mbgerring

That’s correct, and to my point above, driving immigration down to this degree required a level of violence and cruelty so extreme that even the people who voted for it now disapprove of it. And that’s before the profound economic consequences really hit.

> I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it.

Luckily, we have several recent real-life examples demonstrating why “fewer people” is not a viable solution:

Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth, involving a level of surveillance and government control over the most intimate parts of our lives, unacceptable to people even in societies that otherwise accept a high level of surveillance and government control, as well as a lot of babies abandoned in dumpsters.

Weighed against the actual consequences of “less people,” just building more houses is very appealing!

I’d bet that there won’t be a RAM shortage for very long.

There is no reason we should accept the enclosure of the digital commons represented by AI. The data these models are trained on amounts to the total intellectual and artistic output of human kind through recorded history. It belongs to all of us, and accordingly, so should the models and weights produced by it.

About $2k in 2026 dollars and falling.

In general I agree with the 3D printing and open source community that bills like these are bad ideas. However, I want to ask this question in the spirit of helping craft better arguments:

Given that it is extremely well known that most commercial printers will refuse to print anything that looks like counterfeit currency, why is this considered technically unworkable?

I agree that compliance would be onerous, but that's different from insisting that it's not possible.

Don’t listen to the daily news == Don’t worry about the massive program of deprivation, destruction and death carried out on your behalf to secure the aforementioned “unprecedented wealth”

“All you have to do is have a good enough idea and someone will fund it!”

This is a myth. To access capital, in Silicon Valley and anywhere else, you have to engage in elaborate court protocol and social climbing. You have to have the right kind of idea, in a niche that is interesting among the capital-owning class.

Look at what’s getting funded in Silicon Valley right now. Nobody wants any of this AI shit. There is no issue in America that is more unifying across all of our usual dividing lines than opposition to AI.

It’s getting funded because AI is interesting in the social universe of people with billions of dollars to invest.

This is so stupid.

You can’t “earn” a billion dollars doing the thing that the vast majority of people do for money, which is selling your labor.

No one can argue with this.

We all understand that if people who own a lot of capital give a lot of it to you, you can grow that capital into more than a billion dollars.

Most people do not have access to the kind of capital required to do this. Most people never will. The avenues open to the vast majority of people on Earth cannot lead to becoming a billionaire.

Paul Graham knows this, and he is being deliberately obtuse.

I respect Moxie a lot and it greatly diminishes my opinion of him that he agreed to be part of this. I hope he got paid a lot for this, and that he’s plowing the money back into something worthwhile.

I've worked in clean energy for about a decade, building analytics software for DER providers (solar, batteries) and EV companies, and I build large-scale portable battery and solar systems as a hobby. I keep up with the industry and the regulatory environment closely via podcasts, newsletters, and conferences.

It’s true, and the strategy of climate activists in the early 2000s and 2010s was to do everything they could to make coal and other fossil fuels as expensive as possible: by reducing access to capital, increasing the cost of legal and regulatory hurdles, sometime delaying projects through physical blockades, etc etc.

I work in clean energy, and whenever I read comments like those in this thread I realize there’s so much that I take for granted that is still relatively unknown outside my bubble.

It's somehow still early innings for the energy transition, and there are a lot of fun engineering problems to work on. Join us, start here: climatebase.org

No, the clean energy industry is doing that, it’s a large and growing industry with billions of capital deployed and millions of people working hard across technology and policy to make it happen.

It’s primarily a regulatory issue, and more states in the US will approve it over the coming years.

China’s massive coal footprint is shrinking due to successful, intentional effort under the most recent five year plan, and coal’s presence in China’s power mix will likely continue to shrink, while China ramps up exports of clean energy technology to the rest of the world.

It’s also from focused efforts to close coal plants, and rapid, massive deployment of solar in the last 20 years, and new technology emerging (better batteries and dispatch technologies) to make solar into a 24/7 resource.

For whatever reason, there’s a strong motivation for people to dismiss the gigantic global effort to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, and claim that all that effort isn’t really doing anything. Thankfully, this is not true — determined people can change things for the better.

The AI job crisis is large tech employers firing workers to free up cash for AI capex, and those workers competing with everyone else in a competitive job market.

I’ve been unemployed and actively looking for a job for about 6 months, the longest stretch of active job searching I’ve ever done in my career. Several close friends who work in tech or tech-adjacent fields are in the same boat. Anecdata on Hacker News or LinkedIn tells the same story.

