>The cost of producing code has collapsed. AI tools can generate functional, adequate, perfectly average code at a speed and cost that would have been unimaginable even five years ago. And like the outsourcing wave of the early 2000s, the economics are real and rational. Nobody is wrong for using these tools. The code they produce is often fine. It works. It passes tests. It might ship as-is.
After using AI for months (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT) it is extremely rare for their code to work 'as is' first shot and almost always requires several iterations and cleaning up edge-cases.
When it does work 'first shot' it's usually when it's transferring existing working code to a new project which is slightly different.
I believe that increases the chances of one-shot code working, though it's also possible that it did that against Opus 4.5 and isn't necessary against Opus 4.7 but I haven't spotted the difference yet.
Weird, this isn't my experience at all (mostly writing Python lately). Granted, it usually doesn't implement things exactly the way I want them to be implemented, and I iterate a lot on that. But I think it's been like a year? at least six months, since the code didn't work on the first try.
Governments have gotten in the bad habit of acting like nothing will ever go wrong. Living paycheck-to-paycheck, so to speak. Cali not the only one suffering this fate. It doesnt matter if it's Trump's fault or not. Lets just say it is. Bad things happen. You have to be ready.
You're not wrong, but also how "ready" is "ready enough"? What about things the US doesn't generally have access to? Rare earth minerals? Helium? Cobalt? Coffee?
It also costs money to build the infra for storage and more money to maintain. There's always a trade-off. I think governments have done an acceptable job of being ready, but they are predicated on the assumption that the global order that the developed world has largely enjoyed for several decades remains largely intact.
It's a bad assumption in hindsight because some folks chose to go over a cliff over fixing deep-seated problems. You can't really control for chaos.
Moving to green and nuclear energy, pressing hard to upgrade the national grid would be the obvious things to reduce our short-term dependence on fossil fuels.
Energy independence is not a pipe dream, and it isn't ever going to be 100%. We should be working toward it.
We may be somewhat dependent on China or other sources for solar panels, for example, but once we have the product, it has a multi-decade lifetime compared to an instantly-consumed fuel.
Even if you're a fossil fuel fanatic, one should be advocating for more of our refineries to be tooled for processing our own crude oil. But that isn't as profitable in the short term, so we don't do it.
P.S. politically, we've seen our system does not have the capacity to deal with a malicious executive taking total control of the government. We need a complete rebuild of our legislative and executive branches.
We were fully warned of this with the supply chain disruption of covid.
Global supply chain has become dangerously dependent upon a stable geopolitical environment that has been unnaturally provided by the United States for the last near 100 years in post world war II.
This unipolar naval supremacy is not a normal situation. One of the things that triggered world war I was an escalating arms race in battleships between Germany and Great Britain.
I would recommend the United States practically every country, Force its automobile manufacturers to go very hardcore down the plugin hybrid electric vehicle, which will maximize the battery supply to electrify the largest amount of daily consumer transportation.
I would say you should impose a minimum of 40 to 50 mi for an all-electric range, The 20 mile range which is degraded to really about 12 now is not sufficient in my four phev.
Hybrids also weighs far less gasoline and idling and low torque low RPM situations like stop and go and sitting in traffic jams, by utilizing gener of breaking, using the electric motor for the 0-25 acceleration that ICE engines are incredibly inefficient at.
It's my opinion that the equipment and manufacturing switchover should be much less of an imposition on car manufacturers than the full EV switchover. Consumers do not have such a shocking switch to driving habits because a phev just functions like a normal ICE car if the battery drains, it solves long-range transportation issues and concerns with EVs.
Most car manufacturers know how to make turbocharged high efficiency compact engines, most major manufacturers I believe know how to use Atkinson cycle with variable valve timing combined with a hybrid drivetrain to further boost gas efficiency
Not just scrapping them - literally paying foreign companies billions of dollars to not build wind farms. Illegally as well, there’s absolutely no authority for these payments to happen outside of Congress.
I mean, there's a lot of blame to go around, but tearing up a working deal that gave us unprecedented, multilateral access to Iran's nuclear facilities, and then later jumping into a war of choice with no clear objectives and seemingly being surprised by the most obvious geopoltical realities that people with any shred of a clue have been talking about for DECADES would seem to have at least something to do with the current mess.
In my book, the silver lining is that this might finally push the world to move away from fossil fuels in a meaningful way.
