That’s the opposite of my experience. Weird. But I’m also not the kind of person who gets hung up on whether someone used a loop or recursion or if their methods are five times as long as what I would’ve done myself unless there is a performance impact that matters to me as a user. But I’m also the kind of person who doesn’t get paid by the hour to write programs. I use programs in the service of other paid work.
Yes, this experience is unlike most people. Perhaps the problem is that most people are satisfied by the appearance of a working app despite it not working at all. Say, the first tool I was doing, did actually not recurse into subdirs with dylibs which made it useless.
The tariffs are a bit of a new phenomenon so I think that may be motivated reasoning. Construction productivity has also been stagnant for about 60 years. I think the most important factor is that housing prices, in the United States at least, are governed by how much a bank will lend. Very small but affordable houses will never be built because a bank will not finance a $10,000 loan over 30 years. In the same vein, it’s technically feasible for automobiles to be built for just a few thousand dollars, but, again, they will not finance $2500 over five years. So cars and houses are just built to the price point which will satisfy the lenders. You may not hate financialization nearly as much as it deserves.
> The tariffs are a bit of a new phenomenon so I think that may be motivated reasoning. Construction productivity has also been stagnant for about 60 years.
If construction was stagnant for 60 years, adding 10-50% tariffs on lumber and building materials would only make it worse. Not motivated reasoning, just basic economics.
The new tariffs went into effect January 1st, by the way. If you thought things were bad now, they're about to get worse.
This announcement is just another distraction. They want you mad at Wall St, not tariffs.
> In the same vein, it’s technically feasible for automobiles to be built for just a few thousand dollars,
No it's not.
If this was true you'd see it in some other countries. It's not happening anywhere in the world. Unless you redefine automobile to mean a tiny cart with a 5HP motor and some seats.
> If this was true you'd see it in some other countries
The closest thing you have are Japanese Kei cars - you can get a brand-new Suzuki Alto for $6,600 before sales tax, but it would not pass crash US safety standards, it's built for slow city streets of Japan and not highway driving.
Sure, these tariffs may further increase the house of prices (e.g. be relevant to 15% of the cost of the house, with tariffs ranging from 20% to 50% and sources of materials adjusting to these tariffs), but the say 4% future effect of these tariffs is likely less than the effect of zoning laws, other development restrictions, and rent freezing.
> governed by how much a bank will lend [...] Very small but affordable houses will never be built because a bank will not finance a $10,000 loan over 30 years.
Banks typically won't hold onto to your loan for 30 years. Mortgages in the US have been thoroughly fiscalized: your typical bank/mortgage lender bundles up a bunch of loans and sells them to another servicing party as soon as the ink dries on the closing documents. The specialized servicer package them, and offer them as securities to investors who in turn will get a monthly return based on aggregate mortgage installments.
All this to say: lending banks would be happy to finance thousands upon thousands of 5-digit mortgages, and sell those to securitization specialists.
New houses aren't built in existing neighborhoods because dense housing is unpopular, as is a distaste of having "poorer" people as neighbors. Static zoning, terrible transport networks and no funding for new public infrastructure tag-team to discourage new developments on undeveloped farmland.
Not sure about $10,000 houses (that would be pretty spartan, even Tiny Homes usually cost more than that), but the $2500 car thing being due to lenders is completely off base. The reason there are no $2500 cars is that it's impossible to make one and meet current US safety regulations. Once you meet all of those, then you're already well beyond $2500, but it's still a pretty crappy car. Might as well add a few extra creature comforts that most consumers demand (power locks, power windows, bluetooth/stereo, disc brakes, more than 100HP engine, etc.) and you're never going to be below ~$15K with current parts and labor pricing.
I really don’t agree with the author here. Perplexity has, for me, largely replaced Cal Newport’s job (read other journalists work and synthesize celebrity and pundit takes on topic X). I think the take that Claude isn’t literally a human so agents failed is silly and a sign of motivated reasoning. Business processes are going to lag the cutting edge by years in any conditions and by generations if there is no market pressure. But Codex isn’t capable of doing a substantial portion of what I would have had to pay a freelancer/consultant to do? Any LLM can’t replace a writer for a content mill? Nonsense. Newport needs to open his eyes and think harder about how a journalist can deliver value in the emerging market.
But it isn’t joining the workforce. Your perspective is that it could, but the point that it hasn’t is the one that’s salient. Codex might be able to do a substantial portion of what a freelancer can do, but even you fell short of saying it can replace the freelancer. As long as every ai agent needs its hand held the effect on the labor force is an increase in costs and an increase in outputs where quality doesn’t matter. It’s not a reduction of labor forces
OK, let me fall less short. It has replaced the freelancer for me. I communicate product requirements. It builds the product immediately at trivial cost. It’s better than a human. There are jobs I would have considered hiring out that I don’t because the machine is better. Nothing you said about labor effects in the large even logically follow. Have you even used one of these systems?
There is no simple explanation, but an important issue is that there is no price discovery mechanism or system pressure for efficiency. You also may not know that the US healthcare system is also an elaborate jobs program. Walk into any hospital and you will see 5-10 mostly young women doing basically nothing. I don’t know why the powers that be decided that the US should divest itself from any useful work, but here we are. Now we’re a couple generations into this social experiment by “smart” billionaires and their courtiers, and the military industrial complex is begging the Taiwanese to hold our soft hands and teach a blossoming generation hipsters and resentful immigrants how to build the computers we invented. We had a good run, but we’re Rome circa. 400-500 AD. Don’t let the marketing in Venezuela fool you. I’m just hoping the robots give us a few more decades of working plumbing.
We almost do. Employers must provide insurance. If you’re unemployed you can probably get Medicaid. We have private entities handle the details instead of something that looks like the Post Office. There is nothing anyone in Congress can do which results in all 8 billion people on Earth having instant access to all conceivable treatment in any location the the US. Like socialized medicine, there is no meaningful price discovery mechanism in the US. Unlike socialized medicine, it’s a lot harder for political parties to conduct pogroms by rationing resources and euthanizing demographics that don’t vote the way they like.
Humans do not know what’s right. What’s worse is the phenomenon of people who don’t actually know but want to seem like they know so they ask the person with the question for follow up information that is meaningless and irrelevant to the question.
Hey, can you show me the log files?
Sure here you go. Please help!
Hmm, I don’t really know what I’m looking for in these. Good luck!
Can he round up the goons in the CIA and FBI while he’s at it? Is being a tributary vassal state of China materially worse than being a tributary vassal state of foreign power? I’d like sovereignty, but that’s not really an option.
I think his removal has a lot more to do with his willingness to cooperate with the “bad guys“ in the Middle East. I think this also has a lot to do with why we suddenly care about Somali fraud rings that have been operating since the 1990s. The stage is getting set for another regime change in the Middle East. It’s pretty amazing what you can buy with a $250 million campaign donation.
I think there were that many immigrants. I don’t believe they are so many living there now. Iran demonstrated pretty conclusively that mass repatriation is completely possible if you have a government that actually wishes to do so.
I think heads of state bearing personal responsibility for misconduct is an excellent precedent that I would love to see applied much, much more widely. Preferably to the superpowers, especially if said leader were to say, for a totally-hypothetical example, recklessly create a massive security risk near our borders for the sole purpose of benefiting a foreign interest group… but I’ll take what I can get. I think the Sword of Damocles is missing all too often from high society. If life and death decisions, don’t come with life and death risks, then I think they become taken too lightly. I think we are too quick to insulate high society from the consequences of their actions.
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