mattchew

This is the best essay on agentic coding I've read. Clear thinking and writing, pragmatic about the future of agent-led coding.

If you usually skip straight to the comments, you might want to actually read this one.

I had pretty much written off ever my credit card to Google, but a better billing experience and hard billing caps might change that.

I'm not crazy about SOLID principles either. They don't feel like useful, practical ideas to me. They were born to be memorized for a classroom test or a job interview. SOLID does come up in interviews, though.

Most companies don't really invest in trying to do good interviews. Rarely is there anyone motivated (or permitted) to think about the process and make it a lot better or different. Doing what they've always done, or what everyone else seems to be doing, is good enough.

If you can't imagine how politicians could endlessly fight over a UBI you haven't tried hard enough.

The implication is that Amazon was fully aware that this was happening and didn't care. That's what most people would think "let" meant here.

Yes, equivocating over the meaning of "let", the headline is technically true. Like so, so many other technically true but misleading headlines.

I get where you're coming from. The free content is possible because of the advertisements, and you are sort of consenting to the ads when you choose to visit the site. It's not an explicit agreement but it is at least an understanding of what lets the wheels keep turning.

However, when ads are so obtrusive that they slow down my computer or ruin the use of the site completely, or if they have malware payloads (does happen) then I'm quite happy to use an ad blocker. I didn't use one until I started encountering this kind of nonsense regularly.

Our family started taking Vitamin D at the start of the pandemic. We've all gotten sick a lot less than we used to, despite one of us working at a drugstore constantly exposed to sick people.

Of course I don't know for sure that the Vitamin D is causal here, but it's my best guess. I suspect a lot of people are D deficient and just don't know it.

It's pretty dated at this point (and I don't know of anything recent like it), but playing M.U.L.E. is a little education in microeconomics all by itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.U.L.E.

Ok, I see that Planet M.U.L.E. is a recent remake that may actually be alive and kicking, good deal!

http://www.planetmule.com/

This game is on my radar, but as I understand it it really wants a lot of players at the table and my group is typically capped at 4.

Glad to hear it referenced though.

A degree can be a valuable signal to employers and also be a terrible waste of time and resources. It can be both at once.

It would be better if we found ways to let young people get into white collar and middle class professions without spending $100K and four years of their lives. This used to be possible. I'm quite sure it could be done again, but collectively we're not going to go there. Yet, anyway.

Oh, I dream of a day where there are multiple useful search engines, specialized for different purposes.

You're doing God's work here. Thanks and good luck.

I think this is a sincere question.

It's quite possible this ends in a global depression that's worse than what we had in 2008, maybe even worse than what we had in the 1930s.

There are a lot of states that are not very solvent: states collapsing financially is also a possibility. Very bad for the people who live there, and sometimes their neighbors.

Freedom of speech has always meant the idea that different points of view should be aired, not suppressed, and that people should decide for themselves what is right or what is correct, rather than authorities deciding for them.

A society where "wrong" points of view are thoroughly suppressed by giant social media companies or angry mobs (or angry mobs on social media) might not violate the literal text of the First Amendment, but it lacks the spirit of free speech that inspired the First Amendment in the first place.

What I find most disappointing is not that Facebook is censoring QAnon (or whatever), but that the popular sentiment is they should be. That's a big change from the culture I grew up in, and not for the better.

A little older than you, but same basic experience.

I also don't understand how the tide turned so swiftly against freedom of speech, and in favor of authorities deciding what people should be allowed to hear or read. But it did turn, and I don't see the trend reversing.

While I don't like the prospect of an increasingly censored society, it will be interesting to watch the struggle between the big platform censors and those who want to say banned things. I expect this will only escalate over time.

Anyway, just wanted to say you're not alone. Watching some of your cherished values be discarded by society is something you have to accept as you get old, I'm afraid.

Same with us.

Also interested in the answer to this question.

There's a lot of differences in risk appetite (and actual risk) from state to state.

Maybe the feds could allow states to get a waiver from FDA regulations if they want to try things like variolation.

This would still require someone at the federal level to stick their neck out a little, but (I think) a lot less than if they were to propose something like this as a federal policy.

We've got a federal system, let's make some use of it.

This seems like a fairly common view to people who have come late to the topic.

If you have been paying attention for a while, the way the USA has handled this is horrifying.

Compare the outcomes in Italy to those in South Korea to see what good handling of this crisis looks like.

Even though we had the example of Italy weeks ago, we waited and waited and waited until now. Our outcomes will be similar to Italy's in a great deal of the USA.

