A terrible potential is that US products may find themselves unable to get footing internationally, due to broken trust and increased competition, so instead they'll try to rely on every-expanding protectionism and corruption to stay dominant in the US market.
Just as we've seen in the car industry we'll wind up less innovative, less productive, and less economical.
The decades long level of trust in the US and its institutions was unprecedented and built off of the tremendous goodwill and momentum post WW2.
It was an unusually high degree of trust, and now it's unusually low. Even if the US reverses its policies it will take a very long time to rebuild trust, and even then the historical warning marker of the Trump admin will be studied as a reason to never return to the prior level of trust.
Without total trust software products are a natural target for any country that's thinking more about how to defend its own sovereignty. Policies and subsidies for locally built software that previously would have seemed frivolous or wasteful now seem prudent and badly needed.
The higher the risk of e.g. a loan, the more interest it has to pay out to be worthwhile. The exact amount* is, as I understand it, governed by the Black–Scholes model.
* probably with some spherical-cows-in-a-vacuum assumptions given how the misuse of this model was a factor in the global financial crisis.
One should not overlook the human/emotional aspect. Decision-makers are not immune from it.
Hegemony comes with a certain degree of humiliation. Socially, it means accepting that a foreign language being taught in elementary schools becomes synonym with intelligence and eloquence, or protecting a copyright/taxation regime that go against your interest, or accepting that manslaughters perpetuated by troops stationed in foreign military installation on your soil will go unpunished, and so on. There's always been creeping resentment towards the US in any given European nation.
However, resentment is not a concern when "adults are in the room", even if not explicitly in charge. Economic prosperity is great, no one wants to break a good deal. But now those safeguards are failing on the US side. There's suddenly room to rationalize any hostility.
Sure, the extent to which this is a factor vs rational analysis is arguable... but I don't find it mere coincidence that France is the nation spearheading this.
My fear as a Briton and European is that even when Trump departs, the distrust remains so long as the US continues to be so politically divided. The chance of Trump being replaced by someone similar or worse will make most European politicians (incl UK ones) throw their hands up in despair.
The UK seems a lost cause though, even under Starmer it has been far more appeasing than any (West-)EU country. And as right-wing as Starmer is, your next PM will inevitably be even moreso and more buddy-buddy with the US. Perhaps even a personal friend of MAGA.
The UK strongly backed Denmark over the greenland situation. I’d be a lot more worried about the EU’s “appeasement” of russia (slow acting germany, hungary etc) than the UK’s carefully navigated and level headed US relations. That’s what will undo the EU.
Yes, as an American, I could point out that the side of US politics represented by Biden, Obama and Clinton is very real. It's internationalist, cooperative, and reliably so. Clinton was, in some ways, more willing to intervene in Eastern European crises than the EU was. And Biden came in early and aggressively to support Ukraine (though the EU eventually got there, and we can't decide who's side we're actually on, now).
But the problem is, internationalist Democrats are not the whole story of the US. There's another faction, one which our allies used to be able to work with. But that half of our nation's politics has been on a long, ugly moral slide. We are imposing ridiculous and destructive tariffs based on the personal grievances of one man. But a duly-elected Congress absolutely refuses to stop him. We are still covering up massive amounts of information about pedophiles in positions of power, but Congress hasn't done more than hold a vote and refuse to follow up. And we now have masked Federal police just murdering people in our streets for peacefully exercising their 1st and 2nd amendment rights, but a significant minority of voters are still cheering it on. If the moral trajectory sinks much lower, I'm not sure there would be any sins left to commit except public devil worship.
So no, you really can't trust the United States. Not because nobody here understands honor, alliances, or even practical business. But because that's not the whole story of the United States right now. We can't even get the Epstein files released. Which, admittedly doesn't affect you much. But it's clear sign of who we're becoming, and what a critical mass of our voters will ultimately accept.
Trump is not the reason for the current disdain for the American state - he is merely the latest excuse that Americans make for the disastrous state of their country.
The rest of the world started being disaffected by America's actions in 2003, when it launched an illegal war based on utter lies, which murdered 5% of Iraqs' population.
This act and the following acts of war and funding of terrorist groups that the American empire decided was 'necessary' for its survival, have been noticed by the rest of the world, even while Americans' themselves do not have the temerity to confront the issue.
Blaming Trump is just another excuse Americans make for the mess that has been being made by their state for decades before he walked down some elevator somewhere.
I think a lot of largest tech companies feel that they'll face retribution from the current administration for not being supportive enough but would not from future admins.
For many of the smaller players I think there's unfortunately a lot of people who realized there's significant money to be made in grifting. Many of the largest crypto proponents have pivoted into endeavors, whether crypto or otherwise, that profit off of being rewarded for being part of the 'correct' tribe.
