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> I'm terrified of the good enough to ship—and I'm terrified of nobody else caring.
I get the emotion, but factually, the author doesn't need to worry so much.
We've always had cheaper, inexperienced developers shipping code that is the bare minimum to get the product out the door. All of capitalism has been about delivering the minimum quality necessary make money.
Fortunately, economic competition ensures that businesses are constantly trying to deliver a better product than their competition. Which in some contexts means the same thing for cheaper, but in others means better quality at a given higher price.
As long as there is economic demand for higher-quality software, it will continue to be produced. This is structural. It doesn't matter how much starts as LLM output because it's still architected, code gets reviewed, tested, bugs get filed. Because economic competition requires it to be or else you'll go out of business.
And if there's new demand for lower-quality software, for lots of one-off scripts that people can get an LLM to write, or GUI frontends for command-line tools, or whatever it is, then that's amazing too! Even if they're "slop", they're useful and accessible and correctly treated as temporary or disposable. There's nothing wrong with that, and it doesn't mean those tools are going to affect or replace serious software like Photoshop or macOS or whatever.
AI cope regarging "you can still carefully design, AI wont take away your creative control or care for the craft" is the new "there's no problem with C's safety and design, devs just need to pay more attention while coding" or the "I'm not alcoholic, I can quit anytime" of 2026...
I think it makes use of GitHub models.
You find the private keys wherever the owners stored them.
Sorry, but this reads like AI slop.
You'll never know because there aren't that many good films to review.
I started programming 40 years ago as well. The magic for me was never that "you could talk to your computer and it had a personality".
That was the layman version of computing, something shown to the masses in movies like War Games and popular media, one that we mocked.
I also lived through the FOSS peak. The current proprietary / black-box / energy lock in would be seen as the stuff of nightmares.
I really feel this. I can make meaningful progress on half a dozen projects in the course of a day now but I end the day exhausted.
I've had conversations with people recently who are losing sleep because they're finding building yet another feature with "just one more prompt" irresistible.
Decades of intuition about sustainable working practices just got disrupted. It's going to take a while and some discipline to find a good new balance.
1. Containers aren't a security boundary. Yes they can be used as such, but there is too much overhead (privilege vs unprivileged, figuring out granular capabilities, mount permissions, SELinux/AppArmor/Seccomp, gVisor) and the whole thing is just too brittle.
2. lxd VMs are QEMU-based and very heavy. Great when you need full desktop virtualization, but not for this use case. They also don't work on macOS.
Using Apple virtualization framework (which natively supports lightweight containers) on macOS and a more barebones virtualization stack like Firecracker on Linux is really the sweet spot. You get boot times in milliseconds and the full security of a VM.
Or the Epstein files, for that matter
They have separate kitchens for the prep, the cleaners work while they’re out on the yacht, they have people to do the buying, and the restaurants they visit have very well trained staff who stay out of the way.
Those images make me think of
https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2024/02/15/the-rat-with-t...
No, but you might be the only person here who missed "The team found that the AMOC will only weaken by about 18 to 43 percent by the end of the 21st century."
The idiotic article then downplays this horrific numbers because "Yeah, 43 percent is a lot, but it’s nowhere near what other climate models project". As if even a 20%-25% is not very bad already.
And that's just one cherry-picked study, whereas the majority of the studies predict worse outcomes. But sure, let's pick the sole nicer looking as the comforting winner - the "just" 18%-43% reduction "nice" one.
Kahnemann had the intellectual honesty to accept that large parts of his book are flawed, and he called on psychologists to clean up their act by doing a systematic multiple reproduction study program:
https://www.nature.com/news/polopoly_fs/7.6716.1349271308!/s...
Which is why it is relevant to foster a native Linux gaming ecosystem, and not one that depends on running Windows games.
They’ll have to get rid of those cookie banners first.
I was impressed with my M4 mini when I got it a year ago but sometime after the Liquid Glass update it is now: beachball… beachball… beachball… reboot… beachball… beachball… Reminds me of the bad old days of Win XP.
