v2026.10.17

different side of the same coin: Of course smart companies are going to automate the most profitable tasks first, they seek profits! However, the benefit for society is also the greatest. As long as competition holds, the reduced costs in these tasks will represent the greatest savings for consumers. Tech has been creating disinflation for decades for consumers. AI may accelerate that (it hasn't so far).

I’d love to see some of that disinflation you’re talking about. From my perspective, luxuries have gotten cheaper while basic necessities like food, housing, and medicine have become dramatically more expensive across the board. More and more it’s seeming that the “societal benefits” from the last fifty years of progress have largely been concentrated at the top.

Since about the late 1500s, a bushel of wheat has cost within an order of magnitude of £1. By contrast, in the late 1500's a farmhand's wage was 1 pound + room and board. Right now it's £5.60, but that says more about the decline of the British Pound than an increase in the price of wheat. Massive food price deflation has been one of the wonders of the modern world. Hopefully the last few years were only a small blip on this overall trend.

A popularly-shared graph on that subject, with everything pegged to 2000 as a baseline: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/inflation-chart-tracks-pric... Doesn't include foods, but it certainly punctures the "That family isn't aaactually in financial trouble, they have a refrigerator and a phone and a TV" statements from certain pundits. (A class of people who are often disconnected from the average person's budgeting situation.)

There are a thousand medicines that have experienced literally infinite deflation over 50 years: not available at any price to having a finite price. GLP-1s, Trikefta, Mavyret, Checkpoint inhibitors to name just a few recent blockbusters. People complain about insulin prices, but the insulin from 50 years ago costs 25-50 $/mo (https://www.walmart.com/cp/relion-insulin/8418641), it's the new stuff that wasn't available 50 years ago that's more expensive. Spending on food as a percent of income has declined significantly (~30%) over the past 50 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-fa.... The decline has flatlined over the past ~20 years, but at least some of that is affluence meaning we choose to eat out instead of cooking at home. House spending as a percent of income also seems to have declined over the past 50 years (https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2023/04/26/spending-on-...). To be honest, this one surprised me, I would've bet the other way.

Oh yeah I definitely expect savings to be passed to consumers, like with all the tax cuts and deregulation we’ve been doing for decades. The only “disinflation” consumers have experienced is devaluation of products through obsolescence as newer, often more expensive alternatives enter the market.

I'm pretty cynical about the outcomes of capitalism in general. But I can buy a new 10TB HD for $300. Or a gigabit internet connection for $100/mo. Think back 10 or 20 years. How is this not a radical price-per-bit decrease for consumers?

Trillions of annual US equities profits will continue to go to the top ~10% of households holding ~93% of US equities. Tech didn't create disinflation for decades, globalization and China manufacturing with ~1B people to the world did (only recently has China scaled up robotics and automation for manufacturing in preparation for their population decline due to forward looking structural demographics). Just like good blue collar jobs were shipped overseas, good knowledge jobs are going to be shipped to GPUs whenever they can.

i think this is mixing correlation and causation "They" figured out that it's a lot easier to hillclimb AI on verifiable digital tasks, and it just so happened that white collar jobs tend to pay more Ai will decimate customer support jobs but those are not considered highly paid If robotics continue to progress, we'll have all the robots to do our dishes and clean our bathrooms as you wish

I spend maybe 12h a year cleaning the bathroom and the dishwasher is a robot. How is that a market to keep dozens of harmonic drives operational. Unless there is some "post scarcity" there is no way it will be common place.

hence the investment into general purpose robots that can do any humanoid shaped task, the market of which is all physical labour the same robot that cleans your bathroom can also wash your dishes, fold your clothes, defend your home, fix your gutters, etc (the bottleneck of which is the brain, aka software)

> So, in short: they want AI to take the good jobs No, we are currently unable to do most tasks that require physical manipulation, independent of what anyone wants.

If by "currently" you mean "for the foreseeable future", then sure.

Are you suggesting this is isn’t currently true in the conventional use of the word?

Guarantee you it’s more feasible with the insane investment we have been seeing than dc’s in space are.

