nrclark

That might be true for general consumers, yes. Not so true for software developers though. For developers, the tooling is definitely not a moat, and that means the models are what must differentiate.

Claude code is very polished, but I can get the same jobs done using Cursor CLI or any number of open-source coding harnesses (I like Pi, personally). Most plugins/skills/mcps are portable between harnesses with minimal or no effort.

I use the same skills, rules, and MCPs across claude code, cursor, and pi. My tools/plugins aren't identical between harnesses, but porting them from one to another is just a prompt away.

LLM-driven programming doesn't necessarily imply slop. I know some very good developers that use LLMs carefully. As a research tool, code reviewer, Q&A about a large codebase, error message decoder, bug-hunter, and for first-pass implementations. They're always on the newest models and they care about the craft.

Not everybody is oneshotting with Sonnet medium and pushing unreviewable code.

Another option is that it's affected by the order of consumption.

I know somebody who got really into blood glucose monitoring, and she tells me that the order in which she eats a meal affects how much it spikes her glucose. So if she eats a piece of toast followed by a piece of cheese, it causes her a bigger glucose spike than she'd get if she eats the cheese first and then the toast.

Looking at the two meals in the study: if I sat down to eat the processed one, I'd probably start with the veggie straws. If I saw down to eat the unprocessed one, I'd almost certainly start with the egg or the cheese.

edit: and here are some other options: I notice that the unprocessed one is grain-free, vegetarian and has significantly less sucrose. I don't know if any of that makes it more or less healthy, but they're significant differences nutritionally.

As currently practiced, yes. Non-dividend non-voting shares might as well be pokemon cards. Their only real value lies in getting somebody else to buy them, and new money has to flow in from the outside. The question isn't "will it collapse?", it's "when?"

I think the GKI initiative is great, personally. I've worked with chip companies that are super-resistant to upstreaming their code, and just give me a fork-of-a-fork of the kernel and kind of say "welp, good luck maintaining that unless you pay us".

I don't love how much control Google is exerting over Android, and I don't love having to use their signed kernel. But I do prefer that vs. being stuck on an abandoned vendor kernel. If I have to accept low-quality proprietary kernel code, I'd rather keep it in small module-shaped boxes.

Companies like Qualcomm complain about this, but their historical practices are what drove Google to mandate it in the first place.

How open will the boot stack be for this chip? Qualcomm has historically been pretty bad about this: mandatory closed-source bootloaders, mandatory closed-source hypervisors, mandatory closed-source TEEs, forked UEFI, etc.

An open Linux is hobbled without the rest of the stack.

Yes, that's normal for an Android build. Maybe even on the lightweight side as far as build requirements. I agree that it's an absurd about of space.

Same for me.

oh, no that wasn't a correction - it was a pun because "cooked" in American slang means "broken / destroyed / over". In parent's context, "boiling" is correct.

"Boiling" does have a few meanings in English. As a verb, it can either mean "cook in boiling liquid", or it can mean "heat a liquid to its boiling-point". As an adjective, it means "heated to boiling-point". Also "boiling angry" means very, very angry.

Cooked.

That's around 100k/year if used at the same rate for every workday. So the question becomes: does it make your engineer X% more productive, where X is some multiplier based on their salary? There are some software engineers out for sure who are expensive enough that this is worth it.

I don't see this happening any time in the near future. The extra hardware cost is nontrivial, and there's a software support burden. Cellular bandwidth also isn't free, and probably wouldn't be covered by the value of any ads/telemetry that it carried.

OK, but SpaceX is not printing money out of thin air. And neither does the stock market. Somebody will be left holding the bag eventually.

> Children are expensive, but highly subsidized, and just not expensive enough to explain the whole picture.

