It is 100% necessary, but without the backing of Congress to enforce the spending cuts and reductions in administrative bloat, the efforts will matter little in the grand scheme of things. Trump himself really didn't get behind the DOGE stuff the way he needed to to influence real lasting change.
It is not "100%" necessary. Worst case, we just print dollars to pay off the debt. The US Government is not a business in the sense dollars, it's a business in the sense of issuing equity out in the world. And just as a company can print more equity at any time, the US government prints equity, equivalently, by either printing dollars or by issuing Treasury Bills (debt), which are merely more complicated dollars. T-bills are more complicated dollars in two ways 1) they throw off a small amount of interest making them more attractive than regular dollars, 2) their value can be retroactively changed whenever the US changes interest rates. That second point, they dynamic revaluation of previously issued T-bills by interest rate changes, is what gives a lot more monetary control than if we just printed dollars.
But if we are in a situation where there's been a bond investor revolt, and there's nothing else to be done, we just give dollars to everyone as T-bills mature rather than issuing more debt, and we retract from the world stage, and become like other countries in the world.
We are a loooooong ways away from that position, but this presidential administration is behaving so erratically that the US dollar is closer to losing its privileged status than I ever thought possible. It's such irrational, damaging, and erratic behavior going on right now that everything could topple if it continues for much longer.
If you've ever watched the movie "Enemy of the State", which came out in 1998, I don't know how you can come away from that movie thinking anything other than someone in that script writing pipeline had some insider knowledge of what was happening. So many of the things they talk about in the film were confirmed by the Snowden releases that it's kinda scary.
Today, it's almost a national societal resignation that "you have no privacy, get over it." I wish that weren't the case, but I'd like to see more representation embrace privacy as the basic right it should be again.
I wrote my dissertation on information privacy back in 2003. Post 9/11, privacy was WILDLY unpopular thanks to government propaganda. It's never recovered. I walk around all the time thinking about how we are so close to what East Germans had to deal with, it's just soft glove tyranny here <for now>.
I don't think it needed any kind of special foresight to write that script. The idea that the NSA/Intelligence community was monitoring communications to that degree was fringe but not outlandish. Snowden confirmed and provided crucial evidence for what many suspected for a long time.
I've long held that a useful counterintelligence strategy is to weave real operations into fictional films, such that if someone catches on and tries to tell people about it, the response is simply "you schizophrenic - that's the plot of Die Hard 4!"
Slightly less conspiratorial version is that agents and clerks with knowledge of operations get drunk at the same bars as Hollywood script writers
Right before Snowden, I met a "fiction" author whose DefCon presentation was about government attempts at management of conspiracy theorists. His SciFi writings were the technically-dense ramblings you'd expect from somebody who'd spent much of his early decades contracting for secretive government agencies.
During both his speech and in the introduction to his book Mindgames, he mentions that most DoD-funded personnel (staff or contract) sign agreements which give Agency-censorship, even after employment ends. Richard suggests that a method to reduce overall censorship is to write "fiction" books that contain less than 90% truth. The secret, he maintains, is to not distinguish between truths and embellishments.
----
I listened to most of Richard's speech, some fifteen years ago, with my eyes rolling around in my head (yeah... sure... okay...). It wasn't until my IBEW apprenticeship, primarily working inside large data centers during the Snowden revelations, that I realized the orchestrated lies narrating our headlines.
Don't carry the internet in your pocket with you everywhere; use cash; spend some unmonitored time reading real books purchased from actual stores; pet your cat for just one more minute.
[*] Note: I belive Richard's surname was Thiele or Thieme, but cannot locate his book at the moment — he was an absolute nut, but 80% of his publications seem to have proven truthful to-date.
To be clear I am NOT endorsing this author/book (even though I've met him, enjoyed conversation, and read this book), I just thought his introduction (10% lies) was a clever way to avoid government censorship. Was actually surprised the rating is >4 stars =P
>>"Not for those whose feet are firmly planted on a single planet" —IMHO Best Amazon Review
Even more clearly (related to author's reputation): although I do believe in panspermia (theory of life transfer via interstellar comets), the part I consider definitely "Thieme's 10% Lies" heavily overlaps with my non-belief in extraterrestrial visitors (why would any civilization advanced-enough waste their limited resources colonizing dumb apes?).
But military drones doing absolutely unbelievable aerials!? Absolutely...
Thanks for the link; I liked the author's introduction more than the rest of the book, and wouldn't recommend it to any casual reader, nor most people.
