Jonathan Ellis

This is shaping up as the most consistent finding in housing studies: Building lots of luxury housing can reduce rents at the top of the market—but the people it helps most are renters struggling to afford even the least desirable units

What we actually had was a lack of sufficient cognition at right vantage point to deploy on a routine transactional issue. We now have arbitrary amounts of burst cognition which are almost perfectly shaped for this class of issue.

Chess is a really atypical profession. When we watch chess, we don't just care about the objective quality of the moves: we care about them having been decided by a human. By contrast, when we hire a doctor or an accountant we typically just care about the output.

I keep hearing that developers write code too early in the whole "getting things done" process but my experience says the exact opposite. The only real way I've found to figure out requirements IS to start writing code and see what I bump into.

Ya'll worried about AI Coding slop, when there as an entire army of n8n experts who are installing unmaintainable visual workflow spaghetti in small/medium sized businesses at scale Literal merchants of complexity. Its so much worse than using claude code. It's an artifact of being stuck 6 months in the past and n8n is all you know.

Israel limits class size to 40 students, based on a rule written by Rabbi Maimonides in 1170 AD. A 41st student splits the class in two. @metrics52 and Lavy realized: that discontinuity gave them a near-perfect instrument to test the impact of smaller classes on test scores.

A while back, Andrej Karpathy said the app store will be replaced by generated, disposable software," and Amjad Masad predicted that the value of all application software will go to zero I think this "ephemeral software hypothesis" is wrong, though, and I want to explain why:

But those changes still go through verification, staged deployment, and real-world feedback. Code remains the source of truth So my takeaway: while code generation is becoming trivially cheap, software engineering is not

One thing that makes me feel that code factory has not arrived yet is the following experiment: 1.Ask a LLM to do an in-depth rigorous review of your code 2. In a new thread, as same/different LLM to consider those review comments independently and address issues it agrees with 3. Keep repeating until no new concerns I find that this loop always goes on for a ridiculously long time, which means that there is a problem with the notion of claude-take-the-wheel. This seems to happen no matter the harness or the specificity of the specs. It works fine for simple applications, but in the limit if the LLMs have this much cognitive dissonance you cannot trust it. Either this, or LLM are RLHFd to always find some kind of issue.

This is a really underrated point about Paul Ehrlich’s career. He wasn’t just wrong in retrospect. The Green Revolution was already well underway when he wrote his most famous book. And he chose to ignore it.

Password rotation or Forced changes lead to "password hedging," where users just add a number or change one letter (e.g., Summer1! becomes Summer2!). It is biologically impossible for most people to memorize a high volume of complex, random strings every few months, leading to "sticky note" security risks. When security is a hassle, users find dangerous shortcuts, like reusing the same "strong" password across every site they own. The most important fact is that NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), the global authority on cybersecurity standards, officially retired this method In its Digital Identity Guidelines (SP 800-63B), NIST now explicitly states that organizations "SHALL NOT require" periodic password changes. They’ve shifted the focus to Length over Complexity. They recommend allowing passphrases of up to 64 characters and only requiring a change if there is actual evidence of a compromise.

Paul Ehrlich was one of the most pernicious public figures of the last 50 years. Somehow he was still celebrated in certain intellectual circles until the very end. Never forget the harm his ideas caused.

"Collectively, we’ve watered down the notion that it takes effort to succeed - that trying is a key part of a student’s job." Outstanding post from Tim Daly. Just one of the parts that hit me below:

I don't think people realize that these insane bureaucratic hurdles apply to *inert tissue samples* too. In my field research, a researcher was delayed by 2.5 years by his IRB for a study involving only dead tissue.

Our company trains AI on tumor tissues. My partner had cancer and it was difficult for us to even get her samples to our lab for profiling.

A city has slums. Two options: bulldoze and move residents to new housing, or upgrade the slum where it stands. New housing sounds better. Chile tested both for 20 years. It wasn't even close.

Latency numbers every programmer must know

Incredibly, Sweden passed a staffing law that went into effect--I'm not making this up--Oct 2022. It requires temp/staffing firms to offer permanent positions after 24 months, & there's legal speculation there it might apply to consulting firms too. 1/2 twobirds.com/en/insights/20…

Most incumbent companies have trouble adjusting to massive technological change, but some manage to do so. One of the world’s most valuable companies started in the horse saddle and buggy whip business, the prototypical obsolete industry.

You asked for a TUI. We built it. Stop context switching between your terminal and a browser window. The Brokk TUI brings Plan Mode and Lutz Mode directly into your shell. It is built for speed and keyboard-driven engineering.