plomme

Hah! This happened to me when digging around after a production incident. I worked on it on and off over the working week, and after a while it started saying (paraphrasing) "You've been at this for five days and done what you can, take a break".

Very good write up, as always, from Red Blob. It turned my high-level assumption on Google Maps pathfinding upside down. I thought, recalling algorithms class, that Google Maps worked so fast due to "optimal substructure" of shortest-path finding. That is that the shortest path from A-C through B also produces the shortest paths from A-B and B-C, and that for most of any given path you could route through some number of precalculated "midpoint" paths. Reading this turns it upside down in the sense that landmarks go behind the target, and not in the middle of the route! Very handy tool.

To paraphrase a famous quote: You have to be lucky every time, an attacker only has to be lucky once.

I wish I knew! My money is still mostly in index funds and real estate.

My sneaking doubt is whether the index can keep growing, because doesn’t that depend on infinite growth based ultimately on mostly finite natural resources, manpower, and land? But maybe we can always extract and produce more with new technology, and that manpower may get leveraged or extended by AI and robotics. Or maybe just financial magic beyond my understanding.

Regardless I have been thinking a lot about what aging and declining populations might do to the economy in the medium-long term. I only know that I know nothing.

Does it follow that the price of the index should go up in perpetuity because workers are motivated?

This has been my investment philosophy as well, but I'm starting to realize that this is forgetting that "past performance does not guarantee future results". It only works when the index goes up, and I don't see any fundamental reason that should be true on the long term. I don't know of a better alternative though.

Ok. How do people find the required service when the need arises? Surely the company will need to have a website that displays what they offer? Or a physical storefront showing what goods they sell? That is marketing, and, I would say, not evil. The “evil” arises as a consequence of the market and medium where an infinite number of competitors are trying to survive. Marketers need to eat and feed their families, too, and so they try to market more efficiently.

I don’t like advertising, but I think calling the act of or working in marketing evil is really reductive vilification. Try to take their point of view, and realize almost nobody is trying to make the world a worse place.

I don't know anything about alzheimers but I'd hope someone that does would engage with David SJ's points instead of dismissing him on lack of authority alone.

> I would always feel bad in those cases, because it's clear they spent a lot of time, and I'm going to have to say "no" and they will feel like they wasted a ton of effort.

I get this feeling, too. I do however think the onus is on the developer to make something reviewable by their team members if they want a speedy review. Stacked PRs, scoping things down, properly structuring commits so you can review commit-by-commit for example.

I also think that "I spent a bunch of time on this" is not a valid reason for expecting an approval. It should hurt if you've produced a bunch of code that is way off target, even if it ends up implementing the feature. That's how I learned at least.

A proper way to go about large projects, in my opinion, is the same as with software development at large. Fail fast if possible. Draw up a crude boxes and arrows sketch or just discuss how you want the code to integrate with whatever already exists and invite the team to comment. If no one has anything to say, well then they can't complain later when you implement that approach. But if anyone cares then most likely valueable input will come that makes the end result better.

Sure, but LLMS and image generators are not the death of "consensus reality". Healthy democracies will still have investigative journalism, public debate, trustworthy institutions, etc.

You're right. But I'd rather be uninformed than misinformed.

I think it may turn out postive; That the less we are able to take images and video at face value the better.

Motivated actors have been able to doctor, fake, or spin media content since time immemorial. But peoples default mode was to trust what they saw. Now that fake imagery is ubiquitous, maybe we'll all get a bit more skeptical.

I’m not saying he’s wrong about the core thesis here, but using Claude Opus 4.6 as a “mic drop” with a chart showing it being twice as good as the last model feels in my experience way off.

Flash is amazing, and what made me drop VSCode. Flash feels like an innovation and basically lets me move my cursor at almost the speed of thought. Highly recommend people try it out and play with it!

BTW: The Vimium extension [1] for Firefox has a similar mode for links called "linkHinting" which I've mapped to s[2] for a similar experience in the browser :)

[1]: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/

[2]: `map s LinkHints.activateMode`