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There are two forms of business software gen AI coding is 100% going to eat:

   1. Simple CRUD apps
   2. Long-tail / low-TAM apps
Because neither of these make economic sense for commercial companies to develop targeted products for.

Consequently, you got "bundled" generalized apps that sort of did what you wanted (GP's example) or fly-by-night one-off solutions that haven't been updated in decades.

The more interesting questions are (a) who is going to develop these new solutions and (b) who is going to maintain these new solutions? In-house dev/SRE or newly more-efficient (even cheaper) outsourced? I'd bet on in-housing, as requirements discovery / business problem debugging is going to quickly dominate delivery/update time. It already did and that was before we boosted simple app productivity.


The issue, and this is a recurring Windows theme, was "replacement without feature parity"

Imho, nothing should be allowed to ship in Windows unless it at least covers 100% of previous functionality.

If there are functional gaps, those should require approval at the CEO level.

The Windows team has incinerated a ridiculous amount of goodwill with 80% replacements that leave 20% of previous functionality (often including important workflows for power users) lost.

The issue isn't that Setting was different: it was that it didn't do as much as Control Panel. And that's a fixable issue! Just build the additional widgets / plug-ins.


The repeated failing of the EU (90s+) was under-appreciation of the economic / political / military pressure that could be brought by constraining key material and energy supplies.

If the EU (specifically Germany) had more presciently modeled out Russian foreign policy with a shift to increased EU reliance on Russian natural gas, there were steps it could have taken.

E.g. building in a tripwire for territorial invasion with the express responses of cutting Russian gas purchases on day 1, freezing Russian assets and access to European banking, and building storage / LNG terminals

Had the EU done this, loudly, Ukraine likely wouldn't have been invaded.

The EU's biggest mistake was presuming that everyone took the international order as inviolate as it did. (China, Russia, the US)


How do you account for the increased competitiveness of economies of scale in a globalized economy with free international trade in your recommendation?

Afaik, the bulk of the US' federal centralization of commerce is based on the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution [0], which based on reading (and more so on precedent) grants the US federal legislature the ability to regulate commerce between states. As most commerce crosses state boundaries, this de facto allows the federal legislature to define and enforce regulatory standards.

In practice, it's more nuanced and subject to continual back-and-forth arguing. E.g. California and Texas trying to decide their own standards, by virtue of their economic size, then hashing it out with the federal government in court.

I'm not sure what the EU regulatory cornerstone equivalent of the Commerce Clause would be.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/commerce_clause



How much easier is it to learn Esperanto than some broken form of simplified English that gets the message across and then also enables you to speak the native language of 26% of the world GDP?

If my concern is % of GDP I'd rather learn Mandarin.

I tried to learn Mandarin and it's really hard! That's coming from someone who is able to say Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz without a problem.

I feel the perceived difficulty varies from person to person. Personally I found Mandarin much easier to pick up than German or Spanish, since you don't have to worry about conjugation.

Afaik, there's a difference between classical philosophy (which opines on the divide between an objective world and the perceived word) and more modern philosophy (which generally does away with that distinction while expanding on the idea that human perception can be fallible).

The idea that there's an objective but imperceivable world (except by philosophers) is... a slippery slope to philosophical excess.

It's easy to spin whatever fancy you want when nobody can falsify it.


There's no way in hell I'd buy a car nowadays without at least a weekend rental.

There's too many random dumb features. (Hyundai/Kia's coffee break notification?)


Pretty much all the manufacturers have that now. I'm skeptical that it works, but it definitely tackles a real problem with drowsy drivers.

The problem with Kia's implementation is that it can't be turned off.

As the unofficial corporate tag line quips: 'Toyota: for when your favorite appliance color is beige'

But in all seriousness, I'll give props to Honda, Toyota, and Mazda for amazing engineering cultures. In the sense of being extremely good at optimizing trade-offs.


Well said! I'd also add that a critical function of middle management in healthy companies is bidirectional information communication: sharing what their teams are doing up and sharing leadership priorities down.

Having worked at some dysfunctional companies where that didn't happen (and a few companies that were amazing at it), it makes a difference at scale.

Nothing is more disheartening than working your ass off as an IC, shipping, then finding out that your VP pivoted approach and your project won't be used.


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