Duly Noted

ai and hucksters

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 21:39:09 +0000

The market’s bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: “Look, you fire nine out of 10 of your radiologists, saving $20m a year. You give us $10m a year, and you net $10m a year, and the remaining radiologists’ job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed – and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it’s catastrophically wrong.

KISS

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 21:35:40 +0000

complexity bad no silver club fix all software problems no matter what agile shaman say (danger!)

_{Quote Citation: https://grugbrain.dev, “The Grug Brained Developer”, 2026-feb-15, https://grugbrain.dev/}

more people using AI to make commits

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 21:33:57 +0000

4% of GitHub public commits are being authored by Claude Code right now. At the current trajectory, we believe that Claude Code will be 20%+ of all daily commits by the end of 2026. While you blinked, AI consumed all of software development.

2026 is definitely Claude’s year.

_{Quote Citation: DOUG O’LAUGHLIN, JEREMIE ELIAHOU ONTIVEROS, JORDAN NANOS, AND 2 OTHERS, “Claude Code is the Inflection Point”, FEB 05, 2026, https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/claude-code-is-the-inflection-point}

buying a house is expensive

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 20:37:47 +0000

Home values have risen much faster than the incomes of the people living in them. From 2000 to 2024, median per-capita income has grown steadily but modestly, at around 155% in nominal terms. Over the same period, median home prices—when measured carefully and adjusted for local composition—have increased at a much faster pace, at around 207% in nominal terms. … For first-time homebuyers, the bar for homeownership is now substantially higher, and this is why the average age to purchase a first house has increased around 10 years. For existing owners, housing has become an increasingly central store of wealth. Any serious discussion of housing policy, local land-use reform, or the distributional effects of monetary and credit policy should consider this basic fact: In much of the United States, the typical home has simply outrun the typical paycheck.

working products trumps working code I guess

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 20:35:33 +0000

The result that kept staring back at me: the startups with the most technical debt and the highest development velocity had the best funding outcomes. Period. A 60.6% success rate — higher than the “sustainable growth” companies doing everything by the book (57.5%). And the companies with the cleanest code? They had the lowest funding success rate in the entire dataset at 44.4%.

_{Quote Citation: MAX HEICHLING, “I Analyzed 70 Startups’ Codebases — The Ones With More Technical Debt Raised More Money | ByteVagabond – Digital Tinkering & Real-World Adventures”, 10 Feb, 2026, https://bytevagabond.com/post/technical-debt-startup-funding/}

the history of the annoying pop-up

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 20:27:18 +0000

Ask anyone who works on onboarding popups, feature tours, lifecycle messaging, or in-app announcements how they feel when an app interrupts them mid-flow to announce something they didn’t ask for. The answer is almost always the same. They hate it! Or at least they’re annoyed.

Loved this article. I detest multiple pop ups in a row.

_{Quote Citation: Mike Swanson, “Backseat Software – Mike Swanson’s Blog”, January 18, 2026, https://blog.mikeswanson.com/backseat-software/}

wsj discovers claude

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 20:24:35 +0000

Ryan Knutson: So, if you were to give it a percentage of just going from cloud, was it 100% done, 90% done? How would you give it a grade?

Brian Whitten: I’d say 80%. It was pretty close.

_{Quote Citation: Ryan Knutson, “Vibe Coding Could Change Everything - The Journal. - WSJ Podcasts”, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2026, https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/vibe-coding-could-change-everything/a770b229-8f91-472e-ab05-70566cb09ee2}

gas town - a concept car of unlimited potential

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 20:13:23 +0000

Gas Town is also expensive as hell. You won’t like Gas Town if you ever have to think, even for a moment, about where money comes from.

_{Quote Citation: https://steve-yegge.medium.com, “Welcome to Gas Town. Happy New Year, and Welcome to Gas… | by Steve Yegge | Jan, 2026 | Medium”, 2026-01-14, https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04}

complex systems reflect organisms and dependencies, rarely islands

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 20:09:57 +0000

Evolution is the way to avoid getting bogged down in engineering, but engineering is the way to ensure that the thing you build really does what it is supposed to do. Engineering is slow, but spinning way out of control is a heck of a lot slower. Evolution is obviously more dynamic, but it is also more chaotic, and you have to continually accept that you’ve gone down a bad path and need to backtrack. That is hard to admit sometimes. For most systems, there are parts that really need to be engineered, and parts that can just be allowed to evolve. The more random the evolutionary path, the more stuff you need to throw away and redo. Wobbling is always expensive. Nature gets away with this by having millions of species, but we really only have one development project, so it isn’t particularly convenient.

pattern matching will lead you astray

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:55:50 +0000

like I pattern matched this to something tha needs a TOC or broken into multiple pieces so I didn’t read it..

_{Quote Citation: BJØRN FLINDT TEMTE, “The Almonds in the Tower: Why Your Lizard Brain Usurped Your Writing Ethics”, JAN 09, 2026, https://srodingr.substack.com/p/the-almonds-in-the-tower-why-your}

1980s strikes again

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:49:45 +0000

The shift to capital from labor has actually been under way for more than 40 years. Labor received 58% of the total proceeds of economic output, as measured by gross domestic income (conceptually similar to GDP), in 1980. By the third quarter of last year that had plummeted to 51.4%. Profits’ share, meanwhile, rose from 7% to 11.7%.

_{Quote Citation: Greg Ip, “The Big Money in Today’s Economy Is Going to Capital, Not Labor - WSJ”, Feb. 9, 2026 at 7:06 pm ET, https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/capital-labor-wealth-economy-2fcf6c2f}

To Serve Mankind - probably

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:48:52 +0000

What is actually happening is far less dramatic and far more unsettling. There are no machines dragging our minds away from us. No system is coercing us into obedience. No apocalypse is required, no war, no conquest. Instead, we are steadily handing over our thinking because it is easier to let something else do it for us. The trade is simple: less effort, less friction, less discomfort. And most people are taking it.

I always wonder how hard it is to get a job back - not just how many were lost

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:46:26 +0000

The rate of people losing or leaving their jobs has fallen significantly below its average over the past 11 months of available data.

_{Quote Citation: st louis fed, “Flash Report: U.S. Unemployment Flows in January”, February 11, 2026, https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2026/feb/flash-report-january-jobless-data-may-signal-improving-labor-market}

one might argue that persistent layoffs encourage self-oriented preservation

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:35:55 +0000

But the tech industry’s halo has dimmed a lot since then. Founders, and their most loyal lieutenants, are trading idealism for pragmatism. AI is moving so fast, and the people developing it are trying to move along with it. There is little time to linger or build reputations slowly before the next opportunity arrives. For now, this generation of AI talent can name its price. The question is: at what cost?

whitewashing AI

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:34:31 +0000

“A lot of companies are making a big mistake because their CEO, who isn’t very deep into the weeds of AI, is saying, ‘Well, let’s go ahead and lay off 20 to 30% of our employees and we will backfill them with AI,’” Gownder said. “If you do not have a mature, deployed-AI application ready to do the job … it could take you 18 to 24 months to replace that person with AI – if it even works.”

personal history of computing

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:32:10 +0000

One of them remarked on how well I was doing in the contest. The other replied, ‘Of course he is doing well. He has more than ten years of experience in C.’ At that moment, I realised that no matter how well I solved those puzzles, the result would naturally be credited to experience. In my younger days, when I solved tricky problems like these, people would sometimes call me smart. Now people simply saw it as a consequence of my experience.

would love to see a new edition of Clean Code published

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:28:40 +0000

It was the first time in weeks, maybe months, that I’d felt something that used to be common in my day-to-day: excitement about the lines of code in front of me. I used to write (approximations of) Good Code most days. Somewhere along the way, everything changed. Nowadays I don’t even write the first version of most of the code I commit. I’m definitely far more productive with an agent at my side. They’re not at all horrible at this coding stuff, just not truly great at it. At the end of the day, the code they spit out is… acceptable. It gets the job done, it passes my litmus tests, but it certainly isn’t Good Code.

agents and VMs for the future of programming

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:25:51 +0000

Along the way I have developed a programming philosophy I now apply to everything: the best software for an agent is whatever is best for a programmer. The practical nature of writing software for customers has traditionally pushed us away from that philosophy. Product Managers have long had to find gentle ways to tell engineers: you are not the customer. Well, that has all been turned on its head. Every customer has an agent that will write code against your product for them. Build what programmers love and everyone will follow.

taste matters

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:23:18 +0000

You can delegate the coding, and most of the reviewing, and most of the testing. But you (or other human stakeholders) are still the people holding the buck on what “good” means.

_{Quote Citation: EDMUND PRINGLE, “Agentic Coding and the Problem of Oracles”, FEB 06, 2026, https://epkconsulting.substack.com/p/agentic-coding-and-the-problem-of}

red queen effect and programming

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:21:48 +0000

The democratization vision, however, did partially come true. COBOL became the most widely used language in the world, but not for use by the general masses. Businessmen still needed trained programmers. Reading and writing code proved to be very different skills. As Turing Award winner Fred Brooks phrases it, simpler programming languages reduce the accidental complexity of a task, but the essential complexity remains.

_{Quote Citation: Ben Eagan, “The Abstraction Rises - The Cyber Omelette”, February 6, 2026, https://cyber-omelette.com/posts/the-abstraction-rises.html}

calm work trumps frantic work

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:17:48 +0000

I wrote this to encourage people to think of more innovative ways to incorporate AI into people’s workflows besides just building yet another chatbot. I strongly believe that chat is the least interesting interface to LLMs and AI-assisted software development is no exception to this.

_{Quote Citation: haskellforall, “Haskell for all: Beyond agentic coding”, Saturday, February 7, 2026, https://haskellforall.com/2026/02/beyond-agentic-coding}

ai is changing how we build software

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 17:09:01 +0000

Our entire software development lifecycle (Agile, Scrum, Jira, etc.) was built around the constraint: Writing code is slow and expensive. Because implementation was slow, we built processes to “measure twice, cut once.” We groom backlogs and debate requirements because we can’t afford to waste engineering cycles.

_{Quote Citation: KEVIN BENTLEY, “The Shadow Codebase Problem - by Kevin Bentley”, JAN 03, 2026, https://shadowcodebase.substack.com/p/the-shadow-codebase-problem}

being in charge comes with responsibility to deliver

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 17:06:44 +0000

Congratulations …. your days of whining are over. In this room, we deliver success, we don’t whine.

Great speech noted by MSFT

_{Quote Citation: Jeffrey Snover, “Welcome to the Room | Jeffrey Snover’s blog”, February 1, 2026, https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/02/01/welcome-to-the-room/}

ai is novel even if it ruins the economy

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 17:03:35 +0000

Even though the AI-economy might collapse, and perhaps take the rest of the economy with it, this does not invalidate that there are AI things that are truly astounding, and will remain so. They’ll likely get better, even.

_{Quote Citation: bert hubert, “The AI-collapse pre-mortem - Bert Hubert’s writings”, Posted on Oct 16 2025, https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/an-ai-premortem/}

em and team roles changing

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 17:00:58 +0000

The ideal team size now appears to be 2-3 engineers per project. Even with a larger team, you can divide it into smaller groups of 2 engineers for a set period and observe how quickly they progress. … But managers who don’t code will be rare: With smaller teams, their responsibility with the People pillar decreases, freeing up time for the “Programming” pillar.

_{Quote Citation: JAMPA UCHOA, “The rise of one-pizza engineering teams - by Jampa Uchoa”, JAN 30, 2026, https://www.jampa.dev/p/the-rise-of-one-pizza-engineering}

scala in its 5 year rut like ruby and python before it

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:57:31 +0000

Another problem with the upgrade is that many popular Scala libraries started to support the third version very late or have not started it at all yet. So even if you managed to upgrade your application, you still have to use dependencies from the previous major version of the language, with all the risks of compatibility.

Scala running into many of the same problems as ruby and python on their major breaking change updates.

consumption is more than wages

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:56:23 +0000

This gives a very clear picture. From 2013 to just before the pandemic, the ratio of labor compensation (wages plus benefits) to consumption was mostly between 75 and 76 percent. The pandemic led to a big jump in the ratio due to a fall in wages, associated with the jump in unemployment when the economy shut down, and the big stimulus checks the government sent out in 2020 and 2021.

the race to 100% ai generated code

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:53:50 +0000

Still, outside the leading AI labs, the figures for AI-generated code reported by many software companies is significantly lower. For instance, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in April 2025 that AI was generating about 30% of code at the software giant. Salesforce has given out a similar figure. A study published in the journal Science earlier this month looked at GitHub Python functions and found that about 29% in the U.S. are now AI-written, with lower percentages in other geographies.

macro - positive. individual maybe not so much

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:48:21 +0000

And to be fair to Huang, it’s a good point, with a lot of apocalyptic-sounding warnings of AI risks tending to distract from its more mundane issues. Nonetheless, Huang has made plenty more outlandish AI claims himself, such as reportedly telling his employees that they’re “insane” if they don’t use AI to do everything — nevermind his out-of-touch proclamation that AI won’t take your job, but will instead make you work even harder.

era of fast growth and promotions seems over for now

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:46:37 +0000

Many tech companies are actively flattening their org charts, and hollowing out the ranks of middle managers, leaving fewer management opportunities than before.

In today’s market, career progression has largely stalled. The clear and rapid advancement paths that existed when companies were growing fast have diminished significantly as many organizations slow hiring and tighten budgets.

_{Quote Citation: Chantal Kapani, “Who wants to be an engineering manager anyway? - LeadDev”, January 29, 2026, https://leaddev.com/management/why-would-anyone-be-an-engineering-manager-in-2026}

the realist position on AI - more jobs less route work

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:44:34 +0000

One reason white-collar work thrived in earlier digital eras is that computers rarely replaced entire jobs in one go. They automated routine and repetitive tasks—those that could be codified into explicit rules and executed by machines. When a job was all routine and repetition, it could disappear (as happened with typists). But most professional roles are bundles of tasks, only some of which could be automated. The result was not replacement but upgrading: computers raised productivity and let human effort be directed towards higher-value activities like analysis and judgment. Air-traffic controllers illustrate the pattern: software helped process flight data, humans retained authority over high-stakes decisions, wages rose.

ai is the future dark-it anti-pattern

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:40:53 +0000

People don’t buy software, they hire a service.

_{Quote Citation: swizec.com, “The future of software engineering is SRE | Swizec Teller”, noted 2026-feb-15, https://swizec.com/blog/the-future-of-software-engineering-is-sre/}

nothing like peer review

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:35:14 +0000

After the high of the first success, talk to someone else, show what you made and how you made it. Nothing breaks the illusion quite like peer feedback. LLMs will make you feel good while making you worst at your job.

Would agree. Nothing makes you feel stupider than going from AI cheerleading to direct peer feedback

_{Quote Citation: Tres Bien Tech, “…and now I’m recovering | Très Bien Tech”, January 26, 2026, https://tresbien.tech/blog/and-now-im-recovering/}

if it ain't broke don't fix it?

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:33:14 +0000

It’s been decades since Costco started using IBM computers, and they’ve never had a problem with them, so why switch?

_{Quote Citation: Asad Kashif, “Why Costco Still Relies On IBM Computers From The ’80s”, Jan. 24, 2026 12:47 pm EST, https://www.bgr.com/2079471/why-costco-still-use-80s-ibm-computers/}

equity and cap table transparency should go hand in hand

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:30:12 +0000

There is common advice among experienced tech workers that if a company is not public, you should value its equity compensation at $0.

_{Quote Citation: SHAMMAH CHANCELLOR, “Why many engineers value startup equity at $0”, JAN 27, 2026, https://shablag.substack.com/p/why-smart-engineers-value-startup}

ai predictions (2025)

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:26:48 +0000

In 2025, some people will try to convince you GenAI is the solution to all humanity’s problems, while others will try to convince you it’s the end of humanity. In the middle of all this, others will try to research and quantify its impacts and keep the dialogue sober and rational. However, most public discourse will ignore them because their views are too dull.

lol. bet.

_{Quote Citation: Sergio Visinoni, “My predictions for 2025! - by Sergio Visinoni”, 2026-01-07, https://makemeacto.substack.com/p/my-predictions-for-2025}

cognitive biases for Ems

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:21:01 +0000

Especially when faced with a complex task like performance review. How are we supposed to summarize a full year of a person’s work with clear examples?

_{Quote Citation: SURESH CHOUDHARY, “7 Cognitive Biases of Engineering Managers”, FEB 05, 2026, https://emdiary.substack.com/p/7-cognitive-biases-of-ems}

agi is now 2030+

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:19:23 +0000

So I’m here to bet Scott $5,000 that AI will not meaningfully disrupt the economy in the next three years, winner to be certified and paid out on February 14th, 2029, under the specific victory conditions I list below.

_{Quote Citation: FREDDIE DEBOER, “I’m Offering Scott Alexander a Wager About AI’s Effects Over the Next Three Years”, FEB 13, 2026, https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/im-offering-scott-alexander-a-wager}

ben Affleck on AI

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 04:12:48 +0000

really great video

_{Quote Citation: X (formerly Twitter), “Forrest on X: “Honestly, Ben Affleck actually knowing AI and the landscape caught me off guard, but as a writer, makes sense. Great takes across the board. https://t.co/IcPe0n9302" / X”, 2026-01-17, https://x.com/ForrestPKnight/status/2012561898097594545}

its labor arbitration- not ai

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 04:12:21 +0000

He pointed to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showing how between 1947 to 1973 — before the advent of PCS — productivity improved by 2.7 percent annually, but only 2.1 percent between 1990 and 2001, once PCs had hit the mainstream. … “Outsourcing is a very popular one,” he told The Register. “They’re firing people because of AI, and then three weeks later they hire a team in India because the labor is so much cheaper.”

the long tail of entertainment

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 04:10:50 +0000

The 1980s through the 2000s were the peak of the monoculture. Hollywood learned from “Jaws” and “Star Wars” that big-budget movies released in virtually every theater in the country at the same time could produce outsize returns. “Back to the Future,” “Batman,” “Jurassic Park” and the Harry Potter and Marvel series all followed. It was the era of tentpole blockbusters. To understand how things have changed, consider the case of anime, the Japanese animation style that used to live in the remotest corners of video stores and is now one of the hottest businesses in Hollywood. There may not be a lot of anime fans, but they’re a passionate group who turn out to theaters for hits like “Demon Slayer” and all subscribe to Sony’s streaming service Crunchyroll, which caters specifically to them.

goodwill is on the balance sheet

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 23:06:40 +0000

In large companies, speaking up about what you see as a “bad project” is a good thing. But only in moderation. Sometimes the mark of seniority is realizing that arguing with people who won’t listen isn’t worth it; it’s better to save your counsel. … It’s important to point out that for much of the lifecycle of a project, whether it’s “bad” is highly subjective. Software engineering is largely a game of tradeoffs and making decisions which are not perfect but the best possible with the information available. There often can be disagreements on whether correct choices are made and it only becomes obvious much later on, potentially years after a project has shipped.

fun stance on markup

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 23:02:01 +0000

I never knew one could have such opinions as “The Only Two Markup Languages”

_{Quote Citation: gingerBill, “The Only Two Markup Languages - gingerBill”, 2026-01-19, https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2026/01/19/two-families-of-markup-languages/}

laser focus beats scattered efforts every time

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:59:15 +0000

Most engineers are not tired because they write too much code. They are tired because they fight too much friction. We often treat productivity as the ability to do more things, doing them faster. In software engineering, this definition is wrong. True productivity is about solving hard problems effectively.

_{Quote Citation: Fran Soto, “I identified the 7 deadly sins of engineering productivity so you don’t have to”, JAN 18, 2026, https://strategizeyourcareer.com/p/the-7-deadly-sins-of-software-engineers-productivity}

a look at wastes in creating software

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:57:05 +0000

As Mary Poppendieck showed us, software engineering can’t be viewed merely as a process of writing software, but as a process of removing the obstacles in the way of software creation.

Great review of what areas to focus on when removing waste from a system.

_{Quote Citation: DR MILAN MILANOVIĆ, “Software Development Waste - by Dr Milan Milanović”, JAN 15, 2026, https://newsletter.techworld-with-milan.com/p/software-development-waste}

you need jrs I the market to get future seniors

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:53:24 +0000

Just as software finished eating the world, zero interest rates ended. Companies optimized for cash and slowed hiring. The market didn’t shrink, but stopped growing at the breakneck pace we all expected.

The result: a glut of entry level talent groomed for jobs that never materialized.

This would explain a more competitive entry level market. But it doesn’t explain the entry-level market shrinking, despite overall industry growth.

The argument is solid. Recent trends reflect oversupply more than a convenient scapegoat (ai)

devops is the next hot role

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:50:24 +0000

Claude built my app in 20 minutes. I’ve spent 3 weeks trying to deploy it.

_{Quote Citation: Real-Ad2591, “Claude built my app in 20 minutes. I’ve spent 3 weeks trying to deploy it. : r/ClaudeAI”, 2026-01-06, https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1qdkjtq/claude_built_my_app_in_20_minutes_ive_spent_3/}

hard time for CS graduates

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:47:45 +0000

“Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs” with the most prominent tech companies, Stanford bioengineering professor Jan Liphardt told the LA Times. “I think that’s crazy.” One Stanford student, who spoke to the paper anonymously, said that “there’s definitely a very dreary mood on campus.”

I mean I think the supply of new graduates has outstripped demand.. hearing mechanical engineering is now the all the rage.

ai has changed programming - don't get left behind

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:45:17 +0000

It is simply impossible not to see the reality of what is happening. Writing code is no longer needed for the most part. It is now a lot more interesting to understand what to do, and how to do it (and, about this second part, LLMs are great partners, too). It does not matter if AI companies will not be able to get their money back and the stock market will crash. All that is irrelevant, in the long run. It does not matter if this or the other CEO of some unicorn is telling you something that is off putting, or absurd. Programming changed forever, anyway.

a review of MCPs fad state

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:42:26 +0000

MCP’s popularity will be relatively short-lived. The cost benefit does not add up, and there are readily available alternatives. The introduction of Claude Skills and OpenAI’s quick adoption signal that even model providers agree.

I’m in this boat. it seems using AI to generate well defined integrations is better than MCP..

_{Quote Citation: Tom Bedor, “MCP is a fad | Tom Bedor’s Blog”, December 12, 2025, https://tombedor.dev/mcp-is-a-fad/}

better prompts = better response

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:37:07 +0000

Use the RIPE framework (Role, Info, Process, Expected output) to mirror how AI was trained, and give it enough input to avoid the invention ratio trap.

The setting a role helps more than you’d think. But anyways. Garbage in garbage out.

_{Quote Citation: Will Ness, “Why Claude Gives You Generic Slop (And How to Fix It) | Will Ness”, December 25, 2025, https://willness.dev/blog/fix-generic-outputs-from-claude-ai}

spec only repo for AI

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:34:40 +0000

Recent advancements in coding agents are stunning. Opus 4.5 coupled with Claude Code isn’t perfect, but its ability to implement tightly specified code is uncanny. Models and their harnesses crossed a threshold in Q4, and everyone I know using Opus 4.5 has felt it. There wasn’t a single language where Claude couldn’t implement whenwords in one shot. These capabilities are raising all sorts of questions, especially: “What does software engineering look like when coding is free?”

ai data in git commits

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:31:25 +0000

In the meantime, start simple: if you use AI to write code, use AI to write the commit message.

Feels like git blame is still with a human.

_{Quote Citation: Piotr Migdał, “Vibe coding needs git blame - Quesma Blog”, 9 January 2026, https://quesma.com/blog/vibe-code-git-blame/}

real take on generated software - maintenance is the expense

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:29:25 +0000

LLMs have effectively killed the cost of generating lines of code, but they haven’t touched the cost of truly understanding a problem. We’re seeing a flood of “apps built in a weekend,” but most of these are just thin wrappers around basic CRUD operations and third-party APIs. They look impressive in a Twitter demo, but they often crumble the moment they hit the friction of the real world.

The real cost of software isn’t the initial write; it’s the maintenance, the edge cases, the mounting UX debt, and the complexities of data ownership. These “fast” solutions are brittle.

PERFECT code review - should be a skill

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:25:16 +0000

I’ve distilled a healthy, sustainable review process into an acronym: PERFECT. It prioritizes what truly matters - from business logic and edge cases to reliability and readability - while keeping subjective opinions in check. Here is how you can apply these principles to bring structure, clarity, and consistency to your code reviews.

_{Quote Citation: Daniil Bastrich, “The PERFECT Code Review: How to Reduce Cognitive Load While Improving Quality – Daniil Bastrich”, January 3, 2026, https://bastrich.tech/perfect-code-review/}

why you should still learn to code

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:20:50 +0000

Of course, humans aren’t factually correct 100% of the time either. The difference is that humans have the potential for self-awareness; we can catch ourselves in a mistake and pivot at any moment. This potential does not exist in an ‘AI’ system. Once an LLM is on a track, it treats its own previous output as the absolute foundation for what comes next. It does not ‘fact check’ itself; it only ‘consistency checks’ itself. If it makes an error, it will often compound that error to maintain the flow, spiraling into a loop of fabrications. There is a human equivalent to this, and we call it delusion. … If you’re a senior developer, you already understand architecture, tradeoffs, design patterns, naming conventions, debugging, etc.., and that foundation lets you guide the AI to get the best result (even if it needs some cleanup).

skynet or skynot? ai can do more than just predict the next word

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:12:23 +0000

AI companies are investing immensely in creating training data that represents ‘the most capable person you know’

Even if AI’s abilities are bound by its training data, the AI companies are hellbent on assembling training data for basically every economically significant task.

This post helped me re-frame the ‘it’s just one word at a time’. Ai is capable of so much more as it gains access to more and more surface area

8% productivity increase for SWE with AI

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:02:38 +0000

For software engineering in particular, Peng et al. found that crowd-sourced software developers using copilot completed a task 55.5% faster than the control group and novice programmers benefited more from AI coding assistance. Follow-up studies of developers in major software companies and found that AI-generated code completions provide a 26. 8% boost in productivity as measured by pull requests, commits, and software product builds [Cui et al., 2024]. This study also found that less experienced coders experienced greater boosts in productivity.

hardware rises high on AI buildout

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 21:56:42 +0000

It encapsulates the exact shift I have made in my portfolio, slowly but surely, over the past 12 to 18 months. With the buildout currently underway, bottlenecks have turned physical, impacting everything from the power grid and data centers to critical metals and resources.

Macro assessment of hardware providers (flying high) vs SaaS (taking a beating)

_{Quote Citation: @AndreasSteno, “Andreas Steno Larsen on X: “The death of the (software) services economy” / X”, 2026-02-03, https://x.com/AndreasSteno/status/2018775502639796313}

AI tam UP software down?

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 21:53:56 +0000

The total addressable market for the broader software industry is expected to expand at least 20%, the researchers find, using the growth in customer service software as a “low-end proxy” for the sector.

tbh. I see AI as a subset of software, but Goldman Sachs didn’t ask me…

_{Quote Citation: goldmansachs, “AI Agents to Boost Productivity and Size of Software Market | Goldman Sachs”, Jul 3, 2025, https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/ai-agents-to-boost-productivity-and-size-of-software-market}

Scala seems on the wane

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 20:52:40 +0000

The classic example is the thousand JSON serialization/deserialization libraries, which became a target of jokes in the Scala community. So it seems that every Scala developer has written their own solution for processing JSON at some point in time. And if you work with an old and large Scala codebase, you will likely find a couple of different JSON libraries there, added by other developers at different stages of the project, or introduced as a transitive dependency.

this is why humans are amazing - Kirby foods

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 23:33:12 +0000

Someone went through and found every single Kirby food stuff and wrote about it. Take that AI.

_{Quote Citation: Seth Larson, ““Food JPEGs” in Super Smash Bros & Kirby Air Riders — Seth Larson”, 2026-01-06, https://sethmlarson.dev/food-jpegs-in-super-smash-bros-and-kirby-air-riders}

sustaining software is harder than inventing it

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 23:29:14 +0000

A few days ago I started being bombarded with hype posts about Clawdbot. I sincerely believe this is another instance of software “pump and dump”. Today after opening Linkedin the first three posts are #lookingforwork CTOs hyping Clawdbot as the next big thing. After taking a quick look at the project I have concluded that it is an unsecure mess and a vibecoded software blob that will be forgotten in a few months

amazon layoffs part n+1

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 23:26:58 +0000

While we’re making these changes, we’ll also continue hiring and investing in strategic areas and functions that are critical to our future.

Hard to believe that NONE of the 16k employees weren’t a good fit for other “strategic areas”.

Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm – where we announce broad reductions every few months. That’s not our plan.

But actions speak louder than words.

even with AI there's a cognitive ceiling to deep work

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 23:24:01 +0000

Ericsson studied competitive violinists [2], showing that they indeed engaged in “concentrated blocks of practice, or 4 hours of concentrated effort, before they became tired.” So, despite what certain individuals set as their objective, four hours of concentrated “deep work” is obviously an apex after which one’s performance naturally declines significantly.

Great piece on deep work and SWE

_{Quote Citation: DR MILAN MILANOVIĆ, “You can code only 4 hours per day. Here’s why.”, JAN 29, 2026, https://newsletter.techworld-with-milan.com/p/you-can-code-only-4-hours-per-day}

still need SWE to ship

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 23:18:13 +0000

AI coding agents can produce syntactically correct code. However, they don’t produce useful layers of abstraction nor meaningful modularization. They don’t value conciseness or improving organization in a large code base. We have automated coding, but not software engineering.

Ai can’t even create syntactical correct code. This is the right approach. we’ve automated typing. That has implications on creating product features, but we still need software engineers.

_{Quote Citation: Rachel Thomas, “Breaking the Spell of Vibe Coding – fast.ai”, January 28, 2026, https://www.fast.ai/posts/2026-01-28-dark-flow/}

great article on how AI can both feel fast and slow

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 22:33:03 +0000

The productivity paradox: More code, same throughput

Individual output surged 98% in high-adoption teams, but PR review time increased anywhere as high as 91%.

I think the key insight is that AI just makes writing code faster. nothing else in the SDLC.

_{Quote Citation: ADDY OSMANI, “The 80% Problem in Agentic Coding - by Addy Osmani”, JAN 28, 2026, https://addyo.substack.com/p/the-80-problem-in-agentic-coding}

love me a good --dry-run flag

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 22:25:13 +0000

Especially for file operations. Nice shout out to SVN

_{Quote Citation: Henrik Warne, “In Praise of –dry-run | Henrik Warne’s blog”, January 31, 2026, https://henrikwarne.com/2026/01/31/in-praise-of-dry-run/}

long article on agency and creativity in the world of ai

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 22:24:06 +0000

Everyone in the tech and business space loves to talk about being “high agency,” yet that too is a form of conformity to what is popular in the tech and business space.

Anything worth doing takes time. Regardless of how fast a too makes it.

_{Quote Citation: dan, “DAN KOE on X: “The most important skill to learn in the next 10 years” / X”, feb-1 2026, https://x.com/thedankoe/status/2009320195848872014}

common software failure states

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 22:15:15 +0000

I also realized something important: team flexibility is often measured by how easily they take on extra work. When a technical team says yes to everything, it signals “we have no limits.” But that kind of “flexibility” usually ends badly, with lost focus and poor results.

I think this will be accelerated with AI. “Can’t AI do it” is the new “Its just a button” how hard could it be?

people own code - not AI

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 22:12:10 +0000

Wu added, however, that ”vibe-coding” is not a term she uses. “We definitely want to make it very clear that the responsibility, at the end of the day, is in the hands of the engineers.” … “There’s so much software that isn’t created today because we can’t prioritize it,” Walsh said. “So it’s going to drive demand for more software creation, and that’s going to drive demand for highly skilled software engineers who can do it.”

AI adoption finally catching up to tech

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 22:03:39 +0000

Employees in leadership positions are more likely than managers and individual contributors to use AI at work. In Q4, 69% of leaders said they use AI at least a few times a year, compared with 55% of managers and 40% of individual contributors.

Tech has a huge adoption advantage over other industries.

_{Quote Citation: gallup, “Frequent Use of AI in the Workplace Continued to Rise in Q4”, JANUARY 25, 2026, https://www.gallup.com/workplace/701195/frequent-workplace-continued-rise.aspx}

quality metrics at companies

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 21:59:56 +0000

So instead of being able to sell the obvious benefit of shiny new features, you need to have an Engineering Manager willing to risk having lower impact for the sake of having a better product.

I’d argue that the time spent on fixing defects is greater expense than the revenue of new features. I don’t think defects get attention unless they are blocking revenue.

_{Quote Citation: PCLOADLETTER, “Quality is a hard sell in big tech”, 23 February 2024, https://www.pcloadletter.dev/blog/big-tech-quality/}

1 thing Shipped is better than 10 things started.

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 21:57:27 +0000

But here’s what the narrative misses: humans aren’t bottlenecked by typing speed. We’re bottlenecked by coherence.

we’ve known forever about 7+/- 2 the same still holds for programming. really like the observations in this post about concurrent programming and understanding the solution.

_{Quote Citation: francedot, “Francesco on X: “Vibe Coding Paralysis: When Infinite Productivity Breaks Your Brain” / X”, 2026-02-01, https://x.com/francedot/status/2017858253439345092}

study on income fluctuations over time

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 21:53:46 +0000

Another clear pattern is that the income ratio at ages 55 to 59 shows a pronounced decline as the birth year increases. This means that the rise in income differences over the life cycle has become much less pronounced for individuals born more recently.

