But once you've toppled the house of knowledge work, you'll find you can rebuild it easily because the foundation still exists, and it's the thing missing in this analysis; judgement.

I have switched to pnpm already.

I don't think it's common knowledge how much they dropped imports since the Iran / straight of hormuz crisis.

Back at the start of that conflict there were a lot of breathless takes about what catastrophe was in store in a few weeks time, and what materialised was bad but not in anything like the same league as what was predicted.

The thing that wasn't accounted for in the analysis at the time was just how rapidly and by how much China could suppress its appetite for oil imports.

System 1 can refer to the dashcam or the mk1 eyeball + notepad in your example.

System 2: a system for tracking the presence of a person across both time and location

An example of system 2 would be the facial id system being trialled on the london underground currently.

These are a difference in kind not in degree. It doesn't matter how many system 1's you deploy, you cannot unlock the capability of querying where any given face was observed across time and location.

Where did you learn that? It doesn't reflect the structural volumes present. Central banks make interventions all the time in line with little stabilisation programs. Those are almost always deemed success.

Maybe you deduced it by yourself? If so, fx is weird despite traditionally being seen as the simplest area in finance. E.g. It's counter-intuitive but we tend to think trade make up most FX volume globally. It's in the area of less than 3%. The majority by far is speculative and hedging.

The other trap is fx volume, people assume the know what volume is but then they learn expressions of fx volume is almost always actually tick volume.

Maybe i will write a blog post, if nothing else than to get my own thoughts in order.

I don't want to be overly critical, there's languages that people complain about and then there are languages that no one uses... If i compare it to js/ts, some stuff is genuinely better in Python - e.g. if you missed an await. While both ecosystems have lint tools available for this, but the behaviour is just friendlier in python.

Structured concurrency is better in python, but even if TaskGroup is nicer to use than AbortController, it still has its own foibles which means i'll usually advocate for AnyIO.

But the js/ts ecosystem just generally benefits from being async from the get-go where python you're just a time.sleep() away from a bug that will slip through dev envs and ci pipelines undetected and only rear its head under load in prod.

If i have a tip to share its the debug flag for asyncio run:

    asyncio.run(f(), debug=True)  # find some more issues before prod

It's not going to be the right stack for long lived websocket connections or whatever but for a CRUD-ish or enterprise app, often very productive.

[1] buffer bloat is too easy to sleep walk into

    queue = asyncio.Queue()  # oops

    await asyncio.gather(*(fetch(item) for item in items))  # look mum! no outbound sockets left or maybe even no file descriptors

    data = requests.get(url).json()  # oops! we're blocking the event loop

I can go on and on about async python (cancellation bugs, leaking a task - that has a cataclysmic failure mode where if you forget to hold a reference to your asyncio.create_task() then it's all weak refs in that machinery so your task can get garbage collected before it ran or completed in production! super tricky forensics. Then there's all the obvious stuff like race conditions, new ways of creating deadlocks, blah blah i really can go on for days.

Does zig have auto vectorisation? I'm thinking that if you write the code in a vector friendly way, then the compiler can do the boiler plate for you

https://llvm.org/docs/Vectorizers.html

https://inside.java/2025/08/16/jvmls-hotspot-auto-vectorizat...

And From: https://getdx.com/research/measuring-developer-productivity-...

    > Diffs per engineer*
    >
    > * Not at individual level

I found "initiatives" was added. What does this new initiatives measure bring. Why do we care about otherwise unqualified initiatives, how do i know that doesn't just mean using the other 4 proven measures as cover for pushing pet projects without merit?

I'm super cynical tonight it seems. This is just rubbing me up the wrong way i guess and i can't really put my finger on why.

Incidentally, Whenever i've done this in the past it's had a pleasant side effect of improving architecture. You end up forcing something akin to "push for's down and pull if's up" because crossing the ffi boundary is not free. It can be quite magical, as in leading to comically unbelievably speed ups when you also take advantage of vector intrinsics.

what if the market was hard to enter?

What if the inputs aren't available?

What if the costs of the inputs rises?

What if the capital for expansion isn't available?

What if the manufacturers don't expect demand to persist?

What if there's a shortage of skilled labour?

What if it takes years to expand supply?

What if there wasn't effective competition?

I'm not sure it's as certain as you seem to claim.

Could be an Alpina

This is a circa 1990s engine in the US market i think? Dual Overhead Cam didn't really become popular in the US market until then i think. 70s-80s for single overhead cam to become established.

The diagrams are beautiful and informative as always from this author.

There's no free lunch id think, the PG model is more robust. Unsafe extensions can take down the whole instance in the threaded model, processes contain the blast radius to that connection (also typically easier to debug since this type of issue is thankfully rare, it's also gnarly to get on top of).

Further, on linux (not on windows) a lot of the lines between a thread and a process get blurry (copy on write, shared memory mappings etc). They're both handled very similarly in the kernel, theyre both scheduled using similar machinery.

>> For PG to do plan caching it would need to serialize the plan between processes and that would require some significant work since it was never designed that way.

Is that true? I'm thinking the buffer cache and locks and WAL coordination are just as fast - it's just mmap'd SHM into each process. It's not like every access needs IPC?

Anyway i was going to post my favourite tool in this space https://github.com/jopohl/urh universal radio hacker just makes the process trivial, but i see the repo is marked archived now. Either way, the software is excellent.

But how do I get to express that demand? Asking as a frustrated regular user of excel - excel is amazing software but if your laptop is not in airplane mode, the number of little delays that creep in is wild. It's all seemingly network delays, connecting to onedrive servers when i'm editing a field (why?!), 10s of connections to random microsoft domains as i flick between tabs in the UI (why?!) - each flick incurring a subtle but observable delay.

>> Dreaming is free... All Electron devs

I like your sentiment for sure but i reckon you might be barking up the wrong tree. I'll give the clearest counter example i know of:

When i scroll a buffer in Zed (it's a 120fps editor written in rust that i really want to like) i perceive micro stutters.

When i scroll a buffer in VSCode (an electron app) it's buttery smooth.

I've tried this many times over 1.5+ years of releases. It's a reliable finding on an m1 macbook pro and an m1 imac.

If the slow stack can be fast and the fast stack can be slow, then there's more to this than just tech stack.

If something is judgement heavy, "code i care deeply about", then i don't really agree with the direction of travel here. Don't try to delegate decisions you care deeply about.

I do like the framing of agent loop vs harness loop, but only delegate stuff that you can accurately specify in advance, that usually means stuff that's repeatable in my case ("hey go see how i did X, do that but for Y"), and that inherently means stuff that's predictable.

For stuff where lack of my judgement as input is just going to cause me to say "no", we're down to collaborating in the "agent loop" as Armin puts it. And that's totally fine. It's fast, but also safe.

Remember before AI coding assistants, sometimes you'd get an engineer join your team who was SUPER productive, your peers would be jealous "oh yeah but you guys only got all that done because you have X on your team!" - they didn't live the curse of having that kind of person around - if you don't have them PERFECTLY aligned, then they run off at break neck speed in the wrong direction.