China is absolutely winning innovation in the 21st century. I'm so impressed. For an example from just this morning, there was an article that they're developing thorium reactor-powered cargo ships. I'm blown away.
> The tech is from America actually, decades ago. (Thorium).
I guess it depends on how you see it, but regardless, the people putting it to use today doesn't seem to be in the US.
FWIW:
> Thorium was discovered in 1828 by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius during his analysis of a new mineral [...] In 1824, after more deposits of the same mineral in Vest-Agder, Norway, were discovered [...] While thorium was discovered in 1828 its first application dates only from 1885, when Austrian chemist Carl Auer von Welsbach invented the gas mantle [...] Thorium was first observed to be radioactive in 1898, by the German chemist Gerhard Carl Schmidt
For being an American discovery, it sure has a lot of European people involved in it :) (I've said it elsewhere but worth repeating; trying to track down where a technology/invention actually comes from is a fools errand, and there is always something earlier that led to today, so doesn't serve much purpose except nationalism it seems to me).
I don't know if how close Europe is, but I'm sufficiently whelmed by Mistral that I don't need to look elsewhere yet. It's kind-of like having a Toyota Corolla while everybody else is driving around in smart cars but it gets it done. On top of it, there's a loyal community that (maybe because I'm not looking) I don't see with other products. It probably depends on your uses, but if I spent all my time chasing the latest chat models (like Kimi K2 for instance) I wouldn't actually get anything done.
> I don't know if how close Europe is, but I'm sufficiently whelmed by Mistral that I don't need to look elsewhere yet. It's kind-of like having a Toyota Corolla while everybody else is driving around in smart cars but it gets it done.
My problem was that it really doesn't, none of the models out there are that great at agentic coding when you care about maintainability. Sonnet 4.5 sometimes struggles and is only okay with some steering, same for Gemini Pro 2.5, GPT-5 recently seems like it's closer to "just working" with high reasoning, but still is expensive and slow. Cerebras recently started offering GLM-4.6 and it's roughly on par with Sonnet 4 so not great, but 24M tokens per day for 50 USD seems like good value even with 128k context limitation.
I don't think there is a single model that is good enough and dependable enough in my experience out there yet, I'll probably keep jumping around for the next 5-10 years (assuming the models keep improving until we hit diminishing returns so hard that it all evens out, hopefully after they've reached a satisfying baseline usefulness).
Don't get me wrong, all of those models can already provide value, it's just that they're pretty finnicky a lot of the time, some of it inherent due to how LLMs work, but some of it also because they should just be trained better and more. And the tools they're given should be better. And the context should be managed better. And I shouldn't see something as simple as diffs fail to apply repeatedly just because I'm asking for 100% accuracy in the search/replace to avoid them messing up the brackets or whatever else.
You have to try the latest Corolla then. Really smart. Lane and collision assistance, ... Unlike my old Corolla which is total dumb. It even doesn't turn the light off when I leave the car
in my short employment career I have never seeing orgs with that those layers of management ship anything useful.
things take time to get shipped, teams spend a lot of time in meetings.
personally my preference is a flight hierarchy. a team then its team lead who ships code - reports to CTO. Product & Design report to engineering. likewise you need fewer product managers if needed at all.
Ok but what do you do when you have a large company that works on... 50 products all in parallel? This doesn't exactly scale. You can't have 50 team leads ALL reporting to the CTO.
Companies can be successful despite bad practices though. Google is successful and they developed multiple competing chat apps, but that doesn't mean that developing multiple chat apps will make one successful.
what history has shown though is that things boomerang. there's times when 'morals' are loose and times when society goes ultra-conservative.
luckily for a lot of us we are going to experience both in our lifetimes - times when porn was freely accessible, weed / drugs everywhere. and we're already starting to see things getting tied down e.g ID laws on porn sites, next gambling sites are banned, same as divorces, adultery laws are introduced.
thing is these a16z guys have money & try to build a narrative around that money.
they did the same in the crypto days - probably most of their narratives were taken down.
then when they finally dumb their investments on the stock market - the market within a year or 2 sees the ruse and stock goes tumbling down. they would've cashed out.
> “which language is best?” we need to ask “what is this language going to cost us?” Not just in salaries, but in velocity, in technical debt, in hiring difficulty, in operational complexity, in every dimension that actually determines whether you survive.
then boom suddenly php, ruby & java are pragmatic choices in economic sense for business systems. same as c++ for hedge funds & video games etc.
Some sites want to ship small bundles to the client by default, sourcemaps enables that + you get to introspect it because it's downloaded only when requested. Literally best of both worlds :)
To elaborate on your comment, if you just ship sourcemaps in production, that means you can ship minified code and track down what _actual_ source that you _aren't_ shipping to users is getting called, is in stack traces, etc.
this -- chips are getting fast enough both arm n x86. unified memory architecture means we can get more ram on devices at faster throughput. we're already seeing local models - just that their capability is limited by ram.
Sure Kafka is used for much more advanced applications. In autonomous microsservices if I'm not mistaken these topics could be even used as the source of truth so that each specialized database could be reconstructed by replay. I'm saying that for simple topics that are just used to coordinate job queues, elixir can handle it just fine.
just white, grey & blue.
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