> I think a lot of largest tech companies feel that they'll face retribution from the current administration for not being supportive enough but would not from future admins.
Hopefully we get the opportunity to disabuse them of this notion.
> I think a lot of largest tech companies feel that they'll face retribution from the current administration for not being supportive enough but would not from future admins.
The Democrats should play hardball but the geriatrics can barely take a swing.
They don’t know where the plate is, what the game is, or what day it is. They’re just hoping for ice cream when the nurse comes around with the meds. Meanwhile they are retelling stories from the 1960s for the hundredth time.
This is exactly it and parallels what happened with the end of the Wiemar Republic. There was an asymmetry in response between the Nazis and the government. You can see that in the limited prosecution and light sentences of the Beer Hall Putsch perpetrators.
The tech titans like Thiel see the Trump administration as a "big bet" a startup investment. They can "shoot for the moon" and try to realize the network state. If they fail, they figure they'll just toss the Democrats some campaign contributions and all will be good.
I would be heavily predisposed to vote for any candidate who had a public goal of breaking up the big tech companies and taxing their CEOs into oblivion. I want this primarily because of the immediate about-face they all had when Trump 2.0 was elected and them all contributing to and standing behind him during his inauguration. Had they not, mercifully, all shown themselves as the snakes that they are I probably would have mostly continued to considere them a-political-ish and not been strongly opinionated.
I suspect the wheels are in motion for many such transitions away from US dependency, in software and other fields.
Whenever trust is massively breached, and I believe much of the EU feels strongly that the US has breached trust, the natural action is to regroup and then gradually begin figuring out how to not be vulnerable to the same risk again.
If the US continues escalating the Greenland situation I expect that process will speed up massively.
Sometimes when working through difficult problems I will write pages of notes exploring a topic from a bunch of different angles until my brain is a bit exhausted.
I've found LLMs work reasonably well to just copy-paste that blob of thoughts into to have them summarize the key points back to me in a more coherent form.
I write notes that are very explorative and rambling on some topics. Like I have probably 100+ pages of notes on programming language design where I use my notes as more of a working memory than a cohesive document. In other cases I'll do competitive market analysis by looking at most products in a category and scrawling down first impressions, strengths, and weaknesses.
In some cases yes I'll synthesize that myself into something more coherent. In other cases an LLM can offer a summary of certain themes I'm coming back to, or offer a pseudo-outsider's take on what the core themes being explored are.
If something is important to me I'll spend the time to understand it well enough to frame my own coherent argument, but if I'm doing extremely explorative thinking I'm OK with having a rapid process with an LLM in the loop.
Usually studying a test book is reconceptualizing it in whatever way fits the way you learn. For some people that's notes, for some it's flash cards, for some it's reading the textbook twice and they just get it.
To imagine LLMs have no use case here seems dishonest. If I don't understand a particularly hard part of the subject matter and the textbook doesn't expand on it enough you can tell the LLM to break it down further with sources. I know this works because I've been doing it with Google (slowly, very slowly) for decades. Now it's just way more convenient to get to the ideas you want to learn about and expand them as far as you want to go.
The times it's wrong has become vanishingly small. At least for the things I use it for (mostly technical). Chatgpt with extended thinking and feeding it the docs url or a pdf or 3 to start you'll very rarely get an error. Especially when compared to google / stack exchange.
It was always going to be difficult, but classic Microsoft blunders and extreme arrogance set back Windows Phone dramatically.
They basically couldn't stick to a strategy and alienated every potential audience one by one. I was trying to make a Windows Phone app back then and for developers they forced them to go through an extremely difficult series of migrations where some APIs were supported on some versions and others on other versions and they were extremely unhelpful in the process.
They had a great opportunity with low-end phones because Nokia managed to make a very good ~$50 Windows Phone. Microsoft decided there was no money in that after they bought Nokia they immediately wanted to hard pivot to compete head-to-head with Apple with Apple-like prices. They then proceeded to churn through 'flagships' that suffered updates that broke and undermined those flagships shortly after they released thus alienating high end users as well.
Having worked at Microsoft I think the greatest problem with the culture there is that everyone is trying to appeal to a higher up rather than customers, and higher ups don't care because they're doing the same. I think that works out OK when defending incumbency but when battling in a competitive landscape Microsoft has no follow through because most shot callers are focused on their career trajectory over a <5 year time frame.
Twitter was extremely valuable to me pre-Musk. I followed a lot of creative and technical people doing work I felt was great or valuable, and often it gave me insight into trends well before they occurred. It also made accessible brief discussions with people who normally were difficult to reach.
