It is however, not specifically the typical experience nor true for all individuals across the history of the nation, especially for significant portions of the population across a great deal of the nation's history, and it is remarkably less true for many in the nation at present.

The tools of oppression are globally available, and are in use to deprive people of those explicitly enumerated freedoms both within and outside of the US borders everyday.

That's just the way it is, and the way it has always been.

For specific cases past and present, see: Native American treatment and conditions at any point in time from the time of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights until this moment in time.

Also see the ongoing cases of extrajudicial incarceration and deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers of uncharged and non-hostile citizens and residents without legal repercussions from either state or federal judiciary.

So, no, one cannot count on fair trial nor the presumption of innocence in the US, even though that is very much the promised state of affairs. Wishing does not make it true.

IIRC from when I moved to Japan the first time (30+ y ago) when the old lights were standard, being a wildly curious Gaijin enough to ask "why" about these kinds of strange contradictions, and having lots of exposure in that time to senior citizens who had the spare time and inclination to humor my incessant questions, several of these octogenarian to centarians remembered the introduction of the first gen traffic lights, when the automobile became common enough to require them; and this seeming contradiction was new; this was the explanation I have heard common across several distinct conversations in different towns:

1. 緑 "midori" as a character and word for green was not very common usage before the end of WWII.

2. The (pre-LED) lamps for all three were yellow bulbs viewed through glass filters that were 'red', 'clear-somewhat yellow', and 'blue' - so even though it may appear green, the blue was for the color of the glass.

Also because 青い "aoi" has persisted in use for certain shades of 'green' - for example green apples and leafy fresh veggies; so this 'blue' seems to match the actual color of the light and has an implicit meaning for Japanese - in the sense of 'go while light is still fresh' - and Japanese humor is primarily Punny instead of being actually Funny, so this double meaning resonates even after switching to truly green LED light sources.

You are in school; use the access to claude and other LLMs to learn how code, compilers, hardware abstraction and microcircuits function on a fundamental level. These concepts will provide the foundational comprehension for larger, more complex thinking as your wet-ware matures. A this developmental stage in learning it really is all about building a strong network of 'effective study effects' within your mind.

I see the appeal of showing off a product, many young programmers go through some flavor of this and unfortunately the current state of technology is pushing learners into value = product that solves a big problem = marketability.

Almost the worst outcome for becoming a durable, self empowered, and creative problem solver in the long run would be 'spectacular success' right now at this specific moment.

A slightly better, but more embarassing outcome, is when the world points out the flaws of going live with a shallow git repo, full of mit-licensed AI slop (claude's Commits 2 commits 3,791 ++ 25 --) and a website with 404 links from the git repo. It's a world facing announcement that that you vibe coded some half-baked noise and haven't taken an extra minute on the fine details.

The reason this is the better outcome is the opportunity to learn, to turn back to the tools and extract valuable comprehension of fundamentals that are available to you in a more thorough and more readily accessible manner than has existed at any prior moment in history.

The people who built these tools for you to use, many of them had to subscribe to a quarterly programming magazine, and hand type examples of code into a text interface and see if they could get it to run - and the mental exercises of that type brought about the abstractions and functional programming principles making progress toward modern computing possible.

Don't rob your own mind of the weight lifting type brain strain; use these LLM's for getting your hands on the most fundamental, hard to grasp, simple-to-the-point of seeming too basic and yet somehow almost impossible to hold a clear picture of how it works, type of computing knowledge from yesteryear.

These will be the levers and fulcrums which enable your mind to find innovative solutions to the problems that no-one else will solve.

Or ignore me, build trivialities that waste power and your time, and reach maturity without the ability to solve problems that don't already have solutions buried in the training data, and live in anticipation of the next model update devaluing everything 'you' built.

/

p.s. Microsoft will steal anything MIT licensed and that is not any endorsement of capability or viability; it may be actually a negative symbol for many in the world of security and reliability. Ask your favorite LLM about the history of Microsoft and system security; specifically the features they are baking into OS level, unstoppable AI surveillance.

https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie title: "Part 1: My Life Is a Lie" byline: "How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America"

TLDR; it does actually take well over 100k for a family of four in the US to not be at significant risk of becoming de-housed and the 'poverty line' that everyone points to has not been adjusted to account for the actual erosion of public standard services since the late 1960's and does not take into account the actual costs of many significantly inflated market conditions; including housing, food security, basic transportation, and communication.

