A kickback is a bribe; specifically, a bribe to someone on one side of a larger financial transaction, for facilitating it. As in, vendors A, B, and C are competing for a ten million dollar contract with Walmart to provide some service, so vendor A pays someone at Walmart in a decision making role ten thousand dollars to ensure that they are selected. A small portion of the money that vendor A receives is "kicked back" to the person who facilitated that transaction.
Obviously, this is quite corrupt; that person is supposed to be paid by Walmart to best represent their interests, not select the vendor based on who will best financially compensate them personally.
The Sopranos part is a reference to a TV show about the Mafia, in which (presumably, I haven't seen it), bribery schemes like this are common.
First of all, keep in mind that research has shown that people generally overestimate the productivity gains of LLM coding assistance. Even when using a coding assistant makes them less productive, they feel like they are more productive.
Second, yeah, experience matters, both with programming and LLM coding assistants. The better you are, the less helpful the coding assistant will be, it can take less work to just write what you want than convince an LLM to do it.
Third, some people are more sensitive to the kind of errors or style that LLMs tend to use. I frequently can't stand the output of LLMs, even if it technically works; it doesn't live to to my personal standards.
> Third, some people are more sensitive to the kind of errors or style that LLMs tend to use. I frequently can't stand the output of LLMs, even if it technically works; it doesn't live to to my personal standards.
I've noticed the stronger my opinions are about how code should be written or structured, the less productive LLMs feel to me. Then I'm just fighting them at every step to do things "my way."
If I don't really have an opinion about what's going on, LLMs churning out hundreds of lines of mostly-working code is a huge boon. After all, I'd rather not spend the energy thinking through code I don't care about.
> research has shown that people generally overestimate the productivity gains of LLM coding assistance.
I don’t think this research is fully baked. I don’t see a story in these results that aligns with my experience and makes me think “yeah, that actually is what I’m doing”. I get that at this point I’m supposed to go “the effect is so subtle that even I don’t notice it!” But experience tells me that’s not normally how this kind of thing works.
Perhaps we’re still figuring out how to describe the positive effects of these tools or what axes we should really be measuring on, but the idea that there’s some sort of placebo effect going on here doesn’t pass muster.
Open source has been turned against us and used to build hyperscalers that effectively control modern computing.
Pure open source is also not a sustainable business model. You have to be open core or non-commercial, otherwise anyone and everyone can steal your lunch.
You're asking for the right to compete when they've given you every other single right there is. That's just not nice.
> Open source has been turned against us and used to build hyperscalers that effectively control modern computing.
> Pure open source is also not a sustainable business model. You have to be open core or non-commercial, otherwise anyone and everyone can steal your lunch.
Maybe, but beside the point. The point is "don't call whatever you're doing open source if it isn't open source (per the generally accepted definition which you can read e.g. at https://opensourcedefinition.org/ )". No moral judgement here whether open source is morally superior or not, or whether open source is for suckers because the hyperscalers will co-opt it, or whatever. If you don't want to do open source, then don't, but don't go and call it open source.
New housing is simply more expensive; so it's marketed as "luxury", and it's sold at a premium to the higher end of the housing market. This reduces demand for the older, more affordable existing housing stock, and with depreciation and wear and tear, the new housing will become more affordable as time goes on.
If you're in a market with a shortage of housing, those with more money will simply outbid those with less, even for older, less desirable housing. I've seen it, where when I moved out of my last apartment before I bought a house, my landlady raised rent considerably when looking for a new tenant, and even then she got a tenant who wanted to pay her over the rate that she was asking for to ensure that they were able to get the apartment over all of the other applicants. Wealthy empty-nesters who were downsizing, and willing to pay a premium for an older apartment in a desirable neighborhood, forcing out anyone who might have otherwise been able to afford it.
So yes, while it does help for there to be some push to build more affordable housing, if taken to an extreme building only luxury housing will leave an unbalanced market, in a lot of cases building luxury housing is exactly what you want to do to reduce the competition for the existing, more affordable housing stock.
