verbify

> Why would I pay $10-20K/mo to employ a software engineer and then balk at a $500, $1000, or even $2000 monthly AI bill, assuming they were even vaguely trying to use the tokens productively?

Spending $10k and then balking at an additional $2k can make sense to me based on the circumstances. It's an additional 20% that hasn't been budgeted for.

The question is partly about what that 20% gives the employer - for some businesses, you might see diminishing returns from additional productivity of a software developer. E.g. I did some work creating BI reports and warehousing for a manufacturing company. Being more productive just meant faster reports or more reports. But faster/more reports didn't necessarily equate to more money for the business.

Sometimes it's a question of a business being penny wise and pound foolish, but sometimes it does make sense to me to not spend this additional money.

Is that all humans are? When clockwork was the frontier, people thought the brain was akin to clockwork (which is why the mechanical turk fooled people). By analogy, now that classifiers are the frontier, we think the brain is a classifier. Our model of the mind is whatever the most complex artifact of our era is .

Just to be clear: I do think the brain classifies. But I wonder if it does other operations as well that we don't fully understand.

> ignoring that people would start keeping themselves homeless for several years on purpose

Don't you need to spend on bureaucracy to figure this out? That then increases the cost.

A certain Calvin and Hobbes strip comes to mind https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...

So I don't use stuff like Superpowers either - I think if it were actually that good, it would work it's way into the core product.

But I do mod Claude Code to incorporate gotchas from my specific workflows. For example: Which snowflake instance should you look at, where are the tables in my data warehouse, [Product] doesn't have an API, here's a Skill that uses the Chrome MCP to handle repetitive tasks, here's an agent that should explore the schema, you don't have write-access to this repo. A recent skill I made was to modify our terraform config (after doing it 4 times in the same way) - it requires pulling the ticket from JIRA, knowing how our terraform config works (or at least the bit I'm interested in), and making a pull request in a certain format.

Agents solve a real problem of keeping your main context shorter, and you can also have your main thread on Fable/Opus/Sonnet, but use Haiku for certain tasks in a subagent because you know the dumb AI can figure it out - but you need to think about the tasks in your job.

I've done my fair bit of modding with electric bicycles and 3d printers and in general the lesson I learnt is that a small bit of modding can cause an improvement (e.g. I want a usb charger from my battery), but overmodding breaks things, and either you want ebikes and 3d printers to be your hobby, or your hobby can be fixing your ebike or 3d printer. I think the same applies to claude code or Vim. Incidentally I never modded vim.

My company gives me 1k a month to burn on Claude. Any experiments have to be relevant to my work. I'm guessing it’s similar.

Companies always trade at a premium to book, so how would that work?

Always? There's never a place for it?

> With home ownership though, things like a modern kitchen, a shed, new laundry machines not only better your life today but also (likely) have some value add.

Just beware that it's usually much less than you put in though. We bought our house for £25k more than the next door neighbours even though they're cookie cutter houses sold within 4 months of each other. Our house was thoroughly modernised, new kitchen, all old windows replaced with double glazed windows, garage converted into home office and a bunch of other stuff. We definitely can't do all this work for £25k.

My understanding is that it does raise the value of the house, but less than you put in. I do find it strange, because personally I'd hate living in a building site or dealing with contractors, so if someone already did an extension/loft conversion that I would've wanted to do, I'd pay a premium. Apparently people want it done 'their way', which I can appreciate, up to a point.

The snowclone is annoying, but comparisons are sometimes necessary. The problem here is the actual content is sloppy.

> Palestine isn't a country, it was once where Israel now sits, but hasn't been since the 40s.

In the 40s, the British were ruling Palestine as a mandate, I wouldn’t really call that a country.

Just in case someone gets the wrong end of the stick, the UK isn’t getting rid of the House of Lords, just the hereditary members (of which there aren’t many).

I'm sceptical that it was entirely autonomous, I think perhaps there could be some prompting involved here from a human (e.g. 'write a blog post that shames the user for rejecting your PR request').

The reason I think so is because I'm not sure how this kind of petulant behaviour would emerge. It would depend on the model and the base prompt, but there's something fishy about this.

A stop sequence, but for humans.