Bottom line, the answer to the original questions is: America is not rich, has not been for quite some time, and everyone is sad because the reality is in serious contrast to the image which the wealthy and powerful are very effective at projecting both inside the US and abroad. That image is every bit as disconnected from reality as every other fictional product of the US entertainment industry.

Any action on the part of the model provider, which is not completely in the direction of more money for less work, is actually working against the interest of the provider, the shareholders, and various investors. Any such action would open the specific employees or parties taking that non-profit maximizing action to official review, reversal of action, and possible reduction in responsibility or termination of duties. That is completely within the job description of employment at any of the places, including Anthropic.

So, users, be informed, the model providers are not allowed to take user's best interest in to scope for making utility decisions.

The company will at it's own discretion; reduce customers' allowance of capability, reduce the computational cost for performing the same actions at a later date, reduce the precision and utility of results iteratively as the number of users increases overall demand. Model providers will showcase higher performance and precision to non-paying 'potential customers' and then nominally deliver increasingly reduced performance up-to the point of a specific and acceptable ratio of account cancellations.

This is specifically in order for the model providers to extract as much coin for as little work as possible: that is the purpose of the many profitability matrices and customer load balancing 'knobs' that are run using the very best models. It is a given and very reasonable to expect an explicit requirement from the top that the internally facing model capacity is NEVER degraded for the tasks of increasing revenue per unit of work; that is, to make as much as they can at any point in time, and make more at every point in time than they did before.

The responsible use of these models should be; use the best performance (i.e. the free tier) to assist in the development of infrastructure to run models which are actually under your control; either on in-house hardware, or on leased VPS instances with specific hardware and performance guarantees. Then use models under one's own control to develop stable and irrevocably performant workflows.

Any reliance on public facing subscription models for actual work is 100% guaranteed to deteriorate in functionality over time and waste money trying to maintain performance as measured by cost per token over time. That is the fact of the matter.

/

For starters, I never read NYT beyond the headlines - both because of how broken the paid news model is for insightful reporting, and because of how instrumental NYT has been in breaking that model. This is 'Duh, of course' territory, to the point of being more rage bait...

Yes, Trumptastic governance has further screwed the US's already failing brain trust. The slippery slope of lowering quality for domestic primary math and science education since the 1970's had only been offset by an inflow of competent students and researchers from abroad with generally better than average comprehension of primary math and science subjects.

So now; we have an actively hostile government for these highly qualified students and researchers from abroad, an actively defunded science and math infrastructure for developing domestic supply of educated researchers, and an anti-incentive for any international cooperation on improving these conditions.

The headlines write themselves; but of what use are articles like this except as subscription bait for Ochs-Sulzberger family trust controlled media? /rhetorical question and observations ~ carry-on

Almost nothing is handled in a similar means or approach to Japanese standard practices, anywhere else.

Speaking as someone with 30+ years experience in both Japanese and non-Japanese business dealings and having had and being currently in the process of renewing work and residence permission in Japan under a different classification than before, and having visa sponsors who just finished 'Tax Season' there; the system is both at once extremely linear, and somehow opaque, and the actual paperwork is more easily measured in centimeters than in numbers of pages.

However; that being said, the actual costs of taxes and other fees including retaining the services of an administrative scrivener (not quite the same as a paralegal accountant) are very logical and reasonable for the resultant social/infrastructure outcomes.

But, if one is not already fully fluent in Japanese and does not have a driving requirement to reside and do business in Japan; the system is simply not designed for participation from the outside like the EU or US. When foreigners attempt to participate directly, even the Japanese know that the local system is complex in puzzling ways, and the most common comment I have personally observed is, "Why would you voluntarily do this; we all do it because we must, but if you don't have to, WHY?"

Lets see, 2026 minus 300 is 1726. No electronics, analog or digital back then at all. Not even gas powered streetlights.

Did you mean, three decades ago? That was 1996... so no, it was pretty much digitally controlled, even at the 'washing machine and toaster oven' level.

By 1976 Motorola and Advanced Semiconductor Materials were both in full production. Intel and Microchip Technologies, which was where the 'chips controlling appliances' movement really began as a spin-off from General Instrument's microelectronics division, were online by 1986.

