whalee

"No good choice" in the 2020 election was a universal and sane opinion to have. The 2024 election was the thinnest electoral margins in recent history. You don't know something everyone else doesn't, and these inflammatory comments are out of touch with reality.

We lack robust frameworks for 'forward engineering' stochastic thermodynamic computation over molecular free-energy landscapes (which is basically what a "chemical soup" is doing) like we do for analog/optical/digital computing. This is why, as a field, medicine is so heavily empirical and reverse engineering oriented.

I think counter to the assumption of myself (and many), for long form agent coding tasks, models are not as easily hot swappable as I thought.

I have developed decent intuition on what kinds of problems Codex, Claude, Cursor(& sub-variants), Composer etc. will or will not be able to do well across different axes of speed, correctness, architectural taste, ...

If I had to reflect on why I still don't use Gemini, it's because they were late to the party and I would now have to be intentional about spending time learning yet another set of intuitions about those models.

People could trivially switch their search engine to Bing or Yahoo, but they don't.

If ads are so overpriced, how big is your short position on google? Also ads are extremely inefficient in terms of conversion. Ads rendered by an intelligent, personalized system will be OOM more efficient, negating most of the "overvalue".

I'm not saying they should serve ads. It's a terrible strategy for other reasons.

Not at all. Vanishingly few things during the development process of a novel thing have truly objective measures. The world is far too complex. We all act and exist primarily in a probabilistic environment. A subjective evaluation is not so different than simply making a prediction about how something will turn out. If your predictions based on subjective measures turn out to be more correct than others, your subjectivity is objectively better.

Hence the author's main point: a good taste is one that fits with the needs of the project. If you can't align your own presuppositions with the actualities of the work you're doing then obviously your subjective measures going forward will not be very good.

I don't think the concern is whether a user can compile git from source on said platform, but rather whether the rust standard lib is well supported on said platform, which is required for cross compiling.

This question becomes difficult whenever a system becomes sufficiently complex. Take any chaotic system, like a double pendulum, and press play at step 100,000. You ask 'what is it doing'? Well, it's just applying it's rule. Step to step.

Zoom out and look at it's trajectory over those 100,00 steps and ask again.

The answer is something alien. Probabilistically it is certain the description of its behavior is not going to exist in a space we as humans can understand. Maybe if we were god beings we could say 'No no, you see the behavior of the double pendulum isn't seemingly random, you just have to look at it like this'. Encryption is a decent analogy here.

We're fooled into thinking we can understand these systems because we forced them to speak English. Under the hood is a different story.