willio58

But the corollary, which the article doesn't really acknowledge, is that reforms like credit card interest caps and the Credit Card Competition Act would substantially limit consumer access to credit.

That's a good point, and of course there are downstream affects of this, but I wonder if that's a bad thing. We're not talking about reduction in ability to access say mortgage debt or something of that nature, we're talking credit card debt. Making it possible for a person to be in $10k, $20k, $40k+ in extremely high interest credit card debt doesn't seem like a positive for our economy overall to me. It really just masks the root of the problem, which is that people are working paycheck to paycheck and can't afford the occasional emergency.

Author here! I promise I didn't use Claude for any of this. I will admit I'm working on developing a "voice" in my writing, so maybe that's what you're sensing. Thanks for the read anyway.

Is there an example in your eyes that proves this wrong?

It pales compared to the $3,000 a year in interest towards the national debt I'm responsible for.

Thinking of country-scale finances in the same way you think about personal finance is wrong in many ways. Take debt for example. As an individual, it's arguably best not to have debt at all. As a country, sovereign debt is the foundation of the world's money supply and fuels continuous economic growth.

Also, though the U.S. has $31 Trillion dollars of debt, $22 Trillion of that belongs to U.S. domestic traders.

If we were to cut our debt down to zero, we'd cripple ourselves with taxes and stifle growth. We'd have zero debt but we'd be sent into a massive economic depression, and that would likely ripple out across the planet.

And finally, they did not have to raise Game Pass prices to improve the profit margins. Of course, consumers pulled out.

Myself and 2 of my friends stopped our subscriptions the day that happened and never went back. I know it’s anecdotal but I’m happy to see others did the same.

And just like that you’ve done more due diligence than the VCs who just threw money at this.

CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t and if you’re lucky with timing things might just fall into place.

I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. In most cases it’s the labor class propping the company up, and in some cases the workers are doing so against the wishes of the CEO. Not that executives want to ruin the company, they’re just incompetent and therefore make terrible decisions constantly.

It’s already irreversible, but it’s just disappointing to see how the U.S. administration has chosen to actively fight against it, while other countries like China are embracing reality.

It’s actually funny if you don’t think about it too hard. The U.S. president is trying to make us more reliant on fossil fuels, while starting a war in Iran that’s led to the global fossil fuel market to be negatively impacted, forcing most Americans to pay more for fossil fuels. Who could have seen that coming? We’re doing great!

I hate ads to the point I either pay or use other means to avoid ads in basically everything I use

- NPR (I pay, happy to support)

- Podcasts (I skip ads, using a client that supports that)

- Movies/TV/Music (I self-host, thank you open source community!)

- Twitch (I pay 1 creator 6$/mo and must watch 40+ hours per month)

I don’t have mainline social media downloaded on my phone, I sometimes visit reddit.com and see the ads that aren’t blocked by ad block but I find myself visiting less often recently anyway.

All of this to say, pay a bit and put in some work and you can avoid 95% of ads

Admittedly, I’ve gone through waves of feeling scared for the future of software engineering. I manage many people so I care about them and their futures. But the more I use AI in writing software, not just vibe coding, the more I align with this perspective. And the way I see it, when AGI does come it’s going to affect a whole lot more than the software engineering job market. That’s global societal-level impact type stuff. We’d have to reckon with if work (meaning a 9 to 5) is truly a requirement to thrive in life. Spoiler, it isn’t.

Thanks for the answer! I do see both sides

Using existing CLI directly: No context wasted on tool definitions

Can someone explain this to me? I've seen claude code try to run a not-well-known package and it basically shot in the dark a command, noticed that failed, then ran the help command for the cli tool to get a list of commands and what they do.

How is that different than passing the tools with an MCP? Like how are we saving context?

Yeah give me the median

I love accessibility, I just want to preface what I’m about to say with that.

I found this site hard to read. I’m reading on my phone btw.

The text is too big for me and the line height (space between lines really) isn’t right, it’s too spaced out. Can I read it? Absolutely, I just can’t read it as fast as I normally would. It’s like when my mom hands me her phone and the text is so large I can barely operate it for a while, then I eventually get used to it to a certain extent.

What’s funny is this itself is an accessibility issue in the opposite direction of most accessibility issues. Just goes to show users should really be able to have their own text preferences reflected on the web.

fwiw I got one of the first products listed on amazon when you search mycorrhizal fungi and I'm seeing the same effects stated by the grandparent comment

Interesting, their price bump announcement actually just went and made me upgrade to lifetime (at $250 while I could) instead of write them off completely.

