morsecodist

I feel like the elephant in the room here is that their back end was in RoR before Next.js and remained that way the entire time. They then switched from next.js to a framework designed, in part, with RoR in mind. It seems unsurprising that they had a much better experience using a thing that was tailored to their use case.

I love Next.js. I have used other frameworks including RoR and there is nothing like it (except Svelte or Nuxt but I view them as different flavors of the same core idea). But I only use it to make monoliths. I can see getting frustrated with it if I was using it alongside a different back end.

I am not a lawyer but this sounds absurd. Even if everything in here were true it seems irrelevant to their non profit status. There are issue based non profits that do nothing but publishing information with an ideological slant. There is no restriction on a 501c3 being run by non-citizens let alone influenced. 501c3s can even engage in lobbying.

I know taking it at face value isn't the point but this claim is particularly galling.

From the video it doesn't really seem like tar pit ideas are about technical limitations but more about solving the wrong problem. I don't think the ideas you list are tar pit ideas at all. The value proposition for all of these things is obvious. The technology was hard but once the technology existed it was pretty clear that people would want these things.

At least from my read of the definition tar pit ideas are not just ideas that have been tried and failed but they are supposed to seem easy. Things like the restaurant discovery example are technically very easy to build but the limiting factor to people enjoying buying from restaurants is not a tech platform.

Even if this were true it doesn't necessarily mean it will translate into stock performance. Expected growth is priced in to the current stock price. Also there are lots of "computing power" companies that are not doing too hot (intel sells "computing power"). Just because there is growth in the sector doesn't mean a given company will do well.

Personally, I have found NVIDIA to be one of the most hyped stocks I have ever seen and it feels weird to take a position that it is under-hyped. That said, people aren't capable of beating the market consistently so I would never invest based on this, or any intuition or information I had.

> It’s one where I use AI to write you a thing. Then you have your AI summarize it. Then you have your AI write back. And then my AI summarizes it. Why wasn’t it all just summarized in the first place?

Could not agree more. If you're going to use a prompt that's a few bullets to write me an email just send me the prompt.

It was interesting reading this exchange. I have a similar understanding of DI to you. I have never even heard of a DI framework and I have trouble picturing what it would look like. It was interesting to watch you two converge on where the disconnect was.

This is interesting and they make some good observations but I can't help but think the deck was stacked against them because they are trying to come up with a technical/business solution to what is fundamentally a political problem.

Genuine question because I agree that there are a lot of over complicated systems. I often see people say all you need is SQLite. Do you implement replication yourself? Or you are just accepting that if something happens to your server your data is just gone? I always default to managed Postgres and that seems to be the simplest most boring solution.

Can you say more? What are you doing specifically? I use AI for some things (mostly assisting with software development) and I have had a wildly different experience. I have used ChatGPT o1 and made some icons for internal apps so our employees can easily pick them from a list and the AI generated logos look just awful. I go with them because aesthetics don't matter for this use case they just need to be visually recognizable but it doesn't understand the concept of a logo it wouldn't even give me a white background let alone a transparent one.

I have had some success with some UI components but I usually need to massage them a bit and anything big or requiring a lot of changes it starts to trip over itself.

I don't take their explanation at face value. I think you very well could be right in your analysis here.

It is more interesting to me that actual targeting is based on trade imbalance. They could easily have used the same rhetoric and targeted the tariffs based on something else. I think the way they are targeted is sufficient to rule out a lot of explanations I have seen proposed like I mentioned above. What you are mentioning seems super plausible to me I just can't be sure yet.

Talking about the merits of these tariffs kind of misses the point. The person who wrote this article is very smart. I am sure they are smarter than I am. He has produced a pretty solid analysis of trade policy. But in articles like this people ascribe their own motivations and goals to the tariffs that aren't actually there. Buried in this article is the assumption that the motivation of tariffs and trade policy is to maintain competitiveness with China in manufacturing for both economic and security reasons.

This may be important to the author but it isn't a top priority for the administration. Competitiveness with China and onshoring manufacturing are certainly talking points but they is not stated as the primary motivation for the tariffs. The administration characterizes trade imbalances as countries taking advantage of us. The tariffs are targeted based on trade imbalance. If manufacturing was the goal why apply tariffs to things like raw materials? If competition with China is the goal why apply tariffs to South Korea or Japan, pushing them closer into China's orbit? These are just not the goals of the tariffs and neither their rhetoric or actions suggest that they are.

People have a hard time dealing with values and motivations that are wildly different from their own so they construct all sorts of parallel explanations and defend those instead. But talking about these explanations is non sequitur. It is like the administration adopted a policy of jailing all Capricorns and only Capricorns and people started writing think pieces about how the criminal justice system would be more efficient if they focused on programs to reduce recidivism.

