arthurjj

I realize I've been doing this as part of working with agents heavily the last few weeks. The issue is remembering to have it write and keep them up to date. One thing I've been considering is using a Claude Hook[1] when the session ends to basically "update readme and todo from this session. only change them if needed" or something similar

Agreed they’re definitely underperforming compared to us meatbags according to the famous book “Three felonies a day”. But I don’t think that’s the point the artist was trying to make

As an art piece this is delightful. But it of reminds me of the @patio11 saying "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" the fact that Google and Meta have had 0 and 1 incidents is a bad sign for them.

[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

I'm sympathetic to the points he makes. But it's hard to take it seriously when he makes his money selling marketing and he's complaining about cpc advertising. It's like if a horse breeder were complaining about cars

A few years ago a software engineer asked a few Chemical/Civil/Mechanical engineers and the majority of "real" engineers seemed to think we were [1]. I'm not aware of a better study but happy to be proven wrong, since I generally refer to myself as a Software Developer

[1] https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/

> I'm an SRE and I think it's quite likely the best infra language I've ever seen.

I only worked with 4-5 SREs and they all grudgingly tolerated it. What did you like about it, compared to other infra languages you've used professionally?

I think the internal web tooling was pretty good compared to anyone but AWS circa 2016 but by 2020 when I left it felt a bit antiquated. Similarly they didn't have linters rolled out until it was industry standard iirc.

But BCL is still the worst language I've ever used.

My only commentary is that I prefer "meat puppet" as it's an existing term, which already means something very similar[1], and is a bit more derisive

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meat_puppet

Real, although the speed of the development in the novel is fictionalized

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatchet_(novel)

>And all science fiction is, in one way or another, technological. Even when it’s written by people who don’t know what the word means.

I think this goes too far and then everything is science fiction? She talks about low tech. Is Hatchet science fiction?

To be clear my issue is with the reporting, not the policies

Starting your article with "We expose Big Food’s 239 lawsuits against life-saving policies" especially when a quick google shows it doesn't appear to work [1], isn't good reporting

Similarly "such as" in the quoted sentence implies that they're leaving out a public policy, I have to assume it's in one of 1/5 cases the government hasn't won. But they don't talk about that

[1] https://archive.is/UPdWg#selection-1493.0-1498.0

> Adversarial advocacy is core to most (western?) societies... It's exhausting that _everything_ is litigated. But I still prefer it to authoritarianism.

This is definitely an great way to think about it. Us fighting about it (I hope) leads to a better outcome, even if it's frustrating at the time

Me calling out the NGO is this I hold them to a different standard industry groups. For context I give a few percentage points of my income to charity each year, including some fairly controversial ones (Sea Shepherd, Make Sunsets, Sue the Suburbs). If you're an NGO that reports things and your report is wildly biased, you're a political group that's just abusing the tax code for personal gain. Occasionally that happens but we should still call it out

Thanks for explaining what the lawsuits were about. I'm not sure how I feel about the actual case or even how effective I think black octagons will be. Apparently they were first done in Chile and had little to no long term effect [1]

My assumption that the suits were just was because the article obviously wants you to come away with a very specific conclusion, for example there is a sibling comment that seems to think these cases are about US companies. When reading clearly biased but polished, sources my default is to assume any facts they prominently leave out they did so on purpose.

[1] https://archive.is/UPdWg#selection-1493.0-1498.0

The article says 80% of the lawsuits were in Mexico and ~3% were in America.

I'm about as hippie with my food as you can get, but this "article" is badly written propaganda that conceals more than it reveals. Half way down the article you learn that ~80% (193 out of 239) of the lawsuits are in Mexico and

> many of them were against the country’s labelling regulation. Quinto Elemento Lab reveals the companies’ arguments: that the laws were a violation of their constitutional rights

But the article doesn't say what those rights are, which makes me think the lawsuits were just

I try to buy as many shirts as possible from bands I like and this post reminded me to go look again. I listen to a lot of metal and punk and the problem is most the shirts are either black, which overheat you in SoCal, or have designs that are aggressively ugly [1].

I wish more bands hired better designers or at least had shirts I wouldn't overheat in

[1] I own and wear this one so it's not always a deal breaker https://merchbar.imgix.net/product/174/7292/6127313518766/Zs...

I missed that thread when it came out, it's really a wild read. The difference between how people describe her vs how she's normally portrayed in the media is really startling

I like this summary https://www.andymasley.com/writing/the-ai-water-issue-is-fak...

And this is a reply to her comment about water usage where it becomes clear she's not arguing in good faith. https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/1990498830131888173

I think part of it is she had excellent PR skills and a dedicated fan base. I was at Google when she quit, working in ML, and hadn't heard of her until the story broke. I remember there were a large number of Memegen posts about it, but no one I spoke with knew about her, so I assumed it was brigading.

I think she's since since lost a lot of her allure, especially when she didn't change her mind when the facts about the AI water usage changed 1000x

It might take a while for people to see how the model is useful to them, or to figure out how to make it useful or the capabilities weren't there ye. My mother tried ChatGPT in '23 and thought it was useless, she now uses it regularly, because it's improved and she knows how to use it better.

> More than 30 percent of the US working-age population is using AI [meaning about 70% isn’t], an increase of 3 percentage points from the end of 2025

This makes me less bearish on the AI investments that are being made, if 70% of the working age population isn't using AI then there still is a lot of growth. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed (yet)

> employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA

As someone who lived through multiple rounds of layoffs at big tech companies this seemed quite generous.

Thank you for demonstrating my first point while trying to contest my second.

> As I said in another comment, I think it’s important to debate what these companies are doing, how they’re doing it, and whether the United States’ actions are morally and legally justified.

I think it's sometimes hard to debate these issues in tech circles. In my experience something like 5-10% of techies are vocally critical of these companies or anything National Security related. This article headline is a great example, a serious debate is difficult when you compare people who disagree with you to Nazis

I was discussing resume screening with a jr engineer and unprompted he mentioned he would filter out anyone who worked at a defense contractor, not knowing I had worked at one. I tried to make sure he was removed from interviewing as he obviously wasn't mature enough for it.

I was pretty curious as I have a kid who's not very aware about cars. That appears to be an extrapolation from a pretty biased source [1]. It's probably more honest to say "the aforementioned systems are expected to save 58 to 69 lives each year" after they are fully rolled out to the entire fleet.

That's not counting injuries or property damage, but it is still an already low number

[1] https://www.kidsandcars.org/news/backup-camera-mandate-linke...

[2] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2014/04/07/2014-07...

> When a good programmer writes a new feature, they are looking for both existing and new abstractions that can be applied. They are considering their mental model of the whole system and examining whether it can be leveraged or needs to be updated. That's how they avoid compounding complications.

This is actually a pretty good argument that it's a permanent issue. I haven't tried with writing, or having an LLM write, a summary of the coding style of any of my code bases but my hunch is it wouldn't do a good job either writing it or taking it into account when coding a new feature

Agreed. If I'm looking at what it proposes then about 1/2 the time I don't make the changes. If this were fully automated you would need an addendum like "Only make the change if it saves over 100 lines of code or removes 3 duplicate pieces of logic".

There are other scenarios you would want to check for but you get the idea.

LLMs not being lazy enough definitely feels true. But it's unclear to me if it a permanent issue, one that will be fixed in the next model upgrade or just one your agent framework/CICD framework takes care of.

e.g. Right now when using agents after I'm "done" with the feature and I commit I usually prompt "Check for any bugs or refactorings we should do" I could see a CICD step that says "Look at the last N commits and check if the code in them could be simplified or refactored to have a better abstraction"