I don't understand the people who "get the agent to do everything" for them. It just makes a mess if you do that. Yet if I spend a little bit of time setting a project up properly (including telling my minions exactly what to do) I can then get it to do the boring things for me.

The very worst things you can do in a codebase are (a) not deeply understand how it works (have it be magic) and (b) be lazy and mess up the structure.

How do you fix a problem which happens at 2:00am and takes your system down if you don't have an excellent understanding of how it works?

Over time we're already bad at (a) because most developers hate writing documentation so that knowledge is invariably lost over time.

You don't have to be a FE dev (which is largely a junior/mid-level position anno 2026) to write HTML.

I'm not and I've used it for years. With Markdown being a thing that has been less common, sure, but that's more of a zeitgeist thing.

Sorry but what? HTML's really simple, I've been using it for 30 years now. Pretty much everything you need to know to do something useful can be learned in an hour.

I know that it's 2026 and we've spent the last 15 years hiring people into our field who don't understand the hacker mindset but I didn't think that I'd find them here. They would have been ran out pretty quickly.

Very few developers do that especially on early / key parts of the codebase.

It gets sucked up into housing. So if you're in your early 50s that's fine as you probably brought very cheap. Mid-40s and under? Unlikely unless you were extremely lucky. I'm 45 by the time I've been able to buy housing it has always been peak despite having very high earnings at times.

Eight years ago my internet was using a current over a copper wire. Now it's light through glass. The latter is much more efficient especially over longer distances.

Eight years ago, your ISP was already on light over glass, they just didn't serve it that way to your house.

When I was living in the UK the copper cable was 4.5km long. The reason I know that is because BT denied that there was any copper line installed. So I spoke to the building company who told me they installed the copper cables. Then I wrote a letter to my MP. With his help we got BT to conceed and they hooked us up.

It was bad DSL but bad DSL is better than a 56k modem.

Nowadays DSL lines are anything from a few 100 meters to 1.5 - 2 kilometers. I don't know much about cable TV.

But processing and retranssmission of the data at every network node still takes energy

And plenty of that hardware is more than ten years old.

> pharmaceuticals

A large number of these literally save people's lives. Anti-biotics, statins, anti-depressives, anti-psychotics, insulin, anti-histamines.

Cars can come in the form of ambulances, narcotics can come in form of morphine or cocaine (note the early use in medicine).

You don't just exclude / include entire class by giving a few examples.

Russia is far larger and far less populated, it's an economic backwater and a cultural dead end. Yet despite that they have rail connecting their country together.

So did France. There is a common factor at play with Russia. Has little to do with the country's shape.

It's like saying certain rats solve the maze because the path is simpler. Except that the failing rats happen to have a different incentive.

> So did France. There is a common factor at play with Russia. Has little to do with the country's shape.

You'll have to make yourself clearer, I have no idea what you're implying

I implied that when a nation decides that transport infrastructure is a strategic investment, a decades long initiative, funded by the Public sector, it yields better results.

The private sector unfortunately is too short sighted, and will optimize for profit. Doesn't seem to work well for nationwide infrastructure..that being railroads, but also the internet.

Once you get past the Urals, most of Russia's development is along an east west axis until you reach Baikal and the the far east. Also as a Marxist dictatorship for some years, there was little emphasis on independent travel (cars etc)

To call Russia a "cultural dead end" is a bit much, considering all the great artists of various kinds that country has produced. In fact, you'll find that famous Russian novels like Anna Karenina and Doctor Zhivago feature trains as motifs.

Great point about trains being featured in Russian novels. I imagine trains are well-represented in Japanese literature too, as well as film and maybe poetry. That's an angle I'd enjoy investigating further for other cultures. Surely the U.S. is more of a "car culture", but even offhand I can think of, for example, the novel On the Road with train-hopping having a significant role.

Japan and Russia have slightly different relationships to the train I think. Other than arterial rivers (that often flow in odd directions), the railway was the only serious way to get across Siberia for a long time. Whereas in Japan, while the railways are a source of pride, there were viable alternatives such as roads and boats.