I enjoy the kind of problem solving you are describing there too. That's why I like being able to point LLMs at them first - if they can find the fix I get to save a bunch of time and spend it on more interesting problems, and if they can't find the fix then I know I'm going to have a great time digging into a really gnarly problem myself!
it states how much it costs but not how much faster it is
Everybody that I know that reads SF has their own favorite Ursula K. Le Guin story. I have a hard time because I have two. 'The Lathe of Heaven' and 'The Left Hand of Darkness'.
You should still add an IAP to the Play Store build, and make it "paid" even if it has no different features. There are dozens of us who support OSS apps, dozens!
> science has advanced to the point, where we no longer consider there to be “unexplored” realms, in science
It’s interesting that the last time this vividly happened was on the eve of massive technological advancement, social change and a world war.
That's not the best solution for image or video (or audio, or 3D) any more than it is for LLMs (which it also supports.)
OTOH, its the most flexible and likely to have some support for what you are doing for a lot of those, and especially if yoj are combining multiple of them in the same process.
Not really, because when they are feed into agents, those agents will take over tasks that previously required writing some kinds of classical programming.
I have already watched integrations between SaaS being deployed with agents instead of classical middleware.
> I got my first model train when I was 2 years old, and my dad wouldn’t let me play with it. So he ran it around the Christmas tree and I had to watch.
I wonder how many kids had this happen to them.
The question is the performance optimisations on top.
1990's compilers were also super fast, they only did optimisation for size, speed, constant propagation, and little else.
Zero code motion, loop unroling, code elision, heap via stack replacement, inlining,...
> The Web of Trust failed for PGP 30 years ago. Why will it work here?
It didn't work for links as reputation for search once "SEO" people started creating link farms. It's worse now. With LLMs, you can create fake identities with plausible backstories.
This idea won't work with anonymity. It's been tried.
25% of global annual auto sales are EVs as of 2025. 50% in China, the largest auto market in the world. This will only accelerate. Norway is already effectively at 100%, the rest will follow in time.
US legacy auto is just squeezing profits from what’s left until they turn out the lights. EVs didn’t fail, the US automotive industry did.
https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/trends-in...
https://electrek.co/2025/12/17/25-percent-of-new-cars-sold-g...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-ev-leapfrog-how...
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/automakers-ev-china-ford-gm....
https://electrek.co/2026/02/03/even-after-cutting-ev-incenti...
On the American Spectator:
How about bug fixing? Give someone a repo with a tricky bug, ask them to figure it out with the help of their coding agent of choice.
C-subset, to be precise; but microcomputer C compilers were in the tens of KB range, for one that can actually compile real C.
I really reasonate with this post, I too appreciate "Good Code"(tm). In a discussion on another forum I had a person tell me that "Reading the code that coding agents produce is like reading the intermediate code that compilers produce, you don't do that because what you need to know is in the 'source.'"
I could certainly see the point they were trying to make, but pointed out that compilers produced code from abstract syntax trees, and the created abstract syntax trees by processing tokens that were defined by a grammar. Further, the same tokens in the same sequence would always produce the same abstract syntax tree. That is not the case with coding 'agents'. What they produce is, by definition, an approximation of a solution to the prompt as presented. I pointed out you could design a lot of things successfully just assuming that the value of 'pi' was 3. But when things had to fit together, they wouldn't.
We are entering a period where a phenomenal amount of machine code will be created that approximates the function desired. I happen to think it will be a time of many malfunctioning systems in interesting and sometimes dangerous ways.
No. It's not your identity, it's a piece of software. "I use ____ for as long as the benefits outweigh the drawbacks" is what you should be thinking.
> Also, on a personal level it rubs me the wrong way to have my insurance premiums go towards something that people could just do themselves, from something they did to themselves. I know many will disagree, of course, and there are other examples (say, lung cancer treatments) that are similar.
Our Obsession With Personal Responsibility Is Making Us Sick - https://jacobin.com/2026/02/health-inequality-individual-res... - February 6th, 2026
What coding agent are you using where the code doesn't even compile!?