Yeah but he wouldn't have been in the position to do any of that if the people who funded his campaign like the Adelsons, Kushners, Musk, Linda McMahon, Lutnick and so forth didn't contribute millions to his campaign and leverage whatever other resources they have to promote him.
And they in turn couldn't do any of that if the teams of professionals from lawyers, accountants to engineers didn't help them acquire and use those resources.
Just like violent crime is overwhelmingly perpetuated by a handful of repeat offenders we see the same pattern in white collar crime. A handful of white collar criminals cause damage to American society that cascades through the world resulting in food and fuel shortages that we're talking about.
I get that it's really hard but you have to view this dispassionately and from a systems thinking perspective. The professionals and oligarchs are responsible for the mad king scenario that we're all living through right now. They're responsible for the social decay that affects us daily.
And it's just going to keep getting worse and worse once the mad king eventually goes the way all mad kings do.
Correct, he is the symptom of the problem created by himself.
The Iran nuclear deal rode off the back of Stuxnet and concessions were easier with that damage. The recent strikes with the B2 were largely ineffectual so well done.
AI support generally sucks but I actually wouldn't mind if everyone used it for the initial call routing portion. Beats an IVR tree or waiting for someone to just redirect your call to the real queue.
I respectfully disagree with the initial routing point. I very strongly prefer a traditional tree to “I’m your voice assistant! In a few words, tell me how I can help!”.
The tree is structured and gives me an immediate sense of how to map my task to the support offering. If I’m calling, I probably have an issue that I can’t self-serve resolve via the customer portal or whatever, so walking the tree lets me get an idea of who can help.
The “voice assistant” gives me no sense of what the system is capable of or how to take advantage of those capabilities. So I’m left guessing at phrases or functions based off of the assumption that there’s still some kind of tree-like structure that’s been abstracted away. Same outcome, more cognitive overhead, plus I usually have to shout in my best William … Shatner … impression to get it to understand me.
If you're calling it an "AI assistant" then it's probably not the type of system I was talking about and I probably don't like it either. AI call routing is having an IVR tree's functionality where the call system does the work to map it to a number in the tree. Anything more than that is getting into something else AI.
E.g. instead of waiting for the IVR tree to be read out to find out you needed to press 4 for the shipping department the AI asks "Please state the department you wish to connect to or reason for calling" and you just say "shipping" (or however much of a life story you want to give it) and it's the call system's job to figure out where in the menu that is instead. For repeat calls once you know its AI call routing you can just say "shipping" right as the call starts, the same as you'd known press "4" before the 2nd time around an IVR tree, except you don't have to remember the random digits.
but even a simple impl to answer questions can knock out like 50% of callers who are tech-illiterate at 100x cheaper cost, it's just strictly better economics and better for those customers
I broadly agree though I have noticed that it seems to be getting a bit better. I hate how patronizing pretty much every LLM tends to be, but at least I've noticed now that the AI support is better at figuring out what it is I actually want.
That said, my life hack for these things to get escalated to a human is to just keep saying or typing curse words. Usually that triggers a "connect to human" flow. I can't promise it will always work, but I can say it has worked every time I have tried it.
Dark Matter : supposedly makes up a big amount of the mass of the universe, but cant be seen, does not emit, absorb, or reflect light. Also it can 'pass through' other normal matter, and other dark matter.
It's basically magic aka not actually real, just something in vogue to pretend is real at the present moment.
The "pass through matter" is a consequence of not interacting electromagnetically. That's not that uncommon. Think neutrinos. (Also, "not" might just mean "very much reduced")
It's one thing to be electromagnetically inert, but if it is matter, it has mass, and if it has mass then it must be possible to collide with it. That we can't suggests it does not exist.
Yes, and dark matter will interact with visible matter gravitationally. When we say "doesn't collide with normal matter", it is not exact. It just means "the interaction length is very very long". Same for neutrinos. Their interaction length is huge as well: 1 TeV Neutrinos have an interaction length of 2.5 million kilometers.
> cant be seen, does not emit, absorb, or reflect light. Also it can 'pass through' other normal matter, and other dark matter
Why do you say that like it's obviously ridicule or impossible? Neutrinos do exist and they fit all these criteria. We just know they're not dark matter (or at least not all of it) because they're not heavy enough (and some other things).
