jimberlage

If we're serious about AI taking over jobs, we'll probably need to get more comfortable with any kind of undirected work-for-its-own-sake, not less.

On a long enough timescale, things with a small chance of occurring become a virtual certainty. This includes the best of the human experience and the worst, which can get pretty dark.

Why do people want to live forever?

Even introverts need social connection (perhaps more so) - research here [1]. Introverts are people who feel they have used energy when interacting socially, rather than gaining energy from social interaction. It's not shyness or anti-social traits.

It will feel like more of a chore for introverts, but it's like a chore you need to do even if it feels bad in the moment, like doing laundry or exercising.

And worse for introverts - people who never invite other people eventually stop getting invited themselves, so to maintain social connection requires introverts to sometimes be the driver of the event.

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10328046/

This is probably not the primary way people use the tool, but if I log in (desktop, Chrome on macOS), click "Start a board" on the sidebar, and go to click any of the inputs, I can't type text in them (the inputs are "Start from an example", "What are you building", and "The brief".

Am I understanding this right by thinking - if I was walking toward the black hole past the event horizon, and then I turned around, I would still be walking toward the black hole?

Why were pharmacies viable before? Presumably they didn't lose money for their whole history.

The federal government could potentially oversee the most populous areas of the state and those near a military installation pretty easily. They don’t have to look at every one.

AI is great at reading, so give it things to read. Claude will try to throw big markdown docs in your repo, but you don't have to do that. Make it keep docs by the code.

I include a line in AGENTS.md that says "We *always* add docstrings to methods, classes, structs, and namespaces - there should be 100% coverage of docstrings."

It will make better choices about what functions to make or remove if you force it to justify why the function exists.

And when you have to go back and understand, it becomes easier.

You have to make or use just enough productivity tools not to fall behind, but otherwise it's a trap.

I used to check once a quarter. With AI, I devote 1-2 days a week to the meta-task of improving my tooling, but I'm sure that will fade once AI tooling becomes more standardized.

It's not worth being one of those guys who gets too into the tools, because it can keep you from the actual valuable work. Plus, you are then judged not as a regular engineer, but as a person who is supposed to have some secret productivity sauce, and when people see that it doesn't make more of a difference they can start to discount your opinion.

I first learned about endless scroll in a Ruby on Rails meetup, where the presenter was showing how to craft snippets of HTML with ERB and using a bit of JS to insert them below the existing entries. It's definitely possible.

Maintaining a code path with a snippet for each possible viewing experience, back when REST was all the rage, was a bit obnoxious though.

True (I certainly don't!) but I chose it because I had to do some research a while back and that was close to the average for Americans.

[1]: https://qz.com/average-car-payment-by-state#average-car-paym... [2]: https://www.lendingtree.com/auto/debt-statistics/

I think the problem with getting this done in the US is the lack of public transit and the dysfunction in public schools.

If you could avoid a $700 car payment and still get to school/job/grocery store on time, a lot of Americans would.

But if you can't, and you are paying $700 anyways, why not at least use the fact that you're paying $700/month to travel anywhere and get a bigger parcel of land all to yourself? There's a big incentive to have single-family homes for rent as long as that math is true.

And if you can live in a dense area and get around OK, but paying $700/month saves you from $800/month in private school payments, then the math might still make renting SFH better even if the transit is there.

A counterpoint is that a huge number of suburban Americans already have experience with a condo association through being in an HOA.

Rural homeowners and people with single family homes in streetcar suburbs or cities don't, but most new developments already have an organization with dues for shared maintenance.

Most people don't see that as viable because American cities don't have the public transit needed to make that viable, and equally important, don't have condos built that are the size of a family home. And there's a big push among suburban parents to judge their kids for living in cities, even if they're not as dangerous as the parents think.

If we modeled Spain, we could have more condos. That would require good, safe transit, condos with green space and multiple rooms at a SFH price point, and a cultural change among the older generation to view cities as having less crime.

I can understand why this might make for a bad benchmark, but

Overly strict tests enforce specific implementation details not specified in the prompt, invalidating many functionally correct submissions.

Underspecified prompts omit requirements that hidden tests enforce and that are not reasonably inferable.