Highly subsidized? I have to assume you're not talking about America. I pay $3200/mo to send my kids to a very middle-of-the-road preschool. That's almost $40k/year just in childcare costs so that my wife and I can go to work. The difference between a 1-bedroom apartment and a 3-bedroom apartment is an extra $20k/yr or so in my area. Then there's health care premiums, taking them out for activities sometimes, etc.

I can ballpark the cost of having preschoolers in my area as $30k/yr each. And I don't know about you, but I don't exactly see any government subsidies helping me carry that burden.

PEGs are a great replacement for a complicated regex, and can express a lot of things that are hard to do with a regex. But they're also more verbose, and fewer developers are familiar with their usage. PCRE regex is kind of the lingua franca of text-matching, and making it available would be helpful for newcomers imo.

Something I'd observe here: without expressing an opinion about PEGs vs regexes, I'd note that regexes are much more widely used. They're also completely sufficient for an awful lot of text processing tasks. PCRE regexes would be a great inclusion to the stdlib, and would probably be popular.

Tcl is pretty good at functional-programming type stuff, and it can absolutely do anything that you could do with a macro. It isn't Algol-like at all imo, maybe beyond some superficial syntax. It feels a lot more like if LISP and Bash had a baby out of wedlock.

(I've written a lot of Tcl over the years and it'll always have a spot in my heart)

Not the parent, but yes I would/do write that way for effect.

We use a Docker Compose setup for our team's devcontainer. It's defined right in the repo alongside the Dockerfile used to build our image. Our build scripts are all set up to start/stop/use the container automatically. Integration with Vscode's devcontainer system will come next.

It's been a great way for us to make sure that developers and CI/CD get exactly the same build environment, mount-points, paths, network access, permissions, etc.

It's been a super solid tool overall, and I'm pretty happy with it. The only thing that would make our setup better would be if we could figure out how to go rootless/daemonless with it.

Tar doesn't need to imply gzip (or bzip2, or zstd, etc). Tar's default operation produces uncompressed archives.

out of curiosity - any reason not to use it?

You only have to decompress it first if it's compressed (commonly using gzip, which is shown with the .gz suffix).

Otherwise, you can randomly access any file in a .tar as long as: - the file is seekable/range-addressible - you scan through it and build the file index first, either at runtime or in advance.

Uncompressed .tar is a reasonable choice for this application because the tools to read/write tar files are very standard, the file format is simple and well-documented, and it incurs no computational overhead.

This isn't very surprising. Typical US economic policy aims for 2-3% annual inflation. That counter shows an average 2.6% inflation across 26 years, which is kind of right in the range we'd expect.

It's debatable whether this is good longterm policy - but it's been the norm in the US for decades.

If Windows wants to commit to quality and user experience, they can do it by moving closer to the experience that made a generation fall in love with it.

  - Turn Notepad back into a text editor.
  - Remove ads from your operating system. Yes it feels like a license to print money, but it makes your users hate your product. 
  - Stop charging money for Freecell and Minesweeper.
  - Converge your three control panels back into one. The classic control panel was not broken.
  - Drop the mandatory Microsoft User accounts. Nobody wants this except your bean counters.

When 3 out of these 5 happen, I'll believe that Microsoft is actually recommitting to their users.

Not the grandparent, but I've used most of the OpenAI models that have been released in the last year. Out of all of them, o3 was the best at the programming tasks I do. I liked it a lot more than I like GPT 5.2 Thinking/Pro. Overall, I'm not at all convinced that models are making forward progress in general.

I get your point about camera vs lidar. Humans do have other senses in play while driving though. We have touch/vibration (feeling the road surface texture), hearing, proprioception / acceleration sense, etc. These are all involved for me when I drive a car.

Kind of reads 25 people's stories about "How I became a parasite". Why not create new things, instead of making a career out of leeching the wealth created by others?

I’ve disputed fraud a couple of times on my Chase cards. It was.. fine? Uneventful and simple.

Interesting, I wonder if this will spike VPN traffic into Vietnam.

Agree. Even asking it can anchor your thinking.