AI enthusiasts actively want a world dominated by a few massive tech corps that'll steer our thoughts and kill creativity. The envy towards people who have skills that they polished is always very, very palpable when reading comments they make or hearing them talk in real life. But beyond just AI, the world is increasingly full of people who are proudly self-declared "accelerationists": accelerationism being the idea that we should make everything as shitty as possible because it'll make the world worse and bring everything down to their level. It's crabs in a bucket as a political, economic, and work philosophy.

Gibraltar has been part of the UK for over 300 years and the people are all UK citizens. Forcing those people out or seizing the land from them would be the definition of colonialism, yes. And exclaves exist all around the world. Geography has never really meant anything in national terms. Spain has a piece of land on Africa and I don't think they plan on giving that up.

>Gibraltar has been part of the UK for over 300 years and the people are all UK citizens.

Is this your standard for whether or not something is colonialism? Do you apply it consistently throughout, even when its inconvenient for you?

"Colonialism" is a weird Western guilt fetish that some others successfully milk.

After 10 generations, the people are every bit as local as the previous population was. 300 years is such an abyss of time that most of us would fail to name a single of our ancestors by name.

Kladsko was a Czech city from approx. 1000 to 1742. The old town still looks a bit like very small Prague [0]. Was lost in a war (to the Prussians no less), it is gone, not our anymore. Tough luck. Others live there now, it is theirs.

[0] https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kladsko_(město)#/media/Soubor:...

> "Colonialism" is a weird Western guilt fetish that some others successfully milk

Colonialism is the historical basis of almost all of global society today. It's not at all weird to be concerned with it when it still drives so much of the relative power dynamics between states and between people(s) today.

The example you're giving of Czechia and Prussia simply isn't an example of a colonial action.

That requires buying into the very concept that "colonialism" is a specific sin different (and worse) from ye olde "I am stronger than you and will occupy your territory and take your wealth". I have even met people who claim that Russian expansion into Siberia was not colonialism, because it wasn't done using ships.

I don't really buy it. It feels to me as unnatural as if somebody decided that theft of, say, a smartphone, was a separate and much graver offence than theft of anything else.

It only makes sense to me if there is an underlying ideology, or maybe very practical demands for reparations which shouldn't be hindered by other demands for reparations, and thus the others need to be downgraded pre-emptively.

It may also come handy for distraction from domestic governance failures, such as bad security situation, rolling blackouts, subpar maintenance of infrastructure and endemic corruption. "Hey, don't look into this, you know how bad the colonialists were?"

(Fairly similar to the way the contemporary Russian propaganda tries to pin the failure of their current war of aggression on anyone and anything but their own stupid decision to go all in.)

I have read quite a lot about it and my conclusion is what I wrote above. A mostly ideological distinction without real difference - even less difference than your examples of theft (intellectual property aside - that is not theft by any definition, but infringement).

People have always tried to conquer other territories, make use of them and settle them. To make an artificial slice out of this continuous and omnipresent phenomenon and call it by another name is incoherent, but then ideologies are mostly incoherent, and colonialism as a very specific sin was a very good and efficient argument in Cold War propaganda and its struggle for influence in the Third World.

Soviets excelled in propaganda, and many of their ideas (like AIDS being an artificial disease, unilateral nuclear disarmament, or the fake contrast between colonialism and membership in the Socialist Bloc) survived the fall of the country.

That said, a very similar line was already pushed by the Japanese in order to paint their own brutal empire as some kind of Pan-Asian utopia. But their trace in global discourse is negligible to the Soviet one, which was much more sophisticated and long-lasting.

Do you consider the historic Arabic expansion across the middle east to be colonial, or is colonialism when boats?

I'm not sure what you mean by "when boats" exactly it why you used that phrasing, but it seems like an attempt at pre-emptively mocking a strawman, framing it as childish. That's not very nice rhetoric, is it?

These terms are well defined and it would serve you well to simply consult a dictionary.

