At the end of the day technology is going to advance, and the rational thing to do is to figure out how to use it effectively. Yes, a lot of technology gets abused all the time, our society as a whole is incredibly wasteful. But I see technological progress as a net positive, if anything I think the problem is with our social structures and broken incentives. And that’s what we should focus on fixing.

For me, these tools have unarguably save a ton of time and frustration every single day. For example, I had to work on a Js project recently for work. I haven’t touched Js seriously in at least a decade and I’m not familiar with the ecosystem, libraries, language quirks, and so on. If I had to figure all of that out from scratch previously, I simply would not have been able to take on this project. LLM completely papered over all that for me. I know how to structure programs, I can read Js just fine, but I didn’t have to spend the time searching and internalizing all these little details of how to run tests, which npm modules I’d need to use, what React lifecycle hooks I’d need, etc. It made the project far more enjoyable to work on, and I was able to deliver it as fast as using languages I’m intimately familiar with.

The thing is that I did have to spend the time to actually use the tool effectively, to develop intuition for tasks it can do well and those it can’t. How to get it to write code in a way I can understand and review effectively, how to see when it’s not doing what I want and correct that. Just like any tool, you have to spend the time to actually learn it to get value out of it. If you start with the premise that you dislike the idea of the tool, then it’s guaranteed that you’re not going to have a good time using it. But it’s a mistake to extrapolate that other people aren’t getting actual value out of it based on that.

Meanwhile, the whole context of this discussion is running local models which are tools that are available to the common person, and do not result in any capture of labor that I can see. You could make this argument with using proprietary models that you rent from a vendor, but it simply does not hold with ones you run locally.

GC has little to do with web page bloat though. In fact, that’s precisely where human agency comes in to design things in a sensible way. And I see little evidence to support the claim that stochastic automation leads to worse code myself. I use these tools every day, that’s completely contrary to my experience. I get the impression that you’re starting from a conclusion and coming up with a narrative that fits it rather than actually trying these tools out and seeing how to work with them effectively.

Ah yes tools are poison, you’re very intelligent.

Having done development for over two decades now, I’m really not learning anything useful when I make yet another CRUD end point on a server, or a new widget. The reality is that most coding tasks are highly repetitive and we’re just writing the same boiler plate in slightly different contexts. Being able to offload boring and repetitive tasks to a machine is what automation is for.

I’d rather spend my brainpower on things I find interesting like the overall architecture and the problem being solved while leaving writing implementation details to the LLM. It’s not like you stop solving problems when you use an LLM for coding, you’re just focusing on different things at that point.

It’s also worth noting that this argument isn’t new. I’m old enough to remember how writing assembly by hand was what real coders did or how using GC was cheating because you shouldn’t offload memory management to the computer. In each case it turned out that using better tools let us build more interesting things in the end and freed up human thinking from boring and repetitive work.

I don’t mean you turn the program itself into a genetic algorithm. I’m saying that the agentic loop for producing code acts as one. The code itself is just regular code. And the loop isn’t really any more inefficient than what you do as a developer. It almost never happens that you write perfect code on a first try in practice. You’ll write some code, run your tests, look how it did, and iterate. That’s precisely the same process the agent follows.

The difference from a typical genetic algorithm is that the LLM is not just randomly generating text that eventually fits into the shape you specified. It’s generating code that’s already close to what’s intended most of the time, and it just needs a bit of massaging to get completely right. That’s the feedback loop here.

I find I kind of look at the whole agentic harness setup as a genetic algorithm. Your tests and specs are the fitness function for the program you’re evolving, and the LLM is the mutator. At each step it generates some output, it gets tested against the fitness function, the LLM gets feedback and iterates on it. Eventually something working falls out in the end. The better you can define the selection criteria the more you box the agent in the better results you get.

The trick I can recommend for getting the model to code is to ask it to come up with a phased plan composed of focused features, and then to build each feature on its own branch. That way you have a clear unit of work that does a specific thing which makes it much easier to review the code. Can also recommend tools like https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec for making specs to box the model in when it works.

You can run the Gemma 4 and Qwen3.5 MoE models with as little as 12 GB of VRAM at 30-40 tps (Q4/Q5), and they both blow GPT-4o and DeepSeek R1 out of the water. But 64gb RAM is also not really out of scale with the cost of a shop tool in other trades. If you’re a professional that’s confident in a positive return on the investment, or just a hobbyist with the luxury budget for a “shop” that cost is well within consumer market. That’s not everybody, of course, but it’s not some inconceivable fantasy.

