msteffen

lol, we’re all writing the same thing. I’ll give you one example, because I particularly liked it. My therapist always talks about separating people from problems, and I never had any idea wtf he was talking about. And then he gave me this exercise where he was like, “let’s construct a narrative where this person’s eccentric personality makes them really good at something specific. Where would you expect a person like that to encounter friction and how would you manage it?”

It was sort of fun, we talked about how Arthur Schawlow (who co-invented the laser and won the Nobel prize) was banned from driving on Stanford campus and had to be chauffeured. And I finally understood what he was talking about; you can access this perspective for anybody by constructing such a narrative. What if everybody’s a misunderstood genius at something? Why not? How would you live in such a world? One insight among many.

Therapy, which (at least for me) has focused dually on adhd management strategies that can be very helpful (including, in particular, enhancing relevant social skills related to setting expectations and boundaries) and on identifying and modifying negative self-image issues and counterproductive learned behaviors (e.g. various forms of self-directed hostility that attempt to assert control over a neurophysiological issue).

It’s funny, I went to therapy a lot of times before I found someone I could stick with, and if I were to give my past self a list of what I’ve gotten from therapy, I think I would’ve been unimpressed. Nevertheless, I’ve noticed that I’m more confident and calmer, and it has definitely improved my relationships.

There’s a kind of virtuous cycle that happens where you replace a grumpy mindset where you’re always mad at yourself for not meeting other peoples’ expectations and always mad at other people for making your life hard, with a confident mindset where you understand yourself, are therefore comfortable relating to other people about your abilities and needs, and can focus on putting yourself in situations where you’ll be successful.

1. At an old apartment complex, there was a little playground in a common area, and it usually had at least one family from the complex there at any given time between about 4:00pm and 8:00pm. It was a terrible playground—small, poorly-maintained, surrounded by roads with fast cars and no fence—and people were still there all the time. I’ve been looking for an even better version of that ever since, but have never been able to find it. I wonder if part of the problem is just land use.

2. The author is surprised that so few other parents took up his pick-up/drop-off offer. I would not have taken such an offer from most of the other parents I know, because I don’t trust anybody I don’t know very well (including other parents) to watch my kids. IMHO, the author’s surprise at other parents’ reluctance doesn’t help (it makes me worried that he doesn’t appreciate how much trust he’s expecting to be handed over), even though I agree with his overall point.

I don’t think this is irrational neuroticism. I think we’ve all—guests and host in this story—lost necessary social skills and cultural cohesion, and getting them back is an important but large project.

To try and illustrate the point with an example: one of my kids has an egg allergy. A group of kids, good as they may be at looking out for each other, is not going to be tracking that. Most parents I know have never thought about what foods in their house have egg in them, or about the egg ladder and which foods are highest risk—why would they? If we were all old friends or in a close, shared community, I think this would come up. By a 7th birthday, this would’ve come up a million times and all sides would have worked through all the implications, and the other kids would know about it because they got a lecture from their parents to be careful with mayonnaise or something, and the host would know there’s an EpiPen in her bag that he might have to use on her if he’s not careful. Multiply this complexity by the number of kids at the party.

I wish we were close enough with the parents we know to understand their kids like our own. I don’t know what the author’s relationship is like with the other parents in the story, but I see in this article a bit of naivety to the reality of what the author is asking for, and I think the article itself is a symptom of the problem it complains about.

Uh, I think at the very least you have to caveat on the age of the kids. Babies need a lot of fussy obsessiveness. Kids arms aren’t long enough for them to wipe their own ass until they’re about 4. Don’t know when you get them to start doing laundry or dishes but that takes longer still.

> without much concrete evidence that it hurts long-term outcomes, assuming the child is otherwise healthy and well taken care of.

Not to pick on others’ life choices, but I don’t think that this particular assertion is true. Depends on your evidentiary bar, I suppose, but just from googling it:

* Mass General’s Fatherhood Project (https://thefatherhoodproject.org/schools/the-research/): “Findings from the rapidly growing science of early childhood and brain development show that a father’s active participation and emotional engagement with his children leads to improved social, emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes.”