I think US trains did have their window though. At one time they would have been the main way to get into the interior or across the continent.

Oh Russia has created some amazing culture (Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy) but that was before they fell to the barbarians in the 1920s. After that only Lem comes to mind.. and he was either Ukrainian or Polish. Basically anyone talented and who could fled (Asimov comes to mind) because under the Soviet system, and later under Putinism the arts were a kind of wasteland. Basically the only things they did well involved little girls, drugs or board games.

It's funny as I'm quite fan of quite a few Russians, yet they're all people who either died before the Russian system was created or are those lucky enough to escape.

The Netherlands is a similar shape to the continental contiguous United States yet we have an excellent public transport system. Very good trains and every population has awesome cycling infrastructure.

The US could have all of this and more in their populated areas. They're the richest country in the world. Why is the infrastructure so neglected? It's clearly a choice.

US army can deploy air force, tankers, soldiers and all the logistics together with Burger King anywhere in the world within days and somehow people that pay for it still think a simple rail in their home turf is impossible.

The question to ask is "who owns the rail lines?". That matters for having a good rail system. It's basically the same problem for why the US doesn't have fiber internet available everywhere, too.

Good parallel. An article recently explained how Switzerland has the fastest fibre optical network: all companies share the same cabling. Dig once. No need to hook the property or do anything when switching provider.

For new rail at least, whoever wants to build them gets to own them, right?

I think what it comes down to is that if automobile companies had to build and maintain the roads, we certainly wouldn't have so many cars. But railway companies need to build the train lines, while competing with taxpayer funded automobile infrastructure. It's not impossible (see Japan) but also not easy.

It's rarely that simple. The question has to be asked "who owns the land?" because usually the rail lines get to belong to who owns the land, even if someone else builds them.

The interstate automobile road system got built through judicious use of eminent domain. That avoided all of these issues. Amtrak doesn't have the ability to do that.

Isn't Netherlands trying to deter from car use by laws and taxes and at the same time funneling public money into railroads and bike infrastructure?

>The US could have all of this and more in their populated areas.

Probably people in US have other priorities and that means there are other public policies.

I dunno, centre right national governments in recent years have been pretty car friendly. Driving can be cheaper for family outings. For two adults and two teens to go from Utrecht to Amsterdam and back (26 minutes each way) is €48 (with discount if you buy a flex pass monthly) or €80 without a discount. Suddenly driving is pretty competitive

That ignores the ongoing costs of car ownership: parking/storage, maintenance, and the purchase price itself. Driving costs a lot more than just fuel and tolls.

Oh I know, and that's part of why this family doesn't own a car, but 1) a lot of people are not great at calculating those costs and 2) some of the costs are sunk costs.

Even so, the sticker shock of some trips on Dutch trains is unsettling. Utrecht to Rotterdam is €27.60 round trip (if using undiscounted fare). It's ~112 km (again, round trip). So for the same family you're looking at over €100 to go on a pretty minor journey.

I just want the Dutch government to fund trains more and roads less. It's kinda bizarre how there's no motorway tolls here, at least that I've encountered.

Our car infrastructure receives more subsidy than our train and cycling infrastructure combined. There has actually been some discussion of this in some circles because, given the large environmental and social costs we shouldn't be subsidising cars at all and should be putting it all into public transport.

(we have two cars and five bikes, not counting the kids, and rarely use public transport, but I'd be behind that - as maybe then my town would get a tram system)

It's the US, all you have to do is drive a truckload of cash into Mar-A-Lago and you'll get whatever you want.

Arabella Advisors is about the farthest thing from MAGA you can imagine.

Arabella Advisors provided some of the funding for Chat Control lobbying, alongside the Hopewell Fund, Oak Foundation, and Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF).

Sorry, who are they, and what is ATT in this context?

App Tracking Transparency. I first through "AT&T" and then actually realized the acronym.

What do Arabella Advisors have to do with it?