> respond tersely in Simplified Technical English

to every prompt to deal w/claudes insanity:

https://github.com/bigskysoftware/be-terse*

I do web & general java work on it and it's plenty fast even using a memory hog like IntelliJ (which is typically disk bound anyway). Claude tells me that a new macbook would feel about 1.8x faster in my CPU-bound cases, which is not common.

If memory prices returned to normal and if local inference gets over the hump, I could see upgrading for local AI agents, but I'm fine waiting for a good long while on that.

I say all this as someone who, five years ago, was a perpetual upgrader: immediately bought new product and got excited for next product. Wonder if the future will see the end of that culture in tech and, looking back, it was a little silly and wasteful anyway.

I'm also using an iPhone mini 12 and it's fine.

I have gone created a teaching assembly modeled on x86 with a complete debugger plugin for IntelliJ based on this.

emdash through out

if you can't be bothered to write it why should I bother to read it?

But of course, as I'm sure you recognize, that isn't the main point. The main point is that now we aren't even able to dominate high value manufacturing like microchips, despite being told we were only giving away the low end.

Not making cheap plastic toys means you don't have the supply chain and expertise around plastics molding, which means you eventually lose the ability to produce housing for electronics, which means you eventually lose the ability to produce electronic components, etc. And as we see, this is exactly what has happened, just like we saw happen in Florence, England, etc. before when the elites became more interested in financialization/usury than in production.

I'm american and I don't think america is the clear global leader in technical innovation, particularly looking at electrification. We are pretty good at R&D but have lost a large part of our ability to manufacture due to the supply chain shift.

R&D is fine and all, but we've got (or had) a middle class to feed, and for the last fourty years we've been faking that with credit.

You know how we tried to defeat Vietnam militarily and it was a disaster with all sorts of US service members lives lost, their families destroyed and lots of civilians killed? And then we lost anyway? And then after we stopped and, after a while, we started trading peacefully with them? And then how now they are pretty neutral-to-friendly towards us?

We could try that.

the us has papered over it w/credit (no coincidence that the credit card came out right when productive capacity was being shifted to asia) but eventually every country sits down to a banquet of consequences

same story as ever (florence under the medici, england under the whigs, etc) first productivity then usury

- We'll only move cheap plastic toys to asia

- We'll only move low-value clothing to asia

- We'll only move inexpensive electronics to asia

- We'll only move TVs to asia

- We'll only move computer assembly to asia

- We'll only move low-value semi-conductors to asia

- We'll only move CPU production to asia

Only thing really left is IP and frankly I expect asia to outperform the west in that soon enough (my understanding is that they already are in some areas, I am not an expert)