0. https://mack.work/blog/recursive-language-models

1. https://x.com/lateinteraction/status/2011250721681773013

It's not like this sort of hustling didn't exist prior to LLMs but the volume has ballooned massively.

Their biggest limiting factor is always the cost of generating mediocre content. Removing that barrier was the dumbest thing to do in the world.

From my failed attempt, I remember that

- Students had to find a project matching their interests/skills and start contributing early.

- We used to talk about staying away from some projects with a low supply of students applying (or lurking in the GitHub/BitBucket issues) because of the complexity required for the projects.

Both of these acted as a creative filter for projects and landed them good students/contributors, but it completely goes away with AI being able to do that at scale.

Being a middle aged man working 9 to 5, I would enjoy contributing to a project I was interested in rather than the boring job at work.

Are you saying you only wanted penniless youngsters to contribute, based entirely on their idealism?

There are a lot of things to be sad about AI, but this is not it. Nobody has a right to a business model, especially one that assumes nobody will compete with you. If your business model relies on the rest of the world bring sucky so you can sell some value-added to open-core software, i'm happy when it fails.

The what now? Open source doesn't have a business model, it's all about the licensing.

FOSS is about making code available to others, for any purpose, and that still works the same as 20 years ago when I got started. Some seem to wake up to what "for any purpose" actually mean, but for many of us that's quite the point, that we don't make choices for others.

Like I said, there is a part that should be illegal, and then part where that's used to additionally harm one of the ways that OSS can be sustainable. The second part on its own is not illegal but adds to damages and is perfectly okay to condemn.

Open source software can have business models, it's one of the ways it can be sustainable. It can work like, for example, the code is made available (for any purpose) and the core maintainer company provides services, like with Nginx (BSD). Or there is an open-source software, and companies create paid products and services on top while respecting the terms of that software and contributing back, like with Linux (GPL) and SUSE/Red Hat.

Ok? I agree, but unsure what exactly that's relevant to here in our discussion.

> Open source software can have business models

I believe "businesses" are the ones who have "business models", and some of those chose to use open source as part of their business model. But "open source" the ecosystem has nothing to do with that, it's for-profit companies trying to use and leverage open source, rather than the open source community suddenly wanting to do something completely different from what it's been doing since inception.

I'll remind then. Our discussion follows the top statement "It seems open source loses the most from AI". As far as I understand nobody narrowed the context to "what is currently legal". Something can be technically legal and still harmful to open source. Also, laws are never perfect and sometimes they need to be updated.

(For example, I know that a number of people would say US abducting and detaining citizens and brutally deporting immigrants is not illegal, but if it's technically legal does that make it OK?)

> what it's been doing since inception.

At inception open source was mostly personal side projects for funsies (like Linux) sponsored by maintainer having a dayjob. The big leap happened when copyleft licenses made it such that success of a big commercial company building products on open-source projects would directly improve these open-source projects. And it's nothing new, it happened long time ago. The desire for volunteer contributions to codebase to remain for public benefit in perpetuity is exactly the point of strong copyleft, and it's exactly what's being circumvented by LLM washing. The fact that these LLMs subsequently also harm open source communities adds insult to injury.

I have to imagine this ideology was developed with humans in mind.

> but LLMs learning from code is fair use

If by “fair use” you mean the legal term of art, that question is still very much up in the air. If by “fair use” you mean “I think it is fair” then sure, that’s an opinion you’re entitled to have.

Actually, you don't have to. You just want to.

N=1 but to me, LLMs are a perfect example of where the "ideology embedded into the GPL" benefits the world.

The point of Free Software isn't for developers to sort-of-but-not-quite give away the code. The point of Free Software is to promote self-sufficient communities.

GPL through its clauses, particularly the viral/forced reciprocity ones, prevents software itself from becoming an asset that can be rented, but it doesn't prevent business around software. RMS/FSF didn't make the common (among fans of OSS and Free Software) but dumb assumption that everyone wants or should be a developer - the license is structured to allow anyone to learn from and modify software, including paying a specialist to do it for them. Small-scale specialization and local markets are key for robust and healthy communities, and this is what Free Software ultimately encourages.

LLMs becoming a cheap tool for modifying or writing software, even by non-specialists (or at least people who aren't domain experts), furthers those same goals, by increasing individual and communal self-sufficiency and self-reliance.

(INB4: The fact that good LLMs are themselves owned by some multinational corps is irrelevant - much in the same way as cars are important tool for personal and communal self-sufficiently, despite being designed and manufactured by few large corporations. They're still tools ~anyone can use.)

