Places like Australia have plenty of land but, nah, everyone wants to live urban where housing prices are insane or inherited.

Food costs often go down in developed countries, cheaper than developing ones. Maybe they're so low that they can't afford to become farmers anymore? Not enough people buy corn and corn price is so cheap that it gets made into HFCS. But if you can't mass produce cheap corn, you're screwed and get a desk job.

So we have the service economy. Everyone sells services to one another, works from home, makes tons of money. Madrid has top-tier designers, chefs, doctors, moneylenders, nearly every kind of service. All the piles of money in a concentrated place like Madrid makes the whole place overpriced. If you happen to be the best tuna butcher in Western Europe, there's a limited number of places you can work, but many of these specialist jobs are also wfh.

Is there a hack to this though? Can our top tier Spanish pixel artist sell her services to someone in suburban Canada?

It's not entirely a myth; if you've poked hundreds of steaks by the same supplier, same cuts, same grade, you'll eventually get a feel for them.

The thermometer analogy does carry over though. Some people are not there to be productive or good at their jobs. The job is about them, not their work.

And you can go your whole life without ever cooking or tasting a good steak. The people who can tell the difference will go elsewhere, and those who can't will come back.

And then there's always the boss who wishes he started a franchise but will go with what he has - he'll hire a bunch of newbies or foreign workers who know how to use a thermometer.

[1] https://amazingribs.com/ratings-reviews/best-thermometers/ho...

The nature of work also combines passionate with non-passionate stuff. We may love writing high quality code, but most of the day requires hacky low quality code, meetings, or digging through documentation. Or part of a pipeline of gathering, cleaning, and selling data to a financial institution that uses it for medium interest loans.

The better measurement is find out what work energizes you. You might not feel any flow or fun. You might not feel any emotion whatsoever. But you get out of it like a good workout - both tired and energized.

I believe Anthropic shouldn't go bankrupt. I don't think the violated should be filthy rich either.

The richer publishers are still fighting. The ones taking the settlement may not have strong enough grounds and are happy with what they got.

It should be a speed bump. Just enough that it discourages blatantly breaking the law, and doesn't make it a strong incentive for others to resort to piracy as well.

If copyright law didn't exist, writers would still write but everyone would just take the books. A company like Amazon which doesn't give a damn about ethics would pirate all the books; the slap is painful enough to keep them straight.

If it were too tight, we'd have regulatory arbitrage; AI companies would set up in Japan, Singapore, India, China, and so on where they would get just a slap on the wrist.

Or if international laws were stricter, people would be pirating data on Elon Island or SpaceXAI Station. Forbidding something that valuable would be like Prohibition, lucrative for the criminals.

It's not really fair to anyone, and yet that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist.

The points me and my wife agreed on:

1) It takes a lot of time and energy to raise children, and there's more of both when young

2) Fertility drops sharply in 30s, and we could miss the window altogether. Also the odds of complications goes up

3) You can work as hard as you like after the kids grow up

4) Paying for college will be tougher, but my parents were able to do it

At 40, nearly everyone at my level of seniority has at least one child and they don't fault us for having them. We've all lost sleep over the baby, and we all understand that having a child younger than 2 is highly unproductive, but it gets better and most of the time they do a fine enough job that everyone forgets they have kids.

But the dress you get is not the same as the dress in the picture. If the model looked like you, the dress should fit the same, but the AI dresses don't. Same figure, same skin color, same height, and yet the dress looks different.

That's the problem with homes. There's no way a room fits that many things but AI will make it look like it does. There's a distortion where it changes the specification entirely.

It's like showing someone playing Fallout 4 on a MacBook Air. It's a deceptive practice, unlike the cereal boxes showing milk.

I guess you can extrapolate that and say a trillion dollar company is made of a bunch of people who could have started a billion dollar company.

If you're not using it that way, just use Opus, it's smarter and half the price. If you are using it for long work, then you should probably be using the $200 plan.

You keep hearing things like, "The definition of a moat is being able to raise prices," and, "Your distribution must scale to 99-100% of the market and you should acquire the remaining ones."

$20 is expensive for me. Netflix and Spotify subscriptions are pretty bloody expensive. And they're saying raise the prices?

These people don't live in the real world, at least not in countries where 90% of people including the middle class don't have disposable income.

Like it or not, AI is going to be a requirement, like shoes, running water, a smartphone, a car, a degree, insulin.

It's especially effective if it's a timely event. People do talks and interviews to meet people and get some attention, so you're basically shaking hands with someone who's ready to shake yours.

It's more vital in bigger teams and teams that have something in production, used by a lot of people. A bad push breaks things on multiple levels, and the damage is multiplied by number of users. One person making two build breaking mistakes a year in a team of about 25 would break the build every week - CI/CD and auto review catches some of this, but PRs are good at catching the obvious.

Plus regressions. I've been commenting that "this line prevents the logo printing bug for PNG in HN-1345". Often people don't know why the line is there and why it looks funky. But the new era hates comments. So we're reliant on humans who have faced bug HN-1345 to remember. In some cases, they've faced similar bugs in other jobs.

I think most places overdo it though. 80-20 rule. Less than 20% of time should be spent on this. Most should be automated.

I just check that it works. That it does what it should. That there's no gotchas ("triBeep() rings at 3 frequencies, not three times"). That it's not an architectural problem ("we don't put strings in the async because it leads to a memory leak and/or makes translations harder in the future")

There's some quality control, but it often involves the above - don't name functions triBeep() and so on. Code style should be controlled by the linter.

I never comment on whether it should be onChange vs onChanged, this is all bikeshedding and doesn't prevent bugs or increase productivity.

Antigravity started the workflow where you give a list of things to do and it goes off and does those things without supervision, including drafting and testing edge cases. It can even spin up images. Fable is the latest form of this workflow.

Gemini 3 Pro is actually at a mid designer level. None of the others are even at a junior human design level.

Sonnet 4.5 was, for a brief moment, creative brilliance. But we're talking coding, not writing right? They ditched it all for 4.6.

Opus 4.6 and 4.8 are extremely good for coding. I use them to reliably go through logs that are like 15k lines long. It can read my code, plot out the logs that should happen, check the logs for what actually happens, and from there, form hypotheses, and set up the logs needed to validate these.

Codex/ChatGPT is probably second best in all of the above.

GLM 5.2 can run for hours. Fable was supposedly designed for something that takes a human up to weeks. It's also more for straightforward tasks, so it'll do poorly in tasks that other models are great at.