TimByte

Mandatory education is still probably better than the alternative but it does seem to create a constant tension: the system has to serve students who want very different things from it

The funniest part is that the article about AI slime polluting the internet was itself generated from start to finish by a neural net to promote some startup.

But the problem they're so clumsily trying to monetize is absolutely real. GitHub is rapidly turning from a place with battle-tested solutions into a dumpster fire of hallucinations. And no crutches like MAREF are gonna fix that because platforms profit from showing growth in repo and commit counts even if it's all dead plastic code.

This is a good reminder that "green" does not have to mean perfectly manicured

I don't think the point is that London literally lacks pavement trees. As you say, the London plane is almost part of the city's visual identity in many areas. The interesting thing to me is how uneven the experience can be

The green space exists, but access to it is often something you have to deliberately route yourself through

What struck me is that the "three trees from your window" part sounds almost trivial until you actually test it

To be fair, you're comparing different use cases

It depends on the type of task and the developer's level. For typical CRUD tasks, I'd say AI is often already faster and better than an average developer. But as soon as ambiguous requirements or architectural trade-offs appear, the situation changes

Speed itself also changes the equation. If I can try out five implementation approaches in the same time I used to spend writing just one, the overall quality of the project could very well improve.

If programming were just about typing text, the profession would have disappeared already. In practice most of the work involves understanding requirements, analyzing constraints, finding trade-offs, and fixing problems before they hit production. AI is still noticeably worse at all that than it is at generating code.

At the end of the day it's just a tool. If someone enjoys building things, AI expands their capabilities rather than taking them away. Right now one developer can put together what used to require a small team. To me that sounds like an argument for learning it, not against it

Agreed. Shorting requires timing the market perfectly, but buying assets after a crash just requires having liquidity and patience. Historically, that's often been the safer play

After the dot-com bust, infrastructure assets turned out to be one of the most undervalued asset classes. Maybe in a few years people will look back on GPU clusters the same way they looked at dark fiber back then

I think a lot of people are mixing two different ideas: AI is overhyped and AI company stocks are about to crash. The first might well be true, but the second might not be. The dot-com bubble burst too, but the internet didn't go away. The question is more about who will be left standing once the era of endless capex growth ends.

There's no practical point to this. System calls and hardware interactions are deterministic. We don't need a probabilistic model to efficiently handle interrupts or write blocks to disk. Ai is great for the user interface layer, but at the kernel level, hardcoded C or Rust will always be faster and more reliable

The only viable scenario for that kind of ji approach would be a profiler that analyzes load patterns and recompiles kernel modules with optimal compiler flags for a specific use case. Dynamically generating kernel code from scratch would kill the system with compilation and ast verification overhead

That's the whole point of an operating system - to manage local hardware. That's its reason for existing. The moment task switching starts depending on rtt to a cloud provider's servers, it's just a thin client with delusions of grandeur. Fifty milliseconds per system call, and no amount of tflops on the backend is going to save you from that feeling of working through a proxy in 2005

If you're on macOS, take a look at Orion from the team behind Kagi Search. It runs on WebKit, is really light on battery usage, doesn't come bundled with crypto stuff or AI agents, and still supports Chrome and Firefox extensions natively

I think a lot of people aren't actually against AI itself. Personally I just want to choose when I need a chatbot and when I want a normal list of links. Over the last few years, that line has started getting pretty blurry

Your second idea is pretty much the direction the classic solution takes: walk along the curve incrementally, avoid square roots, and use symmetry to fill in the other parts

Names disappear instantly, but some oddly specific technical acronym from one interview decades ago gets burned into ROM

A small floppy full of actual programs probably said much more about your ability than a whiteboard quiz ever could

Funny how often "there are optimized functions for that" really means "I haven't thought through what the optimized function actually has to do"

What I like about these questions is that they're small enough to fit in your head, but still reveal a lot about how someone thinks about memory, representation, and hardware

I think this is basically right, but I'd phrase it as "capital allocation theater" rather than just stupidity

LLMs will probably expose how much software work was coordination, bureaucracy, and marginal product churn. That could still be a big labor-market shock without requiring the technology to be magic

The worry with AI is not "productivity is bad." It's whether the displaced labor has anywhere comparable to go

What is the next large labour-absorbing sector supposed to be?

One difference though is that the agriculture transitions had somewhere for labor to go: factories, construction, urban services, export manufacturing, etc

I think it's less "nature knows better" and more "we usually don't know enough"

Yeah, nature has a way of very quickly correcting the version of itself we picked up from cartoons

What's striking here is how long a "known" explanation can persist simply because it sounds plausible

I agree with the broader point, but I'm not sure the migration to paid email is automatic

For something as central as a Google account, it feels pretty unreasonable that a long-held personal number can be silently rejected with no appeal path or explanation