Spending $10k and then balking at an additional $2k can make sense to me based on the circumstances. It's an additional 20% that hasn't been budgeted for.

The question is partly about what that 20% gives the employer - for some businesses, you might see diminishing returns from additional productivity of a software developer. E.g. I did some work creating BI reports and warehousing for a manufacturing company. Being more productive just meant faster reports or more reports. But faster/more reports didn't necessarily equate to more money for the business.

Sometimes it's a question of a business being penny wise and pound foolish, but sometimes it does make sense to me to not spend this additional money.

Just to be clear: I do think the brain classifies. But I wonder if it does other operations as well that we don't fully understand.

Don't you need to spend on bureaucracy to figure this out? That then increases the cost.

But I do mod Claude Code to incorporate gotchas from my specific workflows. For example: Which snowflake instance should you look at, where are the tables in my data warehouse, [Product] doesn't have an API, here's a Skill that uses the Chrome MCP to handle repetitive tasks, here's an agent that should explore the schema, you don't have write-access to this repo. A recent skill I made was to modify our terraform config (after doing it 4 times in the same way) - it requires pulling the ticket from JIRA, knowing how our terraform config works (or at least the bit I'm interested in), and making a pull request in a certain format.

Agents solve a real problem of keeping your main context shorter, and you can also have your main thread on Fable/Opus/Sonnet, but use Haiku for certain tasks in a subagent because you know the dumb AI can figure it out - but you need to think about the tasks in your job.

I've done my fair bit of modding with electric bicycles and 3d printers and in general the lesson I learnt is that a small bit of modding can cause an improvement (e.g. I want a usb charger from my battery), but overmodding breaks things, and either you want ebikes and 3d printers to be your hobby, or your hobby can be fixing your ebike or 3d printer. I think the same applies to claude code or Vim. Incidentally I never modded vim.

Just beware that it's usually much less than you put in though. We bought our house for £25k more than the next door neighbours even though they're cookie cutter houses sold within 4 months of each other. Our house was thoroughly modernised, new kitchen, all old windows replaced with double glazed windows, garage converted into home office and a bunch of other stuff. We definitely can't do all this work for £25k.

My understanding is that it does raise the value of the house, but less than you put in. I do find it strange, because personally I'd hate living in a building site or dealing with contractors, so if someone already did an extension/loft conversion that I would've wanted to do, I'd pay a premium. Apparently people want it done 'their way', which I can appreciate, up to a point.

In the 40s, the British were ruling Palestine as a mandate, I wouldn’t really call that a country.

The reason I think so is because I'm not sure how this kind of petulant behaviour would emerge. It would depend on the model and the base prompt, but there's something fishy about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar

The Nazis were still killing people in other places at the same time, so the deadliest day is probably much much higher.

The scale of the Holocaust is hard to imagine. Even just looking at very specific suranmes, there are 23,000 killed with the surname Rosenberg, 12,000 with the surname Adler...

https://collections.yadvashem.org/en/names/search-results-na...

Don't you think it can make sense in terms of pension contributions?

I used to track my finances very carefully (but now I'm more lackadaisical). Double entry would've been helpful for "I'm taking money from this pocket and putting it in this pocket".

If you compare SF or LA to London, then you'll find:

City | Median Wage | Median House Price | Ratio SF | 104k | $1.5m | 14.42 London | 67k | $890k | 13.28 LA | 73k | $1.1m | 15.07

London ends up being slightly more affordable despite lower salaries.

The whole analogy was a bit meaningless - it wasn't an apples to apples comparison. The writer mixed geographic and demographic scales to make a point that could just as well be about the unaffordability of large cities.

San Francisco is much much more expensive, I'm not sure why that means London is "broken". It's just got a different economic dynamic.

Bear in mind that obviously the mean salary in London is going to be far higher than the median (the finance industry will skew it), while I'm not sure that's as extreme as Mississippi. Additionally median salaries reflect a lot of service jobs and similar labour. Dubai has a lower median wage than either London or Mississippi, but people don't think of it as economically broken.

Comparing California (an extremely large state that I presume has cheaper housing outside major urban areas) to a city seems a bit of a poor comparison.

I don't disagree that the UK has high energy costs.

Dallas and San Francisco are both English speaking cities with a shared recent history of being part of the same nation. Most cities in Europe are as close as New York and Mexico City - Dallas and San Francisco is probably more analogous to Milan and Naples (different cultures, different histories, but now speak the same language and are part of the same nation).