aerhardt

They should ask the Ministry of Culture here in Spain, who claims that reading is on the up and up among 14-24 year olds [1].

Nothing points to that in our abysmal PISA reading results, general educational attainment and outcomes, or anecdotal observation, but hey! At least it might be worth asking them about the surveying methodology.

[1] https://www.cultura.gob.es/ca/actualidad/2026/01/260122-baro...

Why are they not preaching for protected weights, but public, ie, under state control? What do you feel his posture will be if that is starting to be discussed?

Also, on an unrelated note, why would you have an account for 5 years and only now post your second comment? AI has been an existential threat for years, why only now?

This is a pattern I am seeing all over the place on HN in the last year in AI threads, and I have to admit that I am starting to become paranoid and my feels need some assuaging.

So this is the one, huh?

I don't think at $1,500 you're not forced to code on your own at all, in the sense of typing code. You're simply forced to not yolo-max twelve parallel agents at all times.

Classical supply and demand models do not show that increasing the price of x causes quantities to first go up then down after a certain inflection point…

You could probably make the relationship through utility rather or a proxy model (you can model anything with enough imagination in economics) but to call it “the result of” as if it is immediately related is not accurate. It is apparent at first sight when you compare the curves…

They’re possibly great at generating alpha in highly complex systems that compose LLMs with tabular machine learning and other analytical techniques at a large scale. So yea, certainly not for these users.

You could maybe somehow relate it to supply and demand dynamics, but the idea that that higher taxes can start reducing receipts after a certain point is widely credited to Laffer (although apparently there are signals of others saying similar things throughout the history of economics). The Laffer model displays an inverted U curve.

France's government expenditure is 57% of its GDP according to th OECD. It's probably an all-time record in the annals of global economic history in peacetime. It's more than the late Soviet Union spent around 1985-1990 according to the IMF / World Bank.

The 2025 deficit ran at around ~150 billion euros. The Zucman wealth tax would raise 25 billion in the most optimistic projected scenario (so, one sixth of the deficit at most). This is the very best case as projected by its proponents - there's a decent chance receipts would be significantly lower than that.

You're absolutely right that right wing parties did not, and almost certainly will not, solve any of these issues. Neither will a wealth tax. In my opinion, this is only solved in a bang.

That's how I feel about most of your writing. I click through most times when I see you either on the front page or in the comments, and I generally walk away feeling like I have food for thought, without necessarily buying everything wholesale. It's part of why I keep coming back.

My root comment simply represented my two cents about the current post. I don't think anything about the post is outrageously incorrect or anything, just somewhat confusing. You're a very prolific contributor in this community and I don't think me or anyone else that welcomes your takes expects everything you write to rock our collective socks every single time, anyway.

I like his other posts. He's bullish on AI, which is fine. I'd like to read a mix of bearish and bullish level-headed takes from people who are subject matter experts. His technical credentials are well past discussion - I love Django, and he comes across as a pretty upbeat but level-headed guy. Certainly beats radical takes in either direction from people who have no clue what they're talking about. It's just this article that I find rather confusing.

I find this analysis confusing. PMF for coding was likely reached some time last year. Profitability, which is different, we don’t know. The article kind of confuses both without making a strong economic case or using numbers in a compelling way. I don’t understand what the Uber case has to do with this either. The Uber COO clearly said that at least in terms of ROI he’s not seeing the results either.

My take is the product has been very useful for coding (PMF) for months. But it’s certainly not useful at any cost…

What they told me and I can read online is that they don’t because they can’t operate on the Austin highways. Have you read anything that’s more detailed?

I’ve just been to Austin where self-driving cars are everywhere but found to my disappointment that they can’t do trips to the airport.

To your point, knowledge work, as a whole is a much larger and complex domain than self-driving.

You’re trying to tell me, in an infinitely smug, condescending, and unnecessarily long-winded manner that you know as a clinical fact that Sam Altman is a psycopath?

For all his weirdness and moral failings, I don’t see Altman saying things like whites being under apartheid in the US. And worse. Multiple times a day. Every day.

Dario Amodei said in the most recent interview with Dwarkesh that Anthropic currently gets achieves an increase of around 20-30% coding productivity, which tracks with my experience. What do you do to reap orders of magnitude more?

Also, how much more money do you make? Or are you working less?

