silverlake

I bought a fully renovated house as my first house. Unfortunately the builder was a moron. I spent 10 years with near constant repairs. Every house on my block has the same story: different builders, same shoddy quality. I was lucky to find a buyer that paid the asking price. I’m now happily renting again. I’ve always had great luck with rentals fixing things immediately.

I have Codex and Gemini critique the plan and generate their plans. Then I have Claude review the other plans and add their good ideas. It frequently improves the plan. I then do my careful review.

It’s the same as buying a house. I want to buy a house for $1.2m. I put down $200k and borrow $1m. The bank determines the value of the house. My equity absorbs a 20% drop in prices, so the bank is fairly protected. Businesses are different because they really can go to $0. Banks will need more collateral and/or make many different types of loans to dilute the risk.

Yep, once you accept “might makes right” the laws in a democracy become polite suggestions. Oh, your town is in the way of hydropower? Too bad the gov’t has more guns than you. That’s how you get the Three Gorges Dam in China. Nevertheless, the Trump Mafia is demonstrating how paper thin democracy and rule of law really is in the US.

The true cost of labor is paid for by taxes. The bottom 50% in the US pay little to negative taxes due to government benefits. Most taxes are paid by the rich. Therefore, the true cost of labor is paid for by the rich, rather than by consumers in the form of higher prices.

Since 2014 most bits of central London have seen 10-30% increase, which is below inflation and far, far below stock returns. This should persuade my wife not to buy here. Thanks!

This resonates with me. I have a hobby where I transform classic books into hand-written papyrus as the author intended. There is something almost meditative in unspooling a 10kg scroll where the sometimes illegible ink allows me to wonder what that sentence even was.

I don’t know. But at least you’ve identified the real problem: lazy people generating trash code. AI isn’t bad, people are.

Enough that stacked PRs are a thing. At my job people sometimes build large features on a branch for 6 months. Then it’s a massive PR and no one can review it.

Hi, AI apologist here. This scenario is a problem with or without AI. You can’t drop a 13k line PR you don’t understand without prior discussion. There are many ways to use AI. Your scenario (keynote speech) is a bad way to use it. Instead, a PR where you understand every line, whether you or an AI wrote it, should be fine. It would be indistinguishable from human generated code.

AI is a tool like any other. I hire a carpenter who knows how to build furniture. Whether he uses a Japanese pullsaw or a CNC machine is irrelevant to me.

I used ET but it requires a server process also. Some machines are too locked down to allow this. Wish there was a way to kick start the server on demand.

It’s a glib analogy, but the goal remains the same. Today’s training sets are immense. Is there an architecture that can learn something with tiny training sets?

I’m actually working on just this. What’s the smallest training data set required to learn tic-tac-toe? A 5yo doesn’t need much training to learn a new game, but a transformer needs millions of samples.

Also, most of them are shockingly incompetent. It took years to assemble a list of quality service providers. I pay a little more but stuff works now.

There is a mountain of code that needs to be written that can’t be due to costs. A project that needs 100 developers may be prohibitively expensive. But 10 10x developers would be within budget. Think health care, manufacturing, government, finance, etc.

I tried to get Gemini CLI to update itself using the MCP settings for Claude. It went off the rails. I then fed it the link you provided and it correctly updates it's settings file. You might mention the settings.json file in the README.

I’ve been talking to wealth management firms and am truly underwhelmed. AFAICT, they charge 0.5%-1.35% for therapy and the chance to put you in high fee products. Roboadvisors are a brilliant product for most people. In fact, a simple Boglehead portfolio is all you need. Most people have simple and similar risk profiles.

The feature I think would be useful is how to manage taxes. Roth conversions, selling the right lot, qualified dividends, tax loss harvesting, etc. A related feature would be generating income while minimizing taxes, i.e. Schwab’s Intelligent Income.

Here’s the real rebuttal to my overconfidence in LLMs. Thanks for the link!

No one is an expert on all the things. I use libraries and tools to take care of things that are less important. I use my brain for things that are important. LLMs are another tool, more flexible and capable than any other. So yes, grandpa goes to Best Buy because he’s running his legal practice and doesn’t need to be an expert on computers.

You’re clinging to an old model of work. Today an LLM converted my docker compose infrastructure to Kubernetes, using operators and helm charts as needed. It did in 10 minutes what would take me several days to learn and cobble together a bad solution. I review every small update and correct it when needed. It is so much more productive. I’m driving a tractor while you are pulling an ox cart.

Have you guys at Cline considered using LLMs to create summaries of files and complex functions? Rather than read a 500 line function, feed it a short comment on what the function is doing. I'd like to use a local LLM to create summaries at every level: function, file, directory. Then let the LLM use that to find the right code to read. This is basically how I navigate a large code base.

No offense, but that video is brutally boring. Even at 1.5x speed I couldn’t get past 10 min. You should transcribe the audio and use an LLM to write a punchy sales pitch.

If you look at the full table of NAEP scores, you see the differences are not that much. 8th grade reading is 245(WV)-266(MA). That's 20 point spread, where NAEP goes to 500 pts. A 4% difference between the best and worst state is insignificant. They all suck because they are at 50% of the scale.

You’re getting downvoted because you’re making a few mistakes. 1) Energy Star is not a mandate, it’s a certificate if you want it. 25% of dishwashers are not ES at Home Depot. 2) Dishwashers are slow for a few reasons, a big one is gov’t stopped use of strong detergents. The new one needs time to dissolve foods. 3) “why solve X when Y is still a problem” is always a weak argument. 4) “markets will solve it” doesn’t always work because the individual cost of an energy guzzling appliance is a few extra dollars, but the collective cost is high.

The difference between appliances in 1970 vs now is immense. My dishwasher is so quiet we double check if it’s on. It uses less water than handwashing. Even the Chamber of Commerce (big business lobby) asked them to keep Energy Star.

IIRC the effect size at 0.15 was narrowly for pre-teen girls on social media. Every other age, and all boys, were below 0.1 when looking at total screen time (i.e. games, youtube). Parents should check up on young girls, but most kids will be fine.

China earns relatively little per iPhone/Mac. The complex components come from other countries like Taiwan, Korea and Japan. Apple earns a hefty profit for marketing savvy, iCloud services, and perhaps financing. China makes a pittance for screwing all the parts together. Where would you prefer to be in this product pipeline?

I think BF16 and FP16 are 1979 TFPOPs, but FP8 is 2x faster at 3958 TFLOPs. So only 10% efficiency, down from 20%. That’s not good.

Why is that a priority? I would think maintaining the reputation of a StateU diplomas would be more important for the school and graduates.

Long ago CUNY had a low admission bar and a high graduation bar. This meant, of course, that many students dropped out. In your case, students choose to pay tuition and not do the work. What is the external pressure on you or the dean or university to make things easier for these people? I think there should be a reverse feeder school idea: enroll in a university where standards are high, if you do poorly then transfer to a community college. That way a degree from that university is a signal for quality.

There’s a great podcast that delves into the Big Dig. It was an exceedingly difficult giant construction project. The original cost estimate was a made up number for political expediency. They lied knowing once they dug a big hole the sunk-cost fallacy would pull them over the finish line.