Don't try to rely on intuition when thinking about particles, there's no reason for evolution to make what happens at quantum scale or relativistic scale intuitive to us.
I mean it's easy to say it's fake, but to counter this, why can a particle that only interacts with gravity not exist?
The neutrino is a good example of a particle that almost doesn't exist. They are produced in solar reactions in spectacular amounts. Trillions of them are flitting through you right now as if you don't exist. You'd need a light year block of lead to ensure you could stop one. Mind-boggling amounts of them have to pass through our detectors to see even a single interaction.
Simply put, the particle physics does not have to behave nice so you can sleep well at night.
I mean sure nature has no obligation to not have a unfalsifable particle, but you wind up in weird places, like, there exists a distribution of dark matter that explains the poltergeist that knocked over your coffee cup last week.
We measure the matter distribution by its affect on light (strong/weak lensing). We also measure the matter distribution by the amount of light coming from it. The results are not the same. The simplest explanation is that there is matter which does not produce or reflect light via e/m, i.e. it is dark. Dark Matter.
We know of particles which behave the same way. Neutrinos for example.
I mean I don't believe a particle that only reacts with gravity is unfalseifiable , it's that gravity just demands the use of unimaginable energies that we've not accomplished at this time.
You act like we've managed to probe the depths of physics with certainty when in reality you find any means to reject that which offends your sensibilities.
> You act like we've managed to probe the depths of physics with certainty when in reality you find any means to reject that which offends your sensibilities.
At the root of science is "sensibilities", like occam's razor, even "what counts as experimental reproduction", etc.
Dark Unknown Matter would be a better name for lay people to understand what's going on. I'm no cosmologist but isn't it just a placeholder for something that gravity interacts with (and not much else) and we don't know what it currently is. When we discover what it is the name will change.
Dark matter doesn't necessarily have to be a new kind of particle (though there are enough constraints it's a bit hard to explain otherwise): it could be cold dust, gas, diffuse and tiny black holes, or large amounts of cold rocky planets.
Yeah, pretty much, which is why this adherence to dark matter seems even more puzzling: we already had a mysterious substance with nonsensical mechanical properties (perfectly solid, but has zero collision) that turned out to be completely superfluous; the actual answer was the different shape of the physical laws. Now we again have a mysterious substance with nonsensical properties (has gravitational pull, doesn't interact with normal matter in any other way) — could it be that it simply doesn't exist?
And it's not like the concept of aether itself was really all that useful for anything. The physicists wanted the light to have some mechanical medium to propagate through instead of being a thing of itself, that actual itself shaped mechanical media, not the other way around (mechanical properties arise from the E-M interaction, not the other way around), simply because all other known waves phenomena existed in mechanical media.
Of course, it could be that dark matter does not exist. In a very real way, nothing in physics “exists” because like all natural sciences physics does not make statements of objective truth, it makes testable predictions.
Dark matter, string theory, aether, etc., those are models that we, at some point in time, think may help us get better predictions and design further experiments. All models turn out to be wrong in the end, but they can be helpful until we come up with better ones.
If you drop the dark matter model, then you would want to have some other model as for why we observe what we observe. Some people find that other available models are even worse than the dark matter one, but if you don’t think so you can take your pick.
Except that there is nothing nonsensical about a particle that has mass and doesn't participate in any SM interaction. It's inconvenient if such a particle exists, as it's very very hard to detect things precisely by their gravitational effects, but there is nothing nonsensical, or even particularly weird, about the idea. Plenty of particles only interact with a few of the SM forces - e.g. photons are not affected by the strong force, nor are electrons, neutrinos are affected by neither the strong force nor EM, only the weak force, gluons only interact with the strong force, not EM nor the weak force, etc
> how does one politically organize against a billion dollar industry which is friends with, and donates to, the ruling class?
You're mixing the places of horse and cart here - the ruling class is ruling because it's organized. Organization comes first, the presence of other organizations, be them ruling or not, has little bearing on the process.
> we just post about it online and click 'like' or post emojis.
That's what you do without organization. It still helps though, getting to the truth isn't easy these days.
After using AI for months (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT) it is extremely rare for their code to work 'as is' first shot and almost always requires several iterations and cleaning up edge-cases.
When it does work 'first shot' it's usually when it's transferring existing working code to a new project which is slightly different.
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