David Heinemeier HanssonModify

Americans often laugh when they see how often Danes will patiently, obediently wait on the little red man to turn green before crossing an empty intersection, in the rain, even at night. Nobody is coming! Why don't you just cross?! It seems silly, but the underlying philosophy is anything but. It's load bearing for a civil society like Denmark.

Because doing the right thing every time can be put on autopilot, and when most people follow even the basic norms consistently, the second-order effects are profound. Like the fact that Copenhagen is one of the absolute safest major cities in the world.

But the Danes also know that norms fray if they're not enforced, so they vigorously pursue even small infractions. The Danish police regularly celebrating ticketing bicyclists making even minor mistakes (like driving instead of dragging their bike on the sidewalk). And the metro is constantly being patrolled for fare evaders and antisocial behavior.

It's broken windows theory on steroids. And it works.

When we were living in the city for three years following the pandemic, the most startling difference to major US cities was the prevalence of unattended children everywhere, at all hours. Our oldest was just nine years-old when he started taking the metro alone, even at night.

How many American parents would feel comfortable letting their nine-year old take the L in Chicago or the subway in Manhattan? I don't know any. And as a result, you just don't see any unattended children do this. But in Copenhagen it's completely common place.

This is the prize of having little tolerance for antisocial behavior in the public space. When you take away the freedom from crackheads and bums to smoke up on the train or sleep in the park, you grant the freedom to nine-year olds to roam the city and for families to enjoy the park at dusk.

This is the fundamental error of suicidal empathy. That tolerance of the deranged and dangerous few can be kept a separate discussion from the freedom and safety of the many. These are oppositional forces. The more antisocial behavior you excuse, the further families will retract into their protective shell. And suddenly there are no longer children around in the public city space or any appetite for public transit.

Maybe you have to become a parent to really understand this. I admit that I didn't give this nearly the same attention before coming a father of three. But the benefit isn't exclusively about the freedom and safety enjoyed by your own family, it's also about the ambient atmosphere of living in a city where children are everywhere. It's a special form of life-affirming luxury, and it's probably the thing I've missed most about Copenhagen since we went back to the US.

What's interesting is how much active effort it takes to maintain this state of affairs. The veneer of civil society is surprisingly thin. Norms fray quickly if left unguarded. And it's much harder to reestablish their purchase on society than to protect them from disappearing in the first place.

But I also get that it's hard to connect the dots from afar, though. Many liberals in America keep Denmark as some mythical place where all their policy dreams have come true, without ever wrestling much with what it takes to maintain the social trust that allows those policies to enjoy public support.

The progressive Nirvana of Denmark is built on a highly conservative set of norms and traditions. It's yin and yang. So if you're committed to those progressive outcomes in America, whether it's the paternity leave, the independent children, or the amazing public transit system, you ought to consider what conservative values it makes sense to accept as enablers rather than obstacles.

Trump is back at the helm of the United States, and the majority of Americans are optimistic about the prospect. Especially the young. In a poll by CBS News, it's the 18-29 demographic that's most excited, with a whopping two-thirds answering in the affirmative to being optimistic about the next four years under Trump. And I'm right there with them. The current American optimism is infectious!

While Trump has undoubtedly been the catalyst, this is a bigger shift than any one person. After spending so long lost in the wilderness of excessive self-criticism and self-loathing, there's finally a broad coalition of the willing working to get the mojo back.

This is what's so exhilarating about America. The big, dramatic swings. The high stakes. The long shots. And I like this country much better when it's confident in that inherent national character.

Of course all this is political. And of course Trump is triggering for many. Just like his opponent would have been if she had won. But this moment is not just political, it's beyond that. It's economic, it's entrepreneurial, it's technological. Optimism is infectious.

As someone with a foot on both the American and European continent, I can't help being jealous with my euro leg. Europe is stuck with monumental levels of pessimism at the moment, and it's really sad to see.

But my hope is that Europe, like usual, is merely a few years behind the American revival in optimism. That it's coming to the old world eventually.

This is far more an article of faith than of analysis, mind you. I can also well imagine Europe sticking with Eurocrat thinking, spinning its wheels with grand but empty proclamations, issuing scorning but impotent admonishments of America, and doubling down on the regulatory black hole.

