Is it a silver lining? I think it's clear that whoever runs any government is free to do whatever they want with total impunity. Dissatisfied citizens complaining on Twitter is not gonna remove any "pro-corpo anti-citizen" politician from power. And if they take it to the streets, they'll just copy the UK's playbook.
Power corrupts, and the more steps removed politicians are from whomever put them in power, the safer they are.
There's a fair chance that discordant voices in the Parliament will grow increasingly stronger, party affiliations notwithstanding. It wouldn't be the first time that the Parliament has asserted its power over the Commission.
If it becomes big enough, they can't "deport" everyone. The only silver lining in the US right now is that it is way too big (and too stupid) to pull off this sad excuse of a blitzkrieg on its citizens.
I won't say they didn't try their darnedest. But estimations at the very highest but the count at 10 million (this is a very generous number) and Germany had a population of 80 million at the time. 12% is scary, but still something you can overcome.
I really hope I'm not proven wrong, but something of that scale is nearly impossible to pull off in optics with the amount of recording we can do now. The equivalent in America is about 40m Americans being "deported". That's the entire Californian population and then some.
Recording makes it easier because you can get people on your side by making it look heroic and cool - for example, see Is-real. It's famously impossible to make an anti-war movie because explosions and machine guns look cool on-screen.
That's great, thanks for sharing. So obvious in hindsight (Pareto principle, power law, "80% of success is showing up") but the ramifications are enormous.
I wonder if this does apply to the same magnitude in the real world. It's very easy to see this phenomenon on the internet because it's so vast and interconnected. Attention is very limited and there is so much stuff out there that the average user can only offer minimal attention and effort (the usual 80-20 Pareto allocation). In the real world things are more granular, hyperlocal and less homogeneous.
> I enjoy the "what if we're the baddies" just as much as anyone else. But are there big stories with these exciting concepts where we aren't the baddies in the Anglosphere?
That's my problem with horror media as well. They all eventually devolve into the "humans were the real monsters all along" cliché.
I don’t want to do twice my workload. I’m old enough to have learned that the faster and more efficient you are, the more demands they pile on you, and the net result is more stress, more expectations for the same pay. AI doesn’t solve unreasonable demands, shifting requirements and looming deadlines, does it?
And still, writing code is not even the bottleneck, the thinking, meeting stakeholders, figuring out technical problems is. What would I do with a machine that spits out bad code.
I guess I’m not cut out for a field where the only metric that counts is how many tickets and lines of code one can churn out in an hour any more.
In my 20+ years in the tech industry, the most important thing I have learned is that writing code is the least significant part of being a software engineer.
You write code once, but then it's modified endlessly. Supporting and using and improving the code is the majority of the work. LLMs are terrible for that. They tend to write code that isnt easy to read and modify. They don't plan for future use cases. They often paint themselves into a corner with successive modifications, and lose context as the project grows.
Don't worry about your job just yet. We are a long long way from replacing people.
If you want more spiders from him (actually, a spider-man), in a fantasy setting, I recommend Spiderlight. Just a fun novella that feels like a D&D campaign, works great as a palate cleanser.
I find his writing style really enjoyable, to the point that I really need to dive into his entire repertoire now.
It’s not gonna collapse. It can only grow bigger; the entire world economy runs and depends on the internet.
Rather, what will happen is a bunch of us will willingly stop participating and stepping away from the technological singularity. A bit like the Amish, this time not for religious reasons. Let the urbanites enjoy their AI-generated virtual realities, with work, sex, and food from the comfort of your phone, competing for fewer and more bullshit office jobs creating more addictive apps; I just want to live on a farm with solar panels, grow tomatoes and write code for fun.
You can still share via torrents, but Soundcloud seems to be the main place, as it has been for almost 20 years now.
On a separate note, I must say that starting to read your comment, I was sure it'll be going towards "Back in 2000 I cudda made a song outta that... Now, in 2025, I just use suno"
Every example I thought "yeah, this is cool, but I can see there's space for improvement" — and lo! did the author satisfy my curiosity and improve his technique further.
Bravo, beautiful article! The rest of this blog is at this same level of depth, worth a sub: https://alexharri.com/blog
Power corrupts, and the more steps removed politicians are from whomever put them in power, the safer they are.
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