🚨 JIANG: “I’ve been in China for 25 years and I can tell you that there is almost no interest for a democracy in China. For a democracy to exist in China you would need to have people who respected human rights, individual liberty, who had empathy, and who believed in the rule of law.
The reality is that in China the system is set up so that the ultimate objective is to become a bureaucrat. That’s what all Chinese people aspire to. The higher you climb the bureaucracy the better. Traditionally China has been an empire and in order to survive in an empire you become a civil servant.
That’s why Chinese work so hard in school. So they can pass the civil servant examination to become a bureaucrat so they can provide guarantees and protection to their family.”
The hidden cost of "enterprise" .NET architecture:
Debugging hell.
I've spent 13+ years in .NET codebases, and I keep seeing the same pattern:
Teams add layers upon layers, to solve the problems they don't have.
IUserService calls IUserRepository.
IUserRepository wraps IUserDataAccess.
IUserDataAccess calls IUserQueryBuilder.
IUserQueryBuilder finally hits the database.
I've seen a lot of classes having one-line methods whose sole purpose was to call the next layer and that's it.
But to change one validation rule, you step through 5 layers.
To fix a bug, you open 7 files.
The justification is always the same:
"What if we need to swap out Entity Framework?"
"What if we switch databases?"
"What if we need multiple implementations?"
What if this, what if that.
The reality:
Those "what ifs" don't come to life in 99% of cases.
I haven't worked on a project where we had to swap the ORM.
But I've seen dozens of developers waste hours navigating through abstraction mazes.
This happens with both new and experienced developers.
New developers asking on Slack all the time:
"Where to put this new piece of code?"
But senior developers are too busy to answer that message. Why? Because they are debugging through the code that has more layers than a wedding cake.
The end result?
You spend more time navigating than building.
Good abstractions hide complexity.
Bad abstractions ARE the complexity.
And most enterprise .NET apps?
Way too much of the second kind.
I'm tired of OpenClaw
Every 2-3 days I have a major moment which I show to my friends: "look what AI agents can do", but then the other 90% is pure frustration and me cursing at my own AI agent for which I spent hours choosing a beautiful name and profile picture.
I was fun at start: I added telegram, added voice input, then adding skills even with just voice prompting was a bliss.
Then dementia hit. Facts from 48+ hours ago were forgotten. I installed a 3 level memory system. It felt like a huge hack, it barely works, I encounter bugs every day which I'm fixing.
Then it breaks with every update. Not all of it, but little things.
The WhatsApp integration is just insanity. After putting in every markdown file that it shouldn't reply to my friends (IN CAPITAL LETTERS) it happily started to chat with my wife and my goddaughter.
And from today even claude subscription stops working.
I feel like a failure! I see all the success stories left and right, YT vids and blog posts "I got it to work and here's what the AI agent does for me", and for me I'm still spending 5x the time fixing my agent than just doing the stuff by hand 🤷