eunoia

It would not be selfish to run your home off the car battery during peak rates and therefore cutting peak demand on the grid. Everyone wins.

For what it’s worth I recently decided to learn Haskell for fun and to keep my brain alive since work turned into a prompt factory.

Fable has made an excellent tutor. Maybe it’s just because the exercises I have it generating for me are relatively simple, but I have yet to catch it suggesting non functional or non compiling Haskell code.

Big fan of Snow Crash. For background I liked Cryptonomicon a lot but also found Seveneves to be a bit of a slog.

I would check out The Diamond Age as well if you’re generally taking Stephenson book recommendations.

Beautiful piece.

I sometimes feel like technologists actually desire to remove the humanity from the world because it's messy and they don't understand it and therefore they fear it.

Mixed bag. Some engineers are excited about the company giving them a blank check to explore a new tool. Some engineers are upset because they feel their skills are being devalued by leadership.

Overall I would say most are exploring the new tools while waiting for the madness to subside. Work in $BIGCORP for long enough and you get used to leadership being out of touch with the work on the ground.

Engineers in $BIGCORP jobs are by and large not the hacker types anymore btw.

Executive leadership talking to the managers in their orgs.

I wish I was kidding, but they really are pushing increased token usage. Like I said, we push back. When we push back they acknowledge it's a bad metric and lately have started to add qualifiers about how we don't want to burn tokens unnecessarily and in fact we should be looking to use tokens more efficiently.

And then in the next meeting we are once again talking about how to encourage our teams to use more tokens.

The goal is to increase AI usage of course, but the only metric they track to measure progress on that goal is token usage. Also endless presentations of vibed tools that we never hear about again after a week. Get a lot of those too.

Fellow FAANG. We have weekly manager meetings where leadership encourages us to increase token usage. We do push back, and leadership acknowledges that token spend is not a great metric and people are likely to game it... and then go right back to encouraging us to increase token spend in our teams.

We have token tracking dashboards that leadership is looking at. I know because they show us in these manager meetings. Haven't opened them to everyone yet as some kind of leaderboard, so at least that's nice.

Lots of rumors token spend will be involved in perf reviews. Leadership denies it... but then holds more meetings telling us how important it is to increase our token spend and discussing inadequacies from the token spend dashboards.

What crime was he convicted of? Surely that has some bearing?

This is real. I’ve seen some baffling bugs in prompt based stop hook behavior.

When I investigated I found the docs and implementation are completely out of sync, but the implementation doesn’t work anyway. Then I went poking on GitHub and found a vibed fix diff that changed the behavior in a totally new direction (it did not update the documentation).

Seems like everyone over there is vibing and no one is rationalizing the whole.

Unfortunately I think we actually agree on this and did come away with the same conclusions.

I would highly recommend the book Amusing Ourselves to Death if you are looking to understand how the populace got to the point where truth is irrelevant and nothing really matters.

It helped my mental model a lot at the very least.

It was never principled opposition to anything, just a power fantasy that the current admin lets them live even more viscerally.

The “don’t tread on me” folks converted to “comply or die” shockingly quickly.

I think you’re fundamentally right. Trump is obviously the worst we’ve seen yet, but power has been accumulating unchecked in the executive branch’s hands for decades now.

Trump is merely a symptom of the problem that is the Imperial Presidency. If we can’t tackle the problem itself we’ll get another politician doing the exact same shit after Trump.

His full Lord of the Rings audiobook is likewise incredible.

How dare you quote me!

Eh not sure why OP chose Boulder, it is a great EV town. I commute into Boulder in an EV every day I need to be in the office. I almost exclusively charge my EV in Boulder at the office. The proportion of EVs I see driving in and out of Boulder is very high.

I also road trip around Colorado in my EV and it works great.

Read the first two this year. Absolutely incredible and now some of my all time favorite sci-fi.

It does now with M series chips. iirc Apple made a point of demoing the quick wake in the announcement too.

We have extremely old words for this kind of behavior: greed, avarice. Traditionally they have not been considered good things.

Companies are not helpless dames in a fascist takeover. History has proven that the people on top of the capitalist hierarchy generally actively welcome fascist elements in government.

It’s a lot easier to juice the profits of your megacorp when the power of government is vested in a single, friendly individual. Of course ten seconds of thinking exposes the fragility of such a system (they may turn on you, they may be replaced, they may destroy the entire country, etc). But Capitalism itself encourages short term, winner-takes-all all thinking. If you don’t cozy up to the wanna be autocrat and help them attain more power, you will be outcompeted by someone who does.

The path of a greedy corporate executive is practically pre-ordained in such a situation. The only question is whether the wanna be autocrat succeeds to become the real deal.

> to have a worse time

I have a much better time in my EV than my ICE car but to each their own.

> We will stop increasing our energy use one way or another once we hit this wall.

> If we want to continue using more energy we'll need a whole second Earth to do it on

Or we make like Niven's Puppeteers and move the Earth out into a further orbit with less insolation.

For the curious:

Cadillac Desert is a great history of American dam building and the Bureau of Reclamation

My understanding is context size. Companies like Cursor are trying to minimize the amount of context sent to the models to keep their own costs down. Claude Code seems to send a lot more context with every request and that seems to make the difference.

Additional reading about how Swift Structured Concurrency (Task API) utilizes and propagates QoS is in the proposal doc.

https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo...

> go again the same day.

That seems like a stretch. What is the actual turnaround time for Starship? fwiw the Shuttle had a lot of lofty promises of reusability that were technically true as long as you didn't consider how long the turnaround time was.

Serious question: do any rocket launch schemes actually use asparagus staging?

I vaguely remember hearing it adds too much complexity for a real world launch. Great in KSP though.

“Let’s go exploring!”

Very much agreed! If anyone knows of a good one I would love to read it as well.