agent281 (u/agent281)

agent281 commented on Has the cost of building software dropped 90%? martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/martinald

thfuran · 7 days ago

That's not a very convincing argument. Even if you can do 10x the work, that doesn't necessarily mean you can easily find customers ready to pay 5x the hourly rate.

agent281 · 6 days ago

I understood their comment as going from

$100 / hour * 100 hours

to

$100 / hour * 500 hours

not to

$500 / hour * 100 hours

agent281 commented on Has the cost of building software dropped 90%? martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/martinald

adriand · 7 days ago

Here's an example from this morning. At 10:00 am, a colleague created a ticket with an idea for the music plugin I'm working on: wouldn't it be cool if we could use nod detection (head tracking) to trigger recording? That way, musicians who use our app wouldn't need a foot switch (as a musician, you often have your hands occupied).

Yes, that would be cool. An hour later, I shipped a release build with that feature fully functional, including permissions plus a calibration UI that shows if your face is detected and lets you adjust sensitivity, and visually displays when a nod is detected. Most of that work got done while I was in the shower. That is the second feature in this app that got built today.

This morning I also created and deployed a bug fix release for analytics on one platform, and a brand-new report (fairly easy to put together because it followed the pattern of other reports) for a different platform.

I also worked out, argued with random people on HN and walked to work. Not bad for five hours! Do I know how long it would have taken to, for example, integrate face detection and tracking into a C++ audio plugin without assistance from AI? Especially given that I have never done that before? No, I do not. I am bad at estimating. Would it have been longer than 30 minutes? I mean...probably?

agent281 · 6 days ago

I appreciate this example. This does seem like a pretty difficult feature to build de novo. Did you already have some machine vision work integrated into your app? How are you handling machine vision? Is it just a call to an LLM API? Or are you doing it with a local model?

agent281 commented on AI coding agents are removing programming language barriers railsatscale.com/2025-07-... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

cultofmetatron · 5 months ago

I think AI will push programming languages in the direction of stronger hindly milner type type checking. Haskell is brutally hard to learn but with enough of a data set to learn from, its the perfect target language for a coding agent. its high level, can be formally verified using well known algos and a language server could easily be connected with the ai agent via some mcp interface.

agent281 · 5 months ago

IMO, Haskell is less helpful for an LLM because of its advanced language features. The LLM is reasoning about the language textually. Since Haskell is very tense, the LLM would need a very strong model of how the language works.

I think languages with more minimal features and really good compile time errors would work well with LLMs. In particular, I've heard multiple people say how good LLMs are at generating Go.

Personally, I like languages with type inference so this wouldn't be my preference.

agent281 commented on LLM code generation may lead to an erosion of trust jaysthoughts.com/aithough... · Posted by u/CoffeeOnWrite

whiplash451 · 6 months ago

> "innovation happens at the speed of trust"

You'll have to elaborate on that. How much trust was there in electricity, flight and radioactivity when we discovered them?

In science, you build trust as you go.

agent281 · 6 months ago

Have you heard of the War of the Currents?

> As the use of AC spread rapidly with other companies deploying their own systems, the Edison Electric Light Company claimed in early 1888 that high voltages used in an alternating current system were hazardous, and that the design was inferior to, and infringed on the patents behind, their direct current system.

> In the spring of 1888, a media furor arose over electrical fatalities caused by pole-mounted high-voltage AC lines, attributed to the greed and callousness of the arc lighting companies that operated them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_currents

agent281 commented on Death of Michael Ledeen, maker of the phony case for the invasion of Iraq spytalk.co/p/death-of-a-m... · Posted by u/nabla9

i80and · 7 months ago

Are we recovering? The knock-on damage you list seems to be accelerating if anything.

agent281 · 7 months ago

Fair enough!

agent281 commented on Death of Michael Ledeen, maker of the phony case for the invasion of Iraq spytalk.co/p/death-of-a-m... · Posted by u/nabla9

motorest · 7 months ago

> $2 trillion for that war. Next time let’s cure cancer(s).

