It's fascinating how Ebay is still solvent, having done nothing of meaning for close to 20 years with basically only a slight UI uplift in the past 15. They seem to thrive primarily on the backs of people getting scammed - either sellers being scammed by buyers, or fraudsters relying on what little exists of Ebay's reputation to get a quick fraud sale.

Both of those examples are of equity manipulation: make the companies assume debt and hollow out their core business, and sell their real assets to another company for cheap.

That's not what's happening here, particularly since GameStop is doing well and paypal is increasingly enshitified with scam posts and bad policies which screw sellers when a buyer wants to make a fraudulent claim. I lost thousands due to the latter and have heard of many people recently swindled by the former.

You got it backwards. It was an undervalued, heavily shorted stock (still is) for a viable company that was doing well, financially, and people figured out that the people doing the shorts were intentionally bankrupting companies for profit. So they decided to do something about it, and maintain the stock value.

As for enshitification on Ebay... go try to buy a "big ticket" item on Ebay like a video card or Mac, half to 9/10 of all listings are "great" deals - from new accounts with anywhere from 0 sales to hundreds of sales of $5 baubles to pump up their figures. It's very difficult to find actual items for sale on ebay anymore because of how much fraud goes on. The 'classified' feature is the worst of it. It's at the point that if Ebay is to survive they need to seriously reevaluate how they're doing business.

Adobe would be a good building material in about 30-50% of the US's landmass. That's substantial, when you consider how much of the US landmass is consumed by Alaska (16% total landmass). You could likely bump that up substantially with things like polymer exterior treatment/waterproofing, larger roof overhangs, and ground isolation.

My FIL has an adobe house in Tucson. The walls are about 2.5" thick once you include the interior framing for things like electrical and sheetrock (which they used in that house, for some reason).

Adobe houses are amazing: they're cool in summer, warm in winter. Street noise, nevermind neighbors mowing the lawn, is almost non-existent.

This specific machine looks questionable. It looks like an early attempt at combining rammed earth concepts with 3d printing, but I feel like more specialized machinery is likely going to be required.

You've also got to compare not only the specific strains of plants being grown, but also how they're being grown. Very different farming practices today than even 40 years ago, but 100 years ago they had even odder ones. It wasn't uncommon to burn petroleum fuel in early tractors and have the exhaust go into the soil, under the understanding that it would add carbon back into the ground. And they still have a lot of the same ag practices and strains as the 1800s, then, too.

Thank heavens, it's global warming and carbon increases of less than 0.02% causing a decrease in other, largely unrelated nutrient levels in foods, because it makes plants grow faster.

I thought for sure it was due to the aggressive industrial farming practices employed globally, including:

* literally "salting the earth" (many pesticides and herbicides are salt based) and making once productive regions inhospitable to growth
* excessive use of pesticides/herbicides which deplete soil microbiome
* soil leeching due to an absence of plant cover to prevent erosion
* using pesticides/herbicides which bind to important trace minerals like manganese and iron
* non-rotation of crops or allowing fields to lay fallow for a season to restore the soil
* growing in regions not suitable to farming due to overall low soil nutrient levels

Just imagine it's the one thing that makes plants grow faster and that we happen to be producing a very small amount of and which powerful people profit from substantially by regulating. Who'd have thought. I'm glad they've got our best interests in mind.

I've experienced the same BS in the ER, too.

Got hit in the head (eye) with someone's shoulder. Felt "fine", no concussion, but my eye felt weird. Figured I'd pulled a muscle, and my vision got increasingly fatigued over the course of an hour. Went to the ER. The pain got worse and got to the point where I was just laying down with my eyes shut. Did some imaging. The ER doctor came in, asked me general questions, and left after a couple hours. They kept me there waiting for 5 hours, and were in the process of releasing me with a tylenol prescription, of all things.

I was fortunate in that one of the hospital's ophthalmologist was on rotation and happened to see my chart. He rushed and grabbed us as we were leaving the hospital personally, and said I had to be rushed to surgery. Turns out the orbital bones (itty bitty bones that do cable management for the eye) were exploded and I was one eye movement away from losing my eye.

This was at a Mayo Clinic hospital.

It's fantastic for iterative testing and code observations.

