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NATO supporting Ukraine in their defensive war is horrific in your opinion, but Putin sending hundreds of thousands of young Russian men to die isn't? Your moral compass sounds deeply flawed.

Perhaps Ukraine should have agreed to never join NATO, but I'm not sure whether this would have prevented the war. After all, Putin seems to genuinely think Ukrainians are not real ethnicity, and that the land thus belongs to Russia. From a Finnish point of view, Russians have again and again proved they cannot be trusted. Even during the good period between collapse of the Soviet Union and invasion of Crimea, Russian air force regularly violated our airspace. Intelligence operatives kept buying property that made no financial sense, but was located near military installations or critical infrastructure. Why would a friendly nation do this?

I believe in negotiations and diplomacy with Russia, but ONLY when all that is backed by enough military force. Because that is what Russians ultimately respect. The Soviet Union annexed or enslaved its weaker neighbors into puppet states, and that is what Russia ultimately aims to do. Ukraine is only the first step.

This is why societies should make it as easy as possible for people to retrain / re-educate themselves. I highly doubt most white collar workers graduating today will be able to do what they trained for until retirement age. Programmers may be among first to see serious reduction in employment, but other office workers will follow.

Why exactly do you think LLM'S will be unable to do planning, architecting, code review, interface and API design? Given good enough specs, they absolutely can do these things.

I feel like coding will be dead soon, and what will be left are project management / team lead / product owner kind of jobs where you craft specs and steer AI agents on very high level. I would hardly call that "coding" anymore.

What I dislike of the status quo is being stuck between traditional programmer, and such project management role. With AI coding I can't really get into a flow state anymore, and without flow state it's hard to focus on the details.

For what it's worth, I have server with 128GB of DDR4 running 24/7 on cheapo AM4 consumer board. No issues whatsoever.

How exactly are young people betrayed by the system supposed to get that disposable income? I live in country with highest unemployment rate in OECD. We have tons of people with master's degree unable to find ANY job, let alone something that would fit their education. There's fierce competition for jobs like part-time warehouse worker or cashier.

Only thing I can think of is moving abroad, but sending lots of young people abroad is not very sustainable from a domestic economy perspective.

Well, I've been reading on The Economist how China is seriously struggling with youth unemployment right now. Lots of fresh university graduates are sitting unemployed, or doing manual labor. In my home country (Finland) we have had way below replacement birth rates for a long while now, yet youth unemployment is at all time high.

The problem with low birth rates is assumed to be that there are less workers to take care of the pensioners. But right now it seems like even the few young workers available often aren't needed anymore, thanks to increasing automation of industries. I predict youth unemployment will be made even worse by AI soon enough. So, why do we need children, if capitalist economies don't need workers? Unemployed people do not pay much taxes to sustain the non-working age population.

I believe low birth rates might become a blessing soon enough. It just means less people for governments to take care of when robots and AI take away most jobs.

Algeria and Morocco hardly seem "fairly well-off" countries, considering how many of their citizens prefer moving to the low-birth rate European countries you loathe. High birth rate of Israel is also unsustainable from economic perspective, as it relies mostly on orthodox Jews who on average are much poorer, less educated, and contribute less to the Israeli economy.

I'm not saying fast fall in birth rates isn't a problem, it obviously is. However, nearly all countries that don't have this problem offer much worse quality of life than those which do.

Perhaps, but at least there is material and financial support to Ukraine. I doubt AfD would continue it, or provide it for other EU member states if attacked.

I'm worried of what European defense will look like if some day France, Germany and UK are all ruled by populist parties with historical ties / understanding attitude towards to Russia & skepticism towards NATO and EU. Not good for us here in Eastern frontier of EU.

Traditional parties have failed badly in economic and migration policies, and Russia does its best to exploit this. They can't win on a battlefield against united Europe, but if small Eastern European countries are left without support, then Russia has much better odds against them.

When AI can replace most SWEs, it can cost-effectively build systems that can replace most other white-collar workers as well. It's mainly skills involving physical work that cannot be replaced without major advances in robotics. Anything done with a computer in a office will be gone if SWE is gone.

I've felt the same for a while now. On my free time I have completely stopped building projects where the main motivation is professional learning. I now only build stuff I want or am genuinely interested in, and utilize AI in the process to save time.

Eventually I plan on learning some physical skills, like renovating, working with electronics and plumbing. I doubt robotics will render that useless very quickly.

I would love such a future. I would be perfectly content focusing on my hobbies and playing video games rest of my life. Perhaps the UBI would be sufficient even for a little bit of travel.

As somebody else said already, you care too much. It's not your fault things are progressing slowly. As the stoic quote says, you have only power over your mind, not outside events, like how qualified the dev team or management is. I guess you could suggest some more training for the team, though the impact of that would mostly depend on their attitude towards learning new things, which again is outside your control.

