rozap

I recently had this discussion with an energetic junior coworker who just learned about TLA+ and thought it would solve all the problems. I think it probably did give the LLM that he was using to do the actual implementation a better starting off point, but the obvious gap remains, which is whether or not the spec (TLA) matches the implementation (elixir) which there's just not a good answer for. I encouraged him to put his TLA code in our docs folder, because as far as I'm concerned, it's just a suggestion, and then write (and understand...) some property tests about the feature.

I think there probably is some value in vibecoding TLA specs and not actually understanding the invariants yourself, but it's way oversold by the talking heads of the tech world, and the gaps need to be filled in some other way if you refuse to write your own code.

It didn't want to tell me in any detail why diesel is $7.50 per gallon

Just because the market reacts to a piece of information to the tune of 6B, doesn't mean the guy is providing 6b of value. It's just a piece of information and the market reacts to what it may or may not mean. Any other goober with an MBA in that role who quits with no notice may induce the same market reaction, even if they were a shit ceo.

Agree with everything you say here.

> I don't think anything here is new or changed

I would argue it's a little new though. I used to write dumb little programs all the time that explored an idea which was probably bad, and in that exploration I often found that there was a better way to do it, or that I didn't know as much as I thought I did, or that another thing already existed that was much better considered than my half baked idea, etc. But there was learning that happened there, so the process was still valuable. Now you can get a working bad idea without learning anything, there is full conservation of ignorance, but a full dopamine hit from "i made this thing". I guess you could argue it's just everything happening at a faster rate, but it feels different to me, and it is pretty eerie.

If AI ruins social media, then that's a huge net good.

It's hard to discuss things seriously when the arguments are comically bad. This whole marketing piece leaves out anything beyond the first order effects, no mention of any sort of class upheaval, no black swan events. All the projections are up and to the right, there isn't even a low confidence scenario where things go poorly. It's hard to discuss an such a deeply unserious thing seriously.

How does that coexist with Capitalism? I just don't see a path.

Regardless of where you fall on the alignment chart, if you are looking backwards from now to the industrial revolution, it's pretty easy to make the claim that from a standpoint of pure technological progress (discounting all other things, like quality of life, environmental impact, etc) that capitalism "won". But going forward, if the need for labor is completely crushed, and capital continues to get concentrated into the hands of the elites, I just don't see how that is viable long term. It seems like for things to shift to the world Keynes (wrongly) predicted, where we all have abundance of leisure time, then there's a massive distribution of the fruits of automation into the hands of the masses, which needs to be controlled by an entity who does not purely exist to acquire more capital, which is sort of the end of capitalism as we know it.

Or maybe AI kills us all before we get there, who knows.

wait you forgot vertex, that one is different

Yea, it does apply. Honestly I'd argue that as you move up the abstraction layer cake, it applies even more. If a team gets a tool which 2x's their output (maybe a higher level language vs writing in C), then the difference in absolute output someone who produces 1 widget per day and 5 widgets per day becomes substantial. If you're given a tool which 10x's your output in a day, then it's even bigger. And of course you can have devs on a team who produce -.5 widgets per day.

Think about the worst colleague you've had, now give them a tool which 10x's their output :)

Silence, we have disruptive direct to consumer peptide startups that need to pump.

The gas truck just came to the gas station on the corner and it's just crazy how big those things are, there's such a surplus of gas right now.

There's a nice extension called unhook which blocks a ton of the YouTube trash, you can configure it to hide different things. At this point, they only thing I see on YouTube is a search box and my subscriptions.

Plenty of people work at Meta.

Yea I figured it was my LSP but when I disabled it, it wasn't resolved. I didn't debug it, I just switched.

It's funny, zed started out really refreshing, and now it's degraded to the point where it's fairly unusable. Regularly it would tie up tons of resources on my fairly beefy laptop. I switched back to sublime and it is a breath of fresh air, I didn't realize how slow zed had gotten. It seems like maybe they lost their way a bit, but I recognize that also they need to make money presumably, and it's hard to do that with a large team and a focused product.

Sometimes I think about how much of a pain it would be for our company to not use elixir. We would be spending so much time on mundane ops stuff and not building the thing. Such a lovely programming model and ecosystem.

"Great men of history do not introspect, move forward, go!"

Goomba fallacy

What are your favorite aero or xp css design systems?

Really fascinating writeup — I particularly appreciated how they didn't hesitate to delve into the load bearing design choices — the implications are staggering.

Yea, he should be driving the state sponsored crossover suv like the rest of the country.

Ea appears to primarily be a post hoc rationalization for someone's unhinged drive for money and power. A way for people who see themselves as good, but act according to a different set of principles, to launder their consciousness through a compelling sounding framework. Now, this isn't to say that all EA practicioners are like this, or that it's bad (I think doing some good is better than doing none, if we can quantify good...), or even that there's a better alternative in the system that we live in. But the whole thing just feels inauthentic and handwaves externalities in a way that always felt uncomfortable. So I'd hardly say EA has "proved" anything.

Very true. I work for an AI company, I use it every day, it's a huge value add for certain problems.

My heat pump died the other day and I called an HVAC place and got an AI agent, which was frustrating and not helpful. So I called a different HVAC place and spoke to someone who could actually help, then I gave them lots of money.

My experience is a bit different. They constantly update it and make it more unusable. At this point it's totally broken. Occasionally I open it, it loads for 30 seconds, I have a notification icon for a post I saw a month ago, then my feed shows the same picture of a guy I follow driving his rally car, which was posted several months ago, then I log off. It's truly bizarre what they've managed to do.

This is wild, have you written about it publicly, or can you expand on it here?

So we're now in this world where everyone is instantly 10x more productive at turning their thoughts into code. Now, think about the coworkers you've had that are middling to mediocre. Do you want them to have a tool that makes them 10x more productive?

That's what I wonder about, what happens to all those folks.

This is a good point. We should just let all the ponzi schemes that are currently underway ride. Maybe they made good investments that will return 100x. The only way to know is to not intervene.

You're right it's a good thing, but I think they're maybe 10 years too late. The issue is that their product is hateful, non-functional, and my feelings toward the brand are probably more negative than any other brand I can think of. So why would I give them money? It's a tough sell.

I spent $111 for two quarts

Yes, this is happening. A friend of mine was telling me about a 25k LoC PR that was submitted by a product manager that he had to content with. And the politics are real - you can't just be like "no", but it's pretty tough to meaningfully review a 25k line PR, let alone from someone who knows fuck all about what they're doing and can't answer questions you might have.