Note also that that 100 miles _is a radius around your nearest international airport_ and need not be what you think of as a border, i.e. a line drawn between two land masses.
This is not correct, it’s a common but false misunderstanding. The text of the law does not support this and the ACLU/EFF don’t see it as a likely problem.
People should stop repeating this claim or it will become one of those “folk truths” that eventually becomes accepted and real.
You are correct; I was wrong on this one! I’d read it so many times and far enough back, coupled with DHS’s general attitude of “we’ll do what we want”, that I’d taken it as true. Delighted not to be right here.
Yes, and: the most important time to use your brain isn't in the loop.
That _is_ valuable, and will remain so, but the temptation to turn it off is there because the loop is good and getting better at what it does. Once you're in the loop, with the rare high-value exception of catching total mistakes nad redirecting, you're mostly choosing between similar-yet-reasonable options. This isn't so much right-vs-wrong as relativistic optimization. Letting the loop do the work will get you a mediocre result quickly, and that's usually fine.
The most important time to use your brain is _before the prompt_. Once you engage with your LLM and agent, you start biasing yourself, and its reasonable suggestions constrain your visibility into other options, other worlds.
I don't agree. I'm recently a huge believer in Programming as Theory Building. The software creation itself is the part that makes you understand what you are building. It's impossible to understand things before you start building them, initial prompt can help you explore, but the idea that after that you can lean back is ridiculous. Most or maybe even all successful software projects are still heavily relying on the best software engineers. That's why anthropic and others are still hiring SDEs.
I somewhat agree with your point, but also I find that the major agent harnesses work really hard at tricking you into leaning back and not letting a proper understanding of what you are building to develop.
This isn't a new problem. I had it when working with outsource developers, too. In both cases, it seemed that just sitting back and describing what I wanted in plain English prevented me from properly wrapping my head around the problem. Which then meant I failed to develop the insight needed to find the really good improvements. Those usually consisted of identifying and removing the bits that were making things worse.[1] It's incredibly difficult for me to think of anything other than just adding more stuff on top of what's already there if I'm not getting my own hands dirty.
So I've been moving away from plan mode and letting the spin away on building large chunks, and back toward working in small increments and typing out the important code with my own hands. That seems to be the sweet spot. I'm still getting a productivity boost because there's more than enough boilerplate and trivial function definitions to farm out. (Easy prompt, too: "Implement `someFunctionStub`.") But I'm also not letting Plan Mode drag me back into the waterfall development pit of insanity.
Good designs tend to have simple mental models. Some of these mental models are generic and apply across many projects. Or are even written into standards. I wouldn’t be too dogmatic about impossibility of understanding before building. Sometimes knowledge beats experience, and having an intuition for when can save a lot of time.
In broad strokes, I agree. You still have to make decisions and apply taste. It's _extremely_ unlikely that you'll have the full spec and shape and architecture of something large fully settled in your head before you start.
It's also unlikely that you're going to make those realizations, expressions, and decisions when your harness is asking you to choose between what _it_ identifies as being important decisions. If you're in the loop you're getting dumped on with lots of stuff that barely differentiates and you're biased away from catching things that matter.
If you're in the loop, use the loop. It's not a terrible construct. It will give you a mediocre outcome. And if mediocre is sufficient, you're done.
And here's the part that didn't make it into my prior comment -- if mediocre isn't sufficient, _stop the loop_. Play with what you've got. See how it behaves. Explore the edge cases yourself. Sketch how it works on paper, and how you want it to work, and think about how that should be constructed. Use your brain.
Then write a really long prompt (maybe referencing your files and notes and assets) to get back into the loop again.
I guess what I'm ultimately getting at is that the loop is useful _and_ a mind-killer, and using your mind is _also_ high value, so do both those things, but don't do them at the same time.
That's great, but you and your family will go hungry as a result. If not this year, next year.
Your stance isn't new, if it's any comfort. I heard (and probably said) exactly the same thing when C compilers started getting good enough to eliminate the need for most assembly coding.
So it is your opinion that in the future llms will take extremely vague specs and turn them into fully functional software that actually works the way the prompter wanted it to?
Does the prompter sit there with the llm all day answering the 1000s of questions necessary to make what he wanted, and the prompter then spent days testing it to make sure what he initially thought he wanted is actually what he wanted?
Then for every additional feature and integration the prompter will do this again?
Are we going to make a new job title for that? Should we call that job a programmer?
Tools are tools. Better tools let us do more faster, but they are still tools.