I'm in no way an expert but stuff like this is fascinating to me. A lot of our perceptions about intelligence are informed by human intelligence because it's the only example we have a strong grasp on. Having independent examples can help us understand properties of intelligent systems in general instead of over fitting on systems that are like us.

To be clear I am 100% fine with billboard bans. I live in a billboard ban state and it's great. I was talking about the proposed complete ban of all advertising of any kind.

There are definitely a lot of problems with advertising and I am all for regulating them but this seems like such an extreme response. As someone who has worked for smaller organizations (both for profit and nonprofit) without some form of advertising people just would not hear about us at all.

Trade surplus is not sufficient to analyze the issue here. It is about commitment. What you want is something closer to the probability that the trade surplus will lead to a policy change. Even if it is true that the average Chinese citizen will be more negatively impacted than the average US citizen that negative impact doesn't equally translate to policy change. The US congress is fairly evenly split. It doesn't take that much to cause a policy shift.

> If the US is consistent with the tariff policy

This is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The US can say it's tariff policy is whatever it wants but the administration is under constraints. If there was some extremely compelling data that the economic effects caused by the retaliatory tariffs would cause an overwhelming democratic victory at the midterms that would have a much bigger effect on policy than the formula for tariffs the administration wrote down. I am not predicting this definitely will happen but it is the kind of thing I am sure people are considering when they are imposing retaliatory tariffs.

If you assume the US tariffs are unchangeable then you would be right but the hope of retaliatory tariffs is that they will get the US to update it's tariffs in response to the economic harm caused. It will also harm China of course but I would imagine they hope the harm caused to the US will reduce the tariffs and leave China better off in the long run. This is not totally unreasonable, the US is ostensibly more sensitive to the economic conditions of it's citizens so one could imagine China outlasting the US in this game of chicken.

This is great timing. I am in the process of designing an event/workflow driven application and nothing I looked at felt quite right for my use case. This feels really promising. Temporal was close but it just felt like not the perfect fit. I like the open source license a lot it gives me more confidence designing an application around it. The conditionals are also great. I have been looking for something just like CEL and despite my research I had never heard of it. It is exactly how I want my expressions implemented, I was on the verge of trying to build something like this myself.

This is really cool. I agree with your point that a human would also struggle to book a flight for someone but what I take from that is conversation is not the best interface for picking flights. I am not really sure how you beat a list of available flights + filters. There are a lot of criteria: total fight time, price, number of stops, length of layover, airline, which airport if your destination is served by multiple airports. I couldn't really communicate to anyone how I weigh those and it shifts over time.

I am a bit confused by this. Typically when you make a breaking change it is because the call site has to make a new sort of decision so you may not want all calls to be refactored the same way and there is no way of determining which you want at runtime.

The example the author uses is modifying a function to return an int or null instead of an int. Let's say you implemented the function a bit naively and in the null case your function would crash the program. Now you are going to refactor your codebase so the caller gets to decide what happens in the null case. Some callers may be unable to handle the situation and will need to implement the crash/exception some may use some sort of fallback behavior.

I think haskell's type system probably would probably prevent someone from having the issue I described above but the problem still stands. Let's say you had a function that returns a union type and you have areas in the code that are supposed to handle every case of that type. If you had a case you need to handle it everywhere and the compiler can't know how you want to handle it. A lot of type systems will catch the missing case which is awesome but you still need to handle each one.

To me web development is the one place where I do feel like there's a lot that "just works". If I had to make a native mobile app I would feel overwhelmed and confused. I wonder if this really just comes down to familiarity. It seems strange to me to assume a given domain should be easy.

> I think the whole idea of "original insight" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

This is by biggest issue with AI conversations. Terms like "original insight" are just not rigorous enough to have a meaningful discussion about. Any example an LLM produces can be said to be not original enough and conversely you could imagine trivial types of originality that simple algorithms could simulate (i.e. speculate on which existing drugs could be used to treat known conditions). Given the amount of drugs and conditions you are bound to propose some original combination.

People usually end up just talking past each other.

I am a big fan of YIMBY-ism but I think your points here are fair. This is a controversial take among YIMBYs but I think the benefits of ADUs are oversold. Of course I am all for allowing them if that is all we can do but the idea of the ADU only exists because it is supposed to allow building more housing while preserving the overall "character" of single family neighborhoods. Subdividing a lot and building a new home is better in every way for both the homeowner and the resident of the eventual structure. ADUs seem like they could provide a lot of housing because it is a huge increase in what is theoretically allowed but it is not a huge increase in what people will realistically build in the United States in 2025 in single family neighborhoods. This is true for the reasons you state and also many other reasons because it is the opposite of economies of scale that typically brings costs down.

