The downside scenario isn't AI equity getting zeroed out and lenders getting crammed down. It's the federal government deciding that AI capabilities are of national strategic importance and throwing trillions of taxpayer dollars onto the bonfire.
The real strength of vim (and emacs, though I haven't learned emacs to know this firsthand) is the expressivity of it rather than the raw speed. When you can express an edit as a sequence of key presses, you can record and replay that to easily and make the "same edit" in many places.
The funniest time I did this was with a interview screening question which had a hundred-deep chain of links with the URL for the next link embedded in some JSON with some additional formatting required to get a working link. Vim let me copy a line of text that's a curl command, shell out to replace it with the ~6 lines of JSON response, edit that as a string down to a curl command to the next URL, and wrap that entire process up as a macro to run a hundred times.
As a vim and emacs user, macros are really nice. But the true superpower, IMO, is that code is fairly structural in the file and outside of it, and both allow me to quickly navigate that structure. Vim is more powerful on the edit side, but emacs has more convenient utilities.
I still vividly remember a peer watching me carefully record a vim macro, thinking I was just editing. Right as he said "Why are you so slow?!?", I ran `100@q` to apply the edit to the whole file. Just "oh." after that.
yeah extremely common pattern, made even more powerful if you feed grep or other text tooling results into vim to get a list of candidate locations to go and fix
What's to stop Netflix from spinning out a Netflix France for the sole purpose of having all French revenue in a single corporate entity subject to the 2% of total global revenues rule?
Netflix France would be able to pay nearly whatever content licensing and technical access fees it wants to Netflix. It's can make approximately zero profit and need not have any French employees, merely be a container for having a total top-line revenue equal to Netflix's revenues from France.
Even if it doesn't, the effect of so much writing getting pushed out the door through default LLM settings is going to make it feel same-y and bland in short order.
Human writers also use specific constructions for definite (though not always consciously known) reasons, and mapping those correlations onto writing models is only getting done on accident. This is a big part of why LLMs doing pointless negations (it's not X, it's Y) is so jarring: people use that construction in order to preempt an expected misconception, whereas LLMs try to use linear algebra over the learning corpus to generate it in appropriate quantities and places according to RLHF/fine-tuning/etc.
In other words, it isn't just verbiage that has a "preferred" quantity, but also higher-level language features, and the appropriate contexts for those features feel like the sort of thing that will be extraordinarily difficult to replicate without a theory of mind.
edit after coming back and re-reading: the "in other words," and rephrase is because I'm trying to explain something complex enough that I'm not even sure I fully understand it, so I try typing out multiple explanations and leave the ones that make the most sense to me. This might be idiosyncratic to my writing and not a significant feature of training corpuses, but even if it wasn't it's a second example of the sort of thing I'd suspect LLMs to be bad at using appropriately.
Another LLM weirdness is to explain what code is not doing. My theory: such negations were somehow encouraged in training because they are very valuable where used properly (and sparely) by humans. "Not doing the obvious thing due to xyz happening two modules over" is a very useful comment. "Not using bubblesort because quicksort is faster" is garbage.
I think a lot of the time it's prompt leakage. Forgive the personification, but it's like they don't have a mental model of the reader of the thing that they're authoring being separate from the person who's prompting them to author it, so it often seems like the main conversation kind of spills into the prose.
Not to pick on GenHTTP Lambda, especially because I think it's someone's fun side project, but I was just trying to read though their docs and I was finding it super difficult. I kept getting distracted thinking "why the hell did it write it _that_ way?"
Like, the first sentence of "The control center" section [1] is the exact sort of weird negation that you're describing:
> The editor link opens a control center rather than a text box: most of the code here is written by agents, so the first thing on the screen is how your lambda is doing.
I can't help but think it generated the first round of the page with a text box to paste the code into, got told "no, I want a control center," and then this ended up in the docs.
