This is like sales and marketing, idealists think you can build the perfect product and it will sell itself. It won't. It's an adversarial marketplace and you have to show the world what you did, against people who are trying to tear you down.

If you want to pollute your own priors with weird artificial litmus tests, it's a free country, but the artificial world-model you build in your head does not affect the real world around you.

China was a ground-level low-trust mess even 25 years ago, with fairly rampant fraud and theft by just about anyone you met on the street. That has completely changed — why? I don't think culture evolves that rapidly ex nihilo, when there's an obvious technology answer.

There is a ground-level appeal of the China-style panopticon because it delivers public order and clean streets. Larry didn't just buy his way to digital dictator by bribing the right people, it answers a question in a way other people are avoiding, because answering it requires a lot of work and uncomfortable tradeoffs.

The market thinks Alphabet is most able to efficiently turn $80B into more money by investing in AI infrastructure.

So, Alphabet is happy to oblige them, given the favorable terms.

Texas is leaning into becoming the manufacturing and R&D hub for the US, and is courting gigascale data centers and rolling out nuclear power, near-infinite solar, wind, and gas to power it as fast as possible.

Florida is leaning into the retired and populist factions of the GOP, banning data centers and taking on populist anti-tech positions that Texas wouldn't dare (because they want the investment).

99% of people don't edit the commits by hand, they review and then tell Claude how to edit the commits (or leave a PR comment it reads), that's far easier to ingest than the tiny exhaust of manual edits.

I think your reading is very generous — this clearly implies that the factory should have had their operations at best frozen once the surrounding area was built out.

Why is the factory's fault that people built houses right up to the edge of of the industrial site? Are you seriously suggesting they should have been shut down because people decided to build houses near an established industrial plant?

I'm very open to tribal sovereignty in deciding what whether to remain in in Canada, but that should apply to tribal territory, not holding the majority of the population of the territory hostage.

Claude code was one person's idea as a pet project and now it's singlehandedly 5x'd Anthropic's valuation. Sometimes single people matter, that's life.

It sounds like you got fired and offered severance.

We need to hold the line — nobody who has held a job with the UK Government ever deserves to be employed by the private sector. Once you're in the government, you've made your choice, you live or die in the public sector. No more begging the private sector for mercy later.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Loudoun+County,+VA/@39.114...