Hiring is really hard and its relatively common for someone to look good on paper and do really well in interviews and completely bomb on the job.

The difference with hiring a CEO is that the blast radius is much larger for that role

Many books can only be bought this way. Publishers don't want to sell books through platforms that don't have DRM, because they are scared of piracy.

It would be great if we could have open ebook reader software that could display these books.

eReaders like the Xteink X4 are beautiful but lots of books are impossible to legally read on it. Yes, I know that I can break the DRM, but I think its sad that this is the only path for legitimate purchases.

https://www.thestack.technology/hugging-face-hacked-turned-t...

If there is a great post on a topic and the author used AI when generating it, what’s so bad about that?

Claude's TLDR of what's causing the problem (may or may not be accurate): "That animation loop is almost certainly leaking memory: each time-step it draws new border geometry (GeoJSON/vector shapes) but doesn't free the old frames, so RAM climbs without bound. When you interact — especially auto-playing the timeline — the tab grows until it swallows all 62 GB of RAM + swap and the kernel kills it."

From my experience people who complain loudly about the price tend to be people who are either (1) working primarily on hobby projects so are unwilling to pay much for Claude Code or (2) using astronomical amount of tokens through elaborately orchestrated multi-agent setups that only make sense when someone else is paying the bill.

I'm not against them being a global organization, that's wonderful. I was just surprised. I expected a parisian office and european accents.

Just as americans don't trust AI or the tech industry, they don't trust any public institutions.

The fundamental problem is not AI or tech or institutions being bad. The fundamental problem is that the way we distribute information about the world has a deep negativity bias. This exists because the information economy is supported by advertisement, which requires attention to profit, and attention is easiest to attract with negativity. "If it bleeds, it leads" has been true forever.

If you want to understand the impact of AI technology on the economy, don't listen to software engineers, listen to economists.

So an engineer joining a country that already has engineers still creates a ton of value in the destination country

Most of the negative impact of agriculture on the climate and on biodiversity happens when we convert an acre of land from its natural state to agricultural use. This is much worse for the environment than the presence of pesticides.

Organic produce consistently takes about 20% more land to produce the same amount of food. As a result, choosing organic over traditional means choosing worse outcomes for the climate and worse for biodiversity.

But if you hold that position, you also have to be fine with companies not offering products and services in your country. AI systems will eventually be good enough (in 10-20 years) for companies to be able to deploy such systems with sufficient accuracy to afford the lawsuits. Until that time, such countries would just not have access to systems before they were bulletproof.

But I also found the article really unsatisfying. The idea that middle management should spend enormous amounts of time building relationships because other middle managers got vibes that one day it might be useful is insane. I think the article represents the worst of big, slow tech bureaucracies.

Replacing middle management with AI would not work, but using AI to avoid managers needing to have all these meetings would probably work really well. The idea that there's some AI system that has access to all the documents/email/task management systems at the company is a good one, and it could identify situations (like the one in the article) where two projects on opposite ends of the organization are colliding.

Instead of two middle managers needing to do 1:1s with no clear need for years because other middle managers got vibes that they should could be replaced by an AI system that uncovered situations like the ones mentioned in the article.

This wouldnt replace middle managers, but it might help them do their jobs better.

One hypothesis for the effectiveness of Claude writing Rails apps is its token efficiency.

I ran across this project awhile back that attempts to measure and compare the token efficiency across projects, and Rails does really well:

https://felipemrvieira.github.io/SyntaxTax/dashboard/

https://www.nber.org/papers/w1762

https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp6183.html