diffxx

I'm ready for their follow up product.

The instantaneous fertility rate dipping below replacement level does not mean humanity dying out. It might mean that this particular civilization with this particular population level is. Infinite growth ad infinitum leads to an inevitable (and likely catastrophic) collapse. No one can say with certainty what the "correct" fertility rate is. That being said, if a society is set up as a pyramid scheme, it must have infinite growth to sustain itself so I won't argue that this way of life is likely dying.

Every EU nation should be thinking about how to fast track and incentivize American immigration.

Yes, though don't forget about the incompetence of adding the wrong person to the chat which goes part and parcel with the embarrassingly superficial/cynical discourse.

As a good friend who is the maintainer of a widely used oss tool likes to quip: the two hardest problems in computer science are naming things and making money in open source.

Here's my countervailing advice for keeping your phone safe: don't use a case or any protection at all. This trains you to take care of it.

I don't think correlation vs causation is the right question. Loneliness was clearly rampant long before chatgpt showed up. The question is whether chatbots are capable of reducing people's loneliness. To me it feels self-evident that in the long run, they are far more likely to increase feelings of loneliness than reduce them.

For me, the only thing that can reduce loneliness is conversation with another conscious entity. Many, if not most, people are barely conscious so this is hard to find in the physical world. But I don't believe llms are conscious, so for me they are a complete dead end for reducing loneliness whatever other virtues the may have.

Imagine putting your time and energy into something other than building a bigger imaginary pile for yourself.

It sometimes feels like there is a strange resistance to defining ad hoc sum types. If your language has good pattern matching capabilities and an expressive syntax for declaring data types, then this scales very well.

For example in a pseudolanguage:

    data FooResult = Number | Error
    def foo(n: Number): FooResult = ...
    foo(42) match {
      case n: Number => print(n + 1)
      case e: Error => // handle error case
    }

This gets you very far most of the time. If the tag overhead matters (which should largely only matter in a hot loop), then try to refactor so that the hot loop doesn't error out.

Granted in many languages the above cannot be expressed succinctly and is often avoided for this reason.

My definition is very different. It is about my ability to have control over my life in the areas that matter most to me. I value my time and personal development above material wealth (to a point). I don't need a giant house. I don't need regular fancy vacations or to own a car. I personally have been not working and living comfortably on much much less than 5mm in a high cost of living city for over five years. I do have to make many tradeoffs but I am happier than working a soul sucking job. It's not a path for everyone.

This does not feel like at all a good faith reading of the situation. Hardcore anti trans-activists on the right would like to make life so miserable for transpeople as to essentially eliminate them from public life entirely. That is the context in which these supposedly hysterical responses emerge. I say supposedly hysterical because transgender people of all ages do commit suicide at a higher rate than other groups. This should be considered a public health emergency but it largely isn't because transgender people are the most useful scapegoat of the day (even better than immigrants). Of course that doesn't mean that every child who questions their self identity should be given immediate medical intervention, but neither does it mean we should deny care for all.

I'm long on humans and suspect that many people will begin to prefer imperfection in reaction to the overproliferation of ai generated content.

I agree with the author that slow can be good and that taste and diligence can trump raw smarts.

I think what is often missed though is the opportunity cost of shipping bad products. Our industry lionizes fast delivery to juice short term earnings but this is very often at tremendous long term cost. When your revenue depends on shoddy products, you must devote an excess of resources to patching the holes that are slowly sinking your ship. The best people will tire of this and jump aboard the next vessel that offers better working conditions and/or higher compensation. But of course one never escapes the fundamental problems by job hopping.

To build something great, reliable and high value takes time. If it were easy, the market would be awash with cheap high quality products. It clearly isn't.

For things to improve, I believe that a small group of workers will likely need to join together and sacrifice short term earnings to build viable long term companies on a different set of ethics and values. I have personally made this sacrifice and am working on something I think is great and valuable that I could not possibly do within a typical company.

I have optimism that soon alternative approaches to building companies will emerge outside of the current VC funding model, which I believe has run its course. There are many, many software developers who are wealthy enough to sacrifice short term compensation to build more equitable companies with longer term vision and with a much higher ownership percentage that will pay off in the long run.

I know I'm being pedantic but zero dependencies is impossible. I'm all for minimizing dependencies though.