We're already seeing other states struggling with soaring house insurance rates (California and Florida) and a pattern of spikes in rates leading government mandated caps on rates leading to insurers pulling out of the states.
I've no idea what the going rate for insurance is currently in New Orleans but it has to be crazy right?
I was curious just how much of a difference there was, so ran a quick eval comparing them and fwiw DeepSeek is considerably slower but much much ~5x cheaper than Haiku and fwiw ~35x cheaper than Claude Opus 4.7.
> I wouldn't be surprised if programmers had, collectively, written more game engines than actual games.
Tailored to web developers, there definitively are more half-finished frameworks sitting on people's disks than finished web applications, I'm sure my ratio is pretty close to 1/1 over the years.
Oh, that's exactly what I do. My rule is: one game, one engine. It's based on whatever the OS provides of course, or an abstraction layer like SDL, but everything above that is my own, tailored specifically to the game at hand.
Or when I wanted to write a novel and went into world-building fantasy enciclopedia for two years... I didn't even pass the page 2 of the novel, lol. Now it's all forgotten.
But how am I supposed to be productive writing blogposts unless I can copy my favorite Clojure templating library into Nix first, so I can have completely statically and reproducible blog posts building from markdown together with the nicest type of templating?
If we're all being honest, I'd rather read the Clojure/Nix templating blogpost instead of the 10,000th "why human interaction is important" bearblog essay.
yeah, part of my current writing push was made more successful by two things:
* I am not allowed to use a blogging system I wrote. (Really, I've written three or four at this point and need to stop, and there are plenty of existing systems that still align with my idiosyncratic constraints.)
* The blog must not have any meta content about blog tooling.
(I cheated a little on the latter by having an extra "site" blog for that - which lets me get the words out but doesn't "count" for the writing goal. A useful outlet, but it meant an extra month or so before "real writing" outnumbered meta writing :-)
I think it is great to combine two personal projects into one!
For me, I can't learn anything unless I actually have a purpose for it. So if I wanted to learn how to write a static site system, I would also need to think of a reason I need one!
one of my goals is to work on the server platform that i am using for my websites. i want to write a blog, but i am using that desire to push myself to work on the platform, so i need to complete that blog interface first.
I think writing a static site generator was the first moment I felt like I may be serious about this programming thing.
Those losers who still need Perl on their servers better be ready for a mind explosion
...thought, me back in (too lazy to look up which year it was). I probably published like two things with it, spent (what felt like) a million person hours on it, just to abandon it and use Textpattern.
But I am also currently writing version 2 of an app that utilizes a general-purpose application server that I wrote (took about seven months), at first. It's been shipping for a couple of years. The server does great, but is unwieldy. I suggest against writing general-purpose servers.
The new version uses a newer, more focused, server that is a lot lighter.
I was trying to get a better sense of the time cost quality matrix of these, so I threw together a quick eval of Sonnet 4.6, Mistral's dev model, and Opus 4.7 (figuring it's what you'd use if you were on Max).
The results for a function implementation and test of levenshtein distance in js are pretty similar but Mistral is 30x cheaper than Opus 4.7 and 4x faster than Sonnet 4.6.
Levenshtein distance is not only a well-understood problem, it's small, self-contained, and extremely well-represented in the training data. The kind of problem where even small/bad models can excel. The golden standard for those tasks is just "use a library" so no wonder the beefy models are expensive: you're chartering a commercial airplane to go grocery shopping.
My personal benchmarks are software engineering tasks (ideally spanning multiple packages in a monorepo) composed of many small decisions that, compounded, make or break the implementation and long-term maintainability.
There's where even frontier models struggle, which makes comparisons meaningful.
It’s making guesses not decisions, framing as decisions will lead you astray to wasted time and tokens.
It’s vaguely productive to tell them a ton of relevant info upfront attempting to minimise their need for load bearing guesses. I say vaguely because obedience is generally only around the level where it's good enough to lull you into a false sense of security, not to actually be obedient.
It’s a bit more productive to use the various loop mechanisms (hooks, /goal etc) to evaluate each end of turn against guard rails and reject with clear instruction on whats unacceptable. Obviously if you only do this without the front load of info then you’re likely to spend more tokens to reach a satisfactory end of iteration.
While you are correct that something like Antigravity 2 + Opus 4.6 can handle large scale software engineering tasks, I would argue that it is usually (but not always) better "coding agent hygiene" to work on smaller code modules and as the human in the loop be a partner, not someone who prompts and then disengages.
Breaking code up into composable chunks has worked well for me over 50+ years as a professional software developer, and I can't get away from the idea that it is still usually the way to go using agentic coding tools.
The one detail I did forget to mention is that if anyone goes with the Mistral subscription (instead of paying per-token), then the Mistral Vibe tool gives you their Medium 3.5 model by default, with a 200k token context. It will probably be enough for plenty of tasks, though there's also a noticeable difference between that and up to 1M.
I'd be curious to know if you consider a Lego store a "toy store". There's one that opened in my city fairly recently and is in an area of smaller boutique shops (kind of like what you described).
My plan was to just see if anyone wanted to actually use it first. That if I couldn't give it away I'd not invest the time in selling or open sourcing it.
I'd sort of designed it for my own needs first and hadn't thought too far beyond that.
Search ads do seem like the one ad type that kind of flips that though. Where it's not based on some general set of interests, but literally the thing you're searching for at that moment.
They seem like that, but in practice, human marketers are your adversaries, and they're buying ads on targeted search terms. I can search "better pancakes than Waffle House" and a marketer at Waffle House will have bought the ads so I just see ads for Waffle House's pancakes. This is not actually useful to me at all.
Yes, but you're missing the point, I'm not debating that. Renewables aren't free, we should care about consumption just as much as production, and we don't know (yet) how to sustain the current consumption with renewables only, that includes being able to manufacture renewables.
I took this a different way which was that to google railway is their customer and out of a variety of professional and security considerations want the communications to come from their customer and not them.
There's an interesting small YT channel that did a series on ACB + History
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hebq-fObdhY
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