locallost

So how many puts did you buy?

I think it's really interesting how these areas are merging, and I'm not sure who goes. Designers or "coders". Probably both depending on the context. The expectations though from every field seems to be that they'll be the last man standing. My best guess is, management has the worst cards.

I am 100% in agreement that companies that try to shut down access to agents will be replaced. It's just the future for a lot of work and workflows. In a way it's an opportunity for someone.

The world always had problems. It's like software, the work is never done. Sometimes new times ask for new solutions, and people need to find them. Adapt or die.

I do think though it's a little dishonest to be this alarmed now just because the crisis is at your doorstep. There is continuous misery all around the globe which everyone should acknowledge. The wars in the middle east brought destruction for generation and for entire regions. I am not sure those people are worried about the interest rates in Japan as much as they are about surviving. Including the current war. Think about Iran and its government what you will, but when a school gets bombed, innocent children die. I am not sure I find this less concerning than the state of natural gas capacity in Germany. And I live in Germany.

As for the energy crisis, the solution is in front of us. If you don't want to depend on foreign fossil fuels start electrifying and switching to renewables and batteries. You can do it cheap and fast. In fact, this is already happening in parts of the world and they are much more shielded from the current issues than elsewhere.

That the name in no slop backwards is too wild to be real, but it's a real person.

I mean it's everywhere now. I complained already at my workplace multiple times, we get huge Claude generated documents, which people then ask Claude to summarize. I don't mind some of it in principle but people are too lazy now to input all the details so you get a bunch of fantasies that were explicitly ruled out already. It's tiring.

It's possibly too harsh because people that hang around here might be those engineers that actually exist. Although I am not sure those would be downvoting. But I've seen a lot of "senior software engineers" that do not understand the basics of the programming language they use every day. This sadly is really not a hyperbole. So the term is a lot of time just brand inflation and wishful thinking.

I'd chip in around $50 for a piece of the settlement :-).

Yes, you are entitled. This has been a big point of contention in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. A lot of the property was nationalized, their former owners defected, and then the heirs came back decades later requesting their property back. In some cases where there was a house, there was now a 15-story building.

Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi

I am aware of the story and the theory behind it, I just don't agree. There is always something to do, and if you have a tightly run competent group, things go smoothly only because the team has a routine built on experience. If you throw a wrench in that and have someone waste time fiddling with m&Ms it will make the other important things worse. For me, asking for something like that and actually getting it would be more terrifying because it would be an indication that you're dealing with amateurs that don't have a routine and no experience. And also like I said, people pleasers that prioritize satisfying important people's whims instead of providing quality work. It's just been my experience those two don't really mix well, you either strive to be skilled at what you do and progress in your career, or you strive to make someone happy, and progress in your career. Think of the Volkswagen engineer that implemented the exhaust gas test cheating device. I expect qualified people to question nonsense, and to disagree. Skilled people are not McDonald's employees flipping a burger after the instructed 90 seconds or whatever. If you run your organization or team rewarding lemming like behavior, just following along with everything everyone else is doing, you will get a team full of lemmings. There's no way around that. How much you can accomplish with that depends on the task. For McDonald's it's fine, but then again it's a shitty product.

We can of course disagree, there's no harm in that.

I literally thought of brown m&ms when I read your first sentence and have to say this way of thinking has to be some kind of mega baloney, no offense. I would be more concerned if someone actually spent time sorting brown m&ms because it means I'm dealing with people pleasers that waste time on nonsense, thus not having time for more important things.

As for the design details, the proof is in the pudding. If they sold well then the person with this idea understood the vapidness of his customers to the point of contempt. But I am reminded of how things like design evolve from being there to solve a problem to over time becoming the problem itself that needs solving and the actual focus. But I don't think this is a good way to deal with things.

