Seems likely that Takaichi has given Taiwan a Japanese security guarantee. [1] This may be a quid pro quo.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/p-4nFgs9fRE

She didn't give a security guarantee. And even if she wanted she can't.

Japan can't even sell arms to Taiwan right now. Even starting selling arms would be a huge change, let alone a mutual defensive pact.

It's extremely hard to change the constitution of Japan. It's the only constitution that has never been revised since WWII. LDP has been pushing this agenda for decades and nothing really happened.

Japan's foreign policy about Taiwan includes the notion that an attack on Taiwan is an "existential threat" to Japan, enabling a constitutional reasonning for a war in such a case.

> It's extremely hard to change the constitution of Japan.

It’s easy to ignore or work around it though, just like it routinely happens for every other constitution in the world.

She just won a super majority in their legislature, she can even amend the constitution now.

No, she can't.

The process to amend the constitution of Japan [0]:

1. two thirds of the house

2. two thirds of the senate

3. referendum

LDP just won the house. IF all LDP house representatives agreed with Takaichi then she could pass the first stage. Only two left!

[0]: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E5%9B%BD%E6...

Can she? As far as I've understood it, the LDP isn't a particularly united party.

Japan giving a security guarantee to Taiwan would be major news!

In reality no such thing happened and one YouTube video of a handful of protestors doesn’t make it so.

What she did say is that a Chinese attack on Taiwan _could_ clearly become an existential threat to Japan. Note that key word _could_

Which… of course it could!

Japan hosts multiple US military bases. If it developed into an armed conflict between the US and China then it’s exceedingly likely that Japan would be attacked. Think Chinese missiles aimed At Yokosuka, just south of Tokyo.

Not only that but Japan and China have multiple territorial disputes. It’s not hard to imagine China deciding to go all in and settle those as well.

Despite what Takaichi says, if there is a war in Taiwan, Japan can only defend itself and it's interests in its sovereign territory. Japan's pacifist constitution only allows defense, even building an aircraft carrier was very controversial because it's considered to be too offensive. It's highly unlikely that Japan will actively help Taiwan defend itself

Laws and rules can be changed.

Or defending taiwan can be PR'd into a self-defending message.

> Japan's pacifist constitution only allows defense

She just won a super majority in the legislature that allows her to change the constitution.

My guess: Japan deletes the pacifist promises in its constitution, fully rearms, announces nuclear weapons capability (or does an Israel and ‘refuses to confirm or deny’), and signs a mutual defense pact with Taiwan.

The weapons are sent on the basis that more expensive the PRC anticipates an invasion of of Taiwan to be, the less likely it is to invade.

I'm sure astroturfers value it more highly than that.

The only way for you to be sure of that is if you're one.

I'm sure there's literature out there on how much astroturfers are paid.

> because crypto brings money so close to engineering it corrupts good product design.

Amen.

Did you experiment with getting an AI to critique incoming PRs, and ignoring ones where it finds clear red flags?

Where are you getting the 10kloc threshold from? Nice round number...

Surely it depends on the design. If you have 10 10kloc modular modules with good abstractions, and then a 10k shell gluing them together, you could build much bigger things, no?

Presumably, organizations selling agentic coding APIs pay marketing people whose job is to boost this kind of article.

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

...And it will be, now that Apple has partnered with OpenAI. The foundation of OpenClaw is capable models.

> What is the logic here? Because if you can read code, I can’t imagine poking the result with black box testing being faster.

It's producing seemingly working code faster than you can closely review it.

Your car can also move faster than what you can safely control. Knowing this, why go pedal to the metal?

Are you planning to open-source it?