I've always been fine with being "behind" on the latest and greatest. I don't mind watching a movie, playing a game, buying a cell phone, etc, that was released a few years prior. If it was really all that great when it came out it should still be good later on.

Buying slow usually saves a.good bit of money when prices go down over time... but this time they went way up and now I'm kicking myself on it. Not upgrading the computer for now, but it is a bit overdue since I had already put it off for many years.

I was just thinking about bread in the US specifically. When I go to the grocery store here the bread is relatively expensive, and the vast majority of it is full of chemical additives. It subjectively tastes like fake crap. It's mass produced in a factory and shipped across the country, and for all that it's not even cheap to buy.

There are one or two specialty bakeries in my city but they are far apart, and a bit expensive, though still so much better than what is available at the chain groceries. I'm sure there are lots of places in the country that don't have those local options at all. Feels like the basic unadulterated loaf of bread has in the US become more of a luxury item than a cheap staple.

In my limited European experience (Italy and France mostly), there were numerous small bakeries in every single neighborhood I visited. I could easily take a short walk and grab a baguette or loaf for 1-2 euro, far cheaper than in the US. The bread was delicious and fresh, locally made, free of all the questionable additives.

Then repeat that for other things like cheese, berries, cured meat... each available in Europe with so much less additive or alteration, so much less mass production, cheaper and more plentiful. My travel diet was excellent and felt both healthier and cheaper.

I'm not sure what lead to this cultural difference. Maybe centralization, car culture, difference in regulation, or something else entirely. But the end result is a bit depressing.

I'm not sure how you would actually do any of that attestation, if it's even possible. Text seems especially difficult. Maybe photo/video could be achieved with specialized hardware and cryptographic signing though I don't know much about either so I'm not sure how it would work. Maybe all that attestation would also tie in to some kind of universal personal identifier online, so that bad actors can be tracked or excluded and can't repeatedly spin up new accounts.

It might mean a big reduction in privacy for certain online spaces that opt in to such a system... but the alternative of all trust being eroded and voices drowned out by a sea of bots or generated content seems potentially worse.

Some people still suggest that AI flat out isn't useful though, and that angle to me doesn't hold much water. I was a slow AI adopter, but I have found plenty of benefit from using AI in various applications recently. I haven't come close to using on the level of some people who orchestrate agents and rarely read or touch the code they are writing, but there have been clear times when I popped into Claude and had it help me very successfully with something that would have taken longer to do without that help. So increasingly I am skeptical of anyone positing that there is no potential benefit to appropriately using AI assistance. I think the author could rewrite around the angle of their perceived negative externalities outweighing potential advantages, but to deny or ignore those potential benefits ultimately distracts or actively takes away from a serious discussion of said negative externalities.

I don't put much stock in the very very frequently cited study about AI productivity included in this blog. It's a single study. The study itself cites multiple other studies that did find a productivity boost in writing software with AI assistance. I don't see the methodology as being very sound, the sample size isn't very big, some of those developers had likely never used AI before so of course they were slower as they explored using a new tool for the first time (which the study more or less writes off as a non-factor). They also used "Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet", which is not the strongest model. I personally find the Sonnet family of models not that useful and much more inaccurate than something like Opus or Fable.

Added up all the free market enterprise section completed deals where the purchaser was indicated as US based

Obama era:

2009: 6,

2010: 1,

2011: 4,

2012: 1,

2013: 4,

2014: 5,

2015: 7,

2016: 6

Trump term 1:

2017: 4,

2018: 8,

2019: 13,

2020: 7

Biden term:

2021: 4,

2022: 4,

2023: 7,

2024: 4

Trump term 2 so far:

2025: 11*,

2026: 9*

Obama average: 4.25 / year

Biden average: 4.75 / year

Trump term 1 average: 8 / year

*Most of the last two years are indicated as still pending, so not sure if they will go through or not.

Not exactly the most scientific data gathering or study. But it does suggest that large mergers and acquisitions have generally been made more frequently under Trump.

