sporkland

While I think share of capital is a great metric, there are obviously flaws where it could be going on while everyone's lives improved. Which I think is happening to some extent, but to another extent I think folks lives are getting worse in meaningful ways like portion of income spent on basics like housing.

Are there 2-3 other key well-measured metrics that are as stark and explainable as this one (i.e. not a massive basket of goods) that well captures whether folks lives are improving or getting worse at a basic level?

I hate to break it to engineers feeling this for the first time, but this is what management and "leadership" has been dealing with forever in software. It's just you were a fleshy Claude/codex. And your goal was never to understand everything it was to build something of value that had the risk squeezed out of it through development processes.

Unfortunately the answer is that you better get comfortable with the feeling and know that when something goes wrong it's not the end of the world (for most of us, some of the AI labs it may actually be) and while it will be painful you fight through the incident, you do the post mortem and you don't let that class of error happen again.

There are some techniques, which you hated as an IC that you'll now have to embrace:

1. Have it write a doc and review it.

2. Have a strong point of view on critical parts of the architecture and one way doors. Review those mercilessly.

3. Spot check and taste test the code.

4. Be merciless about the small mistakes you see slipping in expand scope on them to find the class of problem it is.

5. Think about contracts and test coverage and failure modes at a higher level. What is the most effective way to find misalignment without reviewing every line.

Know that through this meta process you will squeeze out risk but that you won't eliminate it and at some point you feel like you squeezed out enough risk to ship.

And when something does go wrong take that moment to find a way to add another step to your risk reduction process that eliminates that class of errors not just that individual error.

While I think the peter principle plays and human factors definitely play a role I also think that misaligned incentives also start to creep in internally in a way that wouldn't be tolerated by the market in general. Strategy costs and internally subsidized losing approaches add up until the company is no longer effective relative to a clean slate competitor that is being held accountable by the market and customers.

> At a time when basically all VC funding, and in many ways the entire productive capacity of the economy, is shifting to AI,

Really enjoyed this snippet of your post. Not sure why, but being in the weeds with it, it had never really looked like this is an industrial revolution style retooling of how we work, with the pain and benefits that come along with it.

I read his tweet as concerned about the lack of widespread adoption and the impact of that.

Any high level on what you'd do today? I'd love to get mine sequenced at a place that won't sell it to a health insurance place. I saw @pcollison post about unleashing coding agents on his being fascinating, I'd love to know more.

Unfortunately for Ramses and Erika the description tapped into something deeper, a symbol that is all too actually present in our society of the infantile male whose every whim is taken care of.

I myself confused the person for the symbol and owe him an apology. But also eff all the child men walking around always taking and never giving. Be more like Ramses.

I've subjectively detected this in previous codex releases where the 2 days before release of a new model the agent went from great to me pulling my hair out yelling at it. I think it's just a win-win for them. They need to ramp up basic capacity and usage on the new model, what better way to free up capacity than to reduce the effort with the current gen. There's not deep detectors that they've regressed (especially before this guy showed solid data).

> Seeing the hype online feels both validating and deeply frustrating. I worked on this literally one year back in March 2025. I spent months of hard work, sweat, and sleepless nights building it

While I have deep empathy for what the author must be feeling. It feels tone deaf to me that as someone working in the model industry, likely using data sets scraped from other folks work, he doesn't see the hypocrisy in this.

We've hit an interesting question in our society where a lot of us are getting tremendous value out of the uncredited and uncompensated use of people's hard work and sleepness nights. It seems naive of the author or anyone at this point to believe that the same won't happen to them.

The question is whether we want this to be how our society operates? I can see a number of pros and cons and I know it's not a straight line from they trained on the works to derived works. But it's hard to imagine as humans how we will sustain broad motivation over a long period if we keep allowing this to happen.

As an outsider in a hyper competitive commercial space like mobile os (apple, android) which part makes you think it's active obstruction and not just moving fast and trying to keep up, get ahead, etc and they want the open source side but it's a lower priority?

Since S3 supports regionally and zonally locked buckets it seems like any promise around this would have to except those buckets where that was configured.

Hacking is also interesting in that it has a clear success/failure outcome so it's easier to RLVR from similar to math problems. Whereas clean code, good architecture, good product taste are reliant on RLHF.

Article brought to you by your local AI agent.

We had one of the most damaging lab leaks in history with COVID and the wuhan lab. And we couldn't even get the facts straight.

I think this is largely a similar thing. The labs should be running at certain levels of containment given the vitality/risk of the organism under study. Hopefully they get there for all our sakes.

But the revealed preference of society at this point is the damage is worth the benefits both in wuhan and with AI. Unfortunately with some of these "substances" it could eventually prove lethal.

Having tried recently to build an app using POI (restaurants) information derived from OSM I've been left both simultaneously in love with the idea of OSM and sad by the reality of it.

The idea that we all have an open map free to use by developers and users not controlled by a rent collecting corporate entity should be wonderful resource for humanity.

