The article is certainly firebranding, but the core tenet strikes a valid point: how has the US lost the plot within such a short time? How did it go from the flag bearer of freedom and progress to isolationist bully that wants to invade Greenland and become best friends with Russia?
From the outside it is really hard to comprehend. Was it FoxNews that poisoned the American mind or the social media brainwashing? How can a society allow a billionaire to cut programs in Africa that saved hundreds of thousands of lives that cost pennies when compared to any military adventures.
It seems like the US never really reovered fully from the Civil War, and the undercurrent of racism has just been allowed to fully come to the surface with social media.
> how has the US lost the plot within such a short time? How did it go from the flag bearer of freedom and progress to isolationist bully that wants to invade Greenland and become best friends with Russia?
American culture has lost its near-monopoly on optimism. We're now almost as cynical as the Europeans. (:D)
That cynicism means civic disengagement, technological doomerism and general symptoms of depression. That collectively degrades the mostly bottom-up structures we've long relied on, requiring shifts to less-efficient (and hastily cobbled together) top-down command structures.
By what metric? You have to go through Scandinavia, Germany, Spain, and a few Eastern european countries before you get to the US on voter turnout. Not to mention labor unions striking as a form of political protest (eg Italian labor unions striking against the Gaza war). And depression prevalence also seems to be higher in the US. Did you mean worse than Europe instead of "almost as" bad?
America has never been that. With everyone having access to apps like TikTok, the brainwashing stopped working as well and people can see that it isn't.
> TikTok was a Chinese app that had no qualms against shooting Americans what their country does
If one wanted deeply pessimistic takes on America and Americans, there has been a media market for that since at least the advent of cable news. Mistaking TikTok, one expression of a phenomenon, for the general trend is mistaking a tree for a forest.
There has historically been a lot of US-critical content manufactured by the US, which normally deflects criticism towards individual failings, external enemies, or surrogate political effigies. A few examples: Falling Down, Bulworth, American Beauty, all the other 90s/00s media critical of suburbia, 24, The Daily Show. Most of these are left-coded, I’m not as familiar with the right-coded stuff (I usually tuned it out) but from what I can tell it’s usually aimed against foreigners and weak/effiminate liberals. 2010s/20s race activism made “white people” into the effigy for the first time, but that’s still a deflection.
Pre-sale TikTok was the first time that a mirror was held up to US politics from a global perspective, where the masses could get a less fitered and channeled understanding of how they are seen by the world. (Reddit provided this previously but it has fewer users and less impact.)
As much as I hate TikTok and short videos, it had a big impact. There’s a reason that they forced the sale. Domestic control of mass media consumption is the primary method by which public opinion is shaped within the US.
> which normally deflects criticism towards individual failings, external enemies, or surrogate political effigies
And next to that is the ever-profitable imperialist/capitalist/inherently-racist pigs content.
> the first time that a mirror was held up to US politics from a global perspective, where the masses could get a less fitered and channeled understanding of how they are seen by the world
This was happening simultaneously on other tech platforms. Moderation varied. But I think a lot of people are mixing up the tail and the dog in terms of which way causation flowed.
Cable News America-criticism? Is that when a gaggle of millionaires complain about either the racists in Middle America/how liberals smell like Europeans? Then someone blurts out, Dangit, We’re Americans, We’ve been slipping these pasts five minutes at being the bravest and most freedom-loving people, God Bless. To roaring or prompted applause.
Right, but then TT control was transferred to the US, and overwriting any lingering memories with Approved Propaganda is trivial and undoubtedly happening already.
America has absolutely been all of that and more within living memory. The problem is it's getting to the point where you need to be pushing 50 to remember a time when this was the case.
You are getting down voted but the first thing I thought when I read the above comment you replied to was that it was written by an LLM as well. It has all the stylings of it. Word choice, sentence structure, phrasing, metaphors, etc.
I think after the TTL expires the session should be autocompacted and the user should given a choice to continue with compacted version or be hit with the full read cost of continuing with their large but expired context. At the moment users are blind what is going on.
On OpenRouter token consumption is up 5x since November 2025. If this is indicative of the industries growth then I can't fathom how we will not hit resource constraints.
