all_factz

They would have to trade off building new features for refactoring. It seems they consider shipping more important, and that as long as the existing features mostly work, that’s good enough. As customers, we have to ask: do we agree? Do we want features over stability? I think the answer is yes, at least for me (and the market seems to agree). But it’s certainly a risk Anthropic is taking.

I will note that this strategy only really makes sense because Anthropic controls the compute. If open-source harnesses could also use Claude max plans, then they’d have to focus much more on stability and quality, or just build an open-source harness themselves, or probably better yet, get out of the harness-building business altogether. So they’re gambling on staying ahead of open-source models, which seems like it’s been a good bet so far, but we’ll see.

“Which side”? What other side is there in Iran? You think there’s some shadow government that can realistically topple the mullahs from within? The only way the Shah comes back is with US boots on the ground, which would be a disaster for other reasons. Until that happens this is just reckless action that makes the regime even more radical than it already is.

VENI/VIDI/VICI are easy for anyone who studied Latin (as indeed used to be common), and ARIA is similarly easy for anyone who knows about opera. Basically, the crossword is for snobs.

Sure, I agree. Kneejerk condemnation and othering is bad.

But there’s a need to balance even-handedness with a healthy skepticism of those in power. Otherwise you risk becoming an apologist. No one is saying not to do your homework or not to think critically, but we’re also saying not to come in guns blazing in defense of moneyed interests. That’s what the person who brought up the hidden agenda stuff seemed to be doing - making assumptions that favor capital without even taking the time to read the article that addressed those assumptions. That’s not even-handed, it’s biased against labor.

“I reject demonisation of the wealthy” is quite an odd thing for someone identifying as “far left” to say. But then you go on to identify as a “left liberal” - canonically not considered far left - so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.

Whether it’s worth demonizing anyone or not, we can condemn actions that hurt innocent people and we can maintain skepticism of the ultra-wealthy and their motives without “bullying”. It does sound like your principle of compassion extends a little too much towards capital and not enough towards labor.

Sure, and for those cases I’d rather tell the agent to use htmx instead of something hand-rolled.

React is hundreds of thousands of lines of code (or millions - I haven’t looked in awhile). Sure, you can start by having the LLM create a simple way to sync state across components, but in a serious project you’re going to run into edge-cases that cause the complexity of your LLM-built library to keep growing. There may come a point at which the complexity grows to such a point that the LLM itself can’t maintain the library effectively. I think the same rough argument applies to MomentJS.

We need dinners, we don’t need AI

Meh, sort of. Just because LLMs let you output reams of code, doesn’t mean you should use them to do that. As always, you should make the smallest diff that would accomplish your goal. Working this way, LLMs don’t really accelerate my workflow much except for work that’s truly boilerplate and for refactoring. But for the sort of small-ish changes that iterate towards product-market fit, I find I have to spend more time trying to get Claude to do what I want than just writing the code I need by hand.

That’s a little simplistic. Iranians feel, somewhat justifiably, that they and the Arab world have been pushed around by the West for over 100 years. The Jihadism we bemoan today didn’t arise in a vacuum - it is at least partially a reaction to Western interference in Middle Eastern affairs (recall how the US deposed a democratically elected Iranian leader). Israel is one such example of this Western interference, and while I obviously have the utmost sympathy for Israelis - having family there - I do think not enough Westerners are willing to see this from the Arab/Iranian PoV. There’s a reason they dislike us, and it’s not just that they’re fanatics. Negotiation would be more fruitful if we didn’t typecast our enemies as unreasoning fundamentalists.

It’s not a justification, obviously. But it is a (partial) explanation. Israel wanted to keep sweeping the Palestinian issue under the rug, and Hamas and its sponsors were not going to allow that.

Because Rooney writes dressed-up romance novels. They’re mediocre. But to the author’s point, at least they’re readable and touch on real emotion, even if I find them a bit trite. Some balance could be struck between Rooney and the more highbrow experiments the author bemoans. Elena Ferrante is a decent example here, and she does get sales. But even then, I do think the author understates the competition reading faces from new forms of media - yes, there are more people, but the amount of distraction has scaled disproportionately to the number of new people. Massively.

October 7th was a reaction to Trump’s “Abraham Accords” which benefitted Sunni countries at the expense of Iran.

Have you been to Israel? I have cousins there. When I was 14 and visited, my 19 year old cousin told me we need to kill all the Arabs because “if we exile them, they will just come back.” Do you really think (a large segment of) Israelis are less crazy than (a large segment of) Iranians?

Iran has shown itself a rational actor time and time again by not escalating against continued provocation by Israel and the US, knowing that to do so would be to enter a conflict it can’t win. That’s not the behavior of an irrational actor who’s willing to fight whatever the cost, even total annihilation (which would be what happened if Iran nuked the US/Israel).

They may be religious fanatics, but they’re not idiots.

Letting the structure emerge requires people thinking in depth about the underlying principles of what the code does or should do.