So either the community behaves, or the letter becomes more and more complicated trying to be more specific about what should be illegal. Now that GPL is trivially washed by asking a black box trained on GPLed code to reproduce the same thing it might be inevitable, I suppose.

> They're still tools ~anyone can use

Of course, technology itself is not evil, just like crypto or nuclear fission. In this case when we are discussing harm we are almost always talking about commercial LLM operators. However, when the technology is mostly represented by that, it doesn't seem required to add a caveat every time LLMs are mentioned.

There's hardly a good, truly fully open LLM that one can actually run on own hardware. Part of the reason is that hardly anyone, in the grand scheme of things, even has the hardware required.

(Even if someone is a techie and has the money and knows how to set up a rig, which is almost nobody on grand scale of the things, now big LLM operators make sure there are no chips left for them.)

So you can buy and own (and sell) a car, but ~anyone cannot buy and run an independent LLM (and obviously not train one). ~everyone ends up using a commercial LLM powered by some megacorp's infinite compute and scraping resources and paying that megacorp one way or another, ultimately helping them do more of the stuff that they do, like harming OSS.

Only if spitted out code is GPL-licensed, which it isn't.

Fair.

> The point of Free Software isn't for developers to sort-of-but-not-quite give away the code. The point of Free Software is to promote self-sufficient communities.

… that are all reliant on gatekeepers, who also decide the model ethics unilaterally, among other things.

> (INB4: The fact that good LLMs are themselves owned by some multinational corps is irrelevant - much in the same way as cars are important tool for personal and communal self-sufficiently, despite being designed and manufactured by few large corporations. They're still tools ~anyone can use.)

You’re not wrong. But wouldn’t the spirit of Free Software also apply to model weights? Or do the large corps get a pass?

FWIW I don’t have a problem with LLMs per se. Just models that are either proprietary or effectively proprietary. Oligarchy ain’t freedom :)

> Fair.

I don't think it's fair. That ideology was unquestionably developed with humans in mind. It happened in the 80s, and back then I don't think anyone had a crazy idea that software can think for itself and so terms "use" and "learn" can apply to it. (I mean, it's a crazy idea still, but unfortunately not to everyone.)

One can suggest that free software ideology should be expanded to include software itself in the beneficiaries of the license, not just human society. That's a big call and needs a lot of proof that software can decide things on its own, and not just do what humans tell it.

Sure they did. It was the golden age of Science Fiction, and let's just say that the stereotype of programmers and hackers being nerds with sci-fi obsession actually had a good basis in reality.

Also those ideas aren't crazy, they're obvious, and have already been obvious back then.

At worst you are trying to disparage the entire idea of open source by painting the people who championed it as idiots who cannot tell fiction from reality. At best you are making a fool of yourself. If you say that free software philosophy means "also, potential sentient software that may become a reality in 100 years" everywhere it mentions "users" and "people" you better quote some sources.

> Also those ideas aren't crazy, they're obvious, and have already been obvious back then.

Fire-breathing dragons. Little green extraterrestrial humanoids. Telepathy. All of these ideas are obvious, and have been obvious for ages. None of these things exist. Sorry to break it to you, but even if an idea is obvious it doesn't make it real.

(I'll skip over the part where if you really think chatbots are sentient like humans then you might be defending an industry that is built on mass-scale abuse of sentient beings.)

Given what a big deal RMS made over not descriminating over purpose (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#run-the-program) i think that is far from clear.

It is not up in the air at all. It's completely transformative.

2. "Transformative means fair" is the old idea from pre-LLM world. That's a different world. Now those IP laws are obsolete and need to be significantly updated.

> it’s completely transformative

IANAL, but apparently hinges on how the training material is acquired

That doesn't make sense. You are either transforming something or you are not. There might be other legal considerations based on how you acquired, but it doesn't affect if something is transformative.

Again, IANAL, so take this with a big grain of salt.

LLMs don't (cannot, by design) provide attribution, nor do LLM users have the freedom to run most of these models themselves.

The only indispensable part is the resource you're pirating. A resource that was given to you under the most generous of terms, which you ignored and decided to be guided by a purpose that you've assigned to those terms that embodies an intention that has been specifically denied. You do this because it allows you to do what you want to do. It's motivated "reasoning."

Without this "FOSS is for learning" thing you think overrules the license, you are no more justified in training off of it without complying with the terms than training on pirated Microsoft code without complying with their terms. People who work at Microsoft learn on Microsoft code, too, but you don't feel entitled to that.

