PleasureBot

All of these articles about setting up the perfect agent environments with skills, plugins, MCP servers, markdown files, etc. etc. reminds me so much of the culture around setting up the perfect "productivity stack". You need the perfect note-tacking app, ticketing app, calendar integrations, yada yada before you can really do anything meaningful. The reality is that you're going to get beat by someone with a few things written down on a piece of paper who is just getting stuff done.

There's been metabolic studies that show that this isn't true. Comparisons of total caloric usage of completely sedentary people and people who have high exercise load are indistinguishable. There is a large difference among individuals, but not correlated to exercise levels. Sedentary people who start training hard will have a spike in caloric usage for a few months, but their body adapts and calorie burn returns to the same level that it was when they were sedentary. This was new research, so there wasn't an explanation for it. The authors hypothesized that it could be that the body reduces caloric spend on other things, like stress responses, when it is adapted to high exercise levels/ They did note that some extremely elite athletes can temporarily increase their caloric burn (think Michael Phelps eating 10k calories per at some points when training for the Olympics) but its not something most people can achieve or sustain.

If software engineer productivity basically doubled as is being claimed in this thread, I think you'd see companies scrambling to lay off everyone else in an effort to hire even more software engineers. They'd be by far the most valuable and productive employees at every tech company and you'd be foolish not to have as many as you can. I'm being a bit facetious but throughout history when a resource or profession takes a dramatic leap in efficiency, the demand for that thing rather than decreasing as is predicted here, only increases since it has become far more valuable & effective.

Even the least sophisticated criminals know that you should buy a stolen Kia or Hyundai for ~$100 and use that to commit your crime. I suspect most of the crime these Flock cameras are catching is red-light runners and maybe hit and runs if it happens to be caught on camera.

Half of the USA, or at least half of its voting population, now supports the idea that the role of government is simply to be an extension of the personality of the Chief Executive. Essentially, whatever Trump feels is the policy of the government and therefor is the law.

My company's CEO comes from the sales world, and I imagine that's the case in many companies making these RTO decisions. His idea of getting work done is getting everyone in a room together, having some handshakes, sitting down, and talking something out. This is not what getting work done looks like to software engineers, and many other IC positions. The blanket RTO policies come from a lack of understanding how other people & roles work best.

Half the country will just grumble something about Nancy Pelosi and how everyone is corrupt in response to points about the current administration being corrupt. I feel like people have just lost all sense of scale when it comes to political matters. Yes, Nancy Pelosi making a series of improbably fortuitous trades while in office is bad and she should probably go to jail for insider trading. Is that the same thing as the Trump accepting many hundreds of millions, likely billions, in direct cryptocurrency bribes from foreign and domestic agents? Obviously not, the latter has a much, much larger in scale and has direct negative effect on the American people. Half the country is willing to equate the two and, throw their hands up, and say its all the same.

I think this is pretty terrible advice actually. Verbal confrontations like this are a huge dice roll and have a tendency to make not-perfect-but-tolerable relationships totally fall apart. Its one thing to bring these kinds of things up with your partner, but not with a colleague or acquaintance.

Imagine your colleague or someone in your friend-group who you think you get a long with great says "I always feel awkward around you" or "I sense some low-level tension between us" or "I feel like we're annoyed at each-other but trying to stay polite". That can make things very uncomfortable between the two of you. Most times the best course of action is to just continue to be polite because the awkwardness, annoyance, tension, etc. is only experienced by you. Bringing it up to the other person is going to make them feel really uncomfortable, or worse, and can make the relationship potentially unrecoverable.

I can also say from personal experience this verbal confrontation like the author is suggesting can make innocuous situations devolve quickly. There was one guy in a friend group I had who I felt like I couldn't really connect with. He always seemed very awkward and only willing to engage in surface-level conversations with me compared to everybody else. I tried to (gently) ask him about it, basically like the author would suggest doing, and it turns out he did not feel like he was being awkward, surface-level, or failing to connect at all. He thought we had a real genuine, deep friendship. What I said really hurt him and there was a lot of hard feelings on his end. Needless to say we did not go back to being friends after that, and I ruined what could have been a good friendship if I had taken the time to reflect that maybe my interpretation of awkwardness or lack of connection was coming from me and not experienced by him.

