But it's not exactly irrelevant, either, right? It does add to the confusion to leave it out, so, my bad.

As far as the black plague, what gave even serfs so much leverage was the fact that there were so few people in all categories around anymore. Fewer peasants to work the land, so the prices of the free peasants went up commensurately. But even serfs who wants to run far away and set themselves up as free peasants elsewhere could frequently get away with it because a) fewer men on horseback to spare to chase them down, and b) the other lord they went and rented land from didn't have enough peasants to work his land either, and had a real vested interest in making sure they weren't caught and brought back to their original lord.

Except not really. Peasants were considered the property of their lords. If they decided to go and “try their luck” at a neutral location and that was reported to their lord, armed men on horseback would be very likely to show up not long after, to return them back to the lord’s land, but not without a solid beating and/or maiming first.

Sometimes, certain forms of civilization just are oppressive, rather than collaborative. They tend to be out-competed by forms that are less oppressive, true, but it’s not guaranteed and not always fast and not always permanent.

We are, through this process, simulating intelligence. These models aren’t intelligent, but they can simulate it. Every simulation has a degree of fidelity, and we’re not at 100%, not even with the top models. When you think about it in those terms, I find it becomes a lot easier to keep their limitations in mind. Additionally, it becomes easier to remember that this is an algorithm that you are running, and are responsible for, not another being that you can ascribe blame to.

"you would be autocomplete too" "thoughts are just tokens" etc

You're not helping your case the way you think you are.

$20 is a single meal at a fast food restaurant, which I’ll have forgotten about the very next day. This is a much better long term investment.

> Compared to today, this works out to a 17% reduction in weekly limits on Claude Code. We’re working on exciting changes that will make it feel like you’re getting more from Claude, while having more visibility and control of your usage. Can’t wait to share them.

They are both raising the limits by 25% and apparently reducing them by 17%. I think they mean to say you can do more, but what a terrible press release.

AI isn’t “a code abstraction layer” any more than Jira is, or the engineer themselves is.

Like, I kinda jest, but also kinda don’t. Would that really be so bad of an outcome? The net positives don’t really seem to bear up under all the negatives just… going away.

If you have a semi-recent MacBook with even 32GB, you can run 20GB models that are pretty damn smart, with room to spare for the rest of your toolchain.

If you’re reasonably connected to the code you’re writing and prompting the AI at the level of the code, not the level of the feature, you can get some fantastic results.

Sure, it’s not the completely automated dreamland that’s been sold, but it’s still a speed-up on par from going from assembler to a higher-level language, which is still immense.

And for effectively free, if you have a machine that would otherwise have been considered “developer-grade” for a lot of tasks anyway.

You don’t have to go full Patrick Bateman corp-bro, but keeping in mind the phrase “we don’t fire family” and adjusting your approach based on that counter-example can help you to keep things appropriately transactional and not be taken advantage of.

You’re just carrying a blank phone that you intend to set up and use later, and they can’t force you to install your backup onto a phone.

Now, this is sus as hell, and you’ll probably draw all kinds of extra attention, but if border security wants access to your phone in the first place, you’re already in a weird place.

I’ve always been hesitant to short stocks because of the old adage “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” and the market has a REAL vested interest in seeing these companies not explode.

Good luck on this one, genuinely, because you may need it.

(That said, if you DO win big on this one, I think we’re all fucked, so maybe I shouldn’t be wishing you TOO much luck. =) )