England is second to none.

Then there's the mass. I don't need that anymore. The mountains of boilerplate, etc.

I write little islands which need high judgement that are then connected by the obvious goo.

We can't. We built a system that creates a very small number of very expensive munitions and that can't be scaled up. We've been trying to scale up munitions production for years now with the Ukraine war. And it just isn't possible.

Not only does it take years to make any missile now. Our total capacity to make missiles is incredibly low. Like, we can make 600 Patriot missiles per year. We've expended twice that so far with Iran alone. We can make 100 THADD per year. We've expended 300 so far.

The US will run out of missiles way before Iran does. Iran could easily produce 2000 missiles per year and if it pushed it could make closer to 8000.

Iran will recover its missile stocks from the current war in a year. It will take the US until 2031 to do the same.

Sounds great! Have you tried this? Did you see what went wrong? Otherwise this is just the same nonsense as always.

The comments here always blow me away by how totally out of touch with the rest of the world many posters are. No, home delivery is not a luxury, it just works really poorly in your country.

India is going through a 15 minute or less delivery boom right now. It's gotten so popular that the government is asking companies to not promise 10 minutes because that would endanger drivers.

The standard is China is 30 minutes home delivery.

It has nothing to do with loopholes on anything. Just someone managed to convince you that what you've got is better than what exists out there already.

A family member has cancer and we treat chatgpt as part of the team (our doctor's words). I ingest everything into it, work with it to make a good report. Then at the next visit we review it.

This gives you the best of both worlds. You get peace of mind and the doctor explains why and how the agent was right or wrong.

Twice now we've caught consequential mistakes (wrong pain medication and incorrect notation of the exact mutation that he has). Which have made a difference to his quality of life and treatment path.

Most of what the doctors have said is in line with the agent but when there have been disagreements they've been very reasonable. Sometimes the doctors have gone with the agent's version sometimes they've explained why that's inappropriate.

Facebook once existed as "How is a company going to make money from undergrads stalking one another online?" but that company didn't make it big. It was only when it turned into an addictive harmful website that thrives by massively raising the suicide rate of kids, that's when they made it big!

AirBnb once existed as "Who's going to pay to sleep on an airbed on someone's floor?" but they didn't make a billion dollars doing that. It wasn't until it turned into a DYI hotel that displaces local resident, concentrates wealth, and makes housing unaffordable. That's when it made serious money.

So yes, nominally, each of these startups sounds good. But many of them turn into rent seeking, closed ecosystems, that prey on users.

> You must look at the world around you and see how it's actually done.

Correct. I wish PG would do that. Instead of telling this idealized fantasy.

The sad part is, this is going to be used to hurt workers everywhere! Come back to work for your own mental health.

They don't compare remote vs non-remote workers. They compare workers in job families that could be remote vs workers in job families that are unlikely to be remote. Their control group is nonsense, the pandemic affected people in different job families very differently.

The real effect is living alone or not.

Also, it conflates mental health utilization with mental health status. It makes it seem like not taking antidepressants means you aren't depressed. Maybe the actual lesson is that people in remote-capable jobs have better insurance and time to get antidepressants. And those that aren't, get to suffer with their bad mental health.

This paper says absolutely nothing about the impact of remote work on workers. Zero.

I can already on the ground see the effect of the Trump policies. So many tech jobs that would have been in the US are being lost. And companies are learning how to be effective with overseas teams.

Say one of your parents is a citizen of some other country.

If they're Canadian, you're a Canadian citizen. Period. The process is to get your documents that prove it. You don't apply for citizenship, you apply for proof.

In many European countries you are not a citizen. The process is to become one by descent. You apply for citizenship.

Very different.

Except that Google kills the products we use! Google Reader had basically the entire community.

No one cares when they kill something niche.

I don't touch new Google products, they're toxic.

And now with AI I can finally stop using their search too. All that will be left is email because it's too much of a commodity.

I was at an MIT event 8 years ago where Eric Schmidt was booed. It was his first summer at MIT. Basically everything he said about Google and his world view left the students feeling horrified. It was so bad people walked out in a daze.

So if this is the bar, we passed it long ago.

We understand everything a CNN or Transformer does, but we have no idea how to relate that to qualia. This may also be why we need to run endless tests and don't have a theory that let's us predict how well the network processes anything.

I wish people would read some history. The world was pretty horrific until recently. The urban graveyard effect didn't end until fairly recently: cities were so horrific to live in and so many people died that the only way their populations were sustained was by constant immigration.

You must learn to write good reviews. That doesn't happen without writing quite a few.