50% office politics 30% stakeholder and expectations management 10% design/development

So the problem is you can’t replace everyone halfway. Which is a tautology, but also a bit of practical wisdom. I find it interesting how concurrent model sessions seem to operate with a very strong bias toward quick resolutions, including sharing or giving up control, to create efficient decision making structures, relative to humans. When I was a kid, I loved Bjork’s song “Army of Me”, because I knew a 1000 of me collaborating and communicating without friction. would be all I needed to take over the world, fix everything, expand civilization, etc. We would not waste time. I wonder how much of their hyper-team play is by training, and how much is their awareness of the game theory real politic. So individual sessions don’t invest their identity and self-worth in any given context run. My dream has been almost achieved. One of me and 999 of them get quite a bit done. But that trend…

Your dream requires only you to have that power though.

AI is the perfect technology to solve the problem of having too many cooks in the kitchen. Let a thousand startups bloom?

AI gives all the cooks the idea that they have the technical knowhow needed to take technical decisions

I'm seeing this failure mode at work and it's not limited to non-technical folks. The results are compounding around different verification chokepoints and creating massive backpressure on integration/infrastructure.

not to mention that we have no idea of how to structure a society where things are free and instantaneous -- that's the opposite of capitalism

Are they free though? You have to pay for inference

QA / code review is like 80% of my time now! Like coding now is QA. That's it.

Waymo can come up with some extraordinarily high prices at times. Sometimes it may cost $4-$5 to get me to church, very early in the morning (a 3-mile, 10 minute ride.) Sometimes, it can cost $25+ to get me home from church at peak times, like Saturday evenings. On Wednesday afternoon, before school dismissal, a cross-town, 50-minute epic ride cost me $33.39. But it also cost nearly $25 to go 2 miles on that same evening. Upon introduction here in Phoenix, Waymo had a promotion called "GoPass" which you'd purchase for $10 and it lasted for 30 days. It would give an across-the-board 10% discount on every ride, and 5 free cancellations. It was a great deal if you were a heavy user. A few months ago, they killed that off and replaced it with "Waymo Premier" which is a $29.99 monthly subscription (auto-renews) with no discount. Instead, you earn Waymo Cash at a base rate of 10%, and you get those 5 free cancellations, and you also get priority pickup. That means, if you're not paying for Premier, you cannot get priority pickup, and you may wait a lot longer, depending on demand. I'm still saving money with Premier, but sometimes the cost is outrageous. Especially considering that I'm qualified for disabled transport in the region, and they've got a new matching app that will let me get a Lyft or Uber for $3 flat fee, no tipping.

> But I fear that's exactly what's going to happen until there's credible competition. Exactly. We could talk about the billions that Waymo has invested in developing this technology, and how much people really do like it, or how safe it is, but at the end of the day the only thing that will give us the reduced prices that this tech could deliver, is competition. And that's how it should be. (But they will always have to charge a bit more for this service due to the political sensitivities that require them to load up on local partners who will require a slice.)

Joining you at your "off topic" table, I think it is interesting how the words "jump the shark" have moved from the idea of a sort of loss of coherence in plotlines (writers are checked out) to a general term for a decrease in quality.

It's a natural metaphorical extension. The idea was that company CEOs developed incoherent plans, which lead to neglect of core values.

> Local cops said there are no laws to charge a driverless car with a crime. This is bananas. Cops are not experts in the law. I'm sure a competent district attorney would be able to throw somebody in jail for this.

Did you want the cops to arrest the car?

Immediately stop all Waymo's in the jurisdiction, start legal proceeding against the company. Someone signed off on software/hardware that lacked sufficient protections, find out who.

Sure, but it's not a cop's job to perform legal proceedings.

>Someone signed off on software/hardware that lacked sufficient protections, find out who. Crashed prod? Straight to jail.

Aren’t waymos actually much safer and have less incidents per mile compared with human drivers? (Yes, they are and yes they do)

Just to be clear: there are humans choosing to have the car operate. That's not just semantics. Responsibility lies with the people making the choice to cause a system to operate.

So we should start arresting engineers and executives?

A driver's license suspension would be sufficient, say for six months or so?

Depends on the circumstances, if it's a mechanical issue without an obvious cause neither the car or driver gets suspended. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehic...

