Totally! That’s what makes the situation doubly maddening. It would be one thing if these actions were bad for the world and good for the US. But they’re bad for the US too!

I forget who it was that said this, and I’m sure my paraphrasing is bad, but I listened or read something I found chilling. It was something like, ordinary Americans are totally unprepared for the level of danger they will experience over the coming decades.

The only reason Trump is able to destroy global institutions so easily is because Americans take their security for granted. But that security is the result of institutions developed in the aftermath of an utterly devastating war. Now those institutions are damaged and America’s friends are alienated, right when they are most needed to deal with China, Russia, AI, drones, cyber, nuclear, climate…talk about bad timing.

To provide for European security! That’s the deal in terms of Europe and NATO and also specifically to handle Germany. The idea was that America would provide security to Europe including the nuclear umbrella, and one benefit - among many others - was that Germany would not need to have a powerful military.

Can you perhaps guess why people might be concerned about a heavily armed Germany in the postwar period? Those same concerns are bubbling up in European capitals right now, as Germany rearms due to the loss of the US as a reliable partner.

As much as I am critical of the US, until now the US did behave very differently from other superpowers. Consider the end of WWII. The US did not inflict reparations on the vanquished nations but rather, invested huge sums in their rebuilding, in the process making stalwart allies of them. These were not puppet governments, they became thriving democracies.

This is not to excuse the many bad things the US has done in Latin America, Vietnam, etc. But there is really no comparison between US behaviour and that of the USSR (or of colonial European countries, for that matter). People in Soviet-controlled East Germany were quite keen to go to the west and did not perceive the presence of US military bases there as evidence of American totalitarianism.

That, of course, has changed and now America is seen as a predatory hegemon. But that has not always been true.

Exactly. And who benefits from a less educated, less aware populace? The answer is pretty clear: look at who is benefiting right now!

Brilliant coinage, if it’s yours, congrats!

My take: it is not enshittification to raise the price for a product whose demand outstrips its supply. That is basic economics. There are alternatives, it’s not a monopoly. If you think it’s the best product, then pay more for it.

Personally I would be perfectly content if the price of Max went up a bit and Pro no longer worked for CC if it meant that Max was faster and more stable.

I was quite happy with what I pulled off using the first design system: I wanted a new footer section for my IPAAS startup, it generated four options, the fourth of which was quite good. We iterated on it for a bit, then I pulled it into Claude Code (that integrated feature is very cool), CC built it, I deployed it, done. (Bottom section of https://tediware.com/ if you're interested, the bit with "Origin story" on the left and the signup panel on the right).

It was not a complicated build by any means but I liked the concept it developed and it was dead-easy to make it all happen. I think the ideas in the UI are very good. Still rough, but you can see where this could go, and it's got a ton of potential.

The hilarious thing is that I would be willing to bet than in a decade, it's STILL a massive shitshow in enterprise. That's because the problem with enterprise software is not that good design is all that difficult to pull off (it just requires caring!) It's that the people making enterprise software have terrible taste and can't even see (I am convinced) that the thing they built is ugly and hard-to-use.

This seems to be the new narrative around here but it's not jiving with what I'm experiencing. Obviously Anthropic's uptime stats are terrible but when it's up, it's excellent (and I personally haven't had any issues with uptime this week, although my earlier-in-the-week usage was lighter than usual).

I'm loving 4.7. I was loving 4.6 too. I use Codex to get code reviews done on Claude-generated code but have no interest in using it as my daily driver.

It shows up as inconsistency. One of the key things I built in this architecture is the ability of users to define standard operating procedures (SOPs). These are the instructions (i.e. prompt) for the agent to do tasks (I've integrated Sonnet via OpenRouter into the SOP drafting UI, so people have help creating these - and the system prompt for this knows about the API endpoints that the agents have access to, so people get good advice as they write them).

Anyway, it's not uncommon for someone to write an SOP, test it a couple of times, decide that it works, and then tell people it's good to go. There's probably a 1 in 3 possibility that it doesn't actually work when someone else tries it. The reasons for that are almost endless it seems.

This is just one aspect. It seems like something new fails every day. Today:

- the agent stopped responding to incoming email. I dug into it. Somehow the tailscale hostname had changed. I had not changed it. I have no idea why it changed. This is not OpenClaw's fault, but it speaks to my point that there are too many moving parts with these things.

- the agent stopped sending emails when tasks were completed. This runs on a "cron" job. I went through the list of the cron jobs. The "task reporter" cron job was disabled. Why? No idea. I didn't disable it. I'm the sole "operator" of the OpenClaw instance, so if I didn't disable it, then something inside OpenClaw did. Why? I don't know.

What I do know is that someone pings me every day with a complaint that something is not working, which is a new experience for me, and it's embarrassing.