So it's sort of sentient when it comes to training and generating derivative works but when you ask "if it's actually sentient then are you in the business of abusing sentient beings?" then it's just a tool.

Of course it would be more expensive to get them to do it.

But if it was required to provide attribution with some % accuracy, plus we identified and addressed other problems like GPL washing/piracy of our intellectual property/people going insane with chatbots/opinion manipulation and hidden advertisement, then at some point commercial LLMs could become actually not bad for us.

On another note, regarding AI replacing most open source code. I forget what tool it was, but I had a need for a very niche way of accessing an old Android device it was rooted, but if I used something like Disk Drill it would eventually crap out empty files. So I found a GUI someone made, and started asking Claude to add things I needed for it to a) let me preview directories it was seeing and b) let me sudo up, and let me download with a reasonable delay (1s I think) which basically worked, I never had issues again, it was a little slow to recover old photos, but oh well.

I debated pushing the code changes back into github, it works as expected, but it drifted from the maintainers own goals I'm sure.

It's a shame since this technology is brilliant. But every tech company has drank the “AI is the future” Kool-aid, which means no one has incentive to seriously push back against the flood of low-effort, AI-generated slop. So, it's going to be race to the bottom for a while.

Most of innovation came from web startups who are just not interest in "shared" anything: they want to be a monopoly, "own" users, etc. So this area has been neglected, and then people got used to status quo.

PGP / GPG used to have web-of-trust but that sort of just died.

People either need to resurrect WoT updated for modern era, or just accept the fact that everything is spammed into smithereens. Blaming AI and social media does not help.

This is not a technology, but ethics and respect problem.

From the same article:

> Not all AI-generated bug reports are nonsense. It’s not possible to determine the exact share, but Daniel Stenberg knows of more than a hundred good AI assisted reports that led to corrections.

Meaning: developers and researchers who use the tool as it's meant to work, as a tool, are leveraging it to improve curl. But they are not skipping the part of understanding the content of their reports, testing it, and only then submitting it.

Guns have no other purpose than doing harm.

E.g. We don't blame cars, the tool, for driving into a gathering of people that can kill a dozen of them, we blame the driver. The purpose is transport, the same way LLMs for coding are a tool for assisting coding tasks.

We also don't allow car use without a license.

In the end what matters if allowing something is a net positive or not. Of course you can have more precise rules than just a blanket ban but when deciding and enforcing those rules is not free that also needs to be considered in the cost benefit analysis. Unless you can propose how projects can allow "good" contributions without spending more time on weeding out bad ones, a blanket ban makes sense.

> Guns have no other purpose than doing harm.

Objects don't have purposes or intent until people use them, and many objects have multiple reasonable and dual purposes. Objects can be used for net good and net harm. A bow and arrow isn't specifically for harming humans but can be used for such. Chainsaws and meat cleavers too.

What would you like a machine gun-wielding terrorist to be stopped with? A strongly-worded letter?

On the same token of reasonableness and rationality, it's unreasonable to give a toddler a towed howitzer that's ordinarily destined for Big Sandy Shoot.

Even if they were designed only for "harm", you seem to believe "all harm bad". So should criminals in the midst of committing violent acts not be stopped because that would "harm" them? You won't answer this. Extreme pacifism is insane, morally-inconsistent, ideological, thoughtless drivel that fails to acknowledge the monopolies on violence delegated to police and military that they benefit from.

Perhaps you might want to have your military abolished because they are "designed to cause harm"? Or the whole abolish prisons and police nonsense? Real anarchy is really bad.

It would maybe be handy to feed the responses from an LLM through a computational reasoning engine to grade a few of them.

I think you should try eating pudding with a fork next

heck, my cousin bet with me or let me compete eating pudding with chopsticks. (and that was long before i went to china)

practically speaking, the only downside of using a fork (or chopsticks) is scraping the bottom when you are finishing up.

Depends if you are in UK or not.

This is by design. The United States is exactly meant to be that: states that are united, but independent. The federal government was never intended to lord over everyone's lives. The expansion of the federal government, especially the powers of the executive branch, is the problem everyone seems to dislike (when their favored party isn't controlling this branch), and that's what needs to change

These flaws have been continually amended. We can vote for Senators, corporations can operate across state lines, you can’t discriminate, etc.