But in short colonialism implies the use of colonies (surprise surprise) meaning the use of settlers to control or displace populations. There from comes the name

It also differs from other forms of expansionism in a few important ways.

- The power class structure is built on trade imbalances which move resources from the colonised land to the metropole without building up local economies.

- There's no absorption, the territories tend to remain separate and the colonised people can't become citizens or equals with those colonising them.

- And it's understood when speaking about things like the "colonial era" or "historical colonialism" that there was a deal of racial justification and stratification along racial lines.

You'll quickly be able to compare this list to whatever historical event you like.

You can mock the grammar of "only colonialism when boats", but AFAIK when the Soviet Union accused some Western power of engaging in colonialism and got "well, you have your Central Asian dependencies" as an answer, they were quick to refine their definition of "colonialism" to include a "transmaritime" checkbox. So, yeah. FWIW there have been those who accused modern nation states of practicing "internal colonialism" in the sense that oftentimes all the money, support and political representation goes overwhelmingly to some select places while the rest of the country is treated as a convenient reservoir of cheap labor.

My definition of colonialism generally involves people being subjugated and being treated as less and involuntarily part of an empire. People in Gibraltar are British citizens with full rights by definition.

Land borders that one doesn't like doesn't equate to colonialism. It's just a land border that you don't like. The people of Gibraltar voted almost 100% to be British on more than one occasion. Trying to make them not British is the definition of colonialism

Would you hold that standard towards Angola in 1973?

The vast majority of its inhabitants were portuguese citizens with the exact same rights and duties as any other portuguese citizen in Lisbon. The majority of that territory (and certainly the parts with most of the population) was portuguese for 500+ years.

Each of these countries, enclaves, territories, settlements, borders have massive amounts of history that shape why they are the way they are, and attempting to say "this rule should apply equally to all of them" shows a huge misunderstanding of why they are unique.

I mean, do you think the east prussia should be returned to Germany? Should West Virginia be retrieved to Virginia?

Those cases didn't involve colonisation. Though Virginia certainly did if you go back a little further.

Kaliningrad has been colonized properly by Russians, right after removing indigenous population.

There is one main difference, that makes UN recognizes Gibraltar as a colony and not Ceuta and Melilla: days before Gibraltar was conquered 100% of the people that lived there was moved out. This is why Gibraltar is a colony and Ceuta and Melilla not. So I don't have clear opinion if people in Gibraltar should have auto-determination or not.

I was not talking about any of the points you mention, I was refering to the geographical facts alone. Wouldn't you agree that in general it is kind of silly to claim ownership of a piece of land that is far, far away from your own country?

I was born in a country that has islands and I live in a different country that consists exclusively of islands. The islands spread out thousands of miles in various directions. Land being far apart is just a reality of how countries work.

The distance from London to Gibraltar is closer than the distance from London to Bermuda, but nobody finds that weird. France has French Polynesia on the opposite side of the world. Russia has Kaliningrad. Norway has Svalbard. South Africa has another country, Lesotho, right in the middle of it. India wraps around Bangladesh like a tentacle. Azerbaijan has a random piece of land and makes a sandwich out of Armenia. Spain has islands directly west of Morocco. France has land on South America.

The whole world has freaky borders. The only clean borders are places like Wyoming and Colorado.

I would add natural navigation barriers such as rivers and lakes (and some, but not all, mountain ranges) to the list of "clean" borders. They're not straight lines, but they're a natural place to site a border.

There are many, MANY islands scattered around Earth's oceans. Not all of them have the resources to be self-sufficient, so any inhabitants have to import goods from somewhere. There are two options: either each island is its own country, or some islands belong to some other country. Given how easy it is to navigate to most islands (some of them are in harder-to-navigate straits), it doesn't make much practical difference whether the owning country is close or far away.

So no, as a general rule I can't agree. I can certainly agree that there are some rather silly cases, but it's just not practical for all islands to be self-governing, so I can't agree with the general rule you propose.

That may all be true, but you’re talking about voluntary affiliations here.

