Year: 2025

Chill Links

You Should Make Good Arguments for YIMBYism, Not Bad Ones.

People are having fewer kids. Their choice is transforming the world’s economy.

Companies Have Shielded Buyers From Tariffs. But Not for Long.

Amazon to announce largest layoffs in company history, source says.

AI is driving huge productivity gains for large companies while small companies get left behind. I suspect that is likely true.

‘Make American Shipbuilding Great Again’: Korea leans into shipbuilding as it woos Trump.

America Doesn’t Have Enough Weapons for a Major Conflict. These Workers Know Why. Side note: the US Navy has no battleships. In fact, no navy in the world has used battleships since 1995.

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and Zillow say mortgage rates can’t fall enough for Americans to afford a home.

Junior Shift

Chill Tech

This is a real problem.

The best AI agents are better now than a junior dev or infra person. I’d say that the highest-performing AIs now are about the equal of a dev with 2-4 years of experience and an infra person with 3-5 years of experience.

This fact is nuking those lower-level roles.

A lot easier. You basically have to recapitulate half of computer science to get a junior to do something sensible; no such problem with an AI.

I can now write PowerShell scripts a lot faster with AI help. But I already knew how to write PowerShell, so it’s a lot easier for me to prompt the AI and then I can use my prior knowledge to evaluate what the script will achieve, so I can be certain it won’t blow anything up. Juniors have no idea so AI just makes them worse and more dangerous because they both cannot prompt the AI correctly and are unable to determine what the results will do.

Having no junior to senior pipeline is going to be a huge issue in 10 or so years, though. Not sure what we’re going to do about that.

De De

Chill Annoying, Evil

It’s a lot easier for a country to commit suicide than it is to prosper. Germany — even more than most — has chosen to kill itself. In 50 years, it’ll be an Islamicized backwater, forgotten by most and ignored by all but those who have to deal with the suicide bombers who emerge from its borders.

Europe Cooked

Chill Evil

Given past evidence, society will be destroyed with Muslims at about 10% of the population. Which means that much of Europe is already doomed. They’re done and just don’t know it yet.

I don’t intend this in any creepy way, but it’s too bad we can’t convince all the European non-Muslim women (of any race) to immigrate to the United States. It would save them and their future children from the hell their lives are about to become and it would solve some of our demographic problems.

That’s a win/win.

Chill Links

California invests big in battery energy storage — and leaves rolling blackouts behind. That was “impossible” a mere decade ago.

I’m drowning in AI features I never asked for and I absolutely hate it. “You just hate change!”

Alpha-Lipoic Acid and Metformin Combination Therapy Synergistically Activate Nrf2-AMPK Signaling Pathways to Ameliorate Cognitive Dysfunction in Type 2 Diabetic Encephalopathy.

The Great SaaS-Lighting: How IT Users Got Gaslit.

The multi-billion dollar, 15-hour AWS outage that brought the internet to its knees last week was apparently caused by a single software bug.

An American Hunger Crisis Is Coming.

Apollo laser takes down 200 drones unplugged.

Getting Used to 3% Inflation.

The Economy That’s Great for Parents, Lousy for Their Grown-Up Kids.