That temptation is akin to giving in to maladaptive (day)dreaming. The problem is the dreaming, the noticing, the getting annoyed, and the feeling drained - all of these are happening at one place - being done by one entity - your brain. So how to train it to not to do that? Well, again, that same brain has to do it. What I am saying here is - our brains are extremely good at getting "used to". Because it "feels good" to the brain - at least in that instant. So any work that's happening on its own, feels good for most people. More the time passed in that "got/getting used to" state unchecked, more difficult it is to try and bring it back to not getting used to. Or control it, in an attempt to strike a fine balance.
I found this to be a much more nuanced, intellectually honest, personally balanced take than [Sex, AI and the Apocalypse](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746654) from the other day.
Dedollarizing the world economy has more net losers than the US (though that's the obvious one).
It's not without its benefits -- over the last couple decade, the US has found ways to weaponize access to USD, so if you're not a fan of having a country other than your own able to effectively regulate or sanction you and your business, there's some niceties here.
Being able to trade and invest in a stable, highly liquid, easily converted, low risk currency was a net win for most of the world for about half a century. There isn't an obvious replacement, so we'll just see more friction.
The problem with replacing the world reserve currency with something else is that nobody can agree on what that something else should be. Expect to see a lot of jockeying for power as people realize the U.S. isn't the world hegemon anymore. Jockeying, on a state level, usually means war.
> The problem with replacing the world reserve currency with something else is that nobody can agree on what that something else should be.
It isn’t a decision made by some sort of vote, or done overnight. It’s an emergent phenomenon. Sterling had already lost the role de facto by the time Bretton Woods blessed the role of the dollar de jure.
Whatever replaces the dollar will be messy because it won’t have the set of systems the dollar had at its peak (large, highly liquid markets; complete convertibility; bonds backed by huge government spending coupled with huge GDP).
There is really only one alternative and it’s not a great one. It’s not China, as the government is afraid of letting go of control (thus no complete convertibility) and markets lack credibility which impairs liquidity.
The only other opening is unfortunately the Euro. Large, liquid markets yes in aggregate but national markets (e.g. France, Germany) are not unified. They weren’t in the US when the dollar became the reserve currency either, but times have changed. The bond markets are likewise not unified, so risk is higher. But they do have complete liquidity, which is the most important of all after GDP size.
So there will be chipping away at the dollar for years.
Before the industrial revolution, there was almost no sustained economic growth and business was essentially a zero-sum game. Wars of conquest were high-risk business ventures that promised higher returns than actual business.
Then the industrial revolution happened. Economic growth made business more lucrative, while wars got deeper into the negative-sum territory. Leaders were slow to understand that, which is why the 19th and 20th centuries saw a series of increasingly destructive wars that left almost everyone worse off.
But there have been no wars between major powers in the last 80 years. Maybe people in power have realized that all-out wars are no longer productive. But there have been plenty of lesser wars: civil wars, proxy wars, and wars against much weaker states. As well as regional wars, where at least one of the parties is so dysfunctional that it does not benefit from positive-sum business.
> But there have been no wars between major powers in the last 80 years. Maybe people in power have realized that all-out wars are no longer productive.
People talked like that before WW I. There hasn't been a major war in Europe since 1870 almost half a century and trade is such a large war would bankrupt all the major powers and so would never happen. The Great Illusion was published in 1909 and was positively received at the time:
> In The Great Illusion, Angell's primary thesis was, in the words of historian James Joll, that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous."[4][5] For that reason, a general European war was very unlikely to start, and if it did, it would not last long.[6] He argued that war was economically and socially irrational[7] and that war between industrial countries was futile because conquest did not pay.
There was a major war between Russian and Ottoman empires in 1877–1878. And if you look outside Europe, there was an even greater war between Russia and Japan in 1904–1905.
0.15% of world population was mobilized to fight in the Russo–Japanese war. That would correspond to ~12.5 million combatants today. Napoleon's invasion of Russia saw more casualties from combat, starvation, and disease, but it involved a smaller fraction of world population.
I assume you're going off the 1.365M + 1.2M combatant strength listed in the Wikipedia article?
Those are figures for the total size of those national armies at the time. It'd be like saying the Iran war involved 3M people because the U.S. has about 2.1M in uniform and Iran has just under 1M counting reservists. Meanwhile there've been precisely zero boots on the ground in Iran, and the total number of military personnel directly affected is on the order of tens of thousands.
The text of the article has the Russian far east strength at about 95,000 at the start of the war, with another 410,000 trained in over the course of the war. The best proxy for Japanese (and Russian) combat strength might be the Battle of Mukden [1], which had about 250K Japanese and 292K Russian troops. These numbers are smaller by a factor of about 5x.
