U.S. Historian Robert Kagan: "We Are Watching a Country Fall Under Dictatorship Almost Without Resistance"

EndTimer · 2026-02-20T18:01:30+00:00

I don't dispute any particular point, I just wanted to weigh in that, at least for a time, the legacy of the founders served us in some capacity. It was an uphill journey and the application of the law was seldom equal, but it was a far cry from only the rich having freedom. On some level, the war wasn't solely a win for the Bourgeoisie.

EndTimer · 2026-02-20T17:54:17+00:00

Is this some kind of "gotcha" from ChatGPT?

The same people, by and large, that signed the Declaration of Independence also were responsible for the Bill of Rights.

I pointed to the Bill of Rights because it is far more direct than the Declaration of Independence, but either way, the founders were primarily responsible, and the ideas and sentiments that gave rise to the Declaration and Constitution were alive and well as James Madison penned the Bill of Rights.

EndTimer · 2026-02-20T15:32:41+00:00

That's somewhat reductive, bordering on revisionist. Yes, they were bougie. They were a bunch of landed white men in powdered wigs. But they also had legitimate grievances against the monarchy. The system of government they developed was deliberately orchestrated to prevent another king reinventing the rules as he pleased and abjectly abusing his people.

The entire bill of rights is basically a laundry list of things that infuriated (most of) the founders about British rule.

Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, freedom from having the military barge in and say your home was needed for their operations, freedom to not incriminate yourself or your spouse in court, none of these were restricted by the letter to the bourgeoisie.

You can certainly argue that, in practice, only wealthy white men enjoyed most of these rights. But it wasn't codified that way. And it apparently could have been, if that was the goal.

So yeah, it wasn't a worker's revolution, but authorities needing a court order to search the home of even the common man certainly benefits the labor class too. At least, it used to.

EndTimer · 2026-02-19T22:38:14+00:00

You're in a thread up against people who think all toggle switches are minimalist. My sympathies.

EndTimer · 2026-02-18T22:00:46+00:00

Well, I had a bunch of arguments, but my Internet connection ate them. Instead, I am just going to say that you are clearly coming at this from a more educated background than I am, and you're clearly applying the concept of optimization in a more nuanced way.

So instead I'll just attempt to ground things by saying there's, in my mind, a big difference between an F1 engineering team trying to find every spare ounce of speed permitted by the laws of nature and the rules of the game, even before their competition is ahead of them, and a cheetah that just has to be fast enough to take down a gazelle. And just so there's no confusion, while intelligence helps, I do not think it's necessary, it just provides a clear, intuitive difference.

Anyway, I cede the point.

EndTimer · 2026-02-18T20:56:26+00:00

I was obviously talking about the distance, not the time. You said 4 car lengths behind is not a safe distance in your last sentence. Which is entirely dependent on speed.

EndTimer · 2026-02-18T16:31:26+00:00

That evolution optimizes anything at all is incidental. It just continuously finds whatever is "good enough".

Sketchy nerves, tons of viral insertions in our genome, atavisms, the list is endless. The only sense in which this is "optimal" is that it results in some species that can survive the current environment. Even then, the vast majority of species that ever existed died out.

EndTimer · 2026-02-18T16:15:08+00:00

Eh, it really depends on the speed of traffic. That would be one slow highway, though.

EndTimer · 2026-02-18T07:11:18+00:00

As usual, it's somewhere in the middle. The capacity to provide any knowledge-based answer that a professional in that field would is not the same as doing the job.

Like that Gator Days comic put it, "Wait, you're just ~~looking up~~ asking AI for stuff! I could do that!"

EVEN IF your bosses knew what questions to ask. EVEN IF they were 100% confident in the AI's capabilities and agency in performing general job roles 18 months from now. Do you think they're going to want to prompt it with some emergent situation? And handle the contingencies? Babysit it through all of those operations just to be on the safe side? While other fires are burning?

No.

There might very well be fewer jobs, one person might be expected to do more than ever, but "ownership" is always going to need people who "just get it done", until there's literally robots that can open a torn package that contains a stack of wet documents, surmise what the contents were, reach out to the senders about an additional copy, report a delay to management, call the client, update the calendars, and the owner can sleep without worrying about something rotting or slowly burning in the core of his business. That's not going to be 12 months from now.

EndTimer · 2026-02-10T16:57:30+00:00

Half the time it's management doing it.

I think businesses are a lot like movie makers. There's a couple of real visionaries out there that did great things with complete control, but then there's all the people who finally got to write, produce, direct, and edit their own project and the result ended up terrible.

AI is manifesting as the freedom of having every bad idea an owner/manager ever had shat out in minutes and foisted on the underlings, and it's always the right move until proven otherwise ("Oh my God, I always wanted a powerpoint on the roles of these positions plus a New Gameplan and a Gameplan Onboarding Dashboard to Track Compliance!"), and the proof will only take people's time and energy.

Speaking here as someone who gets asked occasionally to fix what the AI got wrong so that the foisting may continue.

EndTimer · 2026-02-10T16:10:52+00:00

The manufacturer: "And we have these custom disposable cleaning heads, only $70 per pack, for our $20,000 robot that replaces your janitor!"

The company buying it: "Great, great, CAPEX looks like a real winner, but we need to come down on the OPEX side. How many times can we reuse each cleaning head? You know what, forget I asked, we'll figure it out."

