plomme

Hah! This happened to me when digging around after a production incident. I worked on it on and off over the working week, and after a while it started saying (paraphrasing) "You've been at this for five days and done what you can, take a break".

Very good write up, as always, from Red Blob. It turned my high-level assumption on Google Maps pathfinding upside down. I thought, recalling algorithms class, that Google Maps worked so fast due to "optimal substructure" of shortest-path finding. That is that the shortest path from A-C through B also produces the shortest paths from A-B and B-C, and that for most of any given path you could route through some number of precalculated "midpoint" paths. Reading this turns it upside down in the sense that landmarks go behind the target, and not in the middle of the route! Very handy tool.

To paraphrase a famous quote: You have to be lucky every time, an attacker only has to be lucky once.

See https://qntm.org/mmacevedo and despair

I wish I knew! My money is still mostly in index funds and real estate.

My sneaking doubt is whether the index can keep growing, because doesn’t that depend on infinite growth based ultimately on mostly finite natural resources, manpower, and land? But maybe we can always extract and produce more with new technology, and that manpower may get leveraged or extended by AI and robotics. Or maybe just financial magic beyond my understanding.

Regardless I have been thinking a lot about what aging and declining populations might do to the economy in the medium-long term. I only know that I know nothing.

Does it follow that the price of the index should go up in perpetuity because workers are motivated?

This has been my investment philosophy as well, but I'm starting to realize that this is forgetting that "past performance does not guarantee future results". It only works when the index goes up, and I don't see any fundamental reason that should be true on the long term. I don't know of a better alternative though.

Ok. How do people find the required service when the need arises? Surely the company will need to have a website that displays what they offer? Or a physical storefront showing what goods they sell? That is marketing, and, I would say, not evil. The “evil” arises as a consequence of the market and medium where an infinite number of competitors are trying to survive. Marketers need to eat and feed their families, too, and so they try to market more efficiently.

I don’t like advertising, but I think calling the act of or working in marketing evil is really reductive vilification. Try to take their point of view, and realize almost nobody is trying to make the world a worse place.

I don't know anything about alzheimers but I'd hope someone that does would engage with David SJ's points instead of dismissing him on lack of authority alone.

> I would always feel bad in those cases, because it's clear they spent a lot of time, and I'm going to have to say "no" and they will feel like they wasted a ton of effort.

I get this feeling, too. I do however think the onus is on the developer to make something reviewable by their team members if they want a speedy review. Stacked PRs, scoping things down, properly structuring commits so you can review commit-by-commit for example.

I also think that "I spent a bunch of time on this" is not a valid reason for expecting an approval. It should hurt if you've produced a bunch of code that is way off target, even if it ends up implementing the feature. That's how I learned at least.

A proper way to go about large projects, in my opinion, is the same as with software development at large. Fail fast if possible. Draw up a crude boxes and arrows sketch or just discuss how you want the code to integrate with whatever already exists and invite the team to comment. If no one has anything to say, well then they can't complain later when you implement that approach. But if anyone cares then most likely valueable input will come that makes the end result better.

Sure, but LLMS and image generators are not the death of "consensus reality". Healthy democracies will still have investigative journalism, public debate, trustworthy institutions, etc.

You're right. But I'd rather be uninformed than misinformed.

I think it may turn out postive; That the less we are able to take images and video at face value the better.

Motivated actors have been able to doctor, fake, or spin media content since time immemorial. But peoples default mode was to trust what they saw. Now that fake imagery is ubiquitous, maybe we'll all get a bit more skeptical.

I’m not saying he’s wrong about the core thesis here, but using Claude Opus 4.6 as a “mic drop” with a chart showing it being twice as good as the last model feels in my experience way off.

Flash is amazing, and what made me drop VSCode. Flash feels like an innovation and basically lets me move my cursor at almost the speed of thought. Highly recommend people try it out and play with it!

BTW: The Vimium extension [1] for Firefox has a similar mode for links called "linkHinting" which I've mapped to s[2] for a similar experience in the browser :)

[1]: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/

[2]: `map s LinkHints.activateMode`

To play devils advocate here: could it be a good thing?

That way they would be incentivized to think about the long term actions of their actions, like not dying before getting affected by global warming etc.

And once aging is understood and solved, maybe it’s possible to iterate on the approach and make it cheaper and more accessible. That would greatly help the aging populations of the west.

If you’re around forever I’d imagine you would care more about what people think of you, too. If not your number of enemies would just rise forever.

Hah, that reminds me! My first work issued Mac didn't have the ESC key, just the touch bar. IIRC a program hung in fullscreen, freezing both the app and the touch bar. So I had to reboot to get out of it because the esc key didn't work.

Given the title I was hoping the page would say something about the “how” you scale wax sealed letters but cool niche business!

I’ve waxed and sealed a bunch of letters in the past and it’s a huge PITA (at least the way I did it). Would have loved this.

Love that you made homemade Club Mate! My favorite soda by far. I didn’t realize it was just tea before now. They have made a sugar free version now as well, but that not as cool as making your own

How do you “get away” with that? Working remotely? What do you do instead with your time? Are you hiring? Lol

The biggest cost when bootstrapping always seemed to be your salary to me, not infra costs. How long can you pay your mortgage and feed your kids off what should be your retirement or rainy day funds?

I never understood this take. Why do you think an employer would waste resources like that? I’m not saying that bullshit jobs don’t exist but I think you are off by an order of magnitude, and even that mostly applies to white collar workplaces with > 100 employees.

Good luck doing nothing of value in a restaurant with 20 employees.

A point I didn’t see sibling comments make is that the dentist often has to file between teeth for them to sit and align correctly. They did so several times in my case. I would not want to do that to myself!

The existence of incentives can encourage crime. Why would anyone throw a game if there wasn't an upside? Nobody does anything for "free", and by creating a market you are providing liquidity leading to more "labor". A market for whether or not someone will die within x date sets up a financial incentive to kill that person. That is encouragement.

Saying that people who enjoy sport/ gambling "don't have anything to do with people who want to cheat and steal to gain materially from it" is a false dichotomy. It's nature. Ask yourself, would you throw a game in your sport of choice in a hobby league for 100 million dollars or whatever? Why not, no one gets harmed, it is a lot of money, it's not even a proper league. This applies to all levels of real world consequences, some people have a larger apetite for risk.

I don't think anyone objects to curing cancer and better figuring out how our bodies work, but getting into conciousness/ mind uploads/ simulated humans is another can of worms ethically speaking. I'm assuming you've already read the fantastic story about Lena by qntm [1], if not, enjoy some existensial dread.

[1] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

How are you doing speech-to-text with Claude Code?

In case you, as I, has not kept tabs of the progress of cloning since Dolly: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/29/horse-clonin... or https://archive.is/dwHsu.

Horse cloning is a major industry in Argentina. Many polo teams are riding around on genetically identical horses. Javier Milei has four clones of his late dog.

Well you are in luck because that was the point of Schroedingers cat; it was constructed to show the impossibly odd implications of quantum mechanics.

From the wikipedia page: “This thought experiment was devised by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 in a discussion with Albert Einstein to illustrate what Schrödinger saw as the problems of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg's philosophical views on quantum mechanics.”

The romans did care about property lines! Romes’ second aqueduct was held up when land owner Crassus refused to give up private land for its construction. Check out the article for a fascinating read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct

I think it’s naive to think that not every part of our jobs will worryingly soon be automated. All the way up to and inckuding CEO. This is not exciting.