* NYTimes (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/health/fathers-child-heal...): “Research Finds Interaction With Father, Not Mother, Affects Child Health”

* https://firstfivenebraska.org/blog/6-ways-children-benefit-f... provides a catalog of evidence and reported benefits

Preach!

Bryan Cantrill (inventor of DTrace and cofounder of Oxide Computer) comes to mind as someone who seems to do both. It’s hard to know somebody’s parenting quality from the outside, but he talks about his kids a lot.

In his case, I think he didn’t start his company until his kids were older. I’m not sure what the early childhood years were like for him.

For “parenting” and “startup”, I would say that each is extremely hard to do well even when it’s the only thing on the list.

I saw an interesting article in the Atlantic[^1] somewhat recently predicting that the people who will thrive in the AI age will be ones who enjoy mental effort. That is, even when AI could do something for them, these people will choose to do it themselves if there’s something to be learned from it.

This post seems to illustrate the point perfectly to me. AI wrote the proof. It was done, Lean checked it. And presented with that, Tao’s reaction is still to want to learn something—how to solve the problem himself—and then to meticulously untangle a 90k-line machine proof (utterly disregarding that there’s no clear upside for doing so—he can’t get a paper out of this) because it’s the only way to learn that. My bet is that it was worth it.

(I also think everyone saying “it doesn’t make sense to write code anymore” is crazy. The best learning tool of all time was just invented, and you want me to not use it? What the point of any of us if not to know things?)

[^1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/ai-open-ai-anthrop...

I know less about this than every other commenter here, but both weather patterns and market performance do seem predictable based on past behavior when modeled at the right level of abstraction. “Sunshine on Monday” does not imply “rain on Tuesday”, but “cold front moving in Monday night” does. (Likewise “stock up Monday” doesn’t imply “stock down Tuesday” but “CEO arrested for fraud on Monday” does.)

I think this is relevant to the discourse on LLMs/programming because for months, people said “they’re just regurgitating their training set,” but now I think people are seeing (I am seeing) that they do learn more abstract models of the world than that. I don’t really know how, but it’s why they can generalize from other codebases and tools and so on.

...Grapes of Wrath is American (John Steinbeck) . But I agree with you that parent comment is ridiculous. Proust wrote page-spanning individual sentences.

I’m just saying, to the extent that there’s a moral question here, “how unreasonable was it for the author to ignore the sign?” I think it’s a lot more reasonable if there are no alternatives given.

My take on TFA was that the lesson was “adults negotiate with each other, have the confidence to reject offers, and the humility to respect when their own offers are rejected.” Quietly seething about something you’re not OK with is bad—you are responsible for representing your own interests, and expecting somebody else to anticipate your needs instead of expecting yourself to raise them is not responsible and not “adult”. Likewise, expect other people to represent their interests, and expect them to expect you to represent your interests.

Now, given that framing, I’m speaking to the question: was the author acting rightly (responsibly representing his own interests) or wrongly (disrespecting the building authorities’ “rejection” of his “offer” to rent the space, contingent AC control)? I say rightly, because he had no other way to represent his interests.

If there had been a number on the sign, turning the ac off instead of calling the number would have been wrong. OTOH, if the building engineer or whoever is mad that the numberless sign was ignored, well, obviously someone wanted it off (hence the sign), and you can’t expect that person to disappear. Maybe put a number on there and talk to them.

I think the keys here are

1. It’s not clear who wrote the note, and they didn’t leave contact info or any opening to a negotiation. If the note had said “this AC must stay on at all times, please call 111-222-3333 with any questions - building engineer” that would’ve completely reversed the morality of story for me. But the note asserts authority by making this non-negotiable demand (which is the part that seems patronizing to me—I agree with TFA here) and doesn’t justify that authority at all, no “I’m the owner” or anything.

2. The first step of finding a compromise is knowing what everybody wants. The author of TFA didn’t seem to do that in the story, and his apparent lack of curiosity about the compressor does not reflect well, I agree, but neither does a threat from whoever wrote the note.

My wild guess here is that the person who wrote the note worked in maintenance and was unhappy about the building warming and cooling and wanted a stable temperature. The resolution may well be that the author has to find a new place to do yoga, but if he’s not interested in air-conditioned yoga, and the building’s authorities aren’t interested in tenants who want the AC off, that outcome might have been inevitable anyway.

