joshuahedlund

It’s a bit cherry-picking, but right now BTC’s 5-year growth is 28% while the S&P is 67%.

To be fair bitcoin’s initial years were extraordinary. By any metric you use though the rate of increase has clearly slowed.

As a birdwatcher I strongly expect the benefit is in the identification experience and agree with this sibling comment:

> A big part of birdwatching is identifying small, fast-moving animals that exhibit specific combinations of behaviors at specific times of the year based on specific climatic conditions. That sort of rapidfire pattern matching from video and audio info is probably a big contributor to what keeps the brain sharp.

It takes time and experience to build up your identification skills but it’s really rewarding and exciting and modern tech makes it easier than ever to learn

> If there are no remaining items

In every software job I’ve ever had, every released new feature leads to maybe three new requests to modify the new feature, two unintentional bug tickets, plus some tech debt. Work leads to more work, not less. I don’t see how increasing the velocity of the work should change that.

Understanding is needed when something breaks and you need to fix it immediately. Otherwise you become a meat proxy and now you’ve added Anthropic’s uptime as a single point of failure to your application.

> It's still valuable to deeply understand parts of a program, but we don't have any tooling that helps us do that. We just have to raw-dog it by thinking really really hard and remembering how all the code connects together.

I deeply relate to this. When engineers were writing all the code that meant every part was deeply understood by _someone_ on the team, and they could valuably contribute to maintenance and further development. It wasn’t perfect, people leave, people forget things, etc, but the overall coverage was high and valuable.

Now, every agent-produced MR introduces code that is deeply understood by _no one_. It’s the “original developer left five years ago” problem, but now growing on every single new piece of code. Reviewing doesn’t give you the same depth of understanding, and the continually increasing impulse is to just approve, maybe nudge it about some isolated enum types or something, but don’t take the time to understand it, just keep the train going.

But then what happens when something breaks and the cloud agents are down…

> all the various hobbies that people can spend a lifetime enjoying

I disagree. AI took chess literally decades ago now, and more humans enjoy playing it now than ever before.

It (hopefully) might not be that easy. The world of bacteria and viruses is a complicated war zone with an arms race of defenses and billions of deaths every single day. It might take thousands of attempts to seed something that doesn’t just instantly die off.

Given that the outages are caused by record traffic, so far they are only cooked in the Yogi Berra sense of “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded”

> jargon-heavy

Yes. It’s even worse than jargon tho I think it just invents its own metaphors. At first I thought this was clever and useful, helping me to internalize the code (“the normal path vs the escape hatch”) but I’m increasingly finding the metaphors to be so thick and esoteric that it’s actually a hurdle to understanding the actual code.

Is this a result of too much activity on GitHub (AI-driven jump in repos), though, rather than a fall?

I may be a dumb layman, but that argument seems too tidy and absolute to me - wouldn’t it suggest, for example, that viruses could never appear because they’d be outcompeted by more advanced bacteria? Earth seems to have room for an incredible diversity of types of life.

Why haven’t I heard of this? Is it available in IDEs like Cursor?

> For equal capability tokens, there has been about a 10x drop in cost every 6 months

Is this still happening? Opus 4.5 was six months ago, can you get its capabilities for 1/10 cost now? Are we on track to get the same for 4.6 in a couple months?

For someone who purports not to care about the film, you seem very familiar with the discourse about it. (I have seen zero experts, or anyone really, discussing boat design.)