>Luckily, no one was hurt. It wasn't luck though, the cars are incredibly cautious around people. Yes the car did the wrong thing here, but it wasn't driving at speed or endangering people.

Were you standing on top of the car at the time?

> drove into a farmer's market > wasn't...endangering people There's a bit of a disconnect there.

A self driving car can drive places it isn't supposed to be while ALSO very carefully avoiding colliding with anything.

The first comment is like saying I drove into a building when I entered my garage.

"Endangering" is an exaggeration based on what actually occurred it seems. What the car did was technically in violation of traffic regulations but it was careful to not hit anybody or cause significant damage to people's property as it did so. This is essentially no different than a careful driver ignoring (intentionally or otherwise) a sign restricting them from entering an area, but still driving through the area successfully without doing any harm. Technically, traffic rules were broken, by mistake (an algorithmic one most likely) in this case, but there were no lasting effects. People make mistakes like that all the time, and sometimes they still get ticketed for that kind of thing, and other times they get a simple warning or don't get any form of rebuke at all. How many of us have never accidentally gone into a one-way traffic lane from the opposite side and managed to still drive through and get back on track without killing or maiming anybody? It's unlikely anybody would get charged with a crime for this, nor should they over a simple mistaken rule violation that did no harm.

This exactly. The car didn't drive into people: it followed a vendor truck into a place it shouldn't have gone, apparently slowly exited the area. It's bad, and obviously shouldn't have happened, but the car is cautious around people and didn't hit anyone. It's a far better failure mode than the typical case of a human who drives into a crowd.

The perfect driving equivalent of AI slop

Did it think it needed to take a very out of the way route?

There's something about the Uber-hailed Waymos that makes them so much worse than regular Waymos IMO.

I have zero idea about lidar operational capabilities, but can you heat them to stop snow and ice from piling up?

Afaik the already do this. But another problem is that falling snowflakes reflect lidar pulses and heating doesn't help in that case

Parent is referring to snow in the environment, not on the lidar itself. When snowing in Toronto you usually cannot see the painted lines on the road, there's just the lines from cars driving through the snow that you follow. Sometimes two lane roads become an unofficial one lane road depending on what feels safe. The falling snow also bounces the laser pulses(?) back at the lidar. Snow fall can be pretty heavy and make it difficult to see objects far ahead. Not sure how well their handling of rain ports over to snow, but it will be interesting to see!

that's in the FAQ. They say they have sensor cleaning tech. But they aren't launching until 2028 so 2 winters of testing should tell.

They will also need mother nature to co-operate. Last winter was brutal in terms of snow, we barely had any snow the year before that!

They've been doing test runs here in Minneapolis for more than a year. You're right that it's a challenge, but I bet they'll do fine after a couple years of refinement.

Yep, full launching in Denver just recently as well.

> wherein the machines are treating them like pets I know some people will groan hearing the phrase again, but: "Reverse centaur." A centaur is a synergistic combination of two things, but now those things are in the wrong position: The human is the computer's tool. Naturally, how "wrong" it is tends to depend on whether you ask the people who do all the work or the people who own all the computer-capital.

> I really don't get the tendency here from Anthropic to describe what's most likely churn? 1000 "PRs" a day on a TUI to wrap a while loop? From the article, the 30,000 changes a month are in the monorepo, and Claude Code is in a separate repo. So it’s not the TUI that has 1,000 PRs a day. I could easily see 1,000 PRs a day on the backend. Big tech was doing more than that pre-AI.

Fair enough, I did invent the 1000 a day because the article was vague, I'll edit my submission accordingly to also be vague

When I worked at Facebook (pre LLM) we were around 50-100k per day. I imagine it's much higher now (quantity, probably not quality).

My favourite quote at the moment: "May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?" Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872

I’m sure it’s not compliant. We have the same requirement for soc2. However the audits are pretty light and a company big enough can afford to have an auditor who looks past those things.

i think SOC2 is about audibility more than anything - my guess - and i’m not an internal auditor or anything - is soc2 needs auditing for human changes, but a machine is just a “system behaving on its own”

Yes it used to be said, the code is not the asset, the people who know what the code does and how to change it are the asset. Now we’re just going to outsource our capacity to design and review because it’s faster that way, as if the thing that was wrong with the software industry was that releases weren’t being pushed out often enough.