Neither path is given. Europe was competitive with America on many economic terms as recently as 15 years ago. But Europe also lacks the ability to change course quite like the Americans. So the crystal ball is blurry.

Personally, I choose faith. Optimism must win. Pessimism is literally for losers.

For decades, the debate in Denmark around  problems with mass immigration was stuck in a self-loathing blame game of "failed integration". That somehow, if the Danes had just tried harder, been less prejudice, offered more opportunities, the many foreigners with radically different cultures would have been able to integrate successfully. If not in the first generation, then the second. For much of this time, I thought that was a reasonable thesis. But reality has proved it wrong.

If literally every country in Europe has struggled in the same ways, and for decades on end, to produce the fabled "successful integration", it's not a compelling explanation that it's just because the Danes, Swedes, Norweigans, Germans, French, Brits, or Belgians just didn't try hard enough. It's that the mission, on the grand and statistical scale, was impossible in many cases.

As Thomas Sowell tells us, this is because there are no solutions to intractable, hard problems like cultural integration between wildly different ways of living. Only trade offs. Many of which are unfavorable to all parties.

But by the same token, just because the overall project of integrating many of the most divergent cultures from mass immigrations has failed, there are many individual cases of great success. Much of the Danish press, for example, has for years propped up the hope of broad integration success by sharing hopeful, heartwarming stories of highly successful integration. And you love to see it.

Heartwarming anecdotes don't settle trade offs, though. They don't prove a solution or offer a conclusion either.

I think the conclusion at this point is clear. First, cultural integration, let alone assimilation, is incredibly difficult. The more divergent the cultures, the more difficult the integration. And for some combinations, it's outright impossible.

Second, the compromise of multiculturalism has been an abject failure in Europe. Allowing parallel cultures to underpin parallel societies is poison for the national unity and trust.

Which brings us to another bad social thesis from the last thirty-some years: That national unity, character, and belonging not only isn't important, but actively harmful. That national pride in history, traditions, and culture is primarily an engine of bigotry.

What a tragic thesis with catastrophic consequences.

But at this point, there's a lot of political capital invested into all these bad ideas. In sticking with the tired blame game. Thinking that what hasn't worked for fifty years will surely start working if we give it five more. 

Now, I actually have a nostalgic appreciation for the beautiful ideals behind such hope for humanity, but I also think that at this point it is as delusional as it is dangerous.

And I think it's directly responsible for the rise of so-called populist movements all over Europe. They're directly downstream from the original theses of success in cultural integration going through just-try-harder efforts as well as the multicultural compromise. A pair of ideas that had buy-in across much of the European board until reality simply became too intolerable for too many who had to live with the consequences.

Such widespread realization doesn't automatically correct the course of a societal ship that's been sailing in the wrong direction for decades, of course. The playbook that took DEI and wokeness to blitzkrieg success in the States, by labeling any dissent to those ideologies racist or bigoted, have also worked to hold the line on the question of mass immigration in Europe until very recently. 

But I think the line is breaking in Europe, just as it recently did in America. The old accusations have finally lost their power from years of excessive use, and suppressing the reality that many people can see with their own eyes is getting harder.

I completely understand why that makes people anxious, though. History is full of examples of combative nationalism leading us to dark edges. And, especially in Germany, I can understand the historical hesitation when there's even a hint of something that sounds like what they heard in the 30s.

But you can hold both considerations in your head at the same time without losing your wits. Mass immigration to Europe has been a failure, and the old thesis of naive hope has to get replaced by a new strategy that deals with reality. AND that not all proposed fixes by those who diagnosed the situation early are either sound or palatable.

World history is full of people who've had the correct diagnosis but a terrible prescription. And I think it's fair to say that it's not even obvious what the right prescription is at this point!

Vibrant, strong societies surely benefit from some degree of immigration. Especially from culturally-compatible regions based on national and economic benefit. But whatever the specific trade-offs taken from here, it seems clear that for much of Europe, they're going to look radically different than they've done in the past three decades or so.

Best get started then.

Mark Zuckerberg just announced a stunning pivot for Meta's approach to social media censorship. Here's what he's going to do:

This new approach is going to govern all the Meta realms, from Facebook to Threads to Instagram. Meaning it'll affect the interactions of some three billion people around the globe. In other words, this is huge.