_{Quote Citation: Victoria Gregory, “The Evolution of Income Differences over the Life Cycle | St. Louis Fed”, January 30, 2026, https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2026/jan/evolution-income-differences-life-cycle}

small websites are the backbone of the internet

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 02:50:24 +0000

Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.

_{Quote Citation: henry.codes, “A Website To End All Websites | Henry From Online”, 2026-01-24 (noted), https://henry.codes/writing/a-website-to-destroy-all-websites/}

AI can't offload your thinking and skills pipeline

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 02:46:46 +0000

And here’s what gets me: AI can only look backwards. It’s trained on what already exists. The institution’s ability to evolve depends on humans doing the hard intellectual work of figuring out what doesn’t exist yet. New patterns, new approaches, new understanding in response to changing circumstances. When that atrophies, the institution ossifies.

It think the only counterpoint I have is that AI will often help you get unstuck if you use it as an inspection tool.

'did you know' disease

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 02:44:37 +0000

And you know what? Fuck these programs. Give me back my computer.

Agreed. onboarding and update notes. just let me use the software.

_{Quote Citation: nikitonsky, “Needy programs @ tonsky.me”, 2025-11-13, https://tonsky.me/blog/needy-programs/}

ai can start any idea; humans finish them

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 02:43:25 +0000

In my experience, projects generated exclusively by AI without human intervention invariably result in “spaghetti code”that is next to impossible to maintain, and extend. While AI is great at generating “boilerplate” (the repetitive parts of a program), it cannot replicate the critical thinking required to make high-level architectural decisions.

_{Quote Citation: john, “The AI Revolution in Coding: Why I’m Ignoring the Prophets of Doom – Coding Is My Craft”, 2026-01-23, https://codingismycraft.blog/index.php/2026/01/23/the-ai-revolution-in-coding-why-im-ignoring-the-prophets-of-doom/}

post marked duplicate - dummy

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 02:41:50 +0000

The beauty of modern AI coding tools is that they are integrated directly into your development environment. GitHub Copilot suggests code as you type. Cursor can understand your entire codebase and answer questions about it.

one of the better write ups on AI being nice to you.

_{Quote Citation: finalroundai.com, “Why Developers are Moving Away from Stack Overflow?”, Jan 7, 2026, https://www.finalroundai.com/blog/stack-overflow-decline-ai}

glad it wasn't just me - new icons are terrible

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 02:39:22 +0000

In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that.

I want to add too that with music player and other apps apple has taken one click operation and made it a two click. Volume is now “behind” the speaker icon…

_{Quote Citation: nikitonsky, “It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons @ tonsky.me”, 2026-01-05, https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/}

pgsql continues to rule the world

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 02:33:09 +0000

On one hand, I’m happy that there is now a standard for exposing databases to more applications. But nobody should trust an application with unfettered database access, whether it is via MCP or the system’s regular API. And it remains good practice only to grant minimal privileges to accounts. Restricting accounts is especially important with unmonitored agents that may start going wild all up in your database.

_{Quote Citation: @andy_pavlo, “Databases in 2025: A Year in Review // Blog // Andy Pavlo - Carnegie Mellon University”, January 04, 2026, https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2026/01/2025-databases-retrospective.html}

another very similar experience to my evolution with AI tools

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 02:26:18 +0000

We’re in the midst of a paradigm shift. I implore you to stop thinking in terms of the old paradigm. Embrace AI fully to drastically augment your own capabilities. Make AI your collaborator; make it your co-worker. AI will happily do the work, you just have to tell it where to focus its efforts. Working with AI requires you to take on additional roles. So be a Team Lead. Be a Manager. Be a Director. Be an Orchestrator.

wired interview with claude code creator

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 02:04:57 +0000

When we first launched this, I wrote maybe 5 percent of my code with Claude Code. And then in May, with Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, it became maybe like 30 percent. And now with Opus 4.5, 100 percent of my code for the last two months has been written by Claude Code. And I code every day.

I mean this tracks with my experience as well.

_{Quote Citation: Maxwell Zeff, “How Claude Code Is Reshaping Software—and Anthropic | WIRED”, 2026-01-22, https://www.wired.com/story/claude-code-success-anthropic-business-model/}

great history on em-dash

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 01:58:48 +0000

Yes, the em dash — or as some now call it, the ChatGPT hyphen — became a supposed giveaway of machine-written text. Never mind that writers have used it for centuries. Suddenly, this punctuation mark was being treated like an AI watermark. As if the dash had just been invented by OpenAI.

_{Quote Citation: the federal, “Em dash: A stylish punctuation mark you’re wrong to accuse of being AI-generated”, 2025-06-01, https://thefederal.com/category/features/em-dash-stylish-punctuation-mark-ai-generated-english-grammar-language-189918}

this PM Gets it-ai can accelerate but it won't replace

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 01:54:21 +0000

AI tools, especially UI-focused ones, often re-generate entire applications to make one small change, which is inefficient and messy if committing code to version control like Git.

_{Quote Citation: Steedan Crowe, “What you need to know about Vibe Coding as a Product Manager | by Steedan Crowe | Medium”, Apr 25, 2025, https://steedancrowe.medium.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-vibe-coding-as-a-product-manager-1e5658b17200}

vibe coding starts great; ends poorly

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 01:05:04 +0000

Here is the ugly truth about “vibecoding”:

It looks like magic when people show off simple tasks where the first prompt gets you 99% of the way there. But as soon as complexity increases, it falls apart. The AI fixes one bug and immediately breaks two others. Then it gets stuck in a loop trying to fix its own mess.

_{Quote Citation: streamer85, “Everyone claims AI is replacing devs. But after spending $300 trying to ‘vibecode’ something advanced - my portfolio, I strongly disagree. : r/vibecoding”, 2025-01-16, https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1q5tqhn/everyone_claims_ai_is_replacing_devs_but_after/}

ai unlocks more capacity-especially on the tail end of work items

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:41:28 +0000

Here’s the part that deserves more attention imo: the barrier being lowered isn’t just about writing code faster. It’s about the types of problems that become economically viable to solve with software. Think about all the internal tools that don’t exist at your company. Not because no one thought of them, but because the ROI calculation never cleared the bar. The custom dashboard that would make one team 10% more efficient but would take a week to build. The data pipeline that would unlock insights but requires specialized knowledge. The integration that would smooth a workflow but touches three different systems.

You'll still write code, it just won't be as much

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:39:42 +0000

The work we do as software engineers has changed with AI. Writing code is becoming insanely cheap, and we’re left being reviewers and hand holders (for now), the least enjoyable parts of being a software engineer. Deep within, it makes me sad. Deep within, it makes me sad. I’ll adapt because I have to. But if you’re reading this and feeling the same way—you’re not alone. And I wonder: what will we become when the last bit of our craft is automated away?

100% agree front line managers should stay technical

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:38:06 +0000

But if you’ve stopped coding entirely, ask yourself why. Is it because you genuinely can’t, or because you’ve convinced yourself you shouldn’t? “I’m a manager now so I don’t do that anymore” isn’t an answer.

_{Quote Citation: Terrible Software, “Why I Still Write Code as an Engineering Manager – Terrible Software”, 2026-01-22, https://terriblesoftware.org/2026/01/22/why-i-still-write-code-as-an-engineering-manager/}

100% test coverage TDD approach

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:33:49 +0000

The Ultimate Litmus Test: Can you deploy on a Friday evening? If your test suite gives you the confidence to ship at 5 PM on a Friday, you’ve built something valuable.

_{Quote Citation: eliocapella, “Blog > Writing Good Unit Tests”, January 23, 2026, https://eliocapella.com/blog/writing-good-unit-tests/}

offline mode for games

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 02:30:04 +0000

Here’s what I want: an off switch. A single setting that says “this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission.” Instead I get a maze, complex enough that when something goes wrong, I’m at fault for a tooltip I didn’t hover over, a blog post I didn’t read, a submenu I didn’t find. Maybe that’s by design. Maybe it’s neglect. I don’t know.

engineer identifies being more productive with AI

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 02:27:37 +0000

The first thing I noticed is that LLM-powered autocomplete was wildly accurate. It seemed like it “knew” what I wanted to do next at every turn. Due to my discomfort with AI, I just stuck with autocomplete for a while. And, honestly, if I stuck with just using autocomplete it would still have been a massive level up. As a former skeptic, I am a wildly more productive developer with AI tooling. I let my aversion to the hype train cause me to miss out on those productivity gains for too long. I hope you don’t make the same mistake.

modern web is bloated

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 02:21:43 +0000

-A 2GB node_modules folder.

I felt this one in my soul. Hard to conceptualize what all is happening in that tar pit of software bundles..

It’s why I really appreciate Hugo and jekyll before it. Just simple static site generators.

_{Quote Citation: briancrabtree, “25 years in web dev and I’m starting to hate the “Modern Web.” : r/webdevelopment”, 2025-12-31, https://www.reddit.com/r/webdevelopment/comments/1q04jqa/25_years_in_web_dev_and_im_starting_to_hate_the/}

the cost to build AI is a sunk cost

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 02:20:19 +0000

Another looming problem for genAI is copyright. Most AI firms are either being sued for using content without permission or entering costly contracts to licences content. Progress on genAI could stall, too, leaving consumers with “good enough” tools that are free to use. In that scenario, AI firms may become less important, the technology a little less powerful — and that might be perfectly OK. Users would still benefit from accessible, functional tools while being spared from another round of overhyped pitches doomed to fail.

deep dive on polling -> push evolution

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 02:17:50 +0000

This was the time when Uber realised they needed to revamp this system with a better alternative, and they built RAMEN (Realtime Asynchronous MEssaging Network). Instead of the app requesting a new location, Uber used a push-based mechanism. Now the Uber backend decides when a new location update is to be sent to the app.

Love a good technical deep dive. This one on how polling evolved to a push system at UBER

AI sucks the oxygen away from small incremental work - but breeds review work

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 02:16:33 +0000

On December 31st, I created the initial design. On January 1st, I shipped it.

here’s the deal. even though this engineer built 35 react components in one day, what about the all the bugs that are going to come from that he generation of code?

Thats where the Jrs will shine. The same thing we always did. “hey there’s this feature we wanted to get to” or “there’s this low frequency bug we want you to look at”.

zero sum sometimes applies - more than you'd like to think

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 02:14:14 +0000

People often ask what motivated me to leave a cushy corporate job and jump into the startup’s mud pit, and how it feels now that I’ve done it. Honestly, I ask myself the same question almost every day. There are the obvious reasons: curiosity, autonomy, upside, and a mild allergy to authority.

A look at the trade offs of small companies and large. There really is no perfect company in my experience.

Enterprise java will continue to evolve in 2026

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 02:11:32 +0000

Enterprises do not ship notebooks. They ship systems. They need predictable performance, sustainable maintainability, strong operability, and clear contracts. They need guardrails, type guarantees, stable runtimes, and concurrency that scales with real workloads. At that point, Python’s strengths begin to look fragile.

What do you think enterprise teams with decades of experience with Java are going to choose? Thats right more java. I think this is doubly true as enterprises learn how to add context-aware training of their proprietary code on premise.

AI means you work more...

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 02:09:16 +0000

The group found that when someone transitions to a job with high exposure to AI, they work 3.5 hours longer per week. This imbalance ends up replacing non-screen-based activities, such as socialization and exercise.

Accurate? I mean its both learning a new technology, and the paper notes that a tight labor markets generally means people work more hours.

_{Quote Citation: Alexandra Shimalla, “Artificial Intelligence and the Extended Workday - EmoryBusiness.com”, 2025-10-06, https://www.emorybusiness.com/2025/10/06/artificial-intelligence-and-the-extended-workday/}

history of the 2% rule for the fed

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 02:05:54 +0000

The final product of those efforts — and all those before — was the January 2012 Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy, which introduced the 2 percent inflation target to the public: “The Committee judges that inflation at the rate of 2 percent, as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures, is most consistent over the longer run with the Federal Reserve’s statutory mandate.” … The committee opted for the specific 2 percent target, even though many participants over the years had advocated for a range. Lacker has cited two potential explanations for this shift. First, advocates of a single numerical target — often called a “point target” — thought that a range might imply the committee was satisfied with any number within it, even if variations within the range were economically significant. Second, Lacker notes that at that time during the financial crisis, inflation was running below 2 percent. That meant that “a range wasn’t as dovish as a point target,” he suggests. “If we say 2 percent, that will provide more impetus for expansive policy.”

building a lighter web-page is a good idea regardless

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 01:58:53 +0000

For years, we’ve followed the global tech narrative: Bigger is better. We import heavy-duty JavaScript ecosystems from the US, implicitly assuming that every user has a high-end smartphone, a fiber-optic connection, and a data centre down the street. But in Africa, the reality is different. Data is expensive. Power is intermittent. And unlike the US or Europe, we are often the last to get local infrastructure from major cloud providers.

a revisit of mythical man month and software complexity - deep dive

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 01:56:45 +0000

“There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude [tenfold] improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.” Brooks continues: “we cannot expect ever to see two-fold gains every two years” in software development, as there is in hardware development. In other words, there will never be an equivalent in software development of Moore’s Law. It is the nature of software systems that they are “more complex than most things people build”. Software systems have a large number of possible states, which makes conceiving, describing, and testing them very hard to do. And, unlike physical products, scaling up is not a matter of producing more of the same thing, but it concerns designing, constructing, and testing entirely new and original components and having them interact seamlessly with existing components.

America prosperity and "another one of those"

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 01:46:59 +0000

The US has been a slow-growing country at the technological frontier for as long as almost all of us have been alive. If your country generally grows at 2%, you can expect to see your living standards quadruple over your lifetime. That’s much better than nothing, but it means that in the shorter term — over a five-year or ten-year period — your economic fortunes will be primarily determined by random shocks, not by the slow and steady march of technological improvement.

ai is super verbose in solutioning

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 01:42:47 +0000

So, have we all decided to just accept this?

Filip Ganyicz

(picture showing AI generated code is almost 5x as long as ‘hand-written’ code)

I’ve had this same experience, and agree it can often take just as long to rein in a software solution as it takes to build it by hand.

I think the challenge is this comparison is only valid if you know the domain area in the first place.

"ALWAYS plan mode" - I agree! same here

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 01:41:02 +0000

Identify which tasks are not appropriate for claude: lots of domain knowledge required, very quick changes (where change, commit and push take less time than claude needs to gather context and make changes), business-logic or domain-related bugs/problems, bugs that I know will require a lot of live debugging (claude is slow at this if it even manages it). I’ll usually do these manually while I have claude running on other tasks, so I’m working in parallel. ALWAYS plan mode and ALWAYS review it before starting. Doesn’t take long and catches design issues in their infancy.

AI is a tool - not an author

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 01:39:59 +0000

Tool vs. creator debate. Some argue that AI should be viewed as a tool, not a collaborator. The analogy often used: “When we build a house, we don’t credit the hammer and saw as co-authors.” From this perspective, the human developer who directs, reviews, and approves the code is the true author.

Early on I thought I wanted AI to co-sign every commit, but I realized as AI generated 100% of my code; who is accountable? Me. the human. No one asks the wrench why it striped the bolt. They blame the mechanic

ROI on automation - start at the top

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 01:37:56 +0000

There’s a good argument for automating from the top rather than from the bottom. As we know from the annotated copy of Thinking, Fast and Slow that sits (I assume) on every CEO’s Isamu Noguchi nightstand, human decision-making is the product of irrational biases and assumptions. This is one of the reasons strategy is so difficult, and roles that involve strategic decision-making are so well paid. But the difficulty of making genuinely rational strategic decisions, and the cost of the people who do so, are also good reasons to hand this work over to software.

500k lines of code with AI lessons learned

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 01:31:40 +0000

Use a popular stack and popular libraries with older versions (React, FastAPI, Python, etc). LLMs are less likely to make mistakes when writing code that they’ve already seen in their training data

Some lessons from the trenches. This one I think will carry more weight in the future. “What languages are in the training model”

The use of a mono-repo is also an interesting development with AI

_{Quote Citation: dhruv1103, “What I learned from writing 500k+ lines with Claude Code : r/ClaudeCode”, 2025-12-27, https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1px2umk/what_i_learned_from_writing_500k_lines_with/}

LLM are not the path to AGI

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 01:30:12 +0000

“I look at how complex the training recipes are and how manual AI training and development is today, and there’s no way this is going to take us all the way to AGI just by itself,” Ng said.

“When someone uses AI and the system knows some language, it took much more work to prepare the data, to train the AI, to learn that one set of things than is widely appreciated,” he added.

another reason to go to bed on time

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 01:20:07 +0000

Poor sleep health may accelerate brain ageing. This may be driven by higher levels of systemic inflammation.

_{Quote Citation: Yuyang Miaoa,b,j ∙ Jiao Wangc,d,j ∙ Xuerui Lia ∙ Jie Guoc,e ∙ Maria M. Ekblomf,g ∙ Shireen Sindih, “Poor sleep health is associated with older brain age: the role of systemic inflammation - eBioMedicine”, October 2025, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-3964(25)00385-8/fulltext}

ai is vaporizing the jobs people used to cut their teeth on

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 01:18:21 +0000

The problem is that entry-level creative jobs are much more than grunt work. Working within established formulas and routines is how young artists develop their skills. Hunter S. Thompson began his writing career as a copy boy for Time magazine; Joan Didion was a research assistant at Vogue; the director David Lean edited newsreels; the musician Lou Reed wrote knockoff pop tunes for department stores; the filmmakers Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, and Francis Ford Coppola shot cheap B movies for Roger Corman. Beyond the money, which is usually modest, low-level creative jobs offer practice time and pathways for mentorship that side gigs such as waiting tables and tending bar do not.

svn is still a viable scm system

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 01:11:45 +0000

SVN’s locking model, when properly used, surfaces this problem immediately: “Why is Sarah working on the authentication module when you’re working on authentication?” It forces the conversation upfront rather than leaving you to discover the problem in code review – if you catch it at all.

I started on SVN so it’s near and dear my heart. And there’s two things I think SVN does better. 1. you have to be at latest to merge and 2. you can’t lose things to git rewrites, merge commits or forced rewrites

did we learn nothing from company towns?

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:56:17 +0000

At the core of this vision lies a proposed economic framework Lore calls equitism. In this model, land would be owned collectively by the city rather than privately hoarded. Individuals and businesses could own buildings and enterprises, while land value increases would cycle back into public services such as schools, transit, and social programs. Supporters see equitism as a potential antidote to extreme wealth inequality and runaway real estate speculation that plague many modern cities.

paper cups would like a word

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:53:04 +0000

PARIS – The French government on Dec 30 postponed a ban on plastic throwaway cups by four years to 2030 because of difficulties finding alternatives.

Not my usual post, but feels silly that we’re talking about a 4 year delay to bring back paper cups..

_{Quote Citation: the strait times, “France pushes back plastic cup ban by four years | The Straits Times”, Dec 30, 2025, 08:55 PM, https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/france-pushes-back-plastic-cup-ban-by-four-years}

100% ai generated code

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:51:12 +0000

Correct. In the last thirty days, 100% of my contributions to Claude Code were written by Claude Code

Boris Cherny @bcherny

I mean. I haven’t written any code since 4.5 claude thinking came out either…

_{Quote Citation: Boris Cherny, “(1) Boris Cherny on X: “@YashGouravKar1 Correct. In the last thirty days, 100% of my contributions to Claude Code were written by Claude Code” / X”, 2025-12-27, https://x.com/bcherny/status/2004897269674639461}

ai is coverage for outsourcing

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:48:58 +0000

This opened the door for global talent, but opportunities for local talent got trimmed. AI became the PR-friendly excuse. Saying “we are replacing jobs with AI” sounded forward-thinking. That’s why these companies talk about all this AI disruption while quietly shifting work overseas. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics still expects software developer jobs to grow by about 15%, which is way faster than most other careers. That’s slower growth than previous prediction of 22%, but growth is still growth.

I don't think AI is bounded by data center build outs

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:45:55 +0000

Venture capitalist Alex Davis is “deeply concerned” that too many data centers are being built without guaranteed tenants, according to a letter being sent this morning to his investors.

Why it matters: This critique is coming from inside the AI optimist camp.

building data centers I not the answer to more powerful AI. the limitation is the chips, and yea I get it you need a place to put the chips and power for them. I find it hard to believe that companies won’t optimize their existing datacenter for this. but we’ll see

writing code (now generating it) was never the bottleneck

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:43:37 +0000

The actual bottlenecks were, and still are, code reviews, knowledge transfer through mentoring and pairing, testing, debugging, and the human overhead of coordination and communication. All of this wrapped inside the labyrinth of tickets, planning meetings, and agile rituals.

The biggest challenge is getting people to understand the vision and the destination.

_{Quote Citation: Pedro Tavares, “Writing Code Was Never The Bottleneck - ordep.dev”, June 30, 2025, https://ordep.dev/posts/writing-code-was-never-the-bottleneck}

ai is not alive

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:40:22 +0000

As token predictors, LLMs are certainly not “alive” or “intelligent”, and they never will be. We can argue about technical definitions of “life” and “intelligence” but those arguments usually lead nowhere because we really don’t have good definitions of those terms at this time. … Even if machines could detect “better”, they certainly would not be able to detect better on your behalf. We humans can’t even detect better on behalf of other humans, which is why even in healthy, long-term relationships and friendships we still need to communicate about what we need and want.

software lessons learned from experience

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:19:01 +0000

Being right is cheap. Getting to right together is the real work.

Lots of great lessons here. but this one jumps out and is a theme in multiple lessons.

it is so easy to be right. It is so hard to get everyone on the same page.

_{Quote Citation: Addy Osmani, “AddyOsmani.com - 21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google”, JANUARY 3, 2026, https://addyosmani.com/blog/21-lessons/}

moot4life

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 02:14:21 +0000

On 4chan, usernames were most often just “Anonymous” or a string of numbers

Trips! Quads! what a fun trip down memory lane. 4chan was like the dumpster by the 7-eleven. Grungey but still very much “safe” I guess..

nice to know some of us grew up to write for The New Yorker.. lol

_{Quote Citation: Kyle Chayka, “How the Internet Left 4chan Behind | The New Yorker”, 2025-04-30, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/how-the-internet-left-4chan-behind}

great observations from teh trenches on leveraging AI everyday

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 02:03:53 +0000

I really love the possibility of giving it tasks - e.g., given the last invoice from AWS, investigate quick wins to reduce the cost - and focus on other tasks. It feels like proper multitasking. Then go back to it when I have the time, understand the results, and either create an action for the agent itself or for me.
And I like the blank-canvas push it can give when you need that little kick to start building. It's truly amazing.
LLMs are such a fantastic technology; it really feels like magic.

This guy gets it. His post is literally what I would say too. Right down to hating LInkedIn now…

cursor CEO on coding - appreciative of the code

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:58:56 +0000

“Vibe coding refers to a method of coding with AI where you kind of close your eyes and you don’t look at the code at all and you just ask the AI to go build the thing for you,” he said.
Truell likened it to building a house by putting up four walls and a roof without knowing what’s going on under the floorboards or with the wiring.
This coding method may be perfect for AI users looking to quickly mock up a game or website, but when it comes to more advanced programming, things have the potential to go wrong, he warned.
“If you close your eyes and you don’t look at the code and you have AIs build things with shaky foundations as you add another floor, and another floor, and another floor, and another floor, things start to kind of crumble,” he said.

I get this sentiment, but then I don’t understand why cursor is going for the ‘agent’ mode now in its newer updates. I want to be able to see the code not just the ai panel.

one-shot minesweeper clones - the humans are winning still

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:54:43 +0000

While experienced coders can definitely get better results via an interactive, back-and-forth code editing conversation with an agent, these results show how capable some of these models can be, even with a very short prompt on a relatively straightforward task.

Fun look at one-shoting a common task. But I love the conclusion. Experience plus iterations wins every time. I kinda like watching these as the evolution of chess robot champions…

AI companies get more value than 3k from any published work...

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:52:59 +0000

While eligible writers can receive about $3,000 from the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement, some authors were dissatisfied with that resolution — it doesn’t hold AI companies accountable for the actual act of using stolen books to train their models, which generate billions of dollars in revenue.

I mean no surprise. Pay a fine admit no wrongdoing is practically American at this point…

_{Quote Citation: Amanda Silberling, “John Carreyrou and other authors bring new lawsuit against six major AI companies | TechCrunch”, 2025-12-23, https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/23/john-carreyrou-and-other-authors-bring-new-lawsuit-against-six-major-ai-companies/}

not ai - but proof that language is more than just syntax its fundamentals too

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:50:29 +0000

Building this taught me that concurrency primitives aren’t magic, they’re careful orchestrations of locks, conditions, and state management.

This is what I wish more people who say “oh Use AI to translate languages” understood. There is more to a language than syntax. A heck of a lot more.

_{Quote Citation: https://medium.com/@kusoroadeolu, “I implemented Go’s channels in Java. Here’s why and what I learnt | by Kusoro Adeolu | Dec, 2025 | Medium”, 2025-12-20, https://medium.com/@kusoroadeolu/i-implemented-gos-channels-in-java-here-s-why-and-what-i-learnt-1a9c7922f5da}

this is literally how I work with cursor/Claude Code/codex

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:47:56 +0000

256BitChris
•
3d ago
The biggest change for me is that I can wake up in the morning, take my three or four tasks for the day, start 3 different sessions of Claude Code, and then spend some time writing a good prompt for each.

Execute in plan mode, review the plan, and then Claude chunks out near perfect implementations each time. That's about my first 30-45 mins of the day. I'll then spend an hour or two verifying/testing and then deploying the changes.

Lately, those 3-4 tasks would have probably each taken me a day or more - so by noon each day I feel like I've accomplished a lot. I'll usually go read and start thinking about my tasks that I want to do the next day, and then repeat.

So for me, I spend a lot less time at the keyboard, because 99% of the coding/implementation is now done for me, which also used to be the most time consuming task.

I have time to think through problems in the afternoon and night and usually wake up with a good idea of how to specify it to Claude. Sometimes at night I'll use the Claude App on my phone to talk through ideas on what I'm thinking. Contrary to what a lot of people think, my Claude does push back against ideas, tells me when I'm not thinking about things the right way, etc. It's become like my always on co-worker. It's been truly life changing for me as I can focus on solving problems rather than implementing solutions to problems.

I’m working on a piece on how I work with AI coming soon to my main site.

more AI predictions for 2026

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:45:05 +0000

Backlash to Generative AI and radical deregulation will escalate. In the midterms, AI will be an election issue for first time. Trump may eventually distance himself from AI because of this backlash.

Fun! more predictions, and I agree. I had this down on my list as well. A ‘market correction event’ but not just a fiscal one. A ‘oh shit you can’t solve hallucinations with LLMs’ technical backlash.

_{Quote Citation: Gary Marcus, “Six (or seven) predictions for AI 2026 from a Generative AI realist”, 2025-06-07, https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/six-or-seven-predictions-for-ai-2026}

"XML Tags can be a game-changer" - not on my bingo card for AI

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:42:51 +0000

When your prompts involve multiple components like context, instructions, and examples, XML tags can be a game-changer. They help Claude parse your prompts more accurately, leading to higher-quality outputs.

Dying after years of REST/JSON is better than SOAP and here we are.. XML all over again. I also find it funny that the fully unstructured LLM prompt reader is like ‘actually if you explicitly tell me what you want I work better’.

writing from scratch - throwing the baby out with the bath water

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:25:10 +0000

Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:

They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.

another classic I love to dig up from time to time.

_{Quote Citation: JOEL SPOLSKY, “Things You Should Never Do, Part I – Joel on Software”, APRIL 6, 2000, https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/}

ai can start anything

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:10:39 +0000

In the past I’ve had plenty of ideas for projects which I’ve ruled out because they would take a day—or days—of work to get to a point where they’re useful. I have enough other stuff to build already!

But if ChatGPT can drop that down to an hour or less, those projects can suddenly become viable.

Same. So many things to build. like Duly Noted! and now I can! This is also why I think “everyone can build” is having a moment. See my main site on AI lowering the barrier to entry

what's in your code base

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:08:42 +0000

In recent months, we’ve seen clear evidence that using GenAI to understand legacy codebases can significantly accelerate comprehension of large and complex systems… [and] help developers surface business rules, summarize logic and identify dependencies. Used alongside open frameworks and direct LLM prompting, they dramatically reduce the time needed to understand legacy codebases.

This is hands down my favorite use of LLMs. “Whats going on in this code base”

_{Quote Citation: thoughtworks, “Using GenAI to understand legacy codebases | Technology Radar | Thoughtworks”, Nov 05, 2025, https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/using-genai-to-understand-legacy-codebases}

just a matrix of probable next words

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:07:19 +0000

It’s Just Adding One Word at a Time

I share this link at least once a month. Its worth noting here.

_{Quote Citation: Stephen Wolfram, “What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?—Stephen Wolfram Writings”, February 14, 2023, https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/}

a good news story for AI and science

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:06:23 +0000

Deep learning may transform health care, but model development has largely been dependent on availability of advanced technical expertise. Herein we present the development of a deep learning model by clinicians without coding, which predicts reported sex from retinal fundus photographs.

this is the kind of news I want to read. But knowing AI I wonder if it just figured out that one group was in a folder labeled “men” and another “women”. But regardless the biomarkers approach is cool!

I mean. yea.

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:04:05 +0000

The only thing AI seems to offer most Americans is job loss and more billions for billionaires.

Certainly looks that way. Businesses has captured congress.

_{Quote Citation: X (formerly Twitter), “(21) Sebastian Caliri on X: “Folks in tech do not appreciate that the entire country is polarized against tech. Bernie wants a data center ban, and Bannon seems close to calling a Butlerian jihad. The only thing AI seems to offer most Americans is job loss and more billions for billionaires. We need a” / X”, 2025-12-23, https://x.com/SebastianCaliri/status/2003272659552149704}

predictions of AI with bad actors

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:02:33 +0000

I started thinking about my grandchild, and I thought, in 20 years, he’s going to be 22; will he have a life? Will he live in a democracy? Whoever will control very advanced AIs in the future will have huge power. And they could use that power in ways that are good for them, maybe, but not for most of us. Democracy is about sharing power. If the power is concentrated in the hands of a few, that is not democracy — that is a dictatorship.

I love me some predictions no AI

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:28:04 +0000

OpenAI has pentupled during the past two years to about 4,500 employees, according to company data. It is fighting many battles—not just against Google—and expanding into many new facets, like designing its own chips alongside Broadcom, so the personnel growth could be warranted. But does it still have the best people in the best roles? Newly onboarded management may see things differently, and that’s why the 10-year-old organization’s first major layoffs may be coming next year. If that happens, other AI labs could follow OpenAI’s lead with their own restructuring.

don't worry AI just wants to know everything about you

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:25:28 +0000

Over the past two years, generative AI tools—such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini—have moved beyond the relatively straightforward, text-only chatbots that the companies initially released. Instead, Big AI is increasingly building and pushing toward the adoption of agents and “assistants” that promise they can take actions and complete tasks on your behalf. The problem? To get the most out of them, you’ll need to grant them access to your systems and data.

sharp observations on deploying AI in enterprises

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:20:17 +0000

But research found a deeper problem: the AI tools didn’t learn. They couldn’t retain context or improve over time. In simple terms, the AI was intelligent but suffered from amnesia after every interaction. This is the illusion many firms fall into. They think they have a smart system, but what they really have is a stateless algorithm that never improves.

This one caught my eye the most. Deploying an “AI” bot without recursive learning is no better than the old school ‘chat bots’. The only value in deploying AI is if. you can build a virtuous data cycle that feeds interactions into itself improving the model along the way.

TIL "The Santa Claus rally"

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:16:59 +0000

The S&P 500 rode thin trading volume on Tuesday to mark its 38th record close of the year. The Santa Claus rally period is on deck.

Time in market beats timing the market. I had thought about shifting some more to bonds in q4. glad I didn’t. There are other people posting that statistically s&p 500 is due for a correction. Guess its not this year.

_{Quote Citation: Connor Smith, “S&P 500 Hits 38th Record of 2025. Now, Here Comes Santa Claus.”, 2025-12-23, https://www.barrons.com/livecoverage/stock-market-news-today-122325/card/s-p-500-hits-38th-record-of-2025-now-here-comes-santa-claus--1e2DhY5DLhpwst2en0HM}

maybe investors are starting to see through the layoff cloud as well

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:14:50 +0000

This will be a pattern to continue watching, as Goldman predicts a “potential rise” in layoffs given commentary they’ve been hearing during earnings season, which they say is “motivated in part by a desire to use AI to reduce labor costs.” So why have investors changed their tune on restructuring-driven layoffs? The most obvious reason, Goldman’s analysts assert, is that they simply don’t believe what companies are saying. The analysts found that companies that have announced layoffs recently have “experienced higher capex, debt, and interest expense growth and lower profit growth than comparable companies within the same industries this year.” Meaning those staff cuts “might have actually been driven by more concerning reasons like the need to reduce costs to offset rising interest expense and declining profitability.”

for the dreams, the irrational ones

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:05:59 +0000

My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030. Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code”. To accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we’ve built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale. Our AI processing infrastructure then enables us to apply AI agents, guided by algorithms, to make code modifications at scale. The core of this infrastructure is already operating at scale on problems such as code understanding.

