This is a fair argument but it’s rapidly becoming a non-argument.
LLMs have come a long way since ChatGPT 4.
The idea that they’ll always value quick answers, and always be prone to hallucination seems short-sighted, given how much the technology has advanced.
I’ve seen Claude do iterative problem solving, spot bad architectural patterns in human written code, and solve very complex challenges across multiple services.
All of this capability emerging from a company (Anthropic) that’s just five years old. Imagine what Claude will be capable of in 2030.
> The idea that they’ll always value quick answers, and always be prone to hallucination seems short-sighted, given how much the technology has advanced.
It’s not shortsighted, hallucinations still happen all the time with the current models. Maybe not as much if you’re only asking it to do the umpteenth React template or whatever that should’ve already been a snippet, but if you’re doing anything interesting with low level APIS, they still make shit up constantly.
> All of this capability emerging from a company (Anthropic) that’s just five years old. Imagine what Claude will be capable of in 2030.
I don't believe VC-backed companies see monotonic user-facing improvement as a general rule. The nature of VC means you have to do a lot of unmaintainable cool things for cheap, and then slowly heat the water to boil. See google, reddit, facebook, etc...
For all we know, Claude today is the best it will ever be.
The current models had lots and lots of hand written code to train on. Now stackoverflow is dead and github is getting filled with AI generated slop so one begins to wonder whether further training will start to show diminishing returns or perhaps even regressions. I am at least a little bit skeptical of any claim that AI will continue to improve at the rate it has thus far.
If you don't really understand how LLMs of today are made possible, it is really easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it is just a matter of time and compute to attain perpetual progress..
My mental model is that coding by hand is similar to horseback riding, sail boating, etc. These skills are still enjoyed by people and in some circumstances they are invaluable.
Removal of hereditary privilege is a good thing in principle.
However, given the Labour party just gave children the vote, cancelled local elections in conservative-leaning areas, and now they're removing the (traditionally conservative-leaning) hereditary peers, it's starting to feel a lot like the Left are gerrymandering our democracy.
They gave 16 year olds the vote, and 16 year olds can leave home, marry, join the army, and so on. Why should they not vote?
They didn't run pointless elections by request of the very councils that were due for them, because those areas are being redrawn and would have to have fresh elections almost immediately, making the results meaningless.
They also gave all the conservative hereditary peers lifetime peerages so they will keep their seats.
Your framing of all three of these is obviously intended to mislead.
> 16 year olds can leave home, marry, join the army, and so on. Why should they not vote?
That's a separate argument.
My point is Labour's change to the rules is very politically convenient for themselves. In the most recent polling, 32% of 16-17-year-olds would vote Labour, while only 17% of the overall electorate would vote Labour.
> They didn't run pointless elections by request of the very councils that were due for them, because those areas are being redrawn and would have to have fresh elections almost immediately, making the results meaningless.
They allowed individual incumbent councillors to choose whether elections were cancelled. This was politically convenient for the Labour and Tory parties because the Reform Party is new, and while it's polling well ahead of Labour, it doesn't have many incumbent council seats.
When a court challenge loomed, Labour quickly u-turned on the latest round of cancellations. Funny how something can seem sensible one day, and can then be u-turned at the slightest whiff of legal scrutiny.
> They also gave all the conservative hereditary peers lifetime peerages so they will keep their seats.
Can you name a single Conservative hereditary peer that will be given a lifetime peerage in Starmer's reform plan?
No, you can do things that benefit you electorally, but are also just the right thing to do. Changing the voting system from FPTP would obviously benefit parties other than the major ones, but that doesn't mean it'd be wrong for those parties to do it if they got into power. So the question is if it's good policy, and so I argue it is, if someone can be living by themselves, working in the army or as a full-time apprentice, married, and having a child, they should be able to vote.
> When a court challenge loomed, Labour quickly u-turned on the latest round of cancellations. Funny how something can seem sensible one day, and can then be u-turned at the slightest whiff of legal scrutiny.
Yes, it's absolutely bad that the government isn't making sure these things are legal before doing them, just as with the Palestine Action proscription. It's also hardly a sign of it being gerrymandering, why would they bother when it's going to give them basically zero advantage, given it would only achieve getting a council that will have no time to actually do anything? The obvious conclusion is they thought it was a waste of money and effort to hold them, but if you have to fight a legal battle over it, it won't actually save any money or effort as that has a large cost, even if it is legal.
> Can you name a single Conservative hereditary peer that will be given a lifetime peerage in Starmer's reform plan?
> The BBC understands ministers have offered the Conservatives the chance to retain 15 hereditary members of the House of Lords as life peers.
So it's not specific names as it hasn't been finalised, but 15 of them. I accept I misremembered when I said "all", but the point stands: not gerrymandering.
> No, you can do things that benefit you electorally, but are also just the right thing to do. Changing the voting system from FPTP would obviously benefit parties other than the major ones, but that doesn't mean it'd be wrong for those parties to do it if they got into power
You're reinforcing my point.
Minor parties (who might collectively be popular with the electorate) will never be able to change the voting methodology to their advantage because FPTP keeps the incumbents in place, and only the incumbents have the power to choose the voting system. So democracy suffers and the incumbents benefit.
Similarly, in this case, allowing children to vote helps the incumbents stay in place despite their party, and their leader being deeply unpopular with the electorate overall. So democracy suffers and the incumbents benefit.