It's great for 'bulking' up development plans, and saves a huge amount of time here. I can read many times faster than I can type, and I can type many times faster than I can type + convert ideas in my head into coherent English or code.

It's also substantially better than most developers at writing code: it mimics working projects, not your average enterprise "just get it done" project. Heck, depending on the model and the instruction, it produces better code than some of the (SunOS) kernel code I've worked on over the years, as well as a great deal of the code written by ex-Sun developers at other shops. A human developer is constrained by their gas tank: mental attention, hunger, sleep. "Just get it done" becomes more of a prerogative with limited attention time. AI doesn't have that problem: a model can be instructed to iterate over an implementation until it meets specification, feed it to another model for verification, and then produce 100+ lines of code in a couple seconds that'd have taken multiple developers multiple days to produce.

The key word here is "architecture". This is something most developers don't have the comprehension desire or ability to address. They just like writing code and understanding new libraries. It's also why most developers won't be successful vibe coders - you'll have devops folks and traditional systems people filling the role more capably.

The 'code monkey' function is more or less dead.

I am concerned for the future, though, as it's becoming increasingly possible to outsource thinking and architecture with AI. I know I've benefited from the capabilities where I just yeet a job at the AI and it gets it done, with no/little "how" consideration on my part. Sometimes, often, this doesn't matter, but that it's as easy to do as it is will, and is, getting a lot of people into trouble. Had to fire a guy for that approach this year already. Supposedly he was once a good developer, but the kinds of things he was doing with AI were extremely problematic because he couldn't "plan" - design, think ahead, consider outcomes, and circle back to verify the instructions were complete. "It builds, it's fine". No, that isn't how this works.

The 'official numbers' are manipulated bullshit. There aren't more software jobs, what there are is an ever increasing H1B replacement of domestic workers (in the US). They'll fire 6,000 US workers and replace them with 9,000 H1B. That's still a net job loss, even if there are 3k more workers.

As for the productivity of existing "skilled" developers, "that depends".

You absolutely can, with agentic frameworks with proper planning and orchestration produce far more good code, with more features. This is how the majority of new, useful software seems to be getting built.

The majority of developers using "coding tools" like Cursor or IDE plugins, however, aren't going to be meaningfully better or produce significantly more work. They'll produce more of the same that they normally produce.

Then there are the developers that are really just vibe coding. They're the ones people frequently criticize: no/bad architectural considerations, no separation of concerns, mungled up cross dependencies, poor variable consistency, etc. These folks generally won't be able to produce much of anything anyone wants to use.

In my experience, doctors make some of the worst diagnosticians. They're the human equivalent of a narrowly trained, highly optimized model: they focus on a very narrow corpus of doctrinal, prescribed medicine (regardless of their subdiscipline). This leads to significant cognitive bias and the tendency to overly generalize. You see this quite a bit with even things as simple as blood work and iron levels: "your iron levels are fine" - meanwhile, ferrin is low, which has a whole slew of symptoms which get passed off as hysteria, particularly with women. There are entire communities of people suffering from low ferrin where they struggled for years getting a proper diagnosis when the tests themselves told the story, had the doctors not been prone to an overly generalized prognosis and ivory tower thinking.

It would make sense that AI would supersede them in capabilities: the corpus is larger and they aren't as prone to the kind of cognitive problems doctors are, at least to as high a degree.

At some point you just need to develop a natural immunity to poison oak (and ivy). It's not hard and is probably preferable to spraying your environment with broad spectrum antibiotic/herbicides and heavy metals (which is what roundup is).

Yep.

It was a cost model doomed to fail from the start without another way to make up the difference, akin to "unlimited refills on drinks".

Sounds like typical Cloud propaganda. "Did you include the cost of your staffing and equipment in your opex?" No, I didn't - and you didn't include it in my cost to deal with your infrastructure, either.

Greens have been pretty consistently anti-nuclear because of who's backed and organized the Green organizations for the past 70 years. It's not about the danger of the technology as much as it is the possibilities that it unlocks versus the more labor intensive traditional power sources - particularly now, as nuclear has gotten far more refined and safer in capabilities.

They never much complained much about the Soviets and their nuclear power production, just that it shouldn't be used here because it's dangerous.

Nuclear is far safer over the life of the facility than other forms of power, particularly now.