If velocity means letting agents live edit a db, I'm fine being slow. Holy hell. Let these people crash and burn but definitely let me know the app name so I know never to use it first.

I think the striking thing is how US companies tend to have no idea how to be wealthy. Record profits, so the ceos use all of their tricks to get rich quick? They are already rich! Don't fix what isn't broken. Not every company needs to expand into 10 new markets, or have 5% lay offs or double in revenue. Some of this is investor pressure, but often it's not. Some guy who made it to the top is bored, doesn't feel like he is obviously doing enough, so he keeps making decisions to justify his position.

This isn't to insight flames but the European companies I worked for knew how to be wealthy! The market took a down turn from COVID, they ate the cost to keep their people. Some flashy new vertical is trending. They decided it's not for them, they have a brand and customers that they should focus on while everyone else works out the kinks. The company decides, why go public at all, we are successful and don't need anyone else's influence over us.

People say "you cannot project beyond 1 quarter". This is true in terms of catastrophe or gambler success. But its not true, if you act in q1 like there will be a q2 or even 5 years from now or heaven forbid a second or third generation you make different moves. You value different things.

A lot of the passerbys nowadays feel like trolls. They come in copy pasting chatgpt responses spamming they need help instead of chit chatting asking questions. We fix their problems, they don't trust us or understand at all. Or worse we tell them their situation is unreasonably bad and they should start over, they scream at us about how some unimaginably bad code passes tests and compiles just fine and how we are dumb.

They tell us we don't need to exist anymore in one way or another. They try to show off terrible code we try to offer real suggestions to improve it, they don't care. Then they leave the community once their vibe/agentic coding leaves that part of their code base. Complete waste of time, they learned nothing, contribute nothing, no fun was had, no ah-hahs, just grimey interactions.

At the end of the day chatgpt won't be there to hold our hands in the hospital, have a laugh over failing to pick up a date, get invited to a bbq, groan over the state of the code in utils.c, or recommend us for our next job/promotion. They say software is social for a different reason than most of these examples.

It's good to be efficient, whatever that means, but there are no metrics on the gains that get made by talking to people. In a lot of ways those gains are what life is about.

https://eig.org/immigrant-retention-estimates/

You know how the US had people from all over the world trying to get into our schools, and how they regularly figured things out important economic healthcare and other discoveries by being ahead of the curve? This group is a huge reason why.

Here's a good link for just 9 things that came from nsf funded studies. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/science/federally-funded-... the first being GPS. There are way more and the obvious ripple down effect of having trained people who went into industry and innovated in the private sector.

I will play along and assume this is sound. 10-40% +/- 10% is along the lines of "sort of" in a completely unreliable, unguaranteed and unproven way sure.

Training data quality does matter but even with "perfect" data and a prompt in the training data it can still happen. LLMs don't actually know anything and they also don't know what they don't know.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11817