prescriptivist

Yeah that's what I was thinkin, too.

I still review PRs, all of which are written by agents. I almost never have meaningful feedback to offer unless it's feedback on the architectural approach. And even then, a lot of architectural/coding patterns that I've been a stickler for in the past mean less to me now because those patterns served to create maintainable code for human beings, which just isn't a priority anymore.

I still review PRs, but rarely suggest changes. The most meaningful reviews come from our review bots. I mostly review broad architectural decisions as a way to keep abreast of changes in the codebase. There's a cohort of engineers I work with who I would be perfectly okay with letting the clankers review, approve, and merge their PRs. But there's a larger cohort of engineers who need what I would call a directional code review.

This happens in every DHH thread and it always gives me a chuckle.

Couldn't agree more. MCP is just Tool Use and the terminal agents all have embedded tool uses like WebSearch, Bash, Grep, etc and those are just MCP by another name. CLI's called by a model are just Bash Tool usage calls. Bash tool is just the most open ended broad MCP you can expose and what you gain is less context bloat (no specialized tool descriptions, just Bash) and what you lose is control over the agent -- until you setup a rigorous set of governing permissions on the Bash Tool.

I have a fleet of sandboxed Claude Code instances running and they share files with each other. The files are stored on AWS but they don't have access to AWS at all -- they can't see the access keys. In fact they don't know the files are on AWS. Instead they have a set of MCP tools for listing/uploading/downloading from an internal, virtual filesystem with a special URI handler (ie agentfiles://somefile.json) and the outer orchestrator of the Claude Code instances takes the MCP requests and does the actual file manipulation on Claude's behalf. The LLM seems to adapt quite well to this strange, arbitrary filesystem and I get to keep these agents fully compartmentalized. And I have tool request logs and logs in the outer orchestrator for full auditing of the agents. MCP is a really natural fit for this kind of stuff.

Google already has gVisor running in Kubernetes as a product (GKE Sandbox), which provides the security guarantees necessary for secure sandboxes (regular k8s isn't great in this respect). They also have pod snapshots running at scale (which run on gVisor), so you can spin up process(es) and snapshot the memory and fs of a pod at a point in time, ship it to a blob in GCS, and then rehydrate those snapshots very quickly (or fork into new instances), which allows for the fast/cheap startup and suspend times and the instant scaling they advertise here. One of these snapshots can be created in one cluster and spun up in another.

Not sure if this is an extension of tech they already have had in their systems, but I've experimenting with it to build my own orchestrator and it's been a pretty neat set of tools and abstractions so far.

Yeah, I wanted a Matrox so bad at that time because you could also do dual monitor on some of those cards. I had a sick NEC with a degauss button and trinitron style horizontal lines and a shit packard bell monitor. I wanted to do dual monitors so bad with both, despite the resolution asymmetry. Some matrox also had connection points for antennas and video capture. They were truly workhorse cards. But they sucked at 3D and were lapped in the Boot mag benchmarks for Quake 3D et al. I ended up with a 3D Labs Permidia 3D card anyway because I couldn't afford a Diamond or Voodoo and ended up turning textures off fully on Quake 3d in the end. Fun times, shout out Hard OCP.

I put it in a hook, and Claude basically re-evaluates every changed comment that it makes against a prompt in the hook. This burns tokens, but my company pays for it, so I don't care.

Sure, but there is nothing in the world of the last 30-40 years that can compare to GLP-1s in terms of helping people consume fewer calories. This is a very coarse statement, but I'm confident in making it: there is nothing healthier than being skinny, and GLP-1s make people skinny in a way that is unique in modernity. Our modern food systems are optimized to encourage people to consume as many calories as they can, and GLP-1s are bulwarks against this system, if you will.

People are so worked up online in places like Reddit and YouTube comments about how there aren't small trucks anymore. It feels almost like a strange mania. So it makes sense that someone like this would come along and capitalize on that (and probably never produce anything). People will throw $25 at a company without intention to actually purchase the truck, just because they feel some weird memetic vibe to support a small truck movement or whatever.

These are called EREVs in China and are fairly popular. Ford has a patent for one in trucks but never built it. It makes a ton of sense. Use the generator to get extended range, but avoid all the moving parts of a driveline.

I live in the land of trees (Maine) and cell service sucks, line of sight between microwave towers is a non-starter AFAICT, but line of sight to the sky is do-able everywhere.

A more accurate description would be that starlink will become the trunk, and possibly the service. Local cell services will own the poles but will essentially provide access for starlink customers. It's not a bad business idea, actually. People pay $30-40 a line for starlink cell service, starlink provides the big pipes so to speak and splits the bill with the local companies that put up the last mile towers.

In rural areas you can put up isolated 5G towers that have their own dish connection to starlink, no need to string a line to the towers anymore...

If you wish to stop it, then stop it.

Yeah, I meant to point out there that there is a tension between the technology that I don't mind, but the infrastructure for it that I do mind. I don't really know what the answer is. I do know that we're probably not going to put this toothpaste back in the tube.

