Thanks, Amazon. Canceled my Prime.
1,298 karma · joined February 4, 2023
- DHHB / Uvinul A Plus
- EHT / Uvinul T150
- MBBT / Tinosorb M
- Iscotrizinol / Uvasorb HEB
- Drometrizole trisiloxane - Mexoryl XL
- Methoxypropylamino cyclohexenylidene ethoxyethylcyanoacetate - Mexoryl 400
- Polysilicone-15 - Parsol SLX
- Disodium phenyl dibenzimidazole tetrasulfonate - Neo Heliopan AP
- Tris-biphenyl triazine - Tinosorb A2B
- Phenylene bis-diphenyltriazine - TriAsorB
- Diethylhexyl syringylidene malonate (photostabilizer)
If you live in the US, you are quite literally taking a risk with your health using US-made sunscreens. Luckily brands like Beauty of Joseon (Korean) and many others are readily available through sites like Yamibuy.
Outside of the US, London (+5.4% annual growth in 2026) is probably the biggest concentration, with high quality inexpensive talent available from universities both within London (ICL, UCL, King's etc.) and from the nearby Oxford and Cambridge universities. Much of that talent used to flow to the US, but given the current administration and restrictions on H-1B, may now be more likely to stay in the UK.
Singapore (+26.7%) is growing very fast and is now in the top 10.
Source: https://www.startupblink.com/blog/best-cities-for-startups-a...
Why do people still want to build businesses in the US or in Silicon Valley? California taxes are already punishingly high, especially after recent rate increases and the 2017 cap on SALT deductions. And now we have a Machiavellian, authoritarian, fascist, tech-illiterate administration interfering with the operation of free markets.
I'm speaking rhetorically, of course. I know Silicon Valley still has the densest concentration of talent and venture capital. The network effects are real. But it is long past time for that to change. I hope entrepreneurs around the the world see this and think twice before moving to the US or starting a business there.
Perhaps they will. I used to work in Silicon Valley and was very much in demand. Now I run my own business from a tax-free state, and my income is high enough that moving back to California would impose a huge financial penalty. I am originally from Europe, and California's marginal tax rate is now so high that I would pay less tax back home. When I moved to the US, the opposite was true.
I'm sure I'm not the only one doing that calculation.
Why do people still want to build businesses in the US or in Silicon Valley? California taxes are already punishingly high, especially after recent rate increases and the 2017 cap on SALT deductions. And now we have a Machiavellian, authoritarian, fascist, tech-illiterate administration interfering with the operation of free markets.
I'm speaking rhetorically, of course. I know Silicon Valley still has the densest concentration of talent and venture capital. The network effects are real. But it is long past time for that to change. I hope entrepreneurs around the the world see this and think twice before moving to the US or starting a business there.
Perhaps they will. I used to work in Silicon Valley and was very much in demand. Now I run my own business from a tax-free state, and my income is high enough that moving back to California would impose a huge financial penalty. I am originally from Europe, and California's marginal tax rate is now so high that I would pay less tax back home. When I moved to the US, the opposite was true.
I'm sure I'm not the only one doing that calculation.
Did Anthropic and/or OpenAI deliberately train their models to produce websites with a specific design language, or did these stylistic preferences emerge naturally as some kind of LLM-selected optimum?
Rewriting Bun with dynamic workflows
An example of what dynamic workflows can unlock at scale is the recent rewrite of Bun. Jarred Sumner used dynamic workflows to port Bun from Zig to Rust with 99.8% of the existing test suite passing, roughly 750,000 lines of Rust, and eleven days from first commit to merge. One workflow mapped the right Rust lifetime for every struct field in the Zig codebase. The next wrote every .rs file as a behavior-identical port of its .zig counterpart, hundreds of agents working in parallel with two reviewers on each file. A fix loop then drove the build and test suite until both ran clean. After the port landed, an overnight workflow addressed unnecessary data copies and opened a PR for each for final review. While not yet in production, all of this was handled by dynamic workflows. Jarred will be writing about this more in the future.
Bear in mind, it's 1.3% on top of the existing ~1.8% average NYC property tax rate, so it may still be comparatively expensive relative to TX property taxes.
Very interesting to know. Many readers may not be aware that council tax in the UK is quite regressive and tops out at ~£4-5K / year on properties valued higher than ~£1M. So you can own a £5M GBP house and still pay only £5K / year for an annual effective property tax rate of just 0.1%.
