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The reason that European tech sucks is that people in Europe are open to such arguments. If an engineer in the US started talking about SHOULD vs MUST, some PM would just give them that "what the fuck did I just listen to" face, spend the next few minutes gently trying to convince them that the customer experience matters more than the spec, and if they fail, escalate and get the decision they want.

For example, why does Google handle this differently for consumer and enterprise accounts? Well it's Google so the answer could always just be "they are disorganized" but there's a good chance that in both cases, it was the pragmatic choice given the slightly different priorities of these types of customers.

Sure, but if you look at more complex picture of engine development you could just as easily support the proposition that programmers are currently not in any danger (by pointing out that the qualitative differences between IC and steam engines were decisive when it comes to replacing horses, and the correct analogy is that much like a steam engine could never replace a horse, a transformer model can never replace a human).

Not detracting from the article, I think it's a fun way to shake your brain into the entirely appropriate space of "rapid change is possible"!

Idk why the author thinks that C would be a better language than Rust for vibe coding. Intuitively, I would have thought that the more formal constraints the system imposes, the better for vibe coding (since the more powerful static checks make it harder to write incorrect code).

Of course in practice I think the author is actually correct - LLM's struggle more than humans with sophisticated formal constraints and less than humans with remembering to write a bunch of boilerplate. But I think it's a pretty counterintuitive result and I'd love to have seen more discussion of it.

This is a fun piece... but what killed off the horses wasn't steady incremental progress in steam engine efficiency, it was the invention of the internal combustion engine.

Its definitely wrong - I've used these exact checkout systems at places with way longer menus than any stadium has ever or will ever have. Even if that wasn't the case, it would still be way too speculative of premise to be worth seriously discussing, especially when the Occam's Razor "they reduced the menu size because its easier, they have a captive market, and why try to make good food when you can just charge $20 for a beer" explanation is right there in front of you.

The article starts by blaming AI for the reduced food menu, a speculative claim which the author made no attempt to validate and which is almost certainly incorrect. I stopped reading right there.

People in the US prefer Signal over Telegram because Signal was created by people who took security seriously, and Telegram wasn't.

People outside the US prefer telegram because they assume that Signal is probably compromised, or at least highly vulnerable to compromise, by US intelligence - they trust Pavel Durov's history of expropriation and arrest more than they trust some nerds who claim that our product is secure.

A lot of people are in fact defending the game, just look at the replies to my post. I'm a staunch free speech proponent but defending this game is like defending the Nazis' right to march - we should defend the right to create it on principle, but also we should be clear that like the nazis, the creators of this game are despicable, the game has no value, and the world would be better off if the game didn't exist.

I think its obvious that making the game should be legal, and also obvious that platforms like Steam should ban it. Payment processors are a weird middle ground, I'll leave it to smarter people than me to figure out the ethics there.

Are there people who have been avoiding Denver because the rent is too high? I think of Denver as somewhere you go if you're sick of the cost of living on the coast.

Bro it's not a "weird art game about trauma" its a rape simulator. Should payment processors be involved here? Probably not. But the game is definitely a bad thing that should not exist and whoever made it is 100% a bad person.

If you need to format your one-liner, maybe it shouldn't be a one liner?

Anyway whether or not this tool is advisable its definitely cool, nice work!

If you've got less than 100 engineers, you aren't going to hit any of the scalability issues and there's literally no downside to a monorepo

URLs lasting forever was a beautiful dream but in reality, it seems that 99% of URLs don't in fact last forever. Rather than endlessly fighting a losing battle, maybe we should build the technology around the assumption that infrastructure isn't permanent?

If you're using Cursor with Claude it's gonna be pretty much the same thing. Personally I use Claude Code because I hate the Cursor interface but if you like it I don't think you're missing much.

I think any time a 50+ year old problem is solved, it should be considered a Big Deal, regardless of how the solution changes our understanding of the original problem.

Exactly - maybe the most significant long-term goal in computer science history has been achieved and it's barely discussed.

Geoguessing isn't much of a reasoning task, its more about memorizing a bunch of knowledge. Since LLMs contain essentially all knowledge, it's not surprising that they would be good at this.

As far as goalpost-moving goes, it's wild to me that nobody is talking about the turing test these days.

i mean... what would any "mere mortals" use the code for other than to directly compete with Gumroad?

Oh, I don't really care about IP theft and agree that it's funny that openai is complaining. But I don't think its true that deepseek is just doing this because they are too lazy to scrape the internet themselves - its all about the human labor that they would otherwise have to pay for.

This is obviously extremely silly, because that's exactly how OpenAI got all of its training data in the first place - by scraping other peoples' data off the internet.

OpenAI has also invested heavily in human annotation and RLHF. If all DeepSeek wanted was a proxy for scraped training data, they'd probably just scrape it themselves. Using existing RLHF'd models as replacement for expensive humans in the training loop is the real game changer for anyone trying to replicate these results.

The rebuttal is something like "things are complicated, large scale societal trends are always rough descriptions of reality at best and can never be reduced to a single 'cause'"

The timing is the whole point - original website is trying to blame everything bad on dropping the gold standard, which happened in 1971.

People leaving trash outside the dumpster?

Have you ever actually lived in a city?

There are piles of trash and shit? Wow. Why don't you use your freedom and move?

I'm doing just that, moving to another neighborhood on Feb 1.

Your argument is that you can't think of a solution, so you'll just abuse these people.

Like I said elsewhere in this thread: I think the need of the thousands of residents of the neighborhood to have livable streets outweigh whatever concern you might have about the well being of a few destructive individuals.

I live in an urban neighborhood where the housing is all apartments. I'm sure that some of my housed neighbors have trouble handling their trash and do destructive things to their own spaces, but it essentially doesn't affect me at all because its happening inside a closed concrete box. Homeless people doing the same thing, on the other hand, mean that I have to pick through the piles of trash and shit every time I leave my home, which in my opinion is just not reasonable.

I'm not saying that the homeless people are worse people or something, but the massive negative externalities they are causing are a result of them being homeless. Giving them housing would obviously be one solution! I'm not very optimistic about that happening in the USA, though, unless you consider prison to be housing.

Yes, I think that the needs of the other few thousand others who live here are more important than the needs of a few destructive people.

They happen literally every day where I live.

It's the "effective" bit that the article doesn't address whatsoever.

"She told me she knows that her belongings are an “eyesore,” so she tries to keep them out of the way."

If only all homeless people were like this. As someone who lives in an epicenter of this stuff, I don't think that encampments / people living in tents on the street are inherently a problem - its the small number of homeless people who aggressively spread trash and human waste everywhere that are making the neighborhood unlivable for everyone. Probably these people are dealing with mental health crises, maybe they are just dicks, but either way we have to get them off the street and I'm pretty sure the only way for that to happen is through oppressive policies.

Safeway's store layout is definitely Coca Cola's problem. That's why they pay for shelf space and in store displays.

The car dealership isn't going to "go under" since they have an exclusive franchise. Presumably, GM isn't incentivizing them to sell super cruise.

If you aren't writing low level code, why not use a GC language?