The flip side is the same thing was true then, and we aren't making a lot of jokes about the narwhal baconing at midnight these days.

Industrial scale dunning kruger/gell man amnesia. We're ~5 years in to the meme of "wow, every white collar profession other than MINE is doomed. But yeah, mine requires really specific domain knowledge, taste, and problem solving, so I'm not super worried about it but it's a very helpful tool"

The better your heart is at getting oxygen into your muscles and organs, the better it can compensate for less oxygen.

Not a bulletproof solution to altitude sickness, but it's definitely one of a lot of variables that matters. It's also just true that some people are way more susceptible regardless, I've got friends who run competitive marathon times who get splitting headaches flying from sea level to denver.

At least within our company, this is quickly becoming what it means to be a software engineer.

It's easier when I have 10 simple problems as a part of one larger initiative/project. Think like "we had these 10 minor bugs/tweaks we wanted to make after a demo review". I can keep that straight. A bunch of agents working in parallel makes me notably faster there though actually reviewing all the output is still the bottleneck.

It's basically impossible when I'm working on multiple separate tasks that each require a lot of mental context. Two separate projects/products my team owns, two really hard technical problems, etc. This has been true before and after AI - big mental context switches are really expensive and people can't multitask despite how good we are at convincing ourselves we can.

I expect a lot of folks experience here depends heavily on how much of their work is the former vs the later. I also expect that there's a lot of feeling busy while not actually moving much faster.

I think it's a really solid release, and while cursor seems to have fallen out of the "cool kids club" in the past three months it remains the most practical tool for me doing AI-first work in a large production code base. The new UI works better in a world where agents are doing most of the work and I can hop back into the IDE interface to make changes.

We've set up a linear integration where I can delegate simpler tasks to cloud agents, and the ability to pick that work up in cursor if I need to go back in forth is a real productivity boost. The tighter integration with cloud agents is something I've been hoping for recently.

I appreciate not being tied at the hip to one model provider, and have never loved doing most of my work from the command line. I was on vs code + meta's internal fork of it for years prior to the current AI wave, so that was a pretty natural transition. I'm pretty optimistic on cursor's ability to win in the enterprise space, and think we're going to see open source models + dev tools win with indie devs over things like claude code as costs start getting passed down more and the gap between frontier models and open source gets tighter.

Every company I've worked at has still had a few engineers who insist on working exclusively in the CLI with vim/emacs prior to AI. Every other engineer used some flavor of a desktop app ranging from more minimal editors to incredibly complex IDEs. I expect we land back on UIs long term.

Global hunger's a great example. When we last left the moon (1972) 35% of the global population was undernourished. Today it's ~8%. Optimism is a choice, and generally a more rational one. That doesn't mean we don't have real issues.

Most of what people find inspiring doesn't directly provide a lot of objective utility, and is often quite dangerous for the individuals who choose to participate. Reaching the highest peaks in the last century, antarctic expeditions, pushing the limits of racing vehicles, attempting a sub two hour marathon, and athletes defining new tricks and styles in extreme sports are all objectively pretty useless in terms of their direct outputs -- and yet I find it all a whole lot more inspiring than my computer getting twice as fast, even if the latter is of way more objective utility to my life.

Min-maxing ROI in a spreadsheet just doesn't do it for me in the same way. There's absolutely a place for that and in a world of limited resources it should be how we spend most of our effort, and it is! The amount of money spent on efforts like this is _tiny_ at the scale of nations, and is certainly a much smaller and better use of funds than wars and corruption.

We're entering pretty substantial numbers of parents who grew up or at least spent their entire adult lives with cell phones and the expectation of constant communication. In fact, from my anecdotal experience, the mid-older millennial cohort is the worst at expecting immediate replies at all hours to any form of communication be it social or work.

One of the things I realize I'm grateful for in hindsight is parents who didn't grow up with that, and had no problem calling the front desk of the school if there was a legitimate emergency that needed to involve pulling me out of school. And it turns out for anything short of that, the news could wait until 4PM.

The rollout of LTE data and more-modern smartphones + social media during that area was a nuclear bomb on teenagers's ability to focus in hindsight. I can distinctly remember the divide between dumb phones/ipods/early smart phones with slow data, and modern social media + fast cellular data to get around school network bans. Things went from the occasional student thinking they were clever with a wired headphone down their sleeve to near constant distraction very rapidly.

The "innovation" has been basic leadership -- setting policies at the school/district and in this case state level. Consistent expectations make it easier for students to follow the policy. Some schools have gone as far as physically locking phones away for the day, though reading the article it sounds like that's not what Oregon is doing.

The capitalist answer would be that markets are more efficient than governments at capital allocation and thus private companies are better positioned to develop software that solves real-world-problems, and in this case are so much more efficient at it that the stuff those companies give away for free as open source still dwarves publicly funded efforts.

My own opinion is that there are plenty of software problems worth solving that don't fit neatly into that bucket and you're likely right that some increased degree of public funding around them is worthwhile. In the US that tends to end up flowing through the university systems. I mean, the internet itself was DoD funding going to university labs.

How does this blow that narrative up? A 50 person team likely broke a license to have a product that's competitive on output at a fraction of the costs of one of the most well capitalized companies on the planet. Claude code and anthropic are certainly the darlings of the space today, but to me this just reinforces the idea that their moat is razor thin on the model front, even compared to OSS that can be run on independent hardware.

The application layer play is also suspect to me. In the medium to long term I _want_ tools that'll let me run whatever models I want vs being tied to an expensive, proprietary, and singular provider. For personal work I care about costs, and eventually my employer will care both about costs _and_ enterprise features/governance that a company like Anysphere is extremely well positioned to provide.

More and more, I see the future of the application layer being model agnostic, most enterprises hosting models on their own cloud for data security concerns, and the models being fully commoditized.