A chart showing “total number of jobs” is not meaningful. I took a temp job in a metal shop to make ends meet while I wait for the endless rounds of interviews I’ve now gone through with 4 companies. It pays less than half of what I was making before, and I am barely making ends meet. It’s not sustainable, even though the pay is more than fair for the work.

There are also a lot of job openings for home health care workers, or seasonal resort workers, that used to be filled by immigrants. Those jobs are not going to be taken by any of the engineers who just got laid off by Meta.

I have the strong impression that people who write articles like this are very disconnected from the reality of the economy right now, and that their curiosity ends at the line on the chart they cooked up to make a contrarian point.

It’s so economically valuable that smarter people than you decided it should be provided as a public good, to give everyone access to it regardless of ability to pay. We should do a lot more of this.

Can you think of any economically valuable reason why it might be important to know about weather trends or events in advance? Any at all?

UNION.

So your position is, “yes, workers have fought back against power in the past and won, but now it’s just too hard :(“

Ok, good luck

- Legislation

- Labor organizing

I grew up in a union household, and my dad and my grandfather fighting for better wages, healthcare and working conditions are the reason why I got a good education and work in Silicon Valley surrounded by Stanford assholes.

All of us who work for a paycheck can get together and say, “no, we will not allow you to record keystrokes and mouse movements to train our replacements. No, we will not have our performance or future employment based on an AI leaderboard.”

Previous generations fought and died for our right to do that, but in 2026 we just sit on our hands and complain on this forum. We can and should do better.

The U.S. is absolutely on fire right now with opposition to data centers. We, collectively, can extract concessions or ban their construction altogether.

These things aren’t “easy”. They are also eminently possible.

Location: San Francisco

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python (web apps, pandas), Javascript/Typescript (all of the web frameworks, data vis), HTML/CSS (Zeldman was right), Java, C++ (enough to get in trouble). CAD, CNC, power electronics, embedded systems.

I am a builder and leader in clean energy and climate tech, with ten years in energy industry software, deep technical and domain expertise, and a long-term focus on climate change.

As a product manager, full-stack software engineer, and solutions engineer, I've built complex energy modeling products end-to-end to accelerate DER deployment and grid decarbonization. In my spare time, I've built custom BESS systems to replace generators, managed logistics to replace diesel truck hauling with EVs, and organized volunteer ecosystem restoration projects.

I am seeking roles that leverage my technical skill, product leadership, and domain expertise, with mission-driven teams focused on decarbonization.

https://matthewgerring.com

Physics allows this, and actually taking advantage of it requires billions of dollars of unprecedented infrastructure buildout that is already destabilizing the power grid.

The only reason that infrastructure buildout is happening at all is the ideological capture of a small handful of obscenely wealthy people, who are fueling this buildout by spreading the extreme paranoia you’re echoing here.

I do not understand why no one else can see the circularity of this reasoning. There is nothing inevitable about tying up all of this productive capital in the pursuit of AI. There are many, many other projects requiring similar capital and human effort, with much more obvious payoffs, such as decarbonizing the world’s energy systems.

“It’s physically possible to provide abundant electricity without burning fossil fuels” is more provably true than any of the insane science fiction bullshit that undergirds the AI buildout, and yet, the entire clean energy industry is still having to build insane financial Rube Goldberg contraptions to make incremental progress.

“Inevitability” is a lie, period. This entire thing is extremely historically contingent, and we could easily stop this train tomorrow.

It looks like they’re being attacked because their mission critical software is suddenly experiencing regressions, and the evidence suggests those regressions are in part caused by AI.

The regressions are the issue. If the software was working as expected, no one would be coming after them for “the sin of using AI”.

> That CSS and web never really addressed did they? There's almost nothing in the web platform to build rich user interfaces. You can barely do styled text.

Let me guess, you stopped reading web standards documents because Facebook told you it didn’t matter, since you could just ship 10MB of javascript with every request

> Websites are largely better, technically, than they were 10 years ago.

Holy shit, no, they are not. What world do you live in?

Here’s your occasional reminder that US software engineers should unionize.

React seemed like a bad idea when it came out, and a much worse idea once I started using it day to day. All of my personal projects use Svelte, and I finally, blessedly applied for a job recently where Svelte was their frontend framework of choice. htmx also felt great the one time I used it.

HTML, CSS and a scripting language inly for progressive enhancement are such beautiful, pure ideas, and learning frontend at the height of the web standards movement made me a partisan of using these technologies as intended. But these days, doing it that way feels like building a house with Japanese joinery techniques.