> After 6 weeks in Taiwan, one thing became very evident, mainland China can take the island in 3 days without firing a single shot
This does not reflect the opinions of any military person I know who has knowledgeably commented on the topic, all of whom have spent quite a bit longer than 6 weeks on Taiwan.
You're welcome!
One of the fun things about Empire is one isn't out to save humanity, but to conquer! Hahahaha.
BTW, one of my friends is using ClodCode to generate an Empire clone by feeding it the manual. Lots of fun!
> blantatly skirting patent laws
Can you please explain (TFA doesn't mention patent laws, just unregulated drugs)? For example, my understanding is that semaglutide is protected by patent in the US - I had assumed HIMS was including semaglutide in some of their formulations under an agreement with the patent holder, but I guess that's not correct?
Side note, I'm all for the true innovators being able to patent drugs (like semaglutide) that they put a lot of research dollars into, but seriously fuck all these additional "method of delivery" and "formulation" patents that are bullshit that just get added on later by the patent holder solely as a way to try to restrict the entry of generics into the market after the original patent expires.
That's literally what automation is. You could make the same argument against the power loom. People did!
Try this: https://wapo.st/4qqatnA
Meaning or not, UBI doesn't work because the math doesn't work.
> bizarre
It isn't bizarre at all. Without work people devolve into playing video games and smoking pot in their mom's basement.
I remember summer vacations from school. It was great for a while, but soon I was looking forward to getting back to school.
It is wild that it took until 2026 for this to happen.
In the late 1990s, when my friends wanted mushrooms or 5MEO-DMT, they'd order from "Poisonous Non-Consumables" catalogs. Today, people are literally doing that (same words, even!), but for the next iteration of GLP1 drugs not yet on the wider market. Compounding pharmacies are selling "research chemicals", like in Bitcoin Mining Profit Calculator: Gaiden.
> nothing we want is on the other side
Wow.
> You decided the rest of the solar system is dead, not the scientific community.
The odds are heavily stacked against other life existing, and get worse with every probe. Of course, nobody can prove there is no other life. And it's not very credible that Terran life will out-compete locally evolved life.
And the idea that preserving some slime mold on Pluto justifies us constraining ourselves to Earth is just sad.
> If you really can't comprehend the reason why Elon Musk is villified by people then there's no point in trying to explain it to you.
I once asked another Musk-hater on HN why? All he could come up with is Musk called a diver a pedo-boy. I pointed out that Musk only did that because the diver went on national TV and told Musk to shove his submarine up his backside.
If you've got a better reason, I'd love to hear it!
The problem with naming my consulting clients that some of them won't want to be named. I don't want to turn down paid work because I have a popular blog.
I have a very strong policy that I won't write about someone because they paid me to do so, or asked me to as part of a consulting engagement. I guess you'll just have to trust me that I'll hold to that. I like to hope I've earned the trust of most of my readers.
I do have a structural conflict, which is one of the reasons my disclosures page exists. I don't value things like early access enough to avoid writing critically about companies, but the risk of subtle bias is always there. I can live with that, and I trust my readers can live with it too.
I've found myself in a somewhat strange position where my hobby - blogging about stuff I find interesting - has somehow grown to the point that I'm effectively single-handedly running an entire news agency covering the world's most valuable industry. As a side-project.
I could commit to this full-time and adopt full professional journalist ethics - no accepted credits, no free travel etc. I'd still have to solve the revenue side of things, and if I wrote full time I'd give up being a practitioner which would damage my ability to credibly cover the space. Part of the reason people trust me is that I'm an active developer and user of these tools.
On top of that, some people default to believing that the only reason anyone would write anything positive about AI is if they were being paid to do so. Convincing those people otherwise is a losing battle, and I'm trying to learn not to engage.
So I'm OK with my disclosures and principles as they stand. They may not get a 100% pure score from everyone, but they're enough to satisfy my own personal ethics.
I have just added disclosures links to the footer to make them easier to find - thanks for the prod on that: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/commit/95291fd26...
