My kids are still too young but I constantly worry about how the world will look like in 8-10 years. On a recent trip to Europe we had to rush inside a bar during a storm. The place was packed and the only table available was next to a large party of loud teenagers on some sort of celebration, maybe a birthday. We had no choice but to sit next to them. After a while, probably over an hour, my wife asks me if I have noticed the kids. Obviously I have. But she insisted, “do you see”?. I have no idea what she’s talking about. So I watch them interact for a bit and I get it. Not one single kid had a phone on them. They are all eating, drinking, talking and laughing like if it’s the 90s. That was pretty amazing to see and gave me lots of hope.
I use virtual credit cards for all subscriptions. If they make unsubscribing difficult, I just kill the card. NYTimes is actually great value for the $4 I pay. I think they have the best photography and infographics of any news site.
I don’t think BYD would be a hit in the US as they are in Europe. It’s an entirely different market. They may be relatively successful just not to the point of taking an important market share, they would probably be like Mazda. Many of the subsides for Chinese EV ended this year too, and they are now realizing price alone is not a differentiator. So even if BYD eventually makes it to the US, they will be priced close to other brands like KIA and Tesla, but without the advantage of the brand and strong local presence. So no, there’s no concerns with BYD and we may see them sooner than later in the US.
The $100/month is excellent value. I don’t understand how’s that not the default option for all professional developers. Unless people don’t produce any value writing code, like playing around and experimenting with vibe coding, I understand. But if software development is your actual income, and assuming you live in a wealthy country, $100/month is nothing for a tool like Codex.
At this point I think it’s more important to have a solid workflow and understanding of how [insert your favorite model here] works and its capabilities, than chasing the next shinny release jumping back and forth between companies. I just finished my first large project with Codex and it is hard for me to believe Claude can be much better. It may be a bit better or worse, but again, they are all so good now that the user is the one driving the difference.
My nephews came to the US in their early teens as non English speakers. They struggled in some of the courses but still got good grades reported to their parents. So, apparently some teachers will put them on a bus together with other minorities and take them on a day trip to the museum instead of math class, but they would still get graded. They retuned back to Spain and had a very difficult time graduating from high school because of math. So I’m not sure how well of a predictor high school is.
Also, not all developers work on software products. The vast majority of developers work supporting software solutions as part of a much bigger business model, such as infrastructure, industry, healthcare and services. Many of these are complex organizations. So, unless you get to turn every employee into a 10x employee, the 10X coder along won’t necessarily make a 10X productivity contribution. What’s likely going to happen is the 10X coder will start to slow down or adding more (unnecessary) complexity to avoid having to sit and wait on overhead, for other areas of the business which are not easily automated away to AI to catch up. As a developer I can finish my project in June instead of December, but what if the customer is still not ready for integration until December? what do I do?
Financially, in very few cases renting actually makes sense.
Assuming of course you make an informed purchase of a home given your particular circumstances.
Most homes in the US appreciate in value, unless you live in rural Pennsylvania.
I also believe buying early forces you to be more financially responsible and makes purchasing your first family home later in life a lot easier.
So I always recommend young people to make the sacrifice and buy a place.
Your first home doesn’t need to be your dream home.
My first place was 700 sqf in a very shady area of the city, but it came with sweet tax abatements for several years and the area improved a lot but the time I sold.
There are always opportunities like that in almost every city in America, even in today’s market.
They also came to realize building, operating and maintaining a military force is extremely expensive. Free healthcare, 7 weeks of vacation, 36 hr work weeks, unemployment benefits, subsidized housing, etc etc is all great when you don’t have the financial burden of protecting your home.
I read it and understood the project goal and the difference between the old and new versions. What else is there to get from this? If I want to read good prose I have plenty of books to pick from. This is just a product pitch that effectively communicates the idea.
Providing credit cards online even by phone for 20 years I have never had any issues, or known anyone who had issues. The few occasions my cards were compromised (all my own fault): a restaurant in Vienna pre Covid when cash was king in Europe, I insisted to use the card and the waiter took it inside lol. Got a 4000k cruise booked a few weeks later. Another time at an ATM in Brazil, I even noticed the suspects around the machines waiting and still went for it. A gas station ATM in NYC. That’s about it. Every time I called the bank and they refunded the money. So what I’m saying is security doesn’t seen to be a big issue in the US when it comes to online transactions with credit cards. Of course this is all subjective from my own experiences, but I’m kind of reckless using cards so I’m probably a good test subject.
I have all three ICE, EV and hybrid at home. I was hesitant at first when getting the EV because we already had the hybrid, but we needed a second SUV to carry kids. After two years with the EV it became evident to me the hybrid doesn’t make sense. It has some of the gas savings of an EV but you still deal with the inconvenience of maintaining a ICE. My EV has received zero maintenance other than cleaning the cameras. Brakes are still good for many more years and tires maybe need replacing in a year. No oil change, no brake pads, no spark plugs, fuel pumps, seals, plus all the time savings scheduling appointments and driving to the dealer. I do see some use cases where hybrids may actually work better, like very long daily commutes in a region lacking charging stations. I believe they are popular because there’s still fear of going full electric, but as many EV owners would tell you that fear is unreasonable and disappears after a few months owning an EV. I go out and run errands with 10% charge. The first days my hands started sweating when the charge dropped under 40%.