I also think the phrasing of that sentence (and many others in those docs) is just super weird and unnatural - e.g. "so the first thing on the screen is how your lambda is doing." It also feels like it mirrors a prompt - like, "no, it should be a control center, not a text box, and the first thing the user should see is how their lambda is doing." But in docs I'd never expect it to be written "the status of your lambda" or "the health of your lambda." And what does the code being written by agents have to do with it?
Lambda is my side project and I 100% agree. Updating documentation with Claude does not work, unless you spend so much effort that you could have written a perfect version yourself. Opus 5.5 got better at it, but it's still a long way to go. I personally cannot stand the PR descriptions generated by Claude. Three pages of text for just a simple change ...
This is my experience as well. I have spent many hours trying to eliminate this kind of contamination and the only solution I've found is to re-write from scratch every time. If the result isn't to your liking just reset its context and provide a more detailed prompt.
The critique of AI systems that lives rent-free in my head is that they "hit the target but miss the point." In writing, especially technical writing, the target is conciseness, word choice, tone, etc, while the point is to effectively communicate authorial intent.
I find it hard to believe that the romans didn't bring rabbits with them. Also, given the fullness of time, it is hard to believe that rabbits didn't ever catch a ride with any number of pre-roman visitors.
This is false actually. The article OP linked is wrong or incomplete. The Romans brought and bred huge numbers of rabbits to Britain, for eating.
We know people are them because when the Romans left ("dark ages") they were eaten to extinction:
"Butchered hare and chicken bones appear in the archaeological record hundreds of years later, among Roman-period food waste. At this time, Sykes said, hares were farmed for food, and the Romans introduced rabbits to the island, although hares and chickens continued to hold religious associations for Britons. After the Romans withdrew from Britain in A.D. 410, the populations of hares and chickens crashed, Sykes said, and rabbits went extinct."
So what is going on in medieval times, centuries later, is they are being re introduced and horded by the Anglonorman aristocracy. This could simply be because, of course, half of England then is in today's France. The Plantagenet dynasty is even more French than the earlier Normans, who are of course mostly ex-Vikings. Later, at peak, the "English" Angevin dynasty territories stretch south from say Calais all the way thru Occ country to the Basques; and are intermarried with Spain and France. There's rabbits everywhere, trivial to bring back to Britain.
But they were apparently difficult and expensive to farm (which seems crazy as they breed like... rabbits) but this is perhaps explained by climate change-- the medieval warm period was about 950-1250 and then it began to get much colder. For example by 1315-1317 there was horrific famine caused by crop failures and abnormal cold summers. In this context the rich people are laboriously farming rabbits in artificial warrens inside of managed game preserves and poor hungry people get executed all the time for eating.
A good book for this era is Tuchman's 'Distant Mirror' which is like Game Of Thrones meets zombie apocalypse. Don't read it if you're French. It may be the reputational nadir of French civilization?
Landlords charge what the market will bear and generally have little if any price elasticity of supply, so they bear nearly 100% of the economic incidence of the tax. This is especially true where housing supply is constrained by zoning policy rather than the price of expanding supply.
It'll make it so new construction tends to be condos rather than apartments, since the first is heavily preferred by tax policy. This reduction in supply will mean higher rents.
New construction is like 1-2% of total housing stock annually. It'll take a relatively long period of time for these sorts of changes to hit prices because again, low price elasticity of supply.
edit: on slightly further thought, you'd also need this effect to either increase overall vacancy or reduce total construction, since any supply shift from occupied rental units to owner-occupied condos also implies a demand shift from renting to owning.
If they're losing money at market rents, what are they going to do about it? If they could raise prices, they would've raised prices before the tax because that's just leaving money on the table. If they throw an emotional fit and leave the unit empty, they're losing even more money. If they sell or go bankrupt, the new owner will have bought it at a lower price and so end up having a profitable business at market rents.
It depends on the price elasticity of demand. When it's 1 - that is, when a 1% change in price results in a -1% change in demand - then any change in supply reduces the total amount of money spent on the good. If demand is more inelastic, then increasing price will increase total spending. Oil is a particularly inelastic good.
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