In fact, I would say the burden of proof is largely on those who would say that Palantir and Thiel can be trusted despite all of their actions and rhetoric.

Yes, it is fair to say basically no one should be trusted with large piles of government data, but this holds more true for the the likes of Thiel who have indicated that they are willing to abuse such access.

Thiel is on the record saying he would use the data to make health and security worse? On the record saying he would abuse access? AFAICT this is not true.

"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

For a guy with his access to data, yes, that makes everybody's security worse.

Edit: Also, that quote does not provide evidence that he is "on the record" saying he would abuse access or make health or security worse.

And your support for this "on the record in many ways" claim was a single quote, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

Are you basing your claim about Thiel's trustworthiness on a belief that only people with faith in democracy can be trustworthy?

Edit: For example, Tocqueville wrote, "Some have not feared to assert that a people can never outstep the boundaries of justice and reason in those affairs which are peculiarly its own; and that consequently full power may be given to the majority by which it is represented. But this is the language of a slave." Do you find him untrustworthy now?

And like any other gambling (see 1919 Black Sox), they can also incentivize behavior for actors who can influence the outcome of what’s being gambled upon.

Personally, that’s a significant enough negative externality for me to not want to live in a society where “prediction markets” are popular.

But if you are going to allow them at all, you want as much expertise as possible in them. Sharks eating minnows is what that looks like.

2. If it’s only banned in the US, yes it pays out, you just need to get a VPN or go to another country.

Also even it’s banned everywhere, the markets are blockchain contracts so you should be able to access it without the website, which is just the frontend. (this is where my technical expertise breaks down, someone who knows blockchain is a better expert)

“You are overestimating the skill of [reading, comprehending, and critically assessing code of a non-guaranteed quality]” is an absurd statement if you properly expand out what “code review” means.

I don’t care if you code review the CSS file for the Bojangles online menu web page, but you better be code reviewing the firmware for my dad’s pacemaker.

This whole back and forth with LLM-generated code makes me think that the marginal utility of a lot of code the strong proponents write is <1¢. If I fuck up my code, it costs our partners $200/hr per false alert, which obliterates the profit margin of using our software in the first place.

We can capture enough reliability on what LLMs produce there by guided integration tests and UX tests along with code review and using other LLMs to review along with other strategies to prvent semantic and code drift

Do you know how much crap wordpress ,drupal and Joomla sites I have seen?

Just that work can be automated away

But Ive also worked in high end and mission critical delivery and more formal verification etc - that’s just moving the goalposts on what AI can do- it will get there eventually

Last year you all here were arguing AI Couldn’t code - now everyone has moved the goalposts to formal high end and mission critical ops- yes when money matters we humans are still needed of course - no one denying that- its the utility of the sole human developer against the onslaught of machine aided coding

This profession is changing rapidly- people are stuck in denial

This is the nutshell of your argument. I’m not convinced. Technologies often hit a ceiling of utility.

Imagine a “progress curve” for every technology, x-axis time and y-axis utility. Not every progress curve is limitlessly exponential, or even linear - in fact, very few are. I would venture to guess that most technological progress actually mimics population growth curves, where a ceiling is hit based on fundamental restrictions like resource availability, and then either stabilizes or crashes.

I don’t think LLMs are the AI endgame. They definitely have utility, but I think your argument boils down to a bold prediction of limitless progress of a specific technology (LLMs), even though that’s quite rare historically.

This “the only thing that matters about code is whether it meets requirements” is such a tired take and I can’t imagine anyone seriously spouting it has has had to maintain real software.

Whether you are tired of it or not, absolutely no one in your value you chain - your customers who give your company money or your management chain cares about your code beyond does it meet the functional and non functional requirements - they never did.

And of course whether it was done on time and on budget

My home, which I own, for example, is very much a “what” that keeps me warm and dry. But the “how” of it was constructed is the difference between (1) me cursing the amateur and careless decision making of builders and (2) quietly sipping a cocktail on the beach, free of a care in the world.

“How” doesn’t matter until it matters, like when you put too much weight onto that piece of particle board IKEA furniture.

He’s mildly controversial, but watch some @cyfyhomeinspections on YouTube to get a good idea of what you can infer of the “how” of building homes and how it affects homeowners. Especially relevant here because he seems to specialize in inspecting homes that are part of large developments where a single company builds out many homes very quickly and cuts tons of corners and makes the same mistakes repeatedly, kind of like LLM-generated code.

No, I can have some idea. For example, “brand perception”, which can be negatively impacted pretty heavily if things go south too often. See: GitHub, most recently.

I mean, there are already companies that have a negative reputation regarding software quality due to significant outsourcing (consultancies), or bloated management (IBM), or whatever tf Oracle does. We don’t have to pretend there’s a universe where software quality matters, we already live in one. AI will just be one more way to tank your company’s reputation with regards to quality, even if you can maintain profitability otherwise through business development schemes.

The same as I’ve been arguing about using an agent to do the grunt work of coding.

If GitHub’s login is slow, it isn’t because someone or something didn’t write SOLID code.

I don’t think we’ll come to common ground on this topic due to mismatching definitions of fundamental concepts of software engineering. Maybe let’s meet again in a year or two and reflect upon our disagreement.

If you mostly parachute in solutions as a consultant, or hand down architecture from above, you won’t have much experience with that, so it’s reasonable for you to underestimate it.

The scalability requirements are part of the “non functional requirements”. I know that the vibe coded internal admin website will never be used by more than a dozen people just like I know the ETL implementation can scale to the required number of transactions because I actually tested it for that scalability.