It can really hurt relationships to bring up things like this if it isn't experienced by the other person, it might be all in your head.

That's not what I said. I said the movie creates a false sense of urgency when the decision-making window is measured in hours or days, not 18 minutes.

The premise of the movie doesn't make any sense. There is no pressure to retaliate to a single nuclear missile launched at Chicago within the 18 minute flight of the missile. The only scenario that introduces a minutes-long decision window is if the US nuclear capability is in imminent danger, which it obviously is not from a single missile headed for Chicago. What any person not following a Hollywood script would do is wait few hours for credible intelligence, coordinate with other nuclear powers to avoid escalation, and wipe out whoever conducted the attack. Its a movie that only works if you don't think about it, which is a major problem because it is trying to be thought provoking.

I believe the list encompasses both genres. The very first entry in the list "Book of the New Sun" is a sci-fi series.

I said it above but the thieves don't usually sell these types of items. They were probably paid by some organized crime group do it. That crime organization now has a very valuable bargaining chip to have charges dropped by returning the stolen items. Basically its probably going to be used as insurance for organized crime.

Usually these items are used as bargaining chips by organized crime. The state agrees to drop the multiple homicides and RICO charges (or whatever the French equivalent of that is), they return the Crown Jewels.

As an alternative I've paid a mechanic I trust (not a cousin or uncle) to inspect a car I was looking to buy. Cost like $75 and I had the peace of mind that I wasn't buying a lemon.

Probably very similar unfortunately. The current state of US politics is that any policy further than center or maybe slightly left of center has a snowball's chance in hell of making it through Congress. The best case scenarios is probably what Biden accomplished: temporarily pausing the slide into far-right authoritarianism. Maybe he's able to pass some extremely watered down version of health care reform or tax reform but that seems unlikely. Certainly nothing like true progressive platform he ran on is possible in the US right now.

I think the real answer is that executives at large companies live in a completely different world than their employees.

For one the circles they run in are going to be full of like-minded people; i.e. people for whom work is the most important part of their life. People like that want RTO and don't understand those who oppose it. When those are your priorities and all of your pees share them, its going to produce an echo chamber where most executives want RTO.

Furthermore their lifestyle is completely different. Most are going to have chauffeurs so they can be productive to/from work. They are going to have aids that take care of the food shopping, laundry, picking kids up from school, cooking, helping with homework etc. RTO does not affect them nearly as much as their employees who still have to deal with all of this in addition to commuting time now.

Its really just as simple as that. They lead completely different lives than their employees, are surrounded by other executives in friend and professional groups who have similar lifestyles, and generally don't understand why someone wouldn't want to RTO.

Its unprecedented in modern times for a nation state to act this way. We declared to the world that we think we have the right to kill foreign nationals in international waters so long as there is "suspicion" of crime. The people on that boat were not even given a chance to explain themselves or surrender. Its monstrous behavior by this administration. Not even countries like North Korea or Russia operate this way.

An integral part of authoritarianism is cruelty. How else can you assert that you have unalienable authority over a group of people? If compliance with authority is easy and painless, you don't really know if people are just acquiescing but silently resisting or not resisting yet but could if they wanted to. By enacting cruelty on others you put them in a position where they absolutely would resist if they could, and thus you demonstrate to the world that people cannot resist your authority.

I fully agree. I think will be debated for a very long time what allowed the USA to get to this point where half the country has talked itself into authoritarianism as a solution to imaginary immigration problems.

For my money I'd say a combination of

1) Poor economic conditions & extreme wealth inequality provides fertile ground for political extremes on all sides.

2) Gerrymandering producing political candidates that are more extreme and more likely to agree with Trump.

3) Over representation of unpopulated rural states in Congress further tipping the balance of Congress towards Trump.

4) The decades long effect of propaganda networks like Fox, Newsmax, etc. producing a media bubble for half the country such that we no longer have a shared reality.

And some interactions between all those factors that exacerbate the problem.