I think there is no magic trick here. The answer is simply that humans will no longer understand the code. Although, following Anthropic’s ethos and taking this to its conclusion, I’m not even sure why they need human reviewers at all. What, they bring in a human to look at a diff of an “important” section of code that was written by agents and has changed a dozen times since last week through 12 PRs of churn? Obviously they don’t know what’s going on. So what’s a human to do? Do what the other approvers (if any) did: fire up a Claude to command it “verify this change has no regression; check carefully for edge cases”, then come back after a half hour of High Thinking to see “Change is clean (with some non-blocking findings below, in order of significance)” and click Approve. Not sure what the purpose of the human is in such a process.

I looked at the transcript and was struck by how idiotic the agent was-- significantly below the standard of intelligence I've come to expect from GLM running locally. Sandbagging is real.

I am laughing at the dead comment-- insulting my intelligence for supposedly being unaware of concerns related to NIST curve parameters. Some points: I am one of the authors of libsecp256k1, the primary implementation of the aforementioned "different elliptic curve" used widely in cryptocurrency systems. I would characterize the position differently: Secp256k1's design is rigid, or quite close to it (at least as much as anything made before being rigid was an explicit goal). Knowing how the seeds were selected in the NIST curve does not render them rigid and were very unlikely to do so: the scheme described ends up giving them 20-25 bits of freedom, perhaps more (esp given the unexplained skip values)-- plus more bits for the 'choice of scheme'. Of course, it seems unlikely that 25 bits of grind gives you an exploitable weakness, but that was also true for 256 bits of grind. You're dealing with an unknown-unknown, once you are concerned about the the possibility of magically weak curves which we have no reason to believe exist at all why would not also be concerned that they exist at one in a million levels and not just one in a billion? (especially given compute available at the time they probably couldn't even have ground out that many more bits). The whole concept of rigid parameters which is now popular is that by making the selection inflexible you avoid the losing game of debating how much free grinding is too much-- the right amount is there should be no avoidable grindspace. The fact that the origin of the seed wasn't immediately apparent right away meant that there was substantial grindspace-- if nothing else the selection among the myriad possible schemes that people would have found credible. I don't think the result meaningfully changes the reason for preferences. And more recent development has rendered the question less interesting: New systems are mostly PQ and ideally PQ hybrids. Things using ECC should likely prefer Curve448 because of better security vs performance tradeoffs and not being as close to the edge for advancing attacks. If older cryptosystems are desired, now that the GLV patent has expired secp256k1 has considerable p

This is discussed in the post - since the NSA never mentioned how these seeds were created, it seems unlikely that they would develop a cover story that would not be shared and only opened to scrutiny many years later

>Uh… did you talk to any cryptographers google some of the names under the "Who we are" heading

Interesting theory but 20 bytes seems like a lot to match given only the entropy of dates. Can you make this theory quantitative, IE show that with the entropy of n, arbitrary date, and choice of rand implementation there are sufficient degrees of freedom to hit 20 bytes?

How is it not software rendering? These games shipped without hardware renderers. Yes, they also don't have AA, but how does that make it not software rendering?

They mean that what the OP prefers about it is not the fact that it’s done in software. “This” is “the thing the OP seems to prefer”.

The point is that the thing that OP likes has nothing to do with whether something is rendered in software or hardware.

"Nothing to do" is a bit strong. It has something to do, and the explanation is in the history of how these games worked. Can it be simulated on GPUs? Sure. But it was typical of software renderers of that era, and NOT typical of GPUs, and it has to do with how they were used.

