Plenty of tools can be dangerous when used improperly. For example, bleach is very useful for cleaning, but I would advice against drinking it.

What part of my argument is flawed, nothing I said is contrary to your statement.

Reddit does have the advantage of being a single site where search is easy to do in a shared db. Since Mastodon is federated, discoverability is going to be inherently worse as requests have to propagate through the network. But I think that for blogs it’s less of an issue since you tend to follow people for their writing.

In my opinion, Lemmy is already a great replacement for Reddit. So, it makes sense for Mastodon to focus on its core functionality which is blogging, while Lemmy can fill the Reddit niche in the fediverse.

I actually think substack format would be a better fit. It’s already a blogging platform at its core with good discoverability. That’s exactly what sites like substack provide and why they’re popular for blogging. Reddit/Lemmy is more of a news aggregator where people post links and discuss them.

Yeah, I think that’s exactly what happened as well. He was too big of a figure and that created an environment where there were no other strong leaders within the party. So, once he was gone, it created a huge power vacuum and squabbling.

China is actually quite independent from the US, and we have recent conclusive proof of that when Trump tried doing a trade war. Turns out, exports to the US are a tiny part of Chinese economy now. And I don’t know why you think China needs microchips from Taiwan when they have chip production entirely on the mainland. I think you need to spend a bit of time to actually research this subject because you’re very much misinformed here. https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2026/5/ieee-iscas-tau-scaling

by the way https://xcancel.com/upholdreality/status/2067629274765394368

I don’t think anybody takes what Trump says seriously at this point. He’ll say one thing than another, it literally changes day to day. What matters is that the US is exhausted now. They just lost a major war against Iran, their weapons stocks are depleted, and China has them by the balls. So, Trump is doing a bit of posturing right now, but it’s not going to translate into anything material because the coffers are empty.

And I can’t see Russia taking out the bridges because it’s almost certain they plan to use them. The goal of the Europeans is to provoke a big reaction right now so they can rally their public. The support for the war is at all time low in Europe right now, so they’re trying to put pressure on Putin to do something big to start scaring people how Russians are coming for them.

Artemov explains everything correctly, and reading his book really helped me see how American propaganda machine works a lot more clearly. The direct inspiration from the nazis and the evolution of the narrative was very interesting to read about as well.

sure kiddo

same

🙄

Something becomes a tool through usage though. So, LLMs can be a tool just as anything else when we put out mind to it.

when you definitely know how tools work

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