The counterpoint to this is that early 20th century Germany was one of the most advanced, sophisticated, and educated countries in the world.

In fact the genocide only stopped when a bunch of unsophisticated American (and Russian) farmboys rolled in.

> was one of the most advanced, sophisticated, and educated countries in the world

It was also an economic disaster. Surely that contributed.

WWI was the cataclysm that destroyed the global economy.

(Its aftermath was a necessary transition, that happened to be disastrously mismanaged.)

The current proponents of new "realism" who claim that regional empires will co-exist in peace would do well to study the causes of WWI.

Yes the Chromebooks are pervasive and used in every subject. Probably because they are cheaper than buying overpriced textbooks for every subject.

I tried it last month after hearing here that it didn’t speak in Claudisms.

As a chatbot it’s totally fine, virtually indistinguishable from Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude.

For coding it’s… okay. I tried 4.6 and it feels similar to Opus from 12 months ago, or maybe Sonnet from 9 months ago. YMMV.

I come from a lower class US background.

I assure you, take one look at us and you’ll instantly see that very few of us are in any danger of starving.

While this is absolutely the case today, and obviously so, history has shown governments are quite capable of starving their people, they have managed this even by mismanagement while those regions still exported food.

As you point out, a HS diploma is largely meaningless these days.

This discussion is about students trying to get into top colleges, which is a completely different population with completely different problems from those doing the bare minimum.

Where are these well engineered products made with care? I would love to use more tech like that.

Unfortunately most sites and apps have been low quality and getting worse since well before AI coding became a thing. Examples: Lowes, Home Depot, American Airlines - all shockingly bad for companies of that size.

Apple used to be the standard bearer for that. These days I'm not so sure.

You just dated yourself to a very specific time. Before that, Sun was the gold standard and Apple was known for terrible software. I still use a 30 year old text editor because it just works better than modern editors. There are plenty of examples. If you don't know of any, its because you just accept the slop with marketing dollars behind it. I can't say I blame you, finding good software seems to require more and more effort with each passing year. I blame the amount of money in software for that. Gotta take the good with the bad.

Let's make it!

A lot of infrastructure. Linux (despite the recent VM escapes found with AI assistance). nginx. openssh. coreutils. Is all solid but also just operates the computer and doesn't actually solve any problem itself.

We’ve already had those limits for years on any corporate project with average (or below) developers.

I work with a lot of AI code, and it’s not any worse than what big teams were already producing.

A small team of 2-3 really good humans is in a whole different league, but that has always been a very rare case.

We’re at the point where people who talk too fancy get accused of being LLMs, and the people who make human mistakes get scolded for grammar.

It seems like constructive criticism rather than scolding.

If I were running around saying "providence" instead of "provenance" I would want someone to tell me.

Yes, it was meant constructively and for exactly this reason. I interpreted what they wrote as what they meant, then realized it was a mistake that I could have easily made too.

Me too, but we're the minority. Most people are rolling their eyes every time this happens. They don't want constructive criticism any more than they want normal criticism.

Sometimes I don’t need my todo app to be “great” or revolutionary in any way. I just need it to work, and bog standard average is perfectly fine for a lot of things.

This frees me up to spend more time at the design level, solving harder or more novel problems.