These two examples are not equally unlikely. They are of different orders of unlikelihood, the one is extremely unlikely, the other simply impossible.
> has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?
Yes. SLAC has an excellent public-lecture series that touches on industrial uses of particle colliders [1].
If you want a concrete example, "four basic technologies have been developed to generate EUV light sources:" (1) synchrotron radiation, (2) discharge-produced plasma, (3) free-elecron lasers (FELs) and (4) laser-produced plasma [2]. Synchrotrons are circular colliders. FELs came out of linear colliders [3]. (China has them too [4].)
We have modern semiconductors because we built colliders.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M6sjEYCE2I&list=PLFDBBAE492...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S270947232...
[3] https://lcls.slac.stanford.edu
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Synchrotron_Radiation...
Yeah I don't understand. Is it actually saying that fast mode is ten times more expensive than normal mode? I cannot be reading this right.
How can Microsoft legally do that? Notepad++ is GPL-licensed open source. It's on Github.[1]
Yup. If you follow the links to the original JP Morgan quote, it's not crazy:
> Big picture, to drive a 10% return on our modeled AI investments through 2030 would require ~$650 billion of annual revenue into perpetuity, which is an astonishingly large number. But for context, that equates to 58bp of global GDP, or $34.72/month from every current iPhone user...
To be clear, this is the horrible "new" Notepad "app" that I absolutely hated and instantly removed when it was forced upon everyone. I doubt the old "edit field in a wrapper" one which has been nearly the same since Win95 has this problem.
(My newest machine is now running Linux.)
What can we use fields of GPUs for next?
Some years ago I was at the Burger King near the cable car turntable at Powell and Market St in San Francisco. Some of the homeless people were talking about the days when they'd been printers. Press operators or Linotype operators. Jobs that had been secure for a century were just - gone.
That's the future for maybe half of programmers.
Remember, it's only been three years since ChatGPT. This is just getting started.
I feel like a lot of comments here are missing the point. I think the article does a fairly good job neither venerating nor demonizing AI, but instead just presenting it as the reality of the situation, and that reality means that the craft of programming and engineering is fundamentally different than it was just a few years ago.
As an (ex-)programmer in his late 40s, I couldn't agree more. I'm someone who can be detail-oriented (but, I think also with a mind toward practicality) to the point of obsession, and I think this trait served me extremely well for nearly 25 years in my profession. I no longer think that is the case. And I think this is true for a lot of developers - they liked to stress and obsess over the details of "authorship", but now that programming is veering much more towards "editor", they just don't find the day-to-day work nearly as satisfying. And, at least for me, I believe this while not thinking the change to using generative AI is "bad", but just that it's changed the fundamentals of the profession, and that when something dies it's fine to mourn it.
If anything, I'm extremely lucky that my timing was such that I was able to do good work in a relatively lucrative career where my natural talents were an asset for nearly a quarter of a century. I don't feel that is currently the case regarding programming, so I'm fortunate enough to be able to leave the profession and go into violin making, where my obsession with detail and craft is again a huge asset.
Looking at the "Decide when to use fast mode", it seems the future they want is:
- Long running autonomous agents and background tasks use regular processing.
- "Human in the loop" scenarios use fast mode.
Which makes perfect sense, but the question is - does the billing also make sense?
No, it's more like moving from line cook, to head chef in charge of 30 cooks.
Food's getting made, but you focus on the truly creative part -- the menu, the concept, the customer experience. You're not boiling pasta or cutting chives for the thousandth time. The same way now you're focusing on architecture and design now instead of writing your 10,000th list comprehension.
After exceeding the increasingly shrinking session limit with Opus 4.6, I continued with the extra usage only for a few minutes and it consumed about $10 of the credit.
I can't imagine how quickly this Fast Mode goes through credit.
> Surely some of that is lag time in economic policy
Why? What if constantly launching foreign wars, leveraging up the financial system and running up deficits isn’t sound economic policy?
See, I can push back on that! Dazed & Confused barely has a plot. It knows what it's about. Hackers has one of those shake-and-bake 80s plots; it's like a Save The Cat movie. I get that people like the subculture stuff in it, but the movie was trying for something else and faceplanted.