As to be expected, many are highly skeptical of Zuckerberg's motives. And for good reason. Despite making a soaring speech to the values of free speech back in 2019, Meta, together with Twitter, became one of the primary weapons for a political censorship regime that went into overdrive during the pandemic.

Both Meta and Twitter received direct instructions from the US government, among other institutions, on what was to be considered allowable speech and what was to be banned. The specifics shifted over those awful years, but everything from questioning the origins of the Covid virus to disputing vaccine efficacy to objections on mass migration to the Hunter Biden laptop leak all qualified for heavy-handed intervention.

The primary rhetorical fig leaves for this censorship regime was "hate speech" and "misinformation". Terms that almost immediately lost all objective content, and turned into mere descriptors of "speech we don't like". Either because it was politically inconvenient or because it offended certain holy tenants of the woke religion that reigned at the time.

But that era is now over. Between Meta and X, the gravity of the global discourse has swung dramatically in favor of free expression. I suspect that YouTube and Reddit will eventually follow suit as well. But even if they don't, it won't really matter. The forbidden opinions and inconvenient information will still be able to reach a wide audience.

That's a momentous and positive moment for the world. And it's a particularly proud moment for America, since this is all downstream from the country's first amendment protection of free speech.

But it's also adding to the growing chasm between America and Europe. And the United Kingdom in particular. While America is recovering from the authoritarian grip on free speech in terms of both social media policies and broader social consequences (remember cancel culture?), the Brits are doubling down.

Any post on social media made in Britain is liable to have those cute little bobbies show up at your door with a not-so-cute warrant for your arrest. The delusional UK police commissioner is even threatening to "come after" people from around the world, if they write bad tweets.

And Europe isn't far behind. Thierry Breton, the former European Commissioner, spent much of last year threatening American tech companies, and Elon Musk in particular, with draconian sanctions, if they failed to censor on the EU's behest. He has thankfully since been dismissed, but the sentiment of censorship is alive and well in the EU.

This is why the world needs America. From the UK to the EU to Brazil, China, Russia, and Iran, political censorship is very popular. And for a couple of dark years in the US, it looked like the whole world was about to be united in an authoritarian crackdown on speech of all sorts.

But Elon countered the spell. His acquisition of Twitter and its transformation into X was the pivotal moment for both American and global free speech. And if you allow yourself to zoom out from the day-to-day antics of the meme lord at large, you should be able to see clearly how the timeline split.

I know that's hard to do for a lot of people who've traded in their Trump Derangement Syndrome diagnosis for a Musk Derangement Syndrome variety (or simply added it to their inventory of mental challenges). And I get it. It's hard to divorce principles from people! We're all liable to mix and confuse the two.

And speaking of Trump, which, to be honest, I try not to do too often, because I know how triggering he is,  credit is still due. There's no way this incredible vibe shift would have happened as quickly or as forcefully without his comeback win.

Now I doubt that any of his political opponents are going to give him any credit for this, even if they do perhaps quietly celebrate the pivot on free speech. And that's OK. I don't expect miracles, and we don't need them either. You don't need to love every champion of your principles to quietly appreciate their contributions.

Which very much reminds me of the historic lawsuit that the Jewish lawyers at the ACLU (in its former glory) fought to allow literal nazis to match in the streets of Skokie, Illinois. That case goes to the crux of free speech. That in order for you to voice your dissent on Trump or Musk or whatever, you need the protection of the first amendment to cover those who want to dissent in the opposite direction too.

That's a principle that's above the shifting winds and vibes of whoever is in power. It's entire purpose is to protect speech that's unpopular with the rulers of the moment. And as we've seen, electoral fortunes can change! It's in your own self interest to affirm a set of rules for participation in the political debate that live beyond the what's expedient for partisan success in the short term.

I for one am stoked about Meta's pivot on censorship. I've historically not exactly been Mark Zuckerberg's biggest fan, and I do think it's fair to question the authenticity of him and this move, but I'm not going to let any of that get in the way of applauding this monumental decision. The world needs America and its exceptional principles more than ever. I will cheer for Zuckerberg without reservation when he works in their service.

Now how do we get the UK and the EU to pivot as well?

Jim Carrey once said that he hoped everyone could "...get rich and famous and do everything they dreamed of so they can see that it is not the answer". And while I sorta agree, I think the opposite position also has its appeal: That believing in a material fix to the problem of existence dangles a carrot of hope that's depressing to go without.

