earthdeity

I follow the argument but the conclusion feels off. If the reason white collars move in is that it's nicer and more desirable, is the solution not improving a place? Making it worse?

It seems like the solution would be making nice cities less rare, and thus less of a hot commodity, rather than preventing them. After all, nearly anything that would make an area nicer to live in, would also make it more desirable, and therefore less affordable. I can't believe letting inner cities be hideous slums is the best thing for society overall (historically, indeed quite common).

That's true for the advertising companies, but Google or whatever advertiser have a big stake in showing you the ad from the millions they serve that you're most likely to click/buy/complete. So there's no fault on McDonald's part, but if you're a vegetarian, arguably Google is doing McDonalds a disservice as their advertiser by showing you the ad (and won't be doing the user any useful service either).

That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough". Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, there isn't really a lot of meaningful competition in the ad space driving superior targeting. It's more about having the killer network, the list of effective channels (search, youtube, instagram whatever) that is the big players advantage rather than their targeting skills.

Claude + Codex, both from work.

Just those.

https://github.com/oscscull/quarterdeck built my own harness. I had trouble with both claude and codex. In particular, managing multiple tasks in a kanban, syncing between my machines, making sure work is done on the right machine and can be triggered from either. Making sure I ping reviewers, meeting reminders, todos. Parking tickets til conditions are met or time elapses. Automated notifications when I have meetings. I have just kept adding features as I want them. This kind of software is so easy to make nowadays, I don't really think there's any sense in "launching" it for others, but I'm using it all the time. I highly recommend doing so (building your own personal work management software in 2026).

I guess this is also in some sense an agent orchestration tool, I don't use any of those.

Don't use.

Nice game! There's no noticeable feedback form on the site. I played it today and was a bit peeved that "Ocean's 11" for "oldest heist movie" matched the 2001 film especially as "Ocean's 11 (1960)" was actually in the list. That's not what the movie was called in 1960... I guess there's some improvements to the matching needed.

I think if we jump instantly to a fully automated world, perhaps there's no problem, but in a normal transition from the actual world the issues are

- capital / limited goods

- allocation of labor

Things like land are a limited commodity. Concentration of ownership usually comes with rent extraction. Because you need to live somewhere, but available locations are finite (and supply can even be controlled, and is). This means that you can end up with a cartel scenario where increasingly normal peoples previously disposable income is tied up in an increasingly large % to those fixed costs of living. This is arguably well under way in some countries.

The second point is, the richest enjoy goods like personal yachts, private planes, luxury restaurants. If a lot of labor is increasingly allocated to producing highly inefficient luxuries, it's essentially wasted. You might have hundreds of businesses employing thousands of people or machines, but the productivity of their work is essentially all going into products consumed by a few people. I'd say a limited amount of this is a good thing, it's a normal part of the proliferation of choice enabled by capitalism. But taken too far you return to a historic economy where most peoples productive life is spent serving a tiny elite, while living in poor conditions themselves.

In our financial system, your income as an individual has to be significant enough to send a signal to produce the goods you want. If this ceases to be true for even a significant minority of people, you will find consumer choices and available quality decreasing for those people, which is a real problem. This is to a lesser extent happening in some segments of the economy.

The first meaningful internet presence he had was the whole WP engine debacle, which seemed to be a pretty ill-advised thing to do from a legal standpoint and also upset the open source community, who are rightly concerned about that sort of thing. Some of the actions taken then broke a number of small sites, upsetting those users. Overall, you've got a baseline reasonable number of pissed off hobbyists with internet presences.

Microsoft has had its controversies, but the reason the interest became personal here is it seems this was his own initiative (he kicked everything off with a public blog post).

And once again in this case, it looks like a bunch of chaotic behaviour centred on the individual more-so than standard "unpopular corporate decision making". That sort of thing has a big PR blast radius and has exposed him to criticism more than necessary (or normal).

Given how avoidable the above is (by simply operating through his lawyers / the organisation), it's feeding speculation on his mental state.

I hooked up claude code to Jira and Figma. This is more a condemnation of Jira than anything, but being able to interact with it in natural language in the terminal is a huge relief. Sadly, it's still limited in some ways. If it's available, it makes things a tiny bit easier than interfacing directly via api, so it's a nice to have.

Defiance of the rules? What rules exactly? The law does make clear that H1-Bs are temporary workers. But it's also permitted to renew, and workers are allowed to pursue immigrant status. In fact, until 1990 there was specific language saying that H1-B's (like all visitor visas) are not supposed to want to stay, they must maintain a foreign residence "which he has no intention of abandoning". This language was struck and the visas became, and still are, the most common defacto "seeking green card" status for workers seeking to move the US.

To be clear, while a person who enters the US on an H1-B is a temporary worker, they are not prohibited from also seeking a permanent status. So it's fully within the rules, which is why it becomes a question of norms. In the present, the H1-B is (was?) the most popular route to permanent immigration to the US besides family sponsorship.

