miguel
22.7K posts
Best headline ever! On this day in 1945 Hitler died.
In 2015, the Chinese police visited a programmer's home. They told him to stop working on his code. They told him to delete it from GitHub. He posted one final message before he obeyed: "Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this. Today they asked me to delete all the code from GitHub. I have no choice but to obey. I hope one day I'll live in a country where I have freedom to write any code I like without fearing." Then he deleted the repo. Then he deleted the message. Then something happened the Chinese government did not plan for. Within hours, the code was mirrored to thousands of other GitHub accounts. Within days, it became the #1 trending repository on GitHub globally. Within weeks, every Chinese developer who could compile code had a copy. The government tried to make it disappear. The act of trying made it permanent. The project is called Shadowsocks. The programmer's username was clowwindy. He built a tiny piece of software that let anyone in China bypass the Great Firewall and reach the open internet. No subscription. No company. No account. You set up a server somewhere outside China. You connect to it. Your traffic looks like normal encrypted web browsing, so the firewall cannot tell you are using it. Why this terrified the Chinese government in 2015: → It was open source. Anyone could compile it. → It was small. The whole protocol fit in a few hundred lines of code. → It looked like normal HTTPS traffic. The Great Firewall could not distinguish it. → It required no money. No accounts. No central server to seize. → It worked on every operating system. You cannot arrest a protocol. You can only arrest the person who wrote it. So they did. And the protocol kept spreading. shadowsocks-windows: 59,300+ stars. GPLv3. Still online 11 years later. The 2015 commits the Chinese government wanted deleted are still in the history. clowwindy was forced to walk away. The code never did. But DO NOT install it. The Great Firewall has feelings too. 100% Open Source. (Link in the comments)
Two economists just published a mathematical proof that AI will destroy the economy. Not might. Not could. Will — if nothing changes. The paper is called "The AI Layoff Trap." Published March 2, 2026. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Boston University. Peer reviewed. Mathematically modeled. The conclusion is one sentence. "At the limit, firms automate their way to boundless productivity and zero demand." An economy that produces everything. And sells it to nobody. Here is how you get there. A company fires 500 workers and replaces them with AI. A competitor fires 700 to keep up. Another fires 1,000. Every company is behaving rationally. Every company is following the incentives correctly. And every company is building a trap for itself. Because the workers who were fired were also customers. When they lose their jobs faster than the economy can absorb them, they stop spending. Consumer demand falls. Companies respond by cutting costs — which means automating more workers — which means less spending — which means more falling demand — which means more automation. The loop has no natural exit. The researchers tested every proposed solution. Universal basic income. Capital income taxes. Worker equity participation. Upskilling programs. Corporate coordination agreements. Every single one failed in the model. The only intervention that worked: a Pigouvian automation tax — a per-task levy charged every time a company replaces a human with AI, forcing them to price in the demand they are destroying before they pull the trigger. No government has implemented this. No major economy is seriously discussing it. Meanwhile the numbers are already tracking the curve. 100,000 tech workers laid off in 2025. 92,000 more in the first months of 2026. Jack Dorsey fired half of Block's workforce and said publicly: "Within the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion." Nobody is doing anything wrong. Companies are following their incentives perfectly. That is exactly the problem. Rational behavior. At scale. Simultaneously. With no mechanism to stop it. Two economists built the math. The math leads to one place. Source: Falk & Tsoukalas · Wharton School + Boston University · arxiv.org/pdf/2603.20617