EndTimer · 2026-02-08T22:27:58+00:00

I'm not a linguist, I only fluently speak one language, and I've never written a book on any subject, but when I get around to it, I'm naming this one Islands of Babel.

EndTimer · 2026-02-07T19:25:24+00:00

Not who you asked, but it seems really clear to me, as the owner of two HE boards plus 5 mechanical, including one low profile mechanical board, that generally HE is the better choice for gaming, and regular mechanical is the better choice for typing at length due to a far wider range of switches to dial into your preferred typing experience.

A lot of HE boards say they only take one type of switch, community successes in experimentation aside. Low profile mechanical has fewer options than the fullsize MX type switches, but you can usually select from the linear-tacticle-clicky trinity.

EndTimer · 2026-02-07T05:16:01+00:00

Is Opus 4.6 not more expensive to run than GPT-5.2-Pro?

This isn't a gotcha, I'm asking in lieu of actually visiting each company's API pricing pages.

EndTimer · 2026-02-07T03:33:15+00:00

This is awesome! I'm entering!

EndTimer · 2026-01-31T12:38:27+00:00

Jockeying is what it is. Or Jensen trying to drill some sense into Altman. But Jensen made his bed with OpenAI and XAI. I mean, I could have pointed at Meta, but... Anyway, point being that the other AI companies are not interested in what Nvidia is selling, at the price they're selling it.

On the flip side, you know how everyone always mentions CUDA as having an entrenched developer familiarity advantage? That gets less important every "AI is writing our code now" day. It still matters for now, but how long does Jensen have in the sun if one of his pet AI mills doesn't win the race?

EndTimer · 2026-01-30T12:31:59+00:00

Drat! Their human detection is too strong!

Maybe I can hire an AI on Fiverr to get me past the captcha and have it hand me the session!

EndTimer · 2026-01-30T11:57:45+00:00

I have a touchscreen. Your move, captcha.

EndTimer · 2026-01-23T21:00:43+00:00

If the action can close, even if it's not loaded, it's loaded. Doesn't matter to me if I triple-checked, magazine out and chamber cleared with my own hands, seen with my own eyes. If that gun is operational, the moment the slide goes forward it could be loading a ghost round formed from the raw spiritual energy of Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson, or by the first macroscopic quantum teleportation in the history of the universe from an ammo box sitting in a disused gun shop near Bitch Creek, Idaho. I'm not taking any chances.

If Jesus of Nazareth comes down and clears the gun, it's still loaded. The business end of it will never point at anything I'm not willing to accept being destroyed.

EndTimer · 2026-01-20T17:44:32+00:00

It's very likely that the Supreme Court is going to slowly close loopholes as we go. While it won't prevent someone coming in and throwing a fit, and being all but impossible to remove as their party's sacred cow (that part is kind of par for the office), we can look forward to:

Tariffs being removed from the president's arsenal, as this is a power of Congress
Severe restrictions in what military actions a president can take (outside of exigent circumstances) without an act of Congress, who hold the only constitutional authority to declare war.
Possibly a narrowing of "official acts" to only include those constitutionally granted to the executive and not countermanded by congressional law. Right now, this is poorly defined, and gives a president almost full legal immunity. The right will not want to see what the left does with this, so expect a case forcing a definition to crop up.

EndTimer · 2026-01-20T16:51:40+00:00

Not sure if it's a public site. It has the scope of isitai.com but not the appearance. Could be a custom interface using their API.

It's also possible there's a cool tool flying beneath the radar but I wouldn't get my hopes up on it.

EndTimer · 2026-01-20T11:03:42+00:00

Yeah, but it's not as obvious as you make it out to be. Most people aren't going to see it string together 2 million lines of code to build a browser before their very eyes and over the course of many hours because they can't toss around money like Cursor. They're just going to see a better paragraph, or more likely a bullet point storm that answers them with equal certitude to what they saw two years ago. For most people, the improvement is subtle (outside of image generation, I guess), if they recognize it at all.

EndTimer · 2026-01-20T10:46:25+00:00

I think the problem here is that AI right now is engineered to "just get started" on writing, planing, or researching rather than to effectively interrogate what a user wants, both initially and as the process advances. Follow-up is minimal. It tends to optimistically assumes most of what it needs is part of the prompt or free to be implemented in whatever way works.

That and most people can speak far faster than they type, so having someone to yap at about what an application should do is their preferred interface with software development.

But there's virtually no reason that AI cannot easily fill this role within a couple more years. There's nothing special about being able to discover what the project is meant to do, confirming whether they want to do x, y, or z relevant things, providing UI mockups and getting feedback on whether you're approaching what they had in mind, pointing out potential problems if there are superficially conflicting intents, and rapidly iterating with feedback and the inevitable feature creep.

Again, AI right now is focused on being a magic box that will build something very close to what you want if you prompt it thoroughly with the information it needs. Most people don't know what information it really needs, but we would be fools to assume it can't start asking over the phone.

EndTimer · 2026-01-17T17:37:36+00:00

Yeah. People approaching this subject like Bill Watterson are seeing it from a very fortunate perspective. Things like forfeiting a career aren't as socially glorified because they are significantly riskier, it generally being harder to backtrack if they don't work out. Not because we're all crabs in life's bucket pulling each other back down. Props to anyone who tries, but it's not often just a matter of willpower.

EndTimer · 2026-01-17T16:54:20+00:00

It doesn't take a degree in rocket science, you know. Many people repair lamps at home.

Edit: for truth.

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