I would just treat the job as a source of paycheck while looking for something better. There are lots of people working jobs like that in slow-moving organizations, most simply don't care as long as they are paid. It's best to find meaning to life from somewhere outside work, such as hobbies.

Coming from Finland, the #1 in EU unemployment rate, I've slowly learned to be happy of the fact I have a job at all.

Higher-end Thinkpads are pretty nice in terms of build quality. Trackpads and screens are worse, but they will physically last just as long.

EU is rich, insulation problem can be handled, especially if we build enough green energy to bring down electricity prices, which makes even poorly insulated houses livable. I live in a Nordic country, and people have survived here for since nearly 10 000 years ago, soon after first ice age ended. If they could do it without any modern tech, Germans, French and the others will be okay.

I'm way more worried about food production.

Banning Russian gas is the right thing to do, and good for long-term energy independence & prices.

I had a similar experience when I was young. Bought a vape and some Cannabis, which probably had really high THC concentration as it tends to have nowadays. Took a bit, didn't feel anything, then took a bit more, and boom, a panic attack. Might even had some hallucinations, I'm not fully sure what was real and what wasn't.

After the experience I felt kind of weird and "slow" for several days. Later I found out that there is also a genetic risk of schizophrenia in my family. No way I'm going to touch anything with THC ever again. I've tried CBD oil though and that was okay, slightly calming effect. But ultimately I prefer beer over that too.

Nordic style social democracy works quite well though. Communism sucks, but too much unregulated Capitalism isn't great either, as we can see in USA and many other countries that suffer from extreme inequality.

I can't see much creativity and innovation in Russia. They sell oil and natural resources & use the money (whatever is not stolen by oligarchs) to fund an unnecessary war which they are losing.

If anything, Russia is a prime example of inefficient allocation of resources.

Probably we can blame higher hygiene standards, or some other environmental factor for it. Forests haven't changed much in past decades.

Here in Finland I've never been affected by any kind of tree pollen at all, but somehow timothy grass pollen gives me horrible symptoms, forcing me to take antihistamine most of the summer. I lived my childhood near farmland and forests, so definitely got exposed to both forms of pollen at early age.

The problem I have is that I find generic code reviews really, really boring. With agents I write less code but read more code that I didn't write myself, which makes the job more boring than it was.

I would rather let AI do the code reviews and focus on test coverage.

"I think the big AI companies are trying to transform into the next Microsoft. Completely capture both enterprise and consumers."

That is going to be a failing strategy though. Whatever OpenAI or Anthropic implement, Microsoft and Google can trivially copy and provide to their existing customers that are already deeply invested in their platforms.

Still those technological issues do happen, and in those situations it's good to have a human pilot in control. See for example Qantas Flight 72 - the autopilot thought aircraft was stalling, and sent the plane into a dive. It could have ended up very badly without human supervision.

"Without ability to manufacture missiles, Iran would be unable coerce people to buy into it's Hormuz transit toll system, and the strait would reopen."

You don't need missiles to keep Hormuz closed. Cheap drones, naval mines and such are enough, and those don't require that much production capabilities, especially if you get some help from Russia. It's enough to hit a ship every now and then, which keeps the insurers away.

Even without any infrastructure IRGC could wage a guerrilla war for a long time.

Cuba can barely keep electricity on amid fuel shortages and ancient infrastructure. They are in no position to fight a war, and don't really have a strong ideological force like IRGC in Iran. The ruling elites are way more likely to make a deal that allows them to keep their heads.

I guess that's how it is in America. If you are lucky enough to live in the Nordics, you pay far, far less, sometimes nothing at all. I don't think anywhere near 3000 a month for 3 kids is normal in most of other EU either.

So, over here car seats may be a much bigger factor than daycare costs.

I agree. Whenever I've tried jumping into NodeJS world, I quickly get overwhelmed by the lack of obvious "right" solutions to common problems. There's no way to know which of the dozens of ORM's, auth libraries or whatever will be still around 10 years from now. With Java & Spring the choice is always obvious.

Of course there are "batteries included" frameworks for NodeJS too, but they all seem to be unstable compared to Spring Boot.

I believe in this case regulation would work just fine. My old Macbook Pro from 2012 was just as solid and high quality as the newest models, but much more repairable. It's possible to create repairable devices without compromising much in other areas.

US car culture has been dead for a long time, at least internationally. People like big American cars made in 50s - 70s for their looks, but since then all I can think of are oversized pickups, Nascar and Tesla which is getting eaten alive by Chinese competitors.

Just cross the border to Sweden or Finland, and the share of EV's of all new cars drop from around 90 to something like 30-35%. The EV transition is going to take a while longer in most EU countries.

Of course something to note is the absolute number of cars sold, which has dropped dramatically at least here in Finland. Most people who are priced out of new EV market simply don't buy any new car at all, and the average age of cars is climbing fast. Either way, few people are looking for new ICE vehicles. No point buying outdated tech new, when the used car market has perfectly good ICE vehicles that perform just the same.