I think a nice compromise would be to restrict agentic coding workflows to cloud containers and a web interface. Bootstrap a project and new functional foundations locally using traditional autocomplete/chat methods (which you want to anyway to avoid a foundation of StackOverflow-derived slop) then implement additional features using the cloud agents. Don't commit any secrets to SCM and curate the tools that these agents can use. This way your dev laptops are firmly in human control (with IDEs freed up for actual coding) while LLMs are safelt leveraged. Win-win.
Alcohol is neither a carb nor sugar and weight is largely a function of calories in versus calories out. All of the hand-wringing about HFCS and seed oils and deep fried Crisco is misplaced; while these things are all unhealthy in their own way obesity is largely a function of sedentary lifestyles and overeating.
Nobody wants to hear that they're a lazy glutton, however, so pop health media conflates various causes and effects. In other words eating foods with higher satiety and lower macronutrient density and walking more is harder than introducing a new dietary restriction to combat the "monster of the week" - inflammation, microbiome imbalance, etc.
> weight is largely a function of calories in versus calories out
Yes, but calories are much easier to rack up in some foods compared to others. There’s this great exhibit I took my kid to see in a science museum that showed that the number of calories in four twinkies was equivalent to something like 20 pounds of carrots. Not sure if those were the exact numbers (it was a long time ago) but the point is that in the modern world it is virtually impossible to become obese if you are eating even large amounts of, say, baked chicken and steamed veggies. No obese person is overeating healthy foods.
> I found that outside of CA, this is asked a lot less often.
I moved to California a few years ago from the Least Coast (insert shaka, surfer, wave emojis here) and had multiple other out-of-towners in the same situation as me say the exact opposite at a party. They all were adamant that they had yet to hear "what do you do [for a living]?" since they'd moved as they did ad nauseum when they lived on the other side of the country.
I've not noticed either way. My pet theory is that people hear this frequently if their social and professional lives bleed into each other which they do if one lives in a town dominated by a specific industry or profession. Those moving westward during COVID and remote work suddenly had to contend with this much less.
Never hear that question either. I don’t ask it either. I’ve actually been pretty successful but asking that question seems to rank someone on a scale that does not reflect their amazing contributions to society.
I ask because a) I'm interested in the same way that a child is in what people's jobs are and b) it gives me a frame of reference for interacting with them conversationally vis a vis common ground.
Wealth signaling still seems to me to be done primarily by conspicuous consumption and expensive hobbies.
> Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture which says that any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken for a sincere expression of those views.
The things you mentioned are important but have been on their way out for years now regardless of LLMs. Have my ambivalent upvote regardless.
Nice! Earlier this week I discovered another enterprising engineer working on a digital sim of the Mesa Mark IIC+ preamp using a discrete component modeling approach [1]. Pretty cool stuff coming out in the digital audio production space these days.
For those not familiar "Cola Bottle Baby" is the Edwin Birdsong tune [1] that Daft Punk sampled for "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger". I heard the sample first but think I prefer the original at this point (despite the songs being different genres). Lots of interesting stuff going on with the bass guitar and chorus that's missing in the Daft Punk cut.
This is true with many of Daft Punk's tracks imo, when listening to the original and then going back to the Daft Punk version it feels like a downgrade because of missing instruments and structure
A half-satirical, half-true hot take by yours truly (imagine that the me from another multiverse wrote it):
Marvel films are largely morality plays punctuated by explosions and contrived witticisms in service of a secular, polytheistic religion for the postmodern age. Everything is a weird cultural buffet of pastiche, relentlessly-punchy dialog, and formulaic storytelling designed to tug on the audience's heartstrings while allowing them to say "I know that thing!" They're a cultural soma for the post-Cold War generation raised on Pokemon that will never know the happiness of the Clinton years again. The studios that make them are more like pharmaceutical companies hocking a hot-selling miracle drug than filmmakers. Everybody else is trying to replicate their financial success by way of "cinematic universes" comprising visual roller coasters disguised as motion pictures and is therefore failing at making actual _movies_.
- A filthy, no-good hipster that dislikes things other people enjoy and likes things that other people hate just because
(I thought "Doctor Strange" was great fun in a trippy way. The multi-verse "Spiderman" was OK. Hated "Guardians". I wouldn't go out of my way to see either again and only see these films in theaters with friends. And yes, I liked "Back to the Future" before it was cool and was born in le wrong generation for it).
I greatly enjoyed the first Iron Man movie which got me to look at the really affordable black and white editions of the Kirby/Ditko/Lee age. I watched a lot of them, bookended by Guardians of the Galaxy which I also greatly enjoyed. Somehow I fell out of the Marvel habit and didn't see any more after that though there wasn't any moment where I felt that I fell out of love.
For every conspicuous vibecoding influencer there are a bunch of experienced software engineers using them to get things done. The newest generation of models are actually pretty decent at following instructions and using existing code as a template. Building line-of-business apps is much quicker with Claude Code because once you've nicely scaffolded everything you can just tell it to build stuff and it'll do so the same way you would have in a fraction of the time. You can also use it to research alternatives to architectural approaches and tooling that you come up with so that you don't paint yourself into a corner by having not heard about some semi-niche tool that fits your use case perfectly.
Of course I wouldn't use an LLM to #yolo some Next.js monstrosity with a flavor-of-the-week ORM and random Tailwind. I have, however, had it build numerous parts of my apps after telling it all about the mise targets and tests and architecture of the code that I came up with up front. In a way it vindicates my approach to software engineering because it's able to use the tools available to it to (reasonably) ensure correctness before it says it's done.
Residential real estate construction has lagged population growth for decades as the average age of the first-time homebuyer has gone up and real wages have stagnated. The largest generational cohort in the United States (the post-WWII one with the nickname that everybody is tired of hearing) is getting out of homeownership as they retire southward or head to assisted living. Many of their family homes are in areas in which young people can't or don't want to live. There's going to be a great value reckoning as this asset transfer takes place - I have trouble believing that "line go up" will apply as it has post-COVID with so many sellers and so few ill-equipped buyers.
On the other side of the coin commercial real estate is often treated as financial leverage and a store of value instead of a going concern. From what I understand commercial landlords very frequently use their existing properties to collateralize new loans in a daisy chain-type fashion. Recall all of the grumbling about the end of downtowns and what would happen to CRE paper if people didn't return to the office a few years back? We came pretty close to the precipice and avoided it by artificially propping up the utility of these buildings. What happens during COVID II: The Quickening?
Combine all of this with a broader economy that's been vigorously puffed down to the filter with two drags of AI smoke left in it and things don't look particularly rosy for RE as an appreciating asset class. Scarcity doesn't automatically imply value perceived or otherwise.
Not financial advice, not an economist, just my $.02.
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