For those who have little hope of the wealth tax applied to them (me for example), but as as someone who has investments and need them for retirement, I need to decide if this will affect bond prices or equity prices in a positive or negative way as their attractiveness will change in relative terms, or if publicly accessible funds will get devalued in favor of private investment opportunities and all public assets get devalued. Oh, wait, I am not wealthy, so I do not have the option of private equity, and cannot participate in what would be an attractive investment opportunity when investments shift towards more opaque assets.

For those that have zero assets, I do not think that a shift by the wealthy to private equity is a good thing, unless you want to work for a private equity company. A government job would be your best bet. And a shift to private equity would have a downward pressure on tax collections, so whatever projections for how much a wealth tax would generate, I am suspect.

A lot of people complain about private equity. This scourge was, to a small or large degree depending on your viewpoint, an unintended side effect of SOX compliance, meant to protect investors, and in the end narrowed down the amount of public companies, and created more opportunities/demand for PE. I think it is debatable how much protection investors actually received.

We live in a system, and making a fundamental change to one part of that system has effects on all parts. Raising the amount of taxes under the current system ? That is one thing. Introducing a whole new tax concept, difficult to predict. Especially if this is done by states, which could cause capital movements with their own unexpected consequences.

I like having multiple personal machines that are always in sync with each other. I also like have multiple dev machines that I don't care if I (or my AI) messes them up.

If Apple came out with a SafariBook equivalent, I would consider it. Might even do both if I could auto sync between them.

I have multiple Chromebooks and an extra monitor, and use Google for files, email, photos. I can grab my cheap Chromebook and throw it into my backpack, don't bother with a case. I have learned to live without using installed apps.

I have a couple of beelink boxes at home that I stash in the corner of a room, connected to my home wireless. I use Crostini to remote into these boxes to do any development. I treat these boxes the same way I treat my Chromebook - disposable. I have scripts that will reconstitute my dev environment from GitHub and my backups.

If I trash a chromebook, I grab or buy a new one. I can do pretty much anything (except dev work) from my phone if needed. If I trash a dev server, I use another one. I also have some virtual machines at Hetzner. I keep my backups there, as well as any apps I want public.

My only concern is my Google dependence. That is the trade-off for being 100% cloud based and treating my devices as disposable.

I cannot remember the last time I wanted internet access but could not find it. Cell coverage is pretty good and reliable these days.

While I think Chromebooks are great, I would consider that if your company grows, not everyone is comfortable with vi/m, and a Mac does give you some nice options for higher end dev systems.

I have used Linux for 20 years, but only for development, and I will only develop on Linux.

For everything else (email, files, photos), I want a browser. Used to be Mac/Osx, but got tired of being managed by it.

Just my preference. You can do everything on Linux, just never felt comfortable with it.

I now have a machine that boots almost instantly and just works without maintenance, upgrades, or compatibility issues. I can throw it in the river, and for $300 get a machine that will be up and running in about one minute. I can use multiple machines (small/cheap to bring on a trip, laptop for casual working, larger machine for more serious work, even at the same time. I have full access to everything from my iPhone, or access to some computer anywhere. I use remote VSCode via Crostini to do development work (terminal, vi, Codex, Claude Code) on a bunch of beelink boxes and Hetzner servers.

I cannot run installed software and I am dependent on Google for email, files, photos. For the latter, I have backups of my email and files (photos are not as easy).

Life is simpler this way.

I loved my Pixelbook, fantastic piece of hardware. When that ended, I went with an Acer Chromebook. Works fine, just not the same.

I would go for a Mac Air or Neo, but only if I could install ChromeOS.

I will most likely get a Googlebook, and would be more likely to do so if it was not named Googlebook and did not have Gemini built in.

I don't think there was a lot of support, outside the farming industry, to prevent machines from taking over peoples jobs even though 1/2 of the workforce were farmers. Similar for manufacturing.

And I do not believe the answer to those changes was to do farming or manufacturing by "hand". I also do not believe that the answer to AI is to not use it.