Reactionaries perceive being unable to persecute people or exert their will as being executive overreach. Most rational people don’t share that perspective, which is why undermining the competence of the government and flooding propaganda everywhere has been a key priority for reactionary forces for the last generation.

So here we are, impossibly rich people can now impose their will with impunity. We’re in a new, undemocratic era.

To me it's crazy how many went from "we favor the Republic" to "all power to a singular person, what could go wrong, he is cool" pretty fast.

Zooming out of the 24h news cycle, "all power to a singular person" concerns seem far too overblown. Half the country hates Trump. He won the popular vote, but not by all that much (despite what he may assert). By comparison LBJ, FDR, and Nixon won ~60% of popular vote. Even if he were a young man, I don't think we're in any danger of a caesar.

The number of Americans willing to check the other person on the ballot is a lot lower than the number of Americans willing to pick up arms when he ignores the law like all the other laws he ignores.

Instead, both parties display an obstinate lack of compromise and wishy-washy, unworkable platforms while the media is only happy to make all of it worse.

Increasing polarization is surely a symptom of problems and that needs to be analyzed, explained and addressed, not excused.

You make it sound like a civil war is a walk in the park, you do need more history and more imagination in order to understand the human cost of obstinance and shallow thinking.

Tell that to the Republicans in Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court.

And the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory

Trump is unique in that the previous folks predated the massive standing army and propaganda capabilities that exist today. The intangible magic is brave individuals and institutions. It’s harder for those individuals with the secret police and army running around.

In the post constitution era, 17 amendments were passed by the house, including an amendment that would make states supreme by law. 6 years after the constitution was ratified, Marbury v. Madison established judicial supremacy for interpreting law, 11 years after that, the court ruled in McCulloch v. Maryland that states are subordinate to federal power.

Political compromise got it done, but centralized power is necessary for survival and prosperity. Congress and the courts realized this immediately. Most of the realpolitik of “states rights” is really about wielding tyrannical power locally.

I thought it was so states could knowingly house illegal aliens or illegal drug businesses without doing anything.

Normally states wouldn't have that right, but I see many who think they should have it. Marijuana is still illegal and those undocumented immigrants are also illegal, more federal influence would make it so states cannot legalize those any more, is that what you want?

So states rights goes both ways, it lets states both be more progressive and more conservative than the average.

All of those things you’re mentioning are state services that they can offer to anyone because it’s not a federal issue.

This is what states rights look like and why the right is mocked for referencing it when they foam at the mouth once it’s used for things they don’t like.

It’s similar to people who claim the civil war was over states rights when southern states were pushing to have other state sovereignty ignored over their own laws when it came to returning slaves.

Whether or not the states help them be authoritarian is orthogonal to the chaos in the streets.

If you just want blue states to bend the knee and capitulate, you should say so.

This is the outcome that you appear to believe is optimal, and you are intentionally using emotionally loaded words like "lenient" to attempt to guilt me into retreating from my position that this is, in fact, not an optimal outcome. In many cases like this additional crimes are committed before the offender is apprehended, crimes which are of course 100% preventable, without you and your "leniency".

>Tell me you at least recognize the difference between actively doing something against some group, and merely not helping them?

Technically speaking, you are right. These states are actively working against their own citizens, not the Federal government.

Feds: hey you arrested individual_x, he's in the country illegally and oh by the way has a few other outstanding warrants, can you please hold him at the jail house, we're going to pick him up for immigration proceedings.

Cops: sure thing, let us know when you get here

And now we get.

Feds: hey hold that guy you arrested, he's got a standing deportation order from years ago, hold him until we get there.

Cops: No, in fact, we're going to let him go.

You continued to imply that banning the former is somehow preferable, even though the latter results in ... street raids.

I'm not really seeing how I'm the bad guy here, and honestly I think your real policy preference is simply that no immigration law is enforced at all. You should have the courage to say so, since that is quite clearly the policy preference for a large portion of the electorate, and possibly a majority of the Democratic Party.

Marijuana is illegal. The states have largely chosen to change their laws on the subject as it was determined that it was creating more problems than it was solving. Additionally, the Federal government, while incapable of changing the law, loosened some of the disincentives for the states laws on the subject.

Well, and the isolation of the country by oceans on both east and west, and by the glaciers to the North, which make invasion by any but Mexico or Canada unthinkably expensive.

As for prosperous, a vast, then-untapped swath of forests, thick humus deposited by glaciers, and mineral deposits, all serviceable by waterways unprotected by competing nations, did play a minor role.