Netflix will never allow you to pay a one time fee for life, neither will any other streaming service on the planet.

Meanwhile, plex is a company that has employees. If I like plex, use it heavily, and want to support them I can do so with money. There are alternatives that are completely free, but I don’t like them as much and the minimal cost for plex is totally worth the value for me.

To each their own!

Hop on plex amp. Take control of your music.

I realize that sounds like an Ad but I’ve been using it for a few months and I feel like I’ve rediscovered my joy for music again.

I mean.. did he turn anti-Elon or did society turn anti-Elon when Elon started doing insane shit? Reminder: Elon bribed his way into leading a self-formed and now essentially defunct government organization to "save costs" but failed to do so in any meaningful way. He did that like a year ago. Meanwhile, the dude made BILLIONS off of government tax breaks, and still leaches off the government with his other companies.

Frank being against Elon speaks less about Frank and more about Elon in my eyes.

The real danger was not allowing smoking because if you ban smoking, people will smoke no matter if it's banned.

This same concept is why full prohibition never works. People who want to do something will find a way and it often comes at the cost of being more harmful to society than if they were allowed to do it in a controlled environment.

Yep, many older people right now don’t have a smart phone and never will.

As long as some younger people stay that course we should be fine. Hopefully we’ll see an increase of dumb phone adoption in a growing cohort younger adults. But the FUD spread in threads like this actually spreads misinformation and makes that less likely to happen

Perhaps rather it is management that is wiping out those jobs

As a manager I’d direct you to the actual decision makers for things like this, company leadership teams. They’d blame the market, yet most of the big tech companies laying off or freezing hiring are doing quite well financially so it makes you wonder.

You must be able to do your job if your AI tooling disappears

While I agree with the sentiment I fear this won’t last long. I already find myself, when Claude goes down for 15 minutes due to whatever, kind of throwing my hands up and taking a walk assuming it’ll be up by the time I get back. Usually it is.

If it went away for good I’d be able to code, but would I want to? I’d be kind of bummed in a way. Which is odd because I used to tout myself as someone who like programming but I think what I’ve discovered is I like building.

The same for any FAANG, money.

AMP

My god AMP was such an annoying thing ~4-5 years ago when I was working in a marketing-forward web dev shop.

"Google really likes when you pipe your words into their shitty UI because it saves some time for the user"

We were all like, cool so on one hand we're being given complex designs for sites to differentiate them, and on the other hand we're bowing to a megacorp who actually wants to skip the whole web design part entirely and pipe our content through their pre-defined UI.

So glad it died. Should have known it would die in a matter of a couple of years with that being the track record for Google in general.

In some ways it’s sad to see, but I’d be lying to say I didn’t have a little happiness seeing the actions of politicians in the U.S. catch up with them.

It’s like there was this belief, we are the most powerful country in the world and we can do whatever we want. Meanwhile we see countries very much question that as we flounder in the Middle East for the umpteenth time in a few decades. We see countries start to get away from the dollar, we see countries call out our military leaders for poor planning.

It’s not like the American public deserve this, but America itself might.

What you are shipping is not the same as what Coinbase is shipping. These are vastly different things. Making a shiny app with AI is great, I'm doing it as I type this. But I am under no delusion that what I make can sustain a multi-million dollar or even billion dollar business in the case of Coinbase. That's plain silly.

At that number I’d argue what you’re doing is not management. It’s basically “you’re the guy who fires people in this group”. For some companies, that’s fine, but those people will essentially never have your ear, and you’ll only have theirs in group settings.

Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports.

As someone who did have 15 direct reports for a while, it’s a joke.

You basically are their manager in name only. Your time is so split you can’t give any one direct reports the attention they deserve. Quarterly and annual reviews are a farce because you genuinely don’t really know how people are doing except the signals you can receive when you’re not in a meeting with one of your 15 reports.

Just goes to show how far up their own asses some CEOs are. Meanwhile real people just want a boss who cares. Hope Brian feels happier with an extra billion dollars or whatever this year!

Yep I take this as a signal to remove the remaining amount of crypto I had on coinbase out. Fun thing for tonight!

It would be functionally the same as what you described if the parent company took on the debt, but that’s not how they do it. They make the purchased entity take on the debt. Hence why you often see mass layoffs in the company that was acquired soon after the deed was done. The company has so much debt it can barely function and the easiest way to pay some back is redirecting salaries at it.

Then once you realize why private equity firms do this, how their leaders have extreme monetary incentives to squeeze value out of companies in ways not limited to this, you realize why it’s insane how we have basically zero regulation on it.