There was a point in time when the majority of people were basically required to work on producing bare necessities like food. But we have already come far past that, where we could easily produce more than enough food for everyone on earth with a relatively small amount of workers.

There is some work that is still more or less essential to a healthy society that humans must perform, but many many people are doing something non-essential (and those doing essential work are often not rewarded proportionally to the "essentialness" of that work). We invent different kinds of "work" to fit into the capitalist machine that we have built, not because it is required for human sustainability or enriching our lives in any way. Some work might be actively harmful to society in every way other than keeping capital flowing around in some circle, and more and more of that capital is being captured/hoarded by some ultra wealthy individuals or corporations and not recirculating at all.

The problem is allocation. We allocate everything via capital, which I recognize has had some very positive outcomes at certain points in history, but may be reaching a point of making less and less sense for the modern world. The work I do honestly does not contribute much of anything to anyone. I do it because I am paid to, and I use that money to pay for my families needs. If my job was automated I would not be freed up for leisure, I would need to find some other work or service to be paid for to survive, regardless of how "important" that work is.

AI eliminating a swath of non-essential work does nothing to help with that allocation issue, in fact it probably ends in a worse overall allocation. AI may legitimately assist with some slice of "essential".work, but probably not that much of it.

Interesting timing to announce this at around the same time as the PS3 digital store is discontinued signaling that digital only doesn't last as long as physical.

My old Nintendo Wii is modified with homebrew software that keeps alive some otherwise inaccessible features since Nintendo shut off their servers. I hope the community can do similar for newer consoles when they reach the end of their life.

Given that interpretation, taking someone else's website and changing 3% of it feels more like copying than stealing, even more so when you see the side by side comparison image and it looks completely the same. I love to take inspiration from all over the place, but I like to think I transform it more into my own vision than the author here. I think making a direct copy of something can sometimes be a good learning exercise in the right context, but I would follow it up with your own novel work that maybe uses some concepts you learned from that copying exercise.

As an aside: the current Mintlify marketing site, not the one copied in the article, reads to me as heavily inspired by Stripe's marketing website. Not as direct a copy as the article here though.

In specific sectors I do think we will see more optimization. If you're working on cloud compute or AI training / large scale data processing, there will be a big focus on optimization as prices are very large at that scale and shortages have a bigger effect.

Also in gaming I think the next cycle will be different. Big game studios used to push for the best possible graphics that might require the newest consoles or high end gaming computers, but the next releases might not be as much of an upgrade. The next gen of consoles or graphics cards themselves might be delayed, or be less powerful, or be too expensive and flop, as chip manufacturing companies continue focus on more lucrative markets and leave average consumers behind.

I think the average member of either party generally understands gerrymandering to be bad, but with an redistricting arms race escalating nobody wants to be left behind.

I think gerrymandering generally is abhorrent and anti democratic. At this point we need a new, more fair redistricting aggressively enforced from the top down to change course, and I'm not sure how we can get that through when it would likely take a 2/3rds majority in congress to pass... but significant members of congress benefit from gerrymandering and would lose their position in the next cycle if it were taken away, so they are unlikely to support the measure.

It's more like a 2d platform golf: https://squigglegolf.com/game/

I had built out a custom level editor and some other fun features, but never really polished off the UI enough to release those. Someday I should really finish / update it.

The space data center doesn't make intuitive sense to me. Why put it in space? Wouldn't it be better just... on the ground? The technology doesn't feel like it's there either, and there would be significant competition from existing or new data centers that don't have all the drawbacks of orbiting the planet.

It has only gone downhill since I left, and is now facing something like a hundred million dollar deficit in budget which will likely lead to deeper cuts and worse student outcomes.

I'm not sure what I will do but the deadline to figure it out is fast approaching. Probably we will move, but not sure how to find the right place that isn't too far away or out of our budget but can offer a better future / stronger education for my children. I don't have the solution, but I know other places have done much better than my city sadly. I've read that states like Mississippi have been able to dramatically improve their educational outcomes with certain literacy programs.

The Elo rating system doesn't make sense in this context; it's designed around collecting zero sum game results for a given community of players and building a model around it.