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kemiller

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This is a great article, but I think it’s hard to ignore that Japan’s culture of harmony is a big part of why they were able to choose sensible regulations that benefitted everyone. We struggle to pass even the most sensible land use reforms because entrenched interests want to remain entrenched even if it hurts the system overall.

BeOS was so amazing; I ran it for a while on x86 hardware. Ahead of its time. But I always loved NeXT. (I'd go down to the local university computer store to drool over them. The staff all knew me by name.) And now, I carry one around with me everywhere I go. Living in the future...

I really would love to move to helix but they can be… stubborn about what gets into the core. And if you start having to go to a plugin (which isn’t even possible last I looked) to get table stakes features in, it kind of defeats the purpose of a modern batteries included modal editor. But it’s still a cool thing I’m glad exists.

Have you ever tried to get an average human to do that? It’s a mixed bag. Computers til now were highly repeatable relative to humans, once programmed, but hopeless at “fuzzy” or associative tasks. Now they have a new trick, that lets them grapple with ambiguity, but the cost is losing that repeatability. The best, most reliable humans were not born that way, it took years or decades of education, and even then it can take a lot of talking to transfer your idea into their brain.

YMMV I guess, but I found the best coffee at kissatens, and I hate dark roasts. Lots of great, sometimes super tiny, third-wave pourover types, too. But I guess Japanese coffee culture is more about evening consumption since there were many that were open at 10PM or later, but very few open before 10AM.

I was leaving a company recently and the fresh grads, with whom I had a good relationship, asked if I had any advice.

I said, “Always remember that the company is not your friend. I don’t mean your boss or your coworkers, they might well be or become your friend. I mean the company itself. If all is well, it may be an excellent ally, but the company can and sometimes will turn on you in an instant if its goals change. Your boss’s job, even if they are your friend, is ultimately to serve the company.

Go out there, work hard, have fun, but put your needs first in the bigger picture.”

Trump doesn't understand soft power, nor how much he has destroyed in such a short span. I have hope that a some future point we can repair these relationships, but they will never be like they were. So stupid. Such a waste.

My observation in my years running a dev shop was that there are two classes of applications that could get built. One was the high-end, full-bore model requiring a team of engineers and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get to a basic MVP, which thus required an economic opportunity in at least the tends of millions. The other, very niche or geographically local businesses that can get their needs met with a self-service tool, max budget maybe $5k or so. Could stretch that to $25k if you use offshore team to customize. But 9/10 incoming leads had budgets between $25k and $100k. We just had to turn them away. There's nothing meaningful you can do with that range of budget. I haven't seen anything particularly change that. Self-service tools get gradually better, but not enough to make a huge difference. The high end if anything has receded even faster as dev salaries have soared.

AI coding, for all its flaws now, is the first thing that takes a chunk out of this, and there is a HUGE backlog of good-but-not-great ideas that are now viable.

That said, this particular story is bogus. He "just wrote the tests" but that's a spec — implementing from a quality executable spec is much more straightforward. Deepseek isn't doing the design, he is. Still a massive accelerant.

Short term, I 100% agree, but remains to be seen what "short" means. According to at least some benchmarks, Deepseek is two full orders of magnitude cheaper for comparable performance. Massive. But that opens the door for much more elaborate "architectures" (chain of thought, architect/editor, multiple choice) etc, since it's possible to run it over and over to get better results, so raw speed & latency will still matter.