Note: the title of the paper is "Writing Code vs. Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools", which is 10 characters too long.
I asked Claude Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3 Thinking, and Gemini 3 Fast "Tell me about the Siberian marmoset" exactly and all 4 said it doesn't exist, with Gemini Thinking suggesting that I'm thinking of the Siberian marmot or Siberian chipmunk (both real animals).
Yes, winters are getting worse and worse, but this year was really bad, way worse than any predictions. I was in Park City in February and there was so little snow it looked like summer, and that was before the streak of warm and dry weather this article is talking about. I literally hiked up to the 2002/2034 Olympic facilities in 55 degree weather with no snow on the ground, while the Olympics were still going on in Milan. And I was in Park City because they had more snow than Colorado...
In addition to the current supply constraint keeping prices high, mortgages being fixed rate means higher interest rates don't really drive prices down (although lower interest rates do drive prices up). If you have a mortgage for $600k at 3% interest rate and rates go to 6.6% (like they are now), the naive loan math says your house is now worth $400k. Who has $200k in equity built up in their home and is willing to walk away from it? Virtually no one, so prices stay high until people get desperate to sell.
This leads to the fun conclusion that raising interest rates might actually make inflation worse. Rent/rent equivalent is already 30% of CPI, so increases in housing costs have a big effect on overall inflation.
For what it's worth, that's already a thing in NYC. NYC shares the ticket revenue for illegally idling vehicles with the reporter, and so some people have made 6 figures in one year reporting idling vehicles[1]. There was a push to get a similar provision in a recent bill about illegal parking in bus and bike lanes, but they ended up just allowing citizen complaints with no bounty payout.
That guy's continued breathing is a testament to how good NYC's surveillance dragnet is or at least how good people think it is.
I can't imagine doing what that guy does at the scale he does. Like you can only wrong so many people until you run across the guy for whom you are the final straw. Though I guess that might be why he mostly runs a ring these days instead of being on the street.
Nobody is going kill someone for reporting idling trucks. The drivers of these trucks don't care; the company tells them to idle and swallows the fine (typically bartered down in bulk).
If you go around doing it you'll make a name for yourself. Couriers, ubers, delivery drivers, they all have social media. Eventually you'll run across the guy who "wrong pedals" you.
Sure, I suppose it could happen in that case. There's no public evidence of any such occurrence, however; most of the city's truck traffic is big companies, and I don't see why any driver would risk prison time to stave off an idling ticket that Amazon, etc. is just going to negotiate down in court anyways.
Pretty much everyone who depends on small business in NYC hates the government and law enforcement of NYC and sees them as revenuers (Louis Rossman covers this in detail on his youtube channel, to mention someone who's respected here on HN). The idea that someone would help them for a cut is incredibly disgusting to most people who live in this world.
It's incredibly foreseeable that some guy in the cab of a box truck who's distracted with his dispatch iPad looks up to see some guy taking pictures, puts two and two together and puts the truck in drive. They don't hire middle class techies to drive these trucks. Your morals don't translate to onto some 20yo guy from Newark. And they also don't translate into his hotheaded 16yo helper who runs with a less than law abiding crowd and you didn't see come out of the building just behind.
I've lived here my whole life, and I know a fair number of people who drive trucks (and cabs, and do food delivery) for a living. Again: it's possible, but I have never heard of anybody even getting a beatdown over this, much less getting killed.
> Like I said, the risk ain't worth my life.
Then don't take it! But I don't think the evidence supports treating the average truck driver as a psycho who's one idling ticket away from vehicular manslaughter.
Edit: as a case in point: Kuntzman[1] has been going around the city fixing car - including plenty of cop car - license plates for years. I think the worst he's gotten is verbal abuse, and he's doing something much more overt and aggressive.
Most of the inflation from the last 4 years is attributable to Russia invading Ukraine. You can't have the largest natural gas exporter and second largest oil exporter invade one of the largest grain exporters without causing basically everything in a supermarket or restaurant to be more expensive.
Also shipping interruptions and lockdowns. Giving people money to not work is goin to have a much larger inflationary effect than giving people money to build things we want.
> Most of the inflation from the last 4 years is attributable to Russia invading Ukraine
Source? Other than media articles repeating "due to the war in Ukraine"
Assuming you are talking about the USA, supposedly the USA is a net /exporter/ of grains [0]
[0] Not loading for me but https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic... . Copilot said "The United States is a net grain exporter. According to the USDA Economic Research Service (ERS), the U.S. typically exports more agricultural goods, including grains, than it imports1. In fiscal year 2023, the value of U.S. agricultural exports was $178.7 billion, despite a decline from the previous year. Grains and feeds are among the leading U.S. agricultural exports"
To put a name on this, it's the Baumol effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect. Essentially, as productivity increases in most industries (from automation), it drives up labor costs in the industries that can't be automated (healthcare, education, performing arts, etc), which drives up the price of those services (healthcare), or drives down the quality to find a market clearing price (increasing student to teacher ratios).
This is a cry for help, not some myopic bureaucrat thinking they're clever. Most of the USFS budget goes to forest fires (both fighting them and prevention), up from 16% 30 years ago, and they're now saying just fighting the fires is taking up too much of their budget to do much of anything else. The USFS already announced they won't hire any seasonal employees next year, which means basic things like emptying trash cans probably won't happen.
Unless you think they should just let the fires burn, which would be catastrophic.
Also it needs to be contextualized further: fighting wildfires is done to save lives. When they have to make a distinction between funding for prescribed burns, which are a mitigation but not prevention measure, and having the people and resources on hand to defend settlements then they're going to choose the latter.
Prescribed burns are treated as a panacea whenever there's wildfires, but they are only a mitigation strategy - you're still always going to have wildfires, the degree of severity and in what areas is what matters (they're also not cheap: it is after all, just starting a forest fire you try to keep under control).
Firefighting is only done to save property. People are completely beside the point. The problem is people don't know when they live in a town (defensible) and the countryside (you're on your own). In general the forest service is spending way too much time and resources in places that they should always let burn. You can actually build and live in a forest fire zone. Its much more convenient to ignore that though.
>Unless you think they should just let the fires burn, which would be catastrophic.
Why? I think it's probably the best thing to do. If the USG doesn't want to allocate enough money to properly manage forests, then why not just let it burn? If that results in some towns burned down, that's fine: voters in those towns can complain to their elected representatives and maybe vote for someone else.
Update: the voters in these towns have voted now, and they voted overwhelmingly for the party that wants to cut federal spending, so I think "let it burn" is absolutely the right thing to do now, and is likely what's going to happen.
Yeah, I think this leads to some of the misconceptions about Brutalism. People think of the violent and aggressive connotations of the word, when it really just means "raw" like unpainted, or more accurately as opposed to the sculpted concrete of Art Deco. Being associated with Soviet and low-income apartment buildings, and urban decay in general, didn't help though.
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