yojo

AI is just another technology, and all technologies should be employed in service to humans.

I think it’s reasonable for people to say “I like the way things were, I don’t like this new future you’re proposing, and I want to limit the technology that’s doing the thing I don’t like.”

There is nothing inevitable about AI. As a society we may decide it is fundamentally unhealthy or anti-human. We have banned or curtailed access and research for other technologies before.

It will actually take a little while to tell if they were, in fact, crying wolf.

There is a lag between when carbon is released and when the effects of it peak. If we did stop all carbon emissions today, the effects of prior emissions would play out over the next 30ish years.

We’re injecting unprecedented amounts of thermal energy into planet-scale systems, and it is hard to predict second and third order effects.

I have kids/I really hope they were crying wolf.

I never write a first version anymore. I do review every change before I open a PR, but it’s entirely for architecture and hygiene reasons.

Code organization, simplest possible implementation, tests that carry actual value, proper factoring of helpers/modules, etc.

I have tried to make skills to automate this, but LLMs anchor so hard on the code that already exists they really struggle to produce simpler alternatives.

It is rare that I catch a correctness bug, but if I do it’s because of stored state or interactions with other systems.

Working in b2b SaaS, there’s a real gravity toward checkbox-driven development. Any time we lose a deal because a competitor had feature A, the immediate response is “we need to build feature A.”

And from a sales perspective, that’s probably not wrong.

I think a new (or newly critical) engineering challenge is how to build in a way that keeps a codebase that’s churning out features from crumbling under the weight.

The domain is code analysis, all languages and frameworks. It’s b2b SaaS, so total volume is not incredibly high. And many customers have contract clauses that we don’t train on their data.

I’m not convinced we could train easily here, or that it’s worth the investment compared to (previously) spending fractional cents on Luna, or now paying even less on Jev. Especially given that these numbers are not meaningful to our margins.

Is this equivalent though? The Laya article ends with “ Treat Laya as a fast foundation model to specialize, not as an omniscient zero-shot oracle.”

I have a dozen different things at work that are currently using LLMs as classifiers for different questions. I don’t have the time, data, or resources to fine tune a model for each of them.

I haven’t had a chance to plug in Jev yet (waiting on approvals), but if it has the general intelligence claimed in the press release, then Laya is in no way comparable for my use case, and whatever TypeSafe has done is a substantial innovation over the Laya paper.

Late reply, but I think once you took away the profit motivated people and the money man, the “museum” would have been exactly that - a collection of antiquated artifacts. But I guess we’ll never know.

I’m not saying it was right or moral, just probably inevitable.

In TS/JS you’re usually inlining the reducer fn, and there’s something hard to read/especially ugly about the comma after the bracket or arrow fn into the initalValue.

That said, when I’m reducing a list, I still use reduce.

You’re not wrong, but I think the alternative future is sama loses control, goes and raises a quick $100M, and hires all the profit-motivated staff to make something that looks like today’s OpenAI.

Dario already showed there was an appetite for this.

If you can afford to eat the loss, don’t insure it.

Obviously insurance companies make money on average for every policy. If they didn’t, they would go bankrupt. So on average, every time you buy insurance, you lose.

So insure only what’s required by law, or things that would throw your life off track if they vanished.

That’s nice in theory, but as these things get better and cheaper this kind of capability is going to drop from nation states to script kiddies. That future is coming, I don’t see any way around it.

We can round up all the bored teenagers we want, but it’s not putting the genie back. Better start adjusting our systems to account for it.

They still haven’t removed “old.reddit.com”. Replace “www” with “old” on any reddit URL and enjoy a relic from when the internet was less ruined.

I was at Dropbox from 2016-2020. We were certainly trying to build a sustainable business, but there was a major identity crisis. Were we consumer web? Buy Mailbox and build Carousel, then shut them both down.

Maybe we’re Notion/Evernote? Buy Hackpad, plow a ton of money into Paper (which was legitimately good), then quietly deprioritize it.

Maybe we’re actually some kind of enterprise document productivity suite? Buy HelloSign. Plow a bunch of money into a desktop app. Pull more plugs.

A lot of smart people were trying. We made a lot of bets (too many?). None of them proved to be a second act, and the competitors eventually caught up.

If you didn’t allow it, you wouldn’t be able to change models in the same conversation, as key parts of the context would be lost.