19:50 Put codex and claude (thinking high) to work in parallel to see who could come up with the better physically accurate mindless tapping orbital mechanics sandbox.
20:10 Both codex and claude finish pretty much at the same time, but my kids say claude's version is more fun.
20:50 Claude runs out of its 5h session limit while finetuning some things, while Codex has 80% left (!).
That sounds like it would be a completely different game and probably not as fun since you'd have to use some very fiddly controls to manually get into orbit. If you eliminate orbit entirely then it's just a slalom race. "Hitting" each star/planet is the immediate feedback that makes it fun.
Yes, give me weird orbits! I want a shot which is just outside the target area to get sucked in by the gravity of the planet, but potentially letting me slingshot around an intermediate planet towards a more distant one. The tap command should still mean “gravity disengaged, momentum still active“ to allow shifts from one orbit to another.
I tried it, but it doesn't make for good gameplay, it just gets too easy. Could maybe subtract points, but that also feels strange. I updated gravity to do things, but orbiting isn't permitted.
i love the gravity. but sometimes the orbital speed is to fast to be able to make the next jump. that's frustrating.
a slow mode, or an option to hit the brakes might be nice. or going slower as the orbit decreases. smaller orbit is harder but slower speed is easier. you just have to find the right moment
the quick bonus should not be more than one point. maybe an extra point for hitting 5 quick jumps in a row.
If the physics were accurate enough, I don't think it'd be easy - you'd get constant elliptical orbits in most cases, right? making the timing much harder going forward
Coding assistants won't win this game. They sure will win the hearts of developers, but to scale you need mass adoption and products for which users want to pay substantially. OpenAI is falling behind in the small features in their chat and app offering and have failed to innovate in their expensive offerings.
Codex btw is getting very competitive. It is fast and no longer far behind.
The strategic playbook of the web era said: Get a huge userbase of normies, then figure out how to monetise them (usually via advertising). OpenAI stumbled into the userbase via ChatGPT, but it's unclear if the strategy or the economics apply to AI. Anthropic tried to compete in the consumer market, but couldn't, so focussed on coding and enterprise, and it looks like that's actually turning into a smart choice, at least right now, because it turns out people will pay subscription costs for agents that do their job for them.
There are three possible paths that sort of substantiate current valuations:
1) Business: LLMs become essential to every company, and you become rich by selling the best enterprise tools to everyone.
2) Consumer: LLMs cannibalize search and a good chunk of the internet, so people end up interacting with your AI assistant instead of opening any websites. You start serving ads and take Google's lunch.
3) Superhuman AGI: you beat everyone else to the punch to build a life form superior to humans, this doesn't end up in a disaster, and you then steal underpants, ???, profit.
Anthropic is clearly betting on #1. Google decided to beat everyone else to #2, and they can probably do it better and more cheaply than others because of their existing infra and the way they're plugged into people's digital lives. And OpenAI... I guess banked on #3 and this is perhaps looking less certain now?
Any publicly available evidence to back that up? There have been post-exit blog posts from OpenAI employees on HN before and it did sound like the only black magic they use there is that many employees work 16 hrs a day during launch of new features. I know that some current Claude Code devs are doing interviews where they claim that they use Claude Code extensively but they clearly have a conflict of interest while they are still employed at Anthropic, so it would be like asking a barber if you need a haircut.
Uber doesn't have to convert hundreds of millions of users to a paid plan - it was paid to begin with. Much easier to raise prices from a low base than to raise them from $0. When push came to shove, Uber also cut payments to drivers and replaced them with a tip screen. Is Nvidia going to accept tip annuities on ChatGPT responses instead of full payment on its chips?
Most importantly, Uber did not have fast-depreciating cars on its balance sheet - OAI meanwhile is planning to spend the GDP of a mid-size nation on owning fast-depreciating datacenters, which they deem necessary to cope with the demand for their services.
From the outside it is really hard to comprehend. Was it FoxNews that poisoned the American mind or the social media brainwashing? How can a society allow a billionaire to cut programs in Africa that saved hundreds of thousands of lives that cost pennies when compared to any military adventures.
reply