> I think this is somewhere in the middle east - Dubai likely

What led you to this conclusion?

Well, I wrote my comment after an exchange similar to this, with the linked example chatbot (chatjimmy): https://pastebin.com/uEV7Pm8q

I asked it a slightly tricky math problem (I re-asked it the same problem to create the paste, and it did about as well the second time). It was unable to solve the problem, and it’s a small, old model, so…fair enough…but also its answer was pretty incoherent, with stuff like “Since A is an invariant set, it's always possible to find a cave that the fox cannot be in. Therefore, you can always catch the fox in that cave.” (…catch it…in the cave it can’t be in?).

Then, off the top of my head: Claude somewhat recently generated a Spark Job where the worker timeout was longer than the worker heartbeat, so workers would always inevitably be killed when they didn’t heartbeat within their timeout window. (also…neither option needed to be set?) Before I noticed the problem, I asked Claude why the job was taking so long, and it told me the data set was too large. More recently, there was a blog post by John Scalzi I was having a hard time finding, so I posed the problem to ChatGPT, and it came back with a blog post that didn’t include any version of the text I remembered and wasn’t really topically relevant (and maybe I hallucinated the blog post, but it could’ve said “I can’t find it” instead of “here you go”). On another occasion, I was trying to find a particular episode of Bob the Builder for my kids, so I Googled it, and Gemini kept giving me the wrong season and episode number, even after several rounds of “no, s5e6 is ‘that thing’, I’m looking for ‘this thing’.” Turned out the episode wasn’t on Amazon at all (which I had to tell it), and I had to go find it on YouTube.

That said, as I sit here scrolling through my history to see if I’ve forgotten any particularly good examples, I have to admit they do a better job than I’m giving them credit for. But I still wouldn’t have them write my email for me (the one time I tried that, when I was playing with openclaw, it sent a fairly demanding email to someone I didn’t know that well without asking for confirmation, and I had to go apologize and explain that I hadn’t really written the email, which was embarrassing), nor am I particularly excited to have chatjimmy as a permanent resident of my pocket.

This is neat but IMO a little crazy.

Something I personally haven’t seen much of, in all the discussions of model benchmarks and AI breakthroughs, is a distinction between “peak performance” and “reliable performance”. The “peak performance” of frontier models is very high: they’re solving open math problems, analyzing large codebases, etc. But my subjective impression is that “reliable performance” is mid at best: out of 100 random questions I might think to ask, it’s likely to say something wrong or stupid a handful of times at least.

I think there’s inherent tension between the two: the more a model reaches or outright hallucinates, the more likely it is to come up with tricky, subtle solutions to problems (I think people are somewhat like this too: Terry Tao’s brother is nonverbal, Jim Watson’s son has severe schizophrenia, etc). But then the less likely it is to generate a sensible email reply.

I use models all the time for coding, but I would not let one take over my daily correspondence. If the idea here is to run frontier models at high speed in data centers, that could be useful (the speed would be cool), but I’d be surprised if the cost of that hardware churn is worth it to frontier labs. But if the idea is to turn this into a chip that goes in your phone as some kind of routine, low-power inference thing…taking something too kooky to be relied on and baking it into your phone’s hardware like that doesn’t make sense to me.

I'd say that by the time you're considering jail, it's too late—these situations are better avoided than rectified.

Per the article, one of the officers was evidently particularly stupid—he failed police academy once and was disciplined for entering a women's restroom because of crimes he imagined could be happening in there. No one wanted to say "you're too stupid to be making high-stakes judgment calls", so they let him keep trying until he was running into an alleged emergency "with no plan," where he shot an innocent person eight times...and then handcuffed him...

I think actuaries have a way of employing statistical realities that would, in a legislative context, precipitate too much defensiveness and bickering to ever be the basis of a rule. Like I think it was quite a while before neuroscience could fully explain why insurance companies wouldn't cover rental car drivers under 25, instead of 16 or 18.

An insurance company would give departments a reason to say "anyone who has ever failed police academy gets pepper spray and that's it." Departments can decide how to deploy that person.