Right, yes, but those principles are often still very much in flux in the early days of a feature. Once a feature is more mature, it’s easier to confidently say what the code should do, and so that becomes a good time to refactor. Early on in the development lifecycle I think it’s rarely a good idea to worry about code duplication, underabstraction, etc.

And yes I agree with you that classes are an organizational concept with parallels in functional languages. Modularity is very important, but as you say there’s no reason that modularity implies classes. Sometimes I find classes to be ergonomic, and when they are using them makes sense, but plenty of other times a struct will do, as long as there’s some type of module system to keep different things different.

So much this. It’s hard not to lose the forest for the trees — we are craftspeople after all — but at the end of the day the overall structure of a program is so much important than whether there’s a bit of duplication here or there. Better to let the structure emerge and then reduce duplication instead of trying to guess the right structure up front. And yeah I’m still not convinced SOLID is real (but I’m also not convinced classes are useful much of the time, for that matter).

I would be much more sympathetic to this stance if you weren’t implicitly endorsing the rights of companies like Meta/Alphabet/OpenAI to profit from the disruption of copyright law. If we’re talking ordinary people being able to breach copyright, then yeah seems potentially interesting. But let’s remember that these companies aren’t acting altruistically. They’re not giving away Silverman’s work - they’re repackaging it for their own profit. That’s not fair to the artist and in fact does not help the children.

Actually, C-level execs are among the most privileged professionals on Earth. Once their salaries take a hit, we can talk about mine getting cut as well. Till then, enjoy being a shill!

If you clicked on the “biological daughter” link, you’d see it links out to a Twitter post where Pavlo shares a paternity test he had to take for some reason. So it’s just a joke, not a commentary on other children he may or may not have.

Trying to understand: what’s to prevent someone from calling an FFI-defined function on a free type without going through the whole linear types rigmarole? E.g. could I call `fopen` and `fclose` directly to circumvent the whole `File` interface?

I’m sure there’s a good answer. This is a really cool and impressive project.

EDIT: Ah, just got to the section on "The FFI Boundary". Makes sense!

It’s not the same outcome at all - severance pay is often the difference between needing to take out a loan or not when embarking on a job search after a layoff. Lack of that stability will have material impact on many people: they might have to move, change which schools their kids go to, avoid medical treatment not covered by Medicare, etc etc. He’s not committing some sort of victimless crime.

Wanting to retain a benefit you had for years is whiny? What are the execs giving up in exchange for asking their employees to work harder? Way to punch down, dude.

There are many reasons someone might want to remain at their place of work and still retain improved benefits and treatment from their employer. As an adult, it’s not for you to judge others’ reasons: who are you to say I should quit my job and spend my time solving stupid Leetcode problems?

If we can agree on that, then I’m not sure how we can disagree that unions can be an important tool in helping employees achieve greater representation in a system which generally privileges the will of execs and board members far above those of employees - you know, the people who actually make the company run.

If unions ever dominate the tech industry to the extent that they control the labor pool, we can discuss whether that’s a good thing. For now, that’s just a bogeyman. But having real leverage to increase your bargaining power in the workspace — IMO that’s very good. No one is stopping you from spending your time doing Leetcode, though.

In 2019, SF Gate found a household income of around 200k a year was still “middle class” (https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/amp/SF-househ...). I’d wager that’s a fair bit higher now.

Even among those making over 200k, there’s a qualitative difference between needing to work and being able to live off passive income. To say someone making 500k a year has more in common with someone who has immense generational wealth just misses the point. The political incentives are different.

I’m obviously aware that all shareholders have a voting stake - but most of their stakes are so small as to be negligible.

There’s a qualitative difference between having a couple thousand RSUs and having a voting stake in a company. Tech workers are well off, but they’re nowhere near as well off as C-level execs and even less well off than major shareholders in the companies they work at. It’s the difference between being upper middle class and rich.

If you have to work to live, you’re a worker, sorry. 500k a year is a lot but in many places it’s not enough that you can stop working. So yeah, if people who make 500k a year know what’s good for them, they should totally align themselves with “regular” workers. 500k is a lot closer to 50k than it is to 5 million.

“Gosh just be nicer to the CEOs!”

Fair - people definitely have different paths, and I don’t mean to suggest that therapy is a panacea. I will say however that not all therapy is focused on trauma; it can also address patterns of thought and behavior which are not conducive to your happiness. In short, I think good therapy is often about learning how to have deeper relationships with yourself and with others through being able to practice vulnerability in a safe, controlled environment. That’s helpful to people whether or not they’ve suffered deep trauma, as feeling connected to others is often the first step out of depression.

I agree “just doing stuff” can help to. But for many people, as others have pointed out, such advice is not immediately actionable. People can be made to do stuff, but if they hate doing those things then they’ll still be depressed.

This is a bit of a chicken-or-egg problem. If you’re depressed, you don’t have the energy to do the beneficial things you’re recommending above. So I come back to the idea that you need to look inward, into the core causes of your depression, and make some sort of peace with them — freeing you to move forward. Therapy helps.