ihumanable

Homer attempting to fix a stuck drawer with a firecracker

Marge: Homer, what are you doing?

Homer: Listen, do you want the job done right or do you want it done fast?

Marge: Well, like all Americans, fast, but...

Homer: Clear _lights firecracker_

Yes, a government has never wasted tax money by giving a contract to a private company before.

Those companies that win big pork filled contracts would never have any incentive to get the company to waste tax dollars.

Adding the profit motive in here definitely helps prevent waste

Capitalist using money to buy capital and then sell services, brilliant.

Government using money to buy capital and then provide services, deadly socialism.

It's always just been about capitalists wanting less competition. That's why they don't want the market to decide and fight for laws to literally outlaw stuff like municipal broadband. If they are so much more efficient, they should be able to offer an equal or better service for the same or better price.

> After Claude Code (AC), the economics that gave us every single piece of software we use today have inverted. Building software has become cheap, with the marginal cost of building a new feature approaching zero, while running it, now that AI sits in the critical path, has become expensive.

This is such a weird take, if I need some piece of software why would an ongoing operating cost be having an AI sitting in the critical path.

If the argument is that making software has become cheap because you can use AI to generate software, it doesn't seem to follow that you would build all software as some sort of shell around AI. If I ask claude to build me a task tracking app, I imagine it would build me something with some bog standard data storage and not decide that it needs to keep the tasks in an LLM.

I don't agree with most of this post, but this part stood out as supremely odd. There is a lot of software that isn't made any better by having AI jammed into it as an always on piece of the operating puzzle.

I like this part of the article.

> On Wednesday, Hickman saw evidence that Urner Barry was taking in data that would lower prices — “pull the market down,” in the words of one executive — and goaded his erstwhile competitors to respond. “As a group,” the executive followed up, “we need to bid like they vote in Chicago, early and often.”

So while they were actively breaking the law, colluding to screw over the free market, they soothed themselves with jokes about non-existent voter fraud.

I'm also a bit confused what Anthropic needs all this code for. Their main product is selling access to their model, but the model isn't comprised of code, it's a bunch of weights right?

So the code is for the stuff around the model, claude CLI, the website, the API... that probably shouldn't be infinitely growing right?

Is there a bunch of code they are using as part of training, or as pre-processing or post-processing the requests to the model?

Lack of focus, like building your own SCM

> He added that he felt the video was “genuine, that his obvious forgiveness of Mr. Horcasitas reflects the character I heard about [Pelkey] today.”

It's an artificial video that is *literally and verifiably* not genuine.

It sorta feels to me like extrapolating from "the internet has all the knowledge for free" to "we won't need tradespeople anymore"

Why hire a plumber when you can just watch some youtube videos and do it yourself?

Why pay someone else for their software when you can just make your own?

Because the hard part of making software wasn't *just* writing the code. It was about understanding the problem well enough to understand what the solution should look like.

I feel like as software engineers we should be pretty familiar with what it's like talking to your average user, they will sometimes understand the root cause of what's making their task difficult (although often will get focused on some annoying but ultimately trivial symptom) and have very disasterously bad ideas on how to solve it.

What we've given them with generative AI is a machine they can put their sometimes ok, sometimes questionable understanding of the problem and their dreadful solutions and it will happily churn away building it regardless of how pointless and silly it is.

A future where every user can tell the AI "We keep getting the sales tax wrong, remove charging sales tax from the checkout flow" isn't one I'm terrifically worried about.

In the same way that having access to information about plumbing didn't suddenly make everyone plumbers, having access to a machine that will implement every idea you have regardless of quality doesn't suddenly make everyone a software engineer.

In elixir we have Enum.filter (run a predicate over the enumerable keeping the things that match the predicate) and Enum.reject (run a predicate over the enumerable removing the thing that match the predicate)

I think since we have a pair of them and reject is so obvious it helps me remember which way filter works.

I think Enum.keep and Enum.reject might be a better pair, but I've used them enough to internalize it now

Brutal conquest is a pretty well traveled path to legitimacy.

Power is taken, and regardless of the ideals of the takers, enough power grants legitimacy.

I still remember when we learned logo in elementary school. I had to get my mom to go out and buy a 3.5" disk so I could save my programs.

When I realized that all of logo was actually saved on that disk and I could continue playing with the turtle at home, I was amazed.

Drawing little things, realizing that I was repeating stuff and breaking it into little functions so I could draw them again more easily. I was learning the essentials of programming and didn't even realize it.

I liked how in the example here it tells the user "Your flight is delayed 2hrs due to storms in Denver..."

Then says "checking alternate routes" then shows them a card with their original flight details (it does have "Delayed" in red at the top) and asks them if they would like to change their flight.

The user responds with "Yes please! :thumbsup:"

The AI does not provide any information about the new flight, and only displays a card for the original flight, which being the original, is the day and time the User likely wanted to travel.

Between it being the only piece of information on the screen and the status of "checking for alternate routes" it will certainly be a surprise for the User when their Sept. 17th 5:45 departure has been rescheduled for Sept. 19th to avoid a two hour delay. Helpfully replaced with a 2 day delay, thanks Muse!

I appreciate that whoever is approving naming at Dyson doesn't care about making boring names.

- Pencil Fluffycones

- Ball Animal 3 Extra

- V16 Piston Animal Submarine

These are real product names that they were happy to ship. I like that they ship these absurd sounding names.

We've seen in the K-shaped economy of late a new kind of consumerism.

The top 10% of consumers accounted for half of all spending in the second quarter of 2025.

Capitalism will happily chug along while leaving a massive number of people desperately poor.

There's a reason the AI CEOs have all become obsessed with the concept of a "permanent underclass."

If a UBI is ever "given" it will be just enough to keep the underclass from rising up and killing the owner class and not one cent more.