resters

The backlash against agentic coding comes from the split that has already existed among professional software engineers. The ones who are most resistant to it are the ones for whom it has been "just a job", but the ones who love it are the ones who love solving problems. It's now possible for a small team (one person, a few) to solve truly daunting software problems with the help of agentic methods. If you were a 9 to 5er who valued craft but didn't dream about solving problems, AI is a buzz kill.

Not everyone opts for that.

why did they spell it with an A at the beginning?

Frontier models are being used to obtain training data from users. We burn tokens teaching OpenAI how to make a cheaper model that is almost as good. I think the new $500/month pricing strategy is a significant misstep by someone who has clearly not tried Gemini 3.8 Flash or Deepseek 4.1 Flash.

wait till they translate all the critiques dolphins have about human civilization.

Garry has made many gripes about the homeless and other kinds of gripes that do not suggest he has Christian values underlying his views.

It's somewhat amusing to read a defense of the GOP focused on a state over-taxing. Federal over-spending is possible without short-term tax increases b/c the federal government runs a big deficit. If the Federal government had to keep a balanced budget, Trump's policies would have raised everyone's taxes far more than anything the state of California would ever dream of.

(future generations will be taxed for all of Trump's gravy train)

Uh, yes it is quite a lot like it and more invasive/harmful. Trump has also removed many transparency and accountability mechanisms, etc. There is absolutely no reasonable justification for supporting it at this point.

Garry Tan is extremely socially conservative, seemingly unabashedly so. I would not be surprised if Garry had donated to Trump, etc.

Note that whatever it once meant to be "conservative", wanting less government control of markets, etc., today's GOP is the party of economic central planning and limiting economic freedom, and also authoritarian rights violations on US soil.

There is absolutely no excuse for supporting the Trump approach / agenda unless one intentionally wishes to see laws broken and democracy subverted.

Same. Fortunately DeepSeek keeps getting better.

At this point nobody should assume good faith on Trump's part... not citizens, not allies, not adversaries engaged in negotiation. It turns out "The Art of the Deal" is simply lying.

Yes, thanks for this, Deepseek! (I did start using the Deepseek harness and v4 flash due to the crazy low usage limits on sol and I'm quite pleased to have discovered how capable both of those are -- both have now earned a place in my agentic workflow).

Google is in direct meetings with Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick and is prudently keeping dangerous frontier models out of the hands of customers until reasonable precautions can be taken.

It's a bit ironic that in a country with free markets, so much of the data that is relevant to modern finance is proprietary and quite expensive.

The exchange/marketplace is the oldest business in the world. How absurd that in 2026 seats on exchanges cost millions and the entities that control exchanges are mechanisms of gatekeeping rather than quality control -- the cronyism shown to SpaceX reveals just how corrupt it's become.

Not sure why anyone has a taste for the kind of butch, chest-pounding performative foreign policy we have these days. Not only does it not work, it's dangerous to national security.

If you're getting 2x you are likely at the limit of your own ability to coordinate or plan intelligent work effort, and you have plateaued such that even when models are twice as powerful as they are today you will still be getting 2x of your own human throughput.

We all have a limit after which we lack the attention (or attention to detail, or time, or energy, etc.) to meaningfully manage it.

Similarly, a manager may be able to handle a team of two very well but end up poorly managing a team of 20.

It used to be that knowing how to write code was a big factor in productivity. Now it is less of a factor compared to the many other cognitive and metacognitive faculties that working with agentic teams demand.

Perhaps, but things like Sora burned a lot of compute -- a high percentage.

While I completely agree with your take, I think everyone has been surprised by how quickly LLMs have become highly useful and extremely powerful, and by how possible it is for relatively smaller models to also be highly useful.

Given that, I would expect that in hindsight OpenAI and Anthropic would spend 40% of what they have on compute if starting over and knowing the actual landscape.

The massive capital allocation was a blind decision and they swung big.

It is still possible that techniques will be developed that create a moat where the massive hardware capex is justified, but US policies of banning competitive GPUs and blocking frontier lab releases makes such things far less likely.

"Escape velocity" for AI is when the open weight models are good enough to help drive the next frontier innovations/techniques. I think we are close to that if not already there, at which point it's a race to commoditization no matter what Altman or Lutnik wish will happen.

How is merging identities the solution?

The goal is not "how can I do blackmail-worthy activities without being blackmailed?" the goal is "how can I participate in a narrow way without, for example, having those reading my content biased by my LinkedIn profile or my corporate affiliation?"

We don't walk around wearing little badges that identify every organization we affiliate with, every group, etc. Why would anyone want their online participation burdened by all that extra (usually irrelevant) information?

In my case, I don't write content I would worry about some determined prose fingerprinter finding, and if I did I would sanitize the prose first :)

Does it really matter that a review was written by "Ronald B Smith" vs "BrewersFan4000"?

I'd argue that it only matters when the goal is to convert "real name" accounts into something that is effectively merged with an Experian soft credit score, Google supercookie-powered profile, etc.

There are some of us (late generation-X / early millennial) who saw this coming and still maintain a variety of separate identities across many domains.

I don't know why someone would want to have the same identity in the workplace as on internet forums, for example.

Social media appears to have given many people the idea that they ought to cultivate their public identity from an early age as preparation for internet fame / personal branding.

I'm very pleased to see open source mapping/navigation systems. I have had the hypothesis for a while that many of the UI/UX designers on the google maps team do not actually drive a car.

I make code review and PR approval optional for my teams. A solid process should emerge from respect and peer pressure alone.

This article is sort of a self-advertised red flag that the writer is rationality-challenged.

1) many disagreements are not ultimately about facts but about intentionally different tradeoffs/prioritization.

2) if in fact one argues on facts/logic then losing the argument means you had your own logic or facts corrected, which should be a good thing, not a bad one.

They are focused on the things you do when you are not over-capitalized and you can’t get unlimited nvidia hardware to train on. And the results speak for themselves.

Meanwhile we in the US are blocked from buying Huawei GPUs and retirees are boasting about the nvidia in their portfolios.

Thank you so much to everyone at DeepSeek who is working on this and who have the courage and generosity to open source this for humanity.

We in the United States will never forget!

For all the harm Trump does to the US at least he is helping China!

China’s leadership is pragmatic, transparent, mature.

Regulation at the state level (which is what Sacks and the toadies were so against) is far superior to this bc it is local and bad ideas only affect those in one state!

Bad Federal regulation has a much larger blast radius.

Let’s hope Chinese models save us from this. BYD is trying to save us from Elon but 100% tariffs are welfare keeping Elon afloat.

This is what we get when the president is a nepo baby who inherited a fortune and bankrupted many companies and had mainly business failures before entering politics.

I’m quite confident that few people are more ignorant on AI than Donald Trump. That he promised less regulation and lied is no different than his many other lies.

In six months everyone will cancel frontier subscriptions.

You're right it's not only trade policy, but I think most of the fab contracts on current models were already negotiated and Apple ate $3.3B of tariffs as a COGS increase (delaying passthrough avoids spotlighting tariff-driven inflation). Increasing DRAM prices are a factor, but would not be a 20% BOM price increase at all (much less on the total price) for most of the impacted devices. The magnitude and the simultaneous across-the-line timing look more like margin recovery than a component passthrough.