Location: United States Why: This blog holds comments I don't want to post elsewhere....
Someone posted this confident assertion online: In a year or three from now, no one will be writing code by hand or reading it manually. I won't deny that it's possible that it's true, but it seems extremely unlikely . One reason is that it doesn't mention cost. When someone makes a broad claim like that and there's no careful argument showing how cost will make it a rational, sustainable…
There was an excellent post on the Databricks blog yesterday. I've never heard of the company, but they apparently spend a lot of money on AI coding, and like many companies, those costs spiraled out of control. It was obvious from the beginning that this was going to happen. Employees using agentic coding (or slop cannons, whichever term you prefer) were constantly talking about how powerful it…
For years I've been okay with technology working its way into every aspect of my life. Keep a smartphone handy in case I need it. Have unlimited data on the smartphone because you never know if you'll need a bunch of data. Use apps like Spotify and YouTube to ensure there's never a time that can be interpreted as quiet or (heaven forbid!) boring. Use social media and a small number of aggregator…
Simon Willison has a new blog post . It's a minor detail in the post, but he includes some Claude output: I see the question “count the notes” is probably asking me to tally up blog notes. It could also mean published notes or drafts, so there’s some ambiguity there. I’ll need to figure out the total number of notes, likely by querying the count for both published notes and drafts to get a clear…
Jack Bogle famously said "Don't just do something, stand there!" Bogle was talking about your investment portfolio. When you're nervous because of the latest news about the economy, politics, or whatever, your first instinct is to take action. It doesn't matter what action you take. Doing nothing feels wrong. You have to do something, anything. And taking action is exactly what you shouldn't do in…
Alibaba has taken low-cost tokens to a new level. I've been using Vercel's AI Gateway, where Alibaba is offering Qwen 3.7 Flash for $0.03/million input and $0.13/million output, and we're not talking about a low-tier model or slow token generation. To be clear, you're sending your data to a Chinese company's cloud, so this isn't something you'd use for private data (always run local models if…
Apologies for the short post. I've been thinking about this topic for a while, but I don't want to invest the time into actually doing research on it. The three big industries in the US right now are AI, AI, and AI. And in fourth and fifth place are AI and AI. Does that reflect a lack of innovation in other sectors of the economy? Will it prevent innovation in other sectors? On one hand, the value…
I participated on Hacker News for a long time. By "participated" I mean taking part in the discussions of articles posted there. Discussions on some topics have always been garbage: economics, politics, and gender, to name a few. For the last year or so, the discussion of about any topic has been garbage. HN in 2026 feels like Digg in 2006 but with half the IQ. That's a shame. I've gotten a ton of…
I'm an AI bull. I think it's going to revolutionize the economy and make most of us better off. While frontier AI models get all the attention, I don't see them being the path by which LLMs move the economy forward. Those models are cool, doing things that still feel like magic (as is the case with any major technology when it's new). Yet they come with some serious drawbacks that are being…
I've been a Firefox user from the very beginning. I mean that in the literal sense. Firefox was the name they adopted in 2004. Before that, it was Phoenix, and I had already been using Phoenix for some time. I promoted Firefox heavily to the people I knew. I donated money to the NY Times ad. The reason I've been using Firefox for so long is because I knew the benefits of open source. Licensing…