One major sticking criteria for not going with OpenCode / pi for all of my coding is I want access to the tier-1 frontier model of the day without API pricing - e.g. afaik I can't use Fable 5 via pi harness even though I have a subscription, so for this week I'm on Claude Code. It's not the need to Fable 5 for everything, but even if I just want the marginal intelligence benefit to stress test an architecture decision, it's a safety blanket to know there isn't a ~smarter~ model I could have used. And for my use cases, the doggedness and capability of these frontier models has been insanely effective.

My feeling is we're still in the Uber era subsidy period - the moment the subscriptions either try to lock me in longer than a month or stop OAI/Anthropic stop delivering frontier models in the subscriptions, I'm out - switching fully over to pi.dev or another OS harness and routing my token spend via OpenRouter or offloading to Qwen locally. Then I'll have to put an accurate dollar amount on frontier intelligence.

https://www.piratewires.com/p/paul-buchheit-interview-transc...

A Little Life - challenging to read but exceptional

Sci-fi

Three Body Problem trilogy - forget the Netflix series the books are excellent, in my opinion #2 was the peak.

The Glass Hotel, Station Eleven, Sea of Tranquility - anything by Emily St. John Mandel - hard to place but her distinct writing style transports me.

Non-fiction:

American Moonshot - fine The Path to Power - anything Caro writes is worth reading

- if you're using SMPL body parameters this will have to stay research / open-source - is this leveraging some sort of monocular depth estimation to estimate the wall in 3D space? Also, do you have assumed camera parameters, or is that also estimated? If there isn't any depth information, this will be highly inaccurate on any cliff routes, but still useful on flat wall climbing.

Overall, a good idea (that I've also thought about building as a climber) - the tricky part that I'm impressed you have a solution to is path planning up the wall. Even assuming a flat wall with no depth estimation, it's still looks effective.

Best private alternative I've found is Vonlane (https://vonlane.com/) - takes longer than flying but it's a business class bus so you can get work done.

Do I use Google traditional Google Search (google.com) to find things? Rarely. Do I use Google Maps to find bars / restaurants / order food? All the time.

I guess the nuance is what we're trying to find. LLM's swallowed the listicle - I don't need google.com to find an autogenerated list of "best restaurants in London". But if I'm in London at at lunch, and I need a coffee nearby, it's still useful.

Also I'm skeptical if this generalizes, do you have measures in place to prevent query hallucination?

As always this goes to show that if you can't be the first, be the loudest. OpenAI has the most well oiled media machine I've seen in awhile.

Seeing the waves of publicity OpenAI gets with every new release, I think we're seeing a new model for big-tech AI research groups. It isn't enough to just hire world-class research talent that publish area-defining papers. There has to be a commensurate investment in media to publicize the research. Obviously, if you don't have the research, you have nothing to market. But it should say something that OpenAI prioritizes great design, communication, and publicity in addition to the world-class research team. It wouldn't surprise me if we see Google AI / DeepMind / FAIR / double-down with their own investments to expand the media presence of their AI orgs.

[1] https://ajayj.com/dreamfields

For an excellent review check out Advances in Neural Rendering: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.05849