>It's a whole lot easier to out-compete somebody when you know the government will backstop you even if you misstep.

You mean like how the US government constantly bails out and props up the American car companies?

> You mean like how the US government constantly bails out and props up the American car companies?

Um, yes? Did I stutter? Do you have bad reading comprehension? Are you using an AI?

Precisely what part of "we have been here before--back in the 1970s with Japan producing better cars" did you miss?

What part of "don't be snarky" or "don't be curmudgeonly" from the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) did you miss? Do you always have to be an asshole? And you comment completely missed the great bailout of the Obama administration which came decades later.

C, Python, and frameworks don't generate all-new code for every task: you're taking advantage of stuff that's thoroughly tested. That simple debugging UI server is probably using some well-tested libraries, which you can reasonably trust to be bug-free (and which can be updated later to fix any bugs, without breaking your code that relies on them). With AI-generated code, this isn't the case.

Depends on what you think with AI-generated code. Do you mean vibe-coded? If yes, then I agree, but there are also other scenarios of AI-generated code.

I use regularly AI in my hobby projects, it provides me feedback, proposed other libraries to use, or other solutions. It generates some classes for which I write tests. I also need to understand the code it generates. If I don't I don't use it. It does speed up my process of creation of code.

If other people also are accelerated lets say 30% then, everything is sped up, cheaper. I think many people use it AI like that. It is just a tool, like a hammer, with which you can harm yourself if you do not know how to use it.

Written English makes plenty of sense, but it's really complicated because you need to know the etymology of the words to understand the logic. It's not just made-up; there's reasons for the "rules" (like why a word is pronounced the way it is, despite the spelling). But new learners don't have time to learn Greek and Latin roots and other such stuff, and under-educated native English speakers won't know much of this stuff either.

The fact is that even native speakers may mispronounce words if it's the first time they say it. For example, words that they encountered in written form only.

Or they write words incorrectly because it doesn't even closely match the pronunciation.

Yes, of course. This happens to me too: there's words I've never heard pronounced, so I don't actually know how to pronounce them (though you can usually solve this by using Google Translate's text-to-speech function).

I never said English was a superbly designed language, just that it does make sense when you look at the entire history and etymology. But yeah, it's a heavily-kludged mess, though it is pretty good at being accessible for new learners just because it's flexible and has a relatively simple grammar.

I'm sure it used to make sense when words when pronounced differently. Pronunciation changed but not the writing. Which means it doesn't make sense at our point in time.

Yeah, I hate to say it, but using Amazon.co.jp is SO refreshing after using a Japanese website. It's really unbelievable how bad most Japanese e-commerce sites are.

This is historically the reason software engineering in Japan has lagged and there's such a talent shortage (leading companies like mine to hire mostly foreign software engineers). I've heard it's changing, but it'll take a long time to catch up.

When I was working for Microsoft China, many of our foreign engineers were Korean and Japanese, who were in China for the higher paychecks.

The TI's keyboard wasn't great either, but it was a lot better than the keyboard on its predecessor, the TI-99/4 (no 'A').

There are a few keyboards out there that move the numeric keypad to the left side of the keyboard, so that right-handed people don't have to move their right hand quite so far to use the mouse. Basically, like a tenkeyless (TKL) keyboard, but keeping the keypad.

I'd love to try one of these for a while.

I use a Keychron Q14. Keypad on the left can be found by searching for "southpaw". The only issue I have with it being on the left is that I was used to sometimes pressing the numpad enter key with my thumb while holding the mouse. It does take a while to get used to using it with the left hand though. Maybe having it mirrored would help, idk.

Can people use it for sailing the high seas?

Maybe, but money goes much farther in Europe than in the US. The cost of living is much lower, so you don't need to pay people so much.

Low European salaries are other reason why brain drain fears are overblown.