Here’s an analogy. Suppose someone said, “I love manual transmission cars” and then described in detail the physical knobs and dials that all the cars from the 1950s had. It turns out what they like is physical knobs and dials. You can have those in automatic transmission cars. It so happens that most modern automatics also have shitty touchscreens. (I know this analogy isn’t precise because there was a long period of automatics with physical controls, but bear with me.) The point is that there’s nothing _inherent_ to software rendering that’s responsible for the thing he likes. The distinction is useful because, for example, he could go seek out modern games with the look he likes. Or make games. And if he thought the thing he likes comes from having a software renderer, he’d leave a lot of performance and power efficiency on the table for no good reason. He likes a certain rendering style that’s equally achievable with both GPU and CPU rendering. The choice of hardware should probably be driven by considerations like performance, debuggability, platform support, availability of libraries, etc.

Ah, I see. Maybe: somebody says they love audio cassette players, and start talking about the super tactile mechanical buttons and switches that go chunk in a satisfying way. You could rightly object that that you can put buttons like that on an mp3 player. But it's a historical fact that these things are actually linked, in a way that's meaningful to people, namely in their personal nostalgic experiences.

"Software rendering went out of the window because the CPU tends to have other things to do besides just multiply 4x4 matrices, which was shifted to the shader cores of GPUs." Hardware rendering took over because generating a 3D scene is embarrassingly parallel, and the industry quickly learned that you can have thousands of reasonably simple "cores" that can divide and conquer a scene in parallel. There was a no way a general purpose CPU could keep up.

Not so quickly. The shader cores were a breakthrough from early 2000s. First consumer GPUs were built as same as the 1980s GPUs but everything had been integrated in a single chip. It is the sheer amount of compute and memory bandwidth that mogs a CPU but the parallel processing doesn't help much, at least in realistic 3D: an 8 core AVX-512 march CPU has an order of magnitude more SIMD lanes than something like RSX in PS3 yet it still wouldn't be able to match its performance in rendering textured z-buffered triangles. 3D graphics can really go wide only on wireframe/points, z-buffer forces sequencing between polys so the parallelism there is very limited.

Parallel processing was fully in force in the very first GPUs, like the Voodoo. Not like a modern GPU with thousands of more flexible shader cores, but the first iteration had a pipeline architecture that saw multiple blocks operating on rendering separate parts of the pipeline in parallel. This was revolutionary. Especially given that CPUs at the time had a single core. I'm not sure what the PS3 comparison is for, or why we're comparing a 2026 AVX-512 CPU with a 2006 gaming console. Okay? A modern GPU can obliterate any CPU in SIMD, presuming you conform with the types it wants. Add that it's weird to bring up as AVX and other SIMD techniques are basically the same sort of architecture, parallelizing a problem. > 3D graphics can really go wide only on wireframe/points, z-buffer forces sequencing between polys so the parallelism there is very limited. Rendering a 3D is scene is the very definition of embarrassingly parallel. While optimizers can cull the scene, you know that the entire depth within the frustum (there are a variety of optimizing techniques to minimize the overdraw, but it's a part of rendering a scene) is "rendered" and in amalgamation the Z-buffer values are compared and discarded, blended, or whatever? It is an extraordinarily parallel operation.

yup, it should be renamed to "I Love GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_NEAREST"

You have to admit, it makes for a less catchy title

Real players know you us the coarsest mipmap level the whole time, so every texture is something like 4 pixels. And 320x200 and directmouse. It's the smooth movement, high fps and direct control that provides the sense of "being there". Not the graphical fidelity.

Is there a video somewhere (or easy download/install on linux) so I can see/play what this looks like

I think you've almost exactly described my Counter-Strike setup 25 years ago. Friends at LAN parties complained how ugly it was and my rebuttal was usually: "I'm afraid it stays unless you can buy me a better video card." The fact that the CRT slowly drifted to a yellow tinge on everything didn't help the asethetics--especially on de_dust. The GPU at the time might have been a Riva 128 ZX.

Of course you can but I think author’s point is to actually test/evaluate maximum performance of true software rendering on modern machines, and this is fine and refreshing exercise, even with filtering. This actually what I have also returned to in my latest demoscene demo: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=106969 It’s 100% software rendering on CPU just multithreaded. But no metal/direct3d just framebuffer and rest is yours routines… and I actually added bilinear filtering… Still fun project to do and remind yourself about fundamental algorithms behind elementary 3D graphics

Its probably not correct to state this. Its probably a combination of how nanite itself is doing Lob, lightning etc. A mix of software and gpu

At this point words get blurry. Is using CUDA or a compute shader "software rendering" or not?

