> bicycles ... has made us increasingly weak

This is pretty difficult for me to buy. Cycling has been shown time & again to be a great way to increase fitness.

> Cycling has been shown time & again to be a great way to increase fitness.

Compared to sitting on your butt in a car or public transport.

Perhaps not compared to walking everywhere and chasing the antelope you want to cook for lunch.

I think what he meant is that both bicycles and LLMs are a force multiplier and you still provide the core of the work, but not all of the work any more.

Cycling, in my experience, is usually way more intense than walking or even running/jogging. It just lets you cover larger distance and gives you more control over how your energy is used.

With the example of LLMs, sure, you could cycle the initial destination you were meant to walk to - write an article with its help, save a few hours and call it a day. Or you could cycle further and use the saved time to work on something a text model can't help you well with.

If we're nitpicking, are we talking about cycling as a sport or cycling as a means for getting from point A to point B?

I'm sure cultures where they cycle to everywhere all the time take it easier than cultures where going out for a bike ride is an event.

Just like with LLMs, cycling will allow you to expand your destinations significantly, so comparison with walking is irrelevant.

Not nitpicking, just playing along with the analogy, which i found not that far fetched

I once had blood clots in my legs. I couldn't walk in the worst parts of it but cycling down the street was easier than walking for more than ten metres. It's better than sitting on your butt for hours on end, sure.

GitHub's reliability has gotten pretty terrible since the Microsoft acquisition, well before ZIRP ended.

Generally agree with your point, but not sure I'd call 312 EV and a 1.6% margin a "landslide".

By modern standards it's huge. Everyone runs data-driven campaigns now, which is to say that they basically ignore all but the swing states, and Trump won all of the swing states.

Which is the same reason that for a Republican a 1.6% popular vote margin is massive. California isn't even close to a swing state so a Republican could flip 2M more votes there over what Trump got in 2016 and still lose the state, even though that by itself would increase their national popular vote margin by more than 2%. Trump got 1.5M more votes in California in 2024 than in 2016 and still lost the state by more than 3M votes. So Republican candidates for President ignore the entire West Coast and the Northeast -- huge population areas -- because losing there by 48 to 52 gains them nothing over losing by 30 to 70.

Democrats do the same thing in Texas and most of the South, but the blue states are bluer than the red states are red, so Republicans come into the median Presidential election with a deficit in the national popular vote and often lose the popular vote even when they win the electoral college, e.g. when Trump won in 2016 he lost the popular vote by more than 2%.

Democrats often fancy the idea of switching from the electoral college to a national popular vote thinking they would win more often, but it would really just change how both parties campaign. Republicans would start campaigning in blue states and vice versa but the safe blue states have more prospective votes for Republicans to flip. And under the existing system, any national popular vote win for a Republican is a landslide.

The better argument that people don't really like Trump that much is that he won so big mainly because the Democrats picked a weak candidate to run against him and they should have had an actual primary and picked someone better.

The point is that the Fed isn't classifying those things. "Ordinary" includes all primary mortgages, whether for a modest home or a luxury pad. It includes all personal car payments, whether for a shared Honda or a Maserati.

The phone tree stuff on Pixel is decent but nowhere near 100% reliable or robust.

If it hears and understands an automated system speaking out a phone tree, it will start to list the options and you can tap on them. Usually works but often doesn't recognize that a phone tree is happening. Other times it recognizes the phone tree, but mistranscribes the options.

As a non-deaf person, it's a handy UX improvement. But I wouldn't recommend that anyone rely on it.

These services are indeed great for those that need them. I received one or two years ago when I worked at a computer shop. Unfortunately they were always scammers, abusing the system.

Yea, FCC needs to do something about the scammers. They're causing a lot of shops to not accept relay calls because of this.

You captured some of the ideas that have been swimming around in my brain for a little while and really crystallized them. Couldn't agree more.

I think for a lot of founders, there is significant financial cost or opportunity cost upfront. Especially if you are bootstrapping.

Maybe but hallucinations become a real problem here. Even with publicly available API's that are just slightly off the beaten path, I've gotten full-on hallucinations that have derailed me and wasted time.

That's great internally, but serious external communication with customers should have a name attached and responsibility accepted (i.e., "the buck stops here").

Culture can’t just change like that.

Isn't the whole "Flutter team layoffs" narrative somewhat debunked at this point? My understanding is that some positions were cut and some were moved, but no more than any other engineering area at Google.

Budget was cut because priorities were stacked and Flutter wasn't high enough. That's exactly the existential risk when beholden to "the hydra."

Yes. Layoffs were across all departments.