eunoia

It would not be selfish to run your home off the car battery during peak rates and therefore cutting peak demand on the grid. Everyone wins.

For what it’s worth I recently decided to learn Haskell for fun and to keep my brain alive since work turned into a prompt factory.

Fable has made an excellent tutor. Maybe it’s just because the exercises I have it generating for me are relatively simple, but I have yet to catch it suggesting non functional or non compiling Haskell code.

Big fan of Snow Crash. For background I liked Cryptonomicon a lot but also found Seveneves to be a bit of a slog.

I would check out The Diamond Age as well if you’re generally taking Stephenson book recommendations.

Beautiful piece.

I sometimes feel like technologists actually desire to remove the humanity from the world because it's messy and they don't understand it and therefore they fear it.

Mixed bag. Some engineers are excited about the company giving them a blank check to explore a new tool. Some engineers are upset because they feel their skills are being devalued by leadership.

Overall I would say most are exploring the new tools while waiting for the madness to subside. Work in $BIGCORP for long enough and you get used to leadership being out of touch with the work on the ground.

Engineers in $BIGCORP jobs are by and large not the hacker types anymore btw.

Executive leadership talking to the managers in their orgs.

I wish I was kidding, but they really are pushing increased token usage. Like I said, we push back. When we push back they acknowledge it's a bad metric and lately have started to add qualifiers about how we don't want to burn tokens unnecessarily and in fact we should be looking to use tokens more efficiently.

And then in the next meeting we are once again talking about how to encourage our teams to use more tokens.

The goal is to increase AI usage of course, but the only metric they track to measure progress on that goal is token usage. Also endless presentations of vibed tools that we never hear about again after a week. Get a lot of those too.

Fellow FAANG. We have weekly manager meetings where leadership encourages us to increase token usage. We do push back, and leadership acknowledges that token spend is not a great metric and people are likely to game it... and then go right back to encouraging us to increase token spend in our teams.

We have token tracking dashboards that leadership is looking at. I know because they show us in these manager meetings. Haven't opened them to everyone yet as some kind of leaderboard, so at least that's nice.

Lots of rumors token spend will be involved in perf reviews. Leadership denies it... but then holds more meetings telling us how important it is to increase our token spend and discussing inadequacies from the token spend dashboards.

What crime was he convicted of? Surely that has some bearing?

This is real. I’ve seen some baffling bugs in prompt based stop hook behavior.

When I investigated I found the docs and implementation are completely out of sync, but the implementation doesn’t work anyway. Then I went poking on GitHub and found a vibed fix diff that changed the behavior in a totally new direction (it did not update the documentation).

Seems like everyone over there is vibing and no one is rationalizing the whole.

Unfortunately I think we actually agree on this and did come away with the same conclusions.

I would highly recommend the book Amusing Ourselves to Death if you are looking to understand how the populace got to the point where truth is irrelevant and nothing really matters.

It helped my mental model a lot at the very least.

It was never principled opposition to anything, just a power fantasy that the current admin lets them live even more viscerally.

The “don’t tread on me” folks converted to “comply or die” shockingly quickly.

I think you’re fundamentally right. Trump is obviously the worst we’ve seen yet, but power has been accumulating unchecked in the executive branch’s hands for decades now.

Trump is merely a symptom of the problem that is the Imperial Presidency. If we can’t tackle the problem itself we’ll get another politician doing the exact same shit after Trump.

His full Lord of the Rings audiobook is likewise incredible.