Honestly I think Lawnmower Man might have had more cultural impact.
It was because there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now.
Yes. Von Braun wrote an otherwise realistic novel in which earth's explorers find intelligent life on Mars.[1] Heinlein wrote realistically of native intelligent life on Mars and Venus, with far more benign environments then they actually have. But once probes got there, we got to see how bleak they are.
There's a little hope for extrasolar planets, now that we can detect some of them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale
No. You had a choice. I voted for Harris (who I do not like as a progressive) instead of chaos and destruction, others had the same choice. To not vote out of protest was a vote for this.
Better luck next time. ~2M voters 55+ age out every year. Can we do better? Remains to be seen.
> The installer, written in Python, often failed because of incorrect assumptions about the target environment and almost always required some manual intervention to complete successfully.
Nothing ever changes. I spent half a day just getting some SDR development stuff to work just now, long live Python code with baked in hard dependencies on particular versions of obscure libraries... In the end it worked, but what a mess.
One of my elderly uncles was in this position, but he was a bit more responsible about it than your grandfather. His way to solve it was like this: he sold his car at a discount to someone else in the same building on the condition that when he needs transport they'll drive him. It works out well, he only uses it when he absolutely has to and the rest of the time he either walks or has stuff delivered. It was a painful decision for him but in the end it worked out well (and I'm the backup driver but I'm about 100 km away from where he lives so it would always take me at least an hour to get there).
> absolutely think that there is a better way to educate than tests and textbooks
Genuine question: why? Specifically, why with textbooks?
Even if textbooks are suboptimal, they’re the way a lot of human information is organized. Just developing the skill of being able to work through a textbook is probably massively productive.
More of a comment than a question:
> Those of us building software factories must practice a deliberate naivete
This is a great way to put it, I've been saying "I wonder which sacred cows are going to need slaughtered" but for those that didn't grow up on a farm, maybe that metaphor isn't the best. I might steal yours.
This stuff is very interesting and I'm really interested to see how it goes for you, I'll eagerly read whatever you end up putting out about this. Good luck!
EDIT: oh also the re-implemented SaaS apps really recontextualizes some other stuff I’ve been doing too…
That's my experience too. And my employer has generally internalized it into their process: instead of negotiating over what code to write, write it all the ways, A/B test them, and negotiate over which code to launch once you have more data about how different approaches might affect user behavior.
Interestingly though, the experimentation process itself seems very under-optimized, and so it is frequently the bottleneck.
Better yet, look at the power output of a femtosecond laser (e.g. some unremarkable tabletop experiment in a lab in Clark Hall is many GW at peak!)
But I think it's not silly, it's at the heart of what a rocket is and how it compares to other technologies like, say, an airplane powered by a jet engine.
I dunno. People in the 20th century definitely seemed to think that cultures we'd imagine are related in the west (Japan and China) have different attitudes about hygiene.
> - Running unmodified Linux programs on Windows
This might actually be my favourite use: I always thought WSL2 was a kludge, and WSL1 to be somewhat the fulfilment of the "personality modules" promise of Windows NT.
Tell claude to build a functional website using plain html and css and no frameworks and it'll do it in a second. Now try that with a junior dev.
Anime went from science-fiction dominated in the 1980s (Gundam) to fantasy-dominated (Friern) today. The strange thing about fantasy was it lived under the shadow of Tolkien and Lewis which I think suppressed it for half a century.
It certainly was easier to get an academic job circa 1960. Things have gotten more difficult in physics because the experimental frontier has moved further away, I mean, you can make whatever theory you want and it is meaningless because we don’t have a machine that can measure the neutrino mass, observe neutrino decay, confirm physics at the GUT or string scale, detect the darkon, etc.
Even something like Mandelbrot’s work was disappointing if you were in grad school in the 1990s because it was not like enough progress was made in fractals post-Mandelbrot that you could get a job working on fractals or chaos.
But that's the killer feature for me! I always forget the little commands I've written over the years, whereas a leading comma will easily let me list them.
