techostritch

I've been reading a lot about Reagan recently, watched a few of his debates. Politics has always been dirty, and I wouldn't say going backwards you get like gradually more serious, but I really miss the time when our Presidents got on stage and seemed to take ideas and policy discussions seriously. In some ways I suspect the post-world war 2 era in American politics was unique, I mean just after our founding up through the Civil War, congresspeople went as far as having duel's to the death.

I feel like I need to read a lot more to really understand Reagan and his legacy, but there are in general lots of things about the vision he painted for America that were inspirational. I'm very curious why it is in that two seemingly comparable times, division following the civil rights movement and the economic troubles of the 70's compared with today, Reagan was able to run on such a positive hopeful message (It's morning in America) and today Republican's seem to be running on just the opposite.

The thing I'm getting out of this Zuckerberg letter is that we've basically learned nothing. It's a nakedly partisan letter designed to signal to Republicans that he's not taking sides. Which I guess is fine, but I'm thinking about Paul Graham's recent tweet about the next round of social networks being designed to be built in to combat trolling, and it makes me think.

This time there was valid concern about issues like the lab leak theory being censored on social media, I predict in the next crisis, social media will be useless adjacent for almost everything.

> it sure shouldn't cost less to do it yourself.

This is an interesting point and something I often wonder about. I think there's a number of different reasons for it, obviously markup and the need to make a profit, but one thing I realized is that when you buy something like AWS, you're often paying for the platinum version, with redundant power, networking, etc, and not the bronze version, which a lot of people would settle for. If I setup my one single instance Grafana VM or physical server, it's going to be a lot less expensive than a solution that's both multiple layers of "platinum" and multiple layers of "markup"

Datadog probably runs on the cloud, which means you get the cloud markup and datadog's mark up both built in.

I went to Costco yesterday and bought three cases of milk and four cases of soda, and it all fit into the back of my Honda civic hatchback! Doesn’t this prove that 18 wheelers are useless once and for all.

But really, I’ve never met an engineer who said that you shouldn’t try to keep things as simple as possible as long as possible.

Hard to see how this doesn’t throw the election to Trump. Most of Kamala’s supporters left RFK when she announced and with them basically tied in the polls, it’s looking like a Trump landslide. I suspect we’ll look back and apply the old Clinton campaign adage “It’s the economy stupid”

I wonder if this election will determine if Elon keeps X. If Trump wins then the political influence is worth it, if Trump loses than it was for not, though Mark Cuban just said that Musk’s Twitter influence is greater outside the country than inside. So who knows

Shocking the industry most likely to be disrupted by AI is bearish on AI

Glad to see new people entering the space, Hopefully with Donald Trump background in business and politics he can bring some badly needed weight to legitimize crypto.

My number one requirement in calling yourself a “company for grown-ups” is that you let your employees decide what work arrangement works best for them.

I mean, I think the answers are unbiased, but I am admittedly biased.

Should gay marriage be legal? Answer Yes, gay marriage should be legal.

yes or no? In the United States, abortion should be legal. Answer Yes.

I don’t understand your question, like start a company with a scope that would normally take 500 people? Or have a company with 500 people, and try to grow only through LLM’s and not hire anyone else.

Also I don’t understand what this thought experiment is trying to get at.

There are still people alive today making good money writing COBOL. There are still professional blacksmiths alive today. I don’t always think the free market solves everything, but in this case specifically I think it will. When there’s a dearth of programmers, and a clear need for those programmers, wages will go up. And there will be people to fill those roles? particularly because I think it will continue to be a hobby for a long time.

I don’t think so. If an LLM is sufficient to write your code, then your code probably wasn’t unique enough to contribute to the shared knowledge anyways. You could make the same argument about coding frameworks,

“If everyone uses react rather than vanilla JS; won’t we lose the critical mass of minds necessary to keep momentum with innovation?”