What made me think of Carrey's quote was this tale of the startup founder behind Loom, who made out with a $60m windfall when his business was sold, and is still working his way through the existential crisis that created. It's harder than you think to suddenly have all the freedom you ever desired land in your lap. You may just realize that you don't actually know what to do with it all!

And this predicament isn't reserved for successful entrepreneurs either. You see miniature revelations of this in many stories of retirement. Workers who after a long life toiling away suddenly arrive at the promised land of unlimited time, the basics taken care of, and full freedom from all responsibilities and obligations. Some literally wither away from all that excess freedom.

One of the Danish newspapers I read recently published a series on exactly this phenomenon. Pensioners who realize that life without work can be a surprisingly difficult place to find meaning in. That being needed, being useful is far more attractive than leaning back in leisure. And, as a result, more and more senior Danes are returning to the workforce, at least part time, to reclaim some of that meaning.

I think you can even draw a connection to the stereotype of rich kids who grow up never being asked to do contribute anything, busy bossing the help around, and as a result end up floundering in a vapid realm of materialism. Condemned rather than blessed.

Yes, this all rhymes a bit with that iconic scene from The Matrix where Cypher is negotiating a return to blissful ignorance with Agent Smith: I don't want to remember nothing! Because once you know that the material carrot is just like the spoon that bends because it doesn't actually exist, you're condemned to a life of knowing that what you imagine as nirvana probably isn't.

What beautiful irony: That the prize for catching the carrot is the realization that chasing it was more fun.

The hardest part for me about collaborating with junior programmers, whether it's in open source or at work, is avoiding the premise trap. That's where the fundamental assumptions baked into the first draft of the code aren't questioned until you've already spent far too long improving the implementation. It's the same with AI.

Because AI at the moment is like a superb junior programmer. One with an encyclopedic knowledge about syntax and APIs, but also one saddled with the same propensities to produce overly-complicated, subtly-defective solutions.

You could read this as a bullish signal for the future of AI programming. That the current trajectory is tracking with the human programmer's progression tree, and that eventually, like the best juniors, it'll graduate to senior levels of competence in the fine details of code aesthetics, novel problem reasoning, and architectural coherence. I hope that's the case.

But that doesn't change the fact that, as of right now, I've yet to see any of the AI models I've been using for the past year produce great code within domains that I'm very familiar with. Occasionally there'll be a glimmer, just like with promising junior programmers, but taken as a whole, the solutions almost always need material amounts of rework.

Which is when that premise trap claps!

I've seen this repeatedly with both the Ruby and JavaScript code that comes out of the AI, so I doubt it's that particular to one language over another. But the propensity to pull in needless dependencies, the overly-verbose presentation, and the architectural dead ends are there all the time.

This is what I hear from people who are trying to use AI to write entire systems for them without actually being capable programmers themselves. That it's an incredible rush to see a prototype come to life in mere minutes, but that actually moving this forward to something that works reliably often turns into a one-step-forwards-two-steps-backwards dance. (Not unlike the many stories someone might have getting catfished by a barely qualified junior programmer on Upwork!).

While that's frustrating, it makes perfect sense when you consider the training data that has been teaching these models. The endless stream of basic online tutorials, Stack Overflow simplified answers, and the unfortunate reality that a fair chunk of internet programming content is made by the blind leading the blind.

Senior human programmers all got started on the same information diet, but eventually graduated to higher levels of understanding and mastery by working on proprietary code bases. Where all the trade-offs that are absent in tutorial-style code reveal themselves and demand to be weighed with finesse.

I think the next big leap for these models under the current paradigm probably isn't likely to happen until they're exposed to a vast corpus on proprietary, corporate code. And how that's going to happen isn't entirely clear at the moment.

So in the mean time, as a senior programmer, you'd do well to treat AI as you would a junior programmer. It's rarely going to save you time asking it to produce an entire system, or even subsystem, if you care about the final quality of the architecture or implementation. Because to verify the assumptions that have been baked into its path will require spending as much time to understand the choices as it would doing the work yourself.

I remain bullish on AI writing code for us all, but also remain realistic about its current abilities. As well as alert to the danger of luring more senior programmers, including myself, into signing off on slop, while it saps our stamina for continued learning, as we lean too much on AI writing for us rather than teaching how.

May this piece age badly within a few short years!