aibot923 (u/aibot923)

aibot923 commented on US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU bbc.com/news/live/c1dr7vy... · Posted by u/belter

ck2 · 5 months ago

The F-35 jet will cost over $1.5 Trillion, doesn't work and won't be used

Cancel it and stop making everyone's daily life absolute hell by doubling the prices of groceries, car payments, etc. every month

National Debt is not a problem for a country that will be around for 1000+ years unless you know of something that is going to greatly shorten that.

There are nearly 1,000 BILLIONAIRES in the US, the debt is their problem, they can pay more taxes until it's down to a number you like.

aibot923 · 5 months ago

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.

aibot923 commented on TSMC expected to announce $100B investment in U.S. wsj.com/tech/trump-chip-m... · Posted by u/perihelions

tnt128 · 6 months ago

The idea that the US protects Taiwan from a possible Chinese invasion over chips is one of those things that sounds believable but really isn't going to happen.

From China’s perspective, the cost of war is much higher than the cost of developing these chips themselves. In the worst-case scenario, they would be 2-3 years behind the cutting edge, which is not mission-critical. Most electronics (civilian or military) don’t really need cutting-edge chips, and China has already proven that they don’t need the latest chips to be a significant AI competitor.

From the US’s perspective, if a war with China were to break out now, there are only three possible scenarios: 1. China takes Taiwan quickly. In this case, there would be nothing for US to defend, and the US would have to try to take Taiwan back militarily—unlikely to happen. 2. Stalemate. Taiwanese people fight bravely, and Chinese forces turn out to be weaker than expected. In this case, the US would be in a comfortable position to send aid and weapons to help Taiwan, prolonging the war to weaken China. With some luck, a regime change could happen without firing a shot. 3. Taiwan successfully defends itself, repels the Chinese invasion, and possibly even takes back some territory—an unlikely scenario, but this is the only one where the US would send troops to help defend Taiwan. If the US gets involved at this stage, it secures a sure win, puts a military base on the island, and further cements its role as the protector of taiwan.

If you believe the US will or should only act in its own interest, then its interest is to remain the only superpower. Rushing into a war on foreign turf and losing is the quickest way to cede the Asia-Pacific region to China. So, despite what politicians might have you believe, the US is not going to help defend Taiwan, no matter who is in the White House.

aibot923 · 6 months ago

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).

aibot923 commented on The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE wired.com/story/elon-musk... · Posted by u/medler

amrocha · 7 months ago

Barring massive political instability, nobody is ever going to lose confidence in the dollar, regardless of debt ratios. Japan has a debt ratio of over 300%, economists have been predicting a crash and capital flight for decades, but none of it has come to pass.

At the end of the day, the Japanese market is huge and people want access to it. Same thing goes for the US.

If the private market doesn’t want bonds, the central bank can purchase them. That’s not inflationary. What is inflationary is how the government then spends that money, but that’s true for any government spending, regardless of how it was financed. Either way, the debt ratios is literally meaningless.

aibot923 · 7 months ago

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.

aibot923 commented on The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE wired.com/story/elon-musk... · Posted by u/medler

amrocha · 7 months ago

Why should you care if the national debt goes up or down? Why is it bad if it goes up? Do you actually understand the underlying mechanics, or have you just built a lot of eloquent abstractions around the idea of “number go up is bad”?

aibot923 · 7 months ago

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.

aibot923 commented on Promising results from DeepSeek R1 for code simonwillison.net/2025/Ja... · Posted by u/k__

simonw · 7 months ago

"Jobs are going to be lost unless there's somehow a demand for more applications."

That's why I'm not worried. There is already SO MUCH more demand for code than we're able to keep up with. Show me a company that doesn't have a backlog a mile long where most of the internal conversations are about how to prioritize what to build next.

I think LLM assistance makes programmers significantly more productive, which makes us MORE valuable because we can deliver more business value in the same amount of time.

Companies that would never have considered building custom software because they'd need a team of 6 working for 12 months may now hire developers if they only need 2 working for 3 months to get something useful.

aibot923 · 7 months ago

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.

aibot923 commented on Thoughts on the Future of Software Development sheshbabu.com/posts/thoug... · Posted by u/rkwz

Clubber · a year ago

>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.

That sounds horrible. I've always sought out smaller companies that need stuff built. It certainly doesn't pay as much as SV companies but it's pretty stimulating. Sometimes being a big fish in a small pond is pretty nice.

IMO, maintaining someone else's code is probably the worst type of programming job there is, especially if it's bad /disjointed code. A lot of people can make a good living doing it though. It would be nice if AI could alleviate the pain of learning and figuring out a gnarly codebase.

aibot923 · a year ago

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.

aibot923 commented on Thoughts on the Future of Software Development sheshbabu.com/posts/thoug... · Posted by u/rkwz

barfbagginus · a year ago

You will be able to speak what human needs must be fulfilled. Then the code will appear and you'll be able to meet those human needs.

You, not a boss, will own the code.

And if you have any needs, you will be able to speak the word and those needs will be met.

You will no longer need to work at all. Whatever you want to build, you will be able to build it.

What about that frightens you?

aibot923 · a year ago

> 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.

aibot923 commented on Thoughts on the Future of Software Development sheshbabu.com/posts/thoug... · Posted by u/rkwz

samatman · a year ago

I'll take the other side of that bet.

It's reasonable to expect that sometime relatively soon, AI will be a clear-cut aid to developer productivity. At the moment, I consider it a wash. Chatbots don't clearly save me time, but they clearly save me effort, which is a more important resource to conserve.

Software is still heavily rate-limited by how much of it developers can write. Making it possible for them to write more will result in more software, rather than fewer developers. I've seen nothing from AI, either in production or on the horizon, that suggests that it will meaningfully lower the barrier to entry for practicing the profession, let alone enable non-developers to do the work developers do. It will make it easier for the inexperienced to do tasks which need a bit of scripting, which is good.

aibot923 · a year ago

> 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.