Huge fan of zoning reform, however I'd love to see equal effort in lending reform. The availability of multi-million dollar mortgages on 30 year terms means that we all get poorer. Getting people into owned homes is a dream left over from the Clinton era that has warped into an ever expanding pool of debt and over sized buildings. Developers will build to the limit of what people can afford (and slightly beyond), and that is defined by mortgage policy. The harsh reality is that as long as you're supporting a system where a 1k sqft house can cost 300, 400, 500k you're not helping anyone who isn't in the business of lending. The only way to reverse the trend is to limit the pool of available capital and bring the sale value of property down.
Can't happen without causing a lot of pain. In large part due to the debt. Holding prices flat in nominal terms is the best-case outcome; holding them flat in real terms the most likely one. Either, however, beats real appreciation.
(For what it's worth, I'm a homeowner with a jumbo mortgage.)
I don't understand how people can use the phrase "right-size" without a crushing sense of embarrassment and shame. Did you swallow a business consultant from 1990? That and phrases like "go forward strategy" say either 1. I do not know how to communicate like a human or 2. I am afraid of speaking naturally because it impinges on my self image as a business leader or 3. I do not want to accurately describe what I'm doing because that might expose my fragile ego to the possibility that I'm doing something which hurts people.
"We're firing a bunch of people because we think we don't need them anymore due to AI and we'll make more money without them."
There are times when businesses must fire people to stay afloat and it's a business that objectively needs to exist. This isn't one of them, so don't waste everyone's time with your BS, please.
I found the section on publishing very interesting. Even if the quality of the output is up to snuff, where should it go? Arxiv doesn't allow AI written work. The author proposes that only work that has been certified by human should be published. However, now the field is in the same boat as software engineering where we are facing a glut of pull requests and not enough time and people to review them.
Try this thought experiment. If, in 6 months, the agents were better coders than you are, would this argument still hold?
This is a personal thought experiment so think it through for yourself. What would the consequence be if the agents really were better than you and you acknowledged that?
The major premise of "It's a trap!" is that it matters if you lose your coding skill. (I'll gloss over general critical thinking and stick with coding for now) However in the world where on any given task it would be done to a higher level of quality and faster if you gave it to the agent, then what are you doing trying to do it yourself? There's plenty of room for that kind of thinking in hobbies, but in the professional world?
Maybe you can add some value in code reviews, but you may also be better off never reading the code at all. Maybe the how of coding stops mattering and the what of products needs to be your top concern.
I can tell you that the agents that I use today are much better coders than I am in the language we're using. I don't write it at all. I couldn't fizzbuzz in it. But with a small team we are building useful internal tools and features at a breakneck pace. I certainly feel the same feelings of getting dumber and losing my coding chops, but I have to step back and say, could what we've built have been built in 5x the time without agents? And the answer is probably no.
The thing I'm mastering now is conjuring software with agents. What lets them rip, what slows them down, where they are today and where they will likely be tomorrow.
I can tell you that you should re-invest in small, modular systems, because agents can build modules and greenfield projects instantly. I can tell you that there is a point at which agents fall over completely even on mid-sized projects, but that that point is receding with each new generation of model, and that Codex 5.4 XHigh Fast set to 500K context window is a beast. (5.5 has yet to win me over)
I can tell you that pushing direct to main is viable, that PRs slow down fully agentic teams, and if your agents have sufficient permissions they can fix things fast enough to be let loose even knowing they may delete your service. I wouldn't do it with your main product yet (unless you're starting your startup today) and I wouldn't try it with a large legacy project. But maybe that rewrite you've always wanted to do is here and just a prompt away.
Now, the sane among you will note that agents are not better today, that they might not ever be, and either way you should never trust a computer to make a decision because it can't suffer the consequences of its actions. Or more down to earth, there are some things that are too important to yolo.
But I will argue that a huge swath of us work in domains where if you're willing to challenge some of the basic assumptions of software development (you should understand the code, it should be maintainable by humans, it should be built to last) then you'll be able to provide very useful software much more quickly than you would otherwise be able to do. Save the skill for your hobbies, and build things people want.
Anyone know if these are already powering all of Gemini services, some of them, or none yet? It's hard to tell if this will result in improvements in speed, lower costs, etc, or if those will be invisible, or have already happened.
I like this idea! I don't need the LLM bits, and want it to run on an old Android tablet I have lying around. Can anyone recommend similar software where I can get wikipedia / street maps / useful tutorial videos nicely packaged for offline use?
Kiwix has an Android app, that'll do Wikipedia and a bunch of other resources. You can get free offline maps from HERE maps or use something like Open Map from Fdroid that uses Open Street Map.
I'm very happy about this change. For long sessions with Claude it was always like a punch to the gut when a compaction came along. Codex/GPT-5.4 is better with compactions so I switched to that to avoid the pain of the model suddenly forgetting key aspects of the work and making the same dumb errors all over again. I'm excited to return to Claude as my daily driver!
I don't think we won't get AGI if Anthropic were to implode, and frankly, right now, I'd rather have someone say clearly, "They cannot stomach the existence of someone telling them 'No' or adhering to moral principles. Like spoiled children they can't hear the former and are terrified by later because it might expose them to the condemnation they deserve."
TLDR (story, not math) - Knuth poses a problem, his friend uses Claude to conduct 30 some explorations, with careful human guidance, and Claude eventually writes a Python program that can find a solution for all odd values. Knuth then writes a proof of the approach and is very pleased by Claude's contribution. Even values remain an open question (Claude couldn't make much progress on them)
I think this is pretty clearly an overstatement of what was done. As Knuth says,
"Filip told me that the explorations reported above, though ultimately successful, weren’t really smooth.
He had to do some restarts when Claude stopped on random errors; then some of the previous search results
were lost. After every two or three test programs were run, he had to remind Claude again and again that
it was supposed to document its progress carefully. "
That doesn't look like careful human guidance, especially not the kind that would actually guide the AI toward the solution at all, let alone implicitly give it the solution — that looks like a manager occasionally checking in to prod it to keep working.
looks like he is trying to make a point that the actual (formal) proof for 2Z + 1 (odd numbers) is still human - by himself that is. Not sure who came up with the core modular arithmetic idea of with s = 0 k increasing by 2 mod m.
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