the productivity gains from coding agents are not evenly distributed. they’re split along a k-shape: senior engineers are getting meaningfully more productive. junior engineers are, at best, treading water. at worst, they’re getting worse.
This is exactly what we should expect. You have to be experienced (as a coder, as a researcher, as a thinker) to discern hallucinations and fakery. Only experience will make that alarm bell ring in your head. Younger and less experienced coders/scholars/writers will uncritically accept whatever their preferred chatbot offers them, and that will all too often lead them into more and more profound errors.
I don’t usually do straight book reviews on my blog, but I made an exception for Simon Armitage’s marvelous new version of Gilgamesh.
If we remove phones without rebuilding the social architecture that once gave childhood meaning, agency, and joy, we risk leaving kids with less stimulation but not more formation.
TEXAS! (by Erin Newman-Mitchell)
How AI Swarms Are Disrupting Democracy: I’m wondering whether the emergence of these swarms will finally prompt people to ask whether social media platforms are appropriate sources of information. Probably not, but I’m grasping at straws here.
Finished reading: The Dark Bible: Cultures of Interpretation in Early Modern England by Alison Knight. A fascinating book, about which I hope to write when life is less crazy. 📚
Apple calls this OS version Tahoe because Lake Tahoe is on the Nevada border and you’re basically gambling with your computing life when you use this OS.
Just got my new Mac Mini, and, since it has Tahoe installed, I had to “upgrade” my MacBook to Tahoe in order to use Migration Assistant. I now have two shockingly buggy Macs. I’m on the newest version, and can’t quite believe how little Apple has done to fix bugs that have been reported since Tahoe came out.