So, I take it you're against property rights, then? Am I misinterpreting you? Can you be clear on it?

Libertarians are quite mixed on IP protections. Some libertarians, like Ayn Rand and Objectivists, support patents as a recognition of individual creativity and property rights. Others, like Murray Rothbard disagreed with those types of protections. That is where I stand. I see patents as government-enforced privileges that favor large corporations and create barriers to entry. Instead, I'd suggest innovators rely on trade secrets, first-mover advantages, or contracts to protect their work.

They don’t just slap “mob rule” on anything that doesn’t suit them. They’re against government overreach that stomps on individual freedom, period. It’s not about protecting just their own power; they’re all about everyone having the same shot at life, liberty, and property. The idea that libertarians are cool with “the mob” handing them property rights but cry foul when there’s any limit is a strawman. Property rights come from hard work and fair deals, not some public handout. Libertarians push back on restrictions when they’re random or rigged to favor cronies, not because they hate all rules.

I have thought that. I believe that's pretty much where I'm coming from. The question is: why does it seem to happen so often? Perhaps it's not merely a vehicle, it's like a cancer that always metastasizes.

Exactly. Once they get control they refuse to share it with "the proletariat" or anyone else. Ask yourself what to do about it. Should we dreamily wish for rainbows and hugs and Communes winning out or a society where individual rights are protected at the expense of the convenience or security of politicians..

Nice try with the strawman, but libertarians love laws against bank robbery; it's textbook aggression against property rights. We just don't cheer for government 'robbers' who use taxes, eminent domain, or regulations to pick pockets legally. If you think opposing crony bailouts means we support actual thieves, you've got the philosophy backwards.

Wrong again; libertarians oppose coercive regulations that screw anyone, period. We fight licensing cartels that block barbers from working poor neighborhoods or tariffs that jack up prices for everyone. That's not 'protecting my interests'; it's dismantling barriers so others can thrive without Big Brother playing favorites. Your zero-sum worldview is the real cronyism enabler.

Libertarians don't oppose self-government; we oppose mob rule disguised as democracy that lets 'other people' vote away your rights. Madison warned about this in the Federalist Papers: majorities trampling minorities. We push for real self-governance: voluntary communities, contracts, and tech that lets individuals opt out of the state's 'empowerment' games. Your take sounds like statism's defense of the herd over the individual and it's super weak and super easy to debunk.

Ah, there we go. I was waiting. You couldn't resist the "But that wasn't REEEEEEL Communism." could ya? Well, here's a thought, since Russia, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the rest of the horrifying Leftist genocides weren't "reeeeal" communism, then what is it about Communism that always degenerates into slaughter and evil? Could it be that it's a fucked up excuse for people in power to smash individual rights and seize power under the guise of equity? Nooooo, couldn't be that, right?

Yep. Seems right in line with my thesis/ideas about LLMs and vibe coding. Key sentence: "Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without; AI makes them slower."

Well, he had an awful lot of ideas about economics and business. None of which seemed to do him any good, ultimately. He took several loans from Engels, too. I'd be surprised if he got paid back. So, maybe him being an utter failure in life isn't indicative of the merit or value of his ideas, but the 100M dead might want a word on the topic, too.

For most folks, when it's a choice between video and reading, they choose video by default. Smartphones mean they have pretty much 100% access to video or social media so they are never going to pick up a book again.

Encouraging them to get Hugo winners is a losing strategy now, too. They give awards to lame authors like N.K. Jemisin simply for being black women. Go back to the 1980's and read the fantasy authors from that era. Then you'll get no woke recommendations beyond Anne McAffery (and she had some good books before she lost her mind and started writing lesbian literotica) and no AI "enhanced" authors, either.

Folks just see sci-fi and fantasy as being full of neckbeards who need a woke reducation. They even claim LoTR is racist. LoTR!