This is one of the reasons buying a luxury house in the UK is comparatively quite cheap in terms of total cost of ownership compared to many states in the US where you have to pay much higher property tax rates, insurance, and so on.
So even if the council tax is doubled on a second home, you still might be paying only 0.2%. Compare that to an average property tax rate of ~1.8% in NYC (before pied-a-terre).
Because the supply of land is relatively inelastic (and to some extent building materials and construction labor). There isn't suddenly 10x more land on the planet because we all start using AI. Maybe we can make more land or build taller buildings, but it gets progressively more difficult and expensive. And because of NIMBY of course.
It's a free market - if you can find someone willing to hire you to work 0.5 days a week, and are happy receiving the same income you do today, you can do so.
But your living standards won't improve, while everyone else's will, and by 10x.
And the people you are competing with to buy housing, a car, consumer goods, healthcare, food, and everything else - people who want to work 5 days a week - will have 10x more money than you. Resources like housing, which are supply constrained, will seem to go up dramatically in price relative to your income, and you'll be living in a slum.
Does that still sound like a good idea?
1. Competitive market dynamics. If you only work four days a week, other employees and companies who are willing to work five days a week will do so and get ahead of you, and you are more likely to get fired or to go out of business. This force pushes us all to work longer (and harder) so we have more money to enjoy in our leisure time.
2. A society's willingness to sacrifice days of leisure for days of work. There are only seven days in a week. The tradeoff between work and leisure - production and consumption - is ultimately what determines how hard we all work. This force pushes us all to work less so we have more time to spend our money.
Economists think on the margin. It's easy to demonstrate these two principles to yourself by thinking through worked examples from different starting points.
Whether the equilibrium lands at 2 days of work to 5 days of leisure, or 5 days of work to 2 days of leisure, depends on our collective preferences, which vary between countries and cultures but have tended to be relatively durable over time.
No technology so far has shifted this balance much - not the steam engine, the industrial revolution, the invention of the personal computer, the internet - and there's no reason to believe "AI" will be any different.
The logical conclusion of this is that - assuming we're all 10x more productive - we'll still be working 5 days and enjoying 2 days a week, but we'll consume 10x more, or everything we consume will be 10x higher quality. Hardly a bad thing.
Yes, and this is what I mean by "which context the prompt runs in". The subagent approach is different and has pros and cons, and it may in some situations be better (but perhaps not in others). On the other hand, I can also just create a new conversation and paste my own review prompt into it; then take the last turn's summary output and feed it back into my main conversation thread in the unusual event I would need to do so. Spawning a subagent is a convenient shortcut for this, but ultimately, it's the same thing.
> I think the intent behind 'install a language server plugin' is that these tools should lint automatically after every edit, without waiting for an explicit call from the LLM.
This is a great point and I had only checked my session logs for explicit tool calls. I went back and looked for diagnostics injected automatically by the harness after every edit, and whether the agent made use of them.
Claude: neither the Rust or Dart LSPs ever inserted any diagnostic events, but Ty did. Across 627 sessions, ty-lsp injected diagnostics blocks in 186 sessions, with a total of 33 findings. Out of those 33, 32 were dismissed as unrelated (13) or pre-existing (19). Only 1 finding was acted upon. The model is in the habit of running the batch analysis tools (ruff, ty, cargo clippy etc.) and prek anyway, so it would have caught that diagnostic regardless.
Codex: no diagnostic events were inserted by any of the LSPs.
So I won't be reinstalling those LSPs.
I find the mix between slash commands that are programmatic harness configuration and control commands (/config, /model, /feedback, /fork, /usage, etc.) and ones that are little more than prompt template insertion (/code-review, /<skill>, etc.) to be a little confusing and unnecessary. A slash command should be one thing, and one thing only: a command for the harness, not the agent.
When I invoke a slash command like /code-review, I should be invoking some additional harness functionality, something above and beyond the agent's sphere of influence - not just pasting some hidden text into the next turn. Otherwise, why wouldn't I just say "Claude, review this code"?
Yet most of these "added value" commands bloating the slash command list, are just shortcuts for copy and paste. I don't want to go to have to learn the syntax of a special /code-review command (which options are positional args, which are --flags, etc.), and I'm much less likely to use or even be aware of a command like this, when I can just ask "Do a balanced code review and fix the issues", or use the GUI to set the effort level to xhigh before asking "Review my code." That way I can also be more specific about exactly what I need, rather than relying on what's in the canned prompt - a prompt which I'll probably never read and vet myself anyway. The value added by the slash command needs to be really high compared to just typing a prompt, for it to justify the friction of discovery and learning the syntax.
