Neither is using "Nazi" as a pejorative, but these kinds of comparisons can be valuable when they identify commonalities between modern proposal and historical approaches to governance that went horribly wrong. (Obviously)
Please do not use the term communist lightly, i.e. as an umbrella term for people who express ideas that e.g. more government control or regulation is in some circumstances reasonable.
The only forms of communism that have ever actually materialized in society have all been authoritarian regimes or outright dictatorships. Where the only "truth" is dictated by the governing leader or party. Where you cannot express your opinion freely. Where you cannot e.g. go to a university or have a slightly better job unless you are loyal to the party establishment. Where people are afraid to talk to their neighbors about politics because they cannot know who is going to report them for anti-government opinions. Where people are persecuted, imprisoned or even killed for their opinions.
To the best of my knowledge, Bernie Sanders has never expressed such ideas.
One might argue that here we are talking about the purely academic definition of communism. But unfortunately, in the real world, there is no such thing as academic communism. So far it has always come with the dictatorship and with people who abuse it. Always.
I'm not proposing anything. I don't think it's the government's remit to be honest. But government seizing the means of production is literally the definition of communism.
The idea that rich people don't pay taxes is a myth. The top 5% richest people in America account for 60% of all of the federal income tax. The bottom 50% on the other hand only account for a total of 3%.
When Elon sold a bunch of Tesla stock in 2021 he paid $11 Billion in capital gains tax on it... That's more than entire cities worth of people combined would ever pay for the rest of their lives.
Can you share a source? Of course the top 5% of _earners_ would pay more, but that's not necessarily the same crew as the top 5% in net worth. And 5% is a large share of the population. I'd be more interested in the top 1% of 1% in terms of wealth.
> The top 5% richest people in America account for 60% of all of the federal income tax
I see this repeated all the time and it's worthless without context. What percent of all income do the top 5% earn? What's their share of national wealth?
It’s a stupid thought-terminating quip entirely centered around a superficial “one number bigger than other” gotcha.
We live in a society where the wealthiest have orders of magnitude more wealth than everyone else. The taxes they pay are not proportional to that wealth, period.
In recent months, Linus said it specifically about code for a personal side project of his. The quote was in the commit message. (I’m not the grandparent commenter, and I think grandparent commenter’s claims may be too broad or require context.)
There are a missing the context: The vibecoded application was written in python while the main code was written manually in C by Torvalds in this side project. He never ever said that AI produces better code than him in the language where he is proficientI.
> The python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding. I know more about analog filters -- and that's not saying much -- than I do about python. It started out as my typical "google and do the monkey-see-monkey-do" kind of programming, but then I cut out the middle-man -- me -- and just used Google Antigravity to do the audio sample visualizer.
Walk down the makeshift tents on the sidewalks of downtown San Francisco and tell me with a straight face that only 16% of those people are addicted to drugs.
My company is doing this too. Our marketing team can use cursor web agents to make coding changes to the marketing website/blog/landing pages. The agents make the code change and make PRs in github where our tech team reviews it before merging. The marketing team is almost entirely non-technical.
How about a security leak (say.. Vercel) and having to run down all of these non-technical folks and getting them to rotate env vars? Or ask them to not do things on their personal account?
Yeah this sounds pretty reasonable really, like instead of using a CMS directly they’re having Claude file PRs to make the same changes. As someone who likes static sites and change control, it actually sounds like an improvement.
Despite my own personal preference for static sites, marketing using a CMS under their own control to make content updates seems vastly more reasonable than vibe coding open ended PRs as a codebase they don't understand gradually grows in complexity over time.
They could even use one of many headless CMSs combined with a static generator. Claude Code in the hands of non-technical users deploying to prod regularly seems like one of the worst possible ways to do it (except for the "cool" value telling people about it).
At my company the internal devs don't even have access to wherever the company site is hosted, it's a WordPress CMS and marketing can make updates safely with a couple clicks and zero day-to-day development oversight required. IT just helps keep the box updated but otherwise it's entirely their own thing.
I was thinking the same thing. Advertising or the wording and layout of information on a website is a different level of complexity to monetary calculations that have legislated paths and outcomes, for example.
As difficult as it is to use CSS to centre a field, the stakes are in a different ball park.
I'm sure a lot of companies are doing that as described (mine too), but I have never in my life heard someone classify website/blog/landing page changes as "production code".
I have non-technical people vibe coding internal tooling that the engineering team simply hasn't had time to get to [1]. It's been a big help internally. Maintenance isn't an issue because the effort to create it was so low, they'd just throw it away and create it again if necessary.
[1] Of course permissions are such that the tools can't do anything that would damage any of the systems.
Contrary to sentiment in this thread, I am seeing positive effects of designers and PMs using AI. Skilled designers can now own how their components look and feel with guardrails.
The way i look at it is: those users are going to ask differing questions than engineering that may lead to possibilities not considered, thought of, believed possible, etc.. which can be a good thing, when harnessed correctly*.
I'd love to hear more about the positive effects of designers and PMs using AI, especially more on the PM side, if you care to go into more detail
Ya but they are owned by freaking microsoft and have billions of dollars and employees to throw at the problem. The outage problems shouldn't be happening period.
Easy to say that! Some problems are legitimately hard to solve though. Github is likely seeing usage patterns that have never been seen before and I bet some of these failure modes are novel
If you are at the limits of your architecture you may need to re-write things, and if you are rewriting things you can not arbitrarily speed that up by throwing dollars at it.
That's entirely a predicament of Microsoft's own making, though. Don't forget that they're the ones who launched "AI" programming into the hype cycle to begin with. So it's entirely reasonable to hold them as a company responsible for the resulting outages, which indeed shouldn't be happening. Dogs, fleas, and so on.
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