I spent last weekend under some of the darkest sky you'll find in the eastern US. Miles from cell service. I had a starlink portable with me and it was nice to get some service and stay in touch, but to watch the sky is to see satellites everywhere.

I've spent a dozen or so weeklong stretches in the last few years completely off grid, only connection being bringing up the inReach once a day. At this point I actually get anxiety at the end of such a trip, knowing that I'm going to be wading through a morass of notifications and slack/email/texts. Doing a once or twice a day sync via starlink didn't really bother me so much when I'm out in the backcountry this last trip.

I'd love to be rid of all of it, but that's not how the world works today.

Sorry but this reeks of marketing. To what extent was Ford actually attempting to replace these engineers with AI tools in the last three years or were they just letting them go by attrition? Was this the result of an actual AI influenced layoff? I read both the Verge and the Bloomberg piece and none of this seems to be articulated but it sure does seem to capture a vibe right now that companies are footgunning themselves all over the place with LLMs, despite no evidence of this being related to any of that...

> good writing, good art, thoughtful code architecture

If you are talking about a consumer product, one of these is not like the others.

Just an update to this. I realize I misspoke and misnamed where that last accent comes from. It's too late for me to edit the original comment, so I'm just going to drop it in here. There's no such thing as the Allagash Valley, only the St. John Valley.

Maine has multiple distinct accents, though like the parent said, it's not worth making the distinction unless it's for a project like this.

In southern Maine, the accent is moderate and is more of a general northern New England accent. Yahd = yard, that kind of thing.

The iconic Maine accent is the Downeast accent and is still kicking up/down there. It's kind of nasally and has a lilt to it. You have to dig through a morass of influencer content on youtube to find an authentic example of it, but this is a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZDpx1aLovc

But there are a number of different accents throughout Maine. My favorite without a doubt is the accent in way northern Maine, from the Allagash Valley. It's just a pleasant accent. This is a good example: https://soundcloud.com/mpbn/troy-jackson-allagash-logging

There's no shortage of third places in the American suburbs, you just have to drive to them. I'm sympathetic to the argument that walkable third places are better third places because I lived car-free in New York City for a decade and enjoyed many of them. But living in the suburbs or exurbs doesn't inherently mean you don't have access to shared communal spaces.

If I believed there is a crisis of isolation in the United States and degradation of community, I would first focus on more recent technologies, say ones introduced around 2007, than on technologies introduced in the early 1900s.

I didn't really say what my perspective is on whether the suburbs are good or bad or cars are good or bad. I think there are plenty of reasonable arguments as to whether they are or not. What I am dubious about is that they are somehow the source of some hand-wavy "widespread" mental health issue in America.

> You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people.

Yes, you could say that, though I'm not sure who would actually say that seriously.

> And yet the companies doing that in those previous generations managed to produce huge profits significantly faster than Generative AI has.

Have you considered a simple answer to this inconsistency? The market and investors does not demand that these AI companies make a profit. The only reason companies are expected to make profits is because either those who own shares in the company expect it, or those willing to invest in a company expect it.

Correct, seems like my memory failed me on that one.

On top of that, the APIs/Tools/Function Calls into the real world don't exist yet. But consumer products are going to start eventually exposing functionality to these LLMs. By that time, I wonder if we'll all have an edge-inference box sitting in every one of our houses that we buy from a consumer products company like Apple or from Amazon, or directly from OpenAI or Anthropic. These little brains will be the low latency central nervous system of a lot of things in our homes, and gateways to the larger models in the cloud. Or at least that's how I imagine it sorting out in the future.

Comparing the IPO market today to the IPO market in the late 90s is not very instructive. You could have IPO'd a lemonade stand in 1998 and raised $10 million.

> The lead singer caught my eye and gave me a wide grin

Daft Punk doesn't have a singer and unless it was a very early show they wouldn't have seen them smile. Most big beat shows wouldn't have a dedicated vocalist. I'd guess Underworld or Prodigy, but lean toward Underworld.

I used Emacs for about a decade and then switched to VS Code about eight years ago. I was curious about the state of Claude Code integration with Emacs, so I installed it to try out a couple of the Claude packages. My old .emacs.d that I toiled many hours to build is somewhere on some old hard drive, so I decided to just use Claude code to configure Emacs from scratch with a set of sane defaults.

I proceeded to spend about 45 minutes configuring Emacs. Not because Claude struggled with it, but because Claude was amazing at it and I just kept pushing it well beyond sane default territory. It was weirdly enthralling to have Claude nail customizations that I wouldn't have even bothered trying back in the day due to my poor elisp skills. It was a genuinely fun little exercise. But I went back to VS Code.

Another comment said it, but that's basically land protected from most use, with some exceptions that are more akin to our national park system, right? I'm talking more about BLM lands in the west, or national forests in the east. Also, there are states with significant public lands holdings that are in the same spirit.

With our public lands, I can usually go to them anytime I want, I don't have to reserve anything. I can park my car, I can get out, and I can begin just walking into the woods or grasslands, sometimes on trail, sometimes off. I can basically camp wherever I want in many of these places. If there's a stream, I can fly fish. If it's hunting season, I can hunt. I can basically disappear into a place that feels wild for a bit.