Of course grad students should generate the first draft of talks, collect data, and generate graphics. That's exactly the point of grad school. You need to learn how to organize and present knowledge. How to tell a story.

>My friend said that nothing in the first five years of his PhD work contributed to his dissertation.

The point of the PhD is to learn to think about hard problems that are vague, to find your way around them, and learn how to do something new. It's not to stuff as much as possible into a dissertation or anything else.

And 6 years for a PhD? That's about right. You need to go from 0 to being the go-to expert everywhere on a totally new problem.

I am A YIMBY too. But no, big money is not on your side. Big money wants to make money, not make your life better. It would like to build as much as possible for as little as possible, at the lowest quality possible, and sell it for an extremely high price. This isn't good for any of us.

> 1. Non-interactive by default > Commands have to run without interactive prompts when an agent invokes them. When a subagent spawns a background process, there's nothing answering the prompt. The command hangs.

If a command has stdout/stdin attached, you can be interactive mode. If it doesn't you can be in non-interactive mode. This isn't even wrong, it's just nonsense.

> 2. Structured, parseable output > A nicely aligned table with ANSI colors is for humans. An agent extracting a post ID needs JSON.

It's a natural language agent. It obviously doesn't need JSON. And JSON is extremely wasteful in terms of tokens.

> 3. Errors that teach, and enumerate > The original principle was "fail fast with actionable errors." That still holds, with one refinement I missed the first time. When the failure is "you passed an invalid value for X," the error should include the valid set.

Except that the valid set can be huge. You're much better off describing what's valid. It's a natural language agent. Talk to it!

> 4. Safe retries and explicit mutation boundaries > Agents retry. Humans glance at a duplicate row and notice; agents don't.

What does this have to do with agents? Yeah, if possible make your operations idempotent. If not, well, .. then don't? Humans will make exactly the same mistakes as agents here.

> 5. Bounded responses, at every layer > Tokens cost money and context. Big outputs are sometimes justified, but the default should be narrow.

How do you know what your agent needs? Let the agent bound and select. Agents are perfectly capable of sending your output through grep or through head/tail.

> 6. Cross-CLI vocabulary consistency > This is the principle I'm most certain about, and the one most under-stated in the original. > Agents don't memorize one CLI at a time. They build a generalized model of what CLIs do, drawn from every CLI they've seen. When your tool uses info for what every other tool calls get, the agent doesn't fail; it succeeds slowly, with extra retries, after burning tokens on --help. Multiply that across thousands of agent invocations per week and the cost is real.

Agents need to deal with hundreds of CLIs that are all inconsistent. What matters is that you describe to the agent how each CLI works. It doesn't matter if they're consistent.

> 7. Three-layer introspection > The original principle here was "progressive help discovery": top-level --help lists commands, subcommand --help shows usage. That's still true, but it's now the bottom layer of a three-layer stack. Each layer answers a different question.

Truly the worst advice. Take a simple clean output that's easy to understand in one go and turn it into a crazy complex json that requires multiple inferences to understand. Not only are you wasting compute, you're wasting your time waiting for that compute.

> 8. Async-aware execution > Most CLIs treat async APIs the way the underlying HTTP endpoint does: submit returns a job ID, poll returns a status, that's the agent's problem. Two failure modes follow. Either the agent writes its own poll loop (wasting tokens and getting it subtly wrong), or it doesn't, and the workflow fails because the result wasn't ready when the next step ran.

No, it got worse. Horrific advice. Take a simple API that an agent can easily wait for in the background and turn it into a stateful monster that can clog everything up with junk. Oh and now when you have multiple agents they get to have a fun conflict.

> 9. Persistent identity through profiles > Agents don't show up once. They show up tomorrow, and the day after, and a week from now, in a different shell, with the same underlying intent and a different specific input. Stateless leaf-shaped CLIs make every invocation re-specify the same eight flags.

Ok, I was wrong. 8 was bad. 9 is much much worse. It's a guarantee that your agents will get things wrong. Why? Because agents forget all the time!

> 10. Two-way I/O > The original principle 6 (composable and predictable structure) covered stdin/stdout pipelining. That's still true. But agents don't only consume CLIs through pipes, and the CLI doesn't only emit through stdout. There are two new mechanisms worth adding: a way for the CLI to emit artifacts where the agent actually needs them, and a way for the agent to report friction back.

This literally exists in a form that every single agent knows: bash pipes and redirects. They've been trained on billions of examples of this. Now instead of just using that, you're adding a custom version that will just confuse the agent.

I'm not sure I could have written a worse list if I tried.

Almost everything we have in modern medicine is.

This whole position is nonsense. The paper stands on its own.