Aren't there any positive tradeoffs in overthrowing the likes of Saddam Hussein?

agent281 · 7 months ago

Maybe? But it destabilized the Middle East, caused the migrant crisis in Europe, the migrant crisis caused a rise in right wing movements in Europe, it caused the rise of ISIS (lots of Iraqi ex-military), ISIS was involved in the the civil war in Syria, it caused a loss of faith in the American government, created a generation of disillusioned combat vets, so on and so forth.

I really think we're still recovering from the damage caused by Bush administration.

agent281 commented on There was a time when the US government built homes for working-class Americans theconversation.com/belie... · Posted by u/pseudolus

riffraff · 7 months ago

You'd need to build a lot more around the houses. Many "bad neighborhoods" in various countries started as affordable housing projects, but that's not enough to have a healthy social situation.

We need the housing, but it doesn't solve most issues.

agent281 · 7 months ago

I agree with GP. I would amend their claim with "most problems* could be solved by building high density housing and services in areas with jobs." I.e., build real cities.

Building homes on federal land in the middle of no where will not do anything for people. We just need to allow people to build housing where there is a demand for labor.

Some things I think would be solved include:

- the housing crisis

- mobility => it would be easier for people to move to other parts of the country because they would be less tied to their homes - labor mismatches

- climate change => less reliance on cars

- funding infrastructure => more dense infrastructure means you don't have as much infrastructure to repair and you have more people paying for it

- city government budgets => high density areas are more tax efficient

- home insurance => the homes on the outskirts of cities are most likely to burn down; if housing is cheap the cost to insure it will be cheaper as well

IMO, if housing is 30-60% of peoples budgets and transportation is another 10-20%, if you can bring those costs down you can de-stress a lot of people. That might make politics less intense too.

* "Most problems" is not strictly accurate. But "more problems than you might think are directly related to housing" doesn't really roll off the tongue.

agent281 commented on Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated asteriskmag.com/issues/10... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

ImJamal · 8 months ago

A lot of retired people would lose their houses so it would be a political disaster to remove it.

agent281 · 8 months ago

Yeah, I think we should keep that aspect of prop 13. That is what it was originally billed as.

It just doesn't make sense that golf courses pay taxes that are more aligned with the 70's property values.

If there was ever a major change to prop 13 taxes, I think we would need to phase in the new taxes over a five to ten year period. Otherwise, the market would be thrown into chaos.

agent281 commented on Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated asteriskmag.com/issues/10... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

ActorNightly · 8 months ago

I mean, majority vote for a certain candidates should do it. If enough people bothered to vote, it could happen.

agent281 · 8 months ago

You would need to overturn the proposition directly. The state Congress can't overturn it so you would need another proposition. That's a "simple" majority vote, but it's the third rail of California politics. We almost got it removed for businesses, but COVID happened and people were not in the mood for raising taxes.

agent281 commented on Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated asteriskmag.com/issues/10... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

babyent · 8 months ago

Right but have you flown for business every few days like that? It seems like you’re still thinking about leisure travel between LA and SF.

My whole point was about business flight. Sure for leisure I’ll take a train. But if I’m flying for work I’d rather deal with a consistent (mostly, compared to any rail I’ve taken) experience.

agent281 · 8 months ago

I would not describe LA to SF as a consistent experience. I had an 8:30 PM flight delayed until 1:30 AM. Actually, the only consistency I've had with those flights is that they are consistently delayed.

I've heard that the flight delays cascade throughout the day. So if the first flight is 10 minutes delayed, all SF-LA flights are delayed for the rest of the day. Since SFO has a lot of fog, my understanding is that it's often delayed.

Maybe it's okay coming from Burbank, but I live on the Westside so I have to take LAX.

I would love to have another option. Ideally, a train would decrease the load on the airlines so that they could handle delays better.

To answer your question directly, no I don't have to do work trips every couple of days, but I do have work trips from LA to SF every couple of months.