Patrick Vlaskovits

American women will stick a newborn in a crib across the house, hook up a speaker system, and sprint up and down the hallway several times a night. The co-sleeping Nordic brain cannot comprehend.

Fewer than half of US adults read a book last year. Even fewer read an actual novel, and the trend is looking worse still for teenagers. Why is nobody talking about this??

At the risk of ending up on the wrong side of history: most of the claims you hear now on AI coding agents are wrong and based on ignorance. Two things are true: 1. It is possible to get good work out of them 2. The majority of what they product is bad The core problem is that it all appears as the façade of good work. The functionality "works" – relatively speaking. But like a house without a strong foundation, it eventually becomes unmaintainable. It does feel crazy to make that claim. People claim to manage a dozen agents at once. The UAE is going to be the first "agentic government". And yet – getting one agent to do consistently great work is far from a solved problem. In the beginning we were getting exponential increases in intelligence for exponential increases in spend. Now we are at best getting linear increases for exponential increases in spend. The math doesn't math. You can point to the ability to do unsupervised tasks for long periods of time. That is true. But early errors can spend hours propagating and require significant rework. This – subpar training techniques and subpar software – are the "dark fiber" of our time. After all, the inefficiencies of dark fiber were only fully known in retrospect. I am convinced that the combination of random variable reward and information asymmetry makes people assume they have "user error". The most ignorant are often the loudest, leading everyone else to question "what am I missing?" ... nobody wants to look stupid. The fact that the AI is anthropomorphically and superficially correct makes identifying foundational shortcomings all the more difficult. I do believe that this is an incredible tool. I use it all day and every day. I am able to get great work out with a lot of great work in. We will solve these problems over time in the same way that groceries are now delivered to your door within hours. There are great minds working voraciously. In the meantime, we are scaling out mediocrity at higher and higher cost.

What do you think?

this will end in tears btw

For 50 years, software engineering ran on code rationing. Writing code was expensive, so we rationed it carefully through roadmaps, RFCs, prioritization meetings, and scope reviews. This created a role: the No Engineer. No, that won't scale. No, we don't have bandwidth. No, that's out of scope. No, we need a design doc first. The No Engineer was valuable for 50 years. Every "no" saved real money. Their judgment was the rationing system. LLMs will be the end of code rationing. Code is cheap now. And while the No Engineer is explaining why something can't be done, the Yes Engineer has already shipped three versions of it. If you're a Yes Engineer, the next decade is yours.

Nice work by Jasmine but...economists by and large don't expect a permanent underclass. You see that in our survey she links, but also 1) productivity high correlated w/ wages historically, 2) architectural disruption is slow (where is Waymo in *your* city?), 3) prices adjust 1/2

I found this account of a random early 1800s American life striking. He wrote out “the life I should like”, which had a certain economic, moral, and romantic shape… and then he lived that life. What enables a person to do this, successfully, and with so little handwringing?

New way to annoy Germans unlocked: refer to Bavarians as 'Germany's significant Austrian minority population'

how does he do it? genuinely. is it a natural gift? is it staged? does he rehearse every possible question preparing for the best answer? truly one of a kind

Tito and Leonid Brezhnev during a hunting trip in the USSR, 1970s.