when you definitely know how tools work

it’s not great

At the end of the day technology is going to advance, and the rational thing to do is to figure out how to use it effectively. Yes, a lot of technology gets abused all the time, our society as a whole is incredibly wasteful. But I see technological progress as a net positive, if anything I think the problem is with our social structures and broken incentives. And that’s what we should focus on fixing.

For me, these tools have unarguably save a ton of time and frustration every single day. For example, I had to work on a Js project recently for work. I haven’t touched Js seriously in at least a decade and I’m not familiar with the ecosystem, libraries, language quirks, and so on. If I had to figure all of that out from scratch previously, I simply would not have been able to take on this project. LLM completely papered over all that for me. I know how to structure programs, I can read Js just fine, but I didn’t have to spend the time searching and internalizing all these little details of how to run tests, which npm modules I’d need to use, what React lifecycle hooks I’d need, etc. It made the project far more enjoyable to work on, and I was able to deliver it as fast as using languages I’m intimately familiar with.

The thing is that I did have to spend the time to actually use the tool effectively, to develop intuition for tasks it can do well and those it can’t. How to get it to write code in a way I can understand and review effectively, how to see when it’s not doing what I want and correct that. Just like any tool, you have to spend the time to actually learn it to get value out of it. If you start with the premise that you dislike the idea of the tool, then it’s guaranteed that you’re not going to have a good time using it. But it’s a mistake to extrapolate that other people aren’t getting actual value out of it based on that.

Meanwhile, the whole context of this discussion is running local models which are tools that are available to the common person, and do not result in any capture of labor that I can see. You could make this argument with using proprietary models that you rent from a vendor, but it simply does not hold with ones you run locally.

GC has little to do with web page bloat though. In fact, that’s precisely where human agency comes in to design things in a sensible way. And I see little evidence to support the claim that stochastic automation leads to worse code myself. I use these tools every day, that’s completely contrary to my experience. I get the impression that you’re starting from a conclusion and coming up with a narrative that fits it rather than actually trying these tools out and seeing how to work with them effectively.

Right, you’re talking about panic buying, but that’s not an indication of actual structural problem. And yeah given the bad media coverage close to election, I can’t imagine that’s gonna get addressed quickly.

Ah yes tools are poison, you’re very intelligent.

Having done development for over two decades now, I’m really not learning anything useful when I make yet another CRUD end point on a server, or a new widget. The reality is that most coding tasks are highly repetitive and we’re just writing the same boiler plate in slightly different contexts. Being able to offload boring and repetitive tasks to a machine is what automation is for.

I’d rather spend my brainpower on things I find interesting like the overall architecture and the problem being solved while leaving writing implementation details to the LLM. It’s not like you stop solving problems when you use an LLM for coding, you’re just focusing on different things at that point.

It’s also worth noting that this argument isn’t new. I’m old enough to remember how writing assembly by hand was what real coders did or how using GC was cheating because you shouldn’t offload memory management to the computer. In each case it turned out that using better tools let us build more interesting things in the end and freed up human thinking from boring and repetitive work.

The only place where there appear to be any actual shortages is Crimea where delivering fuel was always been a logistics problem. These stories about Ukrainian drones affecting Russian oil production have been running for over a year now, but when you look at the actual production numbers it’s very clear there is zero visible effect. The whole context for this thread is a Bloomberg article saying that Russia is shipping out oil at record pace now.

The US wouldn’t be capitulating right now if they were in a position to continue the war, and Israel can’t do shit on its won. They will absolutely try to keep the war going, but they’re running up against material limits here. I also doubt Trump himself really matters all that much here, there’s a huge amount of political capture by Israel in the US, and this lobby is going to push for war no matter what. But US economy and military industry isn’t capable of continuing it.

Sort of, if they did this unprovoked that would’ve really hurt their geopolitical standing and would’ve caused further isolation. But now that burger reich attacked them, everybody sees that it was a reasonable response. And now that it’s been done, Iran can leverage it going forward by setting up some environmental protection fee or whatever, definitely not a toll though.