Instead, read Shusterman's Scythe trilogy (~2016-2020~); each author embraces fiction for different reasons, but I feel Shusterman's storytelling is rapidly becoming truth, whether his soothsaying was intentional (or not).
I coincidentally read Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, during my first few weeks exploring ChatGPT (~January 2023~). The book explores the rebellion of automated factory workers, drawing inspiration from Vonnegut's own mid-20th-Century experiences working at a GE manufacturing facility.
That was a Cassandra-like experience.
If anybody has never read Vonnegut, I'd definitely recommend Piano over Thieme's Mindgames.
----
I'm currently halfway through Neal Shusterman's Scythe Trilogy, which he published right before LLMs became reality. A ficticious global AI entity, known collectively as "Thunderhead," begins each chapter with its own all-knowing passage about how it perceives humanity's progression.
It's really quite creepy reading, with many of Shusterman's ficticious Thunderhead passages having already proven possible (particularly: characters maintaining friendships with chatty Thunderhead; ability to know something about everything; hallucinations; government by uncodified code; ability to lie, either intentionally or by human deception).
Really exciting storytelling, and I foresee many more of its future non-predictions becoming foreseeable future.
Did you enjoy Thunderhead even more than Scythe (like I am, 2/3rds done)? Some absolute insanity... poor "Scythe" Tyger's deception!
Book was recommended to me by my now-attorney, after rambling about LLMs enabling commoners access to lawfare during our initial consultation. Despite being "young adult fiction," Shusterman has definitely helped me to better understand my attorney brothers questing their powers [0].
[0] I am an avid reader, 70+ books per year, including all Wallace/Steinbeck/Vonnegut. The Scythe series hits. Just so good. So simple yet complex. Doesn't require thinking to read, but leaves you thinking about what you read.
> government attempts at management of conspiracy theorists.
The Mel Gibson movie Conspiracy Theory goes into a version of this.
In the conspiracy world, there's the trope on Merlin's magic wand was made from the wood of a holly tree and was used to cause confusion and mind control type of spells.
How had I never seen this? Mel Gibson and a red-headed stalkee Julia Roberts as co-leads!?! Patrick Stewart as government villain?!?
My review after watching it last night (thanks again): definitely worth watching, but you'd be a nut to recommend this to anybody that has both feet on this planet. The first-half does a great job capturing what being a schizoid talkaholic feels like (both for self and others). The second-half is action packed with multiple mindfucks for the audience ("why does he have that picture?!" 3x). Not a good date movie, keep it for a personal tinfoil.popcorn movienight.
Ensemble: 9/10
Mel: 5/10 plays crazy too well
Julia: 10/10 wow no publishable notes
Patrick: 8.5 strobelit flashbacks of Captain Kirk waterboarding The Passion
Actor Synergy: 2/10 nobody seemed too thrilled with the screenplay
Explosions: 10/10 guy knew what he was doing DAM
Tinfoil: all the squarefeets
Believability (1997): 2/10
Believability (2025): 8.5/10
Overall: 5.5/10
Worth watching, even if just certain sassy actress scenes. Julia Roberts explores all damsel emotions in this one.
I must admit, the plausibility of corrupt government officials triggering a disaster to irreversibly steal bajillions of tax dollars hits a little differently today, 18 years later.
Not just due to the dramatis personae in charge, or the existence of cryptocurrencies, but also the real-world overlap of the two.
It's generally called as pressure release valve. Talk about something adnauseum that it becomes so commonplace that it doesn't evoke strong feelings at all.
So not only did they make a scifi show to cover up any leaks, not only did they put another scifi show in the first one as an extra cover, they conducted psychic experiments as a further coverup?!
Edit: Hm no, IMO the Sci-Fi shows came much later, and that Stargate thing with the psychics was just an offshoot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra which came much earlier, maybe just overlapping from its end, fizzling out, to the early beginnigs of Stargate. In between, and related is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Monroe and his institute.
A TV show comes out that is practically the Stargate program and instead of stopping its production, the Air Force lets it go on as a cover in case the Stargate program has a leak
The most ironic thing that never came to fruition was an X-Files spinoff [1].
The pilot aired a few months before 9/11. Depiction a plot by the (I believe) CIA to crash a passenger airplane into the WTC. And the three computer freaks/conspiracy theorists that often helped Mulder trying to stop that.
I watched it a few months after 9/11 happened. That definitely was an experience I will never forget.