My professors didn't seem to want the kids to learn. I remember I took a C++ 200-level programming class and the instructor started with Vectors. I was like "WTF, you haven't even taught variables or control structures yet!". I did fine because, by that point, I'd been coding for years and done several projects in C++ (to my sorrow). However, when I asked the professor he said "We have 45 students in this class and many of them are CS majors. We only can have about 16 get through the upper level math classes because we only have the one professor and the classes are the highest demand in the school. Many majors need 400-level math to graduate and we have to strictly moderate who gets into those classes. So, we have to weed them out somehow."

Almost all your posts are basically a love letter to central planning with a side of "please, government, save me from the big bad corporations!" Libertarians aren’t out here cheering for robber barons; we just know that piling on more regulations is like asking a fox to guard the henhouse. You think the government’s gonna “balance” things for the little guy? Newsflash: those same bureaucrats you’re begging for help are the ones funneling your tax dollars to Wall Street. Cronyism isn’t capitalism: it’s what happens when you let the state pick winners and losers.

You’re scared of corporations “riding roughshod” over people? It's government power that allows them to do it! Try giving individuals more freedom to innovate, compete, and hold businesses accountable through markets, not some DMV-style oversight committee. Trading liberty for a false sense of “safety” just means you’re cool with the government’s boot on your neck as long as it’s "for the children" or "to stop terrorism" (for your right-leaning analogs). If you want a society that prioritizes people, stop asking for more chains and start trusting individuals to make their own way. Protect freedom. Advocate for Liberty. Or, you know, keep your red armband on and keep hoping Uncle Sam’s pet corporations gonna hug it out with the “less fortunate.” Spoiler: they won’t.

Damn straight. If you have a passion for computing and coding, nothing will stop you. If you go to school and just get a nominal degree and major you don't care much about you're going to think IT is very harsh because when you interview in a room full of guys who know what they are doing, they are not going to ask you questions about ML, LISP, or whatever other lame shit out-of-touch professors taught you in College. They want to know that you won't cause them more work and drag down the team. Only competency will count, then, and all your school activities and resume sidebars won't help you at all.

Aren't you a Communist? You cannot be that smart, then, Comrade. Spare me the "100M dead but that wasn't REEEEAL Communism." lecture, too.

People are probably annoyed with you telling them how smart you are. "Smarties" like that are often just gadflies around demagogues only marginally more intelligent than themselves and jealous to boot. So, they gotta run around telling the world how smart they are and how dumb everyone else is. Karl Marx always talked about being an intellectual, too. He sponged off his wife until he died poor. He got three of seven children raised and they were failures, too.

Totally true. Imagine how much of those stock gains could be simply paid to employees as salary if the folks had enough juice to demand it? The problem is those C-suite weasels want the gains in their pocket, not growing the company or being redistributed to people they despise. They have ALWAYS hated us and do everything they can to keep a lid on our salary. That's why anytime I hear "Coding is dead. XYZ killed it. Uhm, I mean XYZ WILL kill it." I think "Another corporate psyop".

That has the ring of truth to it. That and the "-1 Troll" make me think you've probably nailed it.

I use them daily. I'm not sure how much they've helped at all for actual coding tasks. They make too many rookie mistakes and cannot keep large codebases in context at once. We pay for accounts on all the big LLMs and are always testing them to see if they live up to the hype. So far, that's a big "no fucking way". They do other things pretty well, though, like create Doxygen summaries for new functions etc...

Correct. Where's the Shovelware? is a very effective point. Put another way, let's say someone claims to invent a machine that makes coffee out of thin air. One would then expect that coffee prices would crash due to oversupply. If coffee prices stayed the same, I'd we'd call bullshit. I'm not sure how this "revolution" is any different.

Also, I'm a systems programmer and I do use LLMs. I look super suspect at anything longer than about 30 lines because it's constantly full of simple bugs and logic errors. I've used just about all the big LLMs and tools, too. My company has accounts with all of the big ones and I have regged NeoVIM with LLM support and it's helped a few times. However, selling them as a job-crushing panacea has about as much truth to it as when the told me CASE Method was going to eliminate coders.