slashdev

That’s way too simplistic.

Not all immigrants are good. Many cost society more than they contribute. The right kind of immigrants are good.

That’s a very simplistic take on a complex problem.

Unrestricted immigration destroys democratic high trust societies.

There is a balance to be found, as in all things. It isn’t simply diversity always good or always bad.

We can see a little of that in California and also Norway. So, yes, there is some of that going on.

Suppose you add a very high tax (it would have to be a wealth tax, not income, because they don’t have much income.)

Zuckerberg just moved to Florida for a tiny wealth tax in California.

These people would just leave the state or leave the country. It’s been happening in Norway with just a small wealth tax.

It’s not impossible, but it’s also not that simple to do.

These kind of policies are risky, because you may drive away the next generation of entrepreneurs and the jobs they create.

The rich should pay more taxes, but not to the point that it would chase them away or disincentive them from building companies.

That being said, taxes are incredibly destructive. Every dollar you tax someone is much more than a dollar you take from that person and the economy. Government is too big, it’s out of control. They can’t balance a budget either, so we pay an additional destructive tax called inflation. I would personally like to see government go on a diet to half or a quarter of the size it is and reduce taxes at the low end instead.

This sounds a lot like taxing unrealized gains on illiquid assets. A very dangerous idea that would kill innovation and job creation.

Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp seemed to work out well.

It’s always more complex than you think

No, most of the rest of the large developed economies have some standards (e.g. against buying conflict minerals) and sanctions against certain regimes. China is quite happy to ignore that if they can get away with it.

This is exactly my experience as well.

If it were up to me, I'd start out by using the AI to port a Python web app to a compiled language like Go. Then we could maintain that going forward instead.

In reality, a Python code base is maintained by Python programmers, most of whom would vote against such a change.

I was there, I was one of the dynamic zealots.

But at least I can't imagine how this trend reverses course now.

The static vs dynamic language debate is decisively over and static has won. I called this out back in 2023, and I've only become more convinced since then.

Statically typed languages are easier for the reader because you can see the types and quickly jump to their definitions (or even just hover over them in some IDEs).

They're easier for the AI because they provide natural guardrails and feedback to guide it, as well as much more confidence to the programmer that the code does what it is supposed to. Rust even provides strong guarantees about correctness across threads, which is so helpful to multi-threaded code.

The fact that they run faster and use less memory is just icing on the cake.

Even just last year the AI could not handle the borrow checker well. Today I think it is better than me at handling tricky lifetime issues that ocassionally happen in multi-threaded Tokio code. I've been doing almost 100% Rust development over the last 3 years, and the experience is now very good. I don't write code by hand any more, nor do any of the 50 engineers where I work.

I imagine it does quite well with Go, since it's such a simple language. And Go is very readable, and compiles very fast. If you can afford the GC in your problem domain, it might be a good fit. You would have to be so careful with introducing concurrency, because it would be so easy to introduce race conditions that both the AI and human reviewer might miss. I haven't tried to use Go in anger yet with LLMs, so this is all just speculation.

It's not over yet, but the status quo is certainly a loss for the US. Which to me indicates Trump won't stop here, he needs something he can at least spin as a win.

I think Trump is about to lose patience with Iran again and we're in for a second phase of this war. What that looks like afterwards is anyone's guess. I'm not very optimistic.

It's not impossible that if the IRGC can't make payroll that things start to change from the inside, like what happened in Serbia. I'm not going to bet on that outcome though.

As an engineer in Canada, I'm quite frustrated by US-only when it's a remote job and we have the same time zones and culture. It's so easy to employ Canadians either as a contractor or through a proxy like Rippling. I think it's easier than employing people in the US.

Is there a reason you limit it to the US only?

I disagree with your premise (I’ve worked on anonymous telemetry and it can be done well.)

Not every company will do it well. Simpleanalytics.com seems to be one of the better ones.

But it’s still way better than the alternatives which don’t even try to be anonymous.

It’s already a law in Europe. GDPR and ePrivacy. You have to get consent from the user. Having worked for European companies, they take it seriously.

Yes, that’s right. It seems to make up the bulk of the cost of a system call though, depending what it does, like read or write syscalls.

That’s ignoring the other costs of syscalls like evicting your stuff from the CPU caches.