This is the most worrying aspect of it to me. It is hard to imagine an economy or society in general to continue functioning indefinitely with such an extreme difference in outcomes between different groups. As far as I know there is no historical example of a society that allowed inequality to grow at the level ours is that did not ultimately face massive socio-political upheaval. Needless to say it would not be pleasant to live through those times

Seems to me that capitalism, especially when unregulated as has been in the US since the late 70's/early 80's ultimately results in wealth concentrated somewhat in the top 10%, but especially the top 1%, while the bottom 90% sees their share of national wealth drop every lower.

It feels like we are entering a second guilded age, just like the late 1800's. Maybe a few world wars and a global depression will reset the board and we can start again.

A lot of jobs really only exist to increase headcount for some mid/high level manager's fiefdom. LLMs are incapable of replacing those roles as the primary value of those roles is to count towards the number of employees in their sector of the organization.

The incentive to use PEDs is almost certainly higher in other professional sports than cycling. For athletes in leagues like the MLB, NFL, NBA etc. the average career is quite short and you essentially need to make all of the money for your entire life in 3-4 yeas. Plus the step function of being in the league and making millions vs just missing a roster spot and making almost nothing is so extreme you'd be foolish not to take PEDs to give yourself the best chance at a payday.

The NFL (and other major sports organizations) have no incentive to catch their athletes beyond a token amount to make the general public think the league cares about it. They don't want to catch too many as that could lead to a PED scandal that damages the reputation of the league; for example the BALCO scandal in the early 2000's MLB. Plus PEDs allow their athletes to stay healthy and perform at higher levels.

There's a reason athletes refer to PED tests as IQ tests. Only the very dumb or careless get caught, but the reality is nearly all of the athletes in these leagues have used PEDs at some point in their career.

Salt isn't particularly bad unless you already have hypertension. There's a reason electrolyte (aka salt) dietary supplements like LMNT are becoming popular. Of course if you are already consuming lots of processed, salty foods you wouldn't need those supplements. But if you eat mostly whole foods, exercise regularly, and drink coffee you really do need to go out of your way to intake extra electrolytes.

For the same reasons as you said I don't understand its use in our side projects. Maybe I'm alone in this, but I feel like the entire point of a side project is to learn some new tech, framework, etc. If you just let an LLM do the work for you, you don't actually learn anything about the underlying tech, so what was the point of the whole thing? I think LLMs abuse our dopamine system that usually activates when we get our side projects working and allows us to feel that with very little effort. Of course at the cost of not learning anything other than how to prompt an LLM.

People have much more favorable interactions with coding LLMs when they are using it for greenfield projects that they don't have to maintain (ie personal projects). You can get 2 months of work done in a weekend and then you hit a brick wall because the code is such a gigantic ball of mud that neither you nor the LLM are capable of working on it.

Working with production code is basically jumping straight to the ball of mud phase, maybe somewhat less tangled but usually a much much larger codebase. Its very hard to describe to an LLM what to even do since you have such a complex web of interactions to consider in most mature production code.

Germany has a different structure for company ownership than the USA. Members representing relevant stakeholders (employees, the community, environment, etc.) must be present on the board and advocate for their interests.

The fundamental limitation of LLMs writing code is that reading and understanding code is harder and slower than writing it. With other engineers that I work with there is an established level of trust where I do not need to deep dive into every PR. With LLMs it is like I am constantly doing code reviews for someone with whom I have zero trust. This is fundamentally a slow process, especially if you need to maintain this code in the long term and it is part of your 'core business code' that you work on 90% of the time. It also comes with all the downsides of no longer being an expert in your own codebase.

Ultimately I am responsible for any code I check in even if it was written by an LLM, so I need to perform these lengthy reviews. As others have said, if it is code that doesn't need to be maintained, then reviewing the code can be a much faster process. This is why it is so popular for hobby projects since you don't need to maintain the code if you don't want to, and it doesn't matter if you introduce subtle but catastrophic bugs.

Ultimately the tech feels like a net neutral. When you want to just throw the code away after it is very fast and good enough. If you are responsible for maintaining it, its slower than writing it yourself.

I suppose the recourse the Supreme Court is offering is that the baby (or more likely the parents) can sue when the citizenship is denied. At which point I'd just expect ICE to arrest and deport them when they show up to court for their lawsuit.