Pinprick attacks on refineries don’t actually have a big impact. They get a lot of media, but they don’t actually cause major disruptions for more than a few days. If you look at the size of oil refineries you’ll quickly realize that a single drone isn’t going to do much to them. This sort of propaganda is aimed at people who have no clue how this stuff actually works, and just look at pictures of smoke and think Russian oil production has completely stalled while in reality it’s largely unaffected.

works fine for me

The mainstream financial press is running the same tired script. Washington places another handful of Chinese tech giants on the Department of Defense “Chinese Military Companies” list. Beijing issues a sternly worded statement opposing the move, calling it a violation of free-market principles. Wall Street analysts wring their hands over short-term compliance costs and supply chain disruptions.

They are all missing the real story.

The conventional wisdom dictates that being blacklisted by the Pentagon is a death sentence for a foreign technology company. We are told it chokes off capital, kills international partnerships, and freezes global expansion. This view is lazy, superficial, and fundamentally wrong.

In reality, the U.S. government’s aggressive deployment of blacklists is acting as an involuntary catalyst for Chinese technological self-reliance. Washington is not suffocating its rivals; it is forces-manufacturing the exact domestic ecosystem Beijing has tried—and failed—to build through top-down subsidies for a decade. By locking these firms out of the Western orbit, the U.S. is inadvertently creating hyper-resilient, vertically integrated giants capable of dominating the global south. The Illusion of the Capital Chokehold

The immediate panic surrounding a Pentagon listing centers on investment restrictions. Under Executive Order 13959, American investors are banned from buying or selling publicly traded securities of these designated entities.

The consensus view says this is a devastating blow. The data says otherwise.

Look at the capital markets. When a company is added to the 1260H list, Western institutional capital dumps the stock. This creates a temporary valuation dip. But money is water; it finds a way around obstacles. What actually happens is a massive transfer of ownership from risk-averse Western pension funds to state-backed domestic buyers, Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, and private equity firms operating outside the U.S. regulatory perimeter.

I watched this play out firsthand during the early rounds of tech sanctions in 2020. Western firms panicked and sold their positions at a discount. Chinese state-backed funds and regional Asian investors quietly scooped up the equity. The companies did not lose their operational capacity; they just changed who gets the dividends.

Furthermore, the top-tier Chinese firms targeted by these lists are rarely starving for cash. They are cash-flow positive enterprises backed by the deepest state pockets on earth. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) and Xiaomi did not collapse when they hit U.S. regulatory crosshairs; they adapted, reorganized, and found domestic sources of liquidity that are entirely immune to the whims of the U.S. Treasury. Forcing the Hand of Domestic Substitution

For years, the biggest obstacle to China’s “Made in China 2025” initiative was not a lack of funding or engineering talent. It was complacency.

As long as Chinese tech firms could buy standard chips from Nvidia, software licenses from Microsoft, and specialized components from Germany, they had no financial incentive to use inferior, unproven domestic alternatives. Why risk your product line on a local startup when you can buy the global gold standard?

The Pentagon fixed that problem for Beijing.

[U.S. Blacklist Tool] ➔ [Cuts Off Western Component Supply] ➔ [Forces Local Tech Adoption] ➔ [Accelerates Domestic R&D and Scale]

By labeling these firms as military entities and threatening further export controls, Washington eliminated the option of complacency. It forced an overnight migration to domestic supply chains.

Before the blacklists: A domestic Chinese chip designer could barely get a meeting with a major consumer electronics brand in Shenzhen.
After the blacklists: That same consumer brand is actively funding the chip designer, embedding their engineers in the R&D process, and guaranteeing purchase orders.

Consider the logic of a thought experiment: Imagine a scenario where a government bans its domestic auto manufacturers from buying foreign steel. In the short term, car production slows down as local steel mills scramble to upgrade their quality. But within five years, those local mills possess the scale, the capital, and the refined processes to match global standards because they had a captive market that was legally barred from buying anywhere else.

