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People conservative enough to drop the required nuclear bomb on the transit workers union to be able to deploy something like this won't pay for it, and vice versea.

>re-used

Perhaps even by other people, and over time, continuously improving as we discover new use cases or that things are more complicated than they seemed on the first pass. Like... regular software, and not "do[ing] it all in Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT"

A chat window that takes multiple seconds to respond and behaves non-determinstically is a pretty bad paradigm for most computer tasks. It just happens to work for software development in particular.

Twitter consensus now is more like LLMs will be entirely commoditized, apps & features will be cheap, and only systems of record will have lasting value.

Everyone is saying this about "the factory." I have seen some successful fix and migrate campaigns for well-defined, local transformations such as retroactive fixes for new lint rules, flaky tests, or library migrations. But so far the attempts to do nontrivial new functionality in this manner have made big messes that take more effort to review and correct than simply hand-feeding 1-3 vanilla Claude Code sessions with my full attention.

>Programming is something you can't get paid for.

That's the economy. It's not like all our problems are solved or everything that needs building is finished, even in very AI-forward tech companies. We are busier and working harder and longer hours than ever, and we've been hiring thousands of people in India.

True leading up to 2010. The couple of kids who had the original iPhone or the 3G were unusual. Most of my classmates - including myself - got one between the 4 (2010) and the 5S (2013).

The timeline is more plausible for the rise of short-form video.

Essentially every high schooler had an active Facebook account and essentially every school paper was written on a word processor by, like, 2010. By 2018 even Instagram is starting to be played out. I would be very surprised to see a material increase in the share of US or western students using social media over the 2018-2022 period.

People need to stop believing insane, delusional things like the existence of a human being with a certain name, address, phone number, birthday, SSN being secret or private information.

Downstream of that, people need to stop accepting knowledge of the basic public metadata fields or possession of images containing them as evidence of identity verification. Do actual public key cryptography on the internet or check biometrics and the document’s physical security measures in person.

The proposal I’m hearing is to make people training models accountable for anything users do with them.

Obviously you’re going to keep the model behind an API and be very selective about the people allowed to call and the queries it’s willing to answer, in that case. As Anthropic has done with Fable. But that is voluntary restraint - mostly in today’s regime we get frontier capabilities in open weight models on a ~year delay.

I do not buy that LLMs and the capability to run them are fundamentally different from other software or general purpose computing infrastructure in this regard. Moves to ban open source software or force OEMs to put little cops in everyone's computers are bad.

One through eight read as the list of sacrifices you make in having children. But the experiences of loving and being loved back seem at least incomplete without that.

Even startups that beat the incredibly long odds to become successful mostly aren’t successful enough to make up for a long stretch of not earning BigCo RSUs.

I work at a household name tech company and pretty much all our "data" dashboards are running SQL queries against a Hive/Presto environment that's at least 24 hours behind. Real-time dashboards are limited to the service metrics time series database (so combinations of categorical variables, no individual records) or rare expensive Pinot tables.

>Despite all the noise, remote work has not really decreased much in recent years. "Less than 1/3 of companies requiring fully in-person work in 2026."[3]

Remote work is generally being displaced by hybrid. That still requires employees to live in expensive metros and employers to maintain offices with space for everyone. The offices can be a little more austere and the commutes a little worse given that they're only for 2-3 days a week, but everybody's still got to pay for basically the same stuff. Downtown retail, though, is screwed with only 2-3 days of foot traffic to pay the bills.

Most of the 60 minute travel time radius around a San Francisco or Silicon Valley tech HQ is water and nature preserve.

The obvious 21st century United States instance of "don't collect data that the government might later use for persecution" is E-Verify.

The part that has stood the test of time and genuinely seems to carve reality at the seams is the query part. The data definition and data manipulation parts are just ok.

I definitely hear about segments of the industry being like that, but FAANG and adjacent generally isn't. Engineers are expected to display ownership of a problem space (scope depending on seniority), navigate ambiguity, and manage their own time.

In my experience, shared memory instills the appropriate fear and caution, while the apparent simplicity of channels encourages novice Go programers to take on concurrency projects beyond their abilities and without due care. Been on both the submitter and reviewer side of that plenty of times in 10 years.

It's pretty easy to get yourself into trouble with channels: deadlocks, send on closed, channel leaks, deadlocks "fixed" thoughtlessly with arbitrarily-sized buffers, etc.

Pension fund managers, who in turn work for public employees and voters.

In my experience the only people who get paid "well" to just code up well defined JIRA tickets are new grads, and this is essentially a training period until they grow into leading complex and ambiguous projects independently. You can't hang out there more than a few years.

If you've got secret agents on enemy soil who can get near targets with drones, you're probably just bombing them.

If we can beat a security-state airgap by sprinkling USB drives in the parking lot, I think the Iranians can beat an "internal" network by getting someone to click on an email attachment or visit the wrong website on their municipal issued Windows machine.

It's very common for the proprietary software for interfacing with ancient, expensive machines to break after OS upgrades, so they're probably unpatched... you might not even need to burn a 0-day.

I enjoy watching Cursed Controls on YouTube. For him, the gold standard is a flash drive with the program on it physically hanging out in the control cabinet.

The problem with ads is that they steal your attention to serve someone else’s commercial interests, whereas the objects in a home should serve its occupants’ purposes, practical or aesthetic. The fridge in particular is a site for displaying family information like the calendar, children’s artwork, etc. so an ad there, even an honest and passive one, is a violation.

A screen with an ad on it is objectionable enough, even if the ad is untargeted.

And how many more are on the same internal networks as dozens or hundreds of ordinary Windows desktops on which municipal workers are checking their email? Hardly better.

I came to SF in 2016 idealistic about working on hard problems with smart people. Then I learned that an approximation of my childhood home in the Rust Belt suburbs (my parents were a teacher and an accountant) runs about $2.5 million.

Just doing good work and being responsible doesn’t make a sustainable adult or family life in this region. It’s a tournament. There are homes only for the top few contestants. And if you lose, you’re locked out of the professional milieu in its entirety. So playing a strategy with a certain amount of shrewdness, ambition, and prioritization of TC over other goods is required to stay in the game. Unless you want to have roommates in your 40s.