Yes, much more can and should be done to improve and refine the wasteful consumerism treadmill that is central to US industry, but it is not a fundamental need to drive this improvement via cheering the loss and destruction of modern semiconductor manufacturing global capacity. Perhaps you are just repeating some misinformed "it will be better after we finish breaking everything" rhetoric. The rest of us need to do whatever we can to keep this uninformed point of view from 'catching' in yet another corner.

You are more than welcome go back to washing your own laundry in a wringer bucket and storing winter ice in a shed for summertime cooling. So, kindly run along, log off and dream about the good old days in the shade of a waning empire.

Does one have any significant quality time to spend with the children during the formative and developmental stages in their early lives, while engaging in major corporation sociopathetic ass-kissery?

TLDR; being an excellent (or sociopathic) ass-kisser is one way to the top; if alone at the top on your way to alone at the rest-home with kids, exes, and former employees who hate you is the desired outcome.

Are the techniques one must be adept at to manage an extensive cohort of subjects|employees|associates appropriate means of influencing the developmental progress of children, such that they can be actually happy and a beneficial influence on their own partners, progeny, and greater society?

Otherwise, does it only matter that they then have the capacity and rapacity to remain in a position to become or remain rampant over-consumers in pursuit of the most expensive visages of "happiness."

How about using the accumulated wealth in the betterment of those childrens' lives by teaching them to cooperate in meaningful adventures, to build strong and lasting relationships of kindness, to consume with regards to the full scope of the externalized costs of that consumption, to enjoy the act of creation and production of meaningful insight in art and science ?

If one's actual goal is the qualitatively and quantitatively better long term outcomes in the lives of those children; isn't a more stable and harmonious life with the reward of success measured by the reduction in suffering both within and around them by finding their own unique and innate power to imagine, cooperate, discover, and grow, all while contributing to the knowledge base and capability of humanity?

If the goal is: a widening clan of bickering, profit seeking, materialistic, continually dissatisfied workaholics with a series of divorces, early cirrhosis of the liver, to end their days spending down the accumulated wealth in a lonely senior-dementia-warehouse, well sir or madam, carry on.

The Longer part - a.k.a. "what the hell do I know about anything?":

FWIW, I am quite grateful that the fortune500 CEO/COO vater meins was principally unavailable or unable to instill most of his 'techniques' for success in my own early years. He was somewhat more present and it is debatable, malignantly, involved during more of the developmentally significant stages of my younger siblings. The results have been a mixed bag of world class success in the some arenas of life with world class catastrophic outcomes for the other arenas for at least 2/5 to 4/5 of his admitted progeny, depending on how one measures those arenas.

My own, albeit limited, advantage from milder exposure to his 'capabilities' has informed a strong aversion to the quest for infinite collateral resources and externalized risks through manipulation and deceit with and among others.

I wouldn't have it any other way, and have lived a life of immeasurable richness; having years spent with the freedom to ponder, opportunity to discover novelty, create opportunities for many to learn and participate in the arts and sciences. With the freedom to chose vainglorious poverty, indulging in a selfish amount of free time; nine years in total, doing nothing more than looking after goats and gardens in some of the wildest tropical jungle at the princely cost of less than $300 USD per month, all-in. Surviving on wild boar, feral oxen, gamefowl, marine and river fishing, all while living as prehistorically as we could imagine with my spouse and best friend. (Same person) No hot running water, barely any electricity, no petrochemical fuels, and the scarcest of rain shelter in one of the wettest places on earth. It was a kingdom unto itself, and we answered to no one for our daily needs.

Barter and trade of the product of our own two hands among the other, more civilized, inhabitants provided everything we could not make and do without. Occasional travel, by road, by air, and by sail were accomplished without needing a bank account or a land-line. We needed little, and wanted for nothing more than the continued opportunity to live among the tree frogs and roaring streams.

Tell me you're richer, without the ability to live and make lifelong friends through no hidden agenda beyond helping a community of your own choosing to do what is agreed by that community to be best for everyone; and I'll call you a fool with pockets full of money, wasting breath on children who will neither grow wise nor kind by your words and example.

Also, this isn't a sour grapes POV. I have managed a 30B PE fund, nominally in control of several hundred B worth of assets that produce significant percentages of US and global consumption of at least three commodities with properties and operations on 5 continents, and which holds patents in carbon negative and renewable power technologies and which controls some of the operations utilizing those patents. I have contributed personally to the concepts enabling bare-metal layer of hypervisor development, over 20 years ago when hardware and in-kernel virtualization were the dreams of a glorious future. I do know the difference between money and wealth, first hand. I'll take freedom over never-ending consumerism, all my live-long days.

