Hah! This happened to me when digging around after a production incident. I worked on it on and off over the working week, and after a while it started saying (paraphrasing) "You've been at this for five days and done what you can, take a break".
Very good write up, as always, from Red Blob. It turned my high-level assumption on Google Maps pathfinding upside down. I thought, recalling algorithms class, that Google Maps worked so fast due to "optimal substructure" of shortest-path finding. That is that the shortest path from A-C through B also produces the shortest paths from A-B and B-C, and that for most of any given path you could route through some number of precalculated "midpoint" paths. Reading this turns it upside down in the sense that landmarks go behind the target, and not in the middle of the route! Very handy tool.
Yes, it's a bit weird! There are also optimizations that do what you describe, with landmarks along the way, but at least at the time I learned about it, road map pathfinding was using landmarks behind the target.
This has been my investment philosophy as well, but I'm starting to realize that this is forgetting that "past performance does not guarantee future results". It only works when the index goes up, and I don't see any fundamental reason that should be true on the long term. I don't know of a better alternative though.
Well the fundamental reason boils down to the idea that these companies that you're investing in employ a bunch of sophisticated professionals who wake up everyday aiming to grow the success of their businesses. In other words you're really investing in their potential. Compare that to for example something that's purely speculative like gold.. a useless piece of metal that just sits there. Buffett has really helped me see this difference
I would expect the earnings and or growth of those companies to go up at the very least. Whether that translates to higher valuation for ownership shares in those companies is probably more a question of whether there's anything else more appealing out there to invest in. What's your take? What's more appealing?
I wish I knew! My money is still mostly in index funds and real estate.
My sneaking doubt is whether the index can keep growing, because doesn’t that depend on infinite growth based ultimately on mostly finite natural resources, manpower, and land? But maybe we can always extract and produce more with new technology, and that manpower may get leveraged or extended by AI and robotics. Or maybe just financial magic beyond my understanding.
Regardless I have been thinking a lot about what aging and declining populations might do to the economy in the medium-long term. I only know that I know nothing.
The way I look at it our economy has already decoupled from its physical inputs. That's what cyberspace and a Services based economy really enables. It's kind of cool. That's why I find the focus on climate impacts of data centers to be backwards since they're actually enabling the economy to grow without it being centered on physical input
> ...doesn’t that depend on infinite growth based ultimately on mostly finite natural resources, manpower, and land?
There is no practical limit to the price of the index. Shares may represent some claim on those things you mentioned, but shares outstanding have been steadily shrinking for decades, essentially since the dot-com boom [0]. Meanwhile, governments have been printing money like it's going out of style, and most of it has been ending up with the wealthy, who, lacking any practical way to spend it all on consumption, use it to bid up asset prices. It is no wonder that the price of a shrinking pool of actual resources [1] has risen dramatically when measured in a growing supply of money (which is only a relative resource, not a real one).
One could certainly look at the rise of the 401k as a retirement vehicle, and conclude that at some point those flows are going to reverse. One could also look at the US SSA statistics on the number of workers per retiree, and its trend over time, and paint a pretty grim picture, but is that enough to offset the combined forces of inflation and the compounding wealth of the ultra-wealthy?
Man, I don't know, either.
The good news is "nothing" is all you need to know to invest in an index fund.
[0] This has actually reversed recently with the AI boom, but it is the first time in a while that companies have tried harder to raise capital to grow the pie than to buy back shares to return cash to shareholders.
[1] Rather, a shrinking pool of claims on those resources, each claim increasing its value measured in real resources as companies buy back shares, an effect Buffett famously loves.
Ok. How do people find the required service when the need arises? Surely the company will need to have a website that displays what they offer? Or a physical storefront showing what goods they sell? That is marketing, and, I would say, not evil. The “evil” arises as a consequence of the market and medium where an infinite number of competitors are trying to survive. Marketers need to eat and feed their families, too, and so they try to market more efficiently.
I don’t like advertising, but I think calling the act of or working in marketing evil is really reductive vilification. Try to take their point of view, and realize almost nobody is trying to make the world a worse place.
I don't know anything about alzheimers but I'd hope someone that does would engage with David SJ's points instead of dismissing him on lack of authority alone.
Oh FFS what does any knowledge matter any more if we can now say that someone who has no medical training has the ability to turn the entire field of Alzheimers on its head?
> I would always feel bad in those cases, because it's clear they spent a lot of time, and I'm going to have to say "no" and they will feel like they wasted a ton of effort.
I get this feeling, too. I do however think the onus is on the developer to make something reviewable by their team members if they want a speedy review. Stacked PRs, scoping things down, properly structuring commits so you can review commit-by-commit for example.
I also think that "I spent a bunch of time on this" is not a valid reason for expecting an approval. It should hurt if you've produced a bunch of code that is way off target, even if it ends up implementing the feature. That's how I learned at least.
A proper way to go about large projects, in my opinion, is the same as with software development at large. Fail fast if possible. Draw up a crude boxes and arrows sketch or just discuss how you want the code to integrate with whatever already exists and invite the team to comment. If no one has anything to say, well then they can't complain later when you implement that approach. But if anyone cares then most likely valueable input will come that makes the end result better.
I think it may turn out postive; That the less we are able to take images and video at face value the better.
Motivated actors have been able to doctor, fake, or spin media content since time immemorial. But peoples default mode was to trust what they saw. Now that fake imagery is ubiquitous, maybe we'll all get a bit more skeptical.
Sure, but LLMS and image generators are not the death of "consensus reality". Healthy democracies will still have investigative journalism, public debate, trustworthy institutions, etc.
> Healthy democracies will still have investigative journalism, public debate, trustworthy institutions, etc.
Boy do I wish that were the case. Investigative journalism is rare now and instead favours activist journalism, public debate is hard (but getting better), and institutional trust is at all time lows, for various reasons.
People will muddle through regardless, we're not as fragile as most assume.
> will still have investigative journalism, public debate, trustworthy institutions, etc.
All of which are under serious threat from social media, buyouts by billionaires, and simple smear campaigns. Not dependent on AI, but effects which will be magnified by AI.
being skeptical and determining the truth takes a lot of work. I fear that we may just refuse to wade through all the lies and just accept a enforced willful ignorance.
I’m not saying he’s wrong about the core thesis here, but using Claude Opus 4.6 as a “mic drop” with a chart showing it being twice as good as the last model feels in my experience way off.
