roncesvalles

>In fact the only way I know about their existence is through watching news reports of what happened in Canada in 1985.

Since you know about it, the label doesn't apply to you, regardless of how.

>Does one need to know a variety of dishes from each of the 193 UN-recognized states' cuisines to not be uncultured?

No, but you should know the top 5 dishes of the 10-15 most popular cuisines of the world, at least. That's only about 50-75 dishes; many individual restaurants have bigger menus than that.

>Ackee and Saltfish, and Curry Goat! And Oxtail Stew,

Yes... I would expect one to know these. At least that oxtail stew is a popular Jamaican delicacy.

1. Jamaican cuisine is fairly popular globally.

2. Patties are popular within Jamaican cuisine.

It's not something very niche. I think my comment was perfectly fair. It's like not knowing what empanadas, samosas, shumai, or takoyaki are (and yes, one would be uncultured for not knowing any of these too). It betrays something about the cosmopolitan-ness of your life experiences.

It's not even about geography. I'm pretty sure a good proportion of even Torontonians don't know about the Jamaican patty, and I'd call them uncultured too.

There's nothing wrong about being uncultured, it's not the end of the world. You can even work to improve it.

That's why when people like Pieter Levels tweet "I cancelled and then vibecoded 100% of my SaaS subscriptions", you need to take it with a huge grain of salt because you're not Pieter Levels, you cannot vibe code your SaaS subscriptions.

It has had significant quality of life increases for me. I use LLMs for everything from:

- travel and restaurant recommendations. my last few outings have been entirely LLM-advised and they turned out excellent. LLMs seem to have ingested every single Google review, photo, and menu of every business on Earth and can answer very nuanced questions like "is the garlic chicken at <restaurant, city> garnished with coriander?"

- fitness, nutrition, accounting, therapy, medical, legal, immigration advice (sure it's not a real professional but you know what, it's pretty fucking close, and any capability gap is made up by having perfect two-way communication which you don't get when talking with a human)

- coding (work, side projects, personal tools, documentation & pricing questions, "review this code", etc).

- I start reading most articles with the prompt "Summarize this article: <url>". I just started a non-fiction book by pasting into Claude: "There are 12 chapters in the book <book-name>. Can you give me a 2 sentence synopsis of each chapter?". It reduces the "activation energy" hump and screens if it's worth reading at all.

- I use the LLM in my Tesla for on-the-fly advice for parking and other things. You can simply ask "what's the best Boba place around here?" and it will give you a decent recommendation. You can also follow up with "does this place have ample parking?".

- I use the LLM in YouTube to summarize videos and ask specific questions and/or get timestamps to the parts I care about.

If your critical thinking skills are strong then LLM is a literal superpower.

Sorry, but you're just uncultured if you don't know what Jamaican patties are.

This is like saying "never in a million years would I think 'butter chicken' is a red, spicy Indian curry instead of chicken roasted in butter".

Category error. Self-driving cars are still meticulously coded by humans.

The Claude plugin for VSC is amazing and basically "solves programming" for me. It's the primary way that I write code now; I even stopped using Claude Code.

Cursor Tab is nice when you're hand-editing stuff. Not sure it's worth $20 though. I'd totally buy and forget a $5 Cursor subscription just for Cursor Tab.

The $20 price point is just too competitive now and I'd rather use the Claude/Codex plugin over Cursor's agentic coding sidebar.

The time scales are long enough for evolution itself to play out. It's very plausible that the percent of the human gene pool that has the "restless builder" genes simply increased over time. Just consider how much of an advantage being technologically superior gives one party in a war.

The current pace of technological progress means that you cannot just sit and wait for the crops to grow. You need to constantly be learning a new skill on the side, diversifying your income streams, thinking and researching about how to optimize your costs and yields for the following year, etc.

This is because there is no guarantee that you can keep living the same routine till the day you die.

Also, humans are builders. Doing nothing and waiting for the seasons to change like cows in a field might not be in our DNA. Restlessness is our natural state, that's why we have all this stuff.

1. English transliteration has its own cultural inertia. It's not just about what's most phonetically sensible (that too only for some particular English region: how an American phonetizes non would be different from how a Brit or Aussie would).

2. Don't assume the Uzbeks say this word the same way as the Indians do. It may very well sound closer to "non" in Uzbekistan.

Microservices exist because of the limitations of a single human brain in being able to wrangle with that much logic at a time.

It is perfectly conceivable that an alien species with different brain characteristics would draw their microservice boundaries at very different points, possibly varying by a whole order of magnitude in either direction.

I don't agree that there are organizational causes even though that's oft repeated as one of the main reasons. I have never seen a one-to-one relationship of microservices and teams irl. Most teams own many services and some services get touched by many teams. In big companies, there are also microservices with zero owners.

I almost prefer Opus 4.8. Opus 5.0 has the overly scholastic tone of Fable but without the intelligence.

Language is a reductive and lossy serialization of "thought-stuff". Sometimes you need this information-shedding to clear your working memory to make room for more things. Sometimes it's literally just a way to communicate. You're turning something fuzzy into something discrete.