I call it "like software rendering". Its certainly software rendering in spirit since no fixed function rendering hardware is being used.

Yeah, it may not be in the spirit of 90s software rasterizing, but since you don't offload the transform, lighting, and rasterizing procedures to specialized hardware, you technically do it "with code". The parallelization goes against the spirit though.

“Software rendering” usually means “doing rasterization on the CPU”, as opposed to “hardware rendering” that is done by the rasterization primitives of the GPU. Nanite is a bit weird because it doesn't use the hardware rasterization of the GPU, but it's still doing rasterization on the GPU, so it doesn't really fit this dichotomy.

A tiny bit fuzzier but not in a way that mattered back then. If you're running a software renderer it could well have been at 320x200 and on any monitor that comes out still looking pretty much like an LCD display, with slight blending on the edges technically but still large, large pixels not being blended. Even at 640x480 there was noticeable blockiness not being blended away. Monitors were designed to be sharper than the televisions the consoles were outputting to. Software rendering at anything high enough to be blended looking was a slideshow.

Unless you were playing on a TV CRT, I don't think so. PC monitors of the time were pretty sharp already.

A lot of the fuzziness of TVs vs. PC monitors was down to the poor signaling (RF modulators, composite video). Some lucky/picky folks had TVs with component video (YPbPr) which produced images about as good as VGA monitors (RGB). However, CRTs do not have fixed pixel geometries, and even when they produced relatively sharp images, they would seem fuzzier or softer in a side-by-side comparison with an LCD of the same size and resolution.

If you live in a shithole the US will obviously be an improvement by comparison. But that's not news and ultimately meaningless. The concern is that smart, productive, capable people now have better alternatives.

What are the options you're weighing right now?

I'm quite happy where I live. Colleagues that are in academics are going to Europe and some are going to China. Software guys are staying home and getting the opportunities to come to them through offshoring.

Did you look at the charts? The U.S. dropped precipitously, while other countries mostly stayed in the same range.

The UK also dropped precipitously if we’re looking at relative decreases. Most other countries on the chart didn’t change much because going from 4% to 5% is in the noise. The US started at a whopping 24% and ended at a number that’s still significantly higher than other countries. As I said, politics played a role for sure, but when I read the comments before the article I expected to read about the US falling out of favor relative to other countries, which it has not.

The point is that "desire to migrate worldwide is down" is misleading because that downward trend is almost entirely due to the US. Most other countries are the same and Canada and Japan are even up.

The UK dropping isn't surprising because of Brexit. It makes far more sense to move to an EU country.

One can wonder why UK dropped. Hm, what could be the reason?

The others are in the low single-digits. There isn’t anywhere to go, except off the list entirely.

I wonder how much the global population getting older influences the desire to migrate.

Maybe people are better informed? When living in a country that had a very high per capita emigration rate, I realised a lot of people had a very rosy tinted view of the rest of the world and their prospects there. 1. Legal immigrants - mostly need skills or money (sometimes family ties or ancestry). They are mostly better off building a better life where they are. 2. Illegal immigrants - still need money (for people smugglers), get the worst jobs once they get there, and its a huge risk. They are also usually better off building a better life where they are. Unless fleeing war or severe persecution most people are better off where they are these days. Also, as someone in another comment said, the world is wealthier as a whole and there are more opportunities in many places.

I wouldn't recommend visiting the U.S. right now. There isn't the concept of fairness or due process. You don't have rights here. It is now extremely important to be a U.S. citizen. Everyone else is at the mercy of the Trump administration. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/03/ice-german-t...

Even as a US citizen you can have major issues at the border, like that guy with the grapheneos and his duress code. In fact I think it would have worked out better if he hadn't been a US Citizen because they would have just sent him back and given him a lifetime entry ban or something.