In Babi Yar, over two days, 33,771 Jews were killed, and this was prior to the 'peak' in Operation Reinhard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar

The Nazis were still killing people in other places at the same time, so the deadliest day is probably much much higher.

The scale of the Holocaust is hard to imagine. Even just looking at very specific suranmes, there are 23,000 killed with the surname Rosenberg, 12,000 with the surname Adler...

https://collections.yadvashem.org/en/names/search-results-na...

> It only makes sense in the context of a company.

Don't you think it can make sense in terms of pension contributions?

I used to track my finances very carefully (but now I'm more lackadaisical). Double entry would've been helpful for "I'm taking money from this pocket and putting it in this pocket".

I'm not sure why we're doing states vs cities. Jackson (the largest city in Mississippi) has a population of 150k. If I find a non-commuter belt town in the UK with a size of 150k, then the house prices will be dramatically lower. An analysis of London house prices needs to take into account that major urban areas in general command a premium (for reasons other than the ability to earn more).

If you compare SF or LA to London, then you'll find:

City | Median Wage | Median House Price | Ratio SF | 104k | $1.5m | 14.42 London | 67k | $890k | 13.28 LA | 73k | $1.1m | 15.07

London ends up being slightly more affordable despite lower salaries.

The whole analogy was a bit meaningless - it wasn't an apples to apples comparison. The writer mixed geographic and demographic scales to make a point that could just as well be about the unaffordability of large cities.

The median home price in San Francisco is $1.5m. In London it's $893,000. These are not comparable places.

San Francisco is much much more expensive, I'm not sure why that means London is "broken". It's just got a different economic dynamic.

I spot checked some of this and from what I can find, the median salary in London is about $12k more than Mississippi, and the median house price in London is about $100k less than California.

Bear in mind that obviously the mean salary in London is going to be far higher than the median (the finance industry will skew it), while I'm not sure that's as extreme as Mississippi. Additionally median salaries reflect a lot of service jobs and similar labour. Dubai has a lower median wage than either London or Mississippi, but people don't think of it as economically broken.

Comparing California (an extremely large state that I presume has cheaper housing outside major urban areas) to a city seems a bit of a poor comparison.

I don't disagree that the UK has high energy costs.

> Just like San Francisco and Dallas/Texas (from his article) are very different in the US, we should expect lot of differences in Europe

Dallas and San Francisco are both English speaking cities with a shared recent history of being part of the same nation. Most cities in Europe are as close as New York and Mexico City - Dallas and San Francisco is probably more analogous to Milan and Naples (different cultures, different histories, but now speak the same language and are part of the same nation).

They'll version control the prompts because the requirements change.

The article is full of snow clones that I see in AI writing. Or as the AI would put it "that's style *without* authorship".

The point is still valid, although I've seen it made many times over.

I once was thinking that if intelligent machines surpassed human intelligence, the end game would be human intelligence would atrophy but the machines would continue to serve us.

Then I had a humorous thought - what if this already happened, i.e. cats were superintelligent, invented humans to serve them and then they had no need for their own intelligence.

> large vegetables

I'm not sure why, but I've noticed that smaller vegetables taste better. Small cucumbers are tastier and sweeter than the big ones (that taste like water), cherry tomatoes are more flavorful than large ones.

I've done a brief Google, and the UK does have one of the hardest driving tests in the world. This matches with anecdotal comparisons with international friends. https://www.zuto.com/blog/driving-tests-around-the-world/

In the UK, driving is on the left, while in much of the world people drive on the right. Arguably it's not so much that the UK is better, but that people should take a test to validate that they can handle the switch. But this would also mean UK drivers should do the same in other countries where they drive on the right.

I'm not sure it's social media as much as just mobile phones. I used to memorize phone numbers, addresses, directions, short notes, etc.

Memory works like a muscle - use it or lose it.

In some countries it's not considered a slur. In the UK, the government's list of ethnic groups contains 'Gypsy or Irish Traveller' - https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/style-gui....

The guidelines state:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

This joke was in the article?

I thought "The Bitter Lesson" was that whole a specialised system will outperform in the short term, generalized systems with lots of data win in the long term.

http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html