There is no natural reason for this to be the case. If anything, learning curves and economies of scale should result in new units costing less, not more, than ones built by artisans.
Baumol’s Cost Disease means construction labor cost rises faster than productivity. We’re allergic to prefab construction - banks and insurance companies block it. A lot of construction workers left the industry after 2007. Baby Boomers are retiring and told their kids to not get a blue collar job. New housing has to be ADA compliant. People expect to give each kid their own bedroom and have two car garage instead of one car or no garage at all. Recent immigration crackdowns and trade wars are the icing on the cake.
> Baumol’s Cost Disease means construction labor cost rises faster than productivity
Baumol’s applies to jobs that “experienced little or no increase in labor productivity.” I’m arguing there may be extraneous causes for construction’s productivity stasis.
there are! Land use code. And permitting. Municipal processes for permitting housing have stifled any really serious innovation in construction.
you know why we don't have modular, factory built apartment buildings? Not at scale? Because the municipalities won't permit them. and the real reason they won't permit them is because it would put all their inspectors out of business if you didn't have to do any walls open inspections because it was all built in a factory...
Houses depreciate if there's an adequate supply of newer housing keeping up with the housing demand of the area. If there isn't then the general GDP growth of the area in which the house is located dictates that the house's value grows as well.
When you build the high-margin apartment, people vacate other housing units to move into it, reducing demand on the older units, which reduces prices in the area. This is just the law of supply and demand, but you don't have to derive it axiomatically: it's empirically what happens when we increase supply at market rates.
I'd like a land value tax too, but it's not going to happen, and an LVT would guarantee market-rate development.
The number of rich people buying random unoccupied apartments in new multifamily developments has measure zero in the greater scheme of North American housing policy. Meanwhile: the construction of still more housing works against the interests of anyone who would buy a random apartment and hold it vacant as an investment interest, so this is a doubly facile point.
Yes, besides the mundane day to day details, which are actually up the alley of many people, the other thing that prevents people from being a small business owner is the amount of money they need to invest in it, and the fact that they are effectively assuming all of the risk; whether it be competition, changes to supply, changes to demand, etc. Insurance can blunt a few types of rare risk, but not the fundamental business risks.
So you have to be willing to take those risks, and want to be handling those mundane day to day details.
There is the MOD Dwarf, a Linux based pedal that is much as you describe. It has a pedal style case with three foot buttons, a few encoders and buttons and screen for changing parameters on the fly, but to fully configure it you use a laptop or tablet to connect to it and set up a patch.
I barely use email any more, not just due to blatant spam, but also due to companies that I need to receive one notification email each time I do a transaction, or to verify an account, as an excuse to send me daily or weekly emails.
I can't necessarily block them because I might need them for a password reset or a future transaction. I spent a while trying to set up filters that work, but eventually got tired of trying to fight it.
Now I mostly just avoid email for anything other than these things, and have just given up on it otherwise.
Spam won. Email lost.
And social media services are losing in similar ways. Rather than showing me things from people I subscribe to, they're pushing all kinds of automated "content for you" that I don't want and can't opt out of. So I'm pulling away from them as well.
The internet is filling with slop and distraction, both AI generated and not, and we haven't "solved" it, it's constantly getting worse.
You are. The brain actually responds to CO2 concentration, not oxygen concentration. Your metabolism turns O2 and various hydrocarbons into CO2 and water, but many of the feedback loops in this process that mediate how your body metabolizes are based on the CO2 concentration; so even if O2 is unchanged, if you body detects more CO2, it will start metabolizing less.
I also wonder that if we have bigger body volumes combined with lower lung and heart capacity due to inactivity, would that add to the negative cognitive affect of higher CO2?
Obviously, this is quite corrupt; that person is supposed to be paid by Walmart to best represent their interests, not select the vendor based on who will best financially compensate them personally.
The Sopranos part is a reference to a TV show about the Mafia, in which (presumably, I haven't seen it), bribery schemes like this are common.
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