toddwprice

Coding is solved, perhaps, with unlimited token spend on a frontier model. It remains to be seen if it that is prohibitively expensive forever. At my company, we token maxed while the getting was good. But when we had to switch to Anthropic's enterprise plan, and start paying per token, the shit really hit the fan. Now we're retreating back to sane cost levels and finding that - guess what? - people power might just be more cost effective. AI of course is an immense tool to leverage, but still too expensive to create loops and let it run. This will change over time of course, but assuming it is a solved problem is nonsense. Maybe if we solve cold fusion, yes. Until then, evolution is winning the war on entropy.

Nexus by Yuval Harari is one of the most influential books I’ve read.

If stuck on a desert island with only one algorithm in my bag, I’d wish for the Fourier. At least I would die happy.

Reads like somebody prompted ChatGPT: "Write an AI action plan for the United States in the voice of Donald Trump."

<returns stilted text at 3rd grade reading level>

"Make it sound smarter".

And voila, ai.gov is born.

I also miss the web. When HTTP form posts were a thing. React and friends are desktop apps, delivered over HTTP, where the browser is the runtime. You know why we got so obsessed with JavaScript? Cause screen refreshes look janky. "Just use XMLHttpRequest to send the data ONLY over the wire! And get data ONLY as a response!" That's how we got into this mess. I'm not saying you don't need JavaScript, or there aren't reasons to use React. I'm saying there are easier solutions to jank. If good engineering is the ability to design the least complicated solution to a problem, we are far from good engineering.

This is why you should just cram everything into one line.

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I recently visited Tulum and experienced their architecture firsthand. It is breathtaking in both form and function. Beautiful in every way.

Their philosophy got me thinking -- are there lessons to be learned in software? Do we use the same workflow for everything, when perhaps a bespoke workflow could be more appropriate for some projects? Do you already do this?

:-) I figured someone would beat me to this.

ADHD

^^^^^^^ THIS ^^^^^^^