I tested out Gemini 2.5 and it failed miserably at calling into tools that we had defined for it. Also, it got into an infinite loop a number of times where it would just spit out the exact same line of text continuously until we hard killed the process. I really don't know how others are getting these amazing results. We had no problems using Claude or OpenAI models in the same scenario. Even Deepseek R1 works just fine.
I know of several examples of worker-owned coups where the product is excellent: Cheeseboard pizza in Berkeley, Moog synthesizers, etc.
I've always wondered whether this model could extend to cutting edge technology, where the contributions of a few extremely talented individuals could be the decisive factor.
That's not to say Bocoup is limited by this question, because it could be their work does not require any cutting edge research, but instead is deploying existing stable technologies in an artisan/workman/guildsman like professional manner--which I think is the sweet spot for worker-owned/worker-directed activities.
You’re missing the point. It’s not a simple ‘high taxes bad, low taxes good’ binary—it’s a spectrum. The U.S. has a tax structure that allows wealth to concentrate at the top while failing to enforce competition, which actually stifles innovation. Meanwhile, countries like Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Japan—despite having higher taxes—consistently drive innovation.
Germany leads in engineering and automotive tech (Siemens, BMW, Bosch). Sweden produces global tech giants like Spotify and Klarna. Denmark is a leader in renewable energy (Vestas, Ørsted). Japan? It revolutionized robotics, semiconductors, and high-speed rail while fostering companies like Toyota, Sony, and Nintendo.
The issue isn’t just tax rates—it’s whether a system allows new players to compete or just protects entrenched monopolies. The U.S. is increasingly choosing the latter.
> Germany leads in engineering and automotive tech (Siemens, BMW, Bosch). Sweden produces global tech giants like Spotify and Klarna. Denmark is a leader in renewable energy (Vestas, Ørsted). Japan? It revolutionized robotics, semiconductors, and high-speed rail while fostering companies like Toyota, Sony, and Nintendo.
And you can't think of anything the US innovates in?
Your evidence / anecdotes aren't really sufficient to prove the claim .
It does. If you identify "innovation" differently. The American meaning of "innovation" is finding a way to force ten million people to pay you a dollar each. European innovation is, like, Mastodon, where you specifically cannot be forced to pay a dollar. This tends to not pay as well. This is because America selects for people who can get paid lots of money much more strongly than Europe does.
You seriously think America's innovation is Saas for a dollar? As opposed to almost everything that makes the modern world move forward, like cheap spaceflight, modern EVs, quantum computing, semiconductors ... the list of American-driven innovations is endless.
I'm curious if anyone has tried one of the newer e-ink smart watches you see on Alibaba, which use ESP-32 or other low-power SOCs. I saw one recently at a meet-up and the guy who was wearing claimed it was completely open-source and he could run whatever he wanted to on it. It did not have heartrate monitoring or anything other than clock on it, as far as I could tell.
Not only can you run anything you want on it but it supports the Arduino IDE and Micropython. I assume all of the Alibaba ones are based off of Watchy.
The biggest issue is the software. It's mostly abysmal. The best effort I've seen so far has been InfiniTime for the PineTime. It's very difficult without full-time employees working on improving things.
I see decisions of the same type being made in the suburbs around here all the time, and the prioritization is identical. I think the issue is suburbanites and small-town folks generally have not experienced a walkable environment and don't understand how pleasant it can be. They are usually ensconced in cars and go isolated from one destination to another without actually touching the community at all.
I was trying to advocate for bike lanes and no-through traffic for a few streets near our small town's historic center a few months ago, and I'm sorry to say, to the community, I think I sounded like a weird European hippy. Even though I'm totally not a hippy and I'm American-born. I'm as capitalist as you can get. But I still think if the state is going to make design decisions on our streets, we should make decisions that make our neighborhoods better and ultimately more inviting and valuable.
The main opposition to what I was proposing was coming from neighborhoods that must commute from further beyond the city center to get to the highway that connects our town to the nearest major city. We have other, faster, wider roads to get to the highway from all parts of our town, but there are people that are adamant that during rush hour, they must be allowed to potentially commute through the historic downtown, and residential neighborhoods, to avoid traffic jams.
I was trying to explain that the bottlenecks are always the main streets that have the highway on-ramps, but to no avail. People like having many potential, fast routes to the highway, and they are deeply uncomfortable with you removing some routes even if they rarely use those routes themselves.
In other words, occasional car use is more important than daily, frequent pedestrian use.
And where were the pedestrians during this town-hall? For whatever reason there were none. Or if there were, they were silent. I was trying to understand why nobody else was speaking up when there are so many bikers, kids, parents with strollers, walkers with dogs, etc., using these streets that will be impacted by bad decision-making, and my conclusion is that young active people, and those with kids, have no time to go to town-halls. And the kinds of people that do go to town-halls are weirdos with design fetishes, like me, and extremely ornery and conservative people who see any change in their town as an assault on the AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE by perverted European-hippy Democratic Degenerates (into which category I have unfortunately been slotted it seems, though I'm embarrassingly capitalist and libertarian).
I would not suggest this will be the median experience in America. My town has a fair number of MAGA lawn signs, American flags, lifted trucks, Punisher stickers, etc., in addition to the tech community. So its a very specific kind of mix. I'm sure those of you in Berkeley or San Francisco will have much better luck.
My community has some of the strangest dynamics you have ever seen.
I think you’re actually describing a pretty normal experience of who goes to those sorts of meetings (people with lots of time on their hands)
It sounds like you’ve possibly already headed down a similar line of reasoning (or possibly read it already) but I’d recommend you check out the book “Strong Towns”. It’s got a ton of overlap with the ideas you’ve brought up.
The part of China that is innovative is not communist. They have the most free-market labor market, the most free-market regulations in everything except media (which is heavily controlled by the state).
China is the most brutally capitalist society in the world, with a dictator sitting on top managing it at the margins and ensuring media will never be free and threaten the communist party.
I agree with you so much. There's many advantages to declarative and reactive GUI frameworks, but, god, they have so much "magic" going on at all times. Its hard to understand how the declarations get converted to pixels on the screen unless you spend a month digging through blog posts and source code to try and follow the trail of breadcrumbs.
I've made four broad transitions in my career over thirty some years. First I was a hands-on coder for about 5 years. Then I transitioned into tech sales for about two years. Then into leadership/management for four years. Then I went to law school and was a lawyer for about a decade. By then I made enough money to retire in a modest way (and I'm very modest in my lifestyle), so I went back to programming without any pressure. But ended up having to manage a team after a couple years because the project I was working on in retirement grew and needed more hands.
I'm hoping to retire again. And then I'll just work on something like a video game where I don't need to hire anyone else (outside of contractors for art).
What I've learned over the years is that you should never chase prestige and the opinion of others. I did that for too long. What you should chase is getting money by the fastest means possible, even if its something with no title or career prospects, if you can buy your freedom from the wage wheel. If you can jump off the wage wheel then you can do your own projects with freedom. And freedom to set my own calendar is the only thing that matters to me anymore.
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