If our govt officials are willing to betray their citizens for money to China, what’s the point of preferring to give them power over us instead of giving it to China?
In my experience, Gemini 3.x wasn’t just getting a bad rap, it was significantly worse in practice. It could analyze codebases and report back from a one-shot prompt as good as Claude or Codex but any slightly complex task that carried on for more than a few minutes led to hanging, seemingly infinite loops, and bizarre and nonsensical hallucinations, to the point of being unusable for serious work. The Claude and Codex counterpart models at the time rarely had such issues for the same type and duration of complex work, if at all. To be fair, later Claude especially started having hanging issues as many people noticed but that’s been better recently.
That might be his reason but Prof. Yaghi is from a Palestinian refugee family and born in Jordan. There are probably more than a few reasons he might not feel welcome in the US at the moment.
Hi, I had a quick look through your blog via google translate and fwiw, you seem like a very talented developer to me. Speaking as someone from the US (originally from continental Asia) in a very similar situation to yours (except for the AI-dependence), this is just a hunch, but have you considered seeing a psychiatrist for anxiety or similar issues? I kept ignoring things due to my upbringing but started seeing someone recently in my early/mid thirties and things have been slowly improving, thankfully. I don’t know how the healthcare system in South Korea works but hopefully it’s better than the one here.
Another thing I would suggest, since you’re a freelancer and will hopefully have a more flexible schedule someday soon, maybe consider going back to school to advance your studies or if you’re quite advanced already in your field, maybe try your hand at a different subject? It might be what you need to get comfortable interacting with people who have similar interests and predispositions.
I know you didn’t ask for advice, just thought I would share some ideas as someone with a similar position in life from thousands of miles away.
I did get counseling and took medication, but it didn't really improve much. The reason is that my surroundings themselves are just way too stressful.
Part of the problem is that I don't have anyone around me to talk to about programming, and that gets depressing. As you know, with a topic like programming, whether you have people to talk to really depends on where you live.
Ah, the old “only western people have morals, everyone else just cares about how it looks” argument. And where did you get this super objective assessment that eastern peoples only care about “saving face”? Couldn’t be a stereotype popularized by western people to feel better about themselves could it? The racists always come out in full force under any post showing an eastern country doing something better than the US in particular.
> Ah, the old “only western people have morals, everyone else just cares about how it looks” argument.
That's not even remotely close to what I said. You should read the comment you're responding before responding with ignorant and blatantly manipulative falsehoods.
> And where did you get this super objective assessment that eastern peoples only care about “saving face”?
Again - never said anything like that. Learn to read.
> The racists
Actually, learn to think. This has absolutely nothing to do with race, as anyone who has passed high school can tell you. This claim is straight-up objectively false.
The second you start slinging the word "racist" around you immediately prove that you have zero valid points to give and are just trying to cry your way into acceptance. Which correlates with the rest of this post.
This is either a troll post, written by a middle-schooler, or blatant propaganda.
I'm not the guy who responded to you, but “only western people have morals, everyone else just cares about how it looks” is pretty much what you tried to imply.
And before you start on me, yes - I'm able to "think", and no, I'm not a "troll"
If its not what you wanted to imply, then perhaps you'd be better served at owning up & clarifying, rather than insulting others who merely pointed out what you originally wrote.
And on a general note (not specifically or only you), I'm somewhat amused (in a morbid sense) at the sheer predictability of some of the "oh no, don't you dare try to impugn any moral superiority to that lot over there, vs us westerners" reactions.
Refreshing to see how even after a multi year ongoing genocide, kidnappings other countries presidents, and triple-tap bombing little girls elementary schools, westerners still feel they own the "moral high ground" (wherever that is anymore ...)
Ahhh, the propagandist's classic tactic - when unable to muster even the feeblest possible response to an argument, just make up things and pretend that the other party said them.
Fact: I said nothing of the sort. You are lying.
> owning up
I have nothing to own up to because I said nothing of the sort, and anyone with basic reading skills can see that.
> clarifying
I was exactly as clear as I needed to be. I do not need to provide every single possible hedge on my statements. It is ok to not be perfectly clear and disclaim every negative, and this is now normal, sane, socially well-adjusted people behave.
It is completely unacceptable (and more than a little psychotic) to take that ambiguity and interpret it in the worst possible way.
It is downright evil to then defend that malicious misinterpretation instead of apologizing.
You are straight-up lying about my own words. Yes, you are both, and thank you for conclusively discrediting your own position instead of responding with something that'd actually require effort to dispute (such as a logical argument based on facts).
Any large government project in Egypt is a project of the Egyptian military. That’s the result of being under a military dictatorship with a fake civilian president.
Besides Israel and, as of recently, Ukraine, Egypt is the biggest receiver of US military "assistance". Most military officials have attended elite U.S. military academies and the two forces work closely together.