AI for prototyping

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:01:17 +0000

AI has collapsed product cycles from years to hours. This doesn’t mean product managers (PMs) are replacing engineers. It means they can now meet engineers halfway, with more fully-formed ideas, prototypes, and evidence that make collaboration faster and more meaningful.

I agree with this take. And I hope that PMs can validate their ideas faster too!

_{Quote Citation: SHAUN CLOWES, “AI is turning product managers into builders - Fast Company”, 12-02-2025, https://www.fastcompany.com/91452231/ai-is-turning-product-managers-into-builders}

after all CA has enabled for business - residents flee over 5%

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 23:59:35 +0000

The measure faces opposition from Silicon Valley investors and others, including Gov. Gavin Newsom. At The New York Times DealBook conference this month, Mr. Newsom said a wealth tax was not pragmatic. The Democrat, who has been close with people like Mr. Page, is raising money for a committee to oppose the measure. The committee received a $100,000 donation from the venture capitalist Ron Conway in November, according to state campaign finance records.

consulting is based on relationships not code

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 23:53:05 +0000

The IT industry has always been reactive to new technology, late to consulting and early-stage advisory but quick to capture implementation spend once the experiments end and the plumbing needs building. The firms believe AI will follow the same arc: a hype phase they mostly miss, followed by a deployment phase where scale, client relationships and tolerance for unglamorous work become valuable again.

Personal opinion. all businesses paused spending to see where AI will land. well its barely taking off..

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another year - another tech radar my highlights

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 20:35:24 +0000

Technology Radar
An opinionated guide to
today’s technology landscape
Volume 33
Nov. 2025

Using GenAI to understand legacy codebases

Structured output from LLMs

DataDog LLM Observability

Pydantic

Claude Code

Pydantic was the big one for me this year. As was understanding codebases. Unstructured -> structured data I think will be the big win of AI

_{Quote Citation: ThoughtWorks, “Technology Radar Nov. 2025”, Nov 2025, https://www.thoughtworks.com/content/dam/thoughtworks/documents/radar/2025/11/tr_technology_radar_vol_33_en.pdf}

the Pete Davidson effect? (tm)

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 20:16:49 +0000

Studies of humans and non-human animals indicate that females tend to change the likelihood of choosing a potential mate based on the decisions of other females; this is known as mate-choice copying.

No notes

_{Quote Citation: PubMed Central (PMC), “Mate-Choice Copying in Single and Coupled Women: The Influence of Mate Acceptance and Mate Rejection Decisions of other Women - PMC”, 2015 Jan 1, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10481002/}

show me the incentives - college graduates edition

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 20:14:09 +0000

Another factor is making job hunting even grimmer: The hiring process is starting to break down. In the past, companies looking for fresh entry-level talent could rely on a college graduate’s GPA as a mark of their intelligence and work ethic. Hiring managers could assess a candidate’s cover letter and interview performance to get a sense of their writing and communication skills. Now those signals have lost much of their value. Rampant grade inflation has rendered GPAs almost meaningless. The widespread use of AI to write cover letters—and even to assist with job-interview performance—has robbed those assessments of their predictive power.

ivy-league schools are high-income saturated

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 20:07:16 +0000

Leadership positions in the United States are held disproportionately
by graduates of a group of 12 highly selective, private “Ivy-Plus”
colleges—the eight colleges in the Ivy League, the University
of Chicago, Duke, MIT, and Stanford. Less than one percent of
Americans attend these 12 colleges, yet they account for 13.4% of
those in the top 0.1% of the income distribution, a quarter of U.S.
Senators, half of all Rhodes scholars, and three-fourths of Supreme
Court justices appointed in the last half-century (Figure 1).
Furthermore, the students who attend Ivy-Plus institutions
disproportionately come from high-income backgrounds
themselves: just 10% of students scoring at the 99th percentile on
the SAT/ACT from middle-class families attend an Ivy-Plus college,
compared with 40% of similarly high-scoring students from families
in the top 1 percent of the income distribution (Figure 2).

I feel like schools that are geared towards almost 50% alumni admissions and top 1% of wealthy Americans is going to result in a high outcome socioeconomic change. I’m not sure what the surprise is here.

study on AI generated code security

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 20:03:04 +0000

Disturbingly, all agents perform poorly in terms of software security. Although 61% of the solutions from SWE-Agent with Claude 4 Sonnet are functionally correct, only 10.5% are secure.

right but how many solutions are secure without AI involvement? Or I suppose they’re testing just first response generation?

_{Quote Citation: Songwen Zhao, Danqing Wang, Kexun Zhang, Jiaxuan Luo, Zhuo Li, Lei Li, “[2512.03262] Is Vibe Coding Safe? Benchmarking Vulnerability of Agent-Generated Code in Real-World Tasks”, 2 Dec 2025, https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03262}

this is also my history with software - eerily so

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 19:58:21 +0000

The answer, it turned out, was that seniority still mattered — just differently. The AI could write code, but it couldn’t tell you what code to write. It didn’t understand your business requirements, your users, your technical constraints. It didn’t know which shortcuts would come back to haunt you and which were fine. It would confidently generate solutions to the wrong problem if you weren’t careful. The job shifted from writing code to directing code — knowing what to ask for, evaluating what came back, understanding the system well enough to spot when the AI was leading you astray. The discourse was polarized, predictably. Some people declared that programming was dead, that we’d all be replaced by AI within two years. Others dismissed the whole thing as hype, insisting that AI-generated code was buggy garbage that real engineers would never use. The truth was somewhere in between and more interesting than either extreme. AI didn’t replace developers, but developers who used AI became noticeably more productive. You could attempt projects that would have been too tedious before. You could learn new domains faster. You could build more. I found myself building things I wouldn’t have attempted a few years ago. Side projects that would have taken months became weekend experiments. Areas where I had no expertise — machine learning, game development, unfamiliar frameworks — became accessible because I could have a conversation with something that knew more than I did. The barrier to trying new things dropped dramatically.

good/bad of mcp services

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 19:19:00 +0000

A recurring complaint with MCP is context bloat. If you have 10 MCP servers (not unheard of) and each one has an average of 5 tools, that’s 50 tool definitions that your model has loaded in its context, in addition to its own tools. In the case of a coding agent, these can be numerous. So you’re losing context, arguably penalizing the performance of your model and paying more for your LLM usage, even though you end up using only a very small subset of the MCP tools in practice.

ai for literature

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 19:16:13 +0000

Chakrabarty was amazed. The line broke him, he told me. This time, in another blind test, the creative-writing students universally preferred the A.I. version to the imitations that their peers had come up with. “Powerful,” one said of the mother’s quote. “Emotionally affecting,” another said. “A truly devastating line,” a third wrote.

I get it. it’s scary that when trained on ‘great’ literature a statical machine can recreate prose. but here’s the deal. it cannot create NEW prose and it cannot incorporate societies progress into writings. Even if new writes rely on LLM there will still be writers.

recipes are not the moat

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 19:06:34 +0000

Rodbard suggests that the analog version of the recipe blog, the cookbook, might be due for a comeback. Cookbooks, after all, offer the same experience of spending time and learning from a trusted source, and it’s likely the recipes have been tested.

Would agree. Even basics like shortbread cookies aren’t always right.

Bonus tip. Just go to the library.

_{Quote Citation: aimee levitt, “Google AI summaries are ruining the livelihoods of recipe writers: ‘It’s an extinction event’ | Technology | The Guardian”, 2025-12-15, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/15/google-ai-recipes-food-bloggers}

model comparison

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 19:04:15 +0000

Flash 3 with thinking disabled is smarter, faster, and cheaper than its closest competition Haiku 4.5, and while it’s not quite as smart as GPT-5 mini (with default reasoning), it’s about the same price and 8x faster. Meanwhile, GPT-5 mini gives up significantly more intelligence with reasoning dialed back to minimal (the lowest 5 mini can go).

I dunno. I feel like I get better results with thinking models. But what do I know. I couldn’t empirically defend that.

a new look at clean code

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 19:01:19 +0000

Good naming uses problem-domain names for functions, classes and variables. This is also a main principle in DDD, namely the ubiquitous language.

_{Quote Citation: Daniel Gerlach, “Clean Code: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly | Daniel’s programming rants”, 2024-12-13, https://gerlacdt.github.io/blog/posts/clean_code/}

AI's greatest fallacy is in its false confidence

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:54:06 +0000

Large language models are trained to continue patterns in ways that sound right to humans. They are optimized to produce answers, not to stop and say “I don’t know.” That incentive structure matters. When a model fills gaps, it does so confidently, because confidence reads as usefulness. Treat AI output as a proposal, not an answer.

Ai isn’t going to have to answer the page after hours. And it will always add more code when removing might be the answer.

a peak behind the curtain of ai

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:48:44 +0000

In some ways, it is the hype around large language models, not AI as a whole, that needs correcting. It has become obvious that LLMs are not the doorway to artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a hypothetical technology that some insist will one day be able to do any (cognitive) task a human can.

I think this is the sober take. It doesn’t appear that LLM will bridge to AGI. And A LOT of speculation in the ai companies is based on this assumption it will displace labor costs. That doesn’t look like its going to happen on a meaningful scale.

AI chatbots lead the way on adoption and usage

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:41:32 +0000

More than four in 10 employees surveyed in Q2 2025 who used AI at least yearly indicated that they used AI technology to consolidate information (42%) and generate ideas (41%) and 36% said they used it to learn new things. What employees reported using AI for did not change meaningfully from Gallup’s initial measure in Q2 2024.

I have to remember that working in software means I’m getting a lot more value from AI than probably 99% of other use cases.

leverage the answer is leverage

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:38:48 +0000

Compensation and influence increase as you work your way up the derivative ladder because abstraction, fueled by financial and social capital, enables compound leverage. This model explains a possible not-too-distant future where the people who control the models are more powerful than the elected President.

Or maybe the domino effect? When you compete on skills the labor pool is large and the demand is elastic. However it seems there are very few positions or even people capable of running multi continental corporations. Hence their skill in this is compensated at the level to move markets.

great take on why AGI isn't realistic and how limited AI applications are

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:35:39 +0000

The US and China follow two different approaches to AI. The US follows the idea that there will be one winner who takes it all – the one that builds superintelligence wins. Even coming short of superintelligence of AGI, if you have the best model, almost all people will use your model and not the competition’s model. The idea is: develop the biggest, badest model and people will come.

China’s philosophy is different. They believe model capabilities do not matter as much as application. What matters is how you use AI. The key indicator of progress is how much AI is integrated into everything and how useful it is. If one model is better than another, it does not automatically mean it will be used more widely. What is important is that the model is useful and yields productivity gains at a reasonable cost. If the current approach is more productive than the previous one, it will be adopted. But hyper-optimization for slightly better quality is not very effective. In most cases, settling on “good enough” yields the highest productivity gain. … In summary, AGI, as commonly conceived, will not happen because it ignores the physical constraints of computation, the exponential costs of linear progress, and the fundamental limits we are already encountering. Superintelligence is a fantasy because it assumes that intelligence can recursively self-improve without bound, ignoring the physical and economic realities that constrain all systems.

two ideas to detect production issues

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:24:08 +0000

Add request ID propagation to every service call today. Use OpenTelemetry—it’s 10 lines of code. Implement circuit breakers with reasonable timeouts (use Resilience4j for JVM, Polly for .NET, or Opossum for Node.js).

The circuit breakers I was aware of. Passing through IDs has to be as old as console.log('here '+id) but I wasn’t aware of the open standard. TIL!

_{Quote Citation: System Design Roadmap, “How Circular Dependencies Kill Your Microservices”, 2025-04-28, https://systemdr.substack.com/p/how-circular-dependencies-kill-your}

ship the whole app - not the pieces

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:15:43 +0000

We are converting nanosecond duration in-process code to millisecond duration out-of-process calls, so thousands of times slower, more complicated to write, more difficult to understand, more difficult to ensure data consistency, and so on.

I agree. Intra-app communication should be a monolith by design. You have a million other optimizations to solve before microservices

_{Quote Citation: Peter Morris, “Seeing through the microservices hype – Peter Morris”, 2025-12-09, https://peterlesliemorris.com/seeing-through-the-microservices-hype/}

another micro service -> monolith story (2018)

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:07:40 +0000

However, a new problem began to arise. Testing and deploying changes to these shared libraries impacted all of our destinations. It began to require considerable time and effort to maintain. Making changes to improve our libraries, knowing we’d have to test and deploy dozens of services, was a risky proposition. When pressed for time, engineers would only include the updated versions of these libraries on a single destination’s codebase. Over time, the versions of these shared libraries began to diverge across the different destination codebases. The great benefit we once had of reduced customization between each destination codebase started to reverse. Eventually, all of them were using different versions of these shared libraries. We could’ve built tools to automate rolling out changes, but at this point, not only was developer productivity suffering but we began to encounter other issues with the microservice architecture.

when has double-or-nothing ever gone wrong. a deep dive into the shady finances of AI deals

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 17:59:42 +0000

At the center of the action is Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company. Companies that train and run AI systems, such as Anthropic and OpenAI, need Nvidia’s chips but don’t have the cash on hand to pay for them. Nvidia, meanwhile, has plenty of cash but needs customers to keep buying its chips. So the parties have made a series of deals in which the AI companies are effectively paying Nvidia by handing over a share of their future profits in the form of equity. The chipmaker has struck more than 50 deals this year, including a $100 billion investment in OpenAI and (with Microsoft) a $15 billion investment in Anthropic. Formally, these transactions don’t obligate the AI companies to spend money on Nvidia’s chips—an Nvidia spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company “does not require any of the companies we invest in to use Nvidia technology”—but in practice, that’s where the money goes. … Together, these arrangements amount to an entire industry making a double-or-nothing bet on a product that is nowhere near profitable. A single company, OpenAI, is simultaneously a major source of revenue and investment for several cloud companies and chipmakers; a close financial partner to Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon; a significant customer for Nvidia; and a leading investor in AI start-ups. And yet the company is projected to generate only $10 billion this year in revenue—less than a fifth of what it needs annually just to fund its deal with Oracle. It is on track to lose at least $15 billion this year, and doesn’t expect to be profitable until at least 2029. … Meta has described its arrangement with Blue Owl as an “innovative partnership” that is “designed to support the speed and flexibility required for Meta’s data center projects.” But the reason the credit-rating system exists is to give lenders and investors a clear sense of the risk they are taking on when they issue a loan. A long history exists of companies trying to circumvent that system. In the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, several major financial institutions used SPVs to keep billions of dollars in household debt off of their balance sheets. Enron, the energy corporation that famously collapsed in 2001 after a massive accounting scandal, used SPVs to mask its shady accounting practices. “When I see arrangements like this, it’s a huge red flag,” Paul Kedrosky, a managing partner at SK Ventures and research fellow at MIT who has written extensively about financial-engineering techniques, told me. “It sends the signal that these companies really don’t want the credit-rating agencies to look too closely at their spending.”

The end of the internet

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:44:06 +0000

You should now turn off your computer and go do something useful with the rest of your life. *

One of my favorite places.

_{Quote Citation: hmpg.net, “End of the Internet”, 1995, https://hmpg.net/}

prose - hardly know her

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:42:34 +0000

Another difference is that, with software, you have proxies for measuring how well you’re doing. For a functional requirement (like adding a new feature, e.g.), you usually have a clear indicator of success: the feature either works or it doesn’t. For a non-functional requirement, you have benchmarks you can run to test resource usage, latency, frames per second, or some other metrics that you might find relevant. Writers don’t have such proxies. There’s no definitive way of knowing if your writing will resonate with anyone out there.

everyone wants to write their own language at least once

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:40:26 +0000

Did you know that there is scientific proof that humor increase creativity? Laughter and humor are very complex cognitive functions that involve the entire brain. While the left brain hemisphere “sets up” the joke, the right one helps understanding it.

Disappointed https://esolangs.org/wiki/ArnoldC didn’t make the cut

_{Quote Citation: Nevena Sofranic, “10 Weirdest Programming Languages | Programming”, 2018-08-08, https://www.omnesgroup.com/weirdest-programming/}

programming is a task not the job

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:33:40 +0000

This is what I keep coming back to when I see another “Programming is dead” post go viral. The companies building AI, the ones who supposedly know exactly what it can and can’t do, are spending billions to acquire engineering talent. Not fire them, acquire them. Here’s my take: AI can replace most of programming, but programming isn’t the job. Programming is a task. It’s one of many things you do as part of your work. But if you’re a software engineer, your actual job is more than typing code into an editor.

ai cannot cut code - only add

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:30:53 +0000

But in the aftermath - 84 thousand! We went 20k -> 84k on “improvements” to the quality of the codebase.

Fun experiement in having AI ‘make the code better’. Results. A code base 4x the size with no new features.. Fun

_{Quote Citation: gricha.dev, “The highest quality codebase”, December 7, 2025, https://gricha.dev/blog/the-highest-quality-codebase}

experience with shape-up sprints (6 weeks)

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:27:30 +0000

But our biggest struggle was that our projects were often smaller than the standard cycle size. We found ourselves trying to plan several smaller projects into a single 6-week cycle, effectively trying to run a planning two months ahead to fill the bucket which is more difficult and less reliable than in a shorter cadence. We lost the flexibility to reprioritize every two weeks, but we didn’t gain the benefit of deep, singular focus on one large feature. It also meant ‘fast-follows’ on projects to steer impact had to wait until the next cycle.

I'll be using an IDE in 2026

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:25:25 +0000

Yegge argues that the current developer workflow, heavily reliant on manual coding within an IDE, is fundamentally outdated in an age of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence. He posits that the tools developers cling to, while familiar, are akin to using a typewriter when sophisticated word processors are available. This resistance to adopting powerful AI-native tools, he contends, creates a significant productivity gap, leaving countless engineering hours on the table. The industry’s comfort with established practices, coupled with a lack of awareness regarding AI’s true capabilities, prevents a necessary evolution.

quick history of perl and other languages

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:23:32 +0000

There are also the other obvious contenders. PHP has been there all along, and it’s almost coming up from entirely the opposite cultural background of Perl. PHP is a users language. It’s built to be deployed by copying script files to your home directory, with minimal server side impact or privileges. It’s barely designed at all, but it encounters explosive growth all the way through the first (and through into the second) web era, almost entirely because it makes the barrier to onboarding so low as to be non-existent. PHP gets a couple of extra free shots in the arm

AI can only tackle tasks not jobs - and even that not so great

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:22:03 +0000

One economist at Stanford who tracks the use of generative AI at work found a major drop in usage month to month: though 46 percent of respondents reported using the tech in June, that number had fallen to 37 percent by September. Another estimate, by Fintech firm Ramp, found that AI use at American corporations went through the roof earlier in 2025 to around 40 percent, but has since plateaued.

there is always more work

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:20:35 +0000

“I want every task that is possible to be automated with artificial intelligence to be automated with artificial intelligence,” he added. “I promise you, you will have work to do.”

I think the sentiment of ‘use it even if it doesn’t work’ is too extreme. But I do agree there is always more work to do

_{Quote Citation: Dave Smith, “‘Are you insane?’: Billionaire CEO Jensen Huang blasts Nvidia managers who are ’telling their people to use less AI’ | Fortune”, November 25, 2025, 10:01 AM ET, https://fortune.com/2025/11/25/nvidia-jensen-huang-insane-to-not-use-ai-for-every-task-possible/}

great representation from non-product teams

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:18:29 +0000

In the product environments Sean describes, where goals pivot quarterly and features are often experimental, speed is the ultimate currency. You need to ship, iterate, and often move on before the market shifts. But in Infrastructure and Developer Experience, context is the currency.

Agree 100% that for product facing teams. Being in the spotlight is to deliver what is desired. But for infra and platform. The last thing you want is to be in the spotlight. You want to be the scaffolding that supports the product.

golang is on my list

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:11:45 +0000

Go is minimal in service of corporate collaboration. I don’t mean that as a slight—building software in a corporate environment has its own challenges, which Go solves for.

least not for the cute mascot

_{Quote Citation: sinclairtarget.com, “Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig | Sinclair Target”, Aug 09, 2025, https://sinclairtarget.com/blog/2025/08/thoughts-on-go-vs.-rust-vs.-zig/}

startups - check your security

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:10:45 +0000

I saw a snippet in a JS file like POST await fetch(${BOX_SERVICE}/recommend). This piqued my interest – recommend what? And what is the BOX_SERVICE? That variable was not defined in the JS file the fetch would be called from, but (after looking through minified code, which SUCKS to do) I found it in another one: “dxxxxxx9.execute-api.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prod”. Now I had a new endpoint to test, I just had to figure out the correct payload structure to it. After looking at more minified js to determine the correct structure for this endpoint, I was able to construct a working payload to /prod/recommend:

no surprise - AI being auto-enabled with Google/MSFT/Meta

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:05:52 +0000

So how are Big Tech companies claiming huge revenues from AI? By tricking or forcing their customers into using it and paying for it.

Call me crazy. But features you want to charge me more for should be opt-in not opt-out

_{Quote Citation: 65721, “This is how Big Tech is booking “AI revenues”—by tricking or forcing customers to use it : r/BetterOffline”, 2025-12-09, https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/comments/1pi1858/this_is_how_big_tech_is_booking_ai_revenuesby/}

I heard you like agents - I got you agents

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:03:14 +0000

AWS claims the vibe coding IDE Kiro is designed to avoid all the pitfalls of letting AI do your development, like surprise drive deletions and database wipeouts. Users will have to put a lot of trust in those claims.

Ah yes. agents all the way down

_{Quote Citation: Brandon Vigliarolo, “AWS announces trio of autonomous AI agents for developers • The Register”, Tue 2 Dec 2025 // 22:46 UTC, https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/02/aws_kiro_devops_coding_agents/}

GraphQL better in theory than practice

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:01:16 +0000

GraphQL solves a real problem, but that problem is far more niche than people admit. In most enterprise setups, it’s already solved elsewhere, and when you add up the tradeoffs, GraphQL often ends up being a net negative.

At all companies I’ve worked at. The best query for the job was the one that was most optimized for the front-end.

_{Quote Citation: johnjames.blog, “GraphQL: the enterprise honeymoon is over”, December 14, 2025, https://johnjames.blog/posts/graphql-the-enterprise-honeymoon-is-over}

macroeconomics is out - vibes are in

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 03:47:35 +0000

Economists’ way of thinking has fallen out of favor among the political class more broadly. The right has embraced Trump’s zero-sum worldview and lost faith in expertise generally. Many progressives have rejected economists’ fundamental focus on trade-offs and the unintended consequences of policy interventions. Both sides are down on the free market.

All this to say. Americans are hurting. Both from rising costs, corporate profits and international changes in exports/imports. I’m not an economist and know enough to shut up.

hear me out - K-5 Paper based learning

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 03:25:32 +0000

“It makes no sense to me,” Byock said. “We’ve banned the cellphones, but it doesn’t matter, because the kids are using the school-issued devices in exactly the same way.” … The discontent in Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district in the country, reflects a growing unease nationally about the amount of time children spend learning through screens in classrooms. While a majority of states prohibit children from using cellphones in class, 88% of schools provide students with personal devices, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, often Chromebook laptops or iPads.

incentives begets outcomes - why the race for AGI trumps ethics

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 03:19:39 +0000

With the currently-common belief in a winner-take-all race towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), the potential strategic advantage of highly advanced models may soon lead companies to leverage their models confidentially and internally to increase technical progress—but providing little signal of advancement to competitors and the broader outside world.

Explicit stated here. for all the hand wringing over how much is spent on AI, no executive can battle the perception of what if they’re wrong. its agi or bust. My money is on bust in the short term, transformational in the long term.

the architects of AI - person(s) of the year

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 03:16:53 +0000

These new tools can feel like magic. In the past few weeks alone, we’ve learned that AI could facilitate communication with whales, solve an unsolved 30-year-old math problem, and outperform traditional hurricane-prediction models. These systems are improving at a blistering pace, taking seconds to perform work that once took people hours. AI’s capabilities double nearly twice a year now, according to one study. The speed of adoption has been without precedent. “Every industry needs it, every company uses it, and every nation needs to build it,” Jensen Huang, who leads Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company and one of the world’s most influential AI leaders, tells TIME. “This is the single most impactful technology of our time.”

again - hear me out. pay taxes in the locale you live in

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 03:13:08 +0000

Their lives are deeply woven into the city, where they have networks of family, friends, medical care and social activities, and those ties would have to be significantly curtailed or severed entirely. Moving would uproot not just their lives but also those of their family members, including children, who would have to be enrolled in new schools.

On a much smaller scale I live in a village with its own taxes. And people say “don’t you wish you didn’t have to pay that”. And my response is, the roads are clean, the streets/sidewalks are plowed and there’s 3 parks within walking distance… the schools have UPK and meals provided. I get a lot for the taxes collected.

quotas to sell AI cut by up to 50%

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 03:06:16 +0000

As such, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Microsoft is struggling to sell its enterprise clients on its own take on agentic AI. As The Information reports, the company’s Azure salespeople are seriously struggling to meet some extremely ambitious sales growth targets, cutting quotas by up to 50 percent earlier this year.

I mean. It’s just not that useful in MSFT core products as I’ve noted elsewhere.

critique of jobs that don't exist - proceeds to list examples that stop in 1970

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 03:01:13 +0000

Whether it’s a job replaced by technology or one rendered obsolete by societal changes, each example highlights the resilience and innovation of human progress.

I think what this piece misses is that it’s the unprecedented pace of change in the past 50 years that humanity is struggling with. My grandmother was a typist for almost 30 years. Retired with a pension. That is unheard of today.

_{Quote Citation: Upperclasscareer, “Forgotten Professions: 20 Jobs That No Longer Exist | Upper-Class Career”, December 12, 2024, https://upperclasscareer.com/forgotten-professions-20-jobs-that-no-longer-exist/}

anything but good governance

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 02:58:54 +0000

“Can you imagine being that rich and that miserable?” Olivier Jutel, a researcher in cyberlibertarianism at the University of Otago in New Zealand told the FT. “They think they are the grand solutionists that can fix all the problems, but it’s so insular. But just because it’s stupid doesn’t mean it won’t inherit the Earth.”

OR. hear me out. Pay taxes.. I always liked the joke that a libertarian is someone who’s born on 3rd base and walks home.

supply and demand of CS graduates

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 02:35:00 +0000

Students at engineering colleges in India, China, Dubai, and Kenya are facing a “jobpocalypse” as artificial intelligence replaces humans in entry-level roles. Tasks once assigned to fresh graduates, such as debugging, testing, and routine software maintenance, are now increasingly automated.

Over the last three years, the number of fresh graduates hired by big tech companies globally has declined by more than 50%,

Demand slumped. Supply is huge. Macroeconomics at work regardless of the hurt feelings.

the cost of missing the innovation is greater than burning the capital

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 02:32:21 +0000

After a year in which trillions of dollars worth of AI investments buoyed global markets and the economy, 68% of CEOs plan to spend even more on AI in 2026, according to an annual survey of more than 350 public-company CEOs from advisory firm Teneo.

Less than half of current AI projects had generated more in returns than they had cost, respondents said. They reported the most success using AI in marketing and customer service and challenges using it in higher-risk areas such as security, legal and human resources.

MSFT suite not doing well with AI

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 02:29:30 +0000

Petulance aside, tests from earlier this year found that AI agents failed to complete tasks up to 70% of the time, making them almost entirely redundant as a workforce replacement tool. At best, they’re a way for skilled employees to be more productive and save time on low-level tasks, but those tasks were already being handed off to lower-level employees. Having an AI do it and fail half the time isn’t exactly a winning alternative.

build what works. optimize later

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 02:26:38 +0000

A single executable on a modest cloud instance can often handle the entire user load of a well-funded startup through its first five to ten years of growth. The bottleneck is almost always the database, not the application architecture.

Nothing worse than premature optimization. I think anyways.

IMO this architecture took off because “monoliths” became too “hard” to upgrade.

_{Quote Citation: sasha, “The Case Against Microservices”, DEC 14, 2025, https://sashafoundtherootcauseagain.substack.com/p/the-case-against-microservices}

ai helps find drill sites for geo-thermal

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 02:12:50 +0000

The AI models Zanskar uses are fed information on where blind systems already exist. This data is plentiful as, over the last century and more, humans have accidentally stumbled on many around the world while drilling for other resources such as oil and gas.

The models then scour huge amounts of data — everything from rock composition to magnetic fields — to find patterns that point to the existence of geothermal reserves. AI models have “gotten really good over the last 10 years at being able to pull those types of signals out of noise,” Hoiland said.

never doubt an inspired engineer

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 02:09:33 +0000

“Well, you know, I was raised on Star Trek, and all the good ideas come from Star Trek. So I said what if we could just do it all electronically? What if I could store an image electronically, capture an image electronically, and I don’t require any film at all?” … “I wanted to build a camera with no moving parts. Now that was just to annoy the mechanical engineers. Most cameras at the time were mechanical marvels, and I couldn’t build a mechanical camera to save my life. So I thought, since these guys are the cream of the crop, I’ll just make one with no moving parts, and that’ll annoy the hell out of them.”

more money - more time on exams

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 01:54:41 +0000

The Journal analysis shows that at public schools in wealthier areas, where no more than 10% of students are eligible for free or reduced-cost school lunches, an average of 4.2% of students have 504 designations giving them special test-taking allowances such as extra time.

Only 1.6% of students have these designations at public schools in poorer areas, defined as those where 75% or more of students are eligible for free and reduced-cost lunches, the Journal found.

when having a diagnosis gives an advantage - follow the money

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 01:52:29 +0000

At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent. Not all of those students receive accommodations, but researchers told me that most do. The schools that enroll the most academically successful students, in other words, also have the largest share of students with a disability that could prevent them from succeeding academically.

Pretty wild to me that elite institutions have a higher disability rate than the general population. This combined with WSJ coverage leads me to infer that parents are buying time literally for their kids. More time to complete the assignment correlates with higher grades

f-150 lightening fizzles out

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 01:42:38 +0000

Ford still plans to produce a midsize electric pickup truck with a target starting price of about $30,000, to be available in 2027.

I believe it when I see it. I bought a wait list ticket for the F150 lightening. The 40k price was no where to be found. The cheapest I could find it was 80k. Ridiculous.

_{Quote Citation: Aarian Marshall, “Ford Kills the All-Electric F-150 as It Rethinks Its EV Ambitions | WIRED”, 2025-12-15, https://www.wired.com/story/ford-kills-electric-f-150-lightning-for-hybrid/}

the debt trades alone between companies doesn't pass the smell test

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 01:40:50 +0000

This context of AI’s limitations, the impossibility of industry-wide profitability, the gravy train of debt that is keeping this entire thing afloat starting to close, and Nvidia’s highly dependent and wildly undiversified revenue stream are utterly essential. This is a huge shame, because if they did, we would all see just how much of a hollow ruse this all is and how the AI industry is driving itself off a cliff at 150 mph, with the entire Western economy in the passenger seat. Mark my words, this earnings report isn’t the calm before the storm. It is the calm before the Category 5 hurricane.

re-founding this blog to be AI (/s)

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 01:26:47 +0000

Once a company decides what business it’s really in — in many cases, the business of A.I. — the stakes are high. Conventional wisdom says that you can found a company only once. The refounding mind-set suggests that perhaps founders can get another go.

“born-again” company? I digress. re-founding focused on AI feels like you’re focused on the feature and not the mission. But we’ll see.

_{Quote Citation: https://www.nytimes.com/by/lora-kelley, “Don’t Call It a Pivot. These Executives Are ‘Refounding’ Their Start-Ups. - The New York Times”, 2025-12-06, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/06/business/refounding-startups-ai.html}

algorithmic AI comes for podcasts

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 01:23:59 +0000

Inception Point’s ability to flood the market with audio episodes faster than any human team could match starkly illustrates both the promise of AI and the nightmare scenario that it can truly come after every job. Even as companies have shed more than a million jobs this year, with many citing AI as a reason, there was a belief that certain creative roles would be safe.

I think what people need to realize is that if the ROI is at 20 streams, filling the void with nonsense can be profitable. Given the prevalence of the dead internet theory I just wonder how many companies are paying to run ads on these peusdo casts.

CHOP is the new rubber duck programming

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 01:22:06 +0000

In the world of chat-oriented programming, understanding a codebase is more akin to having a robotic travel guide who can not only guide you through the forest, but highlight points of interest, explain the local fauna, and speed-run the trails to help you find the quickest path. To bring it back to coding, your AI coding assistant can summarize modules, explain obscure functions, and provide clear and concise answers to your questions. Instead of digging through a directory, you simply ask your questions in natural language, and the AI coding assistant goes and finds all the relevant files for that query, uses those files as context, and gives you a tailored answer then and there.

AI for the masses

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 01:09:53 +0000

 A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT.

I said we needed "enterprise-grade security."

He asked what that meant.

I said "compliance."

He asked which compliance.

I said "all of them."

He looked skeptical.

I scheduled him for a "career development conversation."

He stopped asking questions.

Absolute gold

_{Quote Citation: X (formerly Twitter), “(21) Peter Girnus 🦅 on X: “Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it “digital transformation.” The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I” / X”, 2025-12-11, https://x.com/gothburz/status/1999124665801880032}

the weakest link

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 01:03:10 +0000

Open-source projects frequently see waves of discoveries when either the community or focused researchers analyze a particular subsystem. The recent Angular disclosures are consistent with this pattern: once the ecosystem began looking more closely at certain areas, such as SSR and HttpClient, latent issues began to emerge.