Colonies are rarely ceded voluntarily, but are usually the result of an invasion or a lost conflict. The fact that this is no longer the case with Gibraltar today, because its inhabitants value the benefits of belonging to Britain, is simply a consequence of the time that has passed since then. It does not automatically undo the imperialist actions of the past.

This is the same mindset of criminal in a low trust society btw

"If you didn't want me to do this, you should had a fence/cameras/security guards. You shouldn't have dressed like that. You shouldn't have put your phone in that pocket."

Excusing trillion dollar corporations like low level criminals is embarrassing. Society shouldn't have to lock itself up because bad actors are spreading everywhere. The bad actors should just be removed.

you never heard of HTTP request smuggling or XSS then... Let alone being able to fingerprint and dump all your browser history and session data, cookies, etc.

As an American, to me it's always felt like non-white Americans are never really accepted as "full" Americans by people as a whole. If a German guy moves to America and gets citizenship, he might be known as that German American guy, sure. But if he has kids, they'll just be called American. Over 100 years ago, some Chinese people moved to America. Those people had kids. Those kids had kids. Those kids had kids. Some of those kids also had kids. But what are those 5th or 6th generation Americans called? Asian Americans or even Chinese Americans, even if they've never been outside of the US and nobody in their family several generations up the line has either. And people who were forcefully brought to America 300 years ago still have their descendants being called "African American" instead of simply "American."

I say this as someone who myself emigrated from America. Nobody calls me "that American guy." I'm just "that guy".

I think the test for being accepted is when you screw up. For example, if you parked wrongly do you become “that foreigner/ethnic guy” or do you remain “one of our idiots”.

It's really quite interesting how there are always posts on HN with people talking about how AI made their life great, did it cheaply, made a great product, and saved the day. But whenever someone asks for specifics, the questions are always dodged or answered very vaguely. It's rare that anyone ever even says what their product does.

To be fair, thraway3837 posted a reply on a sibling comment and offered "AMA" :).

That said, I do see a lot of those posts you're talking about, and I think a lot of AI development is way overhyped. But I also think internal tools like this can be a good use case.

Personally "none of them have read any more than a few lines of code" makes me wary, but if it works for them, then so be it!

I have Claude work on web app testing scripts written in java using JUnit and selenium. The scripts test a vibe maintained flight booking app for an airline I can't mention without doing myself. The app is maintained using copilot by another vender. Claude was given to our team by our employer. We aren't even employees of the airline just contractors under a vendor. Before Claude was adopted everyone secretly used whatever chatbot they preferred. I used opencode with Deepseek v4.

I had a product where I was doing accountancy ratios and it’s not that simple since you have lots of different source data to use and it was such a nightmare to combine everything in the right way. Ai did that easily. Also writing code to extract unstructured data was a few hours vs weeks of work.

I'm happy to provide specifics, within reason, of course. Ask away. I've since responded to comments with more detail, but if I missed something there, let me know!

You keep saying you'll provide specifics, but I haven't seen anything. Instead of saying you'll provide them, actually provide them! Be forthcoming.

This conversation feels like the "disturbance in the kitchen" scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjaHrp6JtyY

Vietnam is even cheaper.

The problem is you get paid in a roided up currency and it's a fun vacation for you. The locals get paid awful wages and a single night at an hotel for a typical person here is a whole month's rent for them.

We're a little over 1 year in and the sudden ramp up feels absolutely nuts. In 2028 people will start to feel like it's normal. Just look at places like Russia. Everyone is used to the corruption and thinks it works well enough for them, so they fear any change will be worse. A lot of Americans have already stopped denying the corruption like they did last term, and have retreated into saying, "yeah, it's bad, but (other candidate) would be worse." Same terrifying mindset.

Constitutional amendments are generally made with the purpose of granting rights to the people, not taking them away. The US once made the mistake of making an amendment to take away rights (banning alcohol), but then another amendment restored the right to get drunk.

Asking "why would a company lie?" is probably the funniest thing I've seen all month. Every big company puts out BS nonstop.