I had this exact same experience in ravenswood this weekend. I was walking to breakfast and one of these bots was blocking the entirety of the shoveled part of the sidewalk. I had to make may way into the snow to inch around the bot just so I could continue to use the sidewalk.
I had guessed it was stopped because it came to an unshoveled portion of the sidewalk. If it can't traverse that, it's not made for this city
I'm not fundamentally mad as these bots. But if they don't figure out how to make them work with other pedestrians, then I'm going to start cheering on any vandalism delivered upon them.
> I had guessed it was stopped because it came to an unshoveled portion of the sidewalk. If it can't traverse that, it's not made for this city
Have them partner with the city and collect evidence of unshoveled sidewalks. Automatically issue fines based off the collected video evidence.
This is one of those things where if these bots cannot traverse a section of sidewalk, many with mobility issues cannot either. And it's endemic to the city.
In my neighborhood there are $5m+ houses that literally never shovel their sidewalk the entire year, as well as a few businesses on "main drag" retail corridors. Fines for this have become exceptionally rare to non existent.
I wholeheartedly agree that it's significantly worse than single-payer, but to say it hurt young people simply doesn't match reality as I saw it play out.
The ACA allowed me to get insurance for the first time since I'd left home several years before. I knew lots of other freelancers at the time who were in the same boat.
Of course in the following years, insurers found plenty of loopholes to increase prices significantly year over year - and this is why leaving the middlemen in the middle was a TERRIBLE choice - but at the very least the quality of those plans still has a reasonable low bar.
I still find myself on the ACA from time to time. I can't afford it. But the plans are still significantly better and thus more affordable than what was available before.
Whenever people visit during the warmer months, I almost always recommend or take them on the Architectural tour. The tour guides are knowledgeable, friendly, and tell great stories. The actual tour is a treat - even if you don't care about the architecture or history, it's a nice way to spend some time on the river. And there's a bar on the boat. My 5-year-old even sat still for the whole ride last month (and there's a place to get ice-cream you can eat while waiting in line to board).
This is what slows me down most. The initial implementation of a well defined task is almost always quite fast. But then it's a balance of either...
* Checking it closely myself, which sometimes takes just as long as it would have taken me to implement it in the first-place, with just about as much cognitive load since I now have to understand something I didn't write
* OR automating the checking by pouring on more AI, and that takes just as long or longer than it would have taken me to check it closely myself. Especially in cases where suddenly 1/3 of automated tests are failing and it either needs to find the underlying system it broke or iterate through all the tests and fix them.
Doing this iteratively has made the overall process for an app I'm trying to implement 100% using LLMs to take at least 3x longer than I would have built it myself. That said, it's unclear I would have kept building this app without using these tools. The process has kept me in the game - so there's definitely some value there that offsets the longer implementation time.
I think there's something of a pendulum here, and I agree it's swayed too far to over-diagnosing ourselves. But I also think of my father who passed a couple years ago.
We didn't have much of a relationship. He had friends, but never close ones. He was weirdly mean or weirdly seclusive or weirdly awkward at times - and also incredibly intelligent and occasionally gracious and hilarious.
After he passed, I wondered if he might have been somewhere on the spectrum - but his peculiarities were simply ignored. A poor boy, in a poor urban neighborhood, with a dead father, being raised by an immigrant mother and immigrant siblings doesn't get diagnosed with much of anything - if they see doctors at all. And hey, he had a near photographic memory, and did great in school, so what's there to worry about?
It's always been "how he was", and that's probably ok, but I do wonder if he would have had a better or somehow different life if he knew more about _why_ he was the way he was.
I'm surprised by this take, simply because of my own experience, where the further I've gotten from religion over a very long time, the less significant I've found death.
Not having "answers" to what comes next has never been a weight for me - at least not since I was a child. Death being a completion, or a finality, is freeing; The end of what has been and what I hope continues to be a wonderful journey. The only weight I carry in regards to death are for those closest to me, and especially those for whom I'm responsible.
I find that surprising in turn! What were the beliefs you had around death?
I can sort of see why you found it less significant, but in monotheistic religions it is still pretty final. It is still the end of the one life you get, even if it is also the entry into something completely different and better.
I typed out the response below but I'm not sure I have a coherent response as to why the secular zeitgeist of death is less intimidating to me than the religious context of it. (Though, I'm not who you're replying to.)
I think it comes down to the sheer amount of pressure I felt within religion to be a certain way while also being told I could never be that way enough to achieve satisfaction in the eyes of god, and outside of religion I'm just another person in a flawed world trying to do my best.
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At the risk of being redundant, death within religion isn't an end, but yet another beginning. Eternal life is the reward for being a diligent disciple, where that means internalizing one's inherent flawed nature and inability to be redeemed but through death in devotion to god... which is a hell of a weight to carry throughout ones' life!
The Christian ethos is woven through with constantly being judged. And forgiven, yes, in theory, but still there is a constant undertone of "you cannot avoid making mistakes, and the mistakes you make are so offensive to god he wouldn't want you anywhere near him, but for magic religion reasons you've been redeemed by god doing something so terribly debased that it outweighs all the awful mistakes you've made."