Creatine is one of the few if not the only supplements we actually know work. But with that said, my experience is that the bump is there but not world changing. Although it could be placebo, I don't think so because the first time I started taking it I noticed something but didn't make the connection because I noticed it playing basketball and not as much lifting. I could just sprint a lot easier. I recently started taking it again and again I noticed I can sprint easier and not be as spent. Of course you can improve by simply working out regularly, but IMHO the bump you get is obvious.

I can agree with that, but even with this perspective you should be critical of parts of Buffett's position since he basically advocates never investing into such companies because you can't predict the winner.

I literally said in my first sentence that the fact he's a billionaire advocating for paying taxes makes him praise worthy and more important than any criticism you might think of. I do think there is a lot to admire and I've used some good advice he's given (not to me personally).

I just think it's interesting that the people who should be criticizing him are actually other capitalists. Because real meaningful economic progress comes from investing in new groundbreaking things, not getting a good return on insurance float or See's Candies. That is all. He says he won't invest in cars, but also that it was obvious it was a machine that would change the world. Coca Cola is another big home run of his, yet a company who's contribution to society is probably overall negative. Etc. That I admire some things or a lot of things even does not mean I idolize anyone.

What do you mean it's the only one known? It got the name because locals called it that way. Locals will not call things they don't normally see.

There are some things to like. Despite being so wealthy, he advocated for higher taxes on the wealthy. I think that in itself is worthy of praise and worthy of ignoring anything else. The fact he distanced himself from Gates because of the Epstein connection. In addition I get the general feeling amassing wealth was more of a game to him. Obviously he did not use it that much or even abuse it. Still, I do think the way he made money was investing in a lot of basically monopolies where it's questionable if that's really doing a service to society. There's nothing wrong with it per se, but I don't think that it's very beneficial to really anyone except himself. If you are a big believer in the free market economy and investment (which I am not), you might also disagree with his views. For instance, he was always very openly critical about investments like cars etc. because you can't pick the winner out of the thousands of entrants into this invention. This makes a lot of sense if you want to grow your wealth. But if you think about it, if everyone did that, there would be no car and ultimately nothing else, and so even his returns would be much smaller because the economy would be much smaller. That people rush in to create a booming market where a lot of wealth is ultimately squandered is a prerequisite to progress. In a capitalist world at least.

For a billionaire, it's probably the most we can except from anyone really.

It makes sense because anyone with experience, ability, and noble goals will give up before they start because it is too difficult. Linus Torvalds said he wouldn't have started Linux if he'd know how difficult it would be (paraphrasing here). So we are left with either people with noble goals, but either no experience or ability, or people with ability and experience, but without noble goals (what we have currently in the US).

But let's not despair. We are better off than centuries ago. The consciousness that people are not there to be ruled does not happen over night. Our civilization is just getting started. A republic if you can keep it.

I can understand your sentiment, but you're wrong. You don't vote against someone, you vote for someone. Nothing else works. I also disagree with the vibes characterization. Looked at the extreme, almost noone in the western world should complain about anything -- the standard of living is so much higher. But that's not how it feels like because you compare yourself to your environment. The voters in the US had a lot to complain about.

Difficult to have it be the same factor considering the majority of Nike production is in Vietnam, and the majority of the Chinese manufacturing is in China. But even if yes those are still not the same shoes.

The direct to consumer pivot is often mentioned, but this is probably something that just accelerated their demise. The bigger problem right now for the turnaround is the competition. A lot of Chinese brands even dominate some spaces like basketball in the last years, and they are still difficult to get in Europe where I live, but they are making a push. Once that happens, I am not sure what Nike is going to do. Quality wise pretty much every review puts shoes from Li-Ning and 361 as the best of the best. And they're not cheap either.

In a lot of ways they remind me of Intel, and I'm not sure there will be a shoe center buildout bubble around to save them.

Next up, designing an even higher level language which will be used by LLMs to compile to high level languages like kotlin or swift. Just store instructions for LLMs in repos.

