The first sentence is:

"The razor blade of the newly unpacked surgical scalpel glints in the late Autumn light."

So I just immediately stopped reading.

This style of writing is exhausting and too common. It's an article about mushrooms, not a spy action thriller.

It feels like there had been some shift over the past decade that has been pushing / encouraging this style of writing, and I'm not sure what's caused it or what the solution is.

It's getting to the point that I'll need to use an LLM to summarize any article I care about to just extract the relevant info.

That would be particularly ironic if it was an LLM that generated the article.

Laser defense system is a very expensive paperweight in those conditions.

There are four times as many people in the US.

Germany has four cities with around a million people.

The U.S. has at least 15.

Also, absolute numbers don't reflect justified shootings, which is an entirely different and much more nuanced conversation.

No part of this should be taken to mean that I don't think there's a problem in the US, I just object to complex issues being overly simplified.

Is there one way to be a good person?

Does being a good person also mean agreeing with your politics?

The whole time I'm doing it, I'm trying to think of better ways. I'm thinking of libraries, utilities or even frameworks I could create to reduce the tedium.

This is actually one of the things I dislike the most about LLM coding: they have no problem with tedium and will happily generate tens of thousands of lines where a much better approach could exist.

I think it's an innovation killer. Would any of the ORMs or frameworks we have today exist if we'd had LLMs this whole time?

I doubt it.

Have you taken a moment to step back and truly evaluate your productivity when using LLMs for code generation?

I don't mean the obvious confirmation-bias tickling stuff like "create a form with these fields and validation".

I mean from a whole-system, total effort analysis, from idea to production, support and maintenance.

I'm curious what you find.

My current theory is that the industry will land in a place where LLMs for code generation are frowned upon for non-trivial work, but that they are embraced for tooling, summarization and explanation.

I think these things have real, concrete value, but that it's a mistake to substitute them for human reasoning - and human reasoning is a crucial characteristic of quality code.

The thing I'm not sure of is whether the current "good enough is good enough" approach to vibe coded solutions will be sticky, or in what contexts.

MS Access still powers entire business departments, because good enough is good enough.

Doing asm on the AVR is beautiful, you can count clock cycles easily and then observe them on the scope.

I wrote a bit banging serial interface for an AVR once and had a mystery when I was testing it from a PC just with a basic echo. Every Nth character would be wrong. Was able to figure out a timing problem by counting clock cycles and found the bug in my code.

Was cool to see it align with what I was seeing on my oscilloscope.

I think there's more opportunity to do something novel.

AI can't do it, and the humans with the skills to do it are rapidly disappearing.

Is that why you made the inflammatory statement "you need to work on your reading comprehension?"

Granted, I probably wouldn't have felt great if someone had said "bullshit" had worked on me.

Especially if it was true.

If you aren't able to see how the issue is much broader than any specific politician, it's difficult to move a conversation forward.

You may want to take a serious and critical look at how these problems have been a part of all politics throughout history.

If your viewpoint is that the current team is the bad guy, but some other team is the good guy, it just means that their propaganda has been effective with you.

I've been disappointed every time.

I do use the LLMs for summarization and "a better google" and am constantly confronted with how inaccurate they are.

I haven't tried with code in the past couple months because to be completely honest, I just don't care.

I enjoy my craft, I enjoy puzzling and thinking through better ways of doing things, I like being confronted with a tedious task because it pushes me towards finding more optimal approaches.

I haven't seen any research that justifies the use of LLMs for code generation, even in the short term, and plenty that supports my concerns about mid to long term impact on quality and skills.

So the TL;DR version is: nah.

Why?

Wholeheartedly agree, but I see the root cause of the issue being income tax itself. As soon as you tax income, you'll go down and endless rabbit hole of what's fair to tax, how much, what kind of income, investment income vs wage income, percentage vs flat rate, etc...

That gave us the mess we have.

I like the idea of consumption tax exclusively (would require an amendment). You're taxed on your purchases.

It's easy to drive behavior (more tax on some things... tax on cigarettes, yachts and private jets) and easy to make more fair (exclude grocery staples).

This was reaffirmed by Marshall [1] with the famous “the power to tax involves the power to destroy."

[1] https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/mcculloch-v-mar...

It's a shame with articles like this that are otherwise insightful, they just lose me with sentences like that.

Like, if you don't have enough insight to recognize that bullshit is a general political issue, and has been forever, how can I rely on any other analysis you make?