But, in the same way, I also do not believe that people will really care that call center workers will be replaced, that designers will be replaced, that many programmers will be replaced, that most admins and middle managers (anyone who pushes paperwork, creates reports, that just communicate and report on work "progress") will be replaced.

I also believe that these workers will get retrained and find better jobs is a fallacy - because it has not happened in the past. Farmers may have done this, but those who lost their well paid manufacturing, most lost their place in society. Blue collar workers in Detroit are not today's laptop warriors.

We will be undergoing a fundamental change in how society functions. It is quite possible the end result will be good, or at least looked at as good. But there was a lot of pain in the previous transitions, and the distribution of "winners" and "losers" will undergo significant change.

50% of the workforce was in farming near the end of the 1800's. Today, 2% 40% of the workforce was in manufacturing early to mid 1900's. Today 8% 60+% of the current workforce is white collar. What will it be in 20 years ?

LLM's are only a couple of years old, we have no idea where this will go. Maybe it will be a big hallucination, maybe we are looking at the very early version of farm and manufacturing machines.

The ENIAC was larger than a person, we now have watches that are significantly more powerful. Maybe in the future, your Apple watch will have more compute than several racks of H100's.

When they came for the farmers, no one else cared - everyone got cheap and bountiful food. When they came for the manufacturers, no one else cared - everyone got cheap and bountiful products. Now they are coming for the white collar workers, and their highly paid laptop lifestyles.

Who is left to care ? The billionaires ?

I try to focus on results. Things like an app that does what you want, data and reports that you need, or technical things like setting up a server, setting up a database, building a website, etc.

I have also found it useful for feedback and advice, but only once I have had it generate data that I can verify. For example, financial analysis or modelling, health advice (again factual based), tax modelling, etc, but again, all based on verifiable data/tables/charts.

I am very surprised on what Claude is capable of, across the entire tech stack: code, sysadmin, system integration, security. I find it scary. Not just speed, but also quality and the mental load is a difference of kind not quantity.

Personal advice on life decisions/relationships ? No way I would go there.

It is also good for me to know that the tools I have built, the data I have gathered, and my thinking approach places me as one of the most intelligent developers and analysts in the world.

All life has intelligence. Anyone who has spent a lot of time with animals, especially a lot of time with a specific animal, knows that they have a sense of self, that they are intelligent, that they have unique personalities, that they enjoy being alive, that they form bonds, that they have desires and wants, that they can be happy, excited, scared, sad. They can react with anger, surprise, gentleness, compassion. They are conscious, like us.

Humans seem to have this extra layer that I will loosely call "reasoning", which has given us an advantage over all other species, and has given some of us an advantage over the majority of the rest of us.

It is truly a scary thing that AI has only this "reasoning", and none of the other characteristics that all animals have.

Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos and Peter Watts Blindsight have different, but very interesting takes on this concept. One postulates that our reasoning, our "big brains" is going to be our downfall, while the other postulates that reasoning is what will drive evolution and that everything else just causes inefficiencies and will cause our downfall.

I do not know how this concept would work in these agentic environments, but would seem useful, in an environment that has a lot of parallel things going on, with a lot of metrics that could be useful, you would want to have multiple monitors that can be quickly customized with standard linux utilities. Token usage, critical directory access, etc.

This, in conjunction with a config file to define/filter out the log stream should be all that's needed to provide as much or as little detail that would be needed to monitor how things are going, and to alert when certain things are going off the rails.

Some things he has done that Putin is probably not fond of:

Javelins in his first term, I believe that was the time the us supplied military weapons to Ukraine. These weapons made a big impact during the invasion

Tried to get Europe off of Russia gas, making very public warnings about depending on Russia. This was first term

Tried to get Europe to invest heavily in thru military, first and second term

Syria, Iran and Venezuela, all allies of Russia, especially Iran for military technology and Venezuela as part of its shadow fleet.

Sanctions