by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-05 17:13:05+00:00
Similar things can be said about LLMs replacing jobs. I'm all for governments regulating such changes, but at best they can only slow things down.

But that said, there is a balance to be had. Ultimately, quality of goods and services, and the competitiveness of the country as a whole must take priority. Not jobs. The whole idea of creating jobs for the sake of creating jobs is perverse. It doesn't help anyone and harms the public in the long term. If we want a way to give people income, UBI or similar welfare-like approaches make sense. They might even be more profitable in the long-run.

With offshoring, has the quality of software gone up or down? If it has gone down, then these companies are harming the country. If they can improve quality by offshoring, then so be it. That only means whatever we're doing isn't working in terms of generating quality software, and we need to fix that. But I think it is a bit more nuanced, offshoring to certain countries tends to have higher quality than others, so that should be taken into account.

My wish is that we all (not just the US) go back to the 50's and 60's space-race era mindset of competitive innovation. I think (and I hope it isn't too controversial to say) that culturally we've been abandoning nationalism and nationalistic-pride, these were the drivers back then. Whether it was Nazi germans, USSR scientists, NASA scientists, bell labs,etc.. there was a strong sense of country/nation and that our work was contributing to that, that something we're building as a collective that will be our legacy to be passed on to the next generation.

The offshoring and general enshittification culture today is not that. It's Reaganism turned pandemic. The only thing that matters it the thickness of the shareholder's wallet. What I expect from governments is to take a bi-partisan approach to this, we need some sort of nationalistic pride to get us back on track. With EU for example, I can see a sense of European identity and choesion being formed now that the US is turning more and more hostile towards the EU. In the cold-war era, we had russia to unite us. Now, we're more concerned about other americans in the US than we are about China or Russia, our sense of partisan/sub-culture identity is much stronger than the national identity, there is no expectation or pressure from the government or the public for companies to work in the best interests of the country. At best we expect them to be proxies for welfare programs.

In other words, whether it is LLMs or offshoring, we should expect them to not do that because the alternative is better. The educated workforce in the US is not looking good,it's pretty dismal. Even the population attending college has gone down dramatically. Companies like TSMC struggle big time when trying to open plants in the US because there is no talent here. From what I hear from teachers all over, the post-covid situation is very scary, it is perhaps more concerning than anything else for the future sustainability of the US as a country.

I agree that we've done a great disservice to the country by offshoring, but only in part, only in cases where the quality of the work was poor. For example,I reckon (and i could be wrong) there are more developers and with better talent per-capita (not by volume) in certain western-european countries than the US. Even in India, for a long time there was this bias that outsourced talent there is of lesser quality, but over the decades I thing things have improved - but you do get what you pay for. My point is, coupled with this sentiment should be how we've also done a great disservice to the country by screwing up education, government and a several other things. It isn't just offshoring, there is a more fundamental mindset that is corrosive and must be addressed.