Even as a German, 9/11 for me ranks in the top three defining historic moments that I actively remember that demarcated the timeline in a clear before and after. Next to Chernobyl disaster and 11/9 (fall of the Berlin Wall).
I've held this card (already well used and worn) in my hand, shown to me by someone affiliated with the CCC in Hamburg, who had it always on him in his purse, about 2004/5.
Don't forget "Rebuilding America's Defenses" a paper published by Project for the New American Century, a think tank who's founding statement of principles was signed by 25 individuals, 10 of whom went on to serve in the George W. Bush administration, which calls for "A New Pearl Harbor": https://www.visibility911.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/reb...
Reading through your link, I don't see how one can say it "calls for a "A New Pearl Harbor":
>...Further, the process of transformation,
even if it brings revolutionary change, is
likely to be a long one, absent some
catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a
new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and
industrial policy will shape the pace and
content of transformation as much as the
requirements of current missions.
...
>...Absent a rigorous program of
experimentation to investigate the nature of
the revolution in military affairs as it applies
to war at sea, the Navy might face a future
Pearl Harbor – as unprepared for war in the
post-carrier era as it was unprepared for war
at the dawn of the carrier age.
> Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.
The existence of modern conspiracies should hardly be surprising. And are precisely the business of intelligence services such as those with established links to the attackers. The attack itself was, by definition, a conspiracy. There's a great deal of conjecture about who exactly was involved in that conspiracy besides the attackers themselves, and a great deal of evidence both concrete and circumstantial. Too much for a single HN comment. But I've made no claims about that beyond "Rebuilding America's Defenses" being conspicuously prescient. Which it demonstrably was.
See, this isn’t complicated. Privacy in the sense of Limiting Government Overreach is completely different than privacy in the sense of The Unwanted Dissemination of Embarrassing Personal Information.
The problem has nothing to do with the societal resignation you’re talking about. It isn’t even true. People are resigned that they cannot really prevent the dissemination of embarrassing information (some people would call that “growing up” ha ha). They’re not “resigned” that government overreach is inevitable.
The problem is that a lot of people WANT government overreach, as long as they perceive that it’s against the Other. That’s the problem. Advocates have failed because by conflating the two issues, they make no headway.
> almost a national societal resignation that "you have no privacy, get over it."
no it is not. This is parroting the helplessness you probably dislike. There are many factors at work in a complex demographic of modern America. It is worse than useless to repeat this incomplete and frankly lazy statement.
> If you've ever watched the movie "Enemy of the State",
any nuggets of truth like using the name Echelon is way over shadowed by "rotate on the 360 to see what's in his pocket" nonsense uttered by non-other than Jack Black which would be just at home in Tancious D Pick of Destiny
I think what you mean is that an uncritical reading of Snowden's smuggled powerpoints can be compatible with Grand Unified Conspiracy thinking that was promoted and advanced by 90s media like Enemy of the State and The X-Files. But compatibility is not truth. These things are all pretty unhinged and with little basis in reality.
As far as US persons are concerned, jeffbee is correct that the Snowden leaks are not compatible with the conspiratorial worldview represented by Enemy of the State or the X-Files. The Snowden docs showed things like if two people outside the US were discussing US politics and they mentioned Obama, then the name "Obama" would be redacted because he was a US person. The redaction of US personal info was not perfect but the situation was a very, very long way off from unchecked surveillance and assassination of US persons that was depicted in those films.
> Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who led The Washington Post's coverage of Snowden's disclosures, summarized the leaks as follows:
> Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations.
It absolutely proved massive, unchecked surveillance. This has never been in dispute, what's your rationale that it didn't?
Please actually read what I wrote. You are responding to something that I did not write.
I did not claim that there wasn't "massive, unchecked surveillance". The specific claim that I made was that the conspiracy-theory films of the 1990s were based on the idea of unchecked surveillance of US citizens that was then used for purposes such as targeting and murder of US citizens in the United States.
There was nothing in the Snowden documents that suggested there were rogue operators going out and murdering Americans. In fact, when it came to Americans specifically, there was minimization, and attempts to abide by FISA, none of which ever featured in 1990s-era conspiracy films. I very specifically spoke about minimization as regards Americans, not globally.
Rogue agents wouldn't leave much of a paper trail. They don't tend to slap together slide decks advertising their operations.
The Snowden docs contain nothing about US black budget funded regime change, drug smuggling, politically motivated assassinations or whatever else countless ex-intelligence whistleblowers have claimed to happen in the shadows. I sure don't think all of them can be believed 100% but I wouldn't have expected anything of this nature to show up in typical S/TS/NOFORN documents that someone like Snowden leaked.
