The EU always has been a scapegoat for incompetent politicians. Now the EU is out of the picture, there’s no-one left to blame. And we can clearly see that the EU, for all its faults, is a very beneficial institution for all involved.
People may agree or disagree on Brexit. But my god your sentence sums up what is happening in the UK, without anyone to blame, whether it is Russia, China, US or EU, UK have simply failed to strategically plan or execute on anything.
And there are plenty of people on HN would say otherwise and say UK is fine.
The EU always has been a scapegoat for incompetent politicians.
You also see this in countries still in the EU and it will happen as long as we will not have true integration, it is always easier to blame the EU for your own failings, since it is harder for the EU to fend for itself in national politics.
One recent example in my country is nitrogen deposition. Long ago, countries have committed to keeping certain nature reserves in good health (or improving them when necessary). Then many subsequent governments always chose the side of the farmers at the detriment of nature. Now many reserves' soil quality is in a terrible state and the courts have told the government to stop and fix the problem. Then we got a bunch of right-wing populist countries that have wasted many more years by blaming the EU and questioning scientific methods for measuring deposits - while it has been abundantly for a long time what actually needs to be done, buy out farmers.
At any rate, this constant undermining and blaming of the EU has the effect you'd expect it to - it destroys trust in the EU. Ironically, the saving grace now seems to be the agressor and the lost ally. More people realize that we can't act in an increasingly hostile world as small and mid-sized countries.
I recently had a discussion with my wife and we check our bank records to find out how long it's been since we've been to a KFC, McDonalds or Burger King. Apparently it's been 16 months now.
It's overpriced, unhealthy and American. Enough reasons to not go.
As an American I also have not gone to any of those restaurants.
The thing is, America is the China of food[0]: we make shittons of unsafe, dangerous product and foist it onto the market by burying the market's pricing mechanism under a mountain of garbage until nobody else can compete and we dictate the price.
People will note that China makes plenty of safe, normal products too. The same applies to American agriculture, but that doesn't matter. The problem is mainly that the industry has absolutely no standards. If they can go a few cents cheaper, they will.
[0] And, prior to this century, we were also China in general - a lot of our manufacturing was stolen from Britain and ran for far cheaper.
Kids are singing mandatory pledges of allegiance in school, but the government itself doesn’t want to give anything to gain their trust. They’re even rebooting unhealthy coal plants. They don’t care about any of you.
What I find most interesting about the USA is the variety; yes, there are low-cost (often unhealthy) options, but there are also a wide variety of wonderful restaurants which are not pinching pennies on their costs, even amongst national chains.
As a website owner I hate the fact that more than 90% of my traffic is now bots, fake bots, bots masquerading as real visitors and real visitors who try try to use my platform to spam others.
Now AI companies are using residential proxies to get around the obvious countermeasures, I have resorted to blocking all countries that are not my target audience.
You should venture outside coding. Just from my last gathering with friends I heard people in Healthcare, Logistics and Construction all mentioning interesting ways in which it improves their productivity.
It was my first movie about prison life in the US and the failures of the American justice and correctional system. I since learned it was realistic in every aspect apart from the escape, and that not much has changed since.
Everything about it is depressing and somehow it’s the best movie ever.
Even capable coders can’t create a Reddit clone in a week. Because it’s not just a glorified CRUD app. And I encourage you to think a bit harder before arguing like that.
Yes you can create a CRUD app in some kind of framework and style it like Reddit. But that’s like putting lines on your lawn and calling it a clone of the Bernabeu.
But even if you were right, the real barrier to building a Reddit clone is getting traction. Even if you went viral and did everything right, you’d still have to wait years before you have the brand recognition and SEO rankings they enjoy.
In what way (that's not related to the difficulty of scaling it, which I already addressed separately)?
The point of my comment was:
"Somebody with AI cloning Reddit in a week is not as special as you make it to be, all things considering. A Reddit clone is not that difficult, it's basically a CRUD app. The difficult part of replicating it, or at least all the basics of it, is its scaling - and even that wouldn't be as difficult for a dev in 2026, the era of widespread elastic cloud backends".
The Bernabeu analogy handwavingly assumes that Reddit is more challenging than a homegrown clone, but doesn't address in what way Reddit differs from a CRUD app, and how my comment doesn't hold.
And even if it did, it would be moot regarding the main point I make, unless the recent AI-clone also handles those differentiating non-CRUD elements and thus also differs from a CRUD app.
>But even if you were right, the real barrier to building a Reddit clone is getting traction.
True, but not relevant to my point, which is about the difficulty of cloning Reddit coding-wise, not business wise, and whether it's or isn't any great feat for someone using AI to do it.
Calling Reddit a CRUD app isn’t wrong, it’s just vacuous.
It strips away every part that actually makes Reddit hard.
What happens when you sign up?
A CRUD app shows a form and inserts a row.
Reddit runs bot detection, rate limits, fingerprinting, shadow restrictions, and abuse heuristics you don’t even see, and you don’t know which ones, because that knowledge is their moat.
What happens when you upvote or downvote?
CRUD says “increment a counter.”
Reddit says “run a ranking algorithm refined over years, with vote fuzzing, decay, abuse detection, and intentional lies in the UI.” As the number you see is not the number stored.
What happens when you add a comment?
CRUD says “insert record.”
Reddit applies subreddit-specific rules, spam filters, block lists, automod logic, visibility rules, notifications, and delayed or conditional propagation.
What happens when you post a URL?
CRUD stores a string.
Reddit fingerprints it, deduplicates it, fetches metadata, detects spam domains, applies subreddit constraints, and feeds it into ranking and moderation systems.
Yes, anyone can scaffold a CRUD app and style it like Reddit.
But calling that a clone is like putting white lines on your lawn and calling it the Bernabeu.
You haven’t cloned the system, only its silhouette.
> Reddit runs bot detection, rate limits, fingerprinting, shadow restrictions, and abuse heuristics you don’t even see, and you don’t know which ones, because that knowledge is their moat.
> Reddit says “run a ranking algorithm refined over years, with vote fuzzing, decay, abuse detection, and intentional lies in the UI.” As the number you see is not the number stored.
> etc...
The question is; is moltbook doing this? That was the original point, it took a week to build a basic reddit clone, as you call it the silhouette, with AI, that should surely be the point of comparison to what a human could do in that time
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