American exceptionalism is always a falsehood.

Still, 250 years is pretty short on the grand history of humanity.

A lot of the constitutional factors you object to - like smaller states having voting power out of proportion to their population, or the constitution being difficult to amend - are also shared by Australia, yet Australia never had race-based chattel slavery.

(Dispossession and maltreatment of indigenous people isn’t really comparable because (a) the US had that too and (b) to the extent that influenced the constitutional architecture, it didn’t really influence the aspects you are complaining about.)

It keeps coming up because in 2026 the compromises made to accommodate slave-owning states reverberate to this day.

The Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787 (at the Constitutional Convention) allowed slave-owning states to count enslaved people as three-fifths of a person. This gave the slave-owning states more representation in the House and more Electoral College votes in presidential elections.

This allowed the south to create a voting block that blocked legislation that would have given the formerly enslaved rights that other Americans had.

The Civil War ended in 1865; black Americans in the south were second class citizens and lived under an Apartheid state for the next 100 years until the Voting Rights Act became law in 1965.

> We killed millions over the ability to own humans

"we" didn't kill millions; it's estimated that 750,000 soldiers were killed [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War#Casualties

This is only true if you omit a frame of reference. The slave states wanted slaves to count 1:1 when assigning representatives. The free states wanted them to not count at all. From the point of view of the slave states (which is a perfectly valid point to claim as there isn't an objectively correct baseline here), the 3/5 compromise gave them less representation. So yes, from one point of view the 3/5 compromise gave some states more voice than they should have had. From another point it gave them less. That's what makes it a compromise.

This is not accurate, and there was a baseline: one man equals one vote.

It was a compromise because the northern states didn't want to count slaves at all because they're not allowed to vote; they were just property.

Of course, the South wanted to count slaves (for census purposes) as a person, even though they couldn't vote.

By allowing slaves to be counted as 3/5 of a person, it enabled the South to have more representation in the House, since the number of representatives is based on the population of the state.

If they weren't allowed to count their slaves, they would have had fewer representatives in the House and wouldn't be able to control legislation, etc.

They wouldn't have done it if it resulted in less representation in Congress.

No, we didn’t, because if that was the reason for the fight, it would have happened before the South, fearing the long-term prospects for the institution of slavery, not only seceded to protect it, but also preemptively attacked federal installations.

Of course, long after the fact, popular opinion on slavery has moved enough that people like to pretend the side that they prefer fought primarily for the opposite reason; the South over (opposition to) federal power and the North over (opposition to) slavery.

The first was because fighting merely for the preservation of the union was not enough to bolster moral. Union forces had been losing or winning pyrrhic victories and the common solider didn’t want to fight to force their southern cousins into a nation they didn’t want to be a part of.

So the stated rationale for the war was changed to be about ending slavey now.

However the emancipation proclamation only ended the practice in states that were in rebellion, which is not what you would expect from a country who had wanted to end slavery from the start.

That offer was not to the confederacy, he refused to negotiate with the confederacy. Its very hostile if workers form a union and the employee gives a sweet deal to each of those workers to leave the union while refusing to talk to the union, its the same thing here refusing to negotiate with their representative is very hostile.

> If any of them agreed to rejoin the Union before January 1, they would be welcomed back and allowed to keep their slaves under the pre-war status quo. But no state took him up on the offer, presumably because their leaders found it intolerable to live in a country where slavery might some day be banned.

No, its because the states had formed a new union and they didn't want to betray that one. Lincoln refused to negotiate with them as a whole, he tried to negotiate with the parts. Its like telling enemy soldiers that they get a sweet deal if they betray their country and join yours instead, that will not get you many because most people refuse to betray their allies.

If Lincoln hadn't refused to negotiate with the confederacy as a whole likely the war would be much less bloody or maybe even fully avoided.

>I legitimately do not understand these takes connecting everything to slavery. It's been more than a hundred years at this point. The trope is getting old.

Yes, it's been more than 100 years. We know the history better than ever. The dividing point was slavery and Lincoln didn't really care about freeing them. He simply picked a side and wanted everyone to go along with it. He picked the North because Texas seceded from the union (again, over slavery) and Lincoln would not allow that to happpen. So that played his hand in choosing to eventually ban slavery.

Does your history mention that Texas was the one who seceded?

>The idea that this era is especially defined by the aristocracy controlling the government is honestly just ahistoric.

Do you not know what's happened the past year alone? We can argue over history, but this is happening before our eyes.

> Does your history mention that Texas was the one who seceded?

