Probably all hot-button topics work like this. Probably we should downplay any time a small homogenous group of people sings a song of doom together. More dissonance please!

I think the muscle memory of doing those tiny problems is good for our minds, but solving larger-scale issues is also challenging.

I'm on vacation right now and getting claude to build a mostly-throwaway e2e testing harness (admittedly not small-prompt-review-repeat) for a backend API to speed up our existing e2e test suites which do click-ops to set up tests 8-10 years ago, we had a team who spent 3-4 months every year maintaining our E2E suite and people would do rotations on there to spread the knowledge.

I basically want an industry standard practice implemented on my team of 4 devs who are too busy doing other things.

I don't know how the next generation of beloved actors comes about and how we don't descend into a pit of neverending photocopies of things people once loved in the 1990s/2000s.

I guess that is taste?

Untestable, touched nearly the entire application stack, had several trivialities that were huge sticking points in review that obscured other more substantive issues we should have spent review time on.

I just spent 3 days reviewing the code of a vibe coding maximalist at work. They needed to touch 96 front-end files, ~50 back-end files. We now have `is_uk_company` spread throughout the entire codebase every time we need to output a date format. I would say 30% of the code can be replaced by a moderately more-wise approach of "you ain't gonna need this", 20% is actively polluting and/or harmful to the coherence of the feature.

I'm pretty sure this plan came from a braindump of a verbal meeting they had with our product team, using OpenAI's top models. There were 2 initial spreadsheets that were ABSOLUTELY INDECIPHERABLE, and now we have a new one labeled "FeatureX - Phase 2 to 4".

Just the date fields is a hilarious example of why I'm skeptical. Python (babel.date) and Javascript (the browser's locale) both have locale-aware date rendering. Using a library for country-based date and time parsing would have eliminated ~12 country-specific change sites... but instead we got `is_uk` and raw date format strings (`%d/%m/%y`) in-line inside already-enormous functions. Also, at a meta level, the backend code shouldn't usually be formatting the dates (data export may be an exception), we should be sending ISO dates and having the frontend format the code if anyone gives a crap.

I'm ~$500/day and I spent 3 days reviewing this stuff. Our CTO spent ~2 days this week reviewing this feature, I'm not sure what his daily rate would end up being. Just the date-formatting part cost me half a day... that's at least $250. A few hundred dollars on Xhigh tokens burned $2500-3500 in human review effort, and I was delayed from:

1. Getting an entire sentiment analysis feature deployed by helping our interns

2. Getting a load balancer solution working to automate a manual process

3. Improving our deterministic Cypress test suite

4. Getting a demo feature launched for our sales team that would bring in more money

Have you ever listened to a politician talk for an hour and you can't remember what they talked about?

If some VC wanted to fund my crazy ideas for building personalized private versions of the internet because people are sick of the nightmare, I would vibe code the hell out of that; but at my current job I have existing customers to keep happy and make sure their financial data doesn't get lost or modified.

We already have social patterns for disregarding "Well... Acktchully" Bros who jump into conversations where they're not welcome and I think we can easily build up a new rule for "Well... Claude says 'Acktschully'" Bros

I am sympathetic to a perspective that says this is not the responsibility of a mayor of a single city... But also; who else is going to do it?

Normal people have very little say over the politicians that govern them in larger electoral regions like states or provinces, and maybe this can signal to other levels of government that they should implement similar rules... If it works.

- News coverage about how extremely hot it has become in north/central Europe - News coverage/comments about heat-related deaths in Europe - People suddenly discovering wet bulb temperatures - "Extreme Heat" warnings, and events getting cancelled

What I see is people complaining about something when I can walk into my local Walmart, Canadian Tire, or hardware store and buy a $150-250CAD air conditioner which will cool a bedroom to 20C.

Is $200CAD ($150 Euro?) worth sleeping well for 2-8 weeks a year (counting warm-but-not-extreme weeks)?

Window designs in Europe may be different, but we have also invented... sheets of plywood and saws to cut baffles. It may not be pretty, but a vast number of low-income apartments in Toronto have plywood baffles + aircon in their bedroom windows.

The complaining, outrage and sudden realizations that it's hot outside are what annoy me. Some years it is >30C for 4 weeks and >25C for 8-12 weeks. Well worth $150 for a cheap aircon unit.

34C is hot and it's legitimately difficult to work indoors without AC, but there are probably people in London working outdoors in the sun.

Air conditioners can be had for as little as $150CAD.

Canadian here. Window air conditioning units work in any fully-openable window. They are $150CAD. Portable air conditioners work in almost every configuration of openable window. They are $250-500CAD.

It takes time to build AC units and ship them to Europe. However, if you delivered a shipment of small units to local retailers normal lower-and-middle-class people could buy one for the price of a month's worth of beer. Canada's economy is much smaller than the EU, yet somehow you can walk into a Walmart, Home Depot or Canadian Tire and buy a $150 air conditioner to install in your own home with 15-20 minutes of effort.

Canadian houses and older buildings are built to withstand winter and somehow we manage. We have a lot of 100 year old buildings (my house for example). Office buildings and hospitals are slightly more complicated, but I think Europe invented windows a long time ago.

The climate is warming; but also, the alarmist types who feint in "extreme heat" of 33-36C are kind of silly.

It does take time, but it MOSTLY takes a shipment of small units to local retailers for normal lower-and-middle-class people to buy for the price of a month's worth of beer. Canada's economy is much smaller than the EU, yet somehow you can walk into a Walmart, Home Depot or Canadian Tire and buy a $150 air conditioner to install in your own home with 15-20 minutes of effort.

Canadian houses and older buildings are built to withstand winter and somehow we manage. We have a lot of 100 year old buildings (my house for example). Office buildings and hospitals are slightly more complicated, but I think Europe invented windows a long time ago