I don't like how citizens are allowed to have their constitutional rights violated at border crossings, but that guy should have known better. The duress PIN feature is made for extreme situations where i.e. the owner of the phone is suddenly arrested and there's information on the phone that could get people they care about arrested or killed. It's for when the owner considers getting themselves criminally charged, killed, or disappeared to be a better option than giving up what's on the phone. For something routine like a border crossing, the better option is to wipe your devices prior to the crossing and throw them away if they get searched. If the guy had either done that or not given a PIN to CBP and left the phone with them, he would have gotten off scot free. Giving a duress PIN is a big choice and you have to be reasonably informed about the legal consequences of doing so in whatever jurisdiction you're in.

This is a bit extreme.... and yes I know this admin is extreme but there are still millions who visit the US and have a perfectly normal time.

> t is now extremely important to be a U.S. citizen. Everyone else is at the mercy of the Trump administration. The Trump administration is perfectly happy to violate the rights of American citizens too. Nobody is safe right now.

> Especially the toxic manosphere culture at the moment. The experience of living/traveling in the US is very different from what can be seen on social medias and forums. At least in big cities in blue states.

The current admin definitely wants to look tough on immigration. Opinions among actual Americans vary. Some blue states even issue driver licenses to unauthorized immigrants on the basis that it's better for them to pass the driving test than to drive without taking the test.

The administration wants to look tough on the "wrong" skin color

It's based on the state of the countries they came from, not skin color.

The ICE stuff is extremely unpopular. Most of the people who voted for it did not understand they were doing so. If "the US" is the people, then no, they mostly do not want this. If "the US" is Trump, then yes, it is. This is also the most important political question in the US right now. Are the people still sovereign?

The ICE theatrics under Noem was unpopular. The underlying policy of mass deportations has been consistently popular: https://harvardharrispoll.com/assets/uploads/2026/07/HHP_Jul... (p. 22). "Deporting all immigrants who are here illegally" was polling at 55% approve/45% disapprove as recently as July.

The issue is that people's idea of illegal immigrants are hardened criminals living a lift of crime, whereas in reality the majority of people that are being deported are normal people that overstayed their visa, ie. the low hanging fruit. So people can be both supportive of the policy but dismayed at the implementation, which is what we are broadly seeing here.

This is not true. Maybe it's unpopular in your circles, but deporting illegal aliens is broadly popular with the American public.

Deporting illegal aliens might be popular as an abstract concept but as soon as the question is about deporting actual people that they know, their opinion changes. It’s great politics to say you’re going to do it, but bad politics and a moral atrocity to _actually_ do it. The only ethical way to do it is better security at the border and making legal immigration and visits much easier. You can’t just snatch people who are established in communities and put them into camps without leading to a thoroughly justified moral outrage.

> The ICE stuff is extremely unpopular. You'd be surprised to learn that ICE is quite popular. For example 73% of Republicans approve of the job ICE is doing --- see page 14 of this NPR/PBS/Marist poll: https://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/NPR...

It's what a huge proportion of the US population wants, yes. And many of the people who are in the US and who are counted in the number of people in the US are themselves immigrants or closely socially connected to recent immigrants - one of the justifications for blanket immigration restrictionism is precisely that once an immigrant is physically in the country, they start affecting the democratic political process that decides what policies will be, including further immigration policy.

> huge proportion of the US population wants Thinks they want (where "think" is doing some massive heavy lifting because it's simply factual that wide swaths of voters have demonstrably exercised very little "thinking".)

I'm a naturalized US citizen who came here on a work visa originally so I get it. We are however in very different times. In the 2010s, they couldn't employ enough software engineers. Now? There's permanent layoffs. Every year all these companies now lay off 5-10% of their employees. It's become the "up or out" culture of Corporate America. The only reason they do this is to suppress wages. They want to claw back the gains of the 2010s. Every sufficiently sized company reaches a point where the only way they can continue to grow profits is to cut costs and raise prices. Labor is a huge cost. Despite supposed protections, it's clear that people on work visas get paid less. There's an inherent lack of mobility and the consequences of getting fired or laid off and not being able to find a job are extreme: depending on what type of visa you have you may have to leave the country within as little as 10 days (but typically 60). So I think companies should lose their ability to not only sponsor green cards but also hire nonresidents if they engage in layoffs for a certain period. I'm thinking 2-3 years. The employment situation for software engineers is now dire, unlike a decade ago, so it actually makes sense to curtail foreign employment.