(Ideally that person wouldn't be a cop at all, but departments will probably always be pushing to hire. This way the argument is between departments and the comparatively highly-informed insurance market, and not voters)

Interesting to read this right after reading about the pseudpocalypse (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48908886)

That article proposes that, soon, it will be possible to connect any online identity to its owner's other identities by analyzing stylistic details in their writing. So even niche online communities will have these problems.

One use-case for curating commits other than git history is carefully structuring code reviews to be easy to review. Eg "commit 1 just rearranges existing code, no business logic changes"..."change 2 modifies business logic, but in one localized place as the refactoring has already been done"..."change 3 only modifies comments"

> But this is also a factional concern; for reasons I don't understand, the Democratic left polarized hard against "abundance" (and thus YIMBYism). So these kinds of arguments now code as "centrist".

I think a lot of these activists were originally fighting gentrification. Then, over time, the gentrifiers won anyway, and now most housing in hcol areas is occupied by wealthy professionals. But the activists never updated their politics (people have a hard time admitting—or, sometimes, realizing—that they lost), and now they advocate policies that shut out the people they originally set out to protect.

I read somewhere that almost every very successful person’s results can be attributed to 2-3 tricks that they consistently apply to great effect.

With Elon, I think one of his is “build it as cheaply as possible, and then you can afford to only sell to people who are purely excited about the tech.” I don’t know when he learned this (I actually wonder if it was a lesson he learned from Eberhard/Tarpenning at Tesla, who were only selling the roadster to sports car enthusiasts who cared more about 0-60 than fit & finish, or range, or cost, or anything else).

Anyway, my current interpretation is that the pizza guys shouldn’t have sold to pepepizza (or friends and family, probably). I know startups do this all the time, but whenever I’ve seen it, it always seems to turn into a distraction from the Big Idea that is the company’s thesis. Then Big Customer gets hung up on ancillary requirements and Cool Startup doesn’t really get to test their thesis at all. Maybe the key is to stay small, focus on finding people who really care about the new oven tech, and size the company to that market until you’ve solved enough problems to expand to people for whom the cool tech is concern #2 or #3.

> learn to turn off the over-thinking part of the brain that blocks creativity

This is all pretty vibe-y but I think that might be what the post’s author found the ability to do and is trying to teach? TFA links to this other post in a similar vein: https://commoncog.com/get-numb-get-good/

I wonder if some of these CEOs are anticipating a big crash and trying to lay people off now, so that (1) they can raise/hoard cash while the money-go-round is spinning and (2) their eng organization is already lean and used to it if/when the money-go-round stops.

“Because of AI” indeed.

> I'm not sure how you get from "LLMs work in mysterious ways" to "So we need more discipline" to "everything is fine."

Are you referring to this part:

> I am not worried, at least in the near term, about AI creating massive, discontinuous returns on investment in the absence of engineering discipline. (Many will try, and it will be entertaining to watch.)

She's saying, "the amazing thing about LLMs isn't that they generate lots of code fast, so don't worry about people using LLMs for that taking over the industry"

She's making two points:

1. Before infra-as-code, people would be afraid to touch parts of production due to lost knowledge about how and why it got that way. Now that we have infra-as-code, you aren't allowed to change infra the old way (ad-hoc changes via dashboard/CLI), even if doing so would be faster and easier. Experienced SREs were required to abandon lots of their old skills with CLIs and dashboards and start working in a completely new way, because the knowledge captured in a terraform repo's commit history is so valuable.

2. In the past, the way code got written was through people making changes in ways that are specific to their current knowledge, the org's current problems, the current users, etc, some or all of which is not written down. Eventually, everyone is afraid to change certain things because they don't know or remember all the considerations that went into them (not just afraid to touch parts of the code, but afraid to delete seemingly-unused features, or migrate the schema, or whatever).

Charity is saying that problem 2 is a hidden/lost-knowledge problem like problem 1, and the amazing thing about LLMs is you have to write down all the knowledge you want them to have, which may lead to a better solution to the "lost knowledge" problem in software development, which would be so valuable that experienced software engineers have to abandon lots of old skills and start using it.

(Not only writing down all the knowledge you want the LLM to have, since they're flaky enough to ignore instructions and miss implications sometimes, but building test suites and tools and so on that adequately guide their solution. This is the "more discipline" she's referring to.)