E.g. "I'm feeling something. Is it anger? Yes, I'm angry." But in reality anger isn't just one thing. It's a cluster of infinite and varied feelings that we label as "anger". Something is lost when we do this labeling.

Notice then that the feeling of "anger" didn't start from your language, you merely used language to label, discretize, classify, standardize, compress it. It's one-way.

I remember when cable TV used to be "addictive". Now I can't watch even 10 minutes of it without getting bored and pulling out my phone. Also something I learned recently: checking your phone at the movies is no longer the faux pas that it used to be.

There's definitely some hedonic treadmill type thing going on with attention and stimuli.

The role of a software engineer is foremost about the ownership of software systems, and secondarily about modifying them or developing new ones.

Software development is a continuous operational undertaking, like having a garden, and not a one-shot "task" like designing a logo. Systems need to be tended to and somebody needs to know how they work, especially if they're business-critical or (in the case of software companies), the business itself.

A corollary point is that many of the rules and policies of the business are solely embedded within the software itself. There is rarely a complete set of documents that says "this is how everything works" -- if you want to know how something works, you ask a software engineer, they take a look inside the codebase and then tell you how it works. In that sense, all software engineers are also product managers (or more accurately, product managers are just crude software engineers, but that's besides the point).

You don't even need to pay a 5% hit. Just paste Fable output into Gemini Flash and it will rewrite it in more accessible language.

Imagine all the times this has already occurred somewhere in the world.

In a way, new companies like Flock entering such domains are a boon because they probably maintain tight audit logs and alerting mechanisms.

Traditional look-up software is probably being misused by cops all the time (à la the old noir trope of a PI having "a buddy in the department" who can look up anything for him).

Usually, the longer the AI works on something the crappier its output because that means the context is getting filled up.

If my AI prompt takes more than 5 minutes to execute, I'm almost certain to stop it and break up the task or be more specific about what files it should look at or what subtask it should tackle first. The people who let it run for hours are absolutely not getting anything worth keeping in the end.

Your comment has nothing to do with the comment you replied to. I almost suspect it's satire.

There is no inherent value in having reports or the title of "CTO". Compensation (broadly considered) is the only objective marker of where your career stands*. We primarily work in exchange for money, not for titles or responsibilities that tickle our ego.

If you're earning $300k at some company as a "Ninja Grandmaster (World Wide) Director CTO with 50 Reports", and a "Super Stinky Junior IC" at OpenAI is earning $400k, the IC is doing better than you.

*more precisely, the cumulative compensation at the end of your career, to account for gambits. it is not relevant that you "climbed the ranks" and were bestowed the title of "CEO" at your company or that you were "entrusted" with 5000 people in the org under you - these are strictly elements of some company's internal gamification and person-role-optimization system.

Those are killer salaries for the ones not in the US. Imagine earning $160k USD in Morocco, Nigeria or Panama. 99.9th percentile.

>This is such a strange perspective to me. I wouldn't describe anybody I know in this way.

Only a minority of jobs require the person to wrack their brains very hard. Most jobs just involve learning a routine and performing it on repeat.

The fear is that AI is also turning the jobs that required thinking into routine-on-repeat jobs (where the routine becomes I/O-ing things to an LLM).

I can totally see the job of a doctor (or more likely, NPs and PAs) devolving into just interviewing and visually examining a patient, feeding everything into an LLM, and doing what the LLM tells them. The next step is they wouldn't even be allowed to do anything else, for liability reasons. A world like this is right around the corner.

I fear more for the future where you're forced to offload your thinking to AI. Everything you say must be cited with LLM, everything you do must be signed off by The LLM. If you're in a meeting and have an idea, but Fable 9 says it's not a good idea, you cannot pursue it or you lose your job. The low-friction path will always be to do what the LLM tells you, and many people will shut off and surrender completely. (this is already how SWEs behave in companies where management forces them to tokenmaxx).

AI will be treated like a God that talks to us, and you can't disagree with it, you can only try to change its mind. The most horrific form of mental oppression. And it's just a few years away.

>We’re supposed to let the Tech Bros go on about how cutting corners is some genius productivity hack.

Vibecoding in a nutshell

I just don't think AI is any of those things. I understand that my argument is anecdotal and qualitative, but I just don't see AI (LLMs) materially increasing net productivity in the economy.

It's unusable only because I can't set 5.6 to Extra thinking in the "Chat" tab, and the "Work" feature that does let me use Extra is totally gimped for coding tasks. I'd rather use Opus 4.8 Extra/Max instead of Sol High (look up the benchmarks, thinking level is everything).

It is quite literally unusable to me.

>5.6 Sol, competitive with Fable (or close enough), and it's available via subscription (even the $20 subscription!)

It's not comparable because OpenAI caps thinking to High in the ChatGPT "Chat" interface (and the "Work" thing where it actually does let us use Extra or Max is fucking shit).

GPT 5.6 Sol (High) is almost certainly worse than Opus 4.8 (Extra), and nowhere close to Fable (Extra).

I literally got a refund for my $20 OpenAI subscription after playing around with 5.6 Sol for a couple of hours (yes even on Codex) because it's so unusable and I'd rather just use Fable today and 4.8 Extra starting tomorrow, still within my $20 Anthropic plan. And I'm not even poor.