To add to this, I find that the delta between the amount of code and pain you get with good and bad abstractions is substantially higher in rust than other languages. It's alright to muddle through in Python or TS, but with Rust bad abstractions are punishing.
I don't think "growing polarisation" is the right framing here. It gives way too much weight and legitimacy to views that have to be subjected to cordon sanitaire [1].
It's not acceptable to associate race with national identity (DHH's London post). It's not acceptable to call for ethnic cleansing (his post on Travellers). It's not "just another view, couldn't we all get along"; we can respectfully disagree on small state vs large state, on low taxes vs high welfare, on isolationism vs interventionism even, but DHH's views have to be unacceptable.
What is happening is a number of very rich, powerful, well-connected men (and sometimes women, see AfD) are trying to normalise those views and demolish the cordon sanitaire. "It's just another view" and framing this view as legitimate, just polarised, is one of their tactics. It's a moral duty of anyone remotely believing in the OG liberalism (you know, that people are equal regardless of their skin colour or ethnicity) to not let them.
Indeed, we are helping growth teams get picked by coding agents, this is not a secret. But I do think this has the potential of getting 1000x worse than SEO so I don't imagine people letting that happen.
For example we just added code review here: https://armature.tech/leaderboards#app/code-review
-> See my comment here about how much coding agents choose themselves. I don't expect people to let this last forever for instance, otherwise it's worrying for literally any software out there.
Just a few decades years ago, everyone's names and phones in the US were freely available to anyone with a phone book. Communications were done in the clear, either via letters (hardly tamper-proof), or via phone (that anyone with access could tap).
Did every American live in a "surveillance state" back then?
Bad analogy. A phone book tells you nothing about who you are talking to or what you are talking about over the phone. Most free countries don't let law enforcement read letters without a warrant. And even in authoritarian states the police couldn't wiretap everyone or read every letter. The volume was simply too massive for any manual operation.
Digitalization and now AI technology changes this drastically because it makes it drastically cheaper to record and flag human communications.
Back then there was only the possibility of listening-in on particulars, and even then people did worry. They weren't fine with that. That's why there's wiretapping laws enacted in the 80s.
Today, and as things continue to progress with speech-recognition, LLMs, video recognition, etc. surveillance can be automated. It's looking conceivable to be able to process all communication population-wide in real-time. That would have been unimaginable back then.
Now, texts and calls today are only a small role of phones. For many people, it's their primary general computing device. It's how they interact with the world. It contains their entire digital life.
Couldn't look at your photo reels and videos, and diary, and every purchase you've ever made, every opinion you've ever said on a public space, every community you've ever interacted with, every location you've ever been in down to the room, from wiretapping a phone in the 80s.
> Some things are exceptionally hard to track now (like e2ee messages) that were trivial to track back then.
Can be easier than back then if stuff like chat-control comes to pass, because now the message can be obtained, processed and stored indefinitely in an automated fashion for everybody at once. E2EE becomes security theater for the most part.
You just said it yourself: the perceived danger of overreach was averted through new laws and control over what the government is doing.
If citizens still have a capacity to restrict the government via (enforced) laws, it doesn't matter much that the communications are in the clear. You can layer something on top just to be sure, but the foundation is laws and a functioning political system.
If there's no functioning political system, the government will just do whatever, like buying the same data they ostensibly can't collect from commercial providers (who weren't restricted from collecting it because there's no US GDPR).
If a country has a functioning political system, it can just do things like ban gun ownership, introduce mandatory IDs, publish everyone's yearly income, or criminalise calling other people slurs in public and not become an uncontrollable dictatorship. If it doesn't, corruption and democratic backsliding will happen regardless. Hyper-focusing on a few tools and superficial traits of a particular system in a particular moment is myopic.
> You just said it yourself: the perceived danger of overreach was averted through new laws and control over what the government is doing. If citizens still have a capacity to restrict the government via (enforced) laws
Restricting the government via laws... The government implements the laws. Trying to restrict the government via laws is mostly just asking "pretty-please don't screw us over." They're not going to make a difference to a corrupt government. Government corruption will become more enticing too because of the added concentration of power it would have. How have laws been working for restricting Trump? He's shown how easily they can be sidestepped and manipulated.
Also, back then implementing end-to-end encryption of all calls wasn't feasible. That would have been the preferred option. It's feasible now. We have it. Why rely on something as fallible as government-restricting laws when we have better options?
It's better for power to be decentralized, as it is with every device owner having sole access to their own devices. As well as being able to communicate anonymously, which is huge for matters of free-speech and democracy.
Indeed, Trump is a great example of democratic backsliding completely unfettered by "freedoms" often mistaken for the actual freedom. The way forward is being able to change things or regaining this ability if it's lost, not trying to carve out some bit that's not under the government's control yet. That's just a form of escapism.
There is a malaise permeating modern culture, where social action does not enter the mind at all, possibly because it does not provide instant results. Collective action and organising local communities has always been the solution to social ills. It's why I'm looking forward to the progressives in US, they seem to be organising themselves quite well.
Algorithmic scroll is factually more harmful, regardless of the amount of harm as long as it's non-zero, because it does affect people. Surveillance on its own doesn't. It just doesn't, everything that you can think of in response is not solely or even significantly caused by surveillance.
Instead, limiting surveillance (which in this case is only linked to the issue at hand with what's explicitly a conspiracy theory, so the link is quite tenuous) was originally meant to limit the government's powers as a form of control over the government. Control over the government is just a part of the Enlightenment project of societies being able to shape their destinies equitably, which includes shaping political arrangements.
Americans have completely lost the ability to shape their political system (when was the last constitutional amendment passed again?), so instead the discourse turned to fetishising particular tools that might help, but were never the point of having freedom. This is a fallacy.
There are straightforward ways to have age verification without descending into a dictatorship. To use an analogy, most European countries have mandatory IDs, some even have digital IDs; many of those counties are freer than the US.
Freedom is being able to stop kids from accessing pornhub without fearing a dictatorship because you can just prevent the dictatorship through a million other means. Freedom is not paralysing the political system as technology and progress (and multi-billion dollar megacorporations) march on.
Otherwise societies just get superficial "freedoms" (like using slurs in public spaces because "free speech") while their governments, say, run a paramilitary murdering political opponents on the street.
LLMs are pretty bad at picking abstractions.
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