seanmcdirmid

> That’s not to say they haven’t done a phenomenal job with demand destruction it’s just their own domestic usage is still very high and they have to import unlike other heavy users.

They will, just not as much as everyone was predicting a two decades ago. The fact that China isn't really feeling any pressure at all here should be a wake up call (they depend on oil, just less and less as time goes on). It isn't just that though, they basically took Nepal off oil completely, a bit of a special case since they had to import via India, which was always really expensive (and Nepal has lots of hydro). And the rest of the third world which simply can't afford much oil anyways now has a convenient other option.

Likewise, I don't see why ICE lovers are up in arms about people buying EVs. Shouldn't that just mean more oil (and less pricing pressure) for them?

I'm guessing China? China has shown the world that it can tolerate the shock, and it was even a huge boon for them as they are successfully exporting excess EV production. World demand is significant, China alone was expected to increase world oil demand to a breaking point, and that isn't happening, and in fact, China is exporting oil demand destruction.

The main complaint from Greece and Italy has been that Germany (and maybe even France) demanded (and got) strong monetary discipline for the Euro, so I'm pretty sure that the Euro itself isn't going to affect their debt much.

Is the euro doing or expected to do something strange?

US could choose defaulting as a better option to hyperinflation. It would lose all its credibility either way. The only thing it should do now is seriously jack interest rates, and maybe consider some austerity, but the working class is already at a breaking point and asking them to sacrifice even more for the billionaires isn't going to go over well politically (and the billionaires...).

> Markets will simply adjust and financial services will arise to smooth instances where liquidation is problematic.

The market will address by the wealth moving to where the wealth tax isn't.

Then the countries will start creating ridiculous exemptions and they become nothing burgers (e.g. see Switzerland's wealth tax).

Having lived in West Richland before (in the Tri-cities, on Red Mountain, scrub and all), I don't think thats really true. Well, it is definitely sunnier than Seattle, but nowhere near Phoenix. It is more normal than special.

Barring that, 80%+ of the people in the PNW live near the coast.

I can't imagine these are very popular in Arizona, but in the PNW the sun isn't a big problem for 10 months out of the year.

I'm further along in my funemployment project:

https://github.com/mcdirmid/cleanroom

So far I have bazel macros up that can produce tested code with a ~30GB MoE model (Jundot/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-oQ6-mtp, I can get ~90 toks/sec on a M3 Max!) using cleanroom separate implementation and test development (and then comparing them until both are correct). Over the last month, however, I found that my bottleneck is in the specifications: as I further divided my components into separate parts (since smaller components are easier to write and test), I started hitting problems with specifications becoming badly ungrounded (code depending on knowledge they cannot access, so something is just hallucinated).

So I redid the format, e.g.

https://github.com/mcdirmid/cleanroom/blob/main/update_with_...

The spec format is designed to be declarative and very modular, and ya, an LLM is primarily writing the specs as well, so I hope to create some sort of formal reasoning framework that the specification can be translated into (by an LLM) so that ungroundness feedback can help the LLM write better specs. Also, I found that it really is much more robust to change/refactor/add features via the spec first and then align changes down to test and code, then to make changes to the code directly (even without using the system, just asking a frontier model to look at the guides and do the alignment itself directly).

I think I'll be ready to do a release over this next month, which means:

- Supporting a build system other than Bazel to express DAGs. Honestly, this could be anything, I just chose Bazel for convenience (easy to express graphs in Starlark), but it assumes a monorepo world that I don't think many developers use.

- How do I even package this? The advance of using Starlark is that I can generate python code to call into the generated python code directly. If I move away from that, I need to figure out what this really looks like as a binary.

- More demos. Right now my only project is the code for the system itself (the classic "the first program of a language is the compiler for the language"). I just can't think of many interesting things to do in Python that aren't agent related (I can support other languages, like Java, Typescript, or even C++, but I'm hitting choice paralysis).

> US currently hold enough power to make them paying their debts oversees too.

The US is increasingly a less relevant country every year. With a wealth tax, yes, all those Americans will have their wealth eventually confiscated (0.5% a year will add up quickly year after year, investments will unwind so wealth will stop accumulated, and eventually it's gone), but I doubt the rest of the world will care and just move on and decide crazy things that happen in the US are like the crazy things that happen in Iran.

