What kind of coding/tasks? I find all of the main ones, including the Chinese ones, to be basically on par. Enterprise programming (CRUD all the way down, not simple one though, full ERP)

Just ask Opus and Kimi to build a game about something random, like "make a Mario Kart-inspired game." Opus gives better results most of the time. That doesn't mean you can't get your particular job done with either of these models.

That is not entirely true. The central committee is extremely powerful, but so are the local governments that actually send the representative, the reason the central committee always votes in unanimity is because the discussion happen at the local government level, a local Chinese government may be ruling over hundreds of millions of people.

I'm not saying this is good, I'm merely stating that the central committee power and Xi's power is still limited by the sheer size of the Chinese state. If you compare that dictatorship to the Stalin dictatorship or Gheddafi dictatorship you'll find that Xi does not have that kind of unfettered power through sheer violence, he still needs to make a high number of cogs to work in unison to exercise it.

And AI is the water

The competitive advantages for US companies will not be left on the ground.

Yes, there is an enormous competitive advantage in using open weight models.

I have setup a sistem where I leverage LLMs and agents to replicate scientific papers, cs and related fields, especially ML ones, and that's what I do in the weekends now.

Are we talking companies here?

Somebody still needs to determine what the company system actually look like, that someone is still probably a programmer, it doesn't matter anymore if that programmer is also a good coder.

An accountant will still need a company system that makes sense of the numbers they crunch

I think you guys will go through the same kind of divide that SWE went through. There is a number of SWE and adjacent IT professionals that do enjoy the LLM assisted work, I'm one of those.

There's a number of them that absolutely loathe it.

Your point about biology does not sound fair, an ex of mine worked in the field and that is not at all what she did.

To be fair LLMs can be used in an empowering way to learn, etc. But at that point it feels disingenuous - why not just one shot the problem and get the result more efficiently than just babying it around?

And yeah, fair enough. I guess my bio sample size is limited, but many of the PhD students I've seen in the experimental sciences seem to operate this way a majority of the time. I remember my brain being absolutely fried after 4 hours of thinking about math, only to hear these folks say they pulled a 12 hour shift in the lab. And I'm just like - how? In any case it's all anecdotes from me so feel free to ignore them.

Are you sure we don't see AI operating roles grow? Afaik the SWE roles that are being cutoff are mainly at the companies (faangs) shuffling the investments to GPUs and the rest of the economy (in the US) is not hiring because it's basically in a recession due to other economical reasons. Anedoctiically I see the opposite in my neck of the woods and I have more work than before because of LLM since I basically transitioned to build LLM infrastructure

I think the downvotes are mostly due to the gold thing. it sounds...deranged

It’s all verifiable. We haven’t revalued US gold reserves since 1973. If gold were worth, say, $8k/oz, and were revalued from the current $42/oz set in 1973, that would instantly add almost 2 trillion on paper to US reserves. All it’s doing is acknowledging the current market price for accounting purposes.

FDR used a similar trick to devalue the dollar, allowing him to expand the money supply. Of course this was when the value of the dollar depended on the value of gold, so the motivation and the effects were different.

Or the deficits don’t matter thing lol

Domestically held debt is nothing more than promises to pay future interest to US bondholders. Foreign debt is another story, but most of our “debt” is domestic. A deficit that results in growing domestic debt simply means that we’re selling more of these promises to people and institutions at home.

Domestic debt mostly matters in that it represents money that is “tied up” rather than circulating within the economy for more productive use. It’s a little more complicated since 20% of the “owners” are internal to the government, such as Social Security. And there’s also institutions like mutual funds. But half is domestic private ownership.

If anything, the size of the deficit simply indicates that USD should be valued lower than it currently is, as there’s too many existing claims on future dollars. People bought those claims assuming that the dollar wouldn’t continue to weaken, but that was apparently a mistake.