Anyway. I have fuck all followers here, which is broadly how I like social media; but let me mutely point at this in a year or so. LLMs are the fiber optic cables of our era; the companies based around them will collapse, the actual core usefulness will persist (without their bullshit hype).

Is Claude Code better? Yes! Is it a trillion fucking dollars better?

No. And that’s “no” as the CTO of an admittedly small but quite cutting edge company where we have to develop new algorithm stuff and wrap it in cloud infrastructure every day, which is meant to be the best case for these systems.

Seriously; people don’t get how fucking insane it is that these people are justifying a trillion dollars in datacentre spend when…. I can run a pretty decent Claude Code alternative on my MacBook Pro M2 Pro from three years ago.

These models will fundamentally change how we interact with computers. That’s wonderful! But a new paradigm in computer interfaces isn’t a machine god, let alone a global economic upset. And everything OpenAI claims to do will ultimately run on your wristwatch.

bullshit trend, it’s ultimately going to enrich a handful of early movers who convinced gullible idiots in boardrooms to buy in.

I’m not an LLM refusenik. I use it every day; it’s a great new technical advancement. If you laid off a single worker thinking AI can replace them, you’re a fuckwit.

I’ve spent 30 years writing about the games biz, which has fended off countless waves of hucksters and bullshit artists, but none quite as awful as the AI bros selling a future where we’ll all consume slop through a hose with no human creativity on the other end. But like every other bullshit trend…

Almost all of this - as @edzitron.com has documented extensively - is via letters of intent, which pretend to move around billions of dollars while having almost zero legal meaning.

The “purchases” of the world’s RAM won’t happen. But they’ll fuck the pricing of consumer devices for years.

This is the one conspiracy theory I’ll subscribe to. AI companies and companies deeply dependent on AI (like NVIDIA) recognised that their USP was months away from being entirely doable on local devices, and acted to fuck the global supply chain.

Any half decent system (including phone CPUs) with 64Gb of RAM can do 98% of the actually useful things that LLMs do.

Why do you think they’ve bent over backwards to sign bullshit contracts that pretend to tie up the world’s RAM supply?

Apologies for today’s snow, Tokyo folks. Mea culpa, I tempted fate by workshopping spring-themed hanami drinks over the weekend.

(“Workshopping” sounds so much better than “went through my drinks shelves concocting an evening of dubious ideas”.)

In 2012 you could have made the same argument for a former failed Prime Minister who had crashed and burned in under a year but... no, the devil's had enough advocacy for one day. Noda's completely the wrong leader for the moment, but I have no idea who on their benches would actually be *right*.

So the CRA *could* appeal to a lot of voters, but on the other side of the balance: dubious branding, a hastily thrown together partnership, an unclear policy platform, and honestly nobody on those benches is a good enough political attack dog to make the public case that the LDP has lost the plot.

Also, while I personally think Komeito has generally been a positive influence in Japanese politics over the past 20 years, the fact remains that they're the political wing of a cult, and tying up with them largely defangs any critique of the LDP's slimy entanglement with the Unification Church.

However, to dispense with the devil's advocate act: just because CRA *could* be making that appeal doesn't mean they *are*. For a start, throwing together a whole new party days before an election with no fully agreed policy platform doesn't exactly scream "we're the stable option".

It's not for nothing that the biggest electoral threats to the LDP have always been forces led by former LDP figures! When the LDP is out of favour (which it still basically is, despite Takaichi juicing cabinet support polls), voters swing to "kinda like the LDP but without the scandals" offerings.

To play devil's advocate for CRA: poll data show that most Japanese voters consider themselves centrists on the vast majority of issues, primarily valuing stability / competence on valence, pocketbook issues. "The LDP is going off the rails, we're offering continuity" isn't the worst campaign ever.

(It’s the same performative act they’re doing with tourism - they don’t want to harm revenues but they know citizens are getting fed up of negative externalities, so they’ll poke and prod haphazardly at various bits of policy until they actually manage to break something.)

It’s nothing as strategic as a smokescreen; they’re pushing buttons and pulling levers in an attempt to square an impossible circle in domestic public opinion, and as is often the case with migration policy, struggle to understand that migrants themselves also have agency and follow the news.

Right, there’s still very clearly an understanding at high levels of government that they need foreign labour to keep the country afloat - so you end up with an incoherent mess of positioning that’s designed to appease diametrically opposed constituencies.

The same factors allowing that sector to put heavy downward pressure on pay and conditions in recent years will also allow them to shrug and say “not my problem” over visa fees. (Japan losing interest in English language education was arguably an early warning sign for the anti-globalist turn…)

It will absolutely suck for ALTs as individuals, but thinking of the employer perspective (since they actually have the voice to make the government reconsider these proposals), unfortunately I don’t think ALT dispatch companies etc. have much clout… or will be particularly troubled.

Oh 100% - the popularity of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party is a global phenomenon, and there’s no doubt a serious level of “but I’m one of the good ones!” thinking going on within some of those groups too. Even so, I think hiring for skilled jobs is about to get a lot harder here…

I’d draw a significant distinction here between the “expats” (here on transfers etc.) and the much larger population of regular immigrants working in high-skilled and reasonably well paid positions across sectors like software, engineering etc. - the large majority of whom are not white westerners.

By the time of his assassination there were already dissenting voices on the far-right accusing him of hoodwinking conservatives by paying lip-service to them while pursuing a globalist policy agenda. His death stemmed that talk, but it could have been the start of a pretty serious schism.

I do wonder how Abe would have coped with the sharply anti-globalist turn on the right that we've seen since COVID. His death makes him easy for the right to canonise, but there's a good chance that they'd have demonised him for his globalist stances instead, had he lived.

(Not that I disagree that there are going to be a lot of shocked_pikachu_face reactions when employers in the US find international workers are going cold on the idea of moving there; I just think places like Japan will find this stove burns their hand FAR more quickly when they touch it.)

America arguably has more leeway on this because salaries in fields like tech are very high by global standards, creating a major pull factor. Japan (and other countries experiencing similar anti-migrant turns, like the UK) have far less runway before the economic damage starts to bite hard.

I've seen many comments along the lines of "the number of foreigners in Japan suddenly increased after Abe died, MAKES YOU THINK". The way his spirit is invoked in RW discourses is honestly fascinating, and they definitely want to revise the history of his actual immigration policies.

I know many fellow "lifers" who won't be inconvenienced by these changes but worry about the direction of travel. Restricting foreign residents' access to health and social welfare systems, for example, remains a fringe proposal for now - but the slope definitely looks more slippery than it used to.

One further thought on this immigration thread. While the proposed cost rises aren't a major issue for most people in relatively high-earning fields like tech / finance, I don't think we should underestimate the impact this "mood music" has on the ability to attract / retain international labour.