Spoiler warning for those who havent seen this movie before:

Callous disregard for the utility and purpose of both the 'Q' and 'A' users; thinly veiled in a 'you don't get to tell me what i care about', wrapped in a 'my concept of how to moderate is just the way it is; if you don't like it, go F* yourself' package, trimmed with a ribbon of 'who do these Lusers that pay the bills think they are' directed at both the site owners (who write the checks to pay the bills) and all three relevant types of visitors, Q's, A's and those who neither ask, nor answer questions, but do see Advertisements and indirectly generate the income which the site owners use to write checks. But who cares?!, since Mods are not being paid (or paid well enough) to adjust a maladjusted concept of 'the way things are' into 'giving a shit' for anyone. Closed with some more vitriol declaring the site still exists and continues to be useful (as nipples on a chicken).

WASH, RINSE, REPEAT...

That was so last decade; I just stopped giving a damn, removed my browser bookmarks and learned to skim past less frequent and less relevant links to useless and meaningless SO pages when they appear in search results.

The funniest outcome is that LLMs will continue to ingest the diminishingly accurate content of sites like this and continue to degrade the utility of even the most broadly defensible LLM use case scenario.

phew, haven't thought that deeply about SO in at least 4 ... wait its 2026, make that 5 years. Good riddance to the the Whole Lot of you.

For starters, TSMC has opened facilities in Az, but these are still owned and operated from Taiwan and rely significantly on Taiwanese capability for substantial inputs to the development process in both knowledge and operational capacity.

The new wafer capacity is not a replacement for Taiwan based infrastructure, but rather an extension of those operations.

And to be blunt: If amerika were to immediately about-face on 1975's "back-to-basics" math movement and resume math theory based primary education in order to develop the foundational comprehension necessary for the materials science at|in the design level workforce, it would still be at least one generation before homegrown capacity was 'on-par' with the current Taiwanese (and Dutch) resources.

TLDR; not a concern from a rational leadership condition.

However, pretending that one TSMC plant in Az is sufficient reason to TACO and post on social media in saggy golf pants == very much a potential outcome; regardless of the absolute immediate cost in lives and material capability, and the unavoidable long term consequences both within the US and around the world caused by said capricious behaviour.

I told him that Ubuntu was probably the best fit for someone changing/doing one's own install. And that was pretty much the extent of the conversation, we went on to talk more about raising beef on land without petrochemical fertilizers, and how he missed the flavor from his youth, circa 1930's vs what he could get in the store today.

A few years later, the next time I was in his living room, his somewhat older - the same - laptop was on his kitchen table with OpenOffice spreadsheets and something he was working on, running the latest Kubuntu flavor. I asked who he had asked to install it; he has a number of technically proficient descendants who live much closer and who visit far more frequently than I did, so I presumed one of my cousins had helped.

He acted a little gruff, told me he had switched to Ubuntu+gnome by reading and following the instructions, and had then decided he tried out the K Desktop and preferred it enough to just make the switch without reinstalling.

Had a bit of fun hearing him explain how he "hadn't been fond of some of the Ubuntu decisions with window managers but liked having both environments installed as somethings were better in K, and other things were better from Gnome."

In thinking about how ready he was, in his 90's, to fully read and follow instructions reminds me that he was from a generation whose automobile user manual came with instructions for adjusting the piston timing as well as how to bleed and adjust brake pressure.

Why does everyone act like switching to Linux from Windows is just too hard for "Kathy and Wayne"? The fact of the matter seems to be we have lost either the _ability_, or the _willingness_, to read-and-follow-directions in the general population. The end result of either is the same.

I carried the drives around in hopes of recovering the codebase for a virtualized+distributed SSI OS (Kerrighed-module-based), which had been in the works for about a year at that point.

Due to changes between 2.4/2.6 and 3.x kernel; the rise of user-level distributed computing in C/RIU, kubernetes+docker, I never really recovered the work: there were partial backups of some of the features scattered across three contributors' systems, but no coherent backup of the unifying components; and well "life" with one of the key contributors becoming 'Justice Impacted' stalled any real progress.

I use this as a personal motivation for RAID!=Backup.

It's a scary thought, and very much requires intense effort to build reliability from the ground up. In-house, on-premesis and private models will require significant investment (not just infra but also real design and engineering skill-sets) to move away from the 'build it fast and break things' approach.