> The Enigma of Reason (Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, 2017): their argumentative theory holds that reasoning evolved for social rather than individual epistemic purposes, to produce and evaluate arguments in group contexts.

Yes! I love that someone wrote this down!

This seems so obvious to me now. I often ask LLMs to cite their sources (they do hallucinate from time to time), and they often give me sources that don't say what is claimed. "How would the LLM know not to give this to me?" I wonder. They're trained to explain but not to convince, so they don't know what's convincing, and they should.

I think humans hallucinate at least as much as LLMs—arguments of any complexity are impossible to formulate without leaping at least a bit—but other humans ground us. That's why when people become socially isolated, they join cults or adopt conspiracy theories or the like.

Conversely, "this is convincing to an expert" converges on “this is true" as our collective expertise grows over time. This is the foundation of the scientific method, of progress in all engineering disciplines, etc.

I liked this article, and I see a lot of other commenters didn't, so I'll give my take:

When starting on a new codebase, how do you make yourself into a helpful contributor as quickly as possible? I go straight for the humans and their human docs. What problem was the system originally built to solve? What was the original design, and what were its biggest problems? Who is currently using it? If you know these, reading the code is much easier because you can guess why things were done the way they are.

Also, this blog post has gotten popular: https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/just-send-me-the-prompt/

I think Charity is observing a very old problem and expecting the new technology to lead to a new solution of some kind. I doubt she thinks even the current generation of tools are the end of the AI software development story. She's not saying we'll drop design docs right into Claude code and walk away (design docs aren't complete either, that's why when you're ramping up you also have to talk to people, read old tickets and postmortems, etc.)

What she's observing is that, in prod, people don't like infra where it's hard to tell how it got into is current state, and so infra-as-code is what we do now. She's also observing that, "it's hard to tell how it got into its current state" is the status quo with codebases, which other people have observed going back to "Programming as Theory Building" and earlier. And she's expecting that, analogous to infra, software development will somehow be done with tools focused on making "how the code got into its current state" clearer.

> The beginning of the end: The day I bought an Adderall from a classmate. When that amphetamine feeling kicked-in, it was as if life was perfect for the first time. I was happy, confident, felt I could do anything.

You know, I had a similar experience, but in my case I got an appointment with a psychiatrist afterwards, described the experience in detail, was given a computer test, diagnosed with ADHD, and then given a prescription. (Also in my case, I learned Adderall doesn’t actually feel great or help you if you take too much).

Take care of your kids. The war on drugs is stupid. Etc.

IIUC, the most basic version is when you have a log where every entry has both “date added” and “effective date,” so you can add stuff to the log retroactively. For example, “the user just informed us yesterday that they moved last year” -> address date added=yesterday, date effective=last year

Yeahhhh…this is not really how Linux works, though.

Most of LLM world is kind of anti-linux right now because the most popular LLMs are walled off by these huge companies and hella expensive. At some point, a nerd will realize they could hack together a surprisingly ok homebrew version of what everybody else is using, and do. Then a company realizes that they can build a brand on the anarchist, grassroots vibe of the homebrew thing, and capitalize its development (software development, but also community development, which is brand development for the company). Now, it’s much later, but the open source thing is competitive, and popular for being open-source.

At one point I got interested in why Red Hat handed over tens of millions of dollars in stock to Linus leading up to their IPO, in exchange for…nothing specific. Nominally it was a gift of appreciation, but handing out random gifts is somewhat opposed to maximizing shareholder returns. It’s because Linus controls merges to the Linux kernel and doesn’t have to care about Red Hat, and the board wanted him to care at least a little bit. They were stuck between “people trust our business because it’s built on this populist OS” and “this populist OS is mostly controlled by a guy who doesn’t work for us.” It’s hard to have one without the other.

I’m glad Apple is taking accessibility seriously, and I wish accessibility worked better on Linux, but I don’t think Linux is ever going to make developers “do their homework,” because the community wouldn’t trust a Linux like that. If the author is right, it’ll happen because “AI for the People, Inc.” builds a business on it and sponsors the work.

I've never heard this before, but it seems very insightful to me.

I mean the headline is great! I can't tell you how many arguments I've had about "you can't execute your way out of a bad strategy" (which I claim the original "you can't exercise your way out of a bad diet" is a special case of)