J253

True, but I do have a claude.md as well. Point is, best practice agentic development doesn’t seem to be on display.

I also maintain a popular open source repo and have seen similar. If I receive a low effort single-pass obviously-Clauded PR (many people (agents) don’t even bother using the AGENTS.md file I provide right in the repo?!) with no associated issue I also have no qualms closing. I do generally leave a short note about why I closed (volume of these is around 5/week) showing how far off they (Claude) was and encourage opening an issue where we can start a discussion which rarely happens for the drive-by folks. So I totally feel this but I find myself more disheartened by the practice than angry. It feels like slowly watching open-source go the way of email. Open and free until no-cost spam ruined the inbox for everyone...

So if our universe is inside a black hole from a parent universe, does that mean every black hole in our universe contains its own child universe? We could be living in cosmic Russian dolls all the way down?

Thanks for all the comments so far everyone! I’m quickly getting the impression that I need to work on my resume. Also, I have never used a recruiter. I apply directly to the jobs through their website. Perhaps I need to rethink this approach as well. Again, thanks for the responses! Also I might have to bite the bullet and create a LinkedIn.

Never heard of the race before. Highly recommend reading about some of the quirks surrounding it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barkley_Marathons

Agreed. I find Vivaldi’s split pane ability incredibly useful. Surprised other browsers haven’t implemented this kind of this yet.

I’m a home roaster and buy my green beans from a website called www.sweetmarias.com. Everything about this company is awesome but there’s guy there named Tom who knows probably as much as anyone could know about the entire coffee process from growing to wholesaling to roasting. He always travels to farms to meets with growers before purchasing. I guarantee if you get a hold of their customer service and explain your situation, you’ll be able to get a hold of someone there who can give you answers to most of your coffee-related questions.

As easy solution to this is the just not give any credit for homework that goes toward a final grade.

Have a number of in person closed book tests that are difficult enough to prove satisfactory understanding of the topic.

Homework is just a mechanism for a teacher/professor to force a student to dig into and really understand a subject. If the student can use these AI tools to subvert that, then instead of wasting energy or god forbid even more AI to fight the AI, just give students a good enough incentive to actually do the homework. Having the entire grade rely on several of these difficult-enough in-person closed-book tests should be incentive enough.

In my opinion and experience, I think you’re right about “there’s Pandas for that” and “that” can be almost anything. It can do almost anything but making it do almost anything requires constant reference to the docs. And I find maintainability difficult. It seems like there’s 50 kwargs for every method. Sometimes things happen in place by default, other times they don’t. Compound indexes still confuse me. But I’m not a data scientist so I don’t do much ad-hoc analysis that seems typical with pandas users.

This is a great resource for pointing out the things you need to think about in designing a language.

To see the nitty gritty line-by-line walkthrough of everything that goes into actually building a language (all the way down to writing your own VM) I HIGHLY recommend reading Crafting Interpreters[1] by Bob Nystrom. I’m not a language hacker but found everything about this book worthwhile and very interesting.

[1] https://craftinginterpreters.com/

To prevent some of the issues with blurring or compression leaking sensitive info, one simple workaround I’ve used is to just put black boxes over the text as usual in any program and then take a screenshot and save it out from there. No accidental history or compression leaking.

> Netflix is on the very fast downward slope

I definitely don’t disagree with this, but here’s a question for people: if Netflix used their original content budget to instead procure existing content like they originally did, would this save them? This is obviously complicated with everyone creating their own streaming service to charge for their own content, but I’d certainly be happier with Netflix if I had a much better selection of other stuff and not “Netflix Originals”.

Something that greatly helped me was understanding the concept of theory of mind [1]. As soon as I learned about the concept and really understood it and successfully started practicing it I became a much better communicator and listener and it helps in nearly every situation involving humans, be it work, personal, or anything else.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

Never heard of that experiment. Just read up on it, though. Fascinating! Thanks for sharing.

Somewhat related, in high school I took a photography class and on the first dark room day, we got paired randomly with someone else in the class to practice taking film out of the canister and a few other dark room things. The person I got paired with and I were from very different circles and would never have exchanged words if it wasn’t for this exercise.

We were only in that room for 15-20 minutes, but I had some of the deepest most genuine conversation I’ve ever had in that sort period of time. After we left the room, we never spoke again. Something about the safety of blindness made us feel comfortable with each other.

If I had instead struck up an AIM chat or a phone call with this person, I guarantee the conversation topics would have been very different. The physical presence, our actual voices, the absence of light…something about that combination made the experience quite profound for my young self.

> Zillow buying up properties in cash over their own online estimates

A discussion around this probably deserves its own entire page, but as I am currently looking for a home as a first-time buyer, seeing “Zillow owned home” labels all over the area in which I’m looking (as if it’s some sort of positive thing) has been infuriating. All they do is use their scale and data science to push me out of the market several times over!

I present no evidence, to prove this, but from what I can tell, this is what they seem to do:

First, they use scale and data science to find what they consider under-priced homes and buy them for cash. If I happen to find the same home for sale at the same time, what seller is going to go with a traditional loan over a full cash offer who could easily offer more if needed? I can’t compete with that.

Secondly, they don’t do anything to the house (aside from clean it up and taking nice pictures—no value added) and then resell it for multiple tens of thousands more than what they just paid. If this house was originally at the high end of my budget, bought by Zillow, then re-listed for more, I can no longer afford it.

Third, if that house DOES sell for more to someone else, it just drives up the rest of the prices in the neighborhood. A lose-lose all around for me and my family. I don’t see how Zillow being able to flip houses is good for anyone. And by flip, I don’t mean fix up—-I have yet to find a Zillow-owned home that has anything of substantial value added to it—-and saving 1% of closing costs or whatever their incentive is by owning a Zillow house is not enough value add.

FWIW, I’ve spent a LOT of time of the past few years trying to get a hold of reliable MLS market data to do my own sort of analysis to try and find affordable enclaves or diamonds in the rough or whatever and that data is damn near impossible to get free access to. So the fact that Zillow has this data and also has unlimited pockets and FTEs who work on this stuff all day…it doesn’t feel right to me.

And it’s not like they’re driving up prices of arbitrary goods or services—these are single family homes (in probably the most popular price range) they’re inflating when we’re already in the middle of a national housing crisis!

/rant

Edit: spelling/clarification

I’m no expert in all things Apple, but this whole thing seems, to me at least, pretty un-Apple like. It would be easier to rationalize if this was actually a directive from, say, a certain large nation who said “if you want to continue to do business here, implement this capability” and what we’re seeing is Apple trying to spin it as a feature or in some sort of positive light.

> I don’t have a credit card and see no point in it.

If you use a credit card like a debit card (pay it off in full every month) it can be rewarding depending on the card. I make $75-$100 cash back every month on my credit card.

This is one of the nice things about shortcuts. I created a shortcut that will turn off wifi and Bluetooth. You can then add an icon to your home screen to run the shortcut and boom. Both are actually turned off…not just disabled for 24 hours. I also have a shortcut to turn them back on when I need them.