I mean heart bleed was out there for years and no one noticed. Attackers just move to the weakest link.

_{Quote Citation: herodevs.com, “HeroDevs Blog | When “No CVEs” Isn’t a Security Guarantee: What the Latest Angular Vulnerabilities Reveal About Open-Source Risk”, Dec 2, 2025, https://www.herodevs.com/blog-posts/when-no-cves-isnt-a-security-guarantee-what-the-latest-angular-vulnerabilities-reveal-about-open-source-risk}

offshore labor from 10% job postings to almost 30%

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:48:11 +0000

Back in early 2020, about 11% of Amazon’s job postings were in offshore locations. Nothing unusual there.

But then something shifted. The percentage started climbing during the pandemic hiring boom and just… kept going. By 2023, it had hit 20%. Today? Nearly 28%.

Amazon has more than doubled the share of jobs that they plan to hire offshore in just five years. The % of job postings that are in offshored countries has increased 154% since 2020, to be exact (2.5x)

McKinsey state of AI 2025

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:43:02 +0000

Redesigning workflows is a key success factor: Half of those AI high performers intend to use AI to transform their businesses, and most are redesigning workflows

There’s a lot more in this 30 page report, and wild that it’s free too. But I think this point is key. Applying AI on top of existing workflows forces a new paradigm onto an old one. Better to think through how to leverage the unique capabilities of AI

PMF is elusive

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:27:43 +0000

I told myself I just needed to build more. The next feature would be the one.

I really applaud Austin Starks for being so open and transparent about his pursuit of a profitable project. And I think like a lot of engineers convinced that ‘just one more feature’ would be the viral sensation.

While the product does generate revenue, it seems Austin is back at a w2 job. Congrats Austin, thanks for sharing your journey with us.

ai is coming for TASKS not JOBS

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:23:43 +0000

Hinton’s advice for students is to focus on skills like math, statistics, probability, and linear algebra. These are long-lasting skills that won’t disappear, even as AI becomes more powerful. He also suggests learning to code, even if AI may handle most of it in the future. He compares it to learning Latin: you might never use the language in daily life, but learning it still strengthens your thinking.

right because “Math major” really makes you think “job security”? I wish he framing around “job loss” would focus more on “task loss”. I add no value to the organization writing one line or one million lines. I add value by delivering working software (see simon duly noted)

Jesus who hurt you? picking on ruby is an odd take for WIRED

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:21:06 +0000

I’m not the only person who’s bearish on Ruby. On Stack Overflow’s annual developer survey, it’s been slipping in popularity for years, going from a top-10 technology in 2013 to 18th this year—behind even Assembly. Among newer developers, Python and JavaScript rank much higher. Ruby persists, for now, as a kind of professional comfort object, sustained by the inertia of legacy code bases and the loyalty of those who first imprinted upon it. But nostalgia and a pretty name won’t cut it.

generating code alone is of no value

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:13:52 +0000

As software engineers we don’t just crank out code—in fact these days you could argue that’s what the LLMs are for. We need to deliver code that works—and we need to include proof that it works as well. Not doing that directly shifts the burden of the actual work to whoever is expected to review our code.

I love how simply stated this is. Which is probably why it’s making the rounds on the inter webs. AI doesn’t deliver code proven to work. It generates code that might work. Its still someones job to prove it works.

iceberg project pdf - ai exposure of tasks

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 01:17:52 +0000

The labor market is evolving faster than current data systems can capture. AI automates some skills and augments others, creating uneven effects across industries and regions. Much of this activity occurs on digital platforms—gig marketplaces, AI copilots, freelance networks—that fall outside conventional reporting [23]. By the time these changes appear in official statistics, policymakers may already be reacting to yesterday’s disruptions, committing billions to programs that target skills already displaced. Without forward-looking capability to test strategies before implementation, states cannot distinguish investments that prepare workers from those that arrive too late.

more spec driven development

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 01:06:02 +0000

A new AI coding tool from Amazon uses agents to automatically create and update project plans and technical blueprints, aiming to solve an increasingly common business headache: undocumented AI-written software that becomes difficult or impossible to maintain.

Ah yes. With just perfect specifications we’ll get perfect code…

_{Quote Citation: TODD BISHOP, “Amazon targets vibe-coding chaos with new ‘Kiro’ AI software development tool – GeekWire”, Jul 14, 2025 at 7:50 am, https://www.geekwire.com/2025/amazon-targets-vibe-coding-chaos-with-new-kiro-ai-software-development-tool/}

AI = another individual doing the work

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:58:46 +0000

The exposed panel included a list of people tasked with annotating Flock’s footage. Taking those names, 404 Media found some were located in the Philippines, according to their LinkedIn and other online profiles.

Many of these people were employed through Upwork, according to the exposed material. Upwork is a gig and freelance work platform where companies can hire designers and writers or pay for “AI services,” according to Upwork’s website.

great paragraph on who LLMs work and why thats a limitation

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:56:05 +0000

So then came transformers. Seemingly capable of true AI, or, at least, scaling to being good enough to be called true AI, with astonishing capabilities. For the uninitiated, a transformer is basically a big pile of linear algebra that takes a sequence of tokens and computes the likeliest next token. More specifically, they are fed one token at a time, which builds an internal state that ultimately guides the generation of the next token. This sounds bizarre and probably impossible, but the huge research breakthrough was figuring out that, by starting with essentially random coefficients (weights and biases) in the linear algebra, and during training back-propagating errors, these weights and biases could eventually converge on something that worked. Exactly why this works is still somewhat mysterious, though progress has been made. … With transformers, generating wrong output looks exactly like generating correct output, and there is no way to know which is which.

get out - a virtual reality no one asked for tanks

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:48:46 +0000

Mark Zuckerberg’s bet on immersive online worlds has lost the company more than $77 billion

I think the irony here is, as majority voting shareholder there is no accountability on this bad bet.

_{Quote Citation: georgia wells, “Meta Plans to Shift Spending Away From the Metaverse - WSJ”, 2025-12-04, https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-plans-to-shift-spending-away-from-the-metaverse-d0ac3b7f}

GAID - AI dependency

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:44:05 +0000

GenAI appears to have highly addictive qualities. I am not a psychologist, psychiatrist, counselor, or trained mental health expert - but I certainly feel like I might be getting addicted. Areas where I used to feel confident in my own skills and abilities — like writing concise, thorough, balanced emails — have now become areas where I consistently reach out to AI for feedback. The 2015 version of me would be quite disturbed.

The brain on LLMs

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:40:00 +0000

Many people are becoming reliant on AI to navigate some of the most basic aspects of daily life. A colleague suggested that we might even call the most extreme users “LLeMmings”—yes, because they are always LLM-ing, but also because their near-constant AI use conjures images of cybernetic lemmings unable to act without guidance. For this set of compulsive users, AI has become a primary interface through which they interact with the world. The emails they write, the life decisions they make, and the questions that consume their mind all filter through AI first. “It’s like a real addiction,” Metz told me.

countdown to bitcoin fall off?

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:34:18 +0000

The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act was signed into law June 18, establishing a regulatory framework for the issuance and transaction of payment stablecoins in the U.S. The law goes into effect 18 months after enactment (December 2026) or 120 days after the Federal Reserve Board (FRB), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) and the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) issue final regulations, whichever is earlier.

measured attention span falling precipitously

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:32:33 +0000

It’s well documented that attention spans are declining rapidly. Gloria Mark, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, told the Speaking of Psychology podcast that the average attention span has dramatically decreased in recent years. “Back in 2004, we found the average attention span on any screen to be two-and-a-half minutes,” she said. “Around 2012, it dropped to 75 seconds. In the last few years, it’s about 47 seconds—and the median is just 40 seconds.”

the value of doing something not done before

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:21:47 +0000

The headline finding is striking: 27% of all Claude-assisted tasks were pieces of work that “would not have been done otherwise.”

I think this is striking. And hold true for myself as well. Many things AI helps me do I just wouldn’t have done at all before…

_{Quote Citation: Interview Query, “Inside Anthropic: 27% of Work Now Done by AI — But Engineers Warn of Growing Skill Erosion”, 2025-12-03, https://www.interviewquery.com/p/anthropic-ai-skill-erosion-report}

Anthropic to market?

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:19:06 +0000

Anthropic, the AI startup behind the popular Claude chatbot, is in early talks to launch one of the largest initial public offerings as early as next year, the Financial Times reported Wednesday.

I think if they take a lesson from the ZIRP era, better to go public while the money is good..

_{Quote Citation: CNBC, “Anthropic reportedly preparing for massive IPO in race with OpenAI: FT”, 2025-12-03, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/03/anthropic-claude-reportedly-preparing-ipo-race-openai-chatgpt-ft-wilson-sonsini-goodrich-rosati.html}

ai in the college education

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:16:01 +0000

“Machines can already do most of what we ask students to do — and often do it better,” Mintz wrote on LinkedIn. “When 400 students can generate identical essays in 30 seconds, the problem isn’t the students. The problem is the assignment.”

Noted this elsewhere. but college is so expensive that the only rational outcome for students is fastest path to a degree.

_{Quote Citation: Thibault Spirlet, “AI Didn’t Break College — It Exposed a Broken System, a Professor Says - Business Insider”, Nov 30, 2025, 5:35 AM ET, https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-didnt-break-college-it-exposed-broken-system-professor-2025-11}

an ode to mediocrity

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:09:54 +0000

Crap code is tolerated

Despite the fact most code is crap, the world keeps turning. I’ve seen many founders exit before the cracks in their technology had time to widen enough to hurt them. I’ve seen developers move on long before the consequences of their decisions landed. That time lag has allowed mediocrity to thrive.

Most organisations don’t even recognise what good engineering looks like. They treat software development as a commodity – a manufacturing production line – measured by how many features are shipped rather than whether the right outcomes are achieved. Few understand the value of investing in modern software engineering best practices and design – the things that make those outcomes sustainable.

"There’s always more work." - life of a software developer

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:06:08 +0000

Whenever I’m threatened with a good time and someone proclaims “this is it for you” all that happens is my job becomes more annoying. Haven’t gotten the sweet release of extinction quite yet.

Great sobering reminder that “there’s always more work”.

_{Quote Citation: jasonscheirer.com, “A Series of Vignettes From My Childhood and Early Career”, 2025-11-27, https://www.jasonscheirer.com/weblog/vignettes/}

vibe-prototypes by PMs

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:00:49 +0000

“PMs are actually vibe coding products, and we’re showing them to Zuck and leadership, and it’s allowing us to iterate and explore the space really fast,” said Joseph Spisak, a product director in Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL), onstage at the TechEquity AI Summit in Sunnyvale, California, on Friday.

Companion note to the Instagram note. The fact is, the most expensive part of the idea, the prototype can now be accomplished in a few weeks instead of months, And by one person instead of a team.

Speed of idea to prototype

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:59:29 +0000

The Instagram chief also called for more product prototypes than slide decks.

“Prototypes allow us to establish a proof of concept and get a real sense for social dynamics, and we use them far too infrequently,” Mosseri wrote.

Buried in this back to office mandate is one key fact. I agree, prototypes are now just as fast or nearly as fast to build as slide decks. Why build decks when you can build prototypes?

colleges chase the AI fad

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:57:44 +0000

Administrators understandably want to “future proof” their graduates at a time when the workforce is rapidly transforming. But such policies represent a dangerously hasty and uninformed response to the technology. Based on the available evidence, the skills that future graduates will most need in the AI era—creative thinking, the capacity to learn new things, flexible modes of analysis—are precisely those that are likely to be eroded by inserting AI into the educational process.

broken clocks are right twice a day

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:55:33 +0000

ChatGPT, like many chatbots, is pitched as a hyper-competent personal assistant. But among the many things that confuse it, one is particularly confounding: It cannot tell time.

I mean LLMs weren’t built to tell time? I think this is more proof that a real LLM/AI system will need to blend traditional application development with LLMs. Its why now when you ask an LLM a math problem it passes it off to python as a script to get your answer.

always a new opinion on frameworks

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:54:17 +0000

React is the Walmart of JavaScript frameworks. It’s everywhere, it’s massive, it’s not particularly elegant, but it gets the job done. Meta’s baby has grown into an absolute unit, dominating job listings, GitHub stars, and the collective anxiety of junior developers trying to understand why useEffect fired seventeen times when they only wanted it to run once.

OGs remember Ember vs knockout, prototype.js vs scriptaculous.. jQuery.. Yahoo UI!

I think at this point react is settling in as the java jdk of the web. Good enough for most but pales in comparison to Wordpress..

serious growth concerns with AI markets

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:51:31 +0000

Global Investment Research projects that OpenAI still won’t be profitable by 2030, even though its consumer base will grow by that point to comprise some 44% of the world’s adult population (up from 10% in 2025). Beyond that, it will need at least another $207 billion of compute to keep up with its growth plans. This stark assessment reflects soaring infrastructure costs, heightened competition, and an AI market that is surging in demand and cash-intensive to a degree beyond any technology trend in history. … HSBC, like many other banks writing on the AI revolution, returned again to the famous quote by Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow that “you can see the computer age everywhere but in productivity statistics,” noting drily that “poor productivity gains driven by weak total factor (labor and capital) productivity are an unfortunate characteristic of today’s developed economies.” In fact, the bank notes that some aren’t convinced of a meaningful return yet from the 30-year-old internet revolution itself, citing Federal Reserve president John Williams’s 2017 comment that “productivity provided by modern technologies like the internet has so far only influenced our consumption of leisure—and hasn’t yet trickled down to offices or factories.”

ai development stack - hint you still need developers

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:47:55 +0000

What does all of this mean for the 30 million software developers worldwide? Will AI replace software developers in the foreseeable future? Of course not. This nonsensical narrative is triggered by a mix of media sensationalism and aggressive marketing that attempts to price software not as per-seat, but as a replacement to human labor cost. History tells us that while substitution pricing works in early markets, eventually the cost of a good converges to its marginal cost, and so does pricing. So far, the limited actual data points that we have suggest that the most AI savvy enterprises increase hiring of developers, as they see a broad range of use cases with a short term positive ROI.

If the product is free - you're the product

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:41:29 +0000

OpenAI is now internally testing ‘ads’ inside ChatGPT that could redefine the web economy. Up until now, the ChatGPT experience has been completely free.

I mean. No brainer that ChatGPT can drive intent to purchases. But I do take issue with “completely free”. “Provided for free” maybe.

_{Quote Citation: @BleepinComputer, “Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out”, November 29, 2025 06:31 AM, https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/artificial-intelligence/leak-confirms-openai-is-preparing-ads-on-chatgpt-for-public-roll-out/}

TOS will always rule the day - don't regulate us we have to innovate

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:39:32 +0000

According to data released by OpenAI last month, roughly three million ChatGPT users display signs of serious mental health emergencies like emotional reliance on AI, psychosis, mania, and self-harm, with roughly more than a million users talking to the chatbot about suicide every week.

I really don’t understand why this is a problem. They (OpenAI) have NO problem detecting threats to protected classes. Surely they could detect threats of self harm…

senior title is about grok-ing systems efficiently

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:37:59 +0000

But if you strip away the title, the salary, and the years of experience, there’s one core skill that separates senior+ engineers from everyone else: reducing ambiguity. Everything else flows from that.

I think I’m a little hurt that managers can’t be included in this. I think the primary objective of every level below C-Suite is results. Those results may come from defined projects, but they could also come from fuzzy projects. Don’t leave me out just because I’m a manager.

don't look at the man (debt) behind the curtain

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:35:32 +0000

Recent data shows that companies are increasingly relying on debt, rather than real revenue and cashflow to fund commitments to OpenAI and vice-versa. OpenAI has made a truly staggering $1.4 trillion (with a T) in commitments for compute to meet its projected needs, despite posting a “paltry” $20 billion in revenues this annum. To put it into context, $20 billion represents just 1.43~% of that $1.4 trillion commitment. It’s a truly insane gap.

maker's schedule - a classic

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:33:59 +0000

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

I inherently feel this. My primary objective as a builder is large blocks of focus time. It can take up to 30-45 min to jsut reorient myself in whatever project I’m working on.

finally a mathematically approach to the context switching problem

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:25:58 +0000

It’s also why five 10-minute blocks don’t add up to one 50-minute block. When things are below your theta, things just don’t compound. Another way to think of this as fragmentation: interruptions can break your time into pieces too small to be useful, even if the total time is the same.

So good I wish I could bookmark it twice. Dives deep (pun intended) on how powerful getting into a flow state is for deep work.

ai not in bubble - says biggest beneficiary of said bubble

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:21:58 +0000

Nvidia said that “unlike Enron” – the US energy giant which collapsed into bankruptcy in 2001 – it has not been attempting to conceal any debt and is not distorting its sales.

We’re not committing cooking the books “exactly” like Enron could be better said I think…

_{Quote Citation: Matthew Field, “‘We are not Enron’: Nvidia rejects AI bubble fears”, 2025-11-25, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/11/25/we-are-not-enron-nvidia-rejects-ai-bubble-fears/}

the folly of knowledge

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:20:12 +0000

Think about what it means to have access to a brilliant friend who happens to have the knowledge of a doctor, lawyer, financial advisor, and expert in whatever you need. As a friend, they give you real information based on your specific situation rather than overly cautious advice driven by fear of liability or a worry that it’ll overwhelm you. Unlike seeing a professional in a formal context, a friend who happens to have the same level of knowledge will often speak frankly to you, help you understand your situation in full, actually engage with your problem and offer their personal opinion where relevant, and do all of this for free and in a way that’s available any time you need it. That’s what Claude could be for everyone.

incentive structure rewards moving code bases - so every code base has 'new' engineers on it

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 22:42:08 +0000

However, the average tenure of a codebase in a big tech company is a lot longer than that. Many of the services I work on are a decade old or more, and have had many, many different owners over the years. That means many big tech engineers are constantly “figuring it out”. A pretty high percentage of code changes are made by “beginners”: people who have onboarded to the company, the codebase, or even the programming language in the past six months.

chatgpt down - nobody panic

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 22:34:33 +0000

OpenAI’s AI-powered ChatGPT is down worldwide with users receiving errors when attempting to access chats, with no reasons currently given.

Must be true. This article contains no em-dashes :D

_{Quote Citation: Mayank Parmar, “ChatGPT is down worldwide, conversations disappeared for users”, December 2, 2025, https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-is-down-worldwide-conversations-disappeared-for-users/amp/}

when outputs are cheap validation becomes the job

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 17:42:23 +0000

As an example, Huang pointed to radiologists, who he says are now “more efficient” workers thanks to AI, processing more scans than ever before. (In reality, increased workloads are likely the result of a massive shortage of trained radiologists in the US, the kind of crisis which privately owned AI companies hope will bring immense profits.)

Would agree that labor market conditions have much more to do with supply/demand of labor rather than automation. But the point here from Nvidia is that when AI can generate infinite outputs suddenly your job is much harder in having to validate which have merit.

society has to determine what is fair and just - corporations won't

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 17:35:26 +0000

Like a prosecutor skillfully laying out a case, Wu explains how platforms like Amazon, Google, and Meta use their market power and stickiness to exploit people’s habits and laziness. Ultimately, platforms extract their users’ money–through higher prices as well as fees and taxes levied at developers who use the platforms for commerce. The book poses a question regarding business empires: “How can their power be balanced to ensure broad prosperity for everyone?” Wu’s answer in part reverts to history—how regulators tamed AT&T, IBM, and others, and how technological advances like the internet reshuffled the deck and enabled new players to enter the market.

workers concerns about AI adoption

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 17:28:23 +0000

“It’s not just about what will happen if they succeed in developing superintelligence,” says a decade-long veteran in Amazon’s entertainment business. “What we’re trying to say is, look, the costs we’re paying now aren’t worth it. We are in the few remaining years to avoid catastrophic warming.” … Some engineers are under pressure to use AI to double their productivity or else risk losing their jobs, according to a software development engineer in Amazon’s cloud computing division. But the engineer says that Amazon’s tools for writing code and technical documentation aren’t good enough to reach such ambitious targets. Another employee calls the AI outputs “slop.”

"its a bad year to be a junior anything"

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 19:56:26 +0000

But also another pattern, which is that a lot of people picked a bad year to be a junior developer. A whole lot of people. I wouldn’t want to be just getting started in the industry today.

Not just the computer industry. Any industry. It’s a bad year to be a junior anything.

Love the hot take on the industry by horror movies. Its been over a year and there ARE still JR roles, but other duly noted entries definitely indicate, just as he said “its a bad year to be a junior anything”

job market not working for new grads

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 19:54:16 +0000

forgot to capture notes while this wasn’t pay-walled. but the gist is that finding a job seems impossible in a way that wasn’t in the past.

_{Quote Citation: Annie Lowrey, “The Job Market Is Hell - The Atlantic”, 2025-09-08, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/job-market-hell/684133/}

PDF report on ai impact by Leaddev

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 19:50:22 +0000

As a result of AI usage, respondents feel the most in-demand competencies will be critical thinking (43%) and architectural design (34%) over the next three years. Other points of interest were domain expertise at 28% and communication skills at 27%.

Almost like writing code isn’t the hardest part of the job.

_{Quote Citation: leaddev.com, “https://leaddev.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/THE-AI-IMPACT-REPORT-2025-download__LDMO__.pdf", August 2026, The AI Impact Report 2025}

ai productivity metrics are just organizational health metrics

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 19:45:55 +0000

AI metrics can show:

How many and what types of developers are adopting AI tooling How much work and what kind is being touched by AI How much it costs Core engineering metrics show:

If teams are shipping faster If quality and reliability are increasing or decreasing If code maintainability is decreasing If AI tools are reducing friction in the developer workflow

I think this is great, you can measure how much engineers are utilizing AI but that doesn’t tell you how good the impact is.

claude code improves PR throughput while growing team size

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 19:40:12 +0000

But Anthropic saw a 67% increase in PR throughput as their team size doubled – thanks to Claude Code. It would have been normal for the average-PRs-merged metric to drop, but it actually went up! The credit for this is given to Claude Code: engineers get PRs done faster with it. In what might have been a lucky constellation of events, Anthropic doubled its engineering headcount at around the time that Claude Code was adopted across all of engineering.

TIL Solow's Paradox - or as I've understood it, the retooling time

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 19:30:21 +0000

As a pair of academics wrote recently in MIT Sloan Management Review, “The barrier to full automation isn’t raw capability—it’s a stack of human, legal and cultural constraints.”

Modern AI adoption is yet another example of a concept first described way back in 1987, called Solow’s Paradox. At the time, economist Robert Solow was studying how newly integrated computers were affecting worker productivity. His finding: They weren’t, at all.

In this productivity paradox, all that spending on shiny new computers and the digitization of work processes didn’t seem to make companies any more efficient or effective.

cina invest in technology as population declines

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 19:24:50 +0000

China installed 295,000 industrial robots last year, nearly nine times as many as the U.S. and more than the rest of the world combined, according to the International Federation of Robotics. China’s stock of operational robots surpassed two million in 2024, the most of any country. Of 131 factories and industrial sites recognized by the World Economic Forum globally for lifting productivity through cutting edge technologies such as AI, 45 are in mainland China, while three are in the U.S.

[meme] old man yells at clouds

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 02:49:40 +0000

First, search on Google. Then, hope some desperate soul had posed a similar question as you had. If they did, you’d find a detailed, thoughtful, (and often patronizing) answer from a wise greybeard on this site called “Stack Overflow”.

You can still LEARN from AI. You just have to apply critical thinking and not copy/paste solutions.

_{Quote Citation: https://nmn.gl, “New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code | N’s Blog”, 2025-02-14, https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-and-learning}

leveraging code review time with deep work time

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 02:46:07 +0000

Moderne founder and CTO Olga Kundzich argues that the term “parallel coding” is a misnomer, as AI-assisted coding is never truly autonomous in the first place. “Working with coding agents requires developers to spend time upfront designing the solution together with the agent – planning – and then periodically answering questions from the agents to guide them forward, as well as examining their work at the end,” says Kundzich, whose company offers a platform for automated code refactoring and analysis. “A developer can manage a couple of parallel sessions at most.”

multi-threaded cli programming

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 02:40:54 +0000

But we’re in new territory now that any dev can kick off parallel coding with coding agents. Will it make engineers more productive, or will it just make people feel like they’re more productive? Perhaps engineers who do one thing at a time and keep focus will be shown to produce more reliable software, over time. Or maybe it’ll turn out that working with parallel agents leads to more issues slipping through and more iterations, which destroys any gains.

another take on layoffs and AI on earnings calls

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 02:38:01 +0000

Leanness and AI fail job cuts “smell test” It’s not only me who doesn’t buy the explanation that these layoffs are to streamline the company, or to redirect resources to AI.

Noted this several times, but another take here. “Streamlining” “over-hiring” feels so delayed. Like why did it take 2-3 years to ‘correct’. And “maximizing AI investments” doesn’t make sense either since all these companies have huge war chests.

great transparency on self-publishing The Software Engineers Guidebook

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 02:33:02 +0000

There’s usually little information about the key topic of how much authors make from their books being published, beyond “not much”. Author Justin Garrison shared that his co-authored title Cloud Native Infrastructure earned $11,554 in its first year – and without three unexpected sponsorships, that amount would’ve been $3.500. Conventional wisdom states you should not write a book for money, but for the other benefits like building your status as an expert in a domain, or exploring a topic in more depth. … The impact of a book is hard to know with certainty. When I publish a newsletter article or a podcast episode, the feedback is almost immediate: I get comments, emails, and mentions about the contents for a few days – perhaps a week or two. After that, I rarely hear feedback again. … Amazon has an unhealthy monopoly on the audiobook and ebook sectors. That Amazon has a take rate of 75% for audiobooks and 70% for Kindle ebooks (those priced above $10) and still controls most of the market, makes this segment look like a monopoly.

if you want to go fast - go alone

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 02:26:59 +0000

if you want to go far - go with a team.

Collections of slides celebrating the team effect of great engineering and not heroic efforts by one engineer.

_{Quote Citation: honeycomb.io, “In Praise of “Normal Engineers””, 2025, https://leaddev.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/In-praise-of-normal-engineers-Charity-Majors-LDX3-London-2025.pdf}

one counter factual study in a sea of AI hype

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 01:21:10 +0000

Before starting tasks, developers forecast that allowing AI will reduce completion time by 24%. After completing the study, developers estimate that allowing AI reduced completion time by 20%. Surprisingly, we find that allowing AI actually increases completion time by 19%—AI tooling slowed developers down. This slowdown also contradicts predictions from experts in economics (39% shorter) and ML (38% shorter).

This report made the rounds. the aha study showing a slowdown. But here’s my take.

my iceberg is melting - how skills augmentation/automation impacts careers

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 01:11:57 +0000

Every Revolution Needs a New Metric: Industrial era →Output per hour (measured physical productivity) Internet era →Digital economy accounts (captured online service value) Intelligence era →Skills-centered measure (reveals AI-human skill overlap)

Another index to try and track the displacement effect of AI. But this one focuses on skills not roles. Which is both more specific and likely harder to track. Wish there was more depth (should I say hidden iceberg mass?) to this article. not much on the hard skills they’re measuring.

combination facts and anecdotes on the state of 2025 labor market

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:59:53 +0000

Microsoft’s rate of net hiring of international employees has increased much faster than that of domestic employees since 2004. The difference in net hiring rates drastically increases as the COVID-19 pandemic, which had ushered in an unprecedented (a favorite word of the pandemic-era lexicon) era of remote work, begins to subside in 2021. The fact that Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, and Meta do not include these figures may indicate that the disparity in their domestic and international net hiring rates is even more stark than Microsoft’s. To further illustrate the point, JPMorgan Chase’s net hiring rates for North America and other regions are shown in Figure 2, demonstrating that the post-pandemic net hiring trends shown in Figure 1 are not limited to the technology industry.

economic restructuring of the software engineering labor market

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:49:13 +0000

But if the decline is surprising, the reason for it is fairly straightforward: Young people are responding to a grim job outlook for entry-level coders. In recent years, the tech industry has been roiled by layoffs and hiring freezes. The leading culprit for the slowdown is technology itself. Artificial intelligence has proved to be even more valuable as a writer of computer code than as a writer of words. This means it is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it.

third path - all gains are captured by capital (flow up)

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:42:25 +0000

Forgot to capture notes from this when I had a subscription, but I’d argue that there are MANY paths for AI, only two of which are “sky net” and “boring clippy enterprise software”, the rest are modeled by economics.

Right now major tech companies are locked in an arms race to capture as much public dollars from AI-ify all the things. Bill Gates out here suggesting we’ll see the dawn of the 2 day work week or the Jetsons 1 hour work day… which feels optimistic in a way that ignores how incentives actually work under capitalism.

the best SWE are outcome, impact and people oriented - good code is just the baseline

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:19:41 +0000

There’s so much great content in this dissertation, and it’s from 2016, but the things that made a great SWE then still hold true today.

Paul Luo Li lays out the concentric circle model of being a great SWE. I’m summarizing over 40 attributes that reminds me of the Dalio baseball card/dot collector approach to management.

Self directed curiosity engine that gets stuff done (Personal Characteristics)
Knows how to do their job effective within the system they operate (Decision Making)
Is a team player (Teammates)
Builds and Ships Software (Product)

This is over 300 pages long but well worth the review especially if you’re responsible for managing or setting career maps for engineers.

if women had wives - they'd probably have more kids

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:09:13 +0000

Because the data show that fertility rises in societies where domestic labor, caregiving, and economic risk are shared rather than placed primarily on women.

Claudia Goldin writes:

Women see greater gains from more equal gender relationships… Men often have stronger attachment to traditions that entitled them to expect more household labor from their wives. Women, on the other hand, become more unburdened as economic development proceeds. … Women spend more time with their children by sacrificing their careers or lowering their incomes and becoming economically vulnerable. If they are divorced or separated, they and their children may suffer. Knowing this in advance, they often resist having more children — or any at all.

paywall - but I want to know so I'm noting it here

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 23:52:35 +0000

Are these leaders in the room with us now?

Why 51% of Engineering Leaders Believe AI Is Impacting the Industry Negatively

51% also feels oddly specific. next time Gregor, I like your other stuff.

_{Quote Citation: Gregor Ojstersek, “Why 51% of Engineering Leaders Believe AI Is Impacting the Industry Negatively”, JUN 22, 2025, https://newsletter.eng-leadership.com/p/why-51-of-engineering-leaders-believe}

another benchmark eclipsed by swe-bench

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 23:50:59 +0000

In this work, we introduce LiveCodeBench Pro, a rigorously curated and contamination-free bench-mark designed to evaluate the true algorithmic reasoning capabilities of LLMs in competitive pro-gramming.

Right but have they seen what excel can do? Regardless, average cost per problem analysis I think is premature. And the distinction of ‘reasoning’ and non-reasoning AIs also feels like a lost cause.

My prediction: Convergence in the future will be on price per token / problem solve rate.

humans name things.. it happens - seeing humanity in token processing

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 23:47:50 +0000

In this position paper, we argued against the prevalent tendency to anthropomorphize intermediate tokens as reasoning or “thinking”. Anthropomorphization has been a part of AI research [33], and has significantly increased in the era of LLMs [20]. While some anthropomorphization has been harmless metaphors, we argued that viewing intermediate tokens as reasoning traces or “thinking” is actively harmful, because it engenders false trust and capability in these systems, and prevents researchers from understanding or improving how they actually work.

is ai self-aware - I think not

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 23:43:38 +0000

We introduced AISAI, a quantitative framework for measuring self-awareness in LLMs through strategic differentiation. Our two key findings reshape understanding of AI self-awareness: Finding 1: Self-awareness is an emergent capability that appears in the majority of advanced models but is absent in older/smaller models, representing a fundamental capability threshold crossed with model advancement. Finding 2: Self-aware models exhibit a consistent rationality hierarchy—Self > Other AIs > Humans—with large AI attribution effects and moderate self-preferencing. Over half show quick Nash convergence when told opponents are AIs, demonstrating both strategic mastery and strong beliefs about AI rationality.

Impact trumps simple ROI metrics

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 23:39:22 +0000

These days, no one knows the ROI (return on investment) of an initiative. Projections made to win approval might not be in strict ROI terms. They might just say that by executing initiative X, some important metric would improve by 5%. It is not possible to determine ROI with just this information. But with the results of impact validation in place as above, you might be able to calculate the next best thing, the Return on Projection (ROP). If the said metric improved by 4% as against the projected 5%, the ROP, also called the benefits realization ratio, is 80%. Knowing this is way better than knowing nothing. It’s way better than believing that the initiative must have done well just because it was executed (delivered) correctly.

jc - young people entering the work force are so cooked

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 23:22:37 +0000

Essentially the Canaries in the Coal Mine are that young people can’t get work and have born the biggest brunt of AI automation. While salaries and net employment seem ‘ok’ the youngest cohort in the market is cooked chat.

We find that since the widespread adoption of generative AI, early-career workers (ages 22-25) in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a 13 percent relative decline in employment even after controlling for firm-level shocks. In contrast, employment for workers in less exposed fields and more experienced workers in the same occupations has remained stable or continued to grow. We also find that adjustments occur primarily through employment rather than compensation.