The worst thing was the terrible, terrible failures in testing. We will never know exactly how many lives could have been saved if we ramped up testing the way South Korea did. We will be able to make some rough guesses after we get the final body count.

Trump also did enormous damage by continuously, repeatedly dismissing the new Coronavirus as no worse than the flu. Foot dragging and denial are natural anyway; having the president constantly dismiss the worst epidemic since 1918 as alarmism from whiners delayed action at the state and local levels, never mind all the action that wasn't being taken at the national level. There are still many people--maybe a majority in my area--who think this is all overblown panicking over nothing.

Here's the best I can say. The travel ban was a good idea and would have saved lives if we had not chosen to throw away the extra lead time it gave us. And most of Europe handled this just as poorly as we did, if that seems justifying to you (it does to some people).

Probably they would. WHO could also provide the USA with tests. We could do more testing domestically. Not only could we open up more testing now, but we could have opened it up weeks ago. We've chosen not to do this. Yes, it is utterly insane.

I second this. If I have rapport with a supervisor, I'm pleased if they take a sincere interest in my well being, but this needs to be done one on one.

If there is no rapport, I don't trust a supervisor trying to poke at my feelings. Demanding I talk about my feelings as part of my job duties? No thank you. Gross overstepping of boundaries. If I thought it was a temporary dumb idea that would blow over I might wait it out. Otherwise I'm looking for the exit.

I've always assumed it was mostly spam, and the bulk of new users preferring other discussion formats.

I appreciate the correction.

I'm hoping one of the ActivityPub Reddit-like projects takes off.

(yeah, I know, someone else make what I want . . . )

(or, we should have just fixed spam on Usenet . . . )

Yup. Unschooling has some tendency to become an ideology instead of a practical point of view, and people get stuck in it. When all your homeschooling friends are stuck in it too, it becomes hard to get out of it even when it's not working well.

It's worth contemplating. We homeschooled our kids and it was a good choice for our family.

I'm sympathetic to unschooling, but I've also seen it go wrong. If you decide to unschool, don't be dogmatic about it. Feel free to be more or less unschooly if that seems to be needed. Don't get sucked into a community where unschooling "purity" is highly valued.

The ideal of free speech is a Western ideal. It is part of the individualist tradition going back at least to the Enlightenment.

Back when I was in college (early 1990s), respect for free speech was almost universal among educated people. Everyone was at least somewhat aware of the usual arguments for free speech and basically accepted them. Sure, there were people who wanted to ban books or music or video games, but they didn't have much success and they were generally viewed with contempt.

This just isn't true any more. There is a sizable fraction of educated people now who think free speech is bad and dangerous, who want an authority to control what people are allowed to say and to restrict what ideas others are allowed to come in contact with. And they're gaining power and influence.

Yes, you're correct that free speech hasn't always been respected in the West. Sometimes it gets stepped on. What I'm talking about is whether people think it SHOULD be respected. They used to, quite strongly, but less so now. If you favor free speech this should be concerning.

It's very upsetting how quickly the West is abandoning the ideal of free speech.

20 years ago I would not have believed it was possible that we would have a significant fraction of educated people who were opposed to free speech. But here we are, where a book defending the idea of free speech is too dangerous for a publisher to touch.

I noticed this got flagged off the front page for a while. I wonder why. Thank you to the admins for restoring it, at least. (Update: flagged again. Nevermind.)

I can't agree with this at all.

Our family has four people in it. We've spent plenty of time and money on medical care in the past 18 years. Almost everything we've done medically, we could have made use of price transparency, if we had it.

Yes, there are scenarios where the most important thing is to get emergency care as soon as possible. These are the exception--the rare exception--not the rule.

Nice! I hope this gets traction.

You can always make up a story where your project brings intangible but wonderful benefits that no decent person could be against. This is normal.

If you can paint a rosy picture of community, or the happiness of children, or the safety of the vulnerable, it is indeed very hard to argue against. Saying the glowing vision is exaggerated or fabulated just makes you look like a grouch and a jerk.

In my town, the new stadium has a VIP area. Important people are specifically shielded from contact with bricklayers. Just saying.

Using lung cancer fatalities to generalize to everyone in the US is fallacious, because most lung cancer occurs in high risk groups (primarily smokers). If you are not a smoker, looking at total fatalities from lung cancer including smokers is looking at numbers that just do not apply to you. It's bad info.

Really not sure how lung cancer figures into this anyhow. I don't see anything about lung cancer in your NIH link. Nope, not in the full article either.

In any case, the numbers you spitballed about eating bacon are definitely off.