The present-day Russo-Ukrainian war is significantly larger. Estimated Russian deaths are 500K+, higher than the total number of Russian soldiers involved in the Russo-Japanese war.
If you continue reading the article, it mentions that Russia had mobilized almost a million soldiers in the Far East by the end of the war, and that mobilization largely happened after the Battle of Mukden. Without the naval defeat at the Battle of Tsushima, Russia would have had the upper hand at that point, and the war would likely have reached a different conclusion.
Industrial armies were massive. By the standards of that era, current US military strength exceeds 60 million. But they mostly relied on reserves, which were slow to mobilize. Japan's quick decisive victories ended the Russo–Japanese war before it had a chance to escalate further, potentially reaching the scale of the Eastern Front in WW1. But even then, the Battle of Mukden was one of the largest land battles in history until that point
The biggest Thucydides Trap wars were WW1 and WW2, which happened specifically as Britain (the first major power to industrialize) lost its hegemony over industrialization and faced competition from Germany, Russia, Japan, the US, etc. Thirty years of some of the most brutal war the world has ever seen followed, which only ended with the U.S. re-establishing hegemony because it was the only one whose homeland hadn't been bombed into oblivion.
You're right that there have been no great-power wars in the last 80 years. That's about the timescale at which major hegemonic realignments occur: WW1/WW2 from 1914-1945 (England -> US), Napoleonic Wars from 1803-1815 (England -> France -> England), Nine Years War + Glorious Revolution + War of Spanish Succession from 1688-1715 (France -> England), European Wars of Religion from 1618-1648 which created the nation-state system.
But that just means that this is the first major hegemonic realignment after the development of nuclear weapons and drone swarms, which makes me fear for the survival of civilization a bit.
To some extent yes, but the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact was never really as threatening as western propaganda made it seem. In basically all metrics that matter - population, GDP, military spending, technological advancement, etc. - the eastern bloc was a distant second to NATO. That makes its collapse far less disruptive to the world order than when the former hegemon falls.
But since the industrial revolution 80 years is something.
I hope it's a trend: but living in Europe right now, I do feel like our strongest ally are giving our enemies reason doubt the deterrence we've collectively built over the past 77 years.
We had to deploy armed troops to Greenland to deter an ally from invasion.
The deterrence to war we've spilled blood building for 77 years.
Economics is part of why we haven't had wars, collective deterrence probably had something to do with it too. Without NATO who is to say how many smaller nations Russia/USSR would have invaded for the fun of it.
I think that's becoming gold. That's why we're seeing the price action in it over the last few years. In a world with little trust, only gold is trusted. Even the Netherlands is repatriating a portion of their gold reserves from New York to London.
Hopefully not. We've lived that movie already with currencies tied to gold. It significantly slowed down past WW1 reconstruction, and is in general makes it very hard to adjust the money supply to enable economic recovery.
The ideal would be something like the International clearing currency proposed by Keynes durin Bretton Woods (he was overruled in favor of the dollar as reserve currency since America had all the power at the time).
The question might be less about what replaced the world reserve currency and more about how the global economy might function or not function without a world reserve currency
Only China has the GDP to replace USA. So while the answer isn't written in stone, it looks like it'll be China, or since China favors UN governance, maybe we'll move to an old discarded idea (because it didn't serve American interests) like an international currency system that Keynes favored.
China probably has the fiscal firepower to replace Eurodollars, but while their financial system remains split between "internally used currency" and "currency for everyone else" and while external investment is treated with deep suspicion and harsh rules, it would be limited to liquidity and exchange purposes. Nobody wants to hold a currency like the yuan over an appreciable period of time. That might be enough; that confers a lot of power and influence to the currency issuer. But definitely different ground than US Treasuries cover.
Historically this is also where we'd insert something into the conversation about who gets to hold the moral high ground, but as you've noted, that's something the current US administration has abandoned entirely.
No, China's economy is not setup to be a reserve currency. To be a reserve currency other countries need to have a stockpile of it to trade with 3rd party countries.
The only way for other countries to have the RMB is either China has to start issues massive amounts of bonds (doubt they'll be okay with foreign government owning their debts) or they stop being an export driven economy (this is because all the money goes back to China, and RMB is unable to actually leave the country if you're in a trade deficit with China) . Neither of which seems likely.
You are confusing being the world's biggest net exporter with being the world's biggest net importer.
But they are the opposites of each other.
So it's fair to say that China is the exact opposite of what it would take issue a reserve currency.