In fact, the one I gave to the client was my second attempt because my first one fell flat on its face when I ran it at the required scale

The code is the spec. No natural language specification will ever full cover every behavior you care about in practice. No test suite will either.

If you don't know this, you haven't maintained non-trivial software.

If your test don’t cover your use cases, you are just as much in danger from a new developer. It’s an issue with your testing methodology in either case.

And there is also plan mode that you should be reviewing

But even with all of that we still have bugs and broken workflows. Now take that human and remove most of their ability to reason about how code changes affect non-local functionality and make them type 1000x faster. And don't have anyone review their code.

The code is the spec, someone needs to be reviewing it.

If the code is cheap to produce, you don't maintain it, you just throw it away and regenerate.

I’ve never seen this done even with LLMs. Not even close. And even if you did it, the test suite is almost definitely more complex than the code and will suffer from all the same maintainability problems.

And 2 clearly agents are worse at reasoning through code changes than humans are.

I could care less about the implementation behind the vibe coded admin website that will only be used by a dozen people. I care about the authorization.

Even the ETL job, I cared only about the performance characteristics, the resulting correctness, concurrency, logging, and correctness of the results.

Why would the team lead need to review all 7 developers? If you're regularly swapping out every single developer on a team, you're gonna have problems.

>I could care less about the implementation behind the vibe coded admin website that will only be used by a dozen people. I care about the authorization.

If you only have 12 users sure do whatever you want. If you don't have users nothing is hard.

This seems weirdly condescending, especially since I think these two things are very related.

There are two types of $14 food truck grilled cheese in my experience:

The first type is usually found at farmer’s markets or free city events where the cheese will be local and artisan, and the bread will be local and artisan, and it’ll be pretty freaking good, and remind you that you can make incredible food with simple ingredients.

The second type is where there’s a captive audience, like a music festival or a brewery patio. This is no free market: you are hungry, and you’re about to be exploited.

I find American society increasingly reflected in the second type of $14 grilled cheese. Movie theaters, sporting events, music events, video games, tipping culture, hidden fees, etc. etc. Exploitative business practices to extract profit at the expense of the customer. It’s like walking around being shown the middle finger at all times. And people complain about the breakdown of the social contract…

the artisan grilled cheese is better than a hotdog that’s been overheated for six hours with a stale bun, and stale popcorn with fake flavoring

Simple ingredients should be cheap. It’s fucking cheese and bread, stop trying to normalize $15 for it. The raw ingredients are milk and wheat, both of which are incredible cheap.

So yeah, I don’t disagree, it should be about half the price if we had better artisan programs in the US. But I don’t think wonder bread and Kraft singles should set the bar for grilled cheese pricing.

Cheese has more nuance to it and I agree the difference between Kraft singles and an aged cheese are vastly different especially in time and labor. For instance Gruyère ages for a minimum of 5 months. All of that being said, your artisanal food truck isn’t making the Gruyère and only about $1.50 worth of cheese goes into it (compared to $0.35 if you used kraft singles).

Personally, I view Trump as a useful idiot for them, as a charismatic figurehead. He knew how to tap into the heartbeat of the populace scorned by globalism. He’s of course sympathetic to their beliefs: his campaign against the New York 5 stands as testament enough. But now he surrounds himself with them and is clearly becoming increasingly convinced that they represent public opinion, emboldened enough to claim just recently that those of Arab descent have inherently inferior genetics.

You do realize we live in a country where Megachurch Pastors are billionaires, the Mormon church has one of the largest private investment funds, Scientology has a death grip on its members, etc etc. These are not innocent business ventures, they manipulate their victims into providing them exorbitant amounts of money and labor.

Capturing American minds is a solved problem for those who have enough money, and has been for awhile. Maybe not every single manipulative actor is working together in coordination, but they’re certainly manipulating.

And there are numerous counter narratives that find fertile bases, e.g. Chomsky on Reddit. Most of these speakers are doing so not with one arm in policy and the other in media, but to compete in the attention economy.

> Megachurch Pastors are billionaires, the Mormon church has one of the largest private investment funds, Scientology has a death grip on its members, etc etc.

And billions of dollars in influencers, interest groups and activists. Elon Musk is singularly as wealthy as the Mormon Church. Art and music narratives.

It’s comforting to assume a lizard man is in charge behind it all. The facts don’t sustain that false comfort. There are cohesive opinion blocks. One of them is the one convinced to the point of faith in Chomsky’s hypothesis. But they compete and fracture and ally and fall. Missing that dynamic significantly handicaps any operational political theory.

You're arguing against yourself. Musk has a clear political allegiance. Same with Ellison and Bezos and the Koch brothers and the Sinclair Media group. It's a clear example of the Manufacturing Consent model operating in practice. And that's just the "mainstream" media. Connecting political influencers and content creators to funding and information sources is a big deal, e.g. https://nypost.com/2025/08/28/business/dark-money-group-payi...

(Relevant to the topic: note the well-known political alignment of the NY Post and how it might affect reporting on a topic like this. I think I had a homework assignment like this in 10th grade.)

Under the current administration we have the president and FCC openly threatening and pressuring media companies, but that's just them being more bold and arrogant than in the past.

There are many ambiguous and uncertain things in this world, but there is very, very clearly a directional flow of messaging and alignment from powerful people and organizations with particular political alignments to the media organizatinos that they control and/or fund.

The irony of the anti DEI crowd being even less meritocratic than the caricature that they’ve created of their opposition.

True tests of courage, morals, and ethics are occurring more and more every day now, especially in the tech industry that is so closely intertwined with the regimes across the world who seek to cause great harm to those who do not look like, speak like, or believe in the same things as them.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" - there’s your quote for political apathy.