I specifically said that the government (and the citizenry by extension) can decide who it wants to enter and stay, how much immigration, whatever. But changing the rules suddenly, upending peoples lives who have not broken any rules, through a pathway the US state itself freely established, is immoral and short sighted.

It should go without saying that there are experts across many fields in industry that any country would benefit from attracting. The US is harming its capacity to attract and keep that talent with these ridiculous theatrics.

Rules are well and good, but norms are important too. An immigration system governs people making major life choices, and companies making large investments.

Legally, there's very little the state can't do, there could be a bill passed tomorrow revoking all immigrant visas. But businesses, and by proxy the nation, benefit from work done by these workers.

Sudden unilateral moves like this are stupid on a social level (cause damage to businesses and communities), and on a moral level. "First do no harm" is a principle just as suited to government as medicine. Even if there is a broad consensus for reducing or eliminating H1B visas, why punish people who followed the system as it exists and contributed? It's perfectly possible to pass a bill, stop handing out new visas, and sunset renewals after some 1-2 year timeframe.

It's legal to invite a bunch of guests over and kick them all out after you open the wine, but you're going to lose friends. And ultimately it will be businesses and individuals paying the cost for these needlessly volatile course changes. Tourism and high skilled immigration rates will face lasting harm.

I think this is a fair take, but also the US does this because it can. I don't think other countries don't do imperialism because they are morally pure, but because to do so means getting into conflict with the US. The US just has the biggest stick and so can push around other nations with impunity.

The US domestically has a commendable historic commitment to free expression and press freedom, which are good things that China does badly. Those things deserve to be commended even while we condemn imperialism. China has its own record of imperialism in Nepal and its ambitions to attack Taiwan. It just doesn't (currently) have the position to act with impunity the US has long enjoyed.

Extraction is a weird way to put it. Usually, immigrants, especially skilled workers, are overwhelmingly net contributors. That's part of why modern economies want them so badly.

It's actually the perfect opposite, a skilled worker who plans to leave is a burden on their home country as they presumably will use services there they never paid for. Hopefully, in developed nations this balances out more or less. In undeveloped nations there's not much of a system to take advantage of.

I live in a country I was not born in, I pay taxes as much as anyone else and pay into social security programs I'll likely never get to use. The state did not have to spend a penny to educate me. If I return to my home country without having worked there another day in my life, I'm probably quite the net loss to them.

The extraction phase of your life is overwhelmingly being a child or elderly.

will those support QUERY?

On a similar note, Firefox doesn't support <input type="month">, which I was surprised to see (chrome landed it in 2012). I checked their issue tracker and... as you describe. Browsers are complex, of course, but they do stand out as a really glacial corner of the software world.

While I agree a lot of information is conferred, most of it is not useful. I'm quite a fan of not attending meetings where I don't get specifically invited (as in, directly, not as part of a group). This may or may not fly at a given organisation. Anyhow, my main learning has been that:

1. All truly important information will be repeated (in the form of tickets, slack messages, further meetings). Usually several times.

2. Most useful subordinate information (the kind that doesn't get repeated) only needs to be related to 1 person 80%+ of the time. It's vanishingly rare 3 or more people need some information that isn't ever repeated elsewhere.

The only really useful work in meetings is making decisions. This is an essential feature, but a big problem is often many "spectators" are invited (attendees without decision power or context). Being a pure spectator in a meeting is almost always completely pointless. Also, people like to make decisions/input so meetings are rife with bike shedding (most people have decision power + context for low importance items usually).

You can go to any number of sites (here's a nice one https://webencrypt.org/openpgpjs/), and encrypt a message. You can exchange public keys over any text channel. You can then send encrypted messages over that text channel. Anyone who really needs to send encrypted messages, trivially can. Of course, many criminals won't, but should we all sacrifice our privacy for such a pathetic measure of security?

That's true, but over a relatively short timeframe, those archives have proven to be extremely ephemeral. I can recall multiple instances of feature rich, good quality searchable archive sites existing, improving, then one day vanishing with a huge amount of data, sometimes permanently. There's usually low redundancy and a reliance on an individual or two, who can cease keeping the data at a whim. Such archives don't monetise well, if at all. So it's a hobby project for someone. Over the last fifteen years a screenshot has proven incredibly more reliable than an archive link.

Probably because workers' protections are very strong in Jaan and it's close to impossible to fire people.

- You cannot fire your staff (easily) - Rather than replace staff, you need to train them - You also really want to engender a sense of loyalty, because anyone who is checked-out is dead weight you need to carry

I think the legal protections for employment are upstream of the working culture. Maybe it's a chicken and egg problem. But in terms of policy you could test this, and it makes sense the culture is just in alignment with the incentive structure. America has an "I've got mine" approach, which is efficient and good for businesses, but... Employees (correctly) know they are replaceable and have a strictly profit/loss relationship with companies they work for. In that framework the risk/reward for a worker to be doing the minimum they need to earn their pay-check is pretty favourable.