invalidOrTaken

I have been feeling this way about software. Don't get me wrong, there are some things I am very interested in and would work on for recreation (macros!), but a lot of it I'm less interested in.

Frankly, despite the obvious financial worries, it's been a little freeing. I can go do something else (because, uh, I may have to).

aaaaand it's been bought by BendingSpoons

This is freaking great. Thank you for posting!

if they're easily doable without, can we really say you're that ambitious?

people don't buy "housing." They buy views, they buy location, they buy neighborhood character. There are perfectly good houses in Nebraska---yet people aren't swarming to Nebraska. It's not because there's anything wrong with the housing.

sure, but there's the obvious counterfactual: if those engineers were scarcer, that level would likely be paid more

As a complete layman---not worth it. We live just fine. Medical researchers slave night and day to keep you healthy.

But if you have any ambition at all---if you want to map the local school board, or get a quick understanding of your finances, or set up a robot in your backyard---then, quickly proves useful.

Loved the post, have been batting around similar ideas w/clojure. I have two questions:

1. Have you had much success w/moar macros in the age of the LLM? I've been impressed by the models' ability to write good ones, but I can tell my taste/judgement for macros isn't quite there. But they tend to be pretty good at writing gnarly ones, and I would love to work more macros into my workflow. Would love your thoughts. (Have I taken "Simple Made Easy" too far and left macro value on the table?)

2. Do your models ever get confused with image-based dev, and state? It's seemed dumb to me to have models keep running `sed` to change files, but it is nice to have a human-readable, filesystem-backed record of definitions. Would love to hear your experience here.

sure, but input tokens are way cheaper than output.

There is also a phenomenon I've named "brevity collapse." Often, when shrinking a codebase, you find you need less glue. Additionally, because it is smaller, you can hold more of it in your head and see more opportunities for shrinkage. Surprising things happen when the bones of your language get more efficient---it's more like going from elephant to flea than elephant to grizzly bear. The smaller scale means there's less "overhead" code, which means you can go smaller still.

The reason we (as in university-funding society) need mathematicians is so that there's a steward over math that can help me, a complete layman, understand and apply mathematics. "Being a steward" will sometimes not look like much. Sometimes it's just going to be dicking around with LLM's.

But math is too important for it to be abandoned by humans and left to models. I, the tax-paying bonehead engineer, need mathematicians to exist. They can have their ego beaten up by Claude, sure, whatever, but they're not allowed to just close up shop in despair.

> all the landowners who own rural land that doesn't have a profitable development path attached to it

If it doesn't have a profitable development path attached, the price(and therefore "value") will go down, as will the tax burden.

a world where people eat so they can feed Big Computer sucks. We need Little Computer, driving robots in the fields.

I have people skills! What the hell is wrong with you people?

Interesting stuff. I do like the taxonomy of "computer work", where it's one part logic cognition, and one part ticky-tack details.

Wildgate