South Park made a parody about that where the cure is injecting literal money into his veins. I don’t know if you’re aware, but most Americans don’t have access to these kind of things. If anything, it’s simply demoralizing to know your loved ones get to die and the billionaires and their families get to live.
And why is that the case in America? You'd think that something as simple as Medicaid for all (I'd say Medicare but that's clearly socialism and we can't have that!) would be simple. But it's not and I doubt it's ever going to change here.
So in the meantime, in this glorious land of temporarily embarrassed billionaires, who vote to perpetuate a system that is killing them (hand in hand with their own choices) I'd prefer people to have access to the miracles if they can find a way to afford them over taking them away because most people can't.
I used to be a lot more progressive. The re-election of Voldemore took care of that. American needs an intervention. But chin up, I guess, now that we have gutted federally funded STEM, the pipeline of miracles here will soon run dry. I guess that takes care of your concern.
I think ICs are threatened because they're told from day one how they are at will employees that can be terminated at any time with or without cause.
On top of that, places like Amazon extol the virtues of only working on projects that can be completed with entirely fungible staffing and Google tries ever so hard to electroplate this steaming turd of an ideology with iron pyrite calling fungibles "generalists."
So along comes AI coding agents, which I love as an IC because it excels at tedious work I'd rather not have to do in the first place, yet I get why others see it as a threat. But I really think it's no more of a threat than any other empty promise to cut costs with the silver bullet of the month and we just have to let the loudmouths insist otherwise until the industry figures out this isn't a magic black box. They never learn, do they? Maybe their jobs depend on never learning.
Spot on, I am having the time of my life with AI, more fun than I've had in decades. But I was in the top 10% of engineering, and top 1% of the bits of engineering I do best, so it's easy for me to use AI to explore more ideas than I could have possibly explored by hand. And if I get replaced, cool bro, my investments are in compute, and compute's just getting started IMO.
Wow, replying to myself here, but also, wow, yes I'm pretty good at something pretty in demand right now. And that didn't happen by chance, and because I was a decade early on that skill, I got all the arrows in my back along with the headstart. We are all created equal, sure, but if I put 100,000+ hours into something that most barely get past 10,000, if I don't end up world class at it, then what was I even doing? I know, I know, hubris, right? Also, didn't have kids so I had the time.
But that said, this will be the 3rd major industry transition of my career. And having survived the past two, you will adapt, or you won't have a job. And that's why, once again, you will ultimately adapt, kicking and screaming if that's what it takes, so why not start early?
AI coding agents are useful already, but they make too many mistakes and they need handholding from expert engineering talent in 2026. Ask me again in 2027. But that's why the best results are coming from the talent right now with the experience to ask the right questions and propose the right tests and fixes as the human in the loop. Otherwise, it's still hallucinatory vibe coding in a loop IMO.
The surprise and disappointment, well not the surprise, is the usual hatred of success that defines humanity. Whatever, downvotes, right?
Or just legalize it across the board recognizing that when only the powerful can make use of it. and we're not going to do anything about the powerful, we might as well let everyone else in on the game.
That is truly my cynical mindset at this point. The degree to which my trading is regulated is beyond absurd in a market and society where things like this are allowed to happen.
Reminds me of a debate in college. I was in college during the baseball doping days in early/mid 2000s and gave a debate presentation that the only way to make it a fair sport is to allow it for everyone; basically there should be no rules. The class vehemently disagreed but purely on emotion, no solid defenses were made that I couldn’t counter with a simple logic rebuttal. In any case, I tend to agree with you. The laws are only on the books to make naive people feel like there money is being looked after and the asset values aren’t manipulated. Remove the laws and the layman is a skeptic by default as he should be.
They would be smart enough to know/assume it’s a rigged game they are playing and stay away from it. The veil of laws and regulations is a lie when they’re not enforced
The biggest issue here is not insider trading itself, but the fact that (foreign) policy is being used for insider trading.
Think of the tariff madness of last year. The biggest issue wasn't that insider billionaires were robbing outsider billionaires. The bigger issue was the massive stress small businesses had to endure, who didn't know how they were going to survive.
I am of the mind that legalization of this practice would decrease trust in the marketplace to an extent that I think is necessary at this point. Of course, the better alternative would be to actually enforce these laws and increase confidence in the marketplace but how will the inside track billionaires make their money if we do?
I think the weakly efficient market of mortality is the only fix here. Dead attitudes and mindsets need their advocates to die of natural causes for society to advance IMO. Also known as "blank advances one funeral at a time."
I'm really glad they did no do that! That would be the end of VRChat & big damage for the community, basically requiring a migration to to inevitable replacement.
Just see what Facebook did to BeatSabre and other VR games and Game studios they acquired.
Sure, they could have cloned it, but better with more money - that would be less questionable, especially if it actually worked out.
Well, at least they helped to provide affordable headsets for VRChat players at the right time. :)
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