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I'm not sure when it was formally banned but my dad talks about boys in his school getting "slippered" and that was in the 60s, so caning was gone but you could still hit kids with slightly less painful objects.

And throwing the heavy wooden blackboard rubber at boys who were goofing around or not listening was also considered completely normal


In the USA it is not banned federally or in all state public schools. Find a school near you that associates with Independent Fundamentalist Baptist movement, their school discipline policy likely includes corporal or physical punishment terminology.

Very regional as well, Eastern europe is supposedly doing well, western europe (UK/NL) is doing alright, north america seems significantly worse

I've got a couple of friends that left London to go back to Poland during covid. They first continued to work remotely, but ended up switching to Polish companies because the pay was better.

Yes I think salaries are still a bit lower, but the gap has closed a lot. And cost of living is lower in Poland plus there is some tax break for self employed contractors that means you only pay ~20% tax compared to ~40% in the UK.

With those two factors you could easily end up better off overall, especially if you have kids


The kids factor is even bigger if you move back close to relatives. The ability to drop your children at grandma's instead of paying for childcare is an easy 1k a month you're saving.

Daycare is completely free in Poland since 2024 (you need to submit an application to ZUS, but there are no limits, it's always accepted), even the private ones. You only pay separately for food (10 zł per day the child is actually attending to the daycare).

I wtedy przynajmniej babcia będzie szczęśliwa pilnować dzieci.

I switched from a Polish company to a German one (both remote), but my pay is more or less the same. The difference is that in Poland to get that money I have to be a "top performer" with a lot of stress and not a lot of time, while in Germany I can be just a mid dev.

Yes Poland in particular is booming. It’s an outsource destination that’s higher skill and less risk than India.

It's more evidence if any was needed that the US is now definitively in a late imperial phase of decline - US elites have become corrupt. This is classic decline of empire stuff.

So no you can't stop it, but knowing that does at least let you make decisions with more clarity in your own life


I'm just glad I'm alive to witness it. Ww2 is what finally sank Britain's declining empireafter ww1, I'm hoping Iran and maybe a global war finally knocks them off that top spot and the east takes over

The lesson from the British empire is it's a slow process, death by a thousand cuts.

"There is a great deal of ruin in a nation" and all that.

We'll be watching it for the rest of our lives, mostly in slow motion with occasional rapid periods of decline like the one at the moment


Be careful what you wish for.

Isn't that mostly just enums?

Is there anything else that doesn't run as valid JS if you strip the types (and maybe some other extra keywords)out?

Genuine question, in my head there's not much, but TS has a few weird corners I maybe haven't used


https://www.typescriptlang.org/tsconfig/#erasableSyntaxOnly covers them all, I strongly recommend running with that option enabled to be future-proof.

enums and decorators mainly. There are also subtleties such as having the ts file extension in imports. Also imports aren't transpiled in cjs so you need to need es modules.

I'm using it in my projects with no issues.


Ah yeah I forgot about decorators - I’ve worked with angular before but clearly I managed to erase all knowledge of it from my brain.

Outside of that I’ve barely seen them used in typescript, they’re not really idiomatic in react projects


Which is why Italians and Greeks famously all die young of heart disease

Always so cute how fellow coffee lovers will loudly boast the health benefits of coffee, but when you add an asterisk they will see it as a personal attack and respond strongly :)

Coffee is not what defines your identity. It's fine to admit it isn't perfect.


The slight cholesterol boost from those doesn't matter... It's like saying that a banana is radioactive. Let me guess, it's bad to eat fat aswell?

There are far worse foods that spike your cholesterol, irrelevant point you've made


My point is not that unfiltered coffee is good, I’m just saying that northern italians who eat dessert for breakfast, cook everything in lard, drink unfiltered coffee and even (gasp) sometimes smoke cigarettes are significantly healthier than Americans on every metric.

Not saying those things are necessarily good for you, I’m just saying we don’t seem to understand this stuff very well


Probably because they don't consume gobs of HFCS and ultra-processed foods, don't take the car for every single thing[0], and have obesity/overweight rates that are 20-40% lower. A healthier work-life balance and concomitant lower cortisol and blood pressure also helps a lot.

If you compare Italians and Greeks to, say, Swedes and Dutchies, you'd get a much different picture.

[0] not entirely Americans their personal fault, their urban design isn't for walking around


I think it's easy to for many to miss the sarcasm. Not everyone is aware of the life expectancy of certain Mediterranean groups.

>and even (gasp) sometimes smoke cigarettes are significantly healthier than Americans on every metric.

Not just "sometimes". Less these days, but when they were recognized as blue zones decades ago almost everybody smoked like chimneys.


Software engineering is one thing but if you look 10-20 years into the future and everyone can run models equivalent to today's SoTA locally with zero monitoring or censorship, that could... not be good.

Some people will use them responsibly but a lot of people will not.