> We know history better than ever before.

Do we?

Trying to find why you isolated Texas. Perhaps due to Texas v. White case after the war? It was prominent South Carolinian politicians, led by the Rhett and Memminger schools, who decided their state was to secede (first) from the Union and disseminated delegates with their proposal for secession, The South Carolina program, to the other slave states for adoption. Texas would be the last of the deep South to secede on the first of February 1861, despite the determination of Governor Sam Houston.

As Texan/Georgian I have the highest doubt that any non specializing university degree is teaching the above. Perhaps I am missing context.

no. i went to public school in mississippi (both high school and undergrad) and learned the real reason behind the civil war. there are definitely some teachers and textbooks who emphasize the states rights narrative, but that doesn't represent education for the entire south becausee it's not a monolithic region.

> The dividing point was slavery and Lincoln didn't really care about freeing them.

lincoln wasn't interested in freeing slaves at the beginning of the war, but he decided to make it an issue once he realized how it could help win the war. (this is very simplified summary btw. dubois has a good argument about this in his book "black reconstruction in america")

read "forever free" by eric foner if you are interested in a better understanding. the institution of slavery and the institutions created in its place influenced a lot of our current system.

"These takes" are from the articles of secessions that the various states published on why they wanted to leave. Georgia:

> The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property […]

Mississippi:

> In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

> Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. […]

South Carolina:

> The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D., 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union; but in deference to the opinions and wishes of the other slaveholding States, she forbore at that time to exercise this right. Since that time, these encroachments have continued to increase, and further forbearance ceases to be a virtue.

Texas:

> […] Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated Union to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. […]

Virginia:

> The people of Virginia, in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in Convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under the said Constitution were derived from the people of the United States, and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression; and the Federal Government, having perverted said powers, not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States.

And cold, hard, indisputable, historical facts of record.

Democracy comes in many flavours and it's very hard to see the US federal system as outside of that when it is composed of elected representatives.

It's not a direct democracy, it's not a democracy where each vote counts the same, but it certainly falls within the very wide definition of democracy -

"a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives."

So what is next. It seems the only option is to just use the courts to re-interpret the constitution, so that things like growing your own wheat is "interstate commerce" and so that stuff like a post-86 machinegun isn't an arm even within the context of being a member of (by federal statute) the unorganized militia.

Popular election of senators has been a disaster, it essentially turned to the Senate from a deliberative body into a pure partisan body like the House.

Popular election of senators in the senate / upper house hasn't been a disaster there.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Senate

Australia also has political weightings wrt various regions populations.

The people vote in Representatives to debate policy, an independent merit based civil service carries it out, overwatched by independent scrutineers, judged by and independent legal system and enforce by a spectrum of LEOs and peace officers.

A feature of the Australian system (IMHO) is how rapid the churn on Prime Ministers can be ... the Washington system by contrast can't even toss out a corrupt felon grifting hard in public view.

eg: Do you refer to the government of Prime Minister Robert Menzies and its clandestine actions wrt organisers of the Vietnam moratorium protests?

* https://mhnsw.au/whats-on/exhibitions/persons-interest-asio-... etc.

It's also unclear why one would expect that the Senate would be less partisan if its membership were selected by state legislatures. State legislators have a lot more partisan loyalty than the rest of us, both because they tend to be more ideological and because they are deeply dependent on the party for future career prospects.

Put another way: it would do nothing. If it did something, it would likely make everything worse, not better. Legislatures would pick the most partisan hack. They would be answerable to fewer, more partisan people. It would pour fire on an already tenuous situation.

It would also make congress significantly less representative of the country, but I guess that's the point.

Sounds like a bad idea and far from non-violent

Abolish the Senate. End our vetocracy. (h/t Francis Fukuyama)

The constitution still can be amended. But congress has been in gridlock for 30 years so we can't even get over the first hurdle. Lets work on fixing that gridlock and then we can review if 38 states signing on is too big a burden. It was already a Herculean task convincing 10/13 states to accept the Bill of Rights.

I mean, it's not a typo, but it's also misleading. It wasn't an active campaign for 202 years. It was largely forgotten for most of that time.

Democracy, dēmos kratos, means state rule comes from the people.

They mean the same damn thing. They are just two different words that mean not ruled by monarchs.

>A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking. Let us examine the points in which it varies from pure democracy, and we shall comprehend both the nature of the cure, and the efficacy which it must derive from the union.

>The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic, are first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.

