We're not replacing services. We're replacing our dependence on the USA.

Every choice comes with a cost.

With allies like the USA, you don't need enemies.

Euh, our job is hard enough as it is, don't start leaning on us to clean up the AI mess too.

I agree, seems he's on a mission instead.

Ah yes. The "mission" of pointing out how bad companies are in the most trivial details.

Can you imagine, knowing so little of the rest of the world, you call this nationalism without irony.

Sir, please read up on Wikipedia what the EU is. What Europe is. Also, this is a very mild response to a "American first" new world order.

US states are, in some ways, less independent than UK countries.

Wales can no more disavow the PM than California can disavow POTUS. So this separate status is limited.

The big counter to this is the idea that US states have their own militaries. States may have militias, but they can be subsumed by the federal government pretty easily, as we saw in California in 2025. They are not truly independent armed forces.

OTOH, states are not allowed to leave the US, we had a war about this a while ago. Meanwhile Scotland had a referendum on leaving the UK a few years ago.

Love it or hate it, we are Americans first before we are New Yorkers or Mississipians and so forth. This is especially true when it comes to international relations; that's handled on a federal level and most people in the world couldn't tell a Nebraskan from an Alaskan.

It's because a lot of people that werent skilful werent on your path before. Now that pandora's box has been re-opened, those people feel "they get a second chance at life". It's not that they have no shame, they have no perspective to put that shame.

You on the other hand, have for many years honed your craft. The more you learn, the more you discover to learn aka , you realize how little you know. They don't have this. _At all_. They see this as a "free ticket to the front row" and when we politely push back (we should be way harsher in this, its the only language they understand) all they hear is "he doesn't like _me_." which is an escape.

You know how much work you ask of me, when you open a PR on my project, they don't. They will just see it as "why don't you let me join, since I have AI I should have the same skill as you".... unironically.

In other words, these "other people" that we talk about haven't worked a day in the field in their life, so they simply don't understand much of it, however they feel they understand everything of it.

This is so completely spot on. It’s happening in other fields too, particularly non-coding (but still otherwise specialized or technical) areas. AI is extremely empowering but what’s happening is that people are now showing up in all corners of the world armed with their phone at the end of their outstretched arm saying “Well ChatGPT says…” and getting very upset when told that, no, many apologies, but ChatGPT is wrong here too.

It's why artists despise the AI art users. In that field it isn't simply them trying to contribute but instead insisting that you wasted your time learning to create art and if you're a professional you deserve to starve. All while being completely ignorant to the medium or the process.

You know...

Many artists through the ages have learned to work in various mediums, like sculpture of materials, oil painting, watercolors, fresco or whatever. There are myriad ways to express your visual art using physical materials.

Likewise, a girlfriend of mine was a college-educated artist, and she had some great output in all sorts of media, and had a great grasp of paints, and paper and canvas and what-have-you.

But she was also an Amiga aficionado, and then worked on the PCs I had, and ultimately the item she wanted most in life was a Wacom Tablet. This tablet was a force-multiplier for her art, and allowed her some real creative freedom to work in digital mediums and create art with ease that was unheard-of for messy oil paintings or whatever on canvas in your garage (we actually lived in a converted garage anyway.)

So, digital art was her saving grace, but also a significant leveler of playing fields. What would distinguish her original creativity from A.I.-generated stuff later on? Really not much. You could still make an oil or watercolor painting that is obviously hand-made. Forgeries of great artists have been perpetrated, but most of us can't explain, e.g. the Shroud of Turin anyway.

So generative A.I. is competing in these digital mediums, and perhaps 3D-printing is competing in the realm of physical objects, but it's unfortunate for artists that their choices have narrowed so far, that they are practically required to work in digital media exclusively, and master those apps, and therefore, they compete with gen A.I. in the virtual realm. That's just how it's gonna be, until folks go back to sculpting marble and painting soup cans.

FWIW, even in physical medium, artists have huge competition with "factory art", i.e. a lot of low-paid laborers creating paintings and drawings for cheap. Quantity, not quality, is the name of the game here - and this is the art that adorns all the offices and hallways around the world.

It's basically like GenAI, but running on protein substrate instead of silicon one.

And even in the digital realm, artists already spent the last decade+ competing with equivalent "factory art", too. Advertising stands on art, and most of that isn't commissioned, it's rented or bought for cheap from stock art providers, and a lot of supply there comes from people and organizations who specialize in producing art for them. The OG slop art, before AI.

EDIT: there's some irony here, in that people like to talk about how GenAI might (or might already be) start putting artists out of work. But I haven't seen anyone mention that the AI has already put slop creators out of work.

A shrug and a sigh in so many words.

Funny, reading your comment I had the idle thought: I mostly really see callousness towards artists coming from people retaliating after being belittled by artists for using AI

And here's your response to what felt like a pretty good faith response that deserved at most an equally earnest answer, and at worst no response.

Instead they got worse than no response lol.

   > All while being completely ignorant to the medium or the process.

also ignorant that the art they generated was made possible by those people who "wasted their time"...

That all makes sense. But the more I know, the more I realize that a lot of software engineering isn't about crazy algorithms and black magic. I'd argue a good 80% of it is the ability to pick up the broken glass, something even many students can pull off. 15% of that comes down to avoiding landmines in a large field as you pick up said glass.

But that care isn't even evident here. People submitting prs that don't even compile, bug reports for issues that may not even exist. The minimum I'd expect is to check the work of whatever you vibe coded. We can't even get that. It's some. Odd form of clout chasing as if repos are a factor of success, not what you contribute to them.

I find that interesting because for the first 10 years of my career, I didn’t feel any confidence in contributing to open source at all because I didn’t feel I had the expertise to do so. I was even reluctant to file bugs because I always figured I was on the wrong and I didn’t want to cause churn for the maintainers.

This is easily the most spot-on comment I've read on HN in a long time.

The humility of understanding what you don't know and the limitations of that is out the window for many people now. I see time and time again the idea that "expertise is dead". Yet it's crystal clear it's not. But those people cannot understand why.

It all boils down to a simple reality: you can't understand why something is fundamentally bad if you don't understand it at all.

It's not as if there weren't that sort of people in our profession even before the rise of LLMs, as evidenced by the not infrequent comments about "gatekeeping" and "nobody needs to know academic stuff in a real day-to-day job" on HN.