Ross @roscrl

Let’s understand what time it is. Over the last few years, Blue America definitively lost control of speech (via social), media (via AI), and money (via crypto) to the Internet. They also lost the American state. Over the same period, Red America has now lost the trade war (to China), the proxy war in Ukraine (to Russia), and the cold war over Taiwan (again to China). They are also winding down the American empire. NYC finance is being driven out by Mamdani and Californian tech is being driven out by wealth taxes. US universities are getting devoured from the inside by wokeness and defunded by the outside by the MAGAs. The US military is withdrawing from Asia (and ceding it to China) and also leaving Europe to Russia, as outlined in the 2025 National Security Strategy. It is focused on beating up nearby countries in the Western Hemisphere only. This is exactly like the Soviet implosion, when Russia lost its far flung military bases and got embroiled in nearby border clashes with Chechens and Ukrainians. That is: it’s an American imperial implosion, a forced retreat. As opposed to a mere reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine. At home, the domestic US is becoming a battleground, nominally over states vs ICE, but really over blue vs red. It’s another BLM and J6, every day, on your feed, forever. Democrats drive around to seek out Republicans for physical confrontation, to finally print out the endless internet conflict into the physical world, to punch something. Blue states are using the visuals to argue for soft secession (and likely Chinese backup), while reds will use it to argue for a tougher crackdown. Abroad, the Biden sanctions and Trump tariffs mean no country has any incentive to hold US dollars, buy US treasuries, trade with America, or trust the US financial system. Similarly, the Biden chip ban and Trump trade war didn’t work to restrain China, which is now stronger than ever and has proven it can build everything domestically. The cutoff of tourist visas, student visas, worker visas, and researcher funding means the US no longer wants to be a hub for science or tech conferences. Whatever is there is legacy. The CA wealth taxes, NYC rent controls, US remittance taxes, DC equity seizures (such as the 10% stake in Intel), and attempted land seizures (most obviously Greenland, but also overseas holdings in America) mean that US-managed financial ledgers are no longer trustworthy. All of this is against the backdrop of escalating sovereign debt crisis, and the devaluation of the dollar against gold and digital gold. Both Western left and right feel desperate, because they perceive their relative pie to be shrinking. And they are actually right in that Blue America has been disrupted by the Internet and Red America has been disrupted by China. What they are wrong about is that this can be reversed with political extremism. There is no Building Back Better or Making America Great Again. Each extreme action by the left leads to an ever more extreme action by the right. Which is not the convergent equilibrium of a swinging pendulum, but the divergent equilibrium of a Galloping Gertie. You know, the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse, where it swung wildly back and forth between left and right till it crashed to the ground? There are hundreds more graphs and links I can post, but when you see the big picture you can see that the American experiment is over. It’s sad, because Uncle Sam was a really great guy. But we need to prepare for his passing, and rebuild after his fall. Fortunately, when Rome fell, Christianity endured. And when America falls, the Internet will endure. The intangible persists even when the tangible has gone to zero. And from those intangible values we can rebuild. The Internet was after all built to resist a nuclear attack, to help rebuild after an apocalypse. But the first step is to accept that the apocalypse is now.

stephanie wakefield @stephwakefield_

6 months ago

@balajis I think it is maybe a bit too soon to be speaking about “after America”?

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@badlogicgames RTFM github.com/badlogic/pi-mo…

@badlogicgames I have a hunch that allowing templated system prompt control could be useful. Having a full on "researcher" persona that does not know about bash or that it is a "expert coding assistant" and only knows web_search + a focused system prompt. Load of rubbish or possibly useful?

@impactology None yet, gut is telling me there is a higher bandwidth GUI way to mold the stream of text tokens on a codebase.

@beyang If reviewing becomes the bottleneck, I feel a GUI is going to be better for visualising codebases. There’s something there with ralph, as it loops you weave it and steer it. Richer visual primitives with animations are my bet but who knows!

@thorstenball Does Amp have an eval framework for new models? Starting from just bash tool access? Every single character dropped into the system prompt potentially changes the whole output. Man, what an interesting problem.

Two conversations this weekend make me think that there's a vibe shift afoot in Silicon Valley around what one should work on and what is worthwhile. Culturally, it feels like the moment is ripe for new frameworks: • Davos expert morality is stale and discredited. • It's also apparent that the "just be super based" Counter-Enlightenment is not really an answer. (Yes, woke went too far, but simply inverting it doesn't work.) • EA is no longer the automatic default for smart people. • There's increasing skepticism of slot and slop machine dynamics. Overall, "what is worthy and valuable?" feels like it's becoming more central.

@mitchellh @perryfromsoma @bbarski @dhh Same first impressions, keycaps are bulky compared to Sculpt which makes it feel more sluggish (and louder) to type. Will give it a fair shot though!

@perryfromsoma @mitchellh @bbarski @dhh Have been waiting years for a copy cat of the Sculpt. Will have to try this out

It really feels like Steve was time traveling to this moment. Steve Jobs gave a great talk at MIT in the 80's about Operational vs Managerial. SO many salient points around speed, continuously learning and driving actions.

Chad Wahlquist @chadwahl

a year ago

I would love to hear everyone’s take on the difference between managerial technology and operational technology and why it might matter. I will give my take tomorrow.

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The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B. Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.

Starship rocket booster caught by tower

@taigrr

super grateful to win the platinum ticket at #gophercon thank you guys for hosting a great conference!!

one of the reasons stripe's devex was so great was because the CTO shipped code. he'd take "engineering vacations" where he joined a team and tried to ship a feature, and then wrote about his experience to that I say, why not more? why are your executives not writing diffs?

tobi lutke @tobi

2 years ago

Cavalry officers need to know how to ride horses. It’s amazing that the business community has somehow talked itself out of this. It’s obviously correct.

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on excellence

@thorstenball @rsms @mitchellh i'm in the thick of this, each meeting is a word battle where the winner is the person who said the most generalised abstract one liner zinger sentences. dont ever get concrete because its not sexy.

@mitchellh @thorstenball can confirm, send help

@tekbog godbless terminally online engineer

@MaxRovensky youtu.be/9Q4yNlbfiYk?t=… we need UI's to get here, it will never happen with the DOM. I feel like a idiot programming web stuff compared to game devs.