The rich will just move to a different country, negotiate with a Swiss canton for a fixed sum tax. I don't see how a tax that punishes wealth is sustainable, the wealth will just go somewhere else.

Maybe if we had a world government or something.

You’ve got parts with oil that have to be done every 10 years or are completely sealed into the part and are expected to last as long as the part does.

Wealth taxes require liquidating investments early and don’t promote good practices, especially if they are applied broadly. I would opt for a tax on loans instead (you have to prepay tax on loans that use investments as collateral and no more step up in basis on death).

A UBI society doesn't mean jobs aren’t available. There most certainly will be jobs. But with UBI and universal healthcare, the jobs can pay whatever the market really demands. People always complain about the government subsidizing low Walmart wages for example, but with UBI that argument is moot. Liberalizing the labor market wouldn’t mean less jobs, it would mean more (we would also have to lean more on corporate and consumption taxes rather than taxes around employment which would also make employment easier).

Gates probably honestly believes in UBI; the guy is practical to a fault but evil misleading genius he is not. I actually don’t see any better options than UBI long term.

I’ve had to move away from thinking to meta-thinking. Most of my engineering effort is now focused on figuring out what information and process to feed a model, and then observing how it runs and tweaking the results until it’s not crap. You also stop worrying about the time it takes to code things and start worrying about tampering down on tech debt aggressively. Things that you would have never had time for before (refactoring to make the system slightly better) become incredibly possible and easy now.

I wasn’t talking about the kids’ safety, I was referring to Waymo’s liability.

Gemini 3.8 flash via Antigravity desktop has been my daily driver for the last few weeks. I also use DeepSeek V4 flash and a Qwen 3.6 MoE for local stuff.

Harnesses are a lot of prompting and sandboxing also. Then you need to add goldfish reminders when it makes mistakes depending on model quality. It isn’t a lot of code, it definitely isn’t a lot of code that you can’t build with an agent.

Only if they retain it, and I would bet they are purging it quickly as a matter of policy to avoid these kinds of situations.

Google would probably be held 100% liable if it happened from their car. . What I don’t get is why Waymo allows unaccompanied juvenile riders at all? That seems like a huge risk for them.

The kid that learns, by the end of their education, to use the more advanced tools is going to economically out competed as an adult by the kid that got stuck learning how to do things the old fashioned way. Amish communities exist snd are productive, but they aren’t competing with graduates from Chinese universities.

I totally agree with the progression though. Learning the old ways (or cheap ways) can help understand the new ways, as long as you eventually progress to the new ways. China, for example, still tests a lot of Euclidean geometry on the gaokao (national tests) even if it is basically obsolete compared to trigonometry, but they have no better way of testing proof skills.

Many overflow drains are not or are poorly connected. If you buy a new home, the inspector will usually skip to overflow test because it will likely fail.

My pushback is that AI can be used for writing, and the results will depend on the person using it. It’s like a type writer doesn’t make anyone a great writer either, but it improve their legibility at least.

Sorry, I meant that universes with exploits don’t exist because the exploits mean they don’t survive very long. Of course, I just have 1 piece data in my sample, so take it with a grain of salt.

Deepness in the Sky "programmer-archaeologist" will never come to pass because of LLMs :(

The Forever War series changes the speed of light at the end to mess with the mortals, not to prevent any calamity however.

Nothing changes, bad writing is just more uniform.

I'm pretty sure organisms would exploit glitches in the universe if they could find them, to the point that they don't exist (well, universe survival bias at work).

I'm going to say its bad, but especially bad for low paid blue collar workers. When I worked at McDonalds as a kid, a lot of crew would get pregnant and work until 8 months, and be gone for a couple of months, I don't know how they did it, and I don't know why it had to be like that.

Richer white collar workers have it better (much much much better), still not great. Our nation is just failing at this, I don't see Amazon being especially bad beyond the typical bad (which is already too bad). Best case is they just outsource their problem to the lowest bidder and the same or worse behavior happens.

Nothing has really changed: bad writers using AI will still be bad writers. Good writers using AI, with some effort put into learning how to use it, can benefit a lot from it in terms of (at least) writing good content faster.