Mh. Would like to hear the full story. My initial mental reflex is one of „es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen“, that is, „there is no right life in the wrong one“, as Adorno put it.
I think it's simpler to just appeal to every entrepreneur's spider sense - go where the great people are. It really does feel a bit like how Silicon Valley and San Francisco felt in 2000s-2010s. Caveat of course, which is even before 2008, aware insiders of SV were trying to warn that the Goodness of the internet was being squeezed too hard, that VC was turning to rent seeking too soon, the cart is way too far ahead of the basic research pipeline, etc. And of course, there's corruptible people, terrible overwork, insane competition, bad stuff etc in China too.
But there's a determined, undeniable sense of "we're going to make the world a better place", and you can physically see and touch it in China. Once you take a big inhale of that air, you realize just how much you missed it and needed it.
This is literally my first time hearing this. All the stuff I see from china is about lying flat, giving up because no matter how hard you work it won't make a difference? Is this a Shenzhen attitude?
There is probably something to be said about living someplace that is actually investing in itself. Seeing new development actually rise to meet the demands of the population. Seeing new transit expanded. People uplifted out of rural poverty. New technological developments. The whole bit.
The US probably felt a little like that in the immediate post war period. The enthusiasm coming out of a terrible war and a terrible depression and seeing actual changes take place in the scale of weeks before your eyes must have been something else.
But today, most cities seem to have been content with solidifying into amber over the last 50 or so years. No investments into society. The poor are still poor and objectively have worse opportunities given the buying power of the jobs available to them. Development isn't happening on a scale to actually meet the population's needs. Transit and most public good efforts are an afterthought because of no direct business profitability angle. It becomes hard to get excited about medical advances when you understand the realities of our healthcare system and that many who need these medicines or treatments won't ever get them. No enthusiasm for anything. A large population of people against anything changing. Young people and young ideas stonewalled out of positions of power in favor of people who ought to have retired by now maintaining the status quo. Technological advances seemingly solely focused on establishing new ways to rent seek, gouge, police, control thoughts, versus things that are simply beneficial to others. "no brainer" ideas facing pushback. Common sense not being valued. The optimism coming out of the civil rights era dashed away against the realities that hate towards your fellow human is a position that will carry popularity in this country. Profit above all. Control above all. Blatant corruption and cronyism by the ruling elite. Awareness that we haven't taken off the shackles of feudalism.
If I ask a SOTA model to just implement some functionality, it doesn’t necessarily do so using a great architectural approach.
Whenever I ask a SOTA model about architecture recommendations, and frame the problem correctly, I get top notch answers every single time.
LLMs are terrific software architects. And that’s not surprising, there has to be tons of great advice on how to correctly build software in the training corpus.
They simply aren’t great software architects by default.
You know that if you ask the LLM correctly you get top notch answers, because you have the experience to judge if the answer is top notch or not.
I spend a couple of hours per week teaching software architecture to a junior in my team, because he has not the experience to not only ask correctly but also assess the quality of the answer from the LLM.
This is admittedly very tangential only, but as a non-native speaker / not a US-American, I found this sentence from the NYT reporting[0] a bit confusing:
> John said that the suspect’s clothing was inappropriate for the weather and that they had made eye contact.
Why is the report mentioning the eye contact? Is that culturally significant, as in, in the US you don’t normally do eye contact with strangers, and if a stranger does make eye contact, it’s suspicious?
I think the eye contact in question was a prelude to the two of them kind of following each other around and a minor verbal altercation, so the later context shows that it was probably kind of suspicious eye contact, rather than a friendly "what's up?"
I agree with the other comments that this sentence is just poorly written.
In cities people tend to not make eye contact while walking by each other, though in smaller towns it is more common to acknowledge each other in passing.
In neither case would it be accurate to find eye contact suspicious. The sentence appears to be a summation of several things the person saw, convincing them poorly and creating the ambiguity.
Isn‘t it funny how that’s exactly the kind of stuff that helps a human developer be successful and productive, too?
Or, to put it the other way round, what kind of tech leads would we be if we told our junior engineers „Well, here’s the codebase, that’s all I‘ll give you. No debuggers, linters, or test runners for you. Using a browser on your frontend implementation? Nice try buddy! Now good luck getting those requirements implemented!“
> Isn‘t it funny how that’s exactly the kind of stuff that helps a human developer be successful and productive, too?
I think it's more nuanced than that. As a human, I can manually test code in ways an AI still can't. Sure, maybe it's better to have automated test suites, but I have other options too.
Yeah, but it doesn't work nearly as well. The AI frequently misinterprets what it sees. And it isn't as good at actually using the website (or app, or piece of hardware, etc) as a human would.
I've been using Claude to implement an ISO specification and I have to keep telling it we're not interested if the repl is correct but that the test suite is ensuring the implementation is correctly following the spec. But when we're tracking down why a test is failing then it'll go to town using the repl to narrow down out what code path is causing the issue. The only reason there's even is a repl at this point is so it can do its 'spray and pray' debugging outside the code and Claude constantly tried to use it to debug issues so I gave in and had it write a pretty basic one.
Horses for courses, I suppose. Back in the day, when I wanted to play with some C(++) library, I'd quite often write a Python C-API extension so I could do the same thing using Python's repl.
The recent models are pretty great at this. They read the source code for e.g. a Python web application and use that to derive what the URLs should be. Then they fire up a localhost development server and write Playwright scripts to interact with those pages at the predicted URLs.
The vision models (Claude Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, GPT-5.2) can even take screenshots via Playwright and then "look at them" with their vision capabilities.
It's a lot of fun to watch. You can tell them to run Playwright not in headless mode at which point a Chrome window will pop up on your computer and you can see them interact with the site via it.
Camera2URL is, as far as I know, the only iOS and macOS application that let‘s you send the picture taken with the camera directly to any HTTP endpoint the moment you press the trigger.
For example, this makes it possible to trigger an n8n workflow the instant you take a photo:
I really wonder why the swarm intelligence of software developers still hasn’t decided on a single best clearly defined architecture for serving web applications, decades after the building blocks have been in place.
Let the server render everything. Let JS render everything, server is only providing the initial div and serves only JSON from then on. Actually let JS render partial HTML rendered on the server! Websockets anyone?
Imagine SQL server architecture or iOS development had this kind of ADHS syndrome.
Call me a naïve fanboy, but I believe that Apple is still one of the very few companies that has an ideologically better approach that results in technically better products.
Where everyone else sells you stuff to make money, they make money to create great stuff.
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