But I agree with the conclusion, system calls are still pretty fast compared to a lot of other things.

How much violence (government control) do you need to exert to block all of these tools? How successful have we been blocking pirated content?

I don't think the genie is easily returned to the bottle and the cure may be worse than the disease.

You can bet on assassination. There are polymarket prediction markets for leaders of many countries where you can bet on if they will cease to be the leader by X date, for any reason.

If they get assassinated, those markets will resolve to yes. At least the rules don't specifically exclude that.

You only hurt yourself with that attitude. AI might take your job.

We have the quietest on-call rotation of any company I've ever worked at.

We have a high standard for code review, static verification, and tests.

The fact that the code isn't hand-rolled artisanal code, and is generated by AI now, has so far turned out to have no impact on product quality or bugs reported.

Generating big chunks code is all I do, all day.

I don't write code by hand any more, neither at work, nor for side projects.

I work mostly in Rust and TypeScript at a developer tools company.

I think your analysis is US-centric. I don't think non-shale oil has peaked yet globally.

What you say about the economics getting worse and lower EROI may be true. It certainly seems like common sense. There are some counter-examples though.

The inflation adjusted cost of extracting oil from the oil sands in Alberta, Canada has actually decreased over time, not increased.

But generally I'd expect increasing cost of extraction to be the norm.

Plus you have no control over the standards for extractions (e.g. methane leaks), and shipping it causes more pollution.

They're actually worse off, and they pay more for it instead of creating jobs and keeping the money in their own economy. Meaning less money for e.g. green programs to move away from fossil fuels.

It's just a losing proposition in every way.

> It’s entirely possible that sea temperature rise is a result of geologic processes at or near the sea bed, and when you warm a liquid dissolved gasses are liberated.

You're mistaking possible for probable. There's no evidence to suggest that's the case, and lot's of evidence that it's from climate change. In science you follow the evidence, not your pet theory.

> But climate science wants us to ignore all that and place the blame entirely on human caused CO2 emissions and cow farts, while we are literally living through and ice age.

I don't think you understand either science or ice ages.

I am 100% bullish on both solar energy and EVs, and I share your optimism around the technology.

But I think you're being too optimistic about what this means for global fossil fuel usage. Definitely over the next decade, but potentially over much longer periods than that.

It would be useful against future supply shocks, don't you think?

No I don't think so. The oil industry is very good at discovering and developing resources previously thought to be out of reach.

People have been talking about peak oil for decades, as long as I can remember, and it never happened.

I think we're technologically capable of extracting more oil, coal, and gas than we would ever want to. We would cook ourselves with the damage we'd do to the climate. I think that's the real constraint - and I hope we pay attention to it.

We're making great progress, this is true. But we're also still increasing our consumption of fossil fuels.

Let's put a number on it. When do you think we reach 50% of today's consumption of fossil fuels? IEA seems to think it continues to grow until 2050. https://www.cbc.ca/news/climate/iea-energy-outlook-2025-9.69...

If that's true, I don't think we reach 50% of current levels by 2100. That's my very non-scientific WAG. I'll be long dead by then. Europe, if they continued drilling in the North Sea and Groningen would have long since exhausted them - a great capital expenditure and investment to bring things back to the original subject of conversation.

What do you think? That would give me a good window into how realistic your view is.

I think where you're going wrong is perhaps not taking into account continued increases in per-capita energy usage worldwide. But of course that will happen, not just because of population growth, not just because of the rest of the world rising slowly towards Western standards of living, but continued technological progress which depends on energy (or at least it has been that way historically.)

Doomberg (the green chicken) correctly observes that when we add a new energy source to the mix, we don't tend to decrease our consumption of previous energy sources.

For example: global wood consumption for energy is at or near all-time high levels, with approximately 2 billion cubic meters (m³) of wood fuel consumed in 2023, up from 1.5 billion m³ in 1961. While the percentage of global energy provided by wood has plummeted from over 90% in the early 19th century to around 3-6% today, the total volume burned has increased, driven by population growth in developing nations and increasing bioenergy use in developed ones.

I agree, but that's the world we live in.

I agree that it can. I won't live to see it, and I hope I live 50 years more.

You're living in a fantasy world that doesn't exist.

Global consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas all rose in 2025. We've not even peaked yet.[1]

[1] https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/12/record-fossi...