You just named symptoms not cause.

1. People vote for old idiots .

2. Local politics is all about milking any potential work with permits. Sky rocket housing due to that .

3. American lost engineering culture everywhere except software . Now software is dead as industry we used to know

Personally I think those are also symptoms. In my opinion, the cause is:

1. Easy money for far, far, far too long in the US and a complete political unwillingness to take any risk of a recession, no matter the long-term cost required to stave it off. In my mind, this explains the rich-poor gap, the rise of crypto, insane valuations, house-price inflation, the weird delta between US and rest-of-world standard of living/salaries, and probably even the migration crisis.

Easy money and cheap (foreign) labor are one and the same. Political parties that are not accountable for this are the upstream problem. In other words, it’s a failure of what we think of as our “democracy.” The will of the people doesn’t mean much when you can just swap out “the people” to get what you will.

Hey, I like easy money.

> American lost engineering culture everywhere except software

microprocessor design : Apple Silicon and lately Intel Panther Lake and later?

Both companies created in the previous century and running on old fuel of past success

that looks like reinvesting profits from innovation in hopes of more innovation

But our bridges and infrastructure are crumbling

That’s not for lack of engineering talent! We just don’t like paying for boring things like… bridges that haven’t collapsed yet. “Call us when it does crumble. We’ve got a border wall to build or gender reassignment surgeries for prisoners to pay for.”

What a cheap shot. “gender reassignment surgeries for prisoners” - cos there are soooo many of those happening we can’t fix a single bridge.

How about another explanation. Your government is totally opposed to helping citizens for “free” (let’s ignore that most government revenue comes from good ol’ taxpayers) when the alternative is to farm out the provision of expensive services to lobbying corporates.

They’re more than happy to punish people however. For free _and_ for corporate profit.

Both parties spend money on ridiculous things that are obviously wastes of money. Are any lies detected?

reference needed

Those are issues of priority and revenue generation, not capability.

Soon we won't have the capabilities. See the nuclear industry and how we don't have the people and training to do the work anymore.

There are 342 million people here. We'll be fine.

> People vote for old idiots .

i think this is also a syndrome not a cause

Agree, coming from a 3rd country to US what I have personally perceived a lot is the generational loop at the later stage..."Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." — G. Michael Hopf

The Russians must be having a grand old time according to this theory.

yeah all those Good Times created by Hard Men like Mussolini and Stalin

or does this quote refer to Hard Men as in the men who rioted and fought and died for 8 hour work days and basic social services?

The latter

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Great UI cult could be an early pre-ai phenomena , not a lost decade.

you will need 100 times less of front end , if any action can be asked or explain in voice, text or video or slides always custom to your request. you don't need navigation complex forms to structure. just text, animation to wait, and a few way to embed more complex structures, like text and basic html with charts.

this sounds like "almost ui" but in reality it's not. this is text + some custom visuzalizations adhoc.

Oh most prominent eu ai company . Without reading an article predict next, will update after :

1. They give up on building competitive models. It’s time to drink wine not to struggle with competition

2. Because of #1 they will talk a bit about something around llms maybe coding agents , and after start talking about sovereignty.

Unlike you, who drank the wine before writing the comment.

3. They are going to start focusing on B2B implementation and deployment.

See what happened to Aleph Alpha...

benchmarks we deserve: google search quick ai answers vs full llm model :)

search answers use Flash 3.5

they use a "low" flavor of it to scale it on billions of users

it's not that huge of a deal if you compare commercial costs in china and cheapest us states, and electricity is only one of the factors.

The real reason: anthropic + openai just cut the reasoning output to prevent distill, and hence you see the rise of chinese models to establish contracts globally .

“and hence you see the rise of chinese models to establish contracts globally”

how will that help them working around the distill issue?

Collecting user data directly by competing on price. The next step would be figuring out how that data can bring them closer to SOTA.

Yes ok but that doesn’t give them the thinking tokens, how to reason about the prompt, which is precisely what’s most important.

a flagship with no pirates, all fired due to ai.

Flash on it's own is not a very competitive model, it's pricing is within ranges of everything else on the market.

Probably the most direct competitor of Flash model :

GPT 5.4 mini

Cache Read $0.075 /M tokens

Gemini 3 flash :

Cache Read $0.05 /M tokens

e.g nothing very magical or ground breaking.

Cache read for dp4-flash is $0.0028 /M tokens, which is more than 10 times cheaper (and also much cheaper for cache miss and output tokens).

Have not actually compared it to other models, but I would not consider it in the same price range.

this price only available if you ok to send your data to Beijing Volcano Engine Technology Co. for the rest open router vendors it is not the same.

Not sure why you are downvoted, this is essentially correct (assuming Volcano Engine tech refers to Deepseek as provider).

Sonnet : Cache Read $0.30

Gemini 3.5 flash : Cache Read $0.15

For Sonnet, that's 10% of input cost (and requires paying for the cache)

For Gemini 3.5 Flash, it's also 10% of input cost.

Which is why 2%/0.8% change the economics in a meaningful way, given the input/cache-heavy way agents operate.

And their disk-based caching is amazing. I got a long 700k context session spanning more than a week, with pauses in between that was longer than a day, and some rewinds mixed in as well.

Stats from pi:

↑400k ↓438k R432M 71.9%/1.0M

Half a billion tokens, $2.12

Anthropic's caching requires you to pay a $0.75/Mtok for Sonnet and $1.25/MTok for Opus as a surcharge on top of the original input token cost. It's not even automatic.

If you are reading ~8 times (8 total back and forth tool calls) that means that cache reads in some sense cost ~$0.4 / M toks (Amortizing the write surcharge over all reads).

It's really quite ridiculously expensive considering what you are paying for is some residence on a VRAM that sometimes gets offloaded to NVMe.

GPT 5.4 Cache Read ≤272K $0.25

And it's multi modal, and available at whatever you might imagine rates limits.

maybe i need to give it second chance, surprisingly Kimi 2.6 consistently fail even to generate valid json plan, where gemma 4 was doing really good, but slow.

Are you going through OpenRouter or direct? I’ve had nothing short of excellent results from Kimi.