The key point is that local models continue to get more efficient and usable. You need high end consumer grade hardware today, but given how fast improvements are happening, it’s entirely likely that you’ll be able to get the same capability on even smaller hardware in a few months.

I think Stalin was largely correct in what he did, the problem was that he left a system which failed to ensure strong leadership going forward. A stable social system can’t depend on a single strong willed individual being in charge and making the right calls. Continuity of competent governance, especially in time of plenty is the hardest problem to solve in my opinion.

And completely agree, China quietly outplayed the west. A lot of it was inherent in western hubris too. They really thought that theirs was the only way to develop, and they figured that China would have to become like them eventually and they’d fold it in. But it didn’t work out that way. Turns out people with 3000 years of continuous civilization under their belt know a thing or two of their won. Also, don’t know if you saw, but American media has now realized DPRK is doing rather well. https://archive.ph/b9zrS

The west really is starting to look like the final days of the Roman empire now. I expect we’ll start seeing provinces getting cut loose next and imploding economically. The UK looks like it might be the first to pop.

oh and just ran across this https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202605/19/WS6a0c0718a310d6866eb4976d.html

I don’t think the crisis has been averted. It’s going to take a long time before energy prices get back to normal because restarting production can’t happen overnight. Just clearing the backlog of tankers in the gulf is going to take over a year. I also don’t see Israel stopping attacking Lebanon which means the fighting is likely to restart soon.

Trump wants to get out desperately, but he has no way out because Israel won’t play along. From Russian perspective it makes sense to play along though because it drives Europeans up the wall. And I don’t see what leverage he has left either.

And completely agree that strikes just serve to remind people in Russia why the war is necessary. The overall situation on the front won’t change, but it will help with firming up public support to remove the threat.

It does look like Russia is ramping up deep strikes on infrastructure especially now that the US ran out of patriots during their Iran fiasco. I think this will be significant over time, and affect logistics going forward which will accelerate the events on the front.

I saw a video just yesterday of some kid beating up TCK cause they took his dad. Yes, public is definitely starting to turn on them.

And American style propaganda does in fact have its origins with Goebbels, I might’ve sent this before. It explains everything very clearly. https://royallib.com/read/artemov_vladimir/psihologicheskaya_voyna_v_strategii_imperializma.html#0

the term is semantic drift

Actually, ReactOS and Wine have historically worked together and share significant technical overlap in the goal of reimplementing the Windows API, though they have different approaches and end goals. They’re separate projects now, but a lot of work in wine happened thanks to ReactOS.

yeah that’s true

looks like

And now everybody saw how the US can just cut access to their model at any time too.

We talked about this before, lack of a good selection process that allowed people of low competence to get into positions of power and created a bureaucracy which was largely concerned with preserving itself rather than solving problems was the ultimate cause of the decline. Simply telling people everything is great while you’re unable to produce substantive change they can see tangibly deligitimizes the system. And that’s precisely what we see happening in the west today, and why there’s now public disillusionment with liberal democracy.

And you’re absolutely right that Europe has been propped up to prevent genuine socialism from taking hold. The US didn’t pour billions upon billions into rebuilding western Europe after WW2 out of sheer altruism. They used it as a way to deligitimize communism in the east. Look how great Europeans are living, look how much faster things develop under capitalism. That was the whole narrative. This is a great read on the subject incidentally, confirms everything you said http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27c/046.html

This is a caricature from a Soviet newspaper from 1955. Absolutely nothing has changed.

Yup, that cartoon is ever green, and just as true as the day it was made.

It never even crossed my mind that someone might try to harm me.

Exactly, there were just not thoughts people had back in USSR. It’s destruction was the biggest crime of the 20th century.

I really can’t see how relations with Europe could be restored at this point. There would have to be a revolution in Europe before that happens.

And I’m just going by what Zelensky said when Blumenthal visited. They openly stated that they’re going to be shuffling Syrsky out by fall, and it’s clear the directive is coming from the US. It could be that Americans are hoping to transition to something like Chechnya soon.

Yeah, LaTex has been a pain to set up historically, so making it more accessible is very welcome.

that’s cause it’s literally what it is, legalized bribery

amazing

it sure does, the US is just the most blatant about it