I've been selling and managing my own projects for over six years, so I don't count myself in the antisocial camp. But LLMs haven't changed the fact that I like to have at least five hours of deep work every day.

I hope you appreciate the irony of saying that in a thread where we are discussing that OpenAI's main competitor is engaging in blatantly anti-consumer behavior.

You're at least describing someone who sounds hard-working... what's the problem?

I'd be more concerned if I was someone who signed up to play ping pong two hours a day and do a bi-weekly commit.

There was a time not so long ago where I was watching "a day in the life of a software engineer" videos on Youtube and I was wondering if some of these were parodies. I still remember one in particular which I'm pretty sure was a parody, but it was only marginally distinguishable from the others.

They're worried about the next step, when we haven't quite digested the current step?

I'm actually surprised that at the scale that AI is being used, we haven't seen more of this - or worse.

Of course a counterfactual is needed, absent clear separation of causes and links to effects, neither of which the productivity metrics on their own establish. This is also widely known and talked about in econ circles in the face of this very data.

> "information technology" generally didn't increase productivity

Do you think it'd be viable to run most businesses on pen and paper? I'll give you email and being able to consume informational websites - rest is pen and paper.

When they decide to touch something as they go, they often don't improve it. Not what I would call "refactoring" but rather a yank of the slot machine's arm.

I'm building a website in Astro and today I've been scaffolding localization. I asked Codex 5.4 x-high to follow the official guidelines for localization and from that perspective the implementation was good. But then it decides to re-write the copy and layout of all pages. They were placeholders, but still?

Codex also has a tendency to apply unwanted styles everywhere.

I see similar tendencies in backend and data work, but I somehow find it easier to control there.

I'm pretty much all in on AI coding, but I still don't know how to give these things large units of work, and I still feel like I have to read everything but throwaway code.

No it is not, but they had a unique positioning around open-source and the parent commenter means that they are losing it.

Specialization works by vertical or by function. Or you can actually mix them if your TAM remains large enough.

Yes, the parent was referring to technical specialization. But my point is either works. Especially in the context of what OP is trying to do which is "automation" - technically very broad.

I've tried reading this and I can't. It's not that the text is AI generated, it's that the whole structure seems to be. (Hope you appreciate the irony of my LLMisms). It's not human-parseable, at least not by this human. And it's not that my attention is shot, luckily I'm still able to read copious amounts of long-form text and analysis.

Also, opening with "I'm a top performer"... That's not how writing for other humans works. It's perfectly legitimate to establish authority in the opening a piece, but you have to show some credible proof. "I'm a top performer" is immediately off-putting.

I've drifted across projects in different industries (FMCG, investment funds, ad agencies, startups of various sorts) and like I said I had a long project (over two years) for an executive search firm and got to see the ins and outs of how everything works from strategy to technology. I could be drifting to find clients in yet another vertical but I've decided to stay put for at least a few years. So to answer your question, in my particular case: I drifted, stumbled upon something by chance, and then took a conscious decision to stay.

> Become an expert in 1 thing

I endorse this. I've been doing generalist consulting for about six years, and I love flying solo. I've been successful in landing some big customers and interesting projects, but I'm tired of the inefficiency that comes with being a generalist, so I've decided to specialize vertically.

I had a super-interesting project in executive search in the last couple years, and I've decided to settle around that area: executive search and recruitment firms. Maybe later, as an extension I'll target other B2B, relationship-driven professional service firms tha share a common core of processes.

I've only recently pivoted but I'm already starting to see the fruits. It's commercially efficient. Many potential customers seem happy to open the door and chat. I know where to find them, online and off. And then it's operationally efficient. I'm confident I could jump on a customer project and recognize most of their processes and systems immediately and have a quick impact. I already have a base of IP (documented business procedures, code, etc.) and only intend to grow it in the coming years and even turn it into a "productized service".

I think people refuse to specialize for three main reasons. The first is for lack of a clear thesis. That's fine, you need to explore for a bit. The second is for a fear of lack of opportunities, which is often unfounded. The third is due to psychological reasons related to the image of self. On this last one I can only advise that (a) even in specialization there is way more variety than you think, (b) you can always keep growing as a generalist with side projects and self-directed learning and (c) nothing is ever fixed in stone, everything is in flow - you can always pivot out into other interesting directions.