He’s a great educator and seems like a genuinely nice guy, at least on interviews. I hope he continues with his teaching career on the side, although the crazy amount of NDAs he probably had to sign may make that effort a bit difficult.
Photopea was a solo attempt to offer a free alternative to Photoshop, and it was highly successful. If the original creator had access to Claude Code back in the day, it is very likely he would have vibecoded the entire thing. So it’s not like the tools are incapable of cloning Photoshop, but it would still require a lot of human effort, more than what the average person would like to invest.
There are many situations in real combat where pilots need to fly even closer than typical air show formations, like refueling or escorting other aircraft. So close formation flying is a fundamental skill for a pilot. Sure, we can minimize risk by not using certain aircraft and close formations during airshows, but pilots will still need to train and execute missions using high(er) risk maneuvers. Also air shows are probably not the largest portion of flight time for a pilot.
Air shows always carry the risk of killing pilots, like any training or combat mission. So we should not have air shows at all because losing a $30M or a $60M jet is secondary to losing highly trained pilots we need for combat readiness.
If the plan was to demo the Growlers team then calling the Blue Angels makes no sense, that’s a completely different team on completely different aircraft. You can still demo them with reduced risk like avoiding flying close profile.
One of the reasons I decided to stay in the shadows as an unglamorous, boring backend developer. Every single time I tried any frontend development, either web or mobile, the moment I started running into issues like this requiring witchcraft to accomplish an objectively trivial task, a bit of my soul left my body.
You don’t need to read the code if you have a robust test suit to validate the output. The article implies testing is the new “reading”. If I spend 10 minutes reading code to find an edge case bug, I have lost the benefit of using AI. AI code is legacy code the moment is generated because I can’t tell why some lines were chosen, so the only way for me to add more features or refactor legacy code is by being very rigorous with testing.
“Microsoft paid photographer Charles O’Rear a confidential amount for the Windows XP wallpaper “Bliss,” but it is widely reported to have been in the “low six figures,” meaning over $100,000.”
Charles should have asked for MS stock instead.
“In 2005, Facebook offered David Choe about $60,000 to paint murals at its office. Instead of cash, he chose Facebook stock. When Meta Platforms went public in 2012, his shares were estimated to be worth around $200 million.”
The Frank Bourassa story is pretty incredible. There’s a TV series but I recommend listening to his interviews. I think NPR has one that is pretty good. The level of planning, logistics and craft the guy put into his illegal money printing shop is admirable. Extremely intelligent and driven person. He could have succeeded in any other legal business if wanted to, but looks like it would not be the same thrill for him. His counterfeit US bills were so good that allegedly some of it is still in circulation with silent approval of the US government.
I have to produce a great deal of documentation at work for our customers, most of it regulatory and compliance assessments.
Some of the sources I need to use come from agencies in the government or working with the government and are often over a thousand pages long.
So AI has been incredibly helpful here because a lot of what I need to do is map this huge bureaucratic set of guidelines and policies to each customer’s particular situation.
Aware of the sloppy nature of LLMs I created my own workflow that resembles more coding than document drafting.
I use Codex, VSCode and plain markdown, I don’t use MS Word or Copilot like all my other colleagues.
I invest a great deal of time still doing manual labor like researching and selecting my sources, which I then make available for Codex to use as its single source of truth.
I start with a skill that generates the outline which often is longer than it should be. Sometimes I get say a 18 sections outline and I ask Codex to cut it in half. Then I ask for a preliminary draft of each section (each on a separate markdown) and read through and update as necessary, before I ask the agent to develop each section in full, then proof read and update again.
When I’m satisfied I merge all the sections into one single markdown and run another skill to check for repetition, ambiguity, length, etc and usually a few legitimate improvements are recommended.
The whole process can still take me several days to produce a 20-30 pages compliance document, which gets read, verified and approved by myself and others in my team before it goes out.
The productivity gains are pretty obvious, but most importantly I think the content is of better quality for the customer.
Believable and not shocking. LLMs literally may have saved my sons and potentially her mother too by allowing us to fact check a lot of non sense data and scare tactics by a group of at least 5 different doctors ambushing us to make a life changing decision in minutes. The problem is doctors, at least in the US, prioritize liability exposure over patients long term outcomes. Let’s say you need an intervention where two options A and B are available to you. A carries 1% risk of complications but a great outcome. Option B has 0.1% risk of complications but once you are discharged the short term effects are challenging and long term effects not well understood. Well, 10/10 times doctors will suggest option B and will do anything they can to nudge you into making that choice, like not telling you the absolute numbers and constantly using the word “death”. They also lie about the outcomes, because again, once you accept the procedure, sign and are sent home, they have nothing to do with you.