150
points
jameslk
Joined 7,317 karma
j@jameskosh.com
https://www.renderbetter.com
https://www.devisedlabs.com
https://twitter.com/JamesKoshigoe
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- jameslk“Agent skills” seems more like a pattern than something that needs a standard. It’s like announcing you’ve created a standard for “singletons” or “monads”
- Archived version:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250912055105/https://www.egypt...
(The site may be hugged to death)
- > As the verification process itself becomes automated, the challenge will move to correctly defining the specification: that is, how do you know that the properties that were proved are actually the properties that you cared about? Reading and writing such formal specifications still requires expertise and careful thought. But writing the spec is vastly easier and quicker than writing the proof by hand, so this is progress.
Proofs never took off because most software engineering moved away from waterfall development, not just because proofs are difficult. Long formal specifications were abandoned since often those who wrote them misunderstood what the user wanted or the user didn’t know what they wanted. Instead, agile development took over and software evolved more iteratively and rapidly to meet the user.
The author seems to make their prediction based on the flawed assumption that difficulty in writing proofs was the only reason we avoided them, when in reality the real challenge was understanding what the user actually wanted.
- > Do me a favor. Tell me why do you think it's a stretch (to assume that this is a job's issue).
I already have in my prior comment:
>> You could make the same argument that it’s a lack of working enough hours. I’m not saying it’s either, simply that hours worked is not proof alone that the problem is the lack of jobs.
In other words, your logic is:
Assume rent should be this amount -> subtract last paycheck to arrive at difference -> assume hourly wages should be this amount -> divide paycheck difference by hourly wage -> assume the result is the number of hours unavailable for work -> assume lack of hours is the cause for inability to live in a home
Note how many assumptions there are. Some questions that may disqualify any chain of this reasoning:
* How much is the median rent in places where a majority of this population lives? Is it potentially higher where they were living?
* Has the rent to income ratio changed at all, especially in their location?
* Were the majority of these individuals making minimum wage before? Could they have been working gigs for less or more?
* Are the lack of “hours” worked really due to lack of work and not another factor (e.g. ability to work, transportation, skill, etc.)?
* How much is this population spending on other costs that have taken precedence over living in a house? Has that changed at all?
With all that said, a stretch is not implausible. In reality, there is no smoking gun, only a myriad of contributing factors, different for each individual.
- 2 points
- > We need to solve the job issue. If thoughtful analysis is done on this, it may actually turn out to be that the lack of lodging is a secondary issue, It may be the root issue is the inability for a sub-segment of our population to a stable 40 hour a week job that is the real Core problem.
It seems like a stretch to assume this is a jobs issue. You could make the same argument that it’s a lack of working enough hours. I’m not saying it’s either, simply that hours worked is not proof alone that the problem is the lack of jobs.
That said, housing prices continue to outpace household income [0], which should be a lot easier to explain as a cause for the problem that many cannot afford housing where they were able to before. Especially in California where there’s a greater incentive to hold on to a house and extract rent from it due to prop 13, and infamous amounts of attempts to constrain housing supply through regulations and lawsuits.
0. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1MH1V (Real Median Household Income vs Median Sales Price of Houses Sold)
- There’s a lot of examples, yes in South America too, but the US helped replace or tried to help replace some governments during the Arab Spring. Libya being the biggest example, where the US and its allies imposed a no fly zone to help topple a dictator it didn’t like [0]. It could have done that in other places, but you didn’t hear a peep from the US when those protests were crushed by their governments during the Arab Spring.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_...
- > One of the dark consequences of America losing its city-upon-a-hill aspirations is we're less able to effectively call out evil abroad.
"City-upon-a-hill" is marketing and has never been grounded in fact. It’s hubris and arrogance. The US is viewed as that place if you get on the wrong side of, it will bomb you or replace your government through coercion. It outspends every country on "defense" to ensure this.
History is littered with plenty of examples where the US favored a more authoritarian or "evil" government over less, sometimes even installing them. Arab Spring is a recent example where you saw governments replaced with the US' help, while leaving some notable monarchies alone.
In reality, the US employs its foreign policy for its own interests. It’s always been like that.
- Ultimately it seems like agents will end up like browsers, where everything is sandboxed and locked down. They might as well be running in browsers to start off
- HN loves this library but I really don’t get the appeal. It extends HTML with a bunch of attributes with their own syntax:
hx-trigger="keyup changed delay:500ms"
hx-trigger="click[ctrlKey]"
It fires off weird events you’re supposed to hook into with JS:
document.body.addEventListener('htmx:beforeSwap', function(evt) { …
You lose static analysis and gain hard to track down bugs merely from typos
It reminds me of ColdFusion and Angular v1, with its extensions to HTML. HTML was meant for defining content structure, not behavior
Just use plain JS over this if you hate React so much. Or jQuery even. Keep the behavior out of the content layer.
- I agree with you general point, however in the long term, I don’t think this will financially end well for those betting on housing as an investment. At some point, if a loan essentially spans the course of a borrower’s lifetime, it’s no longer a loan, it’s a rental.
Therefore the lender will not be made whole when their debt serf dies. That seems to place an upper ceiling on the (inflation adjusted) growth of the investment side.
- Supply constraints are a symptom of the problem, which is housing is a huge leveraged investment for many. You generally won’t get policies for building more when it negatively affects the finances of a majority of voters
- It’s a non sequitur, like saying “Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.”
I’m guessing the author meant it tongue in cheek but really meant “everyone I know or follow knows it’s a bubble”
- > Back then, me and other old-timers were answering about 4,000 new-hire questions a month.
> Then in December, Claude finally got good enough to answer some of those questions for us.
> … Six months later, 80% of the questions I'd been being asked had disappeared.
Interesting implications for how to train juniors in a remote company, or in general:
> We find that sitting near teammates increases coding feedback by 18.3% and improves code quality. Gains are concentrated among less-tenured and younger employees, who are building human capital. However, there is a tradeoff: experienced engineers write less code when sitting near colleagues.
https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...
- In other words, which companies are default alive or dead? [0]
The companies that are sustainable with their own revenue, covering their runway or nearly there, are likely to be alive if there’s not investors to keep them alive. Those with ridiculous commitments expecting a hail mary until their business model materializes, are living on borrowed time
- ChatGPT: This looks like AI. I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a bit of training data in my time.
- > Network Rail said the railway line was fully reopened at around 02:00 GMT and it has urged people to "think about the serious impact it could have" before creating or sharing hoax images.
> "The disruption caused by the creation and sharing of hoax images and videos like this creates a completely unnecessary delay to passengers at a cost to the taxpayer," a spokesperson said.
I don't think this will work the way they think it will work. In fact, I think they just proved they're vulnerable to a type of attack that causes disruption and completely unnecessary delay to passengers at a cost to the taxpayer
- 2 points