The days of much work being done by junior programmers in a constant burnout, replace them at-will, lay-off whenever possible mindset which seems to have been the drive behind NPM and the java(script) world for the last several decades may be winding down. Layoff trends in commercial software appear to show ownership's perspective that historic workloads can now be accomplished by a few remaining programmers and an LLM budget.

Using 'Chat-Oriented Programming' (Steve Yegge's term), if done with an effective approach to technical and operational debt, may enable software development teams to absorb the extensive private function library burden. It may be that the potential n-times productivity available through codegen LLM is necessary leverage to provide a supportable silo of in-house functions, and the 'public repository' approach becomes only safe in an environment with isolation between trusted and untrusted-and-thus-disposable instances of features/functions/applications.

These conditions may again require fully staffed development shoppes. Lets hope the reversal happens before the current talent pool is lost to whatever work they find, or before they learn to farm sustainably and lose the desire to sit at a terminal all day.

On thing is certain; we are experiencing some truly interesting history.

It seems we have entered the Find Out phase of FAFO; which FA began with a lack of preparation in US educators in the 1960's for "New Math" which focused on conceptual understanding and abstractions, such as set theory and differential number bases. This lack of preparation, especially among primary educators (who had not themselves encountered mathematical theory in their own education) led to a regression; "Back to Basics" in the mid 1970's. Those missteps; both in educator preparedness, and in systemic regression to a rote memorization approach were substantially aggravated by reduced standards testing in the 1980's to hide the resulting weaknesses resulting from this regression.

First hand experience as a student through these epochs from the late 70's through the 80's and 90's in US academia led to thinking I was 'not good at mathematics.' For me the 'breaking point' of this pattern was the discovery that even with an undergraduate STEM degree from a PAC10 university, including 'advanced' math courses available therein, I was not sufficiently mathematically educated to qualify for enrollment in a post-graduate physics program at a leading scientific institute or to participate in advanced mathematics discourse at an international mathematics symposium.

During COVID lock-down I attempted graduate level bio-molecular studies from several tier-one US and UK online university programs and ran into proctored coursework where the educators opined that "some problems are simply intractable due to scope or complexity" and I was unwilling or unable to accept that there was no approach to solutions for these systems.

The ensuing self-directed relearning from international curricula and classical resources has remedied my misconception of inability; extended my approaches to include concepts such as p-adic bases and complex topological approaches. and shows that current cohorts of US students will need to become self empowered to learn conceptual math beyond what their educators believe achievable.

Those who do not grok math will always be in the position of being taken advantage of by those who do.

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We operated with a slightly different approach; leveraging long term lease back of land and physical resources to the original operators with caveats, such as transitioning to Organic Certification and Cost Effective Staffing - read that as Wallpapering the Products' Perceived value while shorting the personnel costs through under-staffing and underpaying - with some real improvements which included international market access and lower ecological footprints by ceasing deforestation for expansion and removing toxic petrochemical fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides from the operations which are actually beneficial to both employees and the community.

However, the standard modus operandii in the industry was and still is some flavor of this get in, grow, leverage, and then exit approach.

Individual operations' access to low to no interest financing for OPEX and CAPEX was a fundamental uplift to the value of those operations. There existed the possibility of leveraging the organizations' histories to secure low-to-no interest loans equal to the estimated market value of those operations; spend that money to expand and partially offset the cost of acquisition (protecting the investment funds from market volatility) and leverage those expansions to reduce competition through assimilation or under-pricing the competition.

Often the 'exit strategy' can include sell-off of physical assets to cover the loans; or folding the organization and defaulting on outstanding loans. The fund never actually has to be at risk, the upsides are up-front during the stage wherein the public sees the 'investment' into expansion of or improvement of goods and services before the inevitable degradation due to under-staffing and cost cutting through volume renegotiation or through changing suppliers and processes for cheaper and less effective inputs. When customer satisfaction and employee burnout reach a crescendo... move on.

The end for me was when the organization decided to use COVID as an excuse to cut an entire environmental tech development team from payroll; with zero benefits and the expectation that local government to provide the entire cost of team members and their families' survival, while selling the technology invented and being developed by those team members for approximately one dollar to show as great a loss as possible.

PE is at least as big a blight on the global economy and community well being as joint-stock monopolies serving a few majority shareholders.