My own personal work was interesting enough to others that the right people shared it and I ended up with some major executives and founders in tech following my small account just because they found my work interesting. I also got many job offers just through sharing my work and having positive discussions with people.
Now so much of that is destroyed. The algorithm rarely surfaces novel and interesting things from people you don't yet follow, it instead surfaces blue-check accounts trying to be full time influencers. If a large account posts something you can't add insight to the conversation because your comment will be far below blue check accounts responding with arbitrary nonsense for engagement farming.
Many of the most interesting people on the platform have bailed out because there's just so much toxicity and distracting stress tolerated on the platform now, and no way to self-moderate it beyond ineffectually banning individual accounts.
Twitter was imperfect before Musk, but still extremely valuable in my circle. Now I feel Musk views the platform primarily as a way to manipulate social and political outcomes rather than a place that enriches its users.
This was during the same era that you had many people losing their jobs or reputations because of outrage mobs on the platform. I wouldn't claim that Twitter had no positive aspects at all, but that the negatives far outweighed the positive. (and yes, the outrage mobs are at least just as bad, potentially worse, but just pointed at different targets.)
The toxicity that you're decrying was also there before, maybe just not in your circles or aimed at you.
Frankly I always felt like the "outrage mobs" were almost always consequences catching up to people who did bad things. In a few cases sure it wasn't, but in most cases it was just jerks upset they couldn't just use their power to get away with their behavior.
I remember some of the uproar from tech folks getting criticism in that era. They were mad at things like articles coming out about toxic workplace culture at startups, or reports on pseudo-fraudulent behavior at startups. Many of those people said stuff like "defend founders". Years later those same people who whined about consequences were some of the first to also buy into crypto scams and use their power to try to pressure people into hyping up and not criticizing crypto.
That behavior made me very cynical about a lot of the VC world and much of tech in general. In general I wish those people had more reputational damage for using their public presence to push tribalism in pursuit of power or scamming people of their money.
My X / Twitter account is 17 years old. I made it 2 years after the website was founded, and for a long time I thought Twitter was the most personally positive and professionally valuable social media website I participated in.
Often when I wanted to research a niche technical topic I would search for it on Twitter, or tweet about it and see who in my network knew more. Often I would see individuals with niche followings say incredibly insightful or valuable stuff years before other people were saying it. I also had a bunch of professional connections form on Twitter along with many job opportunities I could have pursued.
Now I view X as having destroyed nearly all of that. The system is so setup to reward rage-bait and slop that even if I try to curate my experience for it the meaningful individuals get drowned out. The algorithm and all the actions taken on the website seem more about creating a social manipulation machine for Musk than enriching its users, and as a result many of the most thoughtful and valuable people have scattered away from the platform.
I'm all for diversity of thought, but X under Musk is about non-transparent algorithmic manipulation of speech and manipulating emergent behavior to achieve political goals. It is one thing to unban people, but it's another thing to intentionally break all tools (like ban lists) that enable people to self moderate. Musk's X amplifies certain speech and then disempowers people who try to attain higher quality more productive discourse.
The watershed event that caused Musk to buy Twitter was when Twitter banned the Babylon Bee for making a joke about Katlyn Jenner.
Most left leaning people were blind to the increasingly censorious management of old Twitter. It had been ramping up pretty aggressively though up to that point.
Personally I haven’t noticed the algorithm disrupt my usage of X. I follow interesting makers and tech type people, and my feed is mostly stuff aligned with my interests. I didn't have the same network/professional usage you’re describing so maybe that’s the main difference for me.
As a way of staying informed and entertained it is better to me than old Twitter. But perhaps you are right as a way of networking or collaborating maybe it’s different now, idk because I never used it like that.
It was not a Jenner joke: "The Babylon Bee's Man of the Year Is Rachel Levine" was the tweet that got them banned. Cringey but not remotely ban-worthy imho.
The context being that USA Today had celebrated Levine as one of its "Women of the Year".
Or as the Babylon Bee put it:
"Levine is the U.S. assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he serves proudly as the first man in that position to dress like a western cultural stereotype of a woman."
Far too blasphemous for Twitter's censors at the time.
As I noted in another comment Figma has used QuickJS to run JS inside Wasm ever since a security vulnerability was discovered in their previous implementation.
In a browser environment it's much easier to sandbox Wasm successfully than to sandbox JS.
That’s very interesting! Have they documented the reasoning for that approach? I would have expected iframes to be both simpler and faster sandboxing mechanism especially in compute bound cases. Maybe the communication overhead is too high in their workload?
Just as we've seen in the car industry we'll wind up less innovative, less productive, and less economical.
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