Code-wise it seems to still nitpick, especially in reviews, but it doesn’t seem to rabbit hole quite as badly on tangents and scope-creep. These are just first impressions though. It’ll take a few weeks of regular use to really have a sense of it.

This is rarely if ever done in a sensible way. Instead you find Managers, Engineers or PMs avoiding troublesome stakeholders, hallway convos or Slack DMs that are never properly written into public record in a searchable/readable way, last minute overrides from higher ups based on limited context of the problem space or their own unaligned career goals, poor recordkeeping, panic mode bandaid fixes when systems break, etc...

IMO a lot of the “meat proxy” and “loop obsession” behavior we’re seeing is simply people using the sense of short term productivity gains as self-soothing against anxiety from corporate dysfunction that they have no control over.

The unsurprising part once it was clear that approach was viable, was that humans wouldn’t be able to help but anthropomorphize it. I feel like the movie Ex Machina is more relevant than ever.

Direct-from-farm delivery boxes are a better bet, at least the mainstay ones, but they’re certainly more expensive and the variety is more obviously seasonal (as you would expect).

Neither of these is a solution to nutrition at scale. It’s difficult to balance the economies of scale that consolidated distribution brings against the corruption that comes along with increased supplier leverage. Monopsony is just as pernicious as Monopoly (and they tend to feed each other, with large grocery and restaurant chains preferring large distributors).

In truth, I don’t think anyone can predict how things will play out at this point. China may well settle for regional control and having a globe full of trading partners with whom they work to build trust, they may double down on their “loan shark” leverage strategy with other developing nations, or they may build up their military and go full colonizer, which may or may not erupt into a hot war. The US might go long slow decline, or may erupt into civil war or widespread civil disobedience, or unlikely as it seems get its act together and course correct. The EU might fall to infighting and dissolve or rally and lead. Rogue nations might pull a truly batshit move with nukes or bioweapons. Who knows how India and SEA will play out at this point? Climate change acceleration will likely put incredible strain on all systems, and the jury is out on the ultimate trajectory/timeline of AI and robotics.

We have been blessed and cursed to live in interesting times if nothing else.

As China rises to become the new gravitational center, it will be interesting to see how they reshape things in their image. On the one hand, they seem to be more engineering-brained than lawyer-brained, which bodes well (might be a more viable path to cyberpunk). But just as the west has been haunted by its history of white supremacy, China will be haunted by its history of Han supremacy, so I am not holding my breath that we net out to some sort of multi-cultural utopia.

The credo of the corrupt, courtesy of General Benavides

One thing I don’t see mentioned in these discussions much is that someone might be perfectly content WFH when given clear goals and autonomy to execute in a neutral political environment, but do a few unexplained mass layoffs, give muddy direction or tighten the leash with stricter policies or new monitoring software and watch paranoia and depression take root (this is true in-office as well but I think gets amplified over Slack due to a stronger prisoner’s dilemma effect).

Unfortunately due to the power differential, any disruption to output caused by these situations will still be blamed on the individual contributor.

People are so uncomfortable thinking about the true extent of the systemic risk that they will happily slurp up distractions, excuses, scams and performative fig-leaf solutions rather than face down the cost of a real system-wide solution. Meanwhile, those occasional black swan disasters are becoming more and more commonplace as we acclimate to that being “just the way things are”.

An unseasonably warm summer here, a database breach there, c’est la vie.

If someone with clout at Anthropic takes it up as a champion and pushes it into the portfolio of apps at the importance of Claude code, it could be an amazing product, eventually a threat to Adobe, Lovable, Canva market share. It needs a better direct editing layer like 2-way figma sync, so you’re not stuck only prompting for every small adjustment. It could really use smart routing of image generation requests to a nano-banana level image generation model for the images that get poured into the ui mockups (so you don’t need to round trip to external sources by hand). And of course, like all modern LLMs doing visual work, it lacks “taste” if not given extensive examples during prompting.

Right now it feels like a fun proof of concept that could be killed at any time ala Google’s many “I got my PM promoted at launch and then was promptly abandoned” projects.

“Managers” are controlled by the C-Suite through institutional politics and incentive structures, the C suite (via the CEO) is held accountable by shareholders, and the board (who are theoretically representing shareholder interests).

A rough picture of shareholder concentration is as follows: 50% of stocks and mutual funds are held by the top 1% richest, 87% by the top 10% richest. Vanguard/Blackrock/State Street cast about a quarter of the votes at S&P500 shareholder meetings, ostensibly in the interest of their shareholders.

So that’s who “controls” management, and whose interests drive most corporate decision making, though obviously there are nuances.

As for #2, as salient as the intro sequence to Idiocracy was, it seems like the only thing I’m hearing about recently is how far under the population replacement rate all developed countries already are. If we can set aside the tribalism long enough to start seeing them as our (society’s) kids, then it just becomes another distribution / investment problem being blocked by #1 (corrupt extractive leadership)

Most of my friends are in some form of tech or creative work, so perhaps that is my bias, but with the threat of destitution removed the vast majority of people I know would turn into maelstroms of creation: art, crafts, coding, building, organizing, civic participation, scientific experimentation, and raising strong families.

Instead they are trapped spending the majority of their time navigating corporate politics to deliver a fraction of their value to society. Seems… dangerously inefficient and corrosive to the human spirit, no?

If instead we stick our head in the sand and ignore the human cost so that we can temporarily enjoy maximum technological progress AND maximum wealth accumulation for shareholders, as we have been doing for the better part of a century, things will slowly break down and eventually collapse when the pace of change accelerates to the point that enough people simply can’t keep up, have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much.