Low-coverage tests under check the requested feature, so incomplete fixes can pass.

A misleading prompt points models toward the wrong behavior or contradicts what tests require.

If the goal is, "how does my model compare to real SWEs", these are pretty reasonable situations that your model will have to encounter. It's a little like making a nursing exam and then flagging that some of the tests required you to ask the attending doctor for additional information that's not in the chart, or that the patient's family didn't fully explain their aging grandma's medical history.

I can understand why they might want a tighter benchmark, but if you're OpenAI and you promised your model as a replacement for real workers, this isn't the best look. It seems like you would want to test these things.

You can be correct, but on different axis.

You can be correct that your method makes code more DRY, and miss the point that the other person believes that things are going to diverge significantly over time and doesn’t value DRY.

You can be correct that your method is more resilient to failure, and miss that the other person believes that some level of failure is OK and wants an option that is less technically complex.

I’ve seen people get upset that they were correct and yet the room shifted against them. Most times, it seems like they are correct. But they are correct on a narrow axis, that misses the motivations of the other people in the room.

This is part of the reason high level account reps focus on the mix and viewpoints of people in the room over technical specs. Get the lay of the land first, and then you can tailor your pitch to be correct in the way that the audience will be receptive to.

I would love to have a unicode character for representing the start/end of a data block so that LLMs could at least send data meant to be uncorrupted down a different path at tokenization.

Managers will document for employees. That’s maybe the better comparison.

Plague, Inc (an iOS game where you control the parameters of a pandemic and try to get a 100% infection rate) will give you a really good feel for the math behind this.

The most successful strategy is to make a virus that spreads fast, with few visible symptoms until the late stages of the disease. A deadly virus, early will just cause borders to be locked and the international research community to swarm on a cure.

Yeah this was me. I just got a message that I hit my limit and now I am looking into what it takes to run Qwen on local hardware.

I don't think this was the British. (Not to apologize for them - they certainly made things worse, not better.) Sudan sits on a historical chattel slavery route that stretches back to Roman times. It's hallmarked by the Northern population raiding the south, along racial lines.

Scholarly article for reference if you want to learn more: https://www.jstor.org/stable/827888

Assuming that all homes are at equal risk of being burglarized. In practice the neighborhoods I’ve seen are either at much higher risk or much lower risk.

William Shatner has the most experimental, wild Spotify I've ever seen. If you haven't ever seen it, look at his discography. He does a lot of almost spoken-word poetry over soft rock, punk, etc. You get the sense that he views acting as his side hustle and is waiting for his musical career to take off.

And from the comments below, sounds like they might be aggressively crawling still, but unidentified or with a different crawler identity. So perhaps they are hoovering up everything in the AI era.

I remember back in the day, when SEO was a more viable channel, being surprised at how much of the game was convincing Google to crawl you at all.

I naively assumed that they would be happy to take in any and all data, but they had a fairly sophisticated algorithm for deciding "we've seen enough, we know what the next page in the sequence is going to look like." They value their bandwidth.

It led to a lot of gaming of how you optimally split content across high-value pages for search terms (the 5 most relevant reviews should go on pages targeting the New York metro, the next 5 most relevant for LA, etc.)

I'm surprised again, honestly. I kind of assumed the AI race meant that Google would go back to hoovering all data at the cost of extra bandwidth, but my assumption clearly doesn't hold. I can't believe I knew all that about Google and still made the same assumption twice.

So half the population would benefit? Half the population is more than enough reason to do all that and more.

The tooling around static types is worlds better than any tooling around spec - it's not like working with a static typing system, unfortunately.

Nice! If you blog at all your perspective would be super interesting to hear.

Every article like this I scan to see if the author had previous C++ experience. And every article, they do.

I will be very impressed and curious if I find a glowing article about C++ from someone who didn’t grow up knowing it as a smaller, simpler language.

The C++ community needs enthusiastic converts who didn’t do it back in the 2000s if it’s going to stay relevant.

Thanks for adding this - I feel like people who can't understand why populism is at it's peak misunderstand this.

Walmart is a U.S. company that historically did well, but I don't see why anyone would care unless you buy their stock or live in Bentonville.

People don't care about macro indicators that lump the 1% and the 99% together.