I mean when I say I talk to them, I don't mean I go to AfD gatherings, you cannot discuss with these people. But I do go to e.g. play sports with some older guys in their 50s and hear what they have to say. And the way I know a lot of them vote AfD is because they never talk about AfD, which is the polar opposite of everyone else around me. Plus the complaining about the Green Party. And btw I am not German and we have zero issues with each other. So I think the reason for a large part of the people voting like this is more nuanced than a simple Nazis and Xenophobes label. Sure a lot of them yes, but I think the regular people that got duped have their reasons. Everyone has certain tendencies and why you get pulled in one direction is an interesting thing to figure out. The problem of why needs to be understood before it can be solved. My opinion I can repeat: it's fear magnified and manipulated by social media, as well as especially in the east a lack of identity and pride. A lot of good people left for somewhere else because the money was better. There are less populated areas where I've been to hike and you ask the locals on the street about a place to eat and they say just "there hasn't been anything here in a long time". And there's some genuine resent in those words. Those places are like 50+ percent AfD.

Burden of the unification, where the eastern states are still lagging in many areas, got the ball rolling. Pent up dissatisfaction. Eventually it rolled over to the rest of the country with COVID, stagnant economy, social media FUD etc. A lot of the same forces that drove Trump's election. People are afraid and dissatisfied, but they cannot really say why. I know, I try to listen to them. "Our educational system is falling apart". I have two kids in school, the opportunities they get are awesome compared to what I had.

It's difficult to convince people in an idea if your goals are noble. If they are not, it's a lot simpler. The basic fear is that they will lose what they have right now and are easily manipulated into magnifying those fears.

The thing with bubbles is that this is a near permanent state. I heard as far as 2017 that there is a bubble and, well if the bubble popped now the economy would tank to a level a lot higher than it was 2017.

The more interesting thing is the needle and if the bubble will run into one.

The economy exist for the people, not the other way around. If too many people can't get something as fundamental as a family that will guarantee long term survival of mankind, the economy needs to adapt, not the people.

Thank you. It's difficult to call Zitron right or wrong because he is merely grabbing the attention and clicks of AI sceptics and people afraid of any change. Patrick Boyle is another example with his constant stream of everything is broken videos, from AI to EVs.

I am not all in on AI, but the discussion requires nuance. Zitron does not have it because he is interested in attention and not discussion. The article deconstructs his antics really well. So again thank you. I really appreciated this part

> To make the case that these things are dying, he pulls on minor issues that are not positioned to cause the very large changes he suggests are about to occur. For Meta, he cited some kind of alleged MAU drop for Facebook. Rather than use Meta's own MAU figures or any kind of revenue or profit numbers, he seems to have used numbers from Similarweb. My experience with 3rd party tracking numbers like this is that they're quite inaccurate and generally useless for anything other than a rough order of magnitude comparison, making the Zitron's cited decline meaningless. FB stopped reporting MAU publicly in December 2023, but most estimates have FB MAU increasing over time and the numbers Meta does report show generally increasing usage over time for their products; Zitron cherry-picked an outlier low estimate to make his point.

Yes he is a classic cherry picker.

What a weird comment. A lot of people posting their use case for them, personally never fell from them, and in the end don't get that about maintaining hydraulic disc brakes. There is literally nothing to maintain except rarely just replacing the pads or the discs.

Absolutely unnecessary simple minded low effort insult.

Probably not. But it's not the first time the grass is no longer green in August. The only thing I said really.

I agree with that, but was specifically referring to the description of everything being very dry in that area. I noticed this already 15 years ago, the area around Budapest was much more yellow and dry compared to countries up north.

But yes, the intensity and especially the duration of the heat has intensified. I stopped visiting my family in the south of Europe around five years ago, and visit in either fall or spring. Can't really take the heat, it's not worth it.

To be honest, it's not unusual for that part of the Europe to be pretty yellow in August. I was taking train rides to Budapest regularly between 2010-2020. But it's getting worse for sure.

Yes, this is pretty standard for business accounts.