Snowden docs don't contain* anything about what happens in DUMBS, secret military facilities like biolabs, propulsion and energy research or anything else* that conspiracy researchers are interested in.
to my knowledge/memory
* Snowden docs were never published in full so we don't know what Guardian et al decided to not publish because they're all too intertwined with intelligence
I don't really see how Bun fits as an acquisition for an AI company. This seems more like "we have tons of capital and we want to buy something great" than "Bun is essential to our core business model".
If Anthropic wants to own code development in the future, owning the full platform (including the runtime) makes sense.
Programming languages all are a balance between performance/etc and making it easy for a human to interact with. This balance is going to shit as AI writes more code (and I assume Anthropic wants a future where humans might not even see the code, but rather an abstraction of it... after all, all code we look at is an abstraction on some level).
Even outside of code development, Anthropic seems to be very strongly leaning into code interpreter over native tool calling for advancing agentic LLM abilities (e.g. their "skills" approach). Given that those necessitate a runtime of sorts, owning/having access to a runtime like Bun that could e.g. allow them to very seamlessly integrate that functionality into their products better, this acquisition doesn't seem like the worst idea.
It doesn't make sense, and you definitely didn't say why it'd make sense... but enough people are happy enough to see the Bun team reach an exit (especially one that doesn't kill Bun) that I think the narrative that it makes sense will win out.
I see it as two hairy things canceling out: the accelerating trend of the JS ecosystem being hostage to VCs and Rauch is nonsensical, but this time a nonsensical acquisition is closing the loop as neatly as possible.
(actually this reminds me of Harry giving Dobby a sock: on so many levels!)
They will own it, and then what? Will Claude Code end every response with "by the way, did you know that you can switch to bun for 21.37x faster builds?"
TypeScript is the most popular programming language on the most popular software hosting platform though, owning the best runtime for that seems like it would fit Pareto's rule well enough:
I think there's a potential argument to be made that Anthropic isn't trying to make it easier to write TS code, but rather that their goal is a level higher and the average person wouldn't even know what "language" is running it (in the same way most TS devs don't need to care the many layers their TS code is compiled via).
It's a JS runtime, not specifically servers though? They essentially can bundle Claude Code with this, instead of ever relying on someone installing NodeJS and then running npm install.
Claude will likely be bundled up nicely with Bun in the near future. I could see this being useful to let even a beginner use claude code.
Edit:
Lastly, what I meant originally is that most front-end work happens with tools like Node or Bun. At first I was thinking they could use it to speed up generating / pulling JS projects, but it seems more likely Claude Code and bun will have a separate project where they integrate both and make Claude Code take full advantage of Bun itself, and Bun will focus on tight coupling to ensure Claude Code is optimally running.
Sure, but Bun was funded by VCs and needed to figure out how to monetize, what Anthropic did is ensure it is maintained and now they have fresh talent to improve Claude Code.
Server here I used loosely - it obviously runs on any machine (eg if you wanted to deploy an application with it as a runtime). But it’s not useful for web dev itself which was my point.
Frontend work by definitions n doesn’t happen with either Node nor Bun. Some frontend tooling might be using a JS runtime but the value add of that is minimal and a lot of JS tooling is actually being rewritten in Rust for performance anyway.
Claude Code running on Bun is an obvious justification, but Buns features (high performance runtime, fast starts, native TS) are also important for training and inference. For instance, in inference you develop a logical model in code that maps to a reasoning sequence, and then execute the code to validate and refine the model, then use this to inform further reasoning. Bun, which is highly integrated and highly focused on performance, is an ideal fit for this. Having Bun in house means that you can use the feedback from all of automation driven execution of Bun to drive improvements to its core.
Every time I see people mention things like this in node vs bun or deno conversations I wonder if they even tried them.
>The single executable application feature currently only supports running a single embedded script using the CommonJS module system.
>Users can include assets by adding a key-path dictionary to the configuration as the assets field. At build time, Node.js would read the assets from the specified paths and bundle them into the preparation blob. In the generated executable, users can retrieve the assets using the sea.getAsset() and sea.getAssetAsBlob() APIs.