Let China spend a few decades running net trade deficits, let it open its capital market so the CNY fully floats, and allow unfettered foreign capital inflows and outflows for a few decades.
Then we can have a discussion about how it can be a dominant reserve currency.
The US was a net exporter for most of the time it was a de jure and de facto reserve currency, up until the dollar was floated (i.e. end of gold convertibility). IOW, it was arguably the reserve currency status that drove the trade deficits, not the other way around. The effect was muted by the artificial constraint of gold convertibility, but the pressures from that restraint manifested in other problems, culminating in a currency crisis and Nixon's decision to end convertibility. That unleashed the deflationary pressures caused by reserved status, accelerating the shift to goods imports.
> The US was a net exporter for most of the time it was a de jure and de facto reserve currency, up until the dollar was floated (i.e. end of gold convertibility).
No, the US ran a goods surplus but a current account deficit.
If we look at US history, we can divide it into a few periods:
revolution to civil war: US is a net debtor, running goods deficits and borrowing from europe.
1870 - Great Depression/start of WW2: US is running goods surpluses (of about 1% of GDP) but continues to heavily borrow from Europe.
Post WW2 - Bretton woods. US is suddenly the world's biggest creditor, and it's good surplus rapidly declines to a deficit, forcing the US off the gold standard.
That middle period puzzled a lot of economists, because the balance of payments identity says that the current account plus capital account must sum to zero, so if the capital account is positive (continues to borrow from Europe) then the current account must be negative. But here we have reports of the US running a goods surplus! Well, the problem is that even though there was a goods surplus, the current account was negative. The US owed so much money in dividend and interest payments that the money earned from the goods surplus wasn't enough and the US kept getting deeper in debt to Europe throughout this period, which meant that Europe was a net accumulator of US liabilities even though the US ran a goods surplus.
And it was the fact that Europe kept accumulating US liabilities that allowed the these liabilities to be traded as an effective reserve currency. If the US was not getting its liabilities into the hands of the europeans, then there is no way US liabilities could possibly be used to settle international trade. This should be a no brainer.
Now a lot of crazy stuff happened during the stock market crash and capital flight during WW1 and WW2 that turned the table on the Europe, so the US ended up in a situation where, very suddenly -- as in, over the course of just a few days -- it became a net creditor to Europe, but that necessitated the Marshall plan, where the US needed to flood Europe with dollar claims -- which were gifts, not investments -- in order to prevent the European economies from grinding to a halt in the immediate aftermath of WW2, and then the US goods trade deteriorated so that we had to go off the gold standard. Thus the period from the end of WW2 to the end of Bretton woods should be viewed as an anomalous disequilibrium period of adjustment, and if you look at US current account data, you see a fairly rapid decline because the US goods surplus during the WW2 period was artificially inflated by counting munitions and war material as exports, but these exports were "paid" for by loans that were forgiven, and this, together with the Marshall plan, is what screws with traditional readings of the balance of payments identity in that WW2-end of Bretton woods period.
Bottom line, if you want to run trade surpluses and be a reserve currency, you need to be giving away more claims than are necessary to buy your goods, because at the end of the day, the rest of the world has to be a net accumulator of claims on you in order for those claims to be a reserve currency.
Huh, interesting. During the ZIRP period (~2016-2017), I remember suggesting somewhat tongue-in-cheek here that the rational response to negative interest rates is to borrow as much money as possible, use it to raise an army, and then go conquer the people who loaned you the money. It sounds like that is actually what the U.S. did, except with a dose of diplomacy that got them to exhaust themselves fighting each other first.
It's kind of the historical embodiment of "Owe the bank $100, and you have a problem. Owe the bankers $100T, and they have a problem."
Which is what you'd expect if you're exporting more than importing. Perhaps you meant by some other accounting, which is what I was alluding to regarding the distortion caused by gold convertibility. Ceteris paribus, the trade & account balance will zero out over time in the absence of some kind of regulatory or similar distortion. China doesn't need to be a net importer to become a reserve currency, but if they became one (deliberately or otherwise) and allowed their currency to float than in time their exports would tend to fall and they'd likely become a net importer, at least if they became the dominant reserve like the US. (If they didn't float, you'd get a mess like the US had.) The reserve status can drive the balance of trade toward net importing. Which is precisely why China doesn't really want to become a global reserve currency. They'd certainly like the soft power that would bring, but they don't want the domestic employment disruption the US suffers from. That doesn't stop them from wanting their cake and eating it, too; they can try, but nobody really believes they could, so nobody takes it seriously. Though it's not necessarily an all or nothing deal. I'm not sure the world needs a single reserve currency as dominant as the dollar. We have markets to arbitrage and balance currency valuations, including future expected valuations. A singular dominant reserve currency is helpful to reduce friction, but less so when you have huge, global currency and currency derivatives markets constantly trading.