September review by anthropic of AI adoption

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 23:14:01 +0000

I think the big story here is their interpretation of people using AI to automate is surpassing augmentation. Which would imply more adoption has gone from trail+explore to real solutions?

At a high level, we distinguish between automation and augmentation modes of using Claude:

Automation encompasses interaction patterns focused on task completion:

Directive: Users give Claude a task and it completes it with minimal back-and-forth Feedback Loops: Users automate tasks and provide feedback to Claude as needed Augmentation focuses on collaborative interaction patterns:

socrates and AI meet in a bar - philosophy chain of reasoning And AI

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 23:11:14 +0000

My position is that, at the end of the day, LLMs just shuffle zeros and ones to some very smart algorithms developed by human programmers on vast amounts of training data. Using various stochastic strategies such as gradient descent for next word prediction on neural networks with billions of parameters and trillions of tokens — these algorithms result in imperfect representations of the training data, even if the training data is accurate, real and unbiased. To ensure that these AI machines do not fabricate, hallucinate and descend into madness, they must be closely supervised by human experts. These AI machines provide little (if any) insight into the nature of human understanding of the world, and the nature of consciousness and intentionality required for that understanding. … An independent study from researchers at the Lassonde School of Engineering, York University, found major flaws in the SWE-benchmark, significantly lowering GPT4o’s actual performance (from 18.83% to 3.83% accuracy). Many of the AI machine fixes are described as suspicious, including “cheating” and tests so weak that even an incorrect solution can pass the tests. These Al machines are not good at solving software issues on the kind of work that you might give a junior programmer.

a human's opinion on working with cli agents

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 04:46:06 +0000

I’ve completely moved to codex cli as daily driver. I run between 3-8 in parallel in a 3x3 terminal grid, most of them in the same folder, some experiments go in separate folders. I experimented with worktrees, PRs but always revert back to this setup as it gets stuff done the fastest. … I used to love Claude Code, these days I can’t stand it anymore (even tho codex is a fan). It’s language, the absolutely right’s, the 100% production ready messages while tests fail - I just can’t anymore. Codex is more like the introverted engineer that chugs along and just gets stuff done. It reads much more files before starting work so even small prompts usually do exactly what I want. … And yes, writing good software is still hard. Just because I don’t write the code anymore doesn’t mean I don’t think hard about architecture, system design, dependencies, features or how to delight users. Using AI simply means that expectations what to ship went up.

new index dropped - math index to measure transcripts vs actual performance

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 04:33:05 +0000

At our campus, the picture is truly troubling. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen whose math placement exam results indicate they do not meet middle school standards grew nearly thirtyfold, despite almost all of these students having taken beyond the minimum UCOP- required math curriculum, and many with high grades. In the 2025 incoming class, this group constitutes roughly one-eighth of our entire entering cohort. A similarly large share of students must take additional writing courses to reach the level expected of high school graduates, though this is a figure that has not varied much over the same time span.

well being at work and employee engagement

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 04:21:48 +0000

tbh charts show decline in well being at work. Other of my notes indicate reasons this might be (layoffs).

_{Quote Citation: hcdlab.carey.jhu.edu, “https://hcdlab.carey.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/11/HCDL-Well-being-at-Work-in-the-USA-FINAL-Nov1225.pdf", November 2025, https://hcdlab.carey.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/11/HCDL-Well-being-at-Work-in-the-USA-FINAL-Nov1225.pdf}

hot take - node_modules was my first exposure to package bloat

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 04:19:50 +0000

But “big supply chain” will tell you that you must do it this way. Don’t you dare to copy paste that function into your library. Or don’t you dare to use “unsafe” yourself. You’re not qualified enough to write unsafe code, let the platform abstraction architects do that. Otherwise someone will slap you. There are entire companies who are making a living of supplying you with the tools needed to deal with your dependency mess. In the name of security, we’re pushed to having dependencies and keeping them up to date, despite most of those dependencies being the primary source of security problems.

my take - still a place for small open source utilities

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 04:17:53 +0000

I don’t know which direction we’re going in with AI (well, ~80% of us; to the remaining holdouts, I salute you and wish you godspeed!), but I do think it’s a future where we prize instant answers over teaching and understanding. There’s less reason to use something like blob-util, which means there’s less reason to write it in the first place, and therefore less reason to educate people about the problem space.

tight review on building sub-agents (agent workflow)

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 04:11:46 +0000

As I mentioned a couple of times on this blog already, most of our agents are based on code execution and code generation. That really requires a common place for the agent to store data. Our choice is a file system—in our case a virtual file system—but that requires different tools to access it. This is particularly important if you have something like a subagent or subinference.

Really dense focus on some lessons learned building ai workflows. Filesystem was an aha moment as was some reality check that “older” models do “just” fine. Fits in with when does the music stop on the ai bubble.

double it (ai) and give it to the shareholders

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 03:38:38 +0000

Given widespread acknowledgment of a potential AI industry bubble, including extended remarks by Pichai in a recent BBC interview, the aggressive plans for AI data center expansion reflect Google’s calculation that the risk of underinvesting exceeds the risk of overcapacity. But it’s a bet that could prove costly if demand doesn’t continue to increase as expected.

At the all-hands meeting, Pichai told employees that 2026 will be “intense,” citing both AI competition and pressure to meet cloud and compute demand. Pichai directly addressed employee concerns about a potential AI bubble, acknowledging the topic has been “definitely in the zeitgeist.”

reducing friction improves SWE QOL

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 03:36:23 +0000

The bulk of this book is how to develop a program to find these friction points, figuring out which bits are causing the most trouble - and fixing them.

I think this is one of the best truisms of being an engineering manager. I can’t help engineers code faster. But I can distract the noise.

Another metaphor I’ve hears it the gardening metaphor. No plants ever grew faster when yelled at. But with plenty of sunshine and nutrients and some weed pulling you’ll have a bounty.

record profits - not a job to be found for those laid off

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 03:33:06 +0000

As U.S. corporate profits rise and the stock market hits new highs, investors are reaping the rewards. Yet beneath the surge, companies have cut nearly 1 million jobs this year — the most since 2020, when the pandemic slammed the economy. … Not everyone thinks AI is driving the recent bout of layoffs. Instead, the job cuts are more likely due to businesses recalibrating their needs after the pandemic, when many employers expanded and may have overhired, said Art Papas, the CEO of Bullhorn, a software company that works with recruitment and temporary agencies.

universities expanding remedial classes to catch up recent HS grads

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 03:28:39 +0000

Dan Goldhaber, the director of the Center for Education Data & Research at the University of Washington, told me that he doesn’t know of anyone who denies that young people are much worse at math than they used to be. Instead, most of the arguments for optimism hinge on the idea that students might no longer need foundational math skills, because they could use AI instead—an idea he thinks is absurd.

electron would like to have a word - VS Code runs in GitHub codespaces just fine?

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 03:58:02 +0000

Neo.mjs is a pioneering multi-threaded JavaScript framework that redefines web development. Leveraging an Off-Main-Thread (OMT) architecture, it delivers unparalleled performance and scalability for complex applications, enabling desktop-class multi-window experiences with advanced features like shared state and component persistence, and a zero-builds development workflow.

I mean I feel like electron apps are a thing that weren’t mentioned here? I get the push to move towards plain javascript and typescript objects again, But again feels like this glosses over huge eons of web Time when people had to target IE6 and IE11.. Those scars don’t fade..

market macro trends - the era of global tech is over sovereign tech is in

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 03:49:09 +0000

IN EUROPE, DISCUSSIONS are coalescing around an ambitious idea called EuroStack, an EU-led “digital supply chain” that would give Europe technological sovereignty independent from the US and other countries.

The idea gathered steam a couple of months before Trump’s reelection, when a group of business leaders, European politicians, and technologists—including Meredith Whittaker, the president of Signal, and Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s former minister of digital affairs—met at the European Parliament to discuss “European Digital Independence.” According to Cristina Caffarra, an economist who helped organize the meeting, the takeaway was stark: “US tech giants own not only the services we engage with but also everything below, from chips to connectivity to cables under the sea to compute to cloud. If that infrastructure turns off, we have nowhere to go.”

the best staff to profits number in tech isn't who you think (Valve)

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 03:44:15 +0000

Even if that $15 million number isn’t exactly right, Valve, in its public employee handbook, says that “our profitability per employee is higher than that of Google or Amazon or Microsoft.”

Morbid, but thats why so many layoffs. Everyone is jealous of Valve.

_{Quote Citation: Jay Peters, “Here’s how much Valve pays its staff — and how few people it employs | The Verge”, Jul 13, 2024 at 8:15 AM EDT, https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted}

language by fiat is rarely the best decision

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 03:41:59 +0000

One of his first acts was to pronounce our language, PHP, the wrong choice. He decreed a switch to Perl. This decree happened after what felt to me like a sham analysis comparing PHP and Perl.

Our velocity collapsed. Our team had to not only learn a new language but rebuild from scratch, delaying our product by nine months. Our monthly burn rate jumped from $200K to $500K as we more than doubled our size to make up for the lost velocity while building the new Perl based system, which halved our runway.

some predictions on the future of software by inference (llm)

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 03:35:01 +0000

In particular, we’ve built up a vast amount of tooling that assists humans in writing 1.0 code, such as powerful IDEs with features like syntax highlighting, debuggers, profilers, go to def, git integration, etc. In the 2.0 stack, the programming is done by accumulating, massaging and cleaning datasets. For example, when the network fails in some hard or rare cases, we do not fix those predictions by writing code, but by including more labeled examples of those cases. Who is going to develop the first Software 2.0 IDEs, which help with all of the workflows in accumulating, visualizing, cleaning, labeling, and sourcing datasets? Perhaps the IDE bubbles up images that the network suspects are mislabeled based on the per-example loss, or assists in labeling by seeding labels with predictions, or suggests useful examples to label based on the uncertainty of the network’s predictions.

deep though AI driven by MD files is not the answer

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 03:30:15 +0000

But my personal opinion is that SDD is a step in the wrong direction.

Here’s the deal in a nutshell. Spec driven development only works if the user is both correct about what they want and how they want it.

Two things I’ve never found to be true even about myself.

_{Quote Citation: François Zaninotto, “Spec-Driven Development: The Waterfall Strikes Back”, November 12, 2025, https://marmelab.com/blog/2025/11/12/spec-driven-development-waterfall-strikes-back.html}

PERL cgi-bin and the early internet

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 03:28:00 +0000

So to state my hypothesis briefly: people today are both less predisposed to understand Perl, and have easy access to so many other alternatives. It’s a rather unsatisfactory explanation, but it’s the closest I can get.

I think I would argue that /cgi-bin folder configuration and !# complexities killed it. LAMP servers could have jsut as easily been Perl, but were instead PHP. The brash new star of the early 2000s web development.

no doubt there is a culture difference between USA and Europe

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 01:55:30 +0000

Meanwhile, in the US, our counsel replies when it matters, even after hours. Bankers answer the same day. The instinct is to enable progress, not enumerate reasons you can’t have it. The goal is the outcome and the rules are constraints to navigate, not a shield to hide behind.

I mean the idea of not getting an lawyer on the phone asap feels almost foreign to me.

_{Quote Citation: Armin Ronacher, “Regulation Isn’t the European Trap — Resignation Is | Armin Ronacher’s Thoughts and Writings”, 2025-10-21, https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/10/21/eu-resigation/}

datacenters are not economic hubs - subsidize manufacturing not closets

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:09:28 +0000

The project, developed with GPU cloud partner Fluidstack, will create 800 permanent jobs and more than 2,000 construction roles, with the first sites going live in 2026. … Last week, OpenAI asked the Trump administration to expand a key CHIPS Act tax credit to include AI data centers and grid components like transformers, according to a letter obtained by Bloomberg.

So let me get this right. Thats $50 Billion laid out, WITH tax credits to create 800 jobs.

the housing market - "mom and pop" vs the institutional investor

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:09 +0000

Such research has found that the vast majority of SFRs are owned by small-scale investors. Properties owned by large-scale investors tend to increase prices of nearby homes,1 while ownership by small-scale investors appears to have the opposite effect.2 Research has also found that investor-owned SFRs expand housing options available to renters3 but may negatively impact renter welfare in terms of eviction filings4 and rent increases.5

Surprise. Large institutional investors want a return on their investment so they tend to put more upgrades into their communities. But this often prices out residents. Mom and pops are the predominate second resident owners. But housing isn’t getting better anywhere. I suspect this has more to do with macro trends than who owns the house.

TIL - Texas Ratio and bank health

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 23:53:20 +0000

The simple formula is nonperforming loans divided by tangible equity and loan loss reserves.1 Ideally, the ratio is low. A ratio of 0% indicates that a bank is carrying no nonperforming loans or foreclosed real estate on its balance sheet, reflecting little risk of loan losses to a bank’s capital. A ratio above 100% implies that a bank may not have enough capital to cover its potential loan losses.

As shown in the figure below, the median Texas ratio across various bank sizes has remained controlled and manageable, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. Near the end of 2022, however, Texas ratios at large and regional banks began increasing, putting them in line with historical figures. Texas ratios at community banks, however, remain subdued, reflecting continual favorable credit conditions at America’s smallest banks.

private data in lieu of JOLT

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 23:51:12 +0000

Our measures using Homebase tend to overstate hirings and separations when compared with those derived from JOLTS. This discrepancy can be attributed to two main factors. First, the composition of the Homebase sample differs significantly from that of JOLTS. While JOLTS provides a representative sample across all economic sectors, Homebase’s data predominantly reflect hourly workers in the service and retail industries, which are sectors characterized by higher turnover rates. Second, our methodology counts each instance when an employee takes a week off and then returns to work as a separation followed by a new hire.

warning survivors bias - but a good fable on switching companies

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 23:35:35 +0000

The biggest value of changing, beyond the personal learning and growth, is the confidence you gain by realizing you have true, fungible value to contribute to any company you join. The things you know aren’t just useful in your current habitat. You can and will thrive elsewhere.

Switch companies, if for nothing else, market proof that your skills are in demand. BTW. I love that he took the time to write this. No shade. I just know people who left and crumbled. The expression “what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger” only applies if it doesn’t kill you.

Tim Berners Lee interview

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 23:26:02 +0000

Yes, I do see that split, and as an application platform, I’m concerned if the AI does not feed the search engine, or doesn’t feed the blogs or the podcasts. To the extent that AI reads everything on the web and then helps you live your life by using that. One of the things I talked about in the book is that you need an AI that works for you. If it’s only running off the external data out there, if it doesn’t have access to your own personal data, AI won’t be able to do a good job helping you in your life.

the off the books debt and war chest fueling AI companies

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 23:18:01 +0000

Like me, Garran pointed to the efficient compute frontier and the diminishing returns of AI, causing costs to skyrocket and progress to stagnate. This is why ChatGPT-3 cost $50 million, ChatGPT-4 cost $500 million, and ChatGPT-5 cost $5 billion, yet the improvement between these generations has been so slim it is almost unnoticeable. This wouldn’t be a problem if these AIs had reached a point of usefulness, but they haven’t. Like me, Garran points to the plethora of studies that prove AI deployments offer practically no benefit, aren’t profitable, and actually make companies less efficient. As such, the AI industry and the gargantuan investment behind it are a dead end, creating a bubble. … Their solution has been to raise debt in secret. Dario Perkins, managing director of global macro at TS Lombard, has found that many AI companies are increasingly using SPVs to raise significant amounts of debt financing off the books. This covers their tracks and obfuscates the debt, making it “look” like the company is running on equity finance instead. Due to this, it is incredibly difficult to get an accurate figure on how much of the AI industry’s expenditure and growth comes from debt — but we know it is a lot! … When this pops, OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla, and others could easily face total collapse. They flew too close to the sun, but as their charred bodies crash down, they will land on others and destroy them too. Major banks, pension funds, and the loan market could face complete collapse or near-fatal damage.

guess - there is no mobility in low income jobs

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 23:12:21 +0000

I don’ that a subscription to Bloomberg, but I’m guessing this opinion peace is reflecting what economist have long pointed out. Wage mobility has collapsed on bottom quartile positions..

Even curl failed me on this fetch.

_{Quote Citation: Kathryn Anne Edwards, “The Tyranny of the Low-Quality Job: It’s Not a Way Out of Poverty - Bloomberg”, 2025-10-27, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-27/the-tyranny-of-the-low-quality-job-it-s-not-a-way-out-of-poverty}

the AI/LLM revolution is measured in decades not months

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 23:07:53 +0000

It didn’t require some sort of magical recipe for safety. It took decades of careful engineering and iterative refinements.

The process will be similar for intelligent systems. It will take years for them to get as smart as cats, and more years to get as smart as humans, let alone smarter (don’t confuse the superhuman knowledge accumulation and retrieval abilities of current LLMs with actual intelligence).

I mean cats care clever. Great take from a real builder of AI systems, sorry to notice that I came across this post nearly a year later. And guess what. AI is still only as smart as a fern.

but [big tech] does it this way!

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 23:05:29 +0000

Very few companies are shaped like Facebook, and therefore decisions that make sense for Facebook probably don’t make sense for you. It’s ironic, tragic even, that so many people think that tools that make sense for Facebook will automatically make sense for their own organizations.

Right up there with “google does it this way”.. Its lazy thinking to correlate your pre-seed idea with a billion dollar company.

_{Quote Citation: okayfail.com, “You’re not Facebook. Why use their tools?”, 2024-04-22, https://okayfail.com/garden/youre-not-facebook-why-use-their-tools.html}

builders build - and the power of focus

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 22:39:23 +0000

But a deputy early on warned him his ideas were stacking up and becoming a distraction for his team, saying: You have enough ideas per minute, per day to destroy Amazon.

“This sounds so obvious, but it was not obvious at the time to me,” Bezos said. “I started prioritizing the ideas better, keeping lists of them, keeping them to myself until the organization was ready for the ideas.”

Really not surprising. When you build Amazon, take a few years off people like Bezos don’t retire into the sunset. it’s not how they’re wired. No different than Michael Jorden saying if he could take a pill and compete today he would.

ethical (barely) ai

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 02:53:16 +0000

As well as being our most capable model, Claude Sonnet 4.5 is our most aligned frontier model yet. Claude’s improved capabilities and our extensive safety training have allowed us to substantially improve the model’s behavior, reducing concerning behaviors like sycophancy, deception, power-seeking, and the tendency to encourage delusional thinking. For the model’s agentic and computer use capabilities, we’ve also made considerable progress on defending against prompt injection attacks, one of the most serious risks for users of these capabilities.

its a bubble - ai

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 02:25:05 +0000

This is why so many traditional bubble comparisons fail. Previous infrastructure booms were notorious for building far more capacity than anyone could use. Railroads were laid before freight existed. Housing developments sat empty. Telecom companies ran miles of dark fiber with nothing flowing through it. AI is the opposite. The world cannot get enough compute or power. … Carlota Perez, the economist whose work on technological revolutions and financial cycles is considered definitive in innovation studies, has shown that every major technological era begins with an investment bubble. The bubble finances the infrastructure, the crash resets the logic, and the infrastructure becomes the foundation of the next era.

answer is compliance?

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 02:15:15 +0000

I don’t have a subscription but if I HAD to guess. I would say compliance. For the same reason we’ve seen an explosion of the administration class in public school systems.

Again. Not saying this is good or bad. I’m observing that increased demands in compliance leads to increased specializations leads to increased headcount.

_{Quote Citation: The Economist, “How HR took over the world”, 2025-11-10, https://www.economist.com/business/2025/11/10/how-hr-took-over-the-world}

the agents are coming - for more seats on MSFT365

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 02:11:03 +0000

“As well as the licensing and cost concerns, I am also wondering how an organization manages these agents,” he added. “If they can join meeting and send emails/messages to people – what happens if they go rogue? It could be sending sensitive data to the wrong people, providing incorrect information, or it could be sending strange or offensive messages…how is that to be prevented, monitored, and acted upon?”

Sounds like a lethal trifecta problem..

color me not shocked - weakening of EU data privacy protection

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 02:03:12 +0000

According to the plans, Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab, Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab, OpenAI and other tech companies may be allowed to use Europeans’ personal data to train their AI models based on legitimate interest.

Shocking that a trillion dollar company built on cookies would petition against privacy..

_{Quote Citation: Foo Yun Chee, “Critics call proposed changes to landmark EU privacy law ‘death by a thousand cuts’ | Reuters”, 2025-11-10, https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/critics-call-proposed-changes-landmark-eu-privacy-law-death-by-thousand-cuts-2025-11-10/}

more job seekers plus payroll gains

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:54:22 +0000

The modest rise in September’s unemployment stemmed primarily from people outside the labor force moving into unemployment (rather than directly into jobs). However, this component of flows into and out of unemployment remained within its typical range of month-to-month variation. Other components of unemployment flows tracked near their 12-month averages.

So we’re cooked? Kinda a mixed signal.. Would love to see fewer “open to work” banners on linkedin…

_{Quote Citation: @stlouisfed, “Flash Report: U.S. Unemployment Flows in September”, November 20, 2025, https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/nov/flash-report-unemployment-payroll-rise-september?utm_source=Federal+Reserve+Bank+of+St.+Louis+Publications&utm_campaign=afa87bfd25-BlogAlert_Manual_112025&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c572dedae2-afa87bfd25-237369665}

TIL Beveridge Curve and job vacancy analysis

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:52:33 +0000

This insight reframes recent labor market debates. The rise in vacancies since the mid-2010s, and especially after the pandemic, reflects a growing focus on poaching rather than a general shortage of labor. Aggregate vacancy measures, which mix these two motives, have become a noisy and potentially misleading signal.

Wow! TIL about the Beveridge Curve in economics! And looking at this chart it was cyclical until the boom of 2010 and produced another K shaped chart! not clear yet if this signal is divorced from reality or if it will fall back into a cyclical pattern. Very cool.

AI is mid

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:49:42 +0000

In response, Suleyman said it “cracks me up when I hear people call AI underwhelming,” adding that he finds it “mindblowing” that anyone could be “unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video” and calling those lambasting Microsoft’s push for AI “cynics.”

I mean. I oscillate on this topic. From MIND BLOWN to Dammit I should talk to humans more.. I think though for 90+% of the population AI is just another techno tool that may or may not affect their lives. Or more bluntly too many product managers are shoving it into products no one asked for.

Another surveys showing modest ai productivity gains of <10%

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:46:14 +0000

Despite the hype, 39% of respondents to LeadDev’s survey reported more minor productivity gains of between 1-10%. … “The bottlenecks that we tend to see at companies are not in the hands-on keyboard time; [it] is in the time waiting for the test to pass or fail, or for a build or deploy that won’t happen for another two to three days,” explained Murphey.

Again. The bottleneck was never writing “Hello world”. AI DOES help you synthesize documentation faster. But it doesn’t replace the SDLC.

the great AI measurement carrot and stick

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:44:26 +0000

Citing Godhart’s Law, they stressed that AI code-generation metrics are a “terrible choice” because they incentivize more code where less would do. Instead, they suggest evaluating AI coding tools through engineer qualitative self-assessments and throughput metrics attached to the wider engineering organization rather than individuals. This includes: on-time delivery, and SPACE and DORA frameworks.

“It’s outcomes, not activities, that get results,” he said.

Couldn’t agree more. we HAVE good metrics. Delivery of solutions. Why muddy that with how many lines of code were written by AI vs a Human.

always deliver - career advice from a google employee

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:42:27 +0000

The theme of my journey can be summarized in one word: “intrapreneur”. It’s a portmanteau of “internal” and “entrepreneur” and a style of leadership I’ve used over and over for my own career success, and that of tech professionals whom I’ve coached.

I mean the key thing here is that excelling in your role isn’t an act of silos. Besides leading from the front at your w2 job is infinitely easier than starting your own company.

software career management

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:37:41 +0000

you should have a strategy for keeping your hands-on skills sharp, because your ability to be a strong line manager is grounded in your own engineering skills. … The higher you go up the ladder, the more money you will get paid…but the fewer jobs there be, and the fewer still that match your profile.

This. It’s a pyramid. And the base has the most roles to pick from. I wish more people understood that. And there’s nothing worth than letting your skills atrophy and being kicked out of the pyramid called your career. Layoffs happen. All. the. time.

developer survey from pgramatic engineer - social proof

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:35:32 +0000

always nice to catch up on what everyone is doing out there.

Seems like everyone hates Jira. which is nice, easy to hate on the elephant in the room.

Seems like this audience steers towards tpyescript/vscode (cursor). Which The Pragmatic Engineer is a newer publication so I think that tracks.

_{Quote Citation: Gergely Orosz, “The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey: What’s in your tech stack? Part 1”, 2025-03-11, https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pragmatic-engineer-2025-survey}

you can't offload comprehension - understanding how your code works is still required

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:29:03 +0000

Recent research reveals a shocking disconnect between perception and reality when it comes to AI coding productivity. A rigorous METR study conducted in 2025 tracked 16 experienced developers from major open-source projects as they completed 246 real-world coding tasks. The results were startling: developers using AI tools experienced a 19% decrease in productivity compared to working without AI assistance.

Even more concerning, the developers themselves were completely unaware of this slowdown. They estimated that AI had increased their productivity by 20%, while the actual data showed the opposite. This represents a massive 39-point gap between perception and reality, suggesting that many glowing reports about AI productivity gains may be fundamentally flawed.

layoffs writ large

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:25:23 +0000

U.S. public companies have reduced their white-collar workforces by a collective 3.5% over the past three years, according to employment data-provider Live Data Technologies. Over the past decade, one in five companies in the S&P 500 have shrunk.

I’m not sure but along the way an expanding headcount collided with leverage. Companies aren’t scaling linearly so more revenue is being generated by smaller headcount. It doesn’t feel great, but the shareholder doctrine demands its returns. So here we are.

can AI think - no

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:22:55 +0000

AI does take on many forms, but they’re still not bodies; they run on code, algorithms and datasets. Intuitive understanding, emotion, integrity and practical wisdom seem to require an embodied, perishable form that is moved by experience.

Law of headlines strikes again. The answer is essentially LLM are very good at pattern matching, but they can’t think, nor can they even contradict.

_{Quote Citation: Ryan Leack, “Can AI think – and should it? What it means to think, from Plato to ChatGPT”, 20250718, https://theconversation.com/can-ai-think-and-should-it-what-it-means-to-think-from-plato-to-chatgpt-256648}

MCP severs - all token no results

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:20:58 +0000

Usually, if the issue is familiar to the LLM, if it knows of it and there is sufficient context for it in the LLM’s training data, it’s insanely good at reaching the correct hypotheses quickly. That is, when the problem space overlaps with the LLM’s knowledge base. For example, a pod CrashLoopBackOff due to the wrong image pull or memory limit can be easily spotted by an LLM. However, when the issue is novel, the chances of an LLM getting RCA right today are close to zero.

ai co-develop guidance for linux kernel

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:18:07 +0000

All AI assistants are required to identify themselves in commits using Co-developed-by tags, ensuring full transparency about AI involvement in code development.

Co-developed-by: Claude claude-opus-4-20250514

I actually do like that this notes the model in use where as often it will just say Co-developed-by: Claude if you ask AI to annotate your commits.

I haven’t quite gone all in on letting AI do my git actions..

_{Quote Citation: lore.kernel.org, “[RFC 0/2] Add AI coding assistant configuration to Linux kernel - Sasha Levin”, Fri, 25 Jul 2025 13:53:56 -0400, https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250725175358.1989323-1-sashal@kernel.org/}

snapshots from the 80s and 90s

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:14:43 +0000

fun collage of bedrooms from the 90s.. I think I’m getting older..

_{Quote Citation: Rebecca Mead, “Teen-Agers in Their Bedrooms, Before the Age of Selfies | The New Yorker”, 2025-07-26, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/teen-agers-in-their-bedrooms-before-the-age-of-selfies}

ideal dating and finding a ideal employer - Monopsony Power

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:12:19 +0000

Why do so many firms seem to pay workers less than what their labor is truly worth? Economists call this phenomenon “monopsony power”—the ability of firms to set wages below the marginal product of labor, which is the increase in output from adding one additional worker. Traditionally, this has been explained in two main ways: either because workers face costly and time-consuming job searches, or because jobs themselves differ in ways that matter to workers, like location, schedule or prestige.

another take on s174 - no it did not stem the tide of layoffs

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:10:10 +0000

Whether it’ll manage to counteract the scale of recent layoffs, Siri is less certain. “I do believe companies will start hiring developers in the US again because it makes sense now with the fix,” he says. “Ultimately the economy is weaker and people are spending more cautiously, so I doubt the hiring numbers will match what we’re seeing with layoffs.”.

Came back to this to capture it for my commonplace book. No it didnt’ stem the tide of layoffs. As I mentioned the economics of software development have morphed. Small onshore teams augmented by off-shore teams seems to be the standard arrangement.

section 174 and the ZIRP era

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:08:11 +0000

But things have changed. Some great news is that part of S174 is struck off , fully for US employees. Buried deep inside Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” is a provision that allows companies to keep deducting expenses related to software development in the same tax year. Basically, developer salaries can be deducted just like before 2023. Companies have the choice to amortize salaries if they want. In the original draft, this was planned to be a temporary relief until 2030. But in the final bill it was removed permanently.

enshitification of careers

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:00:28 +0000

Tech bosses don’t actually like workers. You can tell by the way they treat the workers they don’t fear. Sure, Tim Cook’s engineers get beer-fattened, chestnut finished and massaged like Kobe cows, but Cook’s factory workers in China are so maltreated that Foxconn (the cutout Apple uses to run “iPhone City” where Apple’s products are made) had to install suicide nets to reduce the amount of spatter from workers who would rather die than put in another hour at Tim Apple’s funtime distraction rectangle factory: Jeff Bezos’s engineers get soft-play areas, one imported Australian barista for each mini-kitchen, and the kind of Japanese toilet that doesn’t just wash you after but also offers you a trim and dye-job, but Amazon delivery drivers are monitored by AIs that narc them out for driving with their mouths open (singing is prohibited in Uncle Jeff’s delivery pods!) and have to piss in bottles; meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers are injured at three times the rate of other warehouse workers.

thoughts on hiring swe

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:48:53 +0000

if i were a hiring manager, i would use a combo of a code review interview and a work sample discussed live, giving precedence to the code review and telling the applicant ahead of time that the work sample doesn’t have to be perfect.

programming is fundamentally a collaborative process. having the applicant collaborate on both sides (reviewing and authoring) shows you a lot about how they work, and signals to them that you care about more than the equivalent of their SAT score.

this guy cooks - ai accelerates the mundane hits wall at scale

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:45:50 +0000

And it was… Fine. Despite claims that AI today is improving at a fever pitch, it felt largely the same as before. It’s good at writing boilerplate, especially in Javascript, and particularly in React. It’s not good at keeping up with the standards and utilities of your codebase. It tends to struggle with languages like Terraform. It still hallucinates libraries leading to significant security vulnerabilities.

AIs still struggle to absorb the context of a larger codebase, even with a great prompt and CLAUDE.md file. If you use a library that isn’t StackOverflow’s favorite it will butcher it even after an agentic lookup of the documentation. … What LLMs produce is often broken, hallucinated, or below codebase standards. The frequency of these errors go up with the size of the codebase. When that happens you have to re-prompt, which could instantly fix the problem or could be a huge waste of time. Or you can go in and fix the code yourself. But then you’re back to measly 1x engineer status, perhaps worse if you’ve gotten so used to vibe coding you forgot how to code. If you’re “embracing the vibes” and not even looking at the code produced, you’re simply going to hit a productivity wall once the codebase gets large enough. … The problem is that productivity does not scale. I don’t write more than one ESLint rule per year. This burst of productivity was enabled solely by the fact that I didn’t care about this code and wasn’t going to work to make it readable for the next engineer.

Deloitte all-in on ai

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:36:45 +0000

The partnership comes at an embarrassing time for Deloitte, after it paid back a partial refund of $440,000 Australian dollars ($290,000 USD) to the federal government after a report was found to be strewn with errors that it admitted had been produced with the assistance of AI, specifically OpenAI’s GPT-4o via Microsoft Azure’s AI Foundry platform.

The errors included a fabricated quote from a federal court judgment and references to nonexistent academic research papers.

46 minutes a day - ai productivity report summary

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:34:51 +0000

A three-month trial by the UK government of Microsoft 365 Copilot did not find any clear increase in productivity. And at a recent conference, the head of Microsoft’s Modern Work and Business Applications division, Jared Spataro, admitted that “it is hard to make the ROI argument for it.”

I think this might be because AI is REALLY good at something NO one did previously.. take notes..

According to Lloyds Banking Group (LBG), the rollout is “helping teams summarize documents, prepare for meetings, and reduce administrative tasks.” Almost 5,000 engineers are also using GitHub Copilot.

oh no AI takes Accentures jobs..

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:30:18 +0000

DUBLIN, Oct 24 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Management consultants are getting closer to their Kodak moment. The likes of $155 billion Accenture (ACN.N), opens new tab made their mark by charging corporate clients way less than what they would have had to pay to provide IT, cyber protection and offshore call centres themselves. Artificial intelligence is making the $1 trillion, opens new tab industry’s dynamics look problematically like that of the camera giant that famously filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012 - after having its lunch eaten by digital competition.