The practicalities are often unfortunately far from wonderful:

1. A lot of the POI data in OSM is often either out of date, wrong or incomplete, including names, web addresses, phone numbers, closures, etc.

2. They often don't have addresses as you're supposed to resolve the address from the location, but if you have multi-story buildings this gets problematic.

Part of this I believe is due to the community requirement that this data come from folks walking around vs from providers that say restaurant owners use (square, toast, etc) to manage their online presences.

Google Maps is just dominant in terms of gravity with folks are throwing all their photos and reviews and edits on there. But if google maps had to build google maps on the Places API google itself would be out of business the prices and terms are so out of control.

But even in the more open space you've got:

1. Overture trying to to make OSM actually usable by combining multiple data sources and doing validation. But overture is up to 1 month or more out of date.

2. MapBox and others are trying to make money selling improved POI data on top of OSM derived data with their own sources added.

I ended up building a system that combined OSM (for freshness) plus Overture for reliability plus validation, but no data duplication from google maps to filter bad data coming from OSM and Overture.

If you've ever ridden a bike next to an autonomous car on its worse day and most meatbag drivers on their best day you'd know it's not just life saving... the amount of near misses, stress and asshole moves drops precipitously as well, at least once per trip from my experience, but usually more.

This is way older than 2025, no?

... and? People don't build programs using nand gates that often. I'm not gonna miss people fetishizing missing the forest for the trees in their professional lives instead focusing on other skills that produced real value.

You'll still need to learn stuff and learn your craft but if you don't become an expert at programming switch statements so much the better or the next garbage web framework.

I'm with you on the pros and cons of centralization. But what makes you think if linear became the unified platform that it wouldn't just become like GitHub? See jira.

Given the history here, No matter which tool becomes the death star of developer workflow it always trends towards complexity and the challenges that come with it. Hosting your own doesn't become a panacea as most IT/ops teams also struggle with uptime and upgrades (increasingly relevant).

The only way out IMHO as customers picking two of these goliaths of sending a clear signal to them that we're happy to pay them handsomely for a stable and less sprawling product. Or a hosted open source version with a different cost structure that doesn't drive these wild swings at feature bloat and the inherent instability that comes with that chase.

In college they made us study the case of therac-25 so we understood the dangers of creating too many errors in our software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

The airlines are certainly bad actors, the problem on the other side is there are a massive number of people that are willing to waste massive amounts of time to get undeserved freebies if the boundary is too permissive. I agree with your underlying sentiment that the needle is too strongly on the side of the airlines at the moment, but I think if they shifted towards a more healthy stance they'd quickly be swamped by these abusers.

I'm curious what the game theoretic optimal here is.

For me the music on the Monkey Island CD-ROM remaster was a real jaw dropper.

I'm not sure why this is surprising.

In the US we try to maintain inflation at a target rate of 2%. For commodities where the costs aren't able to keep pace with inflation you'd either expect prices to double every 35 years or for the product to be half-ish the size (assuming labor costs scale by size). It's a 99 cent candy bar so...

I think inflation rate and costs of lots of things due to oil has jumped so much in the last few years that both the costs have gotten mouth watering and sizes have gotten noticeably smaller. But I prefer either of those to leveraging even more low cost filler, which I assume is the other option.

I honestly think in the US portion sizes tend to be larger than I need here so I'd honestly prefer if they lowered prices and dropped sizes to something reasonable.

A few reasons I'd say:

1. Our incentive structure in software has always been to a large extent driven by more features [1]. Agent driven development has poured gasoline on that fire.

2. Despite all the effort we put into quality assurance by engineering teams, it's still hard to full de-risk releases across a broad set of configurations use cases, etc. Especially as most agents and even the test hierarchy itself tends to favor unit or module tests and these issues tend to pop up at integration points or hard to test non functional requirements.

So I think what we're seeing is people are rapidly adopting agent lead development due to #1 but the risk reduction pipelines haven't caught up with #2. I think they eventually will but we're definitely in for a rough road for a bit.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/

People keep referring to the output of neural nets as the "average of the training data" but imho the deep value in neural nets and the interesting philosophical part is they are massive conditional probability engines whose results can change based on the variables you feed in.

While I appreciate how deservedly hated all of our politicians are, isn't it such a sad state of affairs that we can't find trustworthy folks to lead these critical institutions?

> There's so much good stuff in this post.

The post starts off so cynical. I know a few people at anthropic and oai and the simplest explanation also matches my observations that they actually believe what they say. That agents will be doing the bulk of the programming in the not so distant future. They believe they themselves will be out of jobs at that point.

They aren't managing some message and trying to teach the anti AI folks a lesson.

I just made a crappy Microsoft account that I don't check or tie to anything. I'm sure it will backfire at some point.

Was hoping to understand if anyone has done any research on it. I could only really find one research paper on the topic [1], but it seems less focused on this specific issue.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09009