We have an answer to building more housing at a lower cost and it's apartment buildings. We need more apartment buildings. We don't need them everywhere, there will still be plenty of places with predominantly single family homes, but we need them in more places than they are today. They don't have to be big high rises but there needs to be a enough number of units in a single building to make projects pencil.

I do YIMBY advocacy and this sounds policy change sounds like a good thing but I am always struck that our zoning is so restrictive that when people come up with different styles of housing it requires a law change and we talk about it like the law change is giving us this new cool style of housing. What is really happening is the law has taken away this style of housing and someone has come up with nice branding for a denser housing style that seems less scary so they are able budge zoning laws the tiniest bit to allow more density, but only if it is in this cool new style that we are OK with.

I don't think it is absurd to reason about individual contributions, just to focus on measuring them with metrics. I have been on the management side as well though I admit I am much more of an IC. But the way I think that should go is laddering up to business value by describing what the person did and why that contribution was important.

So for example I would say something like: X deserves a promotion because their work was important to delivering project A on time. Project A was difficult but worthwhile because it allowed us as a business to meet goals 1 and 2.

That said I mostly work in smaller orgs. I have never been in a situation where a manager would be so removed from a team they would need a sort of proxy metric to direct them where to focus their attention to understand what the people on their team are doing day to day. I can see how this would get more difficult as a company grows.

The idea of measuring individual developer productivity is kind of absurd to me. I'm not saying that what we do is magic, there are just so many variables.

Measuring story points or lines of code is kind of the opposite of productivity. This encourages developers to do as much meaningless work as possible. I'd want a developer to make a task simpler or use an existing tool which means less time writing code. The value of them saving that work from knowing another way is high but hard to measure.

What you want is measuring business outcomes but those are hard to attribute to a particular developer.

I think unfortunately we're left with our subjective judgement here. I think we'd do better admitting to ourselves that we can't measure this than to pretend we have some sort of science here.

Of course people are free to run their cafe however they like and if they succeed I am happy for them. The article mentions that originally it was a business decision for the example cafe they are focusing on and I think that is the root of it. I am unconvinced by the better vibes based argument. People using cafes as a work and meeting space is nothing new. Before it was laptops people read books or the newspaper or wrote in notebooks. In the early 1900s Stefan Zweig said of Viennese cafes:

"actually a sort of democratic club, open to everyone for the price of a cheap cup of coffee, where every guest can sit for hours with this little offering, to talk, write, play cards, receive post, and above all consume an unlimited number of newspapers and journals."

Coffee in cafes is more expensive and one reason people spend the money is because of the nice space. If cafes in high traffic areas want to increase profits by focusing on a more profitable segment of customers that is totally OK but it should be understood as a business offering less service to make more money and not as social commentary.

Personally, I feel the vibes are better in a chill cafe without a ton of rules. I used to work in cafes in college a bit when I shared a small apartment and had no desk. I was really grateful for that and I tried to always buy multiple things if I was there too long or share a table. Now I work in cafes pretty rarely but I feel less welcome in a cafe with rules because it lets me know they would prefer I leave as soon as possible.

I am new to compliance but this seems super strange to me. Based on my cursory read of SOC2 you need a ton of evidence gathering for months leading up to your audit. How wold you know what to retroactively have if you didn't spend time on it?

SOC2 attestations being easy to get also runs counter to what I have heard from every single other person on this topic. Generally what I hear is that it is extremely hard and time consuming. What am I missing? I would love to be wrong here and for this to be easy.

It should be unsurprising that we don't really have a science of what company policies work best. There are a lot of variables at play and they likely interact with each other in non-linear ways. Outcomes are hard to measure and may look different at different time horizons. For example, if policy A results in more productivity but makes retaining effective employees more difficult you may need several months or even a few years of observations to truly understand the effects. Companies are quite private about their information and they want control over their own company policy. Experiments are costly to perform. How would you perform one? Randomly select a bunch of companies and try to randomly get them to adopt different sorts of policies?

I think this is why you see a lot of herd behavior amongst companies. Some business leader who feels they just have an intuitive sense of what's best just tries something. Are they right? Who knows? But if the company does OK it is evidence the policy isn't a total disaster so more companies follow suit.

This falls apart a bit if providing better food costs more. Restaurants with better food may earn more revenue all else being equal but their costs may be higher. People are willing to pay more for the same quality of food in a better location. It makes sense for a the restaurant with worse food to outbid a restaurant with better food because the location is more important to them and they are allocating more money towards towards rent rather than food quality so they have more to spend.