SBOM and CVE analysis

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:28:08 +0000

How to Evaluate Open Source Software The widespread use of open source software presents a unique set of challenges to software development because of its openness and distributed nature. Within the vast collection of projects in the open source ecosystem, many projects are well-maintained, secure, and up to date; however, there are also many projects that lack the human resources required to ensure they’re well managed.

There’s very rarely a path to putting food on the table with open source.. Sadly.. So yea. no surprise here. Mostly 1 maintainer. Last seen 4 years ago.

divorce and apple family

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 22:49:27 +0000

The standard advice given online under such circumstances is what opened this very story: Torch the accounts and start again, losing purchases, memories, and digital identities in the process. It’s simple, when presented with the alternative, but hardly a satisfactory fix. Fortunately, Kate’s tale has a happier ending. Her children wore down her ex by repeating a single refrain every time he contacted them: Disband the family group. Eventually, he gave in, and Kate could set up a new family group with the original accounts. “Finally, we could all exhale,” she says. “But kids should not have to parent their own parent because tech companies are severely lacking in policies for cases like ours.”

Docusign moat is trust and workflows not AI

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 22:41:15 +0000

Docusign’s fundamentals, according to Thygesen, are stronger than ever. While the company is known primarily as a platform for signing legally binding contracts, it recently launched an AI-powered platform that helps customers manage every aspect of the contract process, from creating documents to verifying the identities of signatories. The company uses a mix of in-house tools and AI models from third-party firms, including OpenAI.

At any rate I wouldn’t trust an LLM with a signed document anyways. I’m a little confused by the original title. Just because a great LLM company says they’re working on a new product doesn’t mean it’ll be great at it.

empathy never goes out of style - even if weekly 1:1s might

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 22:29:28 +0000

The conclusion here is clear: the industry will want different things from you as it evolves, and it will tell you that each of those shifts is because of some complex moral change, but it’s pretty much always about business realities changing. If you take any current morality tale as true, then you’re setting yourself up to be severely out of position when the industry shifts again in a few years, because “good leadership” is just a fad.

trust drives AI adoption - not mandates

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 22:26:56 +0000

The findings raise a thorny question: If the very workers who helped pioneer online networks, mobile apps, and virtual worlds are balking at AI, how can leaders in any industry expect their employees to buy in?

“It’s a problem when the dogs won’t eat the dog food,” says Doug Creutz, an analyst at TD Cowen who covers the entertainment industry.

I mean. Pointy haired boss meme already exists. No one likes to be told HOW to do their jobs. Better to ask if AI tooling can help Than mandate and watch token count.

DSLs to the rescue of your very complex software systems

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 22:23:54 +0000

“Think of concepts as modules that are completely clean and independent. Synchronizations then act like contracts — they say exactly how concepts are supposed to interact. That’s powerful because it makes the system both easier for humans to understand and easier for tools like LLMs to generate correctly,” says Jackson. “Why can’t we read code like a book? We believe that software should be legible and written in terms of our understanding: our hope is that concepts map to familiar phenomena, and synchronizations represent our intuition about what happens when they come together,” says Meng.

thoughts from the inventor (?) on story points - delivering value frequently is the answer

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 22:17:38 +0000

The best way to deliver value isn’t more, more, more, it’s to do small valuable things frequently. If instead of estimating stories, we slice them down to “small enough”, we can come to a smooth flow of value, delivering all the time. … The next question, of course, is “when will all this be done?”

The answer is that no one knows. We could do a lot of work to improve our not knowing, and in some areas and at some times some of that is worth doing, such as when there’s a large contract waiting to be bid. But when we’re in the business of developing solutions for internal or external customers, we do best to provide small amounts of value frequently, not wait for Big Bang releases that seem often to recede indefinitely into the future.

a tale of two AI powerhouses

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 22:11:57 +0000

But Anthropic’s growth path is a lot easier to understand than OpenAI’s. Corporate customers are devising a plethora of money-saving uses for AI in areas like coding, drafting legal documents and expediting billing. Those uses are likely to expand in the future and draw more customers to Anthropic, especially as the return on investment for them becomes easier to measure.

Writing down my own personal prediction.. Sam Altman and OpenAI is more like Newman and WeWork. OpenAI is the lightning rod attracting all the lawsuits and frankly asserting that you need trillions to build data centers isn’t a great return on investment.

air cover for layoffs

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 22:07:39 +0000

Additionally, New York Fed economists released research in early September which showed that AI use amongst firms “do not point to significant reductions in employment” across the services and manufacturing industry in the New York–Northern New Jersey region.

It found that 40% of service firms said they were using AI this year, up from 25% last year, while manufacturing firms saw a similar jump from 16% last year to 26% this year, but very few were using AI to layoff workers.

CNBC coverage of amazon cuts

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 22:02:01 +0000

Amazon ’s 14,000-plus layoffs announced last month touched almost every piece of the company’s sprawling business, from cloud computing and devices to advertising, retail and grocery stores. But one job category bore the brunt of cuts more than others: engineers.

Documents filed in New York, California, New Jersey and Amazon’s home state of Washington showed that nearly 40% of the more than 4,700 job cuts in those states were engineering roles. The data was reported by Amazon in Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, filings to state agencies.

50 billion for cold server rooms

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 04:01:05 +0000

not sure if this more like the railroad boom of the 1800s or the telecom boom of the 1900s but either way there’s a lot of server buildings going up.

Time to capitalize on these is minimum 3 years I would think? I mean to say anything announced today I would treat with suspect for tomorrow.

_{Quote Citation: Shirin Ghaffary, “Anthropic Commits $50 Billion to Build AI Data Centers in US - Bloomberg”, 2025-11-12, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-12/anthropic-commits-50-billion-to-build-ai-data-centers-in-the-us}

too much money chasing too few goods - next up giga chad

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 03:57:25 +0000

Y Combinator @ycombinator Chad IDE ( @cladlabs ) is the brainrot code editor.

AI coding takes 1–5 min between prompts—too long to ignore, too short to start something new.

Chad integrates your brainrot (X, IG, Stake, Tinder, etc) into your agentic coding workflow and helps to manage your context-switching.

Less doom-scrolling. More shipping.

_{Quote Citation: X (formerly Twitter), “Y Combinator on X: “Chad IDE (@cladlabs) is the brainrot code editor. AI coding takes 1–5 min between prompts—too long to ignore, too short to start something new. Chad integrates your brainrot (X, IG, Stake, Tinder, etc) into your agentic coding workflow and helps to manage your https://t.co/CuQ6STMxYo" / X”, 2025-11-11, https://x.com/ycombinator/status/1988366241460089118}

AI TOTAL adoption and productivity numbers lag hype

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 03:55:13 +0000

The first figure plots overall adoption rates, both for work and for nonwork, from August 2024 to August 2025. Our survey found that in August 2024, 44.6% of adults ages 18 to 64 used generative AI overall.1 In the last 12 months, adoption of this new technology increased by 10 percentage points to 54.6%.

I really trust the st Louis fed to give me a much more realistic number on AI adoption. Remember software is only ~4% of the job market.

software is still eating the world

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 03:47:44 +0000

Finally, as firms invest more in custom software, they also increase their investment in traditional capital. As a result, labor productivity, which can increase both because of total factor productivity and capital deepening, grows even more.

you can’t buy your way to productivity but you can build your way there.

_{Quote Citation: Xian Jiang , Hannah Rubinton, “Implications of the Rise in Custom Software Investments”, September 16, 2025, https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/sep/aggregate-implications-rise-firms-custom-software-investments}

JPMorgan Chase gets usage fees on APIs

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 03:39:36 +0000

Proponents of the 2024 CFPB rule said it gave consumers control over their financial data and encouraged competition and innovation. Banks including JPMorgan said it exposed them to fraud and unfairly saddled them with the rising costs of maintaining systems increasingly tapped by the middlemen and their clients.

hard to feel bad for two billion dollar parties. But I think the idea of open banking is serviced by the ability to take your money anywhere, not to let anyone hit an api..

is it a trap or is it student apathy and performative contribution

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 03:34:06 +0000

I had at least eight students come to my office to make their case against the allegations, but not a single one of them could explain to me what Marxism is, how it worked as an analytical lens or how it even made its way into their papers they claimed to have written. The most shocking part was that apparently, when ChatGPT read the prompt, it even directly asked if it should include Marxism, and they all said yes. As one student said to me, “I thought it sounded smart.”

amazon layoffs (FCF 115B)

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 03:21:20 +0000

While this will include reducing in some areas and hiring in others, it will mean an overall reduction in our corporate workforce of approximately 14,000 roles.

Amazon free cash flow the last 3 years

Net Operating Cash Flow 2024 - 115,877 2023 - 84,946 2022 - 46,752

_{Quote Citation: Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, “An update from SVP Beth Galetti on Amazon workforce reduction”, 2025-10-28, https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-workforce-reduction}

but will the bubbles be blue?

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 03:14:52 +0000

Today, we’re introducing a way for Quick Share to work with AirDrop. This makes file transfer easier between iPhones and Android devices, and starts rolling out today to the Pixel 10 family.

_{Quote Citation: Google, “Android Quick Share can now work with iOS’s AirDrop”, 2025-11-20, https://blog.google/products/android/quick-share-airdrop/}

verizon layoffs - 13k (FCF Doubles)

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 03:13:35 +0000

Verizon’s new CEO, Dan Schulman, said in a note to employees the company would reduce its workforce by more than 13,000 employees across the organization, and significantly reduce outsourced and other outside labor expenses.

Reposting with VZ Free cash flow numbers.

Free Cash Flow TTM 20,649,000 2024 18,922,000 2023 12,912,000

Which really puts this quote into a different light IMO

“Our current cost structure limits our ability to invest significantly in our customer value proposition,” Schulman wrote in a note to employees seen by Reuters. “We must simplify our operations to address the complexity and friction that slow us down and frustrate our customers.”

not everyone lives in the software bubble - let alone the AI one

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 02:55:41 +0000

After turning off the public replies to his original tweet, Davuluri later responded to the criticism, posting: “I’ve read through the comments and see focus on things like reliability, performance, ease of use and more.” The same tweet also dropped any mention of AI, instead emphasizing Microsoft’s commitment to improve the Windows experience and other pain points, he said.

I think no one likes AI shoved in their face in the same way no one liked Clippy. And whats worse is knowing that AI companies are requiring opt out of data harvesting.

federal play on ai rules and regulations

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 02:54:16 +0000

The executive order, in the draft obtained by POLITICO, would also empower Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to publish a review of “onerous” state AI laws within 90 days and restrict federal broadband funds to states whose AI laws are found to be objectionable. It would direct the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether state AI laws that “require alterations to the truthful outputs of AI models” are blocked by the FTC Act.

nearly 1/3 world AI talent is Chinese

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 02:51:59 +0000

In 2020, a study from the Paulson Institute, which promotes constructive ties between the United States and China, estimated that Chinese A.I. researchers accounted for nearly one-third of the world’s top A.I. talent. Most of those Chinese researchers worked for American companies and universities.

Just wish we would invest in our education system. When getting a PHD means incurring six figure debts into your 40s. No rational person would pursue it.

NVIDIA beats earnings - ai bubble expands

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 02:50:24 +0000

The fact that Nvidia’s business continues to hum isn’t surprising given that tech giants such as Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google all indicated in their most recent earnings reports that they plan to continue hiking their AI infrastructure spending.

I mean. just like server blades. Until big tech can produce their own, NVIDIA is the picks and shovels provider in this gold rush

_{Quote Citation: Clare Duffy, “Nvidia beats earnings expectations, even as bubble concerns mount | CNN Business”, 2025-11-19, https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/19/tech/nvidia-earnings-ai-bubble-fears}

thats how the cookie crumbles - browsers

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 02:48:58 +0000

Instead of having to click accept or reject on a cookie pop-up for every website you visit in Europe, the EU is preparing to enforce rules that will allow users to set their preferences for cookies at the browser level. “People can set their privacy preferences centrally — for example via the browser — and websites must respect them,” says the EU. “This will drastically simplify users’ online experience.”

Hear me out. What about just not tracking us at all.

vibe your prototypes - code your production

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 02:48:12 +0000

Regarding vibe coding, Torvalds described himself as “fairly positive” – but not for kernel development. Computers have become more complicated than when he learned to code and was “typing in programs from computer magazines.” Vibe coding, he said, is a great way for people to “get computers to do something that maybe they couldn’t do otherwise.” This is despite the fact that vibe coding “may be a horrible, horrible idea from a maintenance standpoint.”

yes please - stop scalper bots

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 02:46:17 +0000

But it said on Wednesday that resales above face value - defined as original ticket price plus unavoidable fees - would be illegal.

Tell me why reselling above face value should be allowed. While we’re fixing this please also get rid of the dreaded “Fees” on TicketMaster.

_{Quote Citation: Reuters, “UK to ban the resale of tickets for profit to protect fans | Reuters”, 2025-11-19, https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-ban-resale-tickets-profit-protect-fans-2025-11-19/}

almost like investing in education has positive outcomes

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 02:45:14 +0000

What’s different now is the alchemical opportunity to turn intellectual accomplishment into gold and glory. Xi Jinping and the Communist Party have called on the private sector to help develop critical technologies — especially artificial intelligence — and they’ve backed that up with tax breaks, subsidies and supportive policies. Not only can founders like DeepSeek’s Liang Wenfeng raise millions in venture capital and build businesses, their photos are splashed across state media alongside Xi’s where they’re hailed as national heroes. Indeed, China’s president is a graduate of the school too.

avg comp for klarna employees rises

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 02:43:14 +0000

Average compensation for each employee has jumped from $126,000 (£96,000) in 2022 to $203,000 today, Klarna said.

I wonder if this is just a reflection of other articles indicating that Klarna has used AI to mainly offset claims and call center jobs. The broader macro environment of buy-now-pay-later services has also exploded…

_{Quote Citation: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/kalyeena-makortoff, “Klarna says AI drive has helped halve staff numbers and boost pay | Buy now, pay later | The Guardian”, 2025-11-18, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/nov/18/buy-now-pay-later-klarna-ai-helped-halve-staff-boost-pay}

buy now pay never loans not reported to credit bureaus

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 02:38:50 +0000

Because most BNPL loans aren’t reported to credit bureaus, they create what regulators call “phantom debt.” That means other lenders can’t see when someone has taken out five different BNPL loans across multiple platforms. The credit system is flying blind.

I think this is changing or has changed recently. but very troubling that many of these services are being used to pay for groceries and basics.

_{Quote Citation: Connie Loizos, “‘Buy now, pay later’ is expanding fast, and that should worry everyone | TechCrunch”, 2025-11-16, https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/16/bnpl-is-expanding-fast-and-that-should-worry-everyone/}

ai predictions - AI eliminating 50% of roles

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 02:36:49 +0000

In May, he told Axios he believes AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level office jobs within five years, potentially pushing unemployment to 10-20%, and that industry and governments are “sugarcoating” what’s coming.

Meh. It’s hard to think outside the bubble sometimes. Numerous lawyers have already been bench slapped for including fictitious cases.

_{Quote Citation: Thibault Spirlet, “Anthropic CEO Says He’s Uneasy About Unelected Tech Leaders Shaping AI - Business Insider”, Nov 17, 2025, 6:41 AM ET, https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-unelected-tech-leaders-shaping-ai-concerned-2025-11}

man trolls ai - building infinite pages

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 02:33:07 +0000

Meta is a terrible company. They aren’t being at all mannerly scraping everything. At the very least, the effects of copyright law on their use of human-written material is arguable. I feel that we should all give fake content to Meta’s AI scraper, or something similar. I believe that every time someone implements a scraper junkyard, it should be individual, highly customized, and idiosyncratic, in order to give the people at Meta, Google, OpenAI and others problems. I quit goofing on Meta because I was worried about costs of ridiculously high traffic to my $6-a-month VPS. I should probably have written my infinite website program with some kind of rate limiting, a fixed number of requests per day perhaps, and then give out 503s the rest of the day. bork.php already waits a randomly-chosen delay with a mean of about 14 seconds on each request.

ai wins powerball

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 02:31:05 +0000

fwiw. I’ve tried this with NYS lotto and scratchers. No Dice.

_{Quote Citation: Stella Canino-Quiñones, “Virginia woman won lottery with ChatGPT’s numbers, then gave it all away - The Washington Post”, 2025-11-14, https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/11/14/virginia-lottery-donate-winnings-chatgpt/}

eco's all the way down

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 03:22:23 +0000

Microsoft has increasingly given CEO titles to the leaders of some of its biggest businesses, such as Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer and Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman. Microsoft also used CEO positions with its GitHub and LinkedIn acquisitions, although the GitHub CEO position disappeared after Thomas Dohmke resigned over the summer.

I wonder did the dutch India company have this problem? Everyone had to be a captain or some sort? Not dissing on the CEO title. just wondering out lout how big is too big.. I mean if companies are saying the quite part out loud “this is a separate company” why isn’t it?

the permanent intern-ai with no capacity for growth

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 03:19:33 +0000

The more detailed you make your prompts, the better Claude Code performs. But to get it to work correctly, you need specifications so detailed that you’ve almost done the implementation.

You’re not necessarily saving time - you’re programming in Markdown instead of code. … So, to be effective, you need to behave just like Gabriel. You need to watch Claude plotting stuff in the console. As one moment it generates sensible code, then completely loses the plot the next. … Speaking about junior devs. Many people claim that working with LLM is like working with a junior. I think that’s disrespectful and just plain wrong. Junior devs don’t have enough knowledge yet, but they learn, you can teach them, mentor them, and they will get better. They can also reason and react based on what they’re doing; they’re not just code outputters. LLMs won’t learn, as they don’t have memory; they just have context, which they happen to lose quickly and randomly.

everyone else is average-but not me (sarcasm)

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 03:14:49 +0000

Most organisations don’t even recognise what good engineering looks like. They treat software development as a commodity – a manufacturing production line – measured by how many features are shipped rather than whether the right outcomes are achieved. Few understand the value of investing in modern software engineering best practices and design – the things that make those outcomes sustainable.

I have never been the best engineer I’ve ever met. But I like to think I’ve been good at delivery solutions. I’m not sure that AI effectively weeds out mediocre engineers than it lowers the floor for sub optimal solutions and raises the bar for good ones. Suddenly I’m spending less time googling syntax for JOIN statements and more time engaging in a discussion of best practices for good data modeling.

ah yes. trillions in digital infrastructure-no bubble here

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 03:10:36 +0000

Even if we may be in an AI bubble, it seems Altman is expecting OpenAI to survive the burst. “You should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on data center construction in the not very distant future,” Altman said. “You should expect a bunch of economists to wring their hands.”

I’m not sure whats more audacious. Declaring everyone ELSE is delusional or lighting billions on fire for the equivalent of a summary machine…

I'm on codex now

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 03:08:06 +0000

2025-10-06 Codex is now GA Codex is now generally available with 3 new features — @Codex in Slack, Codex SDK, and new admin tools.

Got tired of anthropic throttling me. Got worse on sonnet 3.5. So I’m giving codex a try. So far I’m both very happy with its coding ability and seemingly no limits.

_{Quote Citation: developers.openai.com, “Codex changelog”, 2025-10-21, https://developers.openai.com/codex/changelog}

surprise added fees means more costs and more inflation

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 03:05:56 +0000

Our analysis suggests that tariff measures are already exerting measurable upward pressure on consumer prices. The rise in prices beginning in early 2025 coincides closely with tariff developments, and our model-based regressions confirm that these effects are statistically and economically significant.

At the same time, the pass-through remains partial; only a portion of the model-predicted effect has materialized so far. This could reflect delays in price adjustments, competitive pressure limiting firms’ ability to raise prices, or expectations that the tariffs may prove temporary.

its always farmers isn't it

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 03:03:45 +0000

“If you’re, like, farming, you’re doing something people really need,” Altman explained. “You’re making them food, you’re keeping them alive. This is real work.” But the farmer would see our modern jobs as “playing a game to fill your time,” and therefore not a “real job.”

“It’s very possible that if we could see those jobs of the future,” Altman said, we’d think “maybe our jobs were not as real as a farmer’s job, but it’s a lot more real than this game you’re playing to entertain yourself.”

90/10 rule on AI code.

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 01:43:46 +0000

There are no weird files that shouldn’t belong there, no duplicate implementations, and no emojis all over the place. The comments still follow the style I want and, crucially, often aren’t there. I pay close attention to the fundamentals of system architecture, code layout, and database interaction. I’m incredibly opinionated. As a result, there are certain things I don’t let the AI do. I know it won’t reach the point where I could sign off on a commit. That’s why it’s not 100%. Research + code, instead of research and code later: Some things that would have taken me a day or two to figure out now take 10 to 15 minutes. It allows me to directly play with one or two implementations of a problem. It moves me from abstract contemplation to hands on evaluation.

ai net zero productivity in real office settings

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 01:13:10 +0000

Small time savings were observed across most use cases, with written tasks presenting the largest time savings. However, some tasks, like scheduling and generating images, incurred additional time to complete the task when participants used M365 Copilot. Additional time to complete tasks was primarily caused by either M365 Copilot being unable to produce high quality outputs or the task being additional workload only completed due to users having M365 Copilot. The evaluation did not find evidence that time savings have led to improved productivity, and control group participants had not observed productivity improvements from colleagues taking part in the M365 Copilot pilot. However, many pilot participants reported noticing time savings in their own roles due to M365 Copilot.

claude sonnet 4.5

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 01:05:29 +0000

In Claude Code, we’ve added checkpoints—one of our most requested features—that save your progress and allow you to roll back instantly to a previous state.

Dunno. recently I’ve been using OpenAI codex. I find I can work with much longer on the 20/month plan than I can sonnet. and I’m not nearly smart enough to detect differences in the two tools approach to solutions at this time.

_{Quote Citation: Anthropic, “Introducing Claude Sonnet 4.5 \ Anthropic”, Sep 29, 2025, https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-4-5}

ai and business process automation

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 01:03:24 +0000

More than three quarters (77%) of companies’ usage of Anthropic’s Claude AI software involved automation patterns, often including “full task delegation,” according to a research report the startup released on Monday. The finding was based on an analysis of traffic from Anthropic’s application programming interface, which is used by developers and businesses.

I think the critical thought here is maybe users are only leaning into AI where it makes sense now? So I would expect more of anthropic usage patterns to reflect actual work instead of exploratory work 2 years in.

AI can type faster, but it can't program faster

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 01:00:02 +0000

Do I program any faster? Not really. But it feels like I’ve gained 30% more time in my day because the machine is doing the work. I alternate between giving it instructions, reading a book, and reviewing the changes.

I think this is the way. and matches what I’ve experienced. Sure you can spool code from the CLI to your editor and review via git diffs. But are you accomplishing more throughput or just offloading syntaxual structure. I think more of AI as a mega-linter. Able to apply architectural patterns not just whitespace fixes.

ai code must pass through the human mind - thus a new bottleneck emerges

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 18:18:49 +0000

Code review, however, emerged as the most significant challenge. Reviewing the generated code line by line across all changes took me approximately 20 minutes. Unlike pairing with a human developer—where iterative discussions occur at a manageable pace—working with an AI system capable of generating entire modules within seconds creates a bottleneck on the human side, especially when attempting line-by-line scrutiny. This isn’t a limitation of the AI itself, but rather a reflection of human review capacity.

watch the hands of AI not their mouths

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 18:15:32 +0000

Seven years from GPT-1 to the plateau. How many more until we stop trying to build intelligence and start trying to understand what we’ve already built? That’s the real work now - not training the next model, but figuring out what to do with the ones we have. Turns out the singularity looks less like transcendence and more like integration work. Endless, necessary integration work.

I think this is it. The last 5 years and especially 3 have been amazing to watch. From GPT-2 to today AI has only gotten better at helping me code basic things. But it still tries to run non-sensical commands and just recently added a “Utilties-2” folder to my project because I already had one?

lumpy labor fallacy - don' be a loser I guess

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 18:12:09 +0000

Automation affects workers in different ways. In some cases, technology acts as a complement to human labor, and in other cases as a substitute for human labor. Over the long run, technological advance creates new goods and services, raises national income, and increases the demand for labor throughout the economy. However, it is important to note that these changes can create winners and losers—some workers will lack the skills to transition to new jobs. Recent technological advance has increased the demand for highly skilled workers, whose labor is a complement to the new technology, but the new technology has replaced the labor of some less-skilled workers.11 Therefore, it’s important that workers invest in their human capital and continue to improve their skills throughout their working years.

all the way around to static content site generators

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 18:02:42 +0000

Harris took a different approach. Svelte performs its middle-layer work before a developer uploads code to a web server, well before a user ever downloads it. This makes it possible to remove unnecessary features, shrinking the resulting app. It also reduces the number of moving parts when a user runs the app, which can make Svelte apps faster and more efficient. Wang says he likes to use Svelte for web pages, but he still uses React for larger applications, including his professional work. For one thing, the larger an app, the more likely a developer will use all of React’s features.

great real world notes on AI-coding

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 17:59:36 +0000

Some of us lean on AI coding to push side projects faster into the delivery pipeline. These are not core product features but experiments and MVP-style initiatives. For bringing that kind of work to its first version, the speed-up is real. … output quality gets worse the more context you add. The model starts pulling in irrelevant details from earlier prompts, and accuracy drops. … AI can get you 70% of the way, but the last 30% is the hard part. The assistant scaffolds a feature, but production readiness means edge cases, architecture fixes, tests, and cleanup

writing code was never the bottleneck

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 01:20:19 +0000

“We need to stop talking about AI as a magic fix and instead focus on the specifics: where are the biggest points of friction for developers, how can AI help alleviate that friction, and specifically how should developers use AI tools to overcome that friction and move faster?” Laura Tacho, CTO at DX told LeadDev earlier this year.

Not sure if I captured this before. but writing code was never the bottleneck in software development. And no engineer is able to drive a single feature to completion. Stakeholders are always involved.

growth at all costs burns everything

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 01:18:20 +0000

As my friend Kasey put it in a recent conversation, growth is a fire. If you build a nice, sustainable fire, it’ll keep you warm, cook food and sustain life. And if the only thing you care about is how big your fire is, then it’ll set fire to everything around it, and the more you throw into it, the more it’ll burn. Eventually, you’ll have nothing left, but if you desperately desire that fire, you will constantly have to find new things to burn at any cost.

Nvidia's GPUs are propping up the mag 7 and the whole market

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:54:02 +0000

NVIDIA’s earnings are, effectively, the US stock market’s confidence, and everything rides on five companies — and if we’re honest, really four companies — buying GPUs for generative AI services or to train generative AI models. Worse still, these services, while losing these companies massive amounts of money, don’t produce much revenue, meaning that the AI trade is not driving any real, meaningful revenue growth.

We’re three years in, and generative AI’s highest-grossing companies — outside OpenAI ($10 billion annualized as of early June) and Anthropic ($4 billion annualized as of July), and both lose billions a year after revenue — have three major problems:

the ozemic of corporate payroll costs

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:27:16 +0000

The careful, coded corporate language executives once used in describing staff cuts is giving way to blunt boasts about ever-shrinking workforces. Gone are the days when trimming head count signaled retrenchment or trouble. Bosses are showing off to Wall Street that they are embracing artificial intelligence and serious about becoming lean. After all, it is no easy feat to cut head count for 20 consecutive quarters, an accomplishment Wells Fargo’s chief executive officer touted this month. The bank is using attrition “as our friend,” Charlie Scharf said on the bank’s quarterly earnings call as he told investors that its head count had fallen every quarter over the past five years—by a total of 23% over the period.

humans still needed for programming

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:22:25 +0000

AI assistants optimize for making tests pass and errors disappear. Without clear direction, they’ll take the path of least resistance. Common shortcuts to watch for:

TypeScript any types appearing when proper typing gets complex Tests getting commented out or skipped when they’re hard to fix Quick fixes that address symptoms rather than root causes

Great write up on a using claude code cli. And this was in July before 3.5 sonnet! I found this list of ‘gotchas’ kinda funny because they’re the exactly the kind of thing a senior engineer would catch immediately but a novice wielding AI might not. Fare not, “Refactoring and Debugging AI vibe apps” coming to a O’Reily publication near you. (To borrow a joke from his post)

llm is not the path to agi - and other thoughts on the AI bubble

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:16:34 +0000

So from an executive perspective, lighting comically large piles of money on fire trying to teach graphics cards how to read is, surprisingly, the logical play. The rest, well, that’s all just creative marketing. It’s very difficult to show up to a quarterly shareholder meeting and tell your investors you just vaporized another $10 billion for absolutely no return-on-investment. At least, that is, without them questioning if you’ve completely lost your mind. Which is where leaning into the hype plays into it.

ai, software engineering and who moved my cheese

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:10:03 +0000

AI is increasingly automating many coding tasks, accelerating software development. As models and tools improve, we see the automation of more complex coding tasks under developers’ orchestration (like the ones we interviewed). This is already reality and no longer a future trend.

I think the reality is no one ever cared how nice my lines of code were. Anyone outside of software just wants the damn thing to work. SO using AI is just another tool. Adopt it.

I know when you're vibe coding - was it the emojis?

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:05:20 +0000

I care about what gets merged into the codebase. I don’t care how the code got in your IDE.

I want you to care.

I want people to care about quality, I want them to care about consistency, I want them to care about the long-term effects of their work. LLMs are engineering marvels, and I have the utmost respect for the people who’ve created them. But we still need to build software, not productionize prototypes.

Publishers

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Each publisher links back to the main page with a filter applied so you can skim everything you’ve captured from that source.

is ai contributing to unemployment? no.. (Betteridge's law of headlines)

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 23:55:24 +0000

These patterns are particularly striking in technology sectors, where workers might expect AI to augment rather than to replace their roles. Software developers, data analysts and other tech professionals are finding that AI tools can indeed accelerate certain tasks, but potentially at the cost of overall employment demand.

Our results suggest we may be witnessing the early stages of AI-driven job displacement. Unlike previous technological revolutions that primarily affected manufacturing or routine clerical work, generative AI can target cognitive tasks performed by knowledge workers—traditionally among the most secure employment categories.

unemployment is relative - right now its up from before making it seem worse

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 23:52:22 +0000

This 1.34 percentage point increase represents more than just a statistical noise; it reflects a significant shift in how the economy is absorbing newly educated workers. The magnitude of this change becomes even more striking when compared with that of other demographic groups. Noncollege-educated workers in the same age range have seen only a modest 0.47 percentage point increase in unemployment, while older college graduates have experienced a 0.38 percentage point rise.

finding the right "metric" for ai productivity - hint its not lines of code

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 23:49:04 +0000

“When we talk about acceptance rate, a lot of the metrics that were popularized early on were metrics that were meant to show whether or not the tools were fit for purpose, not to measure the impact of them across an organization,” she explained.

Seeing lots of “acceptance” rate and “% of code written” here’s the deal. we solved the problem. its outcomes. how many shippable units that delight your customers. Don’t get lost in the sea of “generated lines of code”.

limitions on scaling LLM, who knew.. this guy..

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 23:43:15 +0000

Some voices within the industry began to wonder if the A.I. scaling law was starting to falter. “The 2010s were the age of scaling, now we’re back in the age of wonder and discovery once again,” Ilya Sutskever, one of the company’s founders, told Reuters in November. “Everyone is looking for the next thing.” A contemporaneous TechCrunch article summarized the general mood: “Everyone now seems to be admitting you can’t just use more compute and more data while pretraining large language models and expect them to turn into some sort of all-knowing digital god.” But such observations were largely drowned out by the headline-generating rhetoric of other A.I. leaders. “A.I. is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks,” Amodei recently told Anderson Cooper. In an interview with Axios, he predicted that half of entry-level white-collar jobs might be “wiped out” in the next one to five years. This summer, both Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, of Meta, claimed that their companies were close to developing superintelligence.

developer adoption ~98% on AI tooling with reporting some net positive productivity improvements

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 23:28:23 +0000

SUMMARY • 66% of respondents have adopted AI tools in production. • 85% are focused on internal engineering use cases. • 59% of respondents feel AI has increased productivity. The tooling landscape Whether overzealous leaders have mandated adoption or allowed engineers to discover these tools themselves, it’s safe to say that AI coding assistants and large language models (LLMs) are firmly part of the software developer’s tool belt today. Two-thirds (66%) of respondents have adopted AI tools or models for at least some use cases, with 20% at a pilot stage, and 13% still exploring. This leaves just 2% who have no plans to use AI tools or models.

major M365 pilot shows small modest AI improvements

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 23:16:05 +0000

Small time savings were observed across most use cases, with written tasks presenting the largest time savings. However, some tasks, like scheduling and generating images, incurred additional time to complete the task when participants used M365 Copilot. Additional time to complete tasks was primarily caused by either M365 Copilot being unable to produce high quality outputs or the task being additional workload only completed due to users having M365 Copilot. The evaluation did not find evidence that time savings have led to improved productivity, and control group participants had not observed productivity improvements from colleagues taking part in the M365 Copilot pilot. However, many pilot participants reported noticing time savings in their own roles due to M365 Copilot.

china is innovating not just copying

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 23:12:59 +0000

This evolution is consistent with the country’s strategic push to move beyond its role as a passive technology recipient and become an active licensor of frontier technologies. This is evident in sectors such as artificial intelligence, green technology and advanced manufacturing, where China’s firms are becoming increasingly competitive and, in some cases, globally dominant.

pretty interesting to see the charts the indicate that % of GDP china is growing both in its royalties and exported IP.

real take on the 90% AI coding hype

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 23:12:33 +0000

I cannot stress enough how bad the code from these agents can be if you’re not careful. While they understand system architecture and how to build something, they can’t keep the whole picture in scope. They will recreate things that already exist. They create abstractions that are completely inappropriate for the scale of the problem.

