This is worse than the prisoner’s dilemma- the “we get there, they don’t” is the highest payout for the decision makers who believe they will control the resulting super intelligence.
If that were truly the goal we would either need a great firewall style internet filter or blocks on devices available to minors, since nothing about this approach works for websites outside of the US jurisdiction.
If you read the article there is a direct quote from Vought, one of the chief project 2025 architects, about how this is really a path to banning pornography. Which the project 2025 folks believe includes any discussion of lgbtq+ lifestyles.
> Do you dress with a hat and shirt like someone in the 50s?
I wish it were like that, then I could be merely unfashionable, without someone coming into my house at night and replacing the clothing I bought and am used to with whatever is in style next.
tax incentives to create solar infrastructure are designed to create solar infrastructure, I don't understand why it's being described as a pejorative "tax dodge" when the government directs funds this way rather than takes the money directly and buys those things.
I guess tax incentives feel strange because it feels a bit like a thing the government needs to do because of bad behaviors.
As you say, the situation would be 100% identical if the government was receiving directly the tax and then buying these things directly. So why don't they do that? Because people with money will find ways to dodge taxes anyway. Tax incentives is basically admitting that people with money are selfish and cheaters, and that we need to "play their game" to achieve what they should normally and ethically do if they were not detrimental to society.
Interestingly enough, if the person would have paid their taxes normally and that this money would have been used for a government project, then the probability of success would have been higher (I know some government projects are really mismanaged, but so was this one anyway), because the government would have been in better position to 1) get experts opinions/supports, 2) understand the rules and regulations, 3) synchronize different projects for a better complementarity.
I don’t think it’s because anyone has resigned themselves to thinking all rich people are cheaters who will win. I think we use tax incentives in the US primarily because of two beliefs - the first that the private market is often more efficient than public purchasing (which has a pretty poor showing from this article, as you point out!), and the other is that people can choose how to contribute some of their obligations back to society from the set of taxable deductions. We want to softly encourage some behaviors and discourage others, and adjusting taxes work well as a lower risk lower force way to do that.
I think a big fraction (the majority) of people who hold the belief that private market is more efficient are also saying things like "you should not do X or the private companies will just go in another country where they don't impose X", with X being usually a thing beneficial for the community/society (collecting fair tax, protecting the employees, protecting the environment, redistributing the money towards basic infrastructure where people cannot afford them, making sure the market is fair, ...). Trying to avoid any of those X is usually morally questionable (and on top of that there is the fact that they will not hesitate to turn their back to the country that provided the environment were they were able to be successful).
So, a lot of these people who hold this belief are agreeing (not explicitly, they just know it's true but don't want to say it out loud) that rich people are doing what is better for them, not what is better for the society. Which is why people view negatively rich people who profit from government tax incentive.
I think you summarize my understanding on why using tax incentives are seen as a negative trait with the sentence
> We want to softly encourage some behaviors and discourage others
If you have to encourage behaviors that are good for the society and discourage behaviors that are bad for the society, it means that some people, without these incentives, will prefer to do the "bad" behaviors rather than the "good" behaviors. I understand that people will not like these people.
Again, tax incentives are totally useless if the rich people are people with normal moral who will naturally try to do the correct thing. The government, not you, is already choosing the domain where it applies tax incentives. So the argument that you don't want to give tax because you think you will do a better job at choosing the project than the government does not hold: if you are doing something where the government provides a tax incentive, you are doing something that the government wanted to be done. And the government is also more than happy to get good advice and support on such projects, but again, there, those generous rich people are not doing anything despite their nice posture. If indeed they don't trust the government to do "good things", it's funny that they don't do them themselves and instead jump on the first tax incentive opportunity. Posture is cheap, but when it comes to invest extra, without government help, for something that is "good", there is no one remaining from the group of the people who explains that a government collecting tax is not a good way to have nice things done.
Ultimately though none of the rendering speed improvements or collaboration ideas make a difference to me. Then there are major feature gaps like not being able to open Jupyter notebooks or view images when connected over ssh that keep bringing me back to vscode editors where everything just works out of the box or with an extension. The developers have great craftsmanship but, they are also tasked with reimplementing a whole ecosystem.
And ultimately I think native performance just keeps being less and less of a draw as agents write most of the code and I spend time reviewing it where web tools are more than adequate.
I want craftsmanship to be important as someone who takes pride in their work and likes nice tools. I just haven’t seen evidence of it being worth it over “good-enough and iterate fast” engineering. I don’t think this vision of engineering will win out over “good enough and fast”
I think Zed has the potential to become a good editor some day, and it might be the only editor with that potential. But yes, right now VS Code is more acceptable.
> I just haven’t seen evidence of it being worth it over “good-enough and iterate fast” engineering.
Aren't things bound to come to a point where quality is a defining feature of certain products? Like take video game software for example. The amount of polish and quality that goes into good selling games is insane. There video game market is so saturated that the things that come up on top must have a high level of polish and quality put into them.
Another thought experiment: imagine thousands of company startups for creating task managers. I can't imagine that those products with strong engineering fundamentals wound't end up on top. To drive this point even further, despite the rise of AI, I don't think I've seen even one example of a longstanding company being disrupted by an "AI native" "agentic first" company.
> I want to like zed. I keep trying it. ... Ultimately though none of the rendering speed improvements or collaboration ideas make a difference to me.
I feel this way as well. I've tried to incorporate Zed into my workflow a few times but I keep getting blocked by 30 years of experience with Emacs. E.g. I need C-x 2 to split my window. I need C-x C-b to show me all my buffers. I need a dired mode that can behave like any ordinary buffer. Etc. etc.
Sadly the list is quite long and while Zed offers many nice things, none are as essential to me as these.
>don’t think this vision of engineering will win out over “good enough and fast”
Oh I'm sure of it. However that won't be good enough for the MBA'S. My prediction is that AI slopware is going to drive the average quality of software back down to the buggy infuriating 1000 manual workarounds sofware of the late 90's and early 00's.
I'm not sure they're scared of Anthropic - they're doing great work but afaict running into some scaling issues and really focused on winning over developers at the moment.
If I was OpenAI (or Anthropic for that matter) I would remain scared of Google, who is now awake and able to dump Gemini 2.5 pro on the market at costs that I'm not sure people without their own hardware can compete with, and with the infrastructure to handle everyone switching to them tomorrow.
That sounds impossible to do well enough without being accused of tampering with evidence.
Just erasing the userid isn’t enough to actually anonymize the data, and if you scrubbed location data and entities out of the logs you might have violated the court order.
Though it might be in our best interests as a society we should probably be honest about the risks of this tradeoff; anonymization isn’t some magic wand.
This is worse than the prisoner’s dilemma- the “we get there, they don’t” is the highest payout for the decision makers who believe they will control the resulting super intelligence.
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