The study was published in May 2025, and then revised in March 2026. It's based on data through December 2024, so virtually useless for saying anything about today.
Given that, I actually think the conclusions of the article are backwards. If the gpt-4/gpt-4o era had a measurable 3% improvement in productivity, how much more improvement are we getting from models today that are way way better?
Note: the title of the paper is "Writing Code vs. Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools", which is 10 characters too long.
I asked Claude Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3 Thinking, and Gemini 3 Fast "Tell me about the Siberian marmoset" exactly and all 4 said it doesn't exist, with Gemini Thinking suggesting that I'm thinking of the Siberian marmot or Siberian chipmunk (both real animals).
Yes, winters are getting worse and worse, but this year was really bad, way worse than any predictions. I was in Park City in February and there was so little snow it looked like summer, and that was before the streak of warm and dry weather this article is talking about. I literally hiked up to the 2002/2034 Olympic facilities in 55 degree weather with no snow on the ground, while the Olympics were still going on in Milan. And I was in Park City because they had more snow than Colorado...
In addition to the current supply constraint keeping prices high, mortgages being fixed rate means higher interest rates don't really drive prices down (although lower interest rates do drive prices up). If you have a mortgage for $600k at 3% interest rate and rates go to 6.6% (like they are now), the naive loan math says your house is now worth $400k. Who has $200k in equity built up in their home and is willing to walk away from it? Virtually no one, so prices stay high until people get desperate to sell.
This leads to the fun conclusion that raising interest rates might actually make inflation worse. Rent/rent equivalent is already 30% of CPI, so increases in housing costs have a big effect on overall inflation.
For what it's worth, that's already a thing in NYC. NYC shares the ticket revenue for illegally idling vehicles with the reporter, and so some people have made 6 figures in one year reporting idling vehicles[1]. There was a push to get a similar provision in a recent bill about illegal parking in bus and bike lanes, but they ended up just allowing citizen complaints with no bounty payout.
Most of the inflation from the last 4 years is attributable to Russia invading Ukraine. You can't have the largest natural gas exporter and second largest oil exporter invade one of the largest grain exporters without causing basically everything in a supermarket or restaurant to be more expensive.
To put a name on this, it's the Baumol effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect. Essentially, as productivity increases in most industries (from automation), it drives up labor costs in the industries that can't be automated (healthcare, education, performing arts, etc), which drives up the price of those services (healthcare), or drives down the quality to find a market clearing price (increasing student to teacher ratios).
This is a cry for help, not some myopic bureaucrat thinking they're clever. Most of the USFS budget goes to forest fires (both fighting them and prevention), up from 16% 30 years ago, and they're now saying just fighting the fires is taking up too much of their budget to do much of anything else. The USFS already announced they won't hire any seasonal employees next year, which means basic things like emptying trash cans probably won't happen.
Unless you think they should just let the fires burn, which would be catastrophic.
Yeah, I think this leads to some of the misconceptions about Brutalism. People think of the violent and aggressive connotations of the word, when it really just means "raw" like unpainted, or more accurately as opposed to the sculpted concrete of Art Deco. Being associated with Soviet and low-income apartment buildings, and urban decay in general, didn't help though.
Because of that, all ski resorts on US public land aren't actually "exclusive". A lift ticket just buys you access to the lifts, you can hike up during the winter or summer, with restrictions during the winter mainly around everyone's safety (designated uphill routes, don't go where they're doing avalanche control).
On top of what everyone else said about how they make money, lots of climbers at this level live outrageously frugally and so can easily save up. Marc-Andre Leclerc lived in a stairwell[0], and their dinners are rice and beans or "what was on sale at walmart". Think stereotypical startup incubator of bunk beds and ramen, there's only one goal and it's not day-to-day comfort.
Given that, I actually think the conclusions of the article are backwards. If the gpt-4/gpt-4o era had a measurable 3% improvement in productivity, how much more improvement are we getting from models today that are way way better?