> There is no substitute for high quality work.

That's where you get it wrong. The world is full of mediocre and low quality work in many, many fields. We all, in fact, depend on mediocre work in many ways.

Many, many people would prefer a solution with mediocre or even bad code than no solution at all while they wait for "high quality work" that never appears.

The magic of LLMs, especially as the technolgy improves, is that a truly mind boggling number of solutions to problems will be created with thoroughly mediocre (or worse!) LLM generated code. And the people benefitting from those solutions won't care! They'll be happy their problems are being solved.

You have to think about the security implications of this.

How many people had any idea this was happening? Very few, I suspect.

A malicious actor could take control of a model provider, and then use it to inject code into many, many different repos. This could lead to very bad things.

One more reason that consolidated control of AI technology is not good.

The term "Western" is often used in an equally broad sense, referring to Europe/North American culture.

That's always been a weird one for me. If I might quote Gemini's summary since it seems accurate enough:

> Geographical/Historical: The Bosporus Strait in Turkey is historically considered the dividing line between Europe (West) and Asia (East).

> Prime Meridian: The 0° longitude line running through Greenwich, England, is used to technically separate the Eastern and Western Hemispheres.

> Cultural/Political: Cultural definitions are often more relevant, placing countries like Australia, New Zealand, and North America in the "West" due to historical ties, despite their geographic location.

I suppose you're leaning into the "Bosporus Strait" option more than the "Prime Meridian" option, given that the former would put most of Europe in the West while the latter would put most of it in the East.

Password reset emails are a real bane. Because email is unreliable, they often don't work, so I end up with customers contacting me wondering why it's not working for them.

One of our software suppliers has particularly bad software for password resets, so there's a steady stream of people needing help for one reason or another. This company seems unable to fix these problems, unfortunately. Ughh.

If someone pays for a product, and then gets support for it, that's not FREE support. That's paid support. It's not their fault if the company they're a customer of loses money when they support those they've sold a product to.

Amazon, for example, charges us for cloud resources and then charges us again (handsomely) for the privilege of submitting bug reports to them. And then sometimes, even with a clear, deterministic repro for a bug with no plausible workaround (besides "stop using the feature"), where the fix is probably as simple as "pull a fix from upstream open source repo" or "sic Claude on it for 10 minutes", the bug remains open for literally years.

This is very different from "I didn't read the instructions on the screen and now I'm calling support". Both scenarios exist. I have some sympathy for businesses facing the latter, and much less for businesses facing the former.

This is an oversimplification.

When people talk about wanting "free support", they mean that they want support included with the price of the product (no extra charges), but you're still going to get what you paid for, and expecting too much might not get you what you want.

If you pay $20/month for a software subscription for your small business, you're going to get a different kind of support than the enterprise customer paying $100k/month. The small business customer will get support via email with multi-day SLAs, and the enterprise customer will get priority support via screen-share with same-day SLAs.

And there are free-tier services that offer limited support, where users that don't pay anything expect to be treated like they're full-fledged customers.

There a limited scenario here, where a paying customer has so many problems with the product that the cost of support exceeds the revenue the customer provides, and when one can confidently say that this is not the result of an overly-needy customer, you spend the money figuring out the problem and making sure that the solution is available to help any customer that follows. The cost of support my exceed revenue for one customer, but once the solution is in the knowledge base, you don't have to repeat those costs again for the next customer.

But there are also small customers who fumble the product and put too much strain on support until a decision is made not to prioritize them over other customers. I have seen small customers with unreasonable expectations get "fired" simply because their revenue wasn't worth it.

If a company routinely sees support costs exceed revenue, that's usually the company's fault for having a faulty and/or hard-to-support product. If a single customer's support costs exceed the revenue they provide, that's usually the customer's fault for leaning too heavily on support to be their personal I.T. provider.

40 years from now we won't be able to boot our device until an LLM codes the software on the fly for it. (Each time it boots, of course.)

Remember, the reason the iPad doesn't do Steam is because Apple won't let it. It is perfectly capable otherwise.

I wonder if there is an enterprise market for a fully audited, fully customizable phone that can be deployed across an entire organization, giving the institution full control of the software, apps, security, usage, etc.

Companies like Burger King spend significant amounts of money on quality control, including customer service interaction. (Hence, mystery shopping being a thing.) I wouldn't be surprised if they find more ways to add AI into the loop, including analyzing photos of produced food, on top of analyzing customer service interactions, just as a cost saving measure.

Give buses signal priority and their own lanes. This would dramatically speed up bus service. However, nobody wants to slow down cars, hence buses will always be a worse option.

Signal Priority only works well if the arrival time of the bus can be predicted some time before arrival at the signal (~30 seconds is a number I've heard a few times). As bus stopping times are highly unpredictable, a lower number of bus stops makes signal priority work much better (and far-side bus stops).

Furthermore signal priority and own lanes are almost always beaten by good circulation planning, reducing the number of traffic lights and cars on the route of the bus.

This is how it works in NL, separate lanes with separate signals that may be used only by buses (and other public transportation, including taxis). Works great!