Even a single person can now build/maintain native apps. It's literally a day of effort for an experienced dev working with the best current models to port an app to a new native platform. Maybe another day or two to walk through wiring up all the test harnesses needed to prove the app is working well without a human having to click everything. Until recently you'd still have to spend a bunch of time on making sure the UI looked and felt right, but models now have good enough vision capabilities to where even that can mostly be automated.
And, honestly, the cost of tracking React over time has always been higher than the cost of tracking native deployment options, which move more slowly and usually with more care than React, where breaking backward compatibility is just another Tuesday. I don't think the promise of React Native being an almost-free "native" app actually pans out in reality. I've never maintained a large React Native app, but from following some apps that are, it seems like it introduces a sizable amount of technical debt that you pay over time. So, in exchange for worse software you also get worse maintenance costs.
What I've realized is that Spotify is great for discovering new songs. But I'm a grown up and listen to the same hundreds of songs every day anyway. No need to keep paying the taxes.
Almost every house in my neighborhood has 1-2 cameras pointing around their houses. When there's an issue, my neighbors share the footages with the group, and that's so useful. And I live in a very very democrat state/city.
Also, we should definitely address the privacy and access control issue with Flock. Removing the cameras isn't the right solution.
Not really a surprise given their own models are the default option? Most people wouldn't change model. And if you want to use Claude or GPT you don't really have a reason to use Cursor over Claude Code or Codex
Why do they need to pay it back? If they pay it back, then what will happen?
I'm from a developing country. My country is objectively much worse than US in every aspect. My country doesn't export anything significant. There's no innovation. insane level of corruption. Yet we don't have this issue. Nobody screams that the country will collapse.
Is this kind of doomsday thinking an American-only culture?
Not at all true for most developing countries, they borrow despite the high interest. It just means that the burden of interest payments squeeze out welfare programs, development programs, etc. Usually the IMF/World Bank step in to influence austerity measures, fiscal and monetary policy for further loans to be disbursed.
The world economy is based on the idea that America will always repay its debt. Them not paying it back will be the financial equivilent of a nuclear bomb, not just for them, but for literally everybody.
Others have spoken to why US treasuries were considered a risk free asset, what is important now is that the US Treasury's market participation has been to attempt to keep borrowing costs lower without paying down the debt (US-Japan currency bailout, treasury bond buyback). The bond market is rejecting the theatrics. Fiscal policy can change (spend less, stop issuing new debt, start paying down existing debt), or yields will continue to rise, causing a potential debt spiral (as the US will be forced to issue new debt and refinance existing debt at ever increasing interest rates). Imagine your credit card interest rate keeps increasing, while you carry a balance the size of your annual income, you keep charging on the card, and the limit is unknown.
This will flow into consumer debt markets, pushing up borrowing costs for everyone (auto loans, credit cards, mortgages, etc), as all consumer debt is priced off of "risk free" US treasury yields. This could slow the US economy further, and the economy is already at stall speed without AI investment.
Have you ever considered that part of the reason your country is like that is because of the government's poor fiscal position? If the US stops spending on science because they have to service debt, innovation might evaporate.
> But, in US, people are so alarmed about US' economy collapsing.
It's more than US Treasuries (debt) are the safe asset upon which all other assets are priced. If they go mental, then lots of assumptions break and the machines will create a financial crisis for us (humans too, but the machines will start it).
For decades, the U.S government has been spending much more than it takes in from taxes. To make up for the shortfall, it uses debt in the form of U.S. treasury bonds. They currently pay about 5% a year.
They have long been considered risk free. Boring, safe, low return investments. Companies or people who need absolutely reliability in their investments buy them - the elderly, pensions, insurance companies, banks the world over.
The U.S. has issued so many of these bonds that the total amount outstanding right now is $40T. This amount is so staggering that to simply pay that 5% in interest payments costs us more than it takes to fund our very large, expensive military.
If they don't pay it back, and declare all those bonds worthless - well all of those people who were relying on what they thought was a rock solid, safe investment go bust. Banks fail worldwide, pensions run dry, retirement funds suddenly are empty, all kinds of businesses collapse. It would make the financial crisis of 08 look like a joke, and it would be a true catastrophe.
That is almost surely not going to happen.
What could happen is that we enter a debt spiral - investors get worried we won't be able to pay it back, and view bonds as less than perfectly safe. They now want 6%. The U.S. has to pay even more in interest every year, so they issue more debt to roll it over, which makes it worse and we get to 7%, etc.
Typically in this situation, a country either quickly gets its act together and commits to reducing spending and raises taxes, or they just turn on the money printers, and use inflation to make that debt smaller in real terms. I have little faith in the U.S. to commit to fiscal austerity and expect them to try to inflate the debt away.
The question is, are we going to have another Volcker willing to raise the prime rate to 20% to counteract our useless legislative branch? Or is the idea of an independent central bank dead at this point?
I don’t think raising rates like “Tall Paul” (Volcker) did would help in this situation. We are in a bit of a pickle. Raising rates would cause the servicing costs to become enormous and would likely just result in even more debt. The alternative, lowering rates, would likely cause a massive spike in inflation. Inflation makes the debt easier to manage because it’s worth less, but then that wreaks havoc on everyone (especially folks on fixed income).
I think the only way out is to reduce military spending, nationalize the health care system, and tax the hell outta the ultra wealthy. But I suspect that won’t happen at least based on the current oligarchy running the country.
It’s really unfortunate too, because we could be taking on debt to invest in citizens like making college free, improving teacher salaries, and general infrastructure but… we ain’t.
Doing that in the middle of the AI bubble would be a huge systemic risk to the US and world economy. Expansion of the US economy is now largely driven by the colossal amount of data centers being built. No one anywhere in the world would invest in risky data centers, LLM company IPOs etc if they could get a 30y 20% bond. Financial institutions like investment banks, hedge funds rely on the AI musical chairs to justify the trillions of commitments on their balance sheets. A Volcker style rate hike would trigger a dash for the exit and cause the collapse of some of these institutions, risking a domino effect rippling through the entire economy.
Plus it'd also massively increase USG deficits since all the debt that's added and rolled over would be financed at that elevated rate. At that point, cuts would amplify the above domino effect (cf. Kalecki Levy equation) reducing tax intake, but no cuts would mean unleashing a debt spiral.
US Debt is not the same as personal debt. US Treasuries are the same as cash so it is just a measure of how much USD are in the global economy. So long as the "debt" can be serviced there is no issue.
Write once, deploy everywhere like React Native mainly benefits small teams and startups who are okay with building 90/10 solutions.
At the shopify's scale, they would want to go advance for every corner of the apps and use cases, and only native allows that.
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