This is exactly what is happening in the Chinese hardware stack. The U.S. gave local suppliers the one thing money cannot buy: guaranteed, high-volume demand from world-class tech firms. Dismantling the “People Also Ask” Delusions

The public discourse around these trade mechanisms is warped by outdated assumptions. Let’s correct the record on the questions that dominate the geopolitical tech debate. Does a Pentagon listing mean a company is actually run by the Chinese military?

No. The legal threshold for the 1260H list is “military-civil fusion.” This definition is so broad it covers almost any enterprise that contributes to national technological capability. If a company develops advanced AI, high-capacity batteries, or commercial drones, it qualifies. Treating these companies as simple extensions of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) misunderstands modern corporate structure. They are commercial profit-maximizing entities that happen to align with state strategic goals—just like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, or Google’s defense-contracting arms in the United States. 💡 You might also like: The Corpus Christi Desalination Impasse A Structural Failure of Industrial Hydrology Can targeted companies appeal and win?

Yes, and they have. Xiaomi successfully sued the U.S. Department of Defense in 2021, proving the designation lacked substantial evidence, resulting in a federal judge ordering its removal from the list. The legal framework behind these listings is often rushed, politically motivated, and vulnerable to court challenges. It is a blunt geopolitical instrument, not a precise judicial finding. Will this policy protect Western intellectual property?

It does the exact opposite. When a company is integrated into the global compliance network, it respects international patent law to protect its export markets. Once you completely sever its ties to the West and remove its ability to operate in those markets, you remove its incentive to respect Western intellectual property. You create a pirate kingdom with zero reason to honor U.S. patent enforcement. The Pivot to the Global South

The underlying arrogance of Western policy is the belief that the U.S. and European markets are the only ones that matter. While Washington builds a walled garden, blacklisted firms are shifting their focus to the markets where the next two billion internet users are coming online.

Firms designated as security risks in Washington are finding red-carpet welcomes across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. To a government in Jakarta, Nairobi, or Brasília, a U.S. military designation is not a red flag—it is a proof of capability. It tells them this specific company possesses technology so advanced that the world’s lone superpower is afraid of it.

Moreover, these companies offer something Western tech conglomerates cannot match: cutting-edge infrastructure unburdened by Western political conditionalities. When a Chinese enterprise builds a smart-city framework or a 5G network in the Global South, it comes with sovereign financing and a guarantee that the system won’t be turned off because of a human rights dispute with Washington. The Strategic Backfire

Every serious student of industrial strategy knows that isolation only works against weak, dependent actors. When applied to a peer competitor with an industrial capacity that rivals your own, isolation backfires spectacularly.

The data supports this grim reality for Western tech suppliers. Every time a new Chinese entity is added to a U.S. restriction list, American semiconductor firms lose a chunk of their R&D funding. Companies like Qualcomm, Intel, and Nvidia rely on Chinese revenue to fund the massive capital expenditures required to develop the next generation of silicon. By legally preventing them from selling to major segments of the Chinese market, Washington is systematically defunding its own tech champions.

Look at the revenue migration over the last three years. The money that used to flow from Shenzhen to Silicon Valley is now staying in the Yangtze River Delta. It is funding Chinese lithography tools, Chinese electronic design automation (EDA) software, and Chinese talent acquisition.

The downside to this contrarian view is obvious: the transition period is brutal. The targeted companies suffer immediate operational friction, stock volatility, and reputational hits in G7 countries. Some smaller firms will die in the transition. But the survivors emerge as structural monopolies within the world’s largest consumer market, fully decoupled from Western supply chains and immune to Western regulatory leverage.

The United States is playing a short-term game of political theater, aiming for headlines that show toughness on foreign competitors. China is playing a structural game of generational infrastructure. By treating every major commercial tech firm in China as a military threat, the U.S. has ensured that they will eventually have no choice but to become exactly that: formidable, self-sufficient champions capable of out-innovating a West that chose protectionism over competition.

Stop looking at the blacklist as a barrier. Start looking at it as an incubator. The terms of global technological dominance are being rewritten, and Washington is providing the ink.

People living in deindustrialized societies have no appreciation for how real world logistics work.

