kansface

I asked ChatGPT of course, and the response roughly corresponded to my expectations so I went no further. Doctors make way more here than elsewhere (British doctors aren’t making 500-750k a year), pharma makes most of its money here, and hospitals charge an arm and a leg - it all checks out, no? Alternatively, if insurance were straight up responsible for doubling health care costs in any easily attributable way, we could easily get rid of it and would have done so by now. The only reason it can continue to exist is that it occupies a no-man’s land of utility.

Insurance companies don't make much money, actually. Hospitals, physicians, and pharma are at the top of the list (60% or so of total spending). Total insurance overhead is perhaps between 10 and 20%.

The panels probably need 5-8 years in that location to be energy positive. A year is great, but doesn’t prove much.

That is not a universal because the incumbents may hold the institutional reigns. See Academy for a counter example.

But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.

It’s perfectly fine if _your_ point in playing music is rooted in some flavor of anti-capitalism and your intrinsic joy of your creative process. _His_ point was to write an album during a sabbatical. He succeeded and then some!

What is your a priori estimate for the percentage of news that is consumed as entertainment? As in, it does not result in a change of behavior in the consumer beyond engendering neuroticism. I'd put that number at or above 95%. News is gossip wearing a suit.

Here is one sector of the US government I'm happy to see burned down. If the alternative is the status quo, I'm OK with any roll of the dice.

Yes, easily head and shoulders above 5.5 and 4.8. The others are like pulling teeth, comparatively (in a domain that never triggers the security fallback at least).

This would not end well.

Yes, exactly this. If I didn't care about price at all, I'd exclusively use this model. It functions more like an actual engineer. I'm in the midst of a DB migration, and eg 5.5 continually suggests stuff like "use DB X instead of DB Y for task Z because its 30% faster" which is an impossibility of reality, given we are migrating DBs. Fable jumped in, reduced allocs by literally 46x, found multiple bugs 4.8 and 5.5 created (max file system usage, correctness issues, etc), and continually suggested awesome improvements unprompted. As in, it would finish a task and then suggest we tackle this other existing problem I didn't know about in a very specific manner... this is the first model that feels like its coming for my job.

I will stake the claim, as an engineer never having studied sociology, that in group favoritism is the (only) stable political arrangement by and large… and further, the preservation of any culture necessitates discrimination of some sort.

I don’t understand why this is insane? Why do you expect a single cause?

We'll get around to training job specific models or the equivalent. Thats just lower on the value chain for now.

No one believes or acts like this will be a one time event (on any side of the issue). The history of all new forms of taxation is that eventually it will come for you.

The sovereign wealth fund would be a stakeholder in equities and estates. It would have to exercise voting privileges and be a party to lawsuits. Do you want Trump getting control of the board of eg SpaceX or Meta?

A 6% wealth tax indeed taxes more than the expected rate of return on the base assets. That is indeed equivalent to a higher rate than 100% in terms of an income tax. This math is in favor of PG’s argument.

Income (returns) are not guaranteed. Go for progressive capital gains if that’s what you want. A wealth tax is a crazy bad idea.

The expected a priori utility of any social intervention is strictly negative… even if “more thoughtful” does check out in reality for higher ed, $700 billion and 15million man years yearly is rather expensive.

3 10mm bolts failing simultaneously after two decades (on direct it seems) is unexpected! If it were an installation problem, I can’t imagine it would take that long and that they’d all go at the same time. Ditto for corrosion… people take victory whips all the time.

Golang truly excels at cross compiling.

What type of features did you implement on your 100k LOC week?

I work on 3rd party API integrations, of which, we have hundreds, each in its own repo. We need to build thousands more at a fraction of the cost. Any given integration historically takes a human a few days up to a few months to build and is subject to ongoing maintenance. We frequently do not have access to the API and we mostly never have a representative data set if we do. Complex APIs tend to expose multiple, entwined data models. Documentation may be wrong or in a foreign language.

I've been building a new framework to do it better. Ideally, we can get an agent to spit them out in a few minutes to hours with a much reduced ops burden for managing the fleet, all with very high confidence. The later requires pushing as much into the type system as possible and leveraging static analysis. Much of the work has been embarrassingly parallelizable. Consider categorizing access patterns across the entire set or ensuring byte for byte parity (over the input space of third party API responses).

This is absolutely not a problem that a human or 2 could tackle prior to AI.

I dunno I've seen agents make boneheaded mistakes even a junior engineer wouldn't make.

Yes, of course.

you're effectively killing the pipline for senior engineers. Then what?

I honestly don't know _what_. Its a prisoner's dilemma.

I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly.

I always have a few agents (2-5) doing research and working on plans in parallel. A plan is a thorough and unambiguous document describing the process to implement some feature. It contains goals, non-goals, data models, access patterns, explicit semantics, migrations, phasing, requirements, acceptance criteria, phased and final. Plans often require speculative work to formulate. Plans take hours to days to a couple of weeks to write. Humans may review the plans or derived RFCs. Chiefly AI reviews the code (multiple agents with differing prompts until a fixed point is reached between them). Tests and formal methods are meant to do heavy lifting.

In my highest volume weeks, I ship low hundreds of thousands of lines of software not counting changes to deps.

At a corporate level, I'd much rather hire a junior engineer

Any formulation of problem sufficient for a truly junior engineer to execute is better given to an agent. The solution is cheaper, faster, and likely better. If the later doesn't hold, 10 independent solutions are still cheaper and faster than a junior engineer.

There is no longer any likely path to teaching a junior engineer the trade.

If we had a functioning congress, I wonder if we might end up with legislation that these things need to be watermarked or otherwise made identifiable as AI generated..

Not a lawyer, but that reads as compelled speech to me. Materially misrepresenting an image would be libel, today, right?

Just because he hasn’t pulled the trigger doesn’t mean there isn’t an actual red line.

This feels pretty fertile atm to me, because it has been prohibitively expensive to do. I expect there is a ton of low hanging fruit. Why not in the age of AI?

This is bad epistemology. Incentives change the behavior on the edges.

It is a reimagining of Pascal’s Wager. On the original front, I don’t see the neo-Rationalists converting to Christianity en masse.

You will improve what you practice, possibly. This is advice for learning to play by ear. I was given the exact opposite advice by my classical guitar teacher in college because I was playing one thing and hearing something else. Sometimes, practice makes you worse or is a waste of time at best. If I could give better advice, it would be to be brutally mindful of what you are playing. Record it, and hear what is there. If it isn’t painful, you probably aren’t practicing.

I've generated 250KLoC this week, absolutely no changes in deps or any other shenanigans. I'm not even really trying to optimize my output. I work on plans/proposals with 2 or 3 agents simultaneously in Cursor while one does work, sometimes parallelized. I can't do that in less code and cleaner. I can't do it at all. Don't wait too long.