> Let’s play a guessing game. How much more valuable is land in Manhattan than in the Bronx? Take a guess, then scroll down for the answer.

As someone who has never been in New York and doesn't live in the US, I knew beforehand that I would fail this test very hard, haha.

Although true, I feel it's worth adding here that the problem is that PM. While looking stupid by asking questions can "do you in" when working with incompetent managers like that, I'd argue that most managers will look at results -- and asking dumb questions can lead to much better results compared to just staying quiet and hoping for the best.

One problem this shows, is that as a consumer I have no idea what the hell is quality clothing. Clearly, expensive does not always mean high quality. And I'm not buying "brand" clothing either.

However, even though I've never worked with CassandraDB, I feel pretty confident that I could do it with Claude Code. Not just "do it for me", but more like "I have done a lot of database migrations in my time, but haven't worked with CassandraDB in particular. Can you explain to me the complexities of this migration, and come up with a plan for doing it, given the specifics of this project?"

That question alone is already a massive improvement over a few years ago. I don't feel like I was using my "critical thinking muscles" when I tried to figure out how the hell to get hadoop to run on windows, that was just an exercise in frustration as none of the documentation matched the actual experience I was getting. Doing it together with Claude Code would be so much easier, because it'll say something like "Oh yeah this is because you still need to install XYZ, you can do that by running this line here: ...".

Now I'm not saying that Claude Code, and agentic in general, isn't taking away some of my critical thinking: it really is. But it also allows me to learn new skills much more quickly. It feels more like pair programming with someone who is a better programmer than me, but a much worse architect. The trick is to keep challenging yourself to take an active role in the process and not just tell it to "do it", I think.

Which begs the question: what would actually be a good field to apply human potential towards? I agree that finance, sales and ads are very low on that list.

I'm not a scientist/researcher myself, but from what I hear from friends who are, the whole "industry" (which is really what it is) is riddled with corruption, politics, broken systems and lack of actual scientific interest.

Most stuff is obvious: nobody needs to tell you what segment of society is drawn to soap operas or action movies, for example. But there's plenty of room for nuance in some areas.

This doesn't guarantee that it actually becomes a succesful movie or show, though. That's a different project and frankly, a lot harder. Things like which actors, which writers, which directors, which studio are involved, and how much budget the show has.. it feels more like Moneyball but with more intangible variables.

I've worked at Apple, in finance, in consumer goods.. everywhere is just terrible. Music/Video streaming has been the closest thing I could find to actually being valuable, or at least not making the world worse.

I'd love to work at an NGO or something, but I'm honestly not that eager to lose 70% of my salary to do so. And I can't work in pure research because I don't have a PhD.

What industry do you work in, if you don't mind me asking?

* Determine what is happening in a scene/video * Translating subtitles to very specific local slang * Summarizing scripts * Estimating how well a new show will do with a given audience * Filling gaps in the metadata provided by publishers, such as genres, topics, themes * Finding the most "viral" or "interesting" moments in a video (combo of LLM and "traditional" ML)

There's much more, but I think the general trend here is not "chatbots" or "fixing code", it's automating stuff that we used armies of people to do. And as we progress, we find that we can do better than humans at a fraction of the cost.

But even if policies make companies less "capable" and less "competitive": that completely ignores what effect they have on society. I bet that a company that was given a free pass to use slavery would be very capable and very competitive -- but is that what we want for our society?

It takes much more skill to write concise than verbose.

While prioritizing higher scorers for selecting progenitors will initially mitigate some of the problems, you will eventually end up with hundreds of thousands of agents that only learned to repeat the letter "a" a million times in a row, which is a huge waste of processing.

The number of times that my manager or coworkers have rejected proposals for technical solutions because I can't make a webpage look halfway decent is too damn high.