I don’t mean you turn the program itself into a genetic algorithm. I’m saying that the agentic loop for producing code acts as one. The code itself is just regular code. And the loop isn’t really any more inefficient than what you do as a developer. It almost never happens that you write perfect code on a first try in practice. You’ll write some code, run your tests, look how it did, and iterate. That’s precisely the same process the agent follows.

The difference from a typical genetic algorithm is that the LLM is not just randomly generating text that eventually fits into the shape you specified. It’s generating code that’s already close to what’s intended most of the time, and it just needs a bit of massaging to get completely right. That’s the feedback loop here.

I find I kind of look at the whole agentic harness setup as a genetic algorithm. Your tests and specs are the fitness function for the program you’re evolving, and the LLM is the mutator. At each step it generates some output, it gets tested against the fitness function, the LLM gets feedback and iterates on it. Eventually something working falls out in the end. The better you can define the selection criteria the more you box the agent in the better results you get.

The trick I can recommend for getting the model to code is to ask it to come up with a phased plan composed of focused features, and then to build each feature on its own branch. That way you have a clear unit of work that does a specific thing which makes it much easier to review the code. Can also recommend tools like https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec for making specs to box the model in when it works.

You can run the Gemma 4 and Qwen3.5 MoE models with as little as 12 GB of VRAM at 30-40 tps (Q4/Q5), and they both blow GPT-4o and DeepSeek R1 out of the water. But 64gb RAM is also not really out of scale with the cost of a shop tool in other trades. If you’re a professional that’s confident in a positive return on the investment, or just a hobbyist with the luxury budget for a “shop” that cost is well within consumer market. That’s not everybody, of course, but it’s not some inconceivable fantasy.

The key point is that local models continue to get more efficient and usable. You need high end consumer grade hardware today, but given how fast improvements are happening, it’s entirely likely that you’ll be able to get the same capability on even smaller hardware in a few months.

lmao it’s always npm install that gets people

I think Stalin was largely correct in what he did, the problem was that he left a system which failed to ensure strong leadership going forward. A stable social system can’t depend on a single strong willed individual being in charge and making the right calls. Continuity of competent governance, especially in time of plenty is the hardest problem to solve in my opinion.

And completely agree, China quietly outplayed the west. A lot of it was inherent in western hubris too. They really thought that theirs was the only way to develop, and they figured that China would have to become like them eventually and they’d fold it in. But it didn’t work out that way. Turns out people with 3000 years of continuous civilization under their belt know a thing or two of their won. Also, don’t know if you saw, but American media has now realized DPRK is doing rather well. https://archive.ph/b9zrS

The west really is starting to look like the final days of the Roman empire now. I expect we’ll start seeing provinces getting cut loose next and imploding economically. The UK looks like it might be the first to pop.

oh and just ran across this https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202605/19/WS6a0c0718a310d6866eb4976d.html

I don’t think the crisis has been averted. It’s going to take a long time before energy prices get back to normal because restarting production can’t happen overnight. Just clearing the backlog of tankers in the gulf is going to take over a year. I also don’t see Israel stopping attacking Lebanon which means the fighting is likely to restart soon.

Trump wants to get out desperately, but he has no way out because Israel won’t play along. From Russian perspective it makes sense to play along though because it drives Europeans up the wall. And I don’t see what leverage he has left either.

And completely agree that strikes just serve to remind people in Russia why the war is necessary. The overall situation on the front won’t change, but it will help with firming up public support to remove the threat.

It does look like Russia is ramping up deep strikes on infrastructure especially now that the US ran out of patriots during their Iran fiasco. I think this will be significant over time, and affect logistics going forward which will accelerate the events on the front.

I saw a video just yesterday of some kid beating up TCK cause they took his dad. Yes, public is definitely starting to turn on them.

And American style propaganda does in fact have its origins with Goebbels, I might’ve sent this before. It explains everything very clearly. https://royallib.com/read/artemov_vladimir/psihologicheskaya_voyna_v_strategii_imperializma.html#0

Indeed, I really hope Iran puts a stop to that finally.