It will not be China as it doesn't have a floating currency. That is one of the prerequisites for becoming a reserve currency, that and removing capital controls.
Finally there has to be a certain willingness from other countries to accept this new currency and I just don't see the EU countries conducting all their international trade in yuan anytime soon.
Finally replacing the USD is just one part. The second part is how to stop the next currency from being weaponized just like the USD is/was. Without the answer to that question, then switching to a new reserve currency is just replacing one problem with another.
A stable, simple cryptocurrency is ideal for this. Not only is it not controlled by any nation state, it's not controlled by anyone. It's just there, a tradable asset that has mathematically-defined rules for how many will ever be created. Also gets around the Triffin Dilemma by not being used as a national currency, or for general consumer purchases.
The international settlement use-case also gets around two of the traditional weaknesses of Bitcoin. The fact that it's deflationary is not concerning when used as a unit of international settlement, because national currencies can be made to be inflationary to spur consumer activity, and then just float relative to Bitcoin. And its low TPS limits also don't matter much when it's only used for general international settlement between large financial entities, rather than as a payment coin for ordinary consumer purchases.
Ideally we get some international cooperation and get an international clearing currency, and don't end up with the reserve currency being tied to a specific nation again.
The different blocs could already start experimenting with this: the Euro could be used for currency exchange within partner nations while bringing back national currencies, BRICS could setup their own currency for trade between themselves, etc.
These problems are not new, they were the same questions we had post WW2, and some good ideas from that era may have been squashed by the ruling power of the time (namely the US), but their merit remains.
I took this advice and posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49757722. Thanks for the nudge! Just generally speaking, I find Rao's writing to be a really good, well-informed counterbalance to...well, darn near everyone else that writes in the same sectors these days.
FWIW "American" might be more continental than national; my recollection is that one of the places where tons of dinosaur bones were found in the early paleontology days is Alberta.
As someone who grew up in the Boston area and is a baseball fan, I always have a strong emotional reaction to someone referring me to as a Yankee. Those are the other guys!
I honestly had the opposite misreading; I thought it was intentionally trying to say it also had been found in South America, but from some googling I can't find any reference to that. Wikipedia seems to have already been updated to "North America and Europe"
Mild correction, but unless you're talking about something in Columbia or maybe Panama, I think what you're referring to is between North American countries.
Like we can prevent the rest of our society from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy: by treating individuals with respect and dignity and not as the ore from which resources can be profitably extracted.
Those were fought for, with large strikes and sadly bloodshed and conflict.
The pressing issue is that in the industrial revolution, capital needed labour so strikes are ineffective. How do people fight for their rights in a system that sees no need for them? Especially in one where power is concentrating and politics is frequently on sale to the highest bidder.
Yes. The first step could be a socialist system that preserves a market-based economy that avoids the horrors of private ownership of capital as well as the hubris of centrally managed economies.
The primary goal should be democratic management of the means of production.
I know lot of folks on Hacker News hates patents but that was the whole point of them: the patent holder got exclusive rights to the invention for 20 years. But the trade off was that specific details about the invention, how it worked and how it's made were entered openly for anyone to look up. The patent holder would basically benefit it for the majority of his or her life but then after that it was permanently part of the public domain.
AFAIK it was the reason why the patent system was invented, otherwise the best option jealous guarding of trade secrets that ideally (for the secret holder) died with them.
It’s telling that you think treating people with respect and dignity is “socialist”.
In a sane society it should be easy to argue against that claim, but looking around in the US at least, it turns out you’re correct: that doesn’t seem to be the norm under US-style capitalism.
Luckily we have other countries to provide an example here.
Why is socialism a pipe dream? Unions and co-ops aren't pipe dreams, and if we had nation wide unions or converted most businesses into co-ops, we would arguably be living under a socialist economy. If people had direct voting power over economic and business issues that would be socialism.
Some methods are more realistic than others, but I don't see a requirement for any outlandish ideas.
Yeah, HN isn't going to be your target market by and large -- this is the home of the folks that would, at most, pull up a page describing a skill and dump it into a harness.
I wouldn't take that as fatal. Most people aren't HN people.
Verbosity is, among other things, a cover-your-ass move. Stating something simply requires cutting details that might matter sometimes. If your counterparty or experience has made this painful, you'll likely write more.
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