Why hire a plumber when you can just watch some youtube videos and do it yourself?

Why pay someone else for their software when you can just make your own?

Because the hard part of making software wasn't *just* writing the code. It was about understanding the problem well enough to understand what the solution should look like.

I feel like as software engineers we should be pretty familiar with what it's like talking to your average user, they will sometimes understand the root cause of what's making their task difficult (although often will get focused on some annoying but ultimately trivial symptom) and have very disasterously bad ideas on how to solve it.

What we've given them with generative AI is a machine they can put their sometimes ok, sometimes questionable understanding of the problem and their dreadful solutions and it will happily churn away building it regardless of how pointless and silly it is.

A future where every user can tell the AI "We keep getting the sales tax wrong, remove charging sales tax from the checkout flow" isn't one I'm terrifically worried about.

In the same way that having access to information about plumbing didn't suddenly make everyone plumbers, having access to a machine that will implement every idea you have regardless of quality doesn't suddenly make everyone a software engineer.

I think since we have a pair of them and reject is so obvious it helps me remember which way filter works.

I think Enum.keep and Enum.reject might be a better pair, but I've used them enough to internalize it now

Power is taken, and regardless of the ideals of the takers, enough power grants legitimacy.

When I realized that all of logo was actually saved on that disk and I could continue playing with the turtle at home, I was amazed.

Drawing little things, realizing that I was repeating stuff and breaking it into little functions so I could draw them again more easily. I was learning the essentials of programming and didn't even realize it.

Then says "checking alternate routes" then shows them a card with their original flight details (it does have "Delayed" in red at the top) and asks them if they would like to change their flight.

The user responds with "Yes please! :thumbsup:"

The AI does not provide any information about the new flight, and only displays a card for the original flight, which being the original, is the day and time the User likely wanted to travel.

Between it being the only piece of information on the screen and the status of "checking for alternate routes" it will certainly be a surprise for the User when their Sept. 17th 5:45 departure has been rescheduled for Sept. 19th to avoid a two hour delay. Helpfully replaced with a 2 day delay, thanks Muse!

- Pencil Fluffycones

- Ball Animal 3 Extra

- V16 Piston Animal Submarine

These are real product names that they were happy to ship. I like that they ship these absurd sounding names.

The top 10% of consumers accounted for half of all spending in the second quarter of 2025.

Capitalism will happily chug along while leaving a massive number of people desperately poor.

There's a reason the AI CEOs have all become obsessed with the concept of a "permanent underclass."

If a UBI is ever "given" it will be just enough to keep the underclass from rising up and killing the owner class and not one cent more.

If they don't like the King's governors they should petition the court to appoint one that more aligns with their taxation desires.

I spend a lot of time reviewing code and the LLM code works for what the implementer wanted and from the outside things function the way people expected, but inside the code is becoming more and more knotted and incomprehensible.

Now maybe you could point claude at it and say "make the code easy for people to understand too" and no one is bothering to do that. Maybe it's a skill issue and the people around me should be prompting better or revising better.

The only thing I know is that I'm seeing it happen. Code quality is going down, comprehension is not just missing because people didn't author the code, it's getting worse because even when they go to read the code it's become too complex and weird. So now they have to rely on LLMs to tell them what the code they are responsible for is doing and how.

The thing that remains to be seen is if comprehensibility will matter. I can't look at the assembly the compiler outputs and comprehend it and it doesn't bother me. LLM advocates argue the same will become true for code, it won't matter if you understand the code because it only matters that the LLM can comprehend it and keep making it do the things you want.

I'm less inclined to believe that being able to reason about your codebase and make changes to it is something I really want to put into a bunch of hyperscaler company hands. Enshittification tells me that this honey moon of affordable intelligence will reach an end at some point and a lot of companies are going to clamp down on more expensive tokens and a lot of engineers are going to find that they have both let their code comprehension skills atrophy and aren't permitted to take every little question and change to the LLM because it's too costly.

They will crack open the codebase, every changeset with a full comprehensive page of LLM-speak explaining how it addresses the problem, every changeset in isolation reasonable enough, and an end state that is something only an LLM can love.

> Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.