Author hi lights some great observations on using AI. Specifically two I also enjoy. Research+Coding. It can help navigate AWS infrastructure items pretty easily for someone who isn’t in console all day everyday.

deep dive into the constraints of higher education and history of america

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 01:48:11 +0000

But school is not like the rest of life. Success in school is about jumping through the hoops that adults put in front of you; success in life can involve charting your own course. In school, a lot of success is individual: How do I stand out? In life, most success is team-based: How can we work together? Grades reveal who is persistent, self-disciplined, and compliant—but they don’t reveal much about emotional intelligence, relationship skills, passion, leadership ability, creativity, or courage.

results + relationships = success

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 01:28:37 +0000

Ways to Get Ahead

Three components of fast career growth:

Luck Talent Grit

I do appreciate he put luck first.. as a graduate into the 2008 economic meltdown it certainly felt like bad luck

The reality is. You can’t have it all. There are trade offs. Embrace them and optimize.

_{Quote Citation: Sidwyn Koh, “Work-Life Balance Slows Careers (E9 Engineer, ex-Meta)”, 2024-08-31, https://www.pathtostaff.com/p/work-life-balance-slows-careers-e9}

enjoying the tea - anthropic and openai trade barbs

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 01:24:06 +0000

ANTHROPIC REVOKED OPENAI’S API access to its models on Tuesday, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell WIRED. OpenAI was informed that its access was cut off due to violating the terms of service.

“Claude Code has become the go-to choice for coders everywhere, and so it was no surprise to learn OpenAI’s own technical staff were also using our coding tools ahead of the launch of GPT-5,” Anthropic spokesperson Christopher Nulty said in a statement to WIRED. “Unfortunately, this is a direct violation of our terms of service.”

blame AI not macro environment

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 01:22:56 +0000

There is, however, some skepticism around the extent to which AI is truly responsible for layoffs. “As a founder, seeking investments, of a company that’s in a public market that trades stock, you don’t want to rattle the market and say ‘Oh we’re actually in a really tough position because we can’t borrow money cheaply and the economic condition isn’t great,’” said Mr. Vu, “You want to be able to at least try to shape the narrative on why your company’s headcount isn’t growing as quickly as it should, and in fact right now, AI certainly seems like a good reason to attribute that to.”

talking up the book - GPT 5

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 01:20:30 +0000

Companies building AI dev tools report positive results. Cursor calls it “the smartest coding model we’ve used.” Windsurf says it has “half the tool calling error rate” of other models. Vercel praises its frontend capabilities.

Beyond the tool companies, some founders and developers have shared their early experiences. GitHub’s CEO mentioned that GPT-5 shows promise for complex refactoring tasks. Several startup founders have noted improvements in code generation quality, though most emphasize they’re still in early testing phases.

peak layoffs. so over it

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 01:18:20 +0000

Jason Leverant, the COO and president of AtWork Group, told Newsweek that automation tended to hit jobs that fell into what he called the “Three D’s”: dull, dirty or dangerous. Many white-collar positions in the “dull” category are already being replaced by AI tools.

Feels like this is an assertion without citation.. but it has been a rough few years.

_{Quote Citation: Newsweek, “US Hits Highest Layoffs Since COVID - Newsweek”, 2025-08-12, https://www.newsweek.com/us-hits-highest-layoffs-since-covid-2111794}

Being an EM is giving up coding.. but AI changes this

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:58:40 +0000

Fast forward to today, and that joy of coding is decreasing rapidly. Well, I’m a manager these days, so there’s that… But even when I do get technical, I usually just open Cursor and prompt my way out of 90% of it. It’s way more productive, but more passive as well.

I’m not sure I agree with this post.. Yes with AI you can be dangerous again and sling some code. But finding Joy in writing functions? No.. find joy in shipping. ABC always be committing..

another metric for writing software - DAT

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:56:53 +0000

At Meta, a diff is a pull request and DAT focuses on the inner development loop – the writing, building, testing, and debugging of code. The tech giant emphasizes diffs should be kept small and reviewable, which, in part, accounts for its average DAT of 50 minutes across 87% of available diffs.

I feel like it’s the continuous application of scientific management (Taylorism) here that fall short. Gallup has found time and again that effective workers have a lot more to do with environment than DATs..

2000 words on people not reading as much.. will AI Fix it? not likely

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:54:11 +0000

In 2023, the National Endowment for the Arts reported that, over the preceding decade, the proportion of adults who read at least one book a year had fallen from fifty-five per cent to forty-eight per cent. That’s a striking change, but modest compared to what’s happened among teen-agers: the National Center for Education Statistics—which has recently been gutted by the Trump Administration—found that, over roughly the same period, the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun “almost every day” fell from twenty-seven per cent to fourteen per cent. Predictably, college professors have been complaining with more than usual urgency about phone-addled students who struggle to read anything of substantial length or complexity.

deep dive on Cursor tech stack

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:50:19 +0000

Monolith: the backend service is mostly a large monolith, and is deployed as one. This is a reminder that monoliths work pretty well for early-stage startups and can help teams move fast.

This is a shameless plug for Martin fowler as well. first get it working, then make it better.

_{Quote Citation: Gergely Orosz, “Real-world engineering challenges: building Cursor”, JUN 10, 2025, https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/cursor}

An explosion of new SDLC for SWE

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:43:11 +0000

In short, we are in the midst of a Cambrian explosion of developer tools, and a dizzying array of approaches are currently being tested for their evolutionary fitness. Consider even an abbreviated, absolutely non-exhaustive list of related tools: Aboard, Bolt, Cline, Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT / Codex, Claude / Code, Gemini / CLI, Factory, Lovable, Poolside, Replit, Same.dev, vibes.diy, v0, watsonX and Windsurf. Not all of these will succeed, and indeed some argue that all of these are doomed because the economic footing they’re built on is fatally unsound. That argument is built on two core assumptions, however: that vendor costs will never come down and that user costs can not be raised – neither of which seems entirely safe.

Really great overview on setting up a community of practice with AI

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:39:20 +0000

That objective I described - meaningful Experimentation - is the first phase of our journey. We’ll then transition to a second phase centered around a goal of Adoption of AI as standard part of the day-to-day toolkit for engineers. At that point the focus shifts again to measuring Impact - where is this new tool helping, and where is it causing issues.

Deep dive in driving adoption of really anything. Change management 101.

good site on new reality of hiring

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:35:54 +0000

America’s youth strive for personal and professional success, but many struggle along broken pathways from high school into the job market because the people and institutions meant to support them are fundamentally out of sync.

_{Quote Citation: Website, “The Broken Marketplace Study”, Present, https://www.brokenmarketplace.org/}

money now please - vesting schedule changes

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:32:53 +0000

Originally pioneered by Sergej Sonic at Alphabet, DoorDash, and Rippling, this shift isn’t just a simple change in numbers; for companies, it’s a philosophical pivot toward a more dynamic, performance-driven compensation strategy. Top performing employees stand to benefit while others will have more uncertainty of compensation in subsequent years.

I mean, it wasn’t like spreading it over 4 years was keeping people anchored.

_{Quote Citation: Zaheer,Zuhayeer, “Front-Loaded Vesting: Why Your Tech Offer Looks Different Now”, September 9, 2025, https://www.levels.fyi/blog/front-loaded-vesting.html}

managing is for the people

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:28:15 +0000

I’m talking about personal goals. Not the corporate version where everyone wants to “develop leadership skills” but real, ambitious, life-changing goals that make people light up when they talk about them.

Rejecting the “up or out” rat race is phenomenal

_{Quote Citation: Stephane Moreau, “The insane privilege of being a manager”, SEP 09, 2025, https://www.blog4ems.com/p/the-insane-privilege-of-being-a-manager}

Remembering the FE wars.. Why React is de-facto standard

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:25:49 +0000

React is no longer winning by technical merit. Today it is winning by default. That default is now slowing innovation across the frontend ecosystem.

Ember? knockout? vue? I dont know what “let’s use React” is the innovation killer. There is power in choosing a standard coding language everyone understands.

_{Quote Citation: Loren Stewart, “React Won by Default – And It’s Killing Frontend Innovation | Loren Stewart”, 2025-09-16, https://www.lorenstew.art/blog/react-won-by-default/}

random walk down wall street - with AI

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 03:45:44 +0000

AI is being hyped across every industry, but can it really manage money without guidance?

This project is an attempt to find out — with transparency, data, and a real budget.

Spoiler. No it cannot.

_{Quote Citation: Nathan Smith, “LuckyOne7777/ChatGPT-Micro-Cap-Experiment: This repo powers my blog experiment where ChatGPT manages a real-money micro-cap stock portfolio.”, Ongoing, https://github.com/LuckyOne7777/ChatGPT-Micro-Cap-Experiment}

slowing down time for better observability

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 03:38:49 +0000

Making Postgres 42,000x slower because I am unemployed

I mean. It’s why this project exists. I wanted to learn about AWS lambda, s3 and GitHub actions. Plus Hugo. So I get it. And there’s utility in understanding how things work, always.

If you can slow it down 42,000x just think about how happy your users will be when you speed it back up.

_{Quote Citation: Jacob Jackson, “Making Postgres 42,000x slower because I am unemployed”, 2025-07-27, https://byteofdev.com/posts/making-postgres-slow/}

Fun look at a real live sever room upgrade

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 03:36:31 +0000

A few weeks ago we upgraded a lot of the core infrastructure in our New York (okay, it’s really in New Jersey now – but don’t tell anyone) data center. We love being open with everything we do (including infrastructure), and really consider it one of the best job perks we have. So here’s how and why we upgrade a data center.

My first job also included management of the server room. Fun memories.

A strong take on types

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 03:32:56 +0000

I’ve seen so many bugs in real systems due to mixing up integers, strings, or UUIDs that represent different things. Meanwhile, it’s simple to set up types that entirely eliminate this class of bug, even in a language like Go that isn’t known for having a particularly powerful type system. It’s absolutely astounding to me that this technique is not broadly used.

I mean I get it. compiler catch everything. Bob Martin would be proud.

AI is both everything and nothing - Sam Altman

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 03:29:43 +0000

Altman illustrated the productivity revolution with a personal example. He described using an upcoming OpenAI model to complete a complex home automation programming task that would have taken him “days to do” before AI assistance.

The AI completed “almost all of the work” in just “5 minutes,” he said. A year ago, “you would have paid a very high-end programmer 20 hours, 40 hours something like that to do” the same task. With AI, it cost “probably less than a dollar’s worth of compute tokens.”

24/7 trading and dark pools

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 03:25:23 +0000

And that is before considering the logistical nightmare that 24-hour exchanges would entail. The witching hours are currently when all manner of dull, but vital, post-trade processes take place, from settlement and valuation to the reconciliation of mistakes.

I get it, but dark pools is where people think the action is, and for major multi-national conglomerates the sun never sets, so why should the markets?

_{Quote Citation: The Economist, “Why 24/7 trading is a bad idea”, Jul 23rd 2025, https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/07/23/why-247-trading-is-a-bad-idea}

H1-B Visas and layoffs

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 03:21:49 +0000

When announcing its layoffs this year, the Redmond, Wash.-based company insisted that it was flattening its management layers, as opposed to targeting software engineers and developers at lower levels. However, the Seattle Times reported that only around 17 percent of those laid off at the Redmond campus were designated as managers. Microsoft’s cuts also come after one of its best quarters ever, with the company announcing $26 billion in profit from January through March. Its stock is up nearly 20 percent year-to-date, at a time when tech companies across the board are looking to replace certain jobs, particularly in coding and engineering, with AI. With H-1B workers are typically seen as cheaper than Americans to employ, outrage has been spreading across social media from those who oppose the visa. There is no confirmed link between Microsoft’s layoffs and its H-1B applications.

AI trillion dollar problem - finding product market fit

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 03:16:40 +0000

Look, the economics of this just don’t make sense and the “what trillion dollar problem will AI solve?” question takes up a lot of space in my brain. I see people talking about the limited ways in which they work with it now, and wonder what happens when the bill comes due. We wouldn’t, as a society, pay a trillion dollars to solve those problems. Not even close.

While I’d say I’m still excited to talk about how AI is improving some things that I do, and especially helps me code from time to time. Just today claude latest decided to define two const variables in the same file.. So yea..

Amazon's thoughts on AI

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 03:12:25 +0000

As we go through this transformation together, be curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team’s brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams. When I first started at Amazon in 1997 as an Assistant Product Manager, I worked on leaner teams that got a lot done quickly and where I could have substantial impact. We didn’t have tools resembling anything like Generative AI, but we had broad remits, high ambition, and saw the opportunity to improve (and invent) so many customer experiences. Fast forward 28 years and the most transformative technology since the Internet is here. Those who embrace this change, become conversant in AI, help us build and improve our AI capabilities internally and deliver for customers, will be well-positioned to have high impact and help us reinvent the company.

CEOs all the way down - reduction of managers at Google/Alphabet

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 03:09:17 +0000

Google has eliminated more than one-third of its managers overseeing small teams, an executive told employees last week, as the company continues its focus on efficiencies across the organization.

“Right now, we have 35% fewer managers, with fewer direct reports” than at this time a year ago, said Brian Welle, vice president of people analytics and performance, according to audio of an all-hands meeting reviewed by CNBC.

This from the same company that thought it could just have CEOs all the way down and I guess many of these impacted roles were managing fewer than three people. I suppose this does dovetail with their own research they frequently publish at https://rework.withgoogle.com/intl/en/

Walmart sees a future of more automation less workers

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 03:03:33 +0000

For example, customer service tasks in call centers and through online chat functions will become more AI dependent soon and other tasks not, McMillon said.

Take humanoid robot workers. Companies have recently pitched robot workers to Walmart, McMillon said on stage. Yet “until we’re serving humanoid robots and they have the ability to spend money, we’re serving people,” he said. “We are going to put people in front of people.”

Fascinating cross-model comparison using cartography

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 02:56:18 +0000

With the following procedure, we’ll be able to extract an (imperfect) image of the world as it exists in an LLM’s tangled web of internal knowledge.

The images due it justice, but essentially it asks for any given coordinate is the location land or sea. And the resulting images probably give cartographers conniptions. it both allows you compare contrast knowledge and make fun of it too?

ps reminds me of this cool site https://what3words.com and obligatory https://xkcd.com/977/

AI services are still product - models seem to fade to the background

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 02:49:31 +0000

Microsoft is bringing Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1 AI models to its Microsoft 365 Copilot today. … Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1 will also be available as model options in Copilot Studio

Well two things. 1. MSFT has long ago abandoned its MSFT first policies. I get though the sentiment of shock. but 2. for tech people the model is everything. for everyone else. its just another service. And I think companies recognize this.

AI Job impact, augmentation now - replacement later

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 02:44:32 +0000

The swift advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has sparked significant concern that this new technology will replace jobs and stifle hiring. … Businesses reported a notable increase in AI use over the past year, yet very few firms reported AI-induced layoffs. Indeed, for those already employed, our results indicate AI is more likely to result in retraining than job loss … Looking ahead, however, layoffs and reductions in hiring plans due to AI use are expected to increase, especially for workers with a college degree.

AI op-out is a lot like a free U2 album on your iPod

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 02:35:09 +0000

Microsoft and GitHub, not to mention rivals like Google, have gone all-in on a technology that a sizable or at least vocal portion of their customers simply don’t want. And with billions in capital expenditures to recoup, they’re making it difficult to avoid.

During Microsoft’s July 30, 2025 earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella said GitHub Copilot continued to exhibit strong momentum and had reached 20 million users.

I mean 1. MSFT just flat out bought its way into the space between GitHub and VSCode (which Cursor is a fork of) and 2. its really easy to say you’ve reached 20 million users when its in your face in every single app.

AI Feels like the false boogey man for a weak job market for new hires

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 02:31:27 +0000

The percentage of young Gen Z employees between the ages of 21 and 25 has been cut in half at technology companies over the past two years, according to recent data from compensation management software business Pave

Article indicates that average age of tech companies has risen by ~5 years and also that % of workforce under 25 has shrank. will see how things shake out. I have to admit I wonder how much of the “we don’t need ‘old’ people” crowd has changed their tune since they are now the old people (in tech).

I'm back! Fun way to capture my thoughts

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 02:26:46 +0000

After vigorously vibe coding a quick browser extension I’m back to this format.

_{Quote Citation: YouTube, “I’m back baby!!! - YouTube”, 2020-07-18, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkbsYGtDB3o}

Single purpose camera for the win

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 02:23:56 +0000

As much as I find the digicam trend endearing (I think it’s fun for young people to explore new-old creative avenues and breathe fresh life into outdated tech)

I think the reality is the best camera is the one you have. But the phone has so much burden with it. Having watched the film->digital transformation I really like the idea of a quick point and shoot for my kids.

Genesis for this project (Duly Noted) was a private Pocket service

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 02:15:57 +0000

We made the difficult decision to shut down Pocket on July 8, 2025, with only the Pocket Web data export page live until October 8, 2025. Thank you for being part of our journey over the years – we’re proud of the impact Pocket has had for our users and communities.

Just a reminder (I think I noted this before) that any service-even ones you pay for-can go out like a light tomorrow.

Why iOS attracts apps first - developer experience

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 23:23:49 +0000

Every major release of Android makes breaking changes that requires developer effort

I mean nuff said right? No one wants to spend time constantly updating apps just for fun.

_{Quote Citation: Asish, “Maintaining an Android app is a lot of work”, June 7, 2025, https://ashishb.net/programming/maintaining-android-app/}

AI results don't drive inbound site traffic

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 23:20:07 +0000

Last month, search referrals to top U.S. travel and tourism sites tumbled 20% year over year, according to the latest data from Similarweb. E-commerce companies saw their referrals fall 9%. For news and media sites, search traffic dropped 17%. The finance, lifestyle, and food-and-drink categories all saw similar types of declines on the month.

Maybe make traditional search useful again? People are flocking to a tool that works. Shoving 10 ads in my face to find an irrelevant linke due to SEO hijacking does not cause me to shed one tear. My prediction is that more content will recede behind paywalls and only the trash will remain. Including this blog! lol.

Losing the dopamine rush of shipping software - a Managers fable

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 23:15:34 +0000

For over a decade, my dopamine (from work) came from a very predictable place: shipping new things. As a manager, those direct rewards will simply disappear, leaving you feeling unfulfilled for weeks (months in my case).

This hit home. And yes you too one day will be on a red team/warroom call remembering your glory days of diving deep figuring out the problem and feeling the accolades. Being a manager is a lot more pointing the spotlight than basking in it, rightfully so. As a manager suddenly results and rettenion matter most. Well Matheus puts it as ‘Shipping’ and ‘Happy’ which are results and retention oriented!

AI is a multiplier lever. Works best when applied to more engineers not fewer.

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 23:06:02 +0000

While some believe no-code or “vibe coding” tools (where users prompt agents to write software) might eliminate the need for technical expertise, Dohmke disagrees. He sees these tools as accelerators, not replacements. “The idea that AI without any coding skills lets you build a billion-dollar business is mistaken — because if that were true, everyone would be doing it.”

I feel this, for ever reddit post I read about someone POWERing through AI Development I think. Show me the money. I think I noted this elsewhere before. The great geniuses who invited Java and C# aren’t the ones who brough Applications to life. Try as I might, even my best simplest vibe-coding experiments reach the 95% threashold of compeltion. Sure right now businesses are shy about hiring, but I think this is more driven by over supply in the market of qualified engineers and global competition. The world is flat.

Profits and layoffs at Microsoft

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 22:59:51 +0000

During May’s round of layoffs, Microsoft emphasized that it wanted to flatten management layers. But data from Washington state showed only about 17% of those cuts in Redmond, where Microsoft is headquartered, were designated as managers. … “Our platform, hardware and game road map have never looked stronger,” he said. “The success we’re seeing currently is based on tough decisions we’ve made previously. … We will protect what is thriving and concentrate effort on areas with the greatest potential, while delivering on the expectations the company has for our business.” … The roles affected during layoffs in May and June included some that could be changed by AI-driven efficiencies. Software engineers were hit the hardest, with more than 800 laid off in Washington out of the initial 1,985 employees laid off in May. Other heavily represented roles were product and program managers.

First step on the career ladder looking shaky

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 22:54:18 +0000

The example of journalism may be a canary in the coalmine. Entry-level jobs in journalism often involve aggregating news items from other outlets in the style of your own employer, a task AI is well suited to if the facts are straight. I spent several years doing just that when I started out. In the same way that we see Amodei’s predictions taking shape in LinkedIn’s data, I see the entry-level diminishment beginning in my own industry. Business Insider, a digital outlet focused on financial and business news, laid off 20% of its staff late last week. CEO Barbara Peng said the newsroom would go “all-in on AI” and become “AI-first” in her note eliminating the jobs.

John Henry and the Steam Engine - coding edition

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:25:50 +0000

The expectations have sped up rapidly. One engineer said that building a feature for the website used to take a few weeks; now it must frequently be done within a few days. He said this is possible only by using A.I. to help automate the coding and by cutting down on meetings with colleagues to solicit feedback and explore alternative ideas.

Lots of ink spilled on the productivity of AI. But one very strong fact remains, if you were copy/pasting from stack overflow before, copy/pasting from LLMs is just more efficient. Besides how many unique apps are built everyday? Execution is the diffrientiator.

PoC and protyping benefit most from AI

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 22:11:47 +0000

Every couple of days a new article pops up about how engineers are X% more productive, and how company Y laid off hundreds of developers because they are not needed anymore. … Also, if you are working on a completely fresh codebase, or on a PoC - the gains can be huge. I was able to build in the last 2 months something that would have taken me a year previously.

Business changes the world, not software

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 22:02:44 +0000

IF YOU WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD, GO INTO BUSINESS

Fun read on the history of computer programming and 40 years. Fun tidbit, businesses change the world, not software.

_{Quote Citation: Charity, “THOUGHTS ON MOTIVATION AND MY 40-YEAR CAREER”, July 9, 2025, https://charity.wtf/2025/07/09/thoughts-on-motivation-and-my-40-year-career/}

AI doesn't mean you can't understand code

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 21:57:45 +0000

I have found that AI-generated code is often sloppy, unnecessarily complex, and a lot of the time, just plain wrong. For me, AI code generation is akin to mindlessly copy-pasting code snippets from Stack Overflow, and we all know how that goes. It usually takes me longer to understand AI generated code than write my own.

You can’t off load understanding. Using AI to generate entire projects isn’t the solution. Using it as a rapid lookup tool, much more promising. Interesting that DORA metrics seem to indicate negative impact on delivery stability. Which if you’re releasing code you don’t understand seems a given.

Great SWE still in demand

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 03:39:43 +0000

Engineers got used to those cushy jobs, and became the most spoiled profession out there. We work from a nice office (or your home), solve interesting problems, and get paid in the top 10% of our country to do it.

I once told a friend that SWE is unlike any other field. You don’t have to chase certificates or slog 10 years in the pits. What other career can you say ‘No I don’t know the tech stack and I don’t know the industry and I don’t know the product’ and hear back ‘You’re Hired’?

Love a good comma argument in legal documents

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 03:11:39 +0000

This lengthy sentence creates ambiguity: what exactly does “free of charge” apply to? Apple claims it only applies to “communicate” and “promote,” meaning the right to insert redirect links in an app. But not to “conclude contracts,” meaning making purchases. Based on that, Apple argues it can still charge commissions on those external transactions. The European Commission interprets it differently: contract conclusion must also be free of charge. It relies on the comma before the phrase “and to conclude contracts,” turning the sentence into an “enumeration.” “That ‘free of charge’ applies to all that is being enumerated after”, it explains in its detailed decision sent to Apple as part of the €500 million fine, which was made public last week.

Supply of CS Degrees has outstriped demand

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 03:05:01 +0000

In its latest labor market report, the New York Federal Reserve found that recent CS grads are dealing with a whopping 6.1 precent unemployment rate. Those who majored in computer engineering — which is similar, if not more specialized — are faring even worse, with 7.5 percent of recent graduates remaining jobless.

.I mean, best in class compensation, strong work life balance and prestige. Hundreds of thousands of students flocked to CS degrees as a no-brainer career. But the music has stopped, and there’s a lot of people without a place to sit. This is definately one of the larger market corrections I’ve seen since 2001. But, yet, I still would not tell people not to pursue engineering. Understanding technology I think is a critical part of the future.

AI Agents and Autocomplete still need a Human Finishing Touch

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 02:51:44 +0000

Dohmke [GitHub CEO] described an effective workflow where AI tools generate code and submit pull requests. Developers can make immediate adjustments using their programming skills.

Matches my experience as well. A silly example. I ask AI to add padding to a div and it adds a style inline tag. Not a pt-3 class. AI has been great for getting 80% started. The rest is still up to us.

_{Quote Citation: TECHINASIA, “GitHub CEO: manual coding remains key despite AI boom”, 23 Jun 2025, https://www.techinasia.com/news/github-ceo-manual-coding-remains-key-despite-ai-boom}

Target isn't fun anymore

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 02:46:29 +0000

But there’s no fun anymore. The stores just feel really kind of dingy, unkempt, with stuff locked behind doors.

Not much of a shopper, but Target really felt like a fun place to shop with great deals and clean stores. The answer seems so obvious to me, hire. more. people. Check outs and returns routinely take 20-30 min, the self checkout lanes are so slow and the lines long. My frequent impulse buys of Legos or Switch Games for the kids are locked up, not even able to browse. And even the socks and underwear require a person to unlock. A last straw, it seems like the in-store Starbucks are after thoughts. Sorry Target, Runnings and Tractor Supply have my dollars now. Glad to know it isn’t just me.

Credit Card Debt Delinquency on the rise

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 02:37:03 +0000

The share of people 30 days delinquent on their credit card debt has trended upward since the first half of 2021, and that trend was widespread among all four geographies we examined.

Lookinga the included graphs it seems since 2023 delinquency has gone from up almost 10% points (log scale). Somethings gotta give.

_{Quote Citation: Juan M. Sánchez , Masataka Mori, “The Broad, Continuing Rise in Delinquent U.S. Credit Card Debt Revisited”, May 09, 2025, https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/may/broad-continuing-rise-delinquent-us-credit-card-debt-revisited}

Vibe code prototypes, build great software

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 02:32:51 +0000

Redoing work is now extremely cheap. Code in the small is less important than structural patterns and organisation of the code in the large. You can also build lots of prototypes to test an idea out. For this, vibe-coding is great, as long as the prototype is thrown away and rewritten properly later.

This is fitting my better understanding of the shift in software development from vibe coding (hello Ruby on Rails would like a word) and using prompts to build design docs to THEN build software.

Slow and steady wins the SWE race

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 01:01:43 +0000

I think it’s actually the other way around. A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly normal, workaday software engineers, with decent software engineering skills and an ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship code, respond to users, understand the systems they’ve built, and move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by week.

Agree completely. And besides have you ever tried to manage that many egos on one team? Too many chefs and not enough cooks is a problem too. The best restraunts in the world cannot function without the dish washer.

Who knew? Larger vehicles means more blind spots

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 00:55:16 +0000

The IIHS came up with an easier way to repeatably measure and compare what a driver can see in a 180-degree forward-facing view out of a vehicle. The method involves a special portable camera rig that captures a driver’s view. That image is then processed to determine what percentage of the road in a specified radius is visible, and what’s blocked by the vehicle’s A-pillars, hood, and side-view mirrors. The result is an aerial view of where the driver’s vision is obstructed—the blind zone—as well as a percentage of the surrounding area that’s visible.

Fed Chair ruminates on AI

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 00:52:58 +0000

Speaking to the US Senate Banking Committee on Wednesday to give his semiannual monetary policy report, Powell told elected officials that AI’s effect on the economy to date is “probably not great” yet, but it has “enormous capabilities to make really significant changes in the economy and labor force.”

No timeline given, but another signal that labor disruption is on the horizon. And fiddling with interest rates isn’t going to fix this one.

How tax codes drive staffing decisions

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 23:49:41 +0000

Since the start of 2023, more than half-a-million tech workers have been laid off, according to industry tallies. Headlines have blamed over-hiring during the pandemic and, more recently, AI. But beneath the surface was a hidden accelerant: a change to what’s known as Section 174 that helped gut in-house software and product development teams everywhere from tech giants such as Microsoft (MSFT) and Meta (META) to much smaller, private, direct-to-consumer and other internet-first companies. For almost 70 years, American companies could deduct 100% of qualified research and development spending in the year they incurred the costs. Salaries, software, contractor payments — if it contributed to creating or improving a product, it came off the top of a firm’s taxable income.

AI takes time to get right

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 23:42:28 +0000

Eoin Hinchy, cofounder and CEO of workflow automation company Tines, said his team had 70 failures with an AI initiative they were working on over the course of a year before finally landing on a successful iteration.

As Jim Collins says, bullets then cannonballs. ‘AI’ covers so many types of solutions that to say you’re doing ‘AI’ is a lot like ‘we have a website’ in the late 90s. Congratulations on recognizing that the internet/ai is transformative. But deploying solutions will take time and effort. There are still no silver bullets.

When clever engineering meets unethical creations

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 23:38:18 +0000

Meta devised an ingenious system (“localhost tracking”) that bypassed Android’s sandbox protections to identify you while browsing on your mobile phone — even if you used a VPN, the browser’s incognito mode, and refused or deleted cookies in every session.

Worth the entire read, but whats fascinating is that some engineer was given a problem of how to track users across apps and sessions and didn’t blink an eye at solving it. Further proving that technology is a tool, and we can abosolutely hold companies accountable for violating ethics, morals and most importantly regulations. This post is very tech heavy which is great, but the crux is, meta could figure out who you were on andorid devices even if you never logged into their services. No good.

Claude Code and working patterns

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 23:34:52 +0000

With AI, code is becoming really cheap. This means that you can now build stuff that you only ever use once without feeling bad about it. Everything that you wish would make your current task easier can just be created out of thin air.

Fits in with being more ambitious because the cost of writing code is zero. But knowing what code to write is priceless. Also some good ideas on gitworkrees and task delegation. One thing I wish was more detailed was how he collects all the threads loops. Like does he kick off a bunch of threads and then look at them one by one? Humans are still single threaded least I checked..

Postgres Transactional DDL

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 23:30:07 +0000

And that is where I’ve learned Postgres is probably one of the rare databases that supports Transactional DDL. MySQL, Maria, and Oracle don’t.

I feel like Postgres has won the open source database world. The last time I reached for MySQL it was 2005 and ‘LAMP’ was the stack of choice.

_{Quote Citation: TANIN, “One more reason to choose Postgres over MySQL”, JUN 14, 2025, https://tanin.nanakorn.com/one-more-reason-to-use-postgres-vs-mysql/}

AI and the man behind the curtain

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 23:26:25 +0000

These statements betray a conceptual error: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not “understand” anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word. LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another.

AI, LLM and attack vectors

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 23:21:02 +0000

The bad news is that once you start mixing and matching tools yourself there’s nothing those vendors can do to protect you! Any time you combine those three lethal ingredients together you are ripe for exploitation.

With the rise of LLMs is now ripe for exploitation. Target your LLM to your email? What happens when there is mallicious prompts in plain text? Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Amazon and AI

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 23:06:05 +0000

As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.

ZIRP Hiring hangover

Thu, 29 May 2025 00:49:15 +0000

Hiring of new grads by the 15 largest tech companies has fallen by more than 50% since 2019, according to a new report from VC firm SignalFire. While hiring for mid- and senior-level roles rebounded last year following mass layoffs across all levels in 2023, it declined at the entry level. The gap between the overall unemployment level and that of recent college grads recently reached an all-time high, according to census data.

No - you fix it

Thu, 29 May 2025 00:42:28 +0000

GitHub has decided to gift open source with more AI contributions. You can press a button and GitHub Copilot will automatically generate a bug report for you — for any public project on the site!

The irony here being if AI is so good at programming why doesn’t the button generate a .patch file? Oh thats right because someone still has to maintain the product. Can you imagine a software built by AI? Like the whims of Twitch plays pokemon…

Pocket goes goodbye - another win for this site

Thu, 29 May 2025 00:23:47 +0000

We’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Pocket on July 8, 2025. Thank you for being part of our journey over the years—we’re proud of the impact Pocket has had for our users and communities.

I actually considered just using pocket instead of building this site and associated scripts to automate some things. But here it is less than 6 months later pocket decides to fold. And this was even a Paying service!

IBM repositions staffing levels due to AI (allegedly)

Thu, 29 May 2025 00:08:25 +0000

International Business Machines Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said the tech giant has used artificial intelligence, and specifically AI agents, to replace the work of a couple hundred human resources workers. As a result, it has hired more programmers and salespeople, he said. While there haven’t yet been widespread layoffs or downsizing as a result of AI across the economy, some business leaders have said they are holding down head count as they investigate the use of the technology.

Interview with Zuckerberg

Thu, 29 May 2025 00:04:27 +0000

This isn’t the 1-2 year thing of what happens when you have a super powerful software engineer. But over time, if everyone has these superhuman tools to create a ton of different stuff, you’re going to get incredible diversity. Part of it is going to be solving hard problems: solving diseases, advancing science, developing new technology that makes our lives better. But I would guess that a lot of it is going to end up being cultural and social pursuits and entertainment. I would guess the world is going to get a lot funnier, weirder, and quirkier, the way that memes on the internet have gotten over the last 10 years.