So I suppose I'm advocating for a different system. Keep slash commands for meta-level harness control and configuration, and add a new mechanism for canned prompt insertion, one which is tailor made for that purpose rather than overloading the slash command system. Let the user see what's in the canned prompts, and even make adjustments or edits as needed before sending them, one-time or persisted. Provide a GUI in the app with the user's favorite prompts, where the user can add, delete, and edit them, making it easy to invoke and insert them as needed. Or let the agent automatically discover and use them as needed, rather than requiring the user to remember and recall their magic shortcuts and their arguments. That's just one idea.
Skills, plugins, commands, and so on, need to be consolidated not just for code review of course but across the full architecture of how prompt templates are managed.
- Write a .claude/commands/review.md. Simple but deprecated.
- Use a /code-review skill, either one you install or one you just write yourself (it's just Markdown, after all).
- Use the /pr-review subagent. Also just Markdown, but it runs "in the background" and "in parallel", so it must be better, I guess.
- Install the /code-review plugin. This just installs the skills and subagents above.
- Simply ask Claude to review the code. Probably works almost as well as the above in most situations.
They are all just variations of "insert a canned prompt", varying only along the dimensions of (a) how and where the prompt is installed and from where it is sourced, and (b) which context or contexts the prompt runs in. There's not much advice here about which option is best, and no clear best practices seem to have emerged yet either. Personally, I find just asking Claude to review the code works well enough.
Some of the advice here is also off. For example:
"Install a language server plugin. Type errors and unused imports caught after every edit. Highest-impact plugin you can install."
I work mostly with Rust, Python, and Dart, and followed similar advice, installing LSPs for all three in both Claude Code and Codex. Two months later, after heavy development in all three languages and hundreds of sessions - and frequently running out of RAM due to all the Rust analyzer, Dart analysis server, and Ty LSP servers the harnesses were spinning up - I checked the session logs to see how often the agents were actually invoking the LSP tools. The answer was they had invoked them literally once the entire time. I uninstalled all my LSPs and haven't looked back. The agents do just fine using ripgrep and calling cargo clippy, dart analyze, ty check, etc. themselves.
Everybody has free access to Google, Wikipedia, and Bing - that doesn't make sharing quotes from those sources worthy of abusive language telling people they shouldn't have children. Some people really do find value in another person opening up their ChatGPT subscription, crafting a suitable prompt, and passing on the response. There is absolutely some value in that, and many AI models are not even free.
Even just with Google, some people aren't very good at crafting search queries. Crafting a query or a prompt, deciding which model to use, vetting and sharing the response - these all add value beyond just "proxying it slowly and poorly".
Replying with an AI response can absolutely be relevant and valuable to a discussion, just as replying with a quote from Wikipedia or some other authority can be.
On the other hand, flaming people for trying to help you is, frankly, obnoxious, even if you don't appreciate the help or the manner in which it was offered.
People quote other sources sometimes. That's entirely OK. In fact, sometimes it's completely appropriate. We have to get used to the idea that sometimes, that source will be AI, and pretty soon (if not already) it will be just as authoritative and correct as Wikipedia or any other expert the person might quote.
If you don't like it, instead of responding by sending them a link to an aggressive, insulting, disrespectful and frankly low emotional IQ site like this, you can just say, "OK, thanks, that's great, but what's your opinion? I'm genuinely interested in hearing what you think." Unfortunately, if you send a link to this site, you are more than likely to lose the person entirely from the conversation anyway.
git-hunk provides an enumerate-then-select workflow: list available hunks with stable content hashes, then stage or unstage specific hunks by hash. Hashes are deterministic and remain stable as other hunks are staged or unstaged, so multi-step staging workflows produce consistent results.
Futures are marked to market every day and gains and losses are paid out daily in cash. So in the example you gave, you would have received $500K profit between when you bought the futures at $1M and when they expire at $1.5M. For cash settled futures that's the end of the story - a final small adjustment happens, in cash, your position disappears, and that's it.
For physically settled futures, the story is the same, but on the day of delivery, you (as the buyer) would be required to pay $1.5M cash to receive the oil, and whoever held the other side of the contract (as the seller) would be required to deliver it to you at some named location, typically a storage facility.
Who loses the $500K? The seller (who was short the contract) has been paying the losses daily as the price moved against them. The payments are handled through the exchange/clearinghouse and their brokerage.
What if they can't deliver? The exchange steps in and provides guarantees.