> We’re going to partner with the world’s best people and we’re going to dominate. You can be along for the ride or you don’t have to be.

> Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

> Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

> The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

> We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

> The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service.

This capitalist doesn't have a gun pointed to his, he instead feels a moral obligation to provide the state with a comprehensive surveillance apparatus and ability to kill enemies of the state while also decrying holding public figures accountable.

- Rocket Design

- Battery Chemistry

- Frontier level AI research

There's no way he's just a guy with a bunch of money paying smart people to do things.

It was a global order built by the US to place the US in positions of power and privilege in every way imaginable.

And the MAGA group looked at it and said "we are being taken advantage of! We have to spend a rounding error worth of money on food aid and Voice of America?! I don't want soft power, I want rock hard power!!!"

They looked at a game with unfair rules that were written by them to benefit them and said "this is unfair.... to me!" Then went about dismantling nearly a century of work that unfairly stacked the deck in America's favor.

The US-Israel-Iran War is an interesting inflection point. They pulled out of every soft-power play, putting every chip in on hard-power military strength and now they are getting wrecked by cheap drones and Iran just being willing to stick it out and not fold. Venezuela will probably go down as the point in which they believed their world view was winning, no need for any diplomacy, just go in and abduct the president and take the oil. Iran showed them the limits of that kind of thinking, if they were more introspective they could learn from it.

They aren't coming out swinging on LLMs shouting it down as slop and calling anyone using it lazy. They just created some, reasonable to me, guidelines that about when the use is and is not allowed in their project.

> The rate tracks SOFR (the Secured Overnight Financing Rate), the benchmark overnight interest rate published every business day by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

See https://docs.carolinacloud.io/organizations/prepaid-interest...

I almost missed that there were 4 colors until the second chart

Since they put this setting on, they can happily use their phone with no motion sickness. So +1 to that N.

They've been making content now for a long time, Lilyhammer came out in 2012.

They had all the data telling them that long lived series that built dedicated followings like The Office, Friends, Star Trek, etc. were reasons that people stayed on the platform.

They had 14 years to put together their own dynasty series, shows that people could connect with over the years that would become their comfort shows that they could return to again and again, fully owned by Netflix and completely locked in their walled garden.

Instead they pursued a strategy of starting a thousand promising ideas but if they didn't instantly take off, done. No room for a show to grow and mature and develop, you better have a great first season and you might get a second.

And I think everyone I know has at least one show on Netflix that they got invested in only for it to get axed with a dozen unresolved story threads. I think the one that made me go "why bother?" was Santa Clarita Diet. A funny dramatic show with star power, Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant, interesting character development, a 3 season run and then just killed.

It wasn't the first series they killed with a dozen loose threads dangling, but it was the last one I watched. At first I told myself, "I might watch another series after it goes the distance and I know they won't just leave it half-finished" but that quickly just turned into "I don't watch netflix produced series" and as they lost more and more of their licensed content "I don't watch netflix" and this month I realized I was still handing them nearly $30 a month for nothing and canceled.

I think about a lot of the most popular shows and how bad their first seasons are. But audiences like to see characters grow and that's a big part of what causes people to connect with a show and want to come back to it again and again.

https://youtu.be/FVRHTWWEIz4?si=btZnQp0IEnmgrtWV&t=2388

"But I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody in the world access to great services. But if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that."

Instead of "protecting" one neighborhood by installing privately owned surveillance devices, seems like the police could have just sat there, waited for a BMW full of Tren de Araugua gangsters to show up and arrest them.

In what world is this the reasonable course of action that was arrived at with the police.

States attempt to hold a company accountable for giving its citizens cancer.

Not like that the conservative Supreme Court says.

Either the conservative movement lacks internally consistency, or it is quite consistent but around one central idea, corporations (that are willing to bend the knee to the government, see anthropic for a cautionary counter example) should be unrestrained from seeking profit.

Even the original states rights arguments around slavery were about how private enterprise shouldn’t be restrained from utilizing chattel slavery to extract profits. Seen through that lens the ruling makes perfect sense, if deferring to a big federal rule is best to protect profits, then big government. If deferring to states causes a race to the bottom ensuring profits, then states rights it is.