He's using affected meanings, and he's going out of his way to say "varies from pure democracy" before referring to "pure democracy" as "democracy." Why is he doing this? Because the words mean the same damn thing!

To an Australian or Briton or Canadian or New Zealander, “Republic” means not being a constitutional monarchy. I think it means something similar in a lot of other countries. Australia is a democracy but not a republic, because it has a King instead of a President. The US, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel (putting aside the Palestinian issue) are democratic republics, because they are democracies with Presidents instead of a King/Queen. China or North Korea are republics but not democracies; Saudi Arabia is neither a republic nor a democracy.

we got bigger and thus we got permutational orders of issues arising as a result. We had to redo the articles of confederation within 20 years of their drafting and that was with 13 states.

Bug or feature, I see it as an inevitability as we grew to 50 states and multiple territories that the federal government would need a stronger hand today than in 1787. Of course, that hand shouldn't be bypassing every section of the constitution to serve the federal government itself. These are the exact fears that caused Shay and Whiskey way back in the day coming to fruition.

One could have a "small" federal government while having a popular vote for president and a reduced/discarded Senate.

And no, not everyone likes it when the federal government is "too big". Personally, I support social welfare and research programs at the federal level, as well as food safety and many other administrative functions there too.

I'm less supportive of "big government" when the executive declares itself the arbiter of the Constitution and all foreign wars and treaties.

It's like insurance: we all need to pool together and help everyone. And for it to work, we can't complain that some people get more help than others. It's a safety net, not floor. If everyone hit the net, the entire thing collapses quickly.

2nd reason is that people can move between the states easily. Imagine the logistical disaster of having a California worker work for a New York company. Which social security does this workers wages get deposited to? What if the worker moves to Arizona? What if the New York company opens a branch in Florida and that worker's department operates out of there?

It's a mess across state lines, and traditionally we have state disputes handled at the federal level.

And that misses the point entirely: parent's point is that greater mobility between states is a good thing.

People should not be condemned to poverty just because they were born in the wrong zip code.

The constitution suggests that "all men are created equal". it sadly needed several revisions to define what "man" is, though. And then some 150 years before we expanded "man" to represent "humanity" instead of "male".

The constitution isn't racist/sexist by the wording of its law, but the interpretations arguably were. And maybe are.

Nothing either good nor bad but thinking makes it so.

We had to spend a long, long time thinking and re-thinking this over. Sadly the trend as of late is to stop thinking altogether. I hope that changes.

Some of us can do both, at once!

That changed in the wake of the South's surrender at Appomattox: The Civil War Amendments explicitly gave the federal government expanded powers. Sure, the southern states were forced to ratify those amendments before Congress would recognize their representatives and senators. But they brought it on themselves; it was one of history's most-horrendous examples of FAFO. And the South was saved from far worse by Lincoln's and Grant's desire to be conciliatory and Andrew Johnson's malign views. (I read a tweet some years ago that Gen. Sherman should have mowed the South like a lawn, with multiple passes.)

Nothing validates this view more than looking at the modern republican party. This is especially blasphemous to say after MLK day, who's life was dedicated to attempting the fix the injustices of the south, and who's death is entirely and inarguably a result of the white supremacist views and actions that were perpetuated, emboldened, and exported by the reconstructionist south (not that the north was innocent, far from it, but the majority of the burden inarguably on the south). At minimum the traitors should have been hanged in public view. The desire to be conciliatory has never been less vindicated -- it's not like the south all the sudden decided to adhere to constitution, they had to be forced to anyhow. It's a nice sentiment, but it should have been left at that.

Well, the south was the only place where there were any appreciable amounts of nonwhite people. "White supremacy" was just "the way things are" in the north, because they pretty much only had white people.

In 1900, decades after the end of the Civil War, the south was about one-third black; every other region (midwest, northeast, west) were less than 2% black.

So behavior of the system fails to meet its design goals? It honestly sounds like you kind of agree with the excerpt you quote.

> The expansion of the federal government ... [is] what needs to change

What are you proposing though? Even assuming the premise here, achieving said goals requires changes to lots of little details and incentives. It's not like there's a single potentiometer controlling Gov't Size™. So what are you actually suggesting?

Certainly, the details of fundamental electoral structure engage deeply with the operation of our government, and the legal scholars in the article seem to be honestly pointing out levers (and big ones at that) we could possibly pull to create a less expansive federal government, or whatever the goal may be.

