What other instances of "we did our job as little too well" are there?
I can think of tabacco and other drugs, but that's not really the same. Monopolistic behavior doesn't really fit either. Maybe Kleenex marketing doing so well their name became interchangeable with the word "tissue"?
The EU (Maybe it's only Dutch, not 100% sure) food score system is completely idiotic since it applies to products within the same food category only, but it's not really explicitly spelled out anywhere that that's the case and as far as I know there's not even a reliable way of knowing what product falls into what category (e.g. is a freezer pizza in the same category as potato chips/snacks, or is it a baked good?), or even how they came to the score at all. So a bag of chips, a 4 cheese pizza and a head of lettuce can all have an "A" grade, with nothing to indicate what that actually means.
I'm amazed at how many people, even now after a decade of this system being in place, get confused about why a bag of chips is apparently an A. It's very misleading IMO and not very useful for conveying info, that's what the ingredient list is for tbh.
I'm wondering if everyone here saying they think harder with LLM agents have never reached "flow state" while programming. I just can't imagine using 100% of my mental focus state for hours with an agent. Sure, I think differently when my coding is primarily via agent, but I've never been totally enveloped by my thoughts while doing so.
For those who have found a "flow state" with LLM agents, what's that like?
I've literally never found flow state with programming. Is it even possible when working as a full stack web dev? I am constantly context switching between backend/frontend, reading documentation, looking at/modifying data, refreshing & interacting with the browser, checking/double checking feature requirements, asking people about things.
For me, yes. It is possible as when working full-stack if you aren't being interrupted. Not all tasks, but some tasks, where you're pretty sure of the high-level requirements, have the necessary agency to stay in a bubble for a bit, and the task is sufficiently complex but narrow enough so you don't have to context switch too much.
With LLM Agents I can't seem to do it, as waiting for the agent to finish working just doesn't tickle my brain in the right way. I feel... distracted, I guess?
> where you're pretty sure of the high-level requirements, have the necessary agency to stay in a bubble for a bit, and the task is sufficiently complex but narrow enough
yea these kind of problems are the exact ones that claude code is very good at one shotting these days. If you can descibe in detail what needs to be done without context switching or research, then describe it to the LLM and bam
I've also mostly worked at small companies so the high level requirements are never well defined :D
I believe you can enter "flow state" with something like Claude Code, from what I've read, but it's mostly reduced to pressing 1 or 2 and typing a few prompts. The reward loop is much more closed now though, so it's a bit more akin to reaching flow state playing Tetris.
Having a deep intuition about what the calculator is doing is the skill we were actually being taught. Teachers don't know always understand why things are being taught.
> Teachers don't know always understand why things are being taught.
Yes, but I don't think that is the actual bottleneck, even when they do, most children probably don't care about abstract goals, but rather about immediate skills in their everyday life, or just the statement, that they will need it.
I guess I'm just trying to suggest that teachers sometimes might think they know why things are being taught, and make claims like "you wont always have a calculator" as the reason for learning mathematics.
One conclusion might be that it'd be better for some students if teachers understood the why, as they might change their approach on some subjects. An example: knowing that certain equations and patterns EXIST, and which kinds of problems they apply to, is generally much more important that knowing the actual equations by heart themselves.
What would make it interesting? Most of the animal mass on earth is livestock for human consumption. More animals are reared to replace the ones that are slaughtered.
It might be interesting for wild fish, but I'm not sure if there are accurate numbers for the wild populations remaining.
Sometimes I think the 30% was supposed to be 3% originally, and no one noticed the decimal was in the wrong place when they shipped it, and then people paid it anyway, so they kept it.
30% is just so unreasonable that it would be totally understandable if someone would believe this.
In 2008, the app store was launching, and physical software was still sold at Targets, Walmarts and other large retailers. A 30% margin was roughly what retailers would make off of physical software sales. By setting the App Store to be the same, Apple was signaling to retailers that they were not trying to undercut their margin, and keep a healthy relationship with them.
The carriers were taking about 70% in tariffs and fees even without you bribing them to get better positioning. That’s why all the mobile app people rushed to Apple in the early days. They could actually turn a profit on the App Store.
If probably be retired now if I wasn’t already so burnt out on how SMS tariffs worked at the time. Utterly opaque and on a delay. They basically wrote you a check for however much they felt like each month.
Essentially the reseller arm of carriers at that time was just a money funnel from VCs to the telcos. They were eating their own young and I was full up on the bullshit.
No one was buying boxed software in 2008. The second we had broadband, call it 2002-ish, everyone was downloading everything. For many of us that began in the 90s before we had broadband. Overnight downloads over 56K phone modems was already overtaking boxed purchases. More people downloaded Netscape in 1995 than bought it boxed.
Not disagreeing with your general point, but Netscape is probably a bad example here. People who wanted Netscape would have been much more likely to know how to download and wanted to download it. Compared to, say, video editing software, which would have much less correlation with web users back in 1995 when not everyone was a web user.
It was 2008; "big box" software was largely seen as obsolete to the vast majority of developers. Marketing was done online, and the benefit of investing in retail had stopped outweighing the consequences. Online updates quickly became the norm, and service features supplanted point-of-sale business model (much like Apple's double-dip into microtransaction profits).
Apple chose 30% because they knew they weren't a retailer. You can hunt for a cheaper Diablo II copy online or at Wal-Mart, but not on iPhone.
> It was 2008; "big box" software was largely seen as obsolete to the vast majority of developers.
Well, I'm just reporting it as I understood their decision in the moment. I was working on The Sims at that time, and I assure you, retailers still mattered to us bigly.
And what you quoted is my opinion as a consumer. Blizzard got it working in 1996, Valve figured it out in 2003 - the industry was moving on.
EA was an outlier, and by the time they capitulated and started Origin it was so bad that people regret signing up for the service. GoG didn't have this issue, Valve didn't have that issue, EA did.
Steam, the Kindle Store and iTunes all had similar sales cuts since before the app store launched in 2008.
It’s egregious now but at the time it wasn’t crazy because software developers often made way less than that when going through traditional publishing routes. Plus everyone was just happy to be making money off the new platform.
Juniors?
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