This "logic" doesn't track at all. Enfranchising women may have benefited the party, does that mean we shouldn't have given women the vote and doing so hurt democracy? Of course not.
Just because something benefits a singular party doesn't make it antidemocratic. Expanding the franchise is more democratic, not less. A party being rewarded electorally for doing something good is the system working, not failing.
There are reasonable arguments to be made (in my opinion) that 16 is too young but you aren't making that argument, the one you are making is completely invalid.
There is no reasonable definition of "the Left" that includes the British Labour party. The only one that fits would be "to the left of the British Conservative party", but that's as arbitrary as redefining it "to the left of Reform UK" and then starting to call the tories "The Left".
> Labour, is one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom, along with the Conservative Party. It sits on the centre-left of the left–right political spectrum
Centre-left doesn’t mean the Left. It just means it’s to the left of the other centrist party (Tories). Just because they lean left doesn’t mean they are the Left, Radical Left, Commies etc
You do know that actual political scientists don't use left vs right to describe parties. They use terms like libertarian, socialist, etc. They do that because left vs right change from place to place and time to time. From the POV of the US, Labour are communists. In France perhaps they are center or center left or even center right. Even the things you call left vs right don't remain consistent. There are policies in the 50s which were considered left but now would be right and visa-versa.
PS You have be to be pretty extreme to think the Labour party isn't "left" enough for you. As in, I'm not sure what else they could do to appease the far left in practice without sever negative consequences for the UK.
> PS You have be to be pretty extreme to think the Labour party isn't "left" enough for you. As in, I'm not sure what else they could do to appease the far left in practice without sever negative consequences for the UK.
Have you looked at actions rather than manifesto? There's very little change in policy actions from the previous non-Labor government, so it doesn't track unless you see the tories as left wing. Which is clearly more extreme.
Carbon taxes are huge, and they are 100% politically imposed.
And they're often disingenously included in fossil fuel pricing to claim that green energy is fundamentally cheaper.
I believe in climate change, and I believe in doing something about it. But being disingenous with the public is only going to create resentment and resistance to Net Zero.
> And they're often disingenously included in fossil fuel pricing to claim that green energy is fundamentally cheaper.
There’s nothing unreasonable about this: fossil fuels have huge costs associated with them that are invisible to the consumer. They’ve just been getting pushed off onto other people forever.
By all means, calculate an arbitrary uplift on the price based on your own definitions of externalities.
But don't expect me to take you seriously when you directly compare a raw price of renewable energy with an uplifted price of fossil fuels.
Especially when your quoted price for renewable energy ignores the cost of grid upgrades, storage infrastructure, and externalities associated with mining materials to manufactur solar panels and wind turbines etc (as happened recently in UK parliament when the energy minister did a very dubious comparison between energy prices)
I've always found it odd that the Paris Accord allows China to keep building coal powered stations when it is already the leading global contributor to climate change:
Meanwhile the Paris Accord seems to bludgeon Europe and America (who are reducing their CO2 emissions significantly), with the net effect of accelerating the deindustrialisation of the West (thus helping industry grow in China).
The Accord should focus on moving industry away from China to countries where electricity predominantly comes from renewables.
You're right. When I posted some facts about Chinese and Indian emissions, my post was actually flagged by someone who didn't want those facts to be known. When it comes to the climate, the Left are not interested in honest pursuit of science - they just cherry pick data that supports their neo-Marxist agenda of redistributing wealth and capabilities from the West to the East, driven by their hatred of the West and its success under capitalism.
> The EU has had 20 years to create an equally successful and popular product, which it failed to do. American companies don’t owe your European nationalist ambitions a dime.
So true.
There's a lot of passive-aggressive anti-US rhetoric and fearmongering on HN at the moment, while America is simply doing what it's always done - innovating and thriving.
As a European, I wish our continent was able to be more like America, as opposed to jealously coveting its outcomes.
and "That blue badge might not be worth what you’re trading for it. A checkmark is cosmetic. Biometric data is forever."
I like the article, but I think it was nearly wholly LLM-generated. It's a shame that this contrived writing style is becoming so commonplace. Just annoying, more than anything.
> I’ve always avoided client-side React because of its direct harm to end users (over-engineered bloated sites that take way longer to load than they need to).
A couple of megabytes of JavaScript is not the "big bloated" application in 2026 that is was in 1990.
Most of us have phones in our pockets capable of 500Mbps.
The payload of an single page app is trivial compared to the bandwidth available to our devices.
I'd much rather optimise for engineer ergonomics than shave a couple of milliseconds off the initial page load.
React + ReactDOM adds ~50kb to a production bundle, not even close to a couple of mbs. React with any popular routing library also makes it trivial to lazy load js per route, so even with a huge application your initial js payload stays small. I ship React apps with a total prod bundle size of ~5mb, but on initial load only require ~100kb.
The idea that React is inherently slow is totally ignorant. I'm sympathetic to the argument that many apps built with React are slow (though I've not seen data to back this up), or that you as a developer don't enjoy writing React, but it's a perfectly fine choice for writing performant web UI if you're even remotely competent at frontend development.
LLMs have come a long way since ChatGPT 4.
The idea that they’ll always value quick answers, and always be prone to hallucination seems short-sighted, given how much the technology has advanced.
I’ve seen Claude do iterative problem solving, spot bad architectural patterns in human written code, and solve very complex challenges across multiple services.
All of this capability emerging from a company (Anthropic) that’s just five years old. Imagine what Claude will be capable of in 2030.
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