marmarama

Talking about the new normal is the new normal.

The weaker antipyretic effect of paracetamol/acetaminophen compared with ibuprofen has been known about for decades in adult studies.

It would have been surprising to obtain a different result in children.

No, it's a bad idea.

Coding agents are not omniscient gods. Cognitive complexity of code is still a thing for LLMs. And every line of code that the LLM writes is still a line that needs maintenance, and has bugs.

Software engineering rules still apply. Coding agents move the needle somewhat on "what can be maintained by us vs. what someone else can maintain" but not _that_ far. And the same "Don't maintain it if you don't have to" approach still applies. More code to maintain means bigger context required, which means the agent burns more tokens to do a task. More context also means the agent makes more mistakes and adds more bugs.

Abstractions are still a good idea. Handing off maintenance through abstractions is still a good idea. Good software design is still a good idea.

It's ironic you talk about communism, because fundamentally this is a problem of "owning the means of production", i.e. who controls the AI and the robots.

If it's you and me, then hey, we can all live happily ever after pursuing hobbies and art, provided for by our mechanical friends, within the limits of resource availability.

If it's an AI trillionaire, things aren't so rosy. If they don't need workers, why would they even bother allocating outputs from the robots to keep us alive?

I don't doubt at all that some group or another will enjoy the fruits of artificial labour. The question is how we are going to get there, and whether that group is most people who are live today and their descendants, or just the families and friends of trillionaires.

You're not looney at all. Frontier models do dumb things all the time, especially on mature codebases. Just yesterday Opus 5.5 butchered the OOP model in a codebase I work on - it duplicated a load of classes that should have just been subclasses. A junior checked it in very satisfied that it was perfect. The LLM review passed it, the tests were fine, and it implemented the feature successfully. It's just the code design had poor taste and poor long-term maintainability.

I keep seeing this kind of thing over and over, and honestly it's not got _that_ much better since the big breakthroughs about a year ago.

For sure I happily vibecode stuff without worrying about it when it's a greenfield project, and if the LLM has written it entirely from scratch then usually it's well structured and sane. But making changes in messy, mostly human-written mature codebases is still a minefield.

If it's just a toy, sure. But even frontier models reach a tipping point of complexity fairly early where they start introducing bugs quicker than they fix them.

A (good) framework abstracts away the complexity so you hit that tipping point much later in terms of codebase size, and reduces your token spend to boot.

People still buy into "research" from Gartner and Forrester despite it being an open secret for decades that they are pay-to-play.

These kinds of "research" companies are there to validate people's preconceived ideas and purchasing decisions rather than being genuinely unbiased. And they are very useful for that, both for consumers and for marketers.

LADSPA v1 is ancient and fundamentally quite broken, and that's what they dropped. Audacity 4 ships with LV2 (i.e. LADSPA v2) support.

FWIW I don't think I've used a v1 LADSPA plugin for a decade.

"As effective as placebo" does not mean worthless. As you point out, placebo antidepressants are fairly effective.

It's a terrible bind. Patients want a pill to fix things, but if they know it's just a sugar pill, it doesn't work. It has to have active ingredients that might work. That's why there's little desire to change the status quo on antidepressants much. Anyone who reads the medical literature knows they're statistically underwhelming, but the experienced reality is that they help people a lot.

Talking therapies, CBT, exercise are all good alternatives but they take time and effort that a depressed person might not be able to manage. An antidepressant prescription they can get in 15 minutes.

That's where the fully automated weapons systems come in. Robotics and AI give the megalomaniacs of the world both a reason and the means to kill everyone with impunity.

The rest of the 21st century is going to be really messed up.

Night Sight appeared on the Google Pixel camera app in 2018. I think Nokia was doing it first on phones before Microsoft destroyed the remains of their phone business.

The reborn Nokia/HMD was also doing multi-sensor image stacking back in 2019 on the Nokia 9 Pureview.

In most countries with universal healthcare, the universal healthcare provider plays a major role in preventive medicine, nudging people towards healthier lifestyles and influencing government policy on a wide variety of topics, such as food standards, consumption taxation, traffic laws, or pollution regulation. Because it's in their interests to do so, because a healthier population saves them money.

Is there the same motivation to help people live healthy lifestyles in the American healthcare system? Are there any lobby groups with the kind of influence and reach as a universal healthcare provider?

Bars, restaurants and supermarkets have glass fronted refrigerators and freezers the world over, and yes, most are double glazed.

They're just less efficient and more likely to break. In a commercial environment that's worth it to show off the contents, but the trade off is different in a domestic setting.

Sure, but if you are a business in the US, you might not be able to use it legally.

And, through the US exercising extraterritorial jurisdiction, businesses in Europe doing business with the US might not be able to use it either, for fear of reprisals. Even though the model is Chinese and hosted in Europe.

This sort of thing happens all the time, especially in the finance and defence sectors.

Your "development build" is another person's daily driver.

Case in point: GrapheneOS (or any other custom Android distro) is unlikely to be able to ever pass remote attestation, even a signed, secure boot build with the bootloader relocked, because it's not the original OS for the hardware.

Same goes for any desktop Linux.