michaelchisari

And quality is the new differentiator when everyone can generate slop.

Obviously. Yet on balance, the ones that can't be kept secret may not be significant.

I'm not making a judgement on what the ideal situation is, more so explaining why the referenced study could have come to its conclusion.

michaelchisari

9 days agodiscuss

The study could have revealed that industries without patent protection evolve to have better trade secret security, effectively leveling the benefits of patents.

michaelchisari

10 days agodiscuss

The question I answered was:

Which fields would you say are the best to just be mediocre in

> I actually can't stand you people.

Unnecessary. People who want a basic middle class existence are not greedy and should not receive disdain. Many have responsibilities to their elders or others, have kids or want them, etc. so avowed poverty is not realistic.

Especially when bohemian poverty is an increasingly vanishing option on a practical level.

michaelchisari

10 days agodiscuss

Nepo baby.

Joking (sort of).

I can't say I know of any in the fields I'm familiar with. I've watched tech get increasingly top-heavy since the covid hiring boom and bust, although it was already trending that way.

There are a lot of fields dominated by boomers on the verge of retirement that are the safest bet for people who want to be good and make a good living but don't care to be extraordinary.

I've heard that from arborists, water treatment specialists, actuaries, a few others.

michaelchisari

10 days agodiscuss

Seems like a great field to get into if you can make it to the top 5-10% skillset.

The rapid advances, in a trend replicating throughout society, push out the middle in favor of the top.

michaelchisari

10 days agodiscuss

Moving fast was a huge moat for a long time, but now moving fast is easy. Quality might be the new moat.

Important to note that fast never meant much to open source and for good reason.

michaelchisari

13 days agodiscuss

It's a common enough experience that it shouldn't be dismissed.

michaelchisari

13 days agodiscuss

| type errors, scope issues, import resolution, dependencies.

I write code myself and use the LLM to find mistakes then fix them manually. I recommend inverting the conventional wisdom on LLMs:

  1. Don't use it to write code. It's a terrible
     programmer. But it's an intelligent rubber duck
     and a solid analysis tool.

  2. Write the code yourself. It'll go faster than
     figuring it out as you go along. It's just typing
     if you have a plan.

  3. Use an LLM to sanity check what you wrote.
     It can find potential design issues or future
     problems or breaks from convention. Decide based on
     your experience how much you want to address these
     issues before moving on.

Is this as fast as AI writing the code? Not at first but possibly over time. Maybe faster. Certainly better quality.

Plus you don't lose any of your skills in the process.

You're still doing the gruntwork necessary to keep your skillset.

And the token cost is a small fraction of what it takes to get LLMs to write good code.

michaelchisari

18 days agodiscuss

I'm set up to use Qwen 3.6 locally if needed. It's solid, it does what I need, it runs on my laptop and it's free.

But that's because I never got on the "run three dozen agents in a ralph loop" trend or other high-token usage methods. The way I use AI is discrete and targeted and it seems that's how it will be for everyone once the economics settle.

michaelchisari

22 days agodiscuss

It was about controlling actions not emotions.

The stoics cried, they laughed, they expressed joy, they were by all accounts emotionally expressive.

The control was about what actions were to be taken in the face of those emotions and other considerations, not suppressing or controlling the emotions themselves.

It's not a small distinction.

michaelchisari

23 days agodiscuss

In 1970, median rent was $108 a month, utilities included.

https://www.nytimes.com/1973/04/08/archives/108-a-month-rent...

michaelchisari

last monthdiscuss

The complexity required of a basic CRUD app versus a client-side optimistic update are worlds apart.

Exhaust all other optimizations before lying to your users about what just happened.

michaelchisari

last monthdiscuss

Anyone worth their salt looked down on copy/paste from Stackoverflow, let alone blindly doing so.

Where does this idea come from that good programmers were ever cool with that?

michaelchisari

last monthdiscuss

My comment was more "all things being equal."

Though the market so far has had a lower limit on "worse". We're finding out how low we can go before consumers start valuing quality again.

michaelchisari

last monthdiscuss

I disagree. At some point of complexity, building it yourself is faster, better and (as we're finding out) cheaper. And more fun, although that varies person to person.

Wrestling with a code generator also creates a sunk cost fallacy where progress grinds to a halt but you still try and use the tools to fix the problems the tools created. Or you go in and fix things yourself, in a codebase you don't truly understand. A single developer can recreate the contextual nightmare miasma of a large corporation all by themselves.

There's also an emerging market consideration: MVP are easy to build so time to market is no longer hard to achieve. It's not a differentiator.

X was built in 3 days but is slow and riddled with bugs and security errors. There are also A, B, C, D and E which are effectively the same thing built just as fast.

Z was built over six months and is rock solid and performant.

Who wins the market share?

michaelchisari

last monthdiscuss

Delighted to see a "brew install dusklight" option.

Curious how this is different from a generalized emulator. Wouldn't this be able to run any GC game that used the same registers as Twilight Princess?

michaelchisari

last monthdiscuss

You underestimate how easy it is to get someone who's into fly fishing to talk about fly fishing. You don't need to have known them for more than thirty seconds.

Even NYC has a fishing meetup group with over 1000 members.

michaelchisari

last monthdiscuss

Interesting. Where have they stated that?

michaelchisari

last monthdiscuss

| a 60-90B model can outperform current SOTA

My conspiracy theory is that Apple recognizes this.

michaelchisari

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Software Engineering at the Tipping Point

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