China is showing the world they have reached the lofty ideal of being a functional society, and I hate that an authoritarian Communist government was how they did it. I don't want to live under such a government, but I can't deny it's looking like a stronger form of government right now.

For the rest of us, if we want democracy to be better than authoritarian Communism, then we actually have to do the "be better" part.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/03/politics/us-military-iran-war...

A month or two ago they sent out an email asking common military members for ideas to deal with Iran. We've paid think tanks millions of dollars for plans like that. Guess they weren't worth anything in practice though.

All that money spent on plans and equipment and it sustains--what?--like 3 weeks of bombing Iranian children? (I mean, we did bomb a children's school on the first day, and nobody has been held accountable, so I'm still bitter about that. Let's be better please.)

I had GTP-5.6 write some shader code recently and it wasn't very clear to me. I spent about an hour chatting with the until I understood the concepts and was able to express them back to the AI using math formulas and variables named in a way that made sense to me. The AI then rendered the code using the formula and variables I was familiar with and it was clear to me.

It shows people who seem to have very full and rich lives, and the reason they do is because they use ChatGPT. These are the people smart enough to say things like "do what needs to be done", or "change the background to make it look better"--insights like these are why they make the big bucks.

On the one hand, I think this is an accurate depiction of the future. There is no meritocracy here. Some people have access to the best AIs and can speak a sentence and get great results, and the rest of us don't have access and so we're the poors. The happy presentation doesn't match the way I'm feeling.

I do wonder how rich CEOs will justify earning 500x as much as their employees when they're just another person that's dumber than an AI. Why are they paid so much again?

I do pay for the energy that powers my monitor and CPU after all.

I guess if you consider enough attributes or "dimensions" then any programming languages will be the furthest in some direction, including Go.

A simple example is: if you highly value language popularity; Go is not most popular. If you highly value a type system that catches errors; Go's type system catches fewer errors than others. Etc. There is no weighted sum of attributes that will select Go--that's my argument.