Death (and "everlasting life") is no reprieve from this, but a form of stick that weighs heavy over you all through your days. You must work to save those around you, or they'll be eternally lost. You must cleave to the teachings of god, or at the very least belief in him, or you'll be eternally lost.
Since I left the church so many things of import that I felt I didn't understand now make much more sense; I struggled to comprehend how god could allow suffering, but now I see that the universe is just absurd and uncaring. While that may seem less comforting, I find the notions of bad things happening randomly less upsetting than there being an all-powerful being who cares about me but chooses to let me suffer for reasons that were never convincing, and as I've grown older sound more and more like an abusive relationship.
Through that lens, death is just a natural consequence of the world. Scary, yes, in the sense that I may not live up to all I want to be before my time is up, but I'm not pre-marked as eternally flawed and only redeemable through processes that do not make sense to me. Instead I know that I can only do my best, and that has to be enough, because I can't possibly do more.
In theory, I'm a fan of it. I think getting a working mock-up as a demonstration of an idea is far better than building something from a few napkin sketches and then iterating while we close in on the original vision.
As for my own work, I just spent a couple hours this afternoon in a back and forth discussion with claude code, asking it to mock up a UI for me before "we" start building it tomorrow. It was just a mock-up, so I didn't require precision, but I was impressed with some tidbits that came along for the ride.
Some things it did without me asking
* Mock data for the lists and pages in json format, so I could easily add records to it for different scenarios
* Working navigation between pages, including modals
* Working progress bars and timers
* Working list sorts and filters
* Toasts for functionality that was beyond the scope of the mock-up ("sending email to author of post" or "banning user")
* Not-half-bad animations and transitions between pages, screens, modals, etc
* A responsive layout that worked better than expected on mobile and desktop
* Some ideas I hadn't considered, that we then expanded upon
I would have mocked this up for a client, but not for myself. It's quite nice to have a working html / javascript / css mockup to play with while I flesh out my own ideas - with a benefit that I actually fully understand the output and can tweak it myself as needed.
I grabbed a cheap one for my 5 year old with some blank tapes. I remember how much I loved recording my voice, or the TV, and eventually LOTS of radio. Tangible media has more weight than just the physical object. Especially in something as durable as a cassette.
It comes in bursts but when he's into it, he has a ton of fun, The manual nature of it is confusing for him (he's used to instant gratification), like waiting a few seconds at the beginning of the tape so he can record, but something about a cassette makes the whole process easier to explain and, I hope, to understand and visualize.
> it doesn't seem to be making me any more efficient
That's been my experience.
I've been working on a 100% vibe-coded app for a few weeks. API, React-Native frontend, marketing website, CMS, CI/CD - all of it without changing a single line of code myself. Overall, the resulting codebase has been better than I expected before I started. But I would have accomplished everything it has (except for the detailed specs, detailed commit log, and thousands of tests), in about 1/3 of the time.
The specs would not likely have happened at all, since this is a solo project; although this experience has led me to want to write these things out more thoroughly, even for myself. It's impressive how little work I need to put in going this route to have fairly thorough actionable specs for pretty much every major decision I've made through the process.
The commits - some would be detailed, plenty would have been "typo" or "same as last commit, but works this time"
The tests - Probably would have been decent for the API, but not as thorough. Likely non-existent for the UI.
As for time - I agree with the other response - I wouldn't have taken the time.
I'm not calling bullshit here, but something smells.
If you really can write a full-ass system like that faster than an LLM, you're either REALLY fucking good at what you do (and an amazing typer), or you're holding the LLM wrong as they say.
I'm ok on speed. Not 10x or anything, but I've been writing full-stack web apps and websites from scratch for a quarter century.
The issue is getting the LLM to write _reasonably decent_ code without having to read every line and make sure it's not doing anything insane. I've tried a few different methods of prompting, but setting up a claude sub-agent that's doing TDD very explicitly and ensuring that all tests pass after every iteration has been most effective.
My first attempt was so fast, it was mind-bending. I had a "working" App and API running in about a day and a half. And then when I tried to adjust features, it would start changing things all over the place, LOTS of tests were failing, and after a couple prompts, I got to a point where the app was terribly broken. I spent about a day trying to prompt my way out of a seemingly infinite hole. I did a more thorough code review and it was a disaster: Random code styles, tons of half-written and abandoned code, tests that did nothing, //TODOs everywhere, and so, so many tweaks for backwards compatibility - which I did NOT need for a greenfield project
At that point I scrapped the project and adjusted my approach. I broke down the PRD into more thorough documentation for reference. I streamlined the CLAUDE.md files. I compiled a standard method of planning / documenting work to be done. I created sub-agents for planning and implementation. I set up the primary implementation sub-agents to split up the spec into bite-sized portions of work ("30-45 minute tasks").
Now I'm at the opposite side of the spectrum - implementation is dog slow, but I rarely have to read what was actually written. I still review the code at large after the primary tasks are finished (comparing the feature branch against main in my IDE), but for the most part I've been able to ignore the output and rely on my manual app tests and then occasionally switch models (or LLMs) and prompt for a thorough code-review.
I had guessed it was stopped because it came to an unshoveled portion of the sidewalk. If it can't traverse that, it's not made for this city
I'm not fundamentally mad as these bots. But if they don't figure out how to make them work with other pedestrians, then I'm going to start cheering on any vandalism delivered upon them.
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