LLMs are already frying some people's brains and there are some human desires that should not be encouraged


That's why there won't be any local models in 10-20 years. The latest Chinese models are already hosted on proprietary clouds.

That's a wild assumption and most certainly wrong. Open models will continue to evolve with or without Chinese labs.

Biggest issue with Opus for me is not so much that it's expensive (though it is), but the fact it's slow especially during US working hours.

I prefer using slightly worse but significantly quicker models on a tighter leash and iterating faster, feels more productive


UK has been trying to thread the needle of staying out of what is obviously a complete cluster** of a war while also not annoying the US too much, but US bombers are taking off from air force bases in the UK to bomb Iran all the time.

Because of that and the general ingrained hostility of the permanent UK security state to Iran, they view us as a legitimate target albeit not a particularly important one because we’re just not that powerful anymore


Yeah when Americans talk about how bad a deal NATO is they always conveniently forget the military bases. Most of their wars tend to involve Ramstein for example.

Yep, also in my experience for some reason British people have a hard time understanding why this might be considered hostile from the people being bombed from our soil.

Even when given the example of roles reversed and asked how they would feel about France or Ireland if Russia had air bases in those countries they were using to bomb London, people just can’t see the issue.

In a sense we’re still under American occupation 80 years later, not just physically but more importantly in our minds


"Almost universal" is a bit of a stretch, most of the time these days Python apps are deployed as Docker containers, and if you're using k8s this becomes effectively mandatory.

However a lot of the time especially for older codebases the docker build will just run pip install from public pypi without a proper lockfile.

So at least install code isn't being executed on your production machine, but still significant surface area for supply chain attacks


Well, the install code can leave some code behind that will be executed on the production machine... It doesn't really help being in a container. While a separate problem from Python ecosystem, people really put a lot more faith in isolation offered by containers than they should. Also, it's often very tempting to poke holes in that isolation because it's difficult and up to impossible sometimes to get things done otherwise.

At this point everyone doing these kind of flows (using claws or any other flows that run agents in a loop 24/7) using any kind of subscription-based billing for inference must be aware they're on borrowed time.

Enough people have gone over the economics - you're costing OpenAI/Anthropic money, potentially a lot of money, so it's inevitable that sooner or later that particular party will come to an end.

Having said that, doing it by running a regex on your prompts to look for keywords is a bit loose


We all get the "realpolitik" of it. That doesn't mean anthropic just gets to ignore the contract they signed. Well it does as long as you're fighting the fight for them before it even gets to anthropic.

I strongly dislike all of these companies (and the people who run them), and I don't love LLMs in general, although I use them every day because they are useful for my job.

But the simple fact is, if you're paying $20/mo and using $200/mo of tokens, that is not going to last forever.

The only way to make it last a bit longer for the people with relatively sane usage patterns is to try and stop people absolutely taking the piss


That's not true, you're using RIAA-style wishful accounting here. If the company is willing to sell me $200 worth of tokens for $20, that's still worth only $20 to me.

The worth of something to you can be more or less than the number of dollars you paid for it. If those tokens let you build something that you sell for far more dollars or saves you time that you put more value on.

Ok well they need to do it above board and legally then.

I don't get it though. Why not just revise the billing so that if users are hitting the servers above some defined frequency, they get charged more?

I'm tired of this startup-adjacent mindset that promotes endless adversarial scamming. I absolutely think people should be able to run OpenClaw or whatever harnesses they want, but I also think they should pay in some proportion to usage rather than trying to exploit an all-you-can-eat buffet offer to stock their own catering business.


If they do that, they lose market share to their competitors, which kills their ability to raise investor capital, which kills the company, because they are almost entirely funded by investor capital.

The demo above uses the prompt "hi". The openclaw string is in the git history, which Claude goes looking for.

You're right, didn't read that properly. Okay then that actually makes sense if that's a (relatively) deterministic way to work out if openclaw is used

It's definitely not! Now I can Claude Code proof all future PRs into my open source repo with a single commit message.

that is a terrible way to figure out if openclaw is used, hah

The only reasonable thing to do if you care about the longevity of your workflow is to build it around open-weight models.

If you choose to not be able to get work done without Claude you're at the mercy of whatever they want.


Oh it's way worse than people realize. The monthly vs api keys is a huge issue for them. They will have to end monthly subscription plans. You can pay $20 a month and use $10k in api tokens. They are in all out panic trying to fix this. But yes, the house of cards is ending.

The company ending part is when they have to cut the $20 a month plan and take things away. They are creating a massive group of coders that can't code - soon to have no way to code. This cohort will rampage through all social forums.


They might not be able to scale it, and indeed they might indeed have to jack the prices. But vibe coding is here to stay. Maybe it'll recede for a few years while people figure out the scaling. But the Pandora's Box is opened and it ain't closing

> You can pay $20 a month and use $10k in api tokens.

Do you have a source? I would be interested to read more about any hard figures that have been posted like this.


They can just do token caps. But they don't want to do that because "infinite" sells better.

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