Their incentive is to keep the browsers good enough to not lose market share. Other than that, the incentive is to either close the web down, or to make the experience as shitty as possible without leading users to switch away, so they can steer users towards the more closed-down native apps.
Unfortunately, companies have an incentive to put us into walled gardens, so the only company that actually cares about the web is the company whose only business model is selling a browser.
Seconding both points. I'm not one of those cases, as I could already sing decently, but I've seen people go from "terrible" to singing professionally.
I also agree that the linked page isn't useful, it's more of a glossary than anything, but then again, I'm not convinced that a distinction between head voice and chest voice actually exists. I've never been able to tell any qualitative difference, as opposed to, for example, falsetto, and the community can't really agree on whether they actually are a thing or not.
I grew up in Brazil, where we had a very successful program for cars running on ethanol fuel with a little gasoline added. It was common to have certain models of car be offered as gasoline or ethanol (back then engines needed to be tuned for one) powered.
At least one car magazine would buy retail cars and fully disassemble them for analysis a year later. The difference between a gas and an ethanol engine was quite shocking - the ethanol engine was always clean and displayed less wear than the gas version of the same engine. Part measurement indicated no significant difference in wear between the engines. There were models only offered with ethanol engines because they offered a little more power because of higher compression rate.
People are somewhat surprised about this work being farmed out to the Philippines as opposed to being done by Americans. I'm pretty sure you don't need me to explain this, though.
With TOS Star Trek movies, the usual claim is that you should avoid the odd numbered ones.
I think people mostly like the cool balloons Annie draws for us.
The Internet Archive probably has it already.
I just find it interesting what these sites are able to get away with to get people to part with their money.
That reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy%27s_Chocolate_Experience
...which ironically has crossed the line into "so bad it's good" territory.
> It comes at the cost of locality,
It need not; you can have more proportional representative in a district based system (and still also have vote-for-person), using multimember districts with a system like Single-Transferrable Vote.
You can also get finer grained proportionality with Mixed Member Proportional which combines a district-based system (either single-member or a multimember proportional system described above) with top-up representation from party lists.
MMP would require Constitutional change in the US; but multimember districts with STV (in states with more than one seat, as well as increasing the size of the House so more states would have more than one seat) can be done by Congress without Constitutional amendment.
Surely you understand there's a massive difference between crypto scams and fake boner pills, vs. real genuine potato chips that now come in a slightly smaller size or phones that don't work for quite as many years as you'd like?
Run the rest of them down? Figure out the total scope of the fraud, so we can enact countermeasures to prevent anything like it from happening again?
Fraud targeting social welfare programs is a grave crime; it strikes at public support for those programs. It enriches criminals very specifically at the expense of those people who would most benefit from the program.
TouchID is a good starting point... though it does confirm your password weekly.
Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but if I lose my memory, how am I supposed to remember the 7 (or 5) friends who have my password...?
Somewhat less tongue-in-cheek, if you really wanted to be serious about your friends not being able to produce your password now for the lolz, then you'd actually want to ensure they were merely acquaintances who didn't know each other and couldn't find each other, e.g. not all Facebook friends. In which case the list of friends becomes essentially as important as the password, and then how do you remember where you've stored that list?
In reality, hopefully you can just entrust your master password with your closest family (spouse, parent, adult children), assuming they're not going to drain your bank account or read your private digital journal.
I had a bunch of those fancy lipid tests and they didn’t tell a story different from the usual tests.
Right, I was taught that in 4th grade by the nuns.
What I was not taught was the archontic ass-demon Thaphabaoth.
Signed into law.
New York governor signs law allowing medical aid in dying for terminally ill residents - https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/new-york-governor-s... - February 6th, 2026
To be fair, the threat landscape changed, too.
The point is that 20% of features doesn't satisfy even 20% of users. It's going to be only a tiny fraction of that because something like 99% of potential users are going to need at least one feature outside the 20%. And if a competitor has all the features they need, but you don't, then you lose the sale.
It has competition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epirus_Leonidas