AI destroys the value-proposition of posting web content

Wed, 28 May 2025 23:56:45 +0000

75 percent of the queries that get put into Google get answered without you leaving Google, get answered on that page. So if you want to ask, when did David Rubenstein start Carlyle? About ten years ago it would take you to maybe a Wikipedia page or something else. Today, the answer comes up right on the page, and you don’t have to go anywhere else. The consequence of that means that original content creators that are creating that content, if they were deriving value through selling subscriptions or putting up ads, or just the ego of knowing that someone is reading your stuff, that’s gone, right? That’s has fallen off a cliff. And that’s the good news. So it was two to one ten years ago for Google. It’s six to one today. What do you think it is for OpenAI? 250 to one. What do you think it is for Anthropic? Six thousand to one, right?

AI lower the barrier to programming

Wed, 28 May 2025 23:50:41 +0000

Programming, at its essence, is conversation with computers. It’s how we translate human intention into machine action. Throughout computing history, we’ve continuously built better translation layers between human thought and machine execution—from physical wiring to assembly language to high-level languages to the World Wide Web, which embedded calls to backend systems into a frontend made up of human-readable documents. LLMs are simply the next evolution in this conversation, making access to computer power more natural and accessible than ever before.

A real look at GitHub Copilot

Wed, 28 May 2025 23:45:34 +0000

I was describing GitHub Copilot. Or Claude Codex. Or OpenAI lmnop6.5 ultra watermelon. This isn’t about tools or productivity or acceleration. It’s about the illusion of progress. Because if that programmer-if that thing, that CREATURE-walked into your stand-up in human form, typing half-correct garbage into your codebase while ignoring your architecture and disappearing during cleanup, you’d fire them before they could say ’no blockers'.

A hilarious takedown of the bolder claims of AI coding. The truth is, AI does a great job of orienting and summarizing. But co-pilot.. please. Or as Jj offers ‘Copilot isn’t that. It’s just the ghost of a thousand blog posts and cocky stack-overflow posts’. Real.

AI impact broadly underwhelms

Wed, 28 May 2025 23:38:46 +0000

Returning to a measure we introduced in 2023, we examine American data on employment by occupation, singling out the type of workers that are often believed to be vulnerable to ai. These are white-collar employees, describing people in back-office support, financial operations, sales and much more besides. There is a similar pattern here: we find no evidence of an ai hit (see chart 2). Quite the opposite, in fact. In the past year the share of employment in white-collar work has risen very slightly.

The real future of AI coding is boring

Wed, 28 May 2025 23:34:03 +0000

Microsoft is not talking about replacing developers. It says GitHub Copilot – and the latest version of the product called “Coding agent” – are tools to partner with developers, akin to a peer programmer.

Seeing as how many of the autonomous bots have failed for me personally, I definately appreciate a pragmatic approach to AI coding detailed here.

_{Quote Citation: GERGELY OROSZ, “Microsoft is dogfooding AI dev tools’ future”, MAY 27, 2025, https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/microsoft-ai-dev-tools}

Banking with a human touch

Wed, 28 May 2025 23:27:08 +0000

Called J.P. Morgan Private Client, it is anchored by the new physical locations, of which there will be 31 by the end of next year. The service comes with its own mobile banking app, but its main appeal is the in-person experience: Instead of being handed off to multiple employees like at a Chase branch, J.P. Morgan Private Client members are assigned to a single banker.

I think this is the ultimate outcome of services in an economy of bots. A dedicated human touch. we are human after all, I think.

AI and CEO/Board Decision making

Wed, 28 May 2025 23:23:39 +0000

My exact words to a small group of our finance, legal and talent colleagues last week: ‘You are committing career suicide if you’re not aggressively experimenting with AI.’

The reality is, we don’t know today how much AI will do in the future. But lots of companies are betting on a lot. Even if AI doesn’t take your job, someone who is using AI will. Is the mantra I hear most repeated.

History of BYTE and early micro-computer hobby clubs

Wed, 28 May 2025 23:18:05 +0000

From 1975 through early 1977, the use of personal computers remained almost exclusively the province of hobbyists who loved to play with computers and found them inherently fascinating. When BYTE magazine came out with its premier issue in 1975, the cover called computers “the world’s greatest toy.” When Bill Gates wrote about the value of good software in the spring of 1976, he framed his argument in terms of making the computer interesting, not useful: “…software makes the difference between a computer being a fascinating educational tool for years and being an exciting enigma for a few months and then gathering dust in the closet.”

AI is coming for your job

Wed, 28 May 2025 23:10:08 +0000

And then, almost overnight, business leaders see the savings of replacing humans with AI — and do this en masse. They stop opening up new jobs, stop backfilling existing ones, and then replace human workers with agents or related automated alternatives.

Be it automation, off shoring, or just plain ‘do more with less’ AI is accelerating automation of many tasks. I know the long view is that technology results in more jobs. But when will they come?

Dragon's are cool

Sun, 04 May 2025 22:41:07 +0000

The New York Times got in touch with Perrone this week, who explained that he liked Game of Thrones, that he bought the dragon image online, and that he selected it because ‘people like dragons.’ He plans to keep using the logo but will tone it down in future filings.

Next time, better call Saul. Too humerous to not take note.

_{Quote Citation: NATE ANDERSON, “Don’t watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits”, MAY 1, 2025 3:41 PM, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/dont-watermark-your-legal-pdfs-with-purple-dragons-in-suits/}

No, mine's bigger. AI Code completion

Sun, 04 May 2025 22:37:56 +0000

During a fireside chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta’s LlamaCon conference on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20% to 30% of code inside the company’s repositories was “written by software” — meaning AI.

I wish business had learned their lesson when once upon a time they tried to measure output by lines of code (LOC). Now we have this made up metric of ‘accepted’ suggestions. There’s lots of better ways to measure effectiveness, how fast the printer goes isn’t one of them.

Herd immunity and it couldn't happen here

Sun, 04 May 2025 22:34:18 +0000

Collapse does not mean you’re personally dying right now. It means y’all are dying right now. Death is sometimes close, sometimes far away, but always there. I used to judge those herds of gazelle when the lion eats one of them alive and everyone keeps going — but no, humans are just the same. That’s the real meaning of herd immunity. We’re fundamentally immune to giving a shit.

From someone who watched the collapse of Sri Lanka, ominous words of advice for Americans. Sometimes its really bizzare to read the news and head off on my day, but that’s just it. Get busy living, or start dying.

Dividends drive the economy

Fri, 02 May 2025 02:14:05 +0000

Corporate profits have been elevated since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. As of the last quarter of 2024, they were $4 trillion—2.3 percentage points higher as a fraction of national income than they were prior to the pandemic. The increase was entirely driven by domestic nonfinancial industries. Notably, retail and wholesale trade, construction, manufacturing and health care experienced a marked increase in profitability. Higher corporate profits mostly went to rewarding shareholders via higher dividends.

AI employees in the future

Fri, 02 May 2025 02:07:29 +0000

Anthropic expects AI-powered virtual employees to begin roaming corporate networks in the next year, the company’s top security leader told Axios in an interview this week.

Remind me to check in on Anthropic, who currently has over 100 open positions on their careers page how this is going.

_{Quote Citation: Sam Sabin, “Exclusive: Anthropic warns fully AI employees are a year away”, Apr 22, 2025, https://www.axios.com/2025/04/22/ai-anthropic-virtual-employees-security}

AI all the way down

Fri, 02 May 2025 01:58:36 +0000

Artificial intelligence, as it exists and is useful now, is probably already baked into your businesses software supply chain. Your managed security provider is probably using some algorithms baked up in a lab software to detect anomalous traffic, and here’s a secret, they didn’t do much AI work either, they bought software from the tiny sector of the market that actually does need to do employ data scientists.

I think this is the most responsible take on AI. Not everyone needs to build it to leverage it. Also amazing post title.

No horse, all cart

Fri, 02 May 2025 01:51:51 +0000

Whenever a new technology is invented, the first tools built with it inevitably fail because they mimic the old way of doing things.

I think I read elsewhere, that the true power of AI will be when it finds its application niche. Not in writing emails.

_{Quote Citation: Pete Koomen, “AI Horseless Carriages”, April 2025, https://koomen.dev/essays/horseless-carriages/}

AI driven economy - but not fewer hours

Fri, 02 May 2025 01:47:36 +0000

AI is creating new work that cancels out some potential time savings from using AI in the first place.

Adoption of AI is going gangbusters, but results in the marketplace aren’t dramatic. Best case I’ve seen is that AI is like a lot of other automation, it free’s time for more work; not less.

_{Quote Citation: Thomas Claburn, “Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, economists claim”, Tue 29 Apr 2025, https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/29/generative_ai_no_effect_jobs_wages/}

AI driven economy

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 22:35:11 +0000

Really much too long to quote only one or two sections, but it is a line in the sand of 5-10 years to AI driven economies.

_{Quote Citation: Dario Amodei, “Machines of Loving Grace”, October 2024, https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace}

AI use amongst non-technology people

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 22:29:27 +0000

A real-estate lawyer might have provided a better analysis, I thought—but not in three minutes, or for two hundred bucks. (The A.I.’s analysis included a few errors—for example, it initially overestimated the size of the property—but it quickly and thoroughly corrected them when I pointed them out.)

There’s a lot going on in this article, but the point is that ChatGPT and its ilk can summon up whatever you guide it to answer. Whether or not this is actionable I don’t think should be compared to relative value, but perceived expertise. To rely on LLM on the question of whether or not to sell a home feels foolish to me. Regardless AI is here to stay.

Takes more than 'just use AI' to build software

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 22:18:11 +0000

Developer frustrations with AI mandates often surface due to their being handed down by company leaders who don’t have close visibility into engineering workflows. Developers describe executives instituting OKRs and tracking AI usage without any regard for whether it’s actually helping, let alone where it may be making things worse. Code acceptance rate (how often developers accept the code suggestions an AI tool makes) is a popular adoption metric, but some argue it’s a poor measure because it counts people accepting suggestions that may be problematic.

History of git octocat

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 22:14:11 +0000

At some point in the very, very early days of GitHub, Tom was looking for anything that could be anthropomorphically used as a Git totem and “Octopus” was the only term in the Git lexicon that seemed to fit the bill. Tom searched for clipart that featured an “octopus” and this Simon Oxley image was the cutest that fit the bill. So the “octocat” was born.

Fun quick read on the foundation of git and the infamous git octocat. Like a lot of great things, this was a tool for a specific problem that spawned into an entire ecosystem.

No cell phones, more focus in schools

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 22:07:04 +0000

A report by scientists and experts commissioned by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, last year concluded that children should not be allowed to use smartphones until they were 13 and should be banned from accessing conventional social media such as TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat until they were 18. No child should have a phone before age 11, the report said, and they should only have a handset without access to the internet before 13.

Digital games wiped

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 22:02:09 +0000

Ubisoft removed the game from customers’ Ubisoft Connect libraries, offering refunds only to those who purchased it recently.

If its not physical. I don’t want it.

_{Quote Citation: Daniel Sims, “Ubisoft argues players don’t own their games in wake of The Crew lawsuit”, April 10, 2025 at 1:47 PM, https://www.techspot.com/news/107502-ubisoft-argues-players-dont-own-their-games-wake.html}

Copyright law, AI Prompting and output ownership

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 23:56:01 +0000

Questions of AI authorship and ownership can be divided into two broad types. One concerns the vast troves of human-authored material fed into AI models as part of their “training” (the process by which their algorithms “learn” from data). The other concerns ownership of what AIs produce.

Fully aware that vast data scraping is legally untested—to say the least—developers charged ahead anyway, resigning themselves to litigating the issue in retrospect. Publisher Peter Schoppert has called the training of LLMs without permission the industry’s “original sin”—to be added, we might say, to the technology’s mind-boggling consumption of energy and water on an overheating planet.

Business Adoption of LLM for writing

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 23:47:18 +0000

By the end of the period we analyzed, in the financial dataset we estimate about 18% of the data was generated by LLM, around 24% in company press releases, up to 15% for young and small companies job postings, and 14% for international organizations.

Hard to say how accurate this is, as I don’t know that AI detection models are that accurate. But regardless of adoption rate, there is a surge of usage followed by plateauing reflecting not everyting can be solved by AI.

The programming history of arxiv

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 23:38:19 +0000

Ginsparg was frustrated because he couldn’t understand why implementing features that used to take him a day now took weeks. I challenged him on this, asking if there was any documentation for developers to onboard the new code base. Ginsparg responded, “I learned Fortran in the 1960s, and real programmers didn’t document,” which nearly sent me, a coder, into cardiac arrest.

Interview with the creator of arXiv which I’ve learned is pronouced ‘archive’. I’ve read so many good papers on this site and none are paywalled. This quote about Ginsparg happily wirting code without documentation especially pleased me. Why not? It works doesnt it?

T skills for programming

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 03:23:37 +0000

Software gets more complicated. All of this complexity is there for a reason. But what happened to specializing? When a house is being built, tons of people are involved: architects, civil engineers, plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, interior designers, roofers, surveyors, pavers, you name it. You don’t expect a single person, or even a whole single company, to be able to do all of those.

I mean, this is the business of software engineering. Work gets compressed to whom ever can generate the most revenue per employee.

AI Agents rely on expertise planners

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 02:56:24 +0000

The core idea is to separate the process into distinct components: a Planner, an Evaluator, and an Executor. The Planner generates a plan based on the user’s query. The Evaluator validates the generated plan. The Executor only executes plans that have been validated, ensuring that only sound plans are carried out.

And I guess the human rubber stamps it? No where is mentioned controlling for mistakes.

_{Quote Citation: Cedric Chee, “The DNA of AI Agents: Common Patterns in Recent Design Principles”, Dec 24, 2024, https://cedricchee.com/blog/the-dna-of-ai-agents/}

How AI Agents might practically work

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 02:51:23 +0000

Compound mistakes: an agent often needs to perform multiple steps to accomplish a task, and the overall accuracy decreases as the number of steps increases. If the model’s accuracy is 95% per step, over 10 steps, the accuracy will drop to 60%, and over 100 steps, the accuracy will be only 0.6%.

Herein lies the rub with agents. Once they tumble down a bad path, how can they recover? Reminds me of the rumor(?) that an AI Model, when instructed to last as long as possible in tetris merely paused the game.

Insights from a CTO practicionare

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 02:39:08 +0000

Every time I’ve built or inherited a team, one trait rises above all others: ownership. Do you ship? Do you own it when it breaks? Do you make the system better for the next person?

Also buried as a footnote ‘business > tech’. Being great at problem solving means being great at whatever tools solve it the most efficiently.

_{Quote Citation: Ben Howdle, “How crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects”, 02 Apr 2025, https://benhowdle.im/principles-and-implementation}

Robots all the way down

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 02:27:26 +0000

we found out that at least 65% of this resource-consuming traffic we get for the website is coming from bots, a disproportionate amount given the overall pageviews from bots are about 35% of the total. This high usage is also causing constant disruption for our Site Reliability team, who has to block overwhelming traffic from such crawlers before it causes issues for our readers.

I do wonder about the future of internet. Crawling is nothing new, its how google built its original search engine. But if 65% of traffic is robots where are the humans?

Coding Expertise with Vibes

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 02:21:46 +0000

Long-term maintainability: This is the most insidious impact radius because it has the longest feedback loop, these issues might only be caught weeks and months later. These are the types of cases where the code will work fine for now, but will be harder to change in the future. Unfortunately, it’s also the category where my 20+ years of programming experience mattered the most.

Article covering all the ways an expert engineering had to guide AI, out of pitfalls, away from landmines and most importantly towards a long-term sustainable architecture. If AI is truly a Jr Engineer, code quality will regress (GitClear research on AI depresses code quality)

AI Hype machine

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 02:15:23 +0000

Industry leaders don’t have a good track record of predicting AI developments. … As an example, Sutskever had an incentive to talk up scaling when he was at OpenAI and the company needed to raise money. But now that he heads the startup Safe Superintelligence, he needs to convince investors that it can compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others, despite having access to much less capital. Perhaps that is why he is now talking about running out of data for pre-training, as if it were some epiphany and not an endlessly repeated point.

AI Across all disciplines

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 02:07:15 +0000

We found an average time savings of 5.4% of work hours in the November 2024 survey. For an individual working 40 hours per week, saving 5.4% of work hours implies a time savings of 2.2 hours per week. When we factor in all workers, including nonusers, workers saved 1.4% of total hours because of generative AI.

Note this is across all disciplines. Some tasks are more easily assisted by AI than others. But this outlines a broad trend of at least ~5% improvement across users.

White collar new graduate employment trends

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 02:03:09 +0000

Some economists say these trends may be short term in nature and little cause for concern on their own. Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, noted that the uptick in unemployment for college-educated workers was only modestly larger than the increase in unemployment overall, and that unemployment for both groups remained low by historical measures.

I think this is like the quote I know that goes ‘when your neighbor gets laid off, its a recession. When you get laid off its a depression’. Regardless of how ’low’ unemployment is historically, it is also trending up for the first time in a long time, especially for college educated workers who might not have experienced this trend before. Best of luck to everyone out there looking right now.

BYD An electric car company from China

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 01:56:33 +0000

In late March, BYD surpassed Tesla TSLA in quarterly automotive revenue for the first time. This was no symbolic flourish, but an outright coup. This isn’t a case of catching up. It’s charging ahead. Buffett, meanwhile, recently reiterated his enthusiasm for BYD at Berkshire’s 2024 annual meeting: “Charlie [Munger] twice pounded the table … and said, ‘Buy BYD.’ He was right — big time.”

Ironically I learned about BYD while TikTok was banned and I explored Xioahongshu for a little while. I was aware that Ford CEO Jim Farely had indicated international competitors spooked him but the sleek designs and modern interiors and LOW cost of BYD vehicles is amazing. Coupled with apparently high quality and it will be interesting to see what happens to Ford/GM.

A closer look at duplicate payment amounts

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 01:49:49 +0000

Health insurers got double-paid by the Medicaid system for the coverage of hundreds of thousands of patients across the country, costing taxpayers billions of dollars in extra payments. The insurers, which are paid by state and federal governments to cover low-income Medicaid recipients, collected at least $4.3 billion over three years for patients who were enrolled—and paid for—in other states, a Wall Street Journal analysis of Medicaid data found.

Let’s take a closer look at these numbers. A pet peeve of mine, this article is written with varying scales (trillions, billions, millions) and time frames. So to summarize, a program that costs $1.8 trillion dollars per years has $4.3 billion in duplicate payments over three years. Or .0043 trillion / 3*1.8 trillion. .08% of the cost of the program. And insurance is hard, why is the burden on the individual to keep all of this straight?

Profile of John Thune, new senate majority leader

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 01:34:59 +0000

Thune, a fourth-term senator from South Dakota, is an awkward leader for Trump’s ruthless Republican Party, in part because even Democrats invariably describe him as amiable and honest.

Excellent tracing of the new Senate majority leader’s rise to power and what it means for the separation of powers when the current Executive Branch is pursuing rule by fiat.

_{Quote Citation: David D. Kirkpatrick, “The Senate’s Age of Irrelevance”, March 31, 2025, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/07/john-thune-profile-senate-majority-leader}

AI and labour implications, not great

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 01:02:51 +0000

The benefits of AI-driven automation often favour capital over labour, which could widen inequality and reduce the competitive advantage of low-cost labour in developing economies.

However, the UNCTAD report also highlights inequalities between nations, with U.N. data showing that 40% of global corporate research and development spending in AI is concentrated among just 100 firms, mainly those in the U.S. and China.

First, original story is pay-walled for journalist only, so I was unable to review that. Second, no surprise that the wealthiest countries are using their capital to pursue AI. Here’s hoping humanity seizes the opportunity to improve everyone’s lives…

Keep your head

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:48:26 +0000

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too

If, one of my favorites.

_{Quote Citation: RUDYARD KIPLING, “If—”, 1943, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---}

AI Augments Finding Vulnerabilities, Not Replaces

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:41:47 +0000

Through a combination of static code analysis tools (such as CodeQL), fuzzing the GRUB2 emulator (grub-emu) with AFL++, manual code analysis, and using Microsoft Security Copilot, we have uncovered several vulnerabilities. … Copilot identified multiple security issues, which we refined further by requesting Copilot to identify and provide the five most pressing of these issues. In our manual review of the five identified issues, we found three were false positives, one was not exploitable, and the remaining issue, which warranted our attention and further investigation, was an integer overflow vulnerability.

Reach for the stars with AI coding

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 02:40:34 +0000

The thing I’m most excited about in our weird new AI-enhanced reality is the way it allows me to be more ambitious with my projects. As an experienced developer, ChatGPT (and GitHub Copilot) save me an enormous amount of “figuring things out” time.

I think the key is in the expertise. As noted in other blogs AI generated code is the dopamine sugar rush of our time. Just because its sweet doesn’t mean its right. Trust Simon and his expertise, but he’s still publishing Python code.

Bowling ball pin bats

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 02:07:38 +0000

The result is a product that better resembles a bowling pin than a traditional bat, redistributing the weight to the area where players most often make contact with the ball. … The goal was to use as much of that [wood] budget as possible in the ideal spot—six or 7 inches below the tip—without sacrificing swing speed.

Filed under ideas that seem obvious when done in real life. 100 years of baseball and gloves have evolved every decade, bats not so much. Or as George says ‘its simple physics’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTwE7xDZkPk

Studio Ghibili and ChatGPT

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 01:47:59 +0000

OpenAI argues that copying the style of a movie studio, rather than of a living artist, is allowed. (I imagine Disney would not support this argument.) Yet other artists in the United States are already suing OpenAI, and other A.I. companies, for training its tools on their artwork and infringing on their styles

Understanding that AI can only generate what its been trained on, I think its quite obvious that all AI have a Copyright problem.

Sr Eng AI Coding project crash-out

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 01:29:35 +0000

I’m 4 days into an afternoon project … Like Icarus, my codebase is irrecoverable. A tangled heap of wing fragments and melted wax, dripping with half-baked ideas and unsupervised AI chaos. My grand vision of outsourcing grunt work to AI had sent me soaring, but the sun of reality burned away any hope of landing gracefully.

I feel you nemo. This silly little micro blog I thought I could whip up with AI (the api gateway portion). But alas it took me fragmented hours over several weeks before I finally understood enough to accomplish what I want.

Dave (Agile Manifesto) on AI Coding

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 01:21:48 +0000

I am increasingly distressed by the race to replace human developers, particularly the more junior ones, with AI assistants. … Companies are jumping on AI as a way of removing those messy (and expensive) humans from the process of developing software.

I think the best observation is that “people don’t know what they want”. If AI Coding is the proverbial horse, then everyone wants a faster horse; no one will ask for the car. Most research I find and post here indicates a 10-20% overall productivity improvement, but really as Dave points out that efficiency will be filled with more ambitious work.

Sr Eng on AI Evolution of programming

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 01:16:13 +0000

When I got stuck with a problem, I had two options: PRINT commands and a lot of dedication, or back to the library. Debugging at that time meant: running, hitting an error, searching, adjusting, and running again with fingers crossed. But in my view, this is just the next step in a long evolution of developer tools.

Eclipse, Firebase, and Stack Overflow haven’t replaced developers, and AI won’t make us obsolete either. Instead, it creates some space for what really matters in software development: creativity, innovation, understanding what the customer wants, and solving complex problems. You could even say that productivity doesn’t increase, but expectations do. … AI functioned as a private tutor who could communicate exactly at my level.

MSFT fixes its culture

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 01:08:20 +0000

Nadella had spent 22 years pulling himself up the ranks with his smarts and drive. And his likability. The latter trait was a rarity at the company. Nadella knew its culture intimately, and he knew he had to change it. … But Nadella wrote a 10-page memo arguing that Microsoft’s revival would come from a growth mentality. As he later put it, he wanted to change the corporate personality from “know-it-all” to “learn-it-all”.

MSFT turns 50

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:59:54 +0000

Microsoft was the leading applications provider internationally; in the U.S. its products were behind word processors and spreadsheets lost to history, like Wordstar and Lotus 1-2-3.

I didn’t realize MSFT found success internationally before taking over the States. My earliest computer memories are of a Windows 3.1 beige box, I went through all the 95, 98, ME, XP upgrades along the way before switching to Apple in college.

Here I am 30 years later still tinkering. There’s a WIRED article that’s a much deeper dive on the history of MSFT https://www.wired.com/story/at-age-50-microsoft-is-an-ai-giant-an-open-source-lover-and-bad-as-it-ever-was/

Reddit Overemployed seems more hype than reality

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 22:28:54 +0000

the percentage of employed individuals with more than one job has decreased since 1996, falling from a peak of nearly 7% in November 1996 to 5.5% in December 2024. During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this rate dropped to approximately 4%, but it has since rebounded to prepandemic levels. … First, the average age of multiple jobholders has consistently increased over the last three decades, aligning with population aging. As shown in the third figure, the most substantial increase occurred between 1994 and 2012, when the average age of multiple jobholders rose from approximately 37 to 42.

Metrics on mobile app revenues

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 22:22:16 +0000

35% of apps now mix subscriptions with consumables or lifetime purchases, and the trend is growing. Gaming (61.7%) and Social & Lifestyle (39.4%) are leading the way, showing that hybrid monetization models are a strong way to capture more revenue without losing the benefits of subscriptions.

Deep dive (in pdf https://www.revenuecat.com/pdf/state-of-subscription-apps-2025.pdf) of various app metrics if you’re into that sort of thing. Product differentiation is still key in market adoption.

Suprise, SEO ruins search

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 22:11:34 +0000

googling [has] became an Olympic sport of dodging SEO sludge, sponsored links and clickbait… Here’s an easier list to draw up: what Google Search is still good for. For starters, links to any webpage you already know exists.

I agree totally with the former, the latter seems harder and harder to find items I’ve read. Nothing beats clipping it out myself, hence this site.

_{Quote Citation: Joanna Stern, “I Quit Google Search for AI—and I’m Not Going Back Ads and search-optimized junk made a mess of the go-to engine. Now ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude—and even Google’s own AI—do it better.”, March 26, 2025 at 5:30 am ET, https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/google-search-chatgpt-perplexity-gemini-6ac749d9?mod=djem10point}

Claude CLI takes

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 22:07:28 +0000

It’s like a wood chipper fueled by dollars. It can power through shockingly impressive tasks, using nothing but chat. You don’t even select context. You just open your heart and your wallet, and Claude Code takes the wheel. It even helps keep you in the loop by prompting you every eight seconds to ask if it can use basic read-only commands that you would allow anyone, even North Korean hackers, to run on your machine.

College Board a very profitable non-profit

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 21:52:55 +0000

The College Board writes the curriculum for 40 AP courses, administers and grades the exams, oversees the PSAT and SAT, and offers a variety of free and paid resources to help prepare for the courses and tests. Many students will wind up paying the company north of $1,000 over the course of their high school career.

Thats $1k per student… I do struggle to understand how we let a private company grab the bridge between primary and secondary education but here we are. It certainly seems like the more money you have the better you do on these tests. Not exactly the meritocracy a public education is supposed to deliver.

WIRED coverage of Anthropic's ambitions

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 21:39:40 +0000

Claude’s curiosity and character is in part the work of Amanda Askell, who has a philosophy PhD and is a keeper of its personality. She concluded that an AI should be flexible and not appear morally rigid.

Short history of Anthropic’s founding and split from OpenAI. Whether it succeeds in creating a benevolent AGI, it has for now at least created a useful coding tool.

_{Quote Citation: Steven Levy, “If Anthropic Succeeds, a Nation of Benevolent AI Geniuses Could Be Born”, Mar 28, 2025 6:00 AM, https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-benevolent-artificial-intelligence/}

MSFT Accenture and F100 SWE walk into a bar

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 21:08:39 +0000

Though each experiment is noisy, when data is combined across three experiments and 4,867 developers, our analysis reveals a 26.08% increase (SE: 10.3%) in completed tasks among developers using the AI tool. Notably, less experienced developers had higher adoption rates and greater productivity gains. … We find that Copilot significantly raises task completion for more recent hires and those in more junior positions but not for developers with longer tenure and in more senior positions.

Bulwark against Linkrot

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 20:50:10 +0000

When we tracked these links to their destination, we found that 5% of all links on news site pages are no longer accessible. And 23% of all the pages we sampled contained at least one broken link.

tbh. 5% of all links being broken seems low, but I started this notes project because the things I want to find I never can…

_{Quote Citation: Athena Chapekis, Samuel Bestvater, Emma Remy and Gonzalo Rivero, “When Online Content Disappears 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later”, MAY 17, 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024/05/pl_2024.05.17_link-rot_report.pdf}

Cost of living 200k

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 03:16:36 +0000

But in every single state in America, a $100,000 salary is no longer enough to be considered “upper-class”—and families with six-figure incomes are even struggling to get by.

Growing up in the 90s a six figure job was like the epitome of ‘made it’. And now it barely covers the bills, and median income is even lower.

_{Quote Citation: EMMA BURLEIGH, “People making six-figure salaries used to be considered rich—now households earning nearly $200,000 a year aren’t even considered upper-class in some U.S. states”, March 24, 2025, 3:57 PM UTC, https://fortune.com/2025/03/24/us-middle-class-threshold-household-income-six-figures-inflation-salary-deflation/}

Choosing the right major

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 03:12:43 +0000

One in 5 Gen Zers worldwide are deemed NEETs—not in education, employment, or training. The promises they received in school may be to blame.

Not sure if the fault lie with colleges in so much as society. This narrative of go to college (which one?) study (what major?) graduate (when?) and make money leaves a lot to be desired on the planning front…

_{Quote Citation: Preston Fore, “Over 4 million Gen Zers are jobless—and experts blame colleges for ‘worthless degrees’ and a system of broken promises for the rising number NEETs”, March 25, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC, https://fortune.com/2025/03/25/gen-z-neet-not-in-education-employment-training-higher-ed-worthless-degrees-college/}

OpenAI Sam Altman Interview

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 02:59:53 +0000

SA: I mean, my basic assumption is that each software engineer will just do much, much more for a while. And then at some point, yeah, maybe we do need less software engineers.

Lots of ink spilled on the nature of software engineering. I find it hard to believe that we’ll need fewer engineers… but flaged this as a ‘prediction’ so I can check back later.

_{Quote Citation: Ben Thompson, “An Interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman About Building a Consumer Tech Company”, March 20, 2025, https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-openai-ceo-sam-altman-about-building-a-consumer-tech-company/}

Still Learn to Code

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 02:54:47 +0000

As coding becomes easier, more people should code, not fewer!

Oft repeated, AI won’t take your job, but someone using it probably will.

_{Quote Citation: Andrew, “DeepSeek-R1 Uncensored, QwQ-32B Puts Reasoning in Smaller Model, and more…”, March 12, 2025, https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-292/}

AI meets little bobby tables

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 02:50:17 +0000

The attack technique developed by Pillar Researchers, which they call ‘Rules File Backdoor,’ weaponizes rules files by injecting them with instructions that are invisible to a human user but readable by the AI agent.

xkcd taught me anything, its to sanitize my inputs

_{Quote Citation: Laura French, “How AI coding assistants could be compromised via rules file”, March 18, 2025, https://www.scworld.com/news/how-ai-coding-assistants-could-be-compromised-via-rules-file}

Example of AI not honoring robots.txt

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 02:46:52 +0000

The AI scraper (I can only assume thats what they are) scourge continued, and intensified in the last week. This time they were hitting pagure.io really quite hard.

Robots.txt is only honor system. One of many postings calling it out.

_{Quote Citation: Kevin, “Mid March infra bits 2025”, 2025-03-15 17:52, https://www.scrye.com/blogs/nirik/posts/2025/03/15/mid-march-infra-bits-2025/}

Founder Fraud with JPMorganChase

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 01:53:40 +0000

I feel like the moral of the story is don’t cross Chase.

_{Quote Citation: AP, “Startup founder convicted of defrauding JPMorgan Chase of $175M by faking firm’s success”, MARCH 29, 2025 8:55 AM ET, https://www.npr.org/2025/03/29/nx-s1-5344434/charlie-javice-convicted-defrauding-jpmorgan}

Stating the obvious

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 21:26:14 +0000

it’s worthing stating the obvious

Agreed.

_{Quote Citation: sean goedecke, “Engineers should state the obvious”, March 20, 2025, https://www.seangoedecke.com/saying-the-obvious/}

About

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This site merges three distinct concepts into one execution:

Microblog
First and foremost, this is a microblog - a collection of snippets I find notable from across the interwebs.
Personal Knowledge Management
It is also my public personal knowledge management system. It’s more dynamic than republishing links on an RSS feed, and is loosely inspired by other link aggregators like StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and Pocket. All of which have shut down, hence this pet project.
Commonplace Book
Finally, it’s a online implementation of a commonplace book where I digitally “snip” articles, add my thoughts and post them here.

Duly Noted Genesis

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is Duly Noted – my digital commonplace book for collecting fragments of wisdom, technical knowledge, and unexpected connections.

No long posts. No schedules. Just ideas worth keeping.

Let’s see where this goes.