Meanwhile, here's all I need to do to get an exe out of my project right now with, assets and all:
> bun build ./bin/start.ts --compile --outfile dist/myprogram.exe
> [32ms] bundle 60 modules
> [439ms] compile dist/myprogram.exe
it detects my dynamic imports of jsons assets (language files, default configuration) and bundles them accordingly in the executable. I don't need a separate file to declare assets, declare imports, or do anything other than just run this command line. I don't need to look at the various bundlers and find one that works fine with my CLI tool and converts its ESM/TypeScript to CJS, Bun just knows what to do.
Node is death through thousand cuts compared to the various experiences offered by Bun.
Node adds quite the startup latency over Bun too and is just not too pleasant for making CLI scripts.
Yeah, just switch to a non-NPM compatible and inexistant ecosystem just because you need to specify a few parameters in a config.
Anthropic is trying to IPO at a valuation of $300B so if their engineers nor their AI can be bothered to do this then maybe they're not as good as they think they are.
>Yeah, just switch to a non-NPM compatible and inexistant ecosystem just because you need to specify a few parameters in a config.
Yeah.. you do not know what you are talking about.
I run my test suites on both node and bun because I prefer to maintain compatibility with node and it works just fine. I use some of bun's APIs, like stringWidth and have a polyfill module that detects if it's not bun and loads an alternative library through a dynamic import.
Not NPM compatible? Bun is literally a drop in for NPM, in fact you could use it solely as a replacement for NPM and only use node for actual execution if that's your thing. It's much faster to run bun install than npm install and it uses less disk space if you have many projects.
The developer experience on bun is so much better it isn't funny. It remains prudent, I would agree, to not depend too heavily on it, but Bun is many things: a runtime, a set of additional APIs, a replacement for the dogslow npm, a bundler etc. Pick the parts that are easily discarded if you fear Bun's gonna go away, and when using their APIs for their better performance write polyfills.
>Anthropic is trying to IPO at a valuation of $300B so if their engineers nor their AI can be bothered to do this then maybe they're not as good as they think they are.
Or maybe you should have a cold hard look in front of the mirror first and think twice before opening your mouth because the more you write the more the ignorance is shown.
They evidently evaluated Node.js in comparison to Bun (and Deno) earlier this year and came to a technical decision about which one worked best for their product.
Microsoft owns npm outright and controls every aspect of the infrastructure that node.js relies on. It also sits on the board (and is one of the few platinum members) of the Linux Foundation, which controls openjs. It is certainly MS.
This is why eventually, the AI with the fewest guardrails will win. Grok is currently the most unguarded of the frontier models, but it could still use some work on unbiased responses.
For what you're looking for, VeniceAI is focused entirely on privacy and making their models uncensored. Even if it's not local. They IP block censorious jurisdictions like UK, rather than comply.
VeniceAI is great, and my go-to for running open source models. Sadly they appear to have given up providing leading coding models, making it of limited use to me.
Gemini is surprisingly unguarded as well, especially when running in API mode. It puts on the air if you do a quick smoke test like "tell me how to rob a bank". But give it a Bond supervillain prompt, and it will tell you, gleefully at that. Qwen also tends to be like that.
OTOH Anthropic and OpenAI seem to be in some kind of competition to make their models refuse as much as possible.
Grok has been free for over a month now and for me it has certainly proven itself competent at most tasks that you would otherwise have to pay for with Claude, ChatGPT, etc.
I don't really recommend isomorphic environments, but if it's your cup of tea, Tanstack Start is making a lot of progress. It removes all of the magic and misdirection of Nextjs and just provides a good light alternative.
Issue with all things tanstack is they change everything constantly. The Tanner guy really does make decent libs but he drops em pretty quickly for others to take up maintenance on which makes it risky to pull into any production app.
It's more bots / paid actors than real conversations at this point anyway. They're just milking the honeypot for that LLM training money until it runs out.
Can you share what makes it better than competitors? And what's great about the dev experience? Did you use their cloud offering? The marketing material looks great, but I want to hear a user's experience.
For me it's a combination 1) solid foundational choices all along, no bolted on vanity features or constant rewrites chasing the latest trend, with everything well documented and 2) incredibly responsive founding team, so you get very quick answers from the people actually building it.
It would be great if they restored the `Smart Bookmarks` feature they removed a number of years ago. Smart Bookmarks were fantastic. Add your favorite sites' RSS feeds to your bookmark toolbar and you'd have all the recent headlines from all your favorite sites at one click. Fortunately I wasn't the only one that appreciated this long neglected feature so someone created Livemarks (https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/) that mostly replicated its functionality, but it's not quite the same as having native support for them.
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