Imagine a plane crashes and analysts start attempting a root cause analysis, discussing control system specifics and whatnot. To me, your stance reads like "This is by design. Plane parts are united but independent. Control systems were never intended to lord over every part of the plane. The expansion of control systems is what needs to change."

I mean... maybe? But even if we agree on that point, any random contraction of the control system seems unlikely to make a plane that flies better. We have to actually engage with the details of what's going on here.

Yeah but it's not going to, because the modern environment deeply favors a stronger federal government, no matter how much people might complain about it when they don't control said federal government. Arguably it's not even a "problem" so much as an inescapable result of the fact that the world of 2026 is vastly different than it was 250 years ago. A country composed of independent but united states makes a lot more sense when the fastest means of travel between them was a horse rather than an airplane or when your best bet for sharing information was...also a horse...rather than the Internet.

The real question is how you work with a system based on the idea of independent states where political power results almost entirely on the distribution of states that align with one of two dominant national ideological camps.

If you have a standing army, that creates a whole rats nest of problems.

And ps, I've talked to people who think we shouldn't have a standing army, and I frankly think they're insane.

You could pull off a “Switzerland but with defensive nuclear second strike capability” model in this era and it’d work fine.

Less than 10% are full timers, the vast majority are conscripts and volunteers. Even officers generally aren't full timers[1].

All I'm saying is, there's a spectrum of 'Complete citizen militia, as envisioned by the framers of the US Constitution' all the way over to 'Standing army as it exists in the US today', and Switzerland is obviously much closer to the former than the latter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Armed_Forces#Personnel

Skills have become widely adopted since Anthropic's announcement. They've been implemented across major coding agents[0][1][2] and standardized as a spec[3]. I'm not sure what you mean by "next big thing" but they're certainly superior to MCP in ways, being much easier to implement and reducing context usage by being discoverable, hence their rapid adoption

I don't know if skills will necessarily stay relevant amongst evolution of the rest of the tooling and patterns. But that's more because of huge capital investment around everything touching AI, very active research, and actual improvements in the state of the art, rather than simply "new, shinier things" for the sake of it

[0]. https://developers.openai.com/codex/skills/

[1]. https://antigravity.google/docs/skills

[2]. https://cursor.com/blog/dynamic-context-discovery

[3]. https://agentskills.io/home

I just helped a non-technical friend install one of these coding agents, because its the best way to use an AI model today that can do more than give him answers to questions. I'm not surprised to see this announced and I would expect the same to happen with all the code agents becoming generalized like this

The biggest challenge towards adoption is security and data loss. Prompt injection and social engineering are essentially the same thing, so I think prompt injection will have to be solved the same way. Data loss is easier to solve with a sandbox and backups. Regardless, I think for many the value of using general purpose agents will outweigh the security concerns for now, until those catch up

These have been outpacing CPI because they're levered by cheap debt, brought to you by central bank actions that keep rates low so governments can play the same levered games with their own runaway fiscal policies.

Because there's a lot one could write about each of: equities, real estate, gold, silver, platinum (which have very different industrial exposures), and bitcoin, which have many price drivers.

So let's try something more parsimonious: what do you make of people, institutions, etc that bid on short and even long-dated sovereign debt around the globe, and come up the collective discovered price of, say...3.5%, annualized, for maturity in a month? https://www.treasurydirect.gov/auctions/announcements-data-r...

This is because sales is a zero sum game. When everyone can do something at scale, like send an email sequence, nobody wins. Now inboxes are flooded with spam that get deleted and phones go straight to voicemail because people have learned it’s not worth it. You can try to create even bigger lists to capture some 0.01% that will respond, but that’s a shrinking game and many B2B companies don’t have the market size for it

Instead, for my company and others I know, we’ve returned to old fashioned human relationships that don’t scale as easily. Building partnerships, asking for warm introductions, conferences, networking, events, hell I even know of someone who knocks on doors for B2B and it works for them. People ignore spam from bots but they’ll listen to real humans. They’ll read emails and take phone calls from people they know. It’s about trust now, not scale

I’d still recommend learning closing and everything needed for once a deal is in your pipeline. I think a book like Founding Sales is good for that, if a bit dated now (skip the stuff about cold sales in the first half of the book). Never Split the Difference for negotiation. For in person sales, this is basically what anyone in partnerships and outer sales do. I don’t know of resources on that. I’m learning from friends who do that and old fashioned searching

I agree with you about the zero sum, once you’ve seen the first hyper personalised email that says they really like your commitment to x, the rest are all the same.