> You're part of a team, you're contributing, you're also (measurably) pulling less hard than you would if the rope were yours alone

There’s a perfectly rational reason for this. Success is collective, but failure is individual.

Rewards for the success accrue to the person who represents it to the right people (usually those with the shortest path to the organization root).

For all intents and purposes, the person who gives the presentation did the work.

A nuclear armed Iran could hold oil and gas shipments in the Straight of Hormuz hostage indefinitely. It could also threaten U.S. bases and warships in the area. It could threaten regional allies with a nuclear attack.

> Are we really back in "trust me they have WMDs" territory?

Irrespective of everything else going on, it’s well established that Iran has a nuclear program in the advanced stages of development. There was a whole UN program around inspecting it.

> That would make the US turn tail. Not start a war with China.

The right kind of missiles hitting the right kind of boat could lead to a very grave escalation.

Indeed. “Used to” is the key observation. In the wake of WW2, the U.S. had both dynamism and the ability and will to act collectively. This combination led to rising standards of living, the space program, Silicon Valley, the internet, etc.

The U.S. economy is still relatively dynamic, but the will to collective action has completely failed.

Europe can act collectively but lacks dynamism.

Which country, today, demonstrates both traits?

If history is any guide, that doesn't happen without a substantial - existential, perhaps - exogenous shock.

One of the things I remember most from my career was a manager "rules lawyering" about bereavement leave when my aunt passed away. Ironically, HR was very sympathetic and accommodating, and it was a non-issue with them.

I've been treated "worse" by jackass execs and managers, but always in the context of work. Someone acting in the way this manager did about a personal situation sticks with me much more than those.

It’s very dangerous to do the “right thing” for the wrong reasons in a complex situation. This is step 1. Does anyone have faith that the Trump admin will properly execute steps 2..N?

I would have some respect if the administration announced that it would support a provisional government led by the apparent winner of the last election in Venezuela. As such it seems to be that the administration has left the existing power structure in place and established a client/patron relationship with the leadership. This is revolting.

“Why don’t you just make the minimum 37 pieces of flAIr?”

The inference response to the prompt is not deterministic. In fact, it’s probably chaotic since small changes to the prompt can produce large changes to the inference.

This doesn’t seem like a good example. People who engineer systems that rely on integrals still know what an integral is. They might not be doing it manually, but it’s still part of the tower of knowledge that supports whatever work they are doing now. Say you are modeling some physical system in Matlab - you know what an integral is, how it connects with the higher level work that you’re doing, etc.

An example from programming: you know what process isolation is, and how memory is allocated, etc. You’re not explicitly working with that when you create a new python list that ends up on the heap, but it’s part of your tower of knowledge. If there’s a need, you can shake off the cobwebs and climb back down the tower a bit to figure something out.

So here’s my contention: LLMs make it optional to have the tower of knowledge that is required today. Some people seem to be very productive with agentic coding tools today - because they already have the tower. We are in a liminal state that allows for this, since we all came up in the before time, struggling to get things to compile, scratching our heads at core dumps, etc.

What happens when you no longer need to have a mental model of what you’re doing? The hard problems in comp sci and software engineering are no less hard after the advent of LLMs.