And yet the models I've used have been great with Rust, which pales in lines of code to JavaScript (or Python or PHP or Perl or C or C++).

I've also had decent experiences with Rust recently. I haven't done enough Haskell programming in the AI era to really say.

But it could be that different programming languages are a bit like different human languages for these models: when they have more than some threshold of training data, they can express their general problem solving skills in any of them? And then it's down to how much the compiler and linters can yell at them.

For Rust, I regularly tell them to make `clippy::pedantic` happy (and tell me explicitly when they think that the best way to do that is via an explicit ignore annotation in the code to disable a certain warning for a specific line).

Pedantic clippy is usually too.. pedantic for humans, but it seems to work reasonably well with the agents. You can also add clippy::cargo which ain't included in clippy::pedantic.

> But it could be that different programming languages are a bit like different human languages for these models: when they have more than some threshold of training data, they can express their general problem solving skills in any of them? And then it's down to how much the compiler and linters can yell at them.

I think this is exactly right.

OMG, thank you for sharing this! I had that book when I was a kid, but couldn't find it again for the life of me. This was the first evidence I had that it wasn't a fever dream.

> how people can be willing to consume a beverage that can be used to eat the corrosion off of battery terminals is beyond me.

Wait 'til you find out what water can do.

I do get your point, but really, it's just corrosive in a different way than the usual highly corrosive stuff we consume daily.

With as hot and dense as they are, wouldn’t black hole accretion disks and jets form stuff, too?

I think black hole accretion disks and jets are something like several orders of magnitude less dense than would be required for that.

So, the normal size truck actually carries the things you want to transport, if you move their handlebars.

You’d pay an extra $7000 because… you don’t like to pack?

Isn't that generally the case, convenience? 20% to 50% extra in price to handle edge cases and unknown unknowns seems pretty cheap. That's like, $100/month to $200/month for a lot of extra flexibility in the US.

As someone unsympathetic to big vehicles in urban areas, and probably most suburban areas, the challenge as always is figuring out how to re-internalize externalized costs.

Or I guess reduce externalized costs. (Additional safety features? Increased road wear tax? Vehicle size class limitations on certain roads or lots?)

Buying secondhand, the F150 is actually cheaper. I neglected to mention this but there’s a lot more used F150s than Rangers on the market

Ah, I could see that point.

When we lived in a more rural area, and I drove my kids to school each morning (in a normal-sized sedan), I taught them to notice the contents of the SUVs they saw. The common pattern, like 90% of the time in the morning, was a lady driver in a spotless SUV with a kid in the very back row of seats.

And the demographics made sense: you’d expect to see more moms dropping off kids, at least in redder parts of the country, and the back row is supposed safest (as long as you only plan on getting into head-on collisions). Still, the common theme of a ridiculous vehicle with exactly 2 occupants sitting in the farthest possible positions from each other came to be funny to us.

Those ludicrous pavement princess pieces of junk are status symbols of conspicuous consumption, and that’s it.

Now, a pickup with tool racks or lumber in the back, or covered with drywall dust, or bearing a ranch sticker? Fine. Those make perfect sense. Anything short of that is just bragging about how much you love donating to Exxon, like an NRA sticker but dumber.

Conversely, I spend about 60% of my working day in the terminal, with another 20% in Zed. Wild how much workflows differ, isn’t it?

Switching from OMZ shaves a few ms on my very fast desktop machine. It shaves seconds of SSHing into a heavily loaded server.

I couldn't possibly agree more. I remember the first time I saw JSON over HTTP. Within a week, I started ripping out all the SOAP code I'd written because "that's what you're supposed to use". JSON plus a few standard verbs is better than the old XML web services in every way.