The 2011 revolution successfully outed Hosni Mubarak (another Egyptian dictator propped up by the US). Following the 2012 elections came the 2013 coup by Sisi. Except, the US was one of the few countries in the world that refused to label this a "coup". The Rabaa Massacre marked the definitive end to the Arab Spring in Egypt
Which exact part of the state of affairs? Because if your point is that the current regime is propped by US assistance, it sounds fair, but would Egypt be a democracy if this military dictatorship disappears? If anything, revolution of 2011 suggests it's unlikely.
Besides, your sources need to be updated as you seem to believe that Ukraine is within top 3 receivers of the US military aid, and it's definitely not true.
The revolution that overthrew a US-backed authoritarian lead to a democratic election. The results of that election were thrown out the window when another coup brought in another US-backed authoritarian
> Besides, your sources need to be updated as you seem to believe that Ukraine is within top 3 receivers of the US military aid, and it's definitely not true.
As of 2026 Q2, the U.S. disbursed over $116 billion in aid to Ukraine and is obligated for a total of $177b. Yes the rest is being disbursed despite Trump's political antics
The results of that election were thrown out the window
Might be good to mention the result of that election were Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood (the originator of many jihadist movements like Al-Qaeda).
The result was definitely unfortunate. He was a neoliberal that was friendly to Israel, China, and even the Iran (to the dismay of the Brotherhood). He only won by about 4 percentage points. Definitely not what I would've wanted for Egypt (I don't think Egypt needed to further the failed neoliberal project) but it was a democratic election nonetheless.
The parent correctly noted that the elected president represented ideology with ideals of is violent theocracy, and he almost immediately started powergrabbing, trying to gain non-supervised judicial and legislative powers in addition to executive. How vague is that? I don't know, to me it looks rather clear that this was a path from one authoritarianism to another.
Mohamed Morsi, far from a violent theocrat, was actually a neoliberal. Egypt, being 90-95% Muslim, ofc would take inspiration from Islamic law principles. Morsi was democratically elected and sought to maintain that democracy unlike that authoritarian that replaced him.
The Brookings Institute even rated him with the Polity Index (which goes from -10 to +10 with -10 being autocratic and +10 being democratic) and concluded he got between a 2 and a 4.
> As of 2026 Q2, the U.S. disbursed over $116 billion in aid to Ukraine and is obligated for a total of $177b. Yes the rest is being disbursed despite Trump's political antics
$135b of it is from the "Department of War". What percentage do you believe is not "military" spending and why do you think that?
Also the distinction seems silly for a country in total war. Funding their medical or food system or whatever means they can re-allocate money to defense
Egypt was a military dictatorship long before they were American allies. You can thank Nasser for that. Repproachment with Egypt in the 1970s was a diplomatic effort to stop the fighting between the Arabs and Israel, and to win over a Soviet ally.
The US supported the democratic movement and even helped ease the way. In fact, alot of Middle Eastern countries are still resentful for American support of the Arab Spring. But it couldn't stop, and admittedly wasn't particularly interested in stopping, the regression back to a military dictatorship in Egypt given the elected president was about as democratic as Turkish president Erdogan. But it never intervened, AFAIU, because while dysfunctional, Egypt is relatively stable from an international perspective and a reliable-enough American ally either way.
To be clear, Egypt receives on average $1.3 billion annually and Israel in a normal year receives about $3.8 billion. Ukraine has received $116 billion since the invasion and averaged about $250m before it.
What are you talking about? This is literally every single major infrastructure project in the world. In the U.S. for example, every major waterway and roadway is built by the govt (local or federal). There is even the “Army Corp of Engineers”.
You can dislike the project, but take your political beaf elsewhere. Your statements are irrational.
Tbh I think your point is overstated but you do bring up an interesting point that affords me the opportunity to plug a really interesting relevant book called Standardizing Empire: The US Military, Korea, and the Origins of Military-Industrial Capitalism. It traces the origins of both global capitalism and the US military's involvement in massive infrastructure projects back to post-war South Korea. In the 50s, about 60-70% of all oceanic shipments were movement of goods to and from SE Asia by the US military. You can, arguably, thank this economic/infrastructure project for the standardized shipping container.
This almost happened to me 4-5 years ago. I don’t recall every detail but right around the time I was deep into a new job interview process, Google Pay decided it needed to verify my identity. It may have been triggered by one of my cards expiring but I don’t think I had ever used the service to actually pay for anything at that point and just had a card saved. Anyhow, I was almost immediately locked out of my primary email account as well and got delayed in sending documents to the potential employer and had to explain that I got locked out of gmail. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn my lesson and still use that gmail account as my primary email but I did at least open alternative accounts on other cloud providers.
And you’ll never know because even if you could turn back time and do it from scratch, you’re likely to opt again not to do it all manually because the cognitive load is going to keep tempting you to reach for the agent again.
reply