Yep, actively suppressing renewable efforts all the way down to shaming on a cultural level. It should be a net positive for Americans to adopt renewables - cheaper energy, more independence, good for the environment - but instead its viewed as silly or too unreliable when it isn't.
I think the lack of concentration in some areas, particularly hubs in Texas and Florida, is actually pretty eye-opening. To me these areas should be very dense with panels from the cost/benefit alone.
So there are a couple of issues here. First, there are a lot of panels in the Austin/San Antonio area, and if you live around here you see a lot of them.
Once you get outside of the larger cities panels, on houses in particular have nothing to do with costs, but instead a more deeply ingrained bias against them because the population is heavily propagandized to.
I have friends that have things like solar deer feeders and cameras and all kinds of other stand alone solar devices that won't put solar on their house "because panels are too polluting"
Exactly, the data backs up the cultural bias happening in these regions. Its not a matter of population density or cost/benefit, but a matter of virtue signaling (or lack of virtue signaling?). I think if people were making rational cost decisions installing these would be a no brainer, but they fear being ostracized from their groups.
You know, I mention this stuff all the time in various meetings and discussions. I read a lot of stuff on Hacker News and just have years of accumulated knowledge from the various colleagues I've worked with. Its nice to have a little reference sheet.
I'm kind of surprised that C-suite folks fall for this marketing ploy when many of them are typically very close to the sales process in very high stakes areas. I guess it just shows you that anyone is susceptible to a well done grift. On second thought I'm thinking back through the history of C-suite decisions I've seen first and second hand and I'm not surprised at all.
IIRC Uber employees would jump into taxis and offer them money on the spot to drive for them.
Its priming the pump, I agree there's probably no way around it. Once you get some adoption you can use that experience to go to other cities. Hit social networks often to generate interest organically.
If you've been to Japan any time recently you'd probably know that just about everything is cheaper in Japan, especially food and drink. I've been twice, most recently back in October, and I'm blown away by how relatively affordable things are. USD goes a long long way in Japan.
Oddly I could not find any cheaply priced Japanese Whiskey, and I looked around quite a bit. It was all about as much or more than what I could get it for in the states.
Japan's salaries are much lower than those in the US. Even adjusted to PPP, the median salary in Japan is still significantly lower that in the US. Few would be able to afford food at US price levels.
> Oddly I could not find any cheaply priced Japanese Whiskey
Any bog-standard supermarket will carry a variety of very low end Japanese Whiskeys. You can easily find 750ml for about 1000 yen. It won't poison you(!), but it is pretty rough. At this price point, it is rarely drunk neat. Also, Japan has nationwide uniform alcohol taxes. Alcohol taxes vary widely in the US by jurisdiction.
I mean more like, I'd look for the stuff that's like $300-$400 in the US at various places that would sell it in Japan and generally speaking it was more expensive in the stores in Japan after conversion. I was expecting it'd be like similar price or less. So I opted to just buy the imports in the US.
I just had to post this somewhere in this thread, but I bought his Vibe Coding book after listening to him talk through it. I figured it would help me understand his approach and therefore help me get into the same mindset for vibe coding on a serious level. It was garbage. The book is largely written and edited by LLMs and it shows on every page. It was a slop how-to book without many useful gems on how to go about vibe coding outside of "just do it".
I have historically liked Yegge's writing, and he's been pretty tuned into what's happening in tech...he rightly predicted JavaScript would take over the world (many people predicted it, as well, including me, but it wasn't obviously true to everyone for another year or two after that prediction was made). I don't think I ever really deeply disagreed with something so much as I disagree with him on AI.
I mean, it's inarguable that our industry has changed dramatically and most code going forward will be written by LLMs. But, I don't think it follows that you can produce quality software without a human in the loop. And, I don't think it follows that burning tokens 24/7 by way of creating unending busy work for agents is going to result in utility. I haven't actually tried Gas Town (it's too ridiculous on its face for me to be willing to invest time in learning it), but I'd still wager that a single competent dev sitting in front of Claude Code can produce better software faster than anyone, experienced or otherwise, trying to get Gas Town's infinite monkeys driving in the same direction.
It didn’t used to be. Back in the mid 2000s I basically designed our company’s tech interview process based on a few articles he’d written about how he was doing the same at Amazon. He was a must follow for me back in the salad days of RSS. When I saw the Gastown announcement I had trouble reconciling the author and the writing.
And even still, it’s hard to ignore him because he’ll still have some insight like “token efficiency is going to be the big thing we care about in the future,” which was a small section of one of his Gastown blogs. And after you’re done asking yourself if that means Gastown is performance art, or he just said that as a hedge against his “vomit tokens” approach so that he could say “look I knew it all along” when this is all proven to be misguided, you’ll start to mull on just the concept of “token efficiency” and realize “someone who can do work in 1/10th the tokens will be king.” I mean hell, Gastown preceded real support for multiagent orchestration in Claude and potentially nudged it along that path.
Yeah, it's just depressing because one of the links in here took me to his Twitter (my mistake) and I was just like, "Oh, got it, life event (maybe a divorce, maybe just aging) turned you toxic and now you're lost in the wilderness. +/- 6 months until he is claiming ketamine solved/ broke him.
(It's nice to have the superpower to judge people on social media posts, I know. It's a gift, I try not to use it for evil.)
It certainly is now, but it's also seemingly all written by LLMs now, as well. He wasn't always like this, though he has always been prone to exaggeration and simplification. He had a lot of solid insights, though, and I enjoyed reading him. Things change.
Did you end up finding a reference you liked better? I'm default suspicious of anything called "vibe coding" but there are probably some good lessons in that territory.
My take at this point is that everything is still too fresh to really settle on some new paradigm for working. Yegge is clearly very passionate about this, and that's what got me to try his book. I just don't think he can really articulate some strategy to it yet.
To answer your question, no. I'm growing deeply suspicious of outright vibe coding as a practice. We still need to figure out the tools and process, so experimentation is pretty much where we're still at.
I have some practices that seem to be very effective but I wouldn't call them "vibe coding" and they're not really exciting enough to write a blog post about. Mostly: code is cheap, review labor is not, write down your process and make templates for all the documents in it (pretty much implementation plan, commit message), make sure the agent keeps a log of everything it's done and why (so it doesn't repeat work), periodically improve the process by instructing the agent to review your session transcripts and pull request comments for ways to make the process more reliable and efficient. The amount of tool churn in this world is pretty funny.
Edit: One concrete thing that the robo coding changes is it's totally reasonable to have the tools synthesize requirements based on a Slack thread, write a design doc, polish that, do a draft implementation, and then finally open a ticket to do the work with the benefit of having tested many of the assumptions.
One explanation is that some think we might be getting to the limits of what an LLM can reasonably do. There's a lot of functions of any job that are not easily translated to an LLM and are much more about interacting with people or critical thinking in a way LLMs can't do. I'm not sure if that's everyone's rationale but that's my personal view of the situation. Like the jobs will change but we likely won't be losing them to AI outright.
reply