aibot923

The F-35 does work, and is deployed around the world right now including the middle east for the recent houthi operations.

National debt is absolutely a problem when interest payments crowd out the rest of your budget. Interest payments currently comprise about 17% of the budget, and this is set to grow. Those can only be paid with taxes or inflation, both of which hit joe taxpayer.

Prediction: USA will NEVER put troops on the ground in Taiwan, particularly with the current admin. There is no risk/benefit analysis where fighting a war makes sense for the USA. The USA's posture is a bluff - it's willing to provide aid and maybe a blockade but not fight directly. It's primary goal is to protect other regional allies and chip access (which it can build domestically).

The interest still needs to be paid. That requires revenue growth, taxes, or printing money. Taxes and printing money makes everyone poorer - the IOUs of yesterday coming due. Japan has had many challenges over the past few decades.

Higher relative debt = higher relative interest payments.

Go high enough, interest payments consume the entire federal budget. There is no way out except revenue growth (infeasible without breakthrough productivity improvements), taxation, and printing money (equivalent to taxation). Before that point, other bad things happen such as creditors losing faith in the government, making debt more expensive and destabilizing the dollar's position as global reserve currency.

Over the last few decades, debt has continued to rise as a percentage of the federal budget, and appears that trend will continue without drastic action.

It's interesting. Maybe I'm in the bigtech bubble, but to me it looks like there isn't enough work for everyone already. Good projects are few and far between. Most of our effort is keeping the lights on for the stuff built over the last 15-20 years. We're really out of big product ideas.

Yep. It's not very satisfying, but that's the state of things. I think we should be more honest as an industry about that. Most of the content that prospective SWEs look at has a self-marketing slant that makes things look more interesting than they typically are. The reality is far more mundane. Or worse: micromanaging, pressure-driven, and abusive in many places.

> You, not a boss, will own the code.

Developers can already deploy code on massive infrastructure today, and what do we see? Huge centralization. Why? Because software is free-to-copy winner-takes-most game, where massive economies of scale mean a few players who can afford to spend big money on marginal improvements win the whole market. I don't think AI will change this. Someone will own the physical infrastructure for economies-of-scale style services, and they will capture the market.

> Software is still heavily rate-limited by how much of it developers can write

Hmm. We have very different experiences here. IME, the vast majority of industry work is understanding, tweaking, and integrating existing software. There is very little "software writing" as a percentage of the total time developers spend doing their jobs across industry. That is the collective myth the industry uses to make the job seem more appealing and creative than it is.

At least, this is my experience in the large FAANG type companies. We already have so much code. Just figuring out what that code does and what else to do with it constitutes the majority of the work. There is a huge legibility issue where relatively simple things are obstructed by the morass of complexity many layers deep. A huge additional fraction of time is spent on deployments and monitoring. A very small fraction of the work is creatively developing new software. For example, one person will creatively develop the interface and overall design for a new cloud service. The vast majority of work after that point is spent on integration, monitoring, testing, releases, and so on.

The largest task of AI here would be understanding what is going on at both the technical layer and the fuzzy human layer on top. If it can only do #1, then knowledge workers will still spend a lot of effort doing #2 and figuring out how to turn insights from #1 into cashflow.