Except it's not a concerning issue. Hantavirus doesn't spread well from human to human except when in close quarters (e.g. cruise ships). When you do the math based on the number of people on the ship, the likely R_0 would be *way* less than one out in the real world. So realistically, if they had evacuated the cruise ship after the first case, most of the people who got sick wouldn't have gotten sick, and you'd have at most maybe one or two cases in people who weren't on the ship, and that's about the realistic limit to its spread.

I don't remember the exact numbers I came up with, but it was something laughable like an R_0 of 0.15 or something.

It's a human interest story, because folks felt for the people trapped on that ship, but it was not a meaningful public health threat given the numbers involved.

It of course works to some extent. It doesn't work to an extent that it can replace a meaningful part of engineer time, though it can certainly be used for rapid prototyping and other special cases.

Most of engineers' time isn't spent writing code. It is spent reviewing code and understanding the code. When a person writes code, they are doing this while they write the code. When AI writes the code, that time is spent on the back end while reviewing the code. This is actually more mentally intensive than writing the code to begin with, because you're having to concentrate much more continuously. This means it takes longer, on average, and you're much more likely to make mistakes and miss critical errors during the review process, because you're trying to shove all of that mental effort into a much smaller amount of time. So you save a lot of time up front, and you pay back nearly all of that time at the end.

Until such time as AI can write perfect code that doesn't require human review, the review process will continue to be the bottleneck, and I'm not seeing any evidence that AI is approaching that point.

AI is great for creating demos that you're going to throw away and rewrite a dozen times. Teams that are playing with ideas for new features can potentially generate a lot more prototypes quickly by using AI. But they're saving time precisely because it's throwaway code. As soon as you're trying to use it for production code, the savings evaporate. Or at least this is what I have seen pretty consistently.

This is not to say that AI is useless for coding. When used as a glorified autocomplete engine, it can save you from a lot of tedious busywork. When used for code review, it at least has the potential to catch interesting bugs before they make it into production. And so on. But the notion that this will suddenly allow for cutting a large percentage of programmers is utterly naïve. Given their previous cuts, they've already exceeded the expected payoff from AI. So blaming this on AI savings isn't realistic.

So the real question is whether they'll be able to get their AI tech up to the quality and scalability level where they can survive on only that revenue before their social media platform craters from inadequate resourcing.

It's the dream of sociopathic greedy billionaires everywhere. Too bad for them that it's a pipe dream.

Here's the harsh reality: AI doesn't work. You can spend days cajoling AI into doing something correctly and spend days reviewing the bad code over and over until it gets it right or you can spend days writing the code. On average, the time savings are minimal, and the cost in terms of code understanding is enormous, resulting in less and less maintainable code over time until you eventually end up having to throw the whole thing away and rewrite it from scratch at an enormous cost.

Mind you, Meta was probably at the point where their whole code base needed to be thrown away and rewritten from scratch at least five years ago, given the level of bugginess that I've seen, so maybe AI lets them extend the long tail of badly written code a bit longer before they completely implode, but that's hardly a position for other execs to aspire to.

They won't. They'll have a bumpy few months followed by mass attrition from the complete destruction of employee morale, followed by panic when they realize that they don't have enough remaining employees to keep the lights on adequately, followed by even bigger panic when they realize qualified candidates aren't even bothering to apply for their open positions.

Nobody wants to work for a dying shell of a company that laid off a third of their workers over only a couple of years. As a company, if you're not innovating and growing, you're dying. Meta is dying. Their AI is basically worst-in-class at this point, and everything else is getting shoved aside to make more money for that latest boondoggle, because their execs don't know how to recognize a sunk cost fallacy.

It would take a literal miracle to save Meta from the death spiral that this will cause. If I owned Meta stock, I'd be selling in a hurry right now, or at least selling covered calls to buy protective puts to limit my losses. Stick a fork in it. They're done.

They drag them to school, but at that point, there's a record, and if it keeps happening, it becomes a legal problem for the parents, who have a responsibility for making sure their kids go to school.

To a school that is under-funded in part because kids aren't meeting the minimum attendance for the school to get paid.

All of those things are the responsibility of their parents. Those are adult problems for adults to solve. Kids can't realistically solve them, and can't reasonably be expected to solve them. And as soon as you let kids try to solve them, you're reinforcing the cycle of poverty by preventing them from getting the education that would enable to them to break that cycle. I'm not saying it's fair or good, just that preventing such things is better than the alternative, where we have child labor who grow up to be adults who earn minimum wage or worse.

Eric Schmidt's ChatGPT prompt begins: "You are Marie Antoinette, writing a commencement speech for the Univ. of Arizona graduating class of 2026..."

Chronic illness is rare, and at some point, you try to figure out a way to get the kid tutoring.

I see what you did there.

If half your kids are chronically sick, there's something wrong with your school — environmental issues like mold, social issues like bullying, or senioritis like Bueller.

Chronic absenteeism? When/where I was a kid, this was called truancy, and the police could pick you up for it. How is this still a thing?

My guess is you don't use Cursor very much if a $20 monthly subscription is enough for your needs. I still run into limits with Anthropic's $200 per month (I have 13% of my weekly allotment left with 13 hours left in the week), and I just use it as a hobbyist. Even though I am a very active hobbyist, I still can't imagine someone using these tools even 10 hours a week on just a $20 per month plan.

Who do you know that was trained on stuff that will happen in the future?

Meh. If that is about their hiring practices, on principle I'd rather they be inclusive, but it isn't likely to destroy the quality of the product if they aren't. If it is a more general statement however — "We make our product available to everyone" — then that is a much bigger concern, because it could be an indication that the software might become a lot less available.

Personally, if I used their software, I'd be more worried about the transparency -> trust change. A company like that must be transparent, because if they aren't, you can't trust them. When I see a change like that, I read it as "Trust us. We aren't sending your passwords to the NSA."

If that's true, it likely won't be true for long. Qualcomm modems sucked when Apple started using them, too — constant baseband crashes, etc. It took a couple of years before they were even kind of stable.

The nice thing about the Apple modems is that they are in control of the entire stack. That means when there's a bug, there's no fighting back and forth between two companies about whose problem it is. That means every baseband crash, no matter how rare, likely has enough stored data to figure out why it crashed, reproduce it, and fix it. That also means that they can do detailed analytics and experiment with different tower switching algorithms on a global scale to improve reliability over time. This is something that companies like Qualcomm simply are not equipped to do, because they don't make devices, and thus don't have the ability to send software updates or experiment flag changes to billions of devices out in the field.

The stories I've read say that Qualcomm's hardware is better (read: faster) when you have a strong signal, but that in weak-signal environments, Apple's modems are considerably more reliable. I hope so. I've found the Qualcomm modems to be absolute trash in moderate-signal environments ever since they made us switch us from Sprint towers to T-Mobile towers, and things have only gotten a little bit better in the half a decade since.

I'd gladly take a slower maximum speed in exchange for avoiding the constant problems I have with the signal dropping out entirely.

On land owned by someone else. The government compels the landowner to make that land available to whoever put up the pole. It's not like the landowner had any say in the matter.

In a book that refers to Netflix as "a new upstart service that Blockbuster Video should be wary of."