I would support this idealistic approach and disregard for consequences if we didn’t have an “ally” that’s doing exactly the same thing, and potentially vulnerable if a major power decides to intervene
You probably didn’t write up a detailed prompt with perfect specifications in 10 seconds, either.
In my experience, it doesn’t matter how good or detailed the prompt is—after enough lines of code, the LLM starts making design decisions for you.
This is why I don’t accept LLM completions for anything that isn’t short enough to quickly verify that it is implemented exactly as I would have myself. Usually, that’s boilerplate code.
> This is why I don’t accept LLM completions for anything that isn’t short enough to quickly verify that it is implemented exactly as I would have myself. Usually, that’s boilerplate code.
^ This. This is where I've landed as far as the extent of LLM coding assistants for me.
I’m working on a research cybersecurity tool that attempts to combine the natural language understanding and information synthesis strengths of LLM-driven agents with symbolic logic and knowledge bases expressed as Datalog programs for determinism and declarative semantics.
The approach is to perform system scanning using a combination of LLMs and traditional algorithms to dynamically populate a Datalog knowledge base. The facts of the program are constrained to a predefined “model schema” of sorts and a predefined set of rules that encode specialized domain knowledge of how new facts can be derived from known facts.
We generate proof trees / attack graphs from the knowledge base and queries posed to it. The attack graph uses big-step semantics to plan and guide the execution flow, and the system dispatches to agents with tool use to fill in the details and implement the small-step semantics, so to speak. This may include API calls to a Metasploit Framework server or RAG over vulnerability and exploit databases.
We use Pydantic AI to constrain the LLM output to predefined schemas at each step, with a dash of fuzzy string matching and processing to enforce canonicalization of, e.g., software names and other entities.
Tl;dr: neurosymbolic AI research tool for cybersecurity analysis and pentesting.
It's also worth noting that some of the damage will be permanent.
Trump's mini trade war with China in 2018 (for which he had to bail out farmers) led to US farmers permanently losing market share in soybean exports to Brazil.
> In 2018, during Trump's first term, the U.S. and China engaged in tit-for-tat tariffs that led Beijing to take permanent steps to reduce its reliance on American farm goods.
> The share of China's soybean imports from the United States dropped to 18% in the first 11 months of 2024, from 40% in the whole of 2016, while Brazil's share grew to 74% from 46%, according to Chinese customs data.
No, but we're not just importing stuff because it keeps port workers busy. We import stuff because there is demand for it, and port workers' labor generates many multiples of profitable business activity downstream.
Thankfully one does not have to be a credentialed anything to be right. All you need is to present evidence for anyone to reproduce your claim. A ten year old kid not even out of elementary school could be absolutely correct if the evidence supports what is being claimed.
No single aspect of the economy exists in a vacuum. Tariffs and lower shipping volumes portend thousands of small businesses potentially going under, translating to many more thousands of people losing their jobs and incomes. This has many unforeseen knock-on effects in declining economic activity.
Are we really subscribing to Reaganistic trickle-down economic theory now? How sure are we that those imports aren't mostly just lining the pockets of the rich?
We're measuring the wrong things. We need to measure cost of living instead of how empty or full a Port is. We don't know if these two things are correlated yet.
Trickle-down is the idea that giving tax breaks or benefits to the wealthy or big corporations will eventually benefit everyone else through increased investment or job creation. What I’m talking about here is the basic flow of goods and services in an economy—when that gets disrupted, the effects hit workers and consumers directly, not eventually or indirectly.
When imports slow down, businesses have fewer goods to sell or face higher input costs. That leads to higher prices for consumers and layoffs for workers. It doesn’t just impact “the rich.”
This isn’t about trickle-down economics; it’s about how supply chains work. The impact of these tariffs will show up in lost jobs, higher prices, and reduced access to everyday goods. Those are real effects for regular people, not just abstract economic concerns.
Reduced shipping volumes immediately mean less work for truckers—thousands of people taking a hit to their income right off the bat, which in turns leads to less economic activity. This is exactly what people mean when they say no part of the economy exists in a vacuum. It’s all connected.
Yes. The port traffic data discussed in this thread is one such example.
I'm not an economist or supply chain expert myself, so I rely on actual subject-matter experts to interpret and contextualize the raw numbers for me. So far, they're all painting a pretty gloomy picture.
Good people to follow on this are CEO of Flexport Ryan Petersen [1], Jason Miller from MSU who had a great podcast with Derek Thompson [2], CEO of FreightWaves Craig Fuller [3], etc.
Tobacco and alcohol, both of which have objective, measurable negative health outcomes supported by decades of research, versus some vague notion of "junk products" as defined by... who? And this is without even getting into the fact that the tariffs will raise the price of everything, not just these supposed "junk products."
I don't see how any of this refutes the claim that the Chinese population has a much greater pain threshold than the US. If anything, you're only bolstering the claim.
> I don't see how any of this refutes the claim that the Chinese population has a much greater pain threshold than the US.
I was more combatting the point that China has some super smart decade+ forward thinking leadership. Whereas the reality is that the same political party is still willing to sacrifice tens of millions of Chinese people for negative economic growth.
The resilience of course is another thing. The main reasons they have a higher pain threshold is that for many the quality of living never really changed drastically and there is a heightened sense of nationalism. More generally, on a personal level Asians try to "save face", meaning they could be starving to death and still smiling to not let their enemy see their pain.
I still maintain that they can't hold out, and that the CCP has been very quietly entering into negotiations with the US [1]. There was already an exceptionally difficult property market situation threatening stability, and now their entire supply chain is being disrupted on every level. The pressure they are under is immense.
“Amazing” is the correct word for it
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