Wouldn’t surprise me if the providers just remove that ability and lock the model once the conversation starts.

Honestly, GPT 5.6 Luna is worth a look. It’s a reasonably good implementer at a small fraction of the cost. $100 buys a heck of a lot of it at API pricing.

Not sure about the OAi Pro plan, doesn’t look like the 80% Luna price slash made its way into the quota system.

You could also try tuning down the effort level on Opus. It makes a huge difference in token consumption and you might be able to get away with lower than you’ve set

At the beginning of the pandemic all the mills cut production anticipating economic collapse that didn’t come. Prices spiked on high demand and low production.

Mills did ramp back up, but it’s unclear to me if they used it as a chance to do so slowly/preserve margins. Lumber never got close to pre-pandemic levels.

Tariffs probably also play a role here. About a quarter of US lumber comes from Canada, and barbed wire is just steel with a little bit of processing.

For products with little value add there’s not anywhere for the tax to be absorbed, and no real way for domestic producers to quickly scale up, even if they wanted to.

You still pay cache token costs on API calls. Cache cost/token are 90% lower, but you pay it every single turn.

I’m not sure if they let you skip the cache write cost on the first turn. That would imply cross-user caching infrastructure or special casing the default system prompt to give you a discount. Maybe? Away from the computer but you could try a “hello” in a fresh session and see what was billed.

Claude Code injects a ton of tools into the system prompt, including their “memory system” that’s like 10k+ tokens. Depending on your task shape, this can easily double your task cost (e.g. a low context-using job that takes many turns, like a monitoring loop).

You should use --disallowed-tools to prune any tools not needed for the task. Note that this is also a perpetual game of whack-a-mole since they’re always adding new tools.

I read the balls as “houses”, though the phallic spire emerging from them dead-center is also very on-brand

Oh, and the memory use! I run a lot of concurrent sessions. 3 gigs for a terminal window is ludicrous.

I have been working all day every day in Claude. I loathe their bug-ridden UI. Every release is a new crop of bugs, sometimes the old ones get fixed, usually not.

Any kind of scrolling back, copying text, using their menu system - basically anything that isn’t typing characters has had/still has unaddressed bugs.

OpenAI shipped a competitive model and I’m over in Codex now. I have yet to hit a bug.

If you’re holding the SOTA crown, people will put up with your buggy mess. As soon as that crown slips your pile of trash becomes a huge liability.

I’ve experienced this in Claude Code - it’ll start asking me if we can submit the PR at the end of every turn.

Google at least is serving AI results on SRPs billions of times a day, and has pre-existing expertise in data center buildouts and custom silicon.

They have one of the more compelling cases for rolling their own.

Schumpeter is one of their columns; this is an editorial piece, not one of their news articles.

The regular stuff is still well written, IMO.

Meta is straight evil. It undermines the institutions of democracy and it negatively impacts its users mental health, all in service of selling your data to advertisers so they can better goad unnecessary consumption.

If I learn you work at Meta, I will judge you as at best lacking a moral compass and treat you appropriately.

Apple has problems, but is a lot closer to morally neutral. Ditto for Netflix.

Amazon has hollowed out local retail/is also bad for society, though not on Meta’s scale. But you sell your soul more cheaply there.

Internally, it’s important to understand that every ask should have a business goal associated with it. The thing being asked for is rarely (never?) the only way to accomplish that goal.

Great engineers focus on the customer or business need and find/propose alternatives that are possible.

I have worked at places that have negotiated flat percentage discounts on all AWS spend.

This explanation seems plausible to me.

You can hook traditional SAST into your coding tool, and get cheap-ish realtime detection for some classes of vulns while coding.

You can optionally layer LLM diff scanning if you want to burn some tokens on your tokens. Modern tools can catch some impressively subtle issues.

Before unlimited PTO took off, standard in FAANG-like (US) industry was ~12 corp holidays + 15-25 days annual PTO, depending on seniority.

I don’t know anyone who takes the high end of that anymore, especially senior/staff folks.

Unlimited PTO takes a liability off the company’s books, and makes every time off request a negotiation.

Two things:

1) Unlimited PTO is a scam. Ask anyone who ever got paid out six weeks salary when they changed jobs.

2) “the craft” is doing some heavy lifting here. I happen to enjoy AI-assisted dev, but it is nothing like the work that drew me to the industry.

Otherwise agreed on all counts.