Bubonic plague is known to be active in Colorado, I think there are a handful of cases each year

If you live in the Rocky Mountains try to avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine. If you catch it, get to a hospital quickly and take the antibiotics and you'll probably be fine. If you delay treatment you should use that time to get your affairs in order.

> avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine

I thought at least fleas could transfer it between mammals?

Current thought in the academy is that the flea-rat vector wasn't the dominant vector for the medieval plague "Black Death" mortality event, but human-flea-human. See also 2018 PNAS paper Katharine Dean, Nils Stenseth, Boris Schmid at Oslo. Basically, Northern Eurasian people were really gross, Mongols even moreso, and that provided the vector for a dominant human-flea-human spread. The rat vector, we're missing evidence that should be there: mass rat mortality; fast & huge mortality in areas with few rats; clustering followed human networks, not rodent networks. Also the kind of flea. Check the refs for more details.

The initial infection though, definitely from a central Eurasian rodent, likely a marmot somewhere near Kyrgyzstan.

Thus 'avoid close contact with prairie dogs'. The 'medieval rat/flea'-connection was a problem because rats and humans lived in close vicinity to each others. In colorado, that goes prairie dog->flea->other prarie dog, you'll find them on the animal, in the burrow, and on the carcass, but a flea doesn't hop 5 miles towards from through the desert.

Endemic in Antananarivo (very many deaths per year), not sure about the rest of Madagascar.

I was at a presentation a couple days ago where a spacecraft flight software engineer was describing the agentic setup that they're using with next to no human in the loop to create modules used for flight.

I feel this in my bones. My team is one of the most communicative in our org and have garnered a widely positive reputation I think largely as a result of our coming together every day to solve problems. Trying to get information out of the less communicative groups is like pulling teeth, i wonder how they get anything done at all

I've been working on generating a large code base for the last couple of weeks. Finally got around to generating a sort of code-duplication report and have spent the last week just having it de-duplicating logic that had been strewn all over the place (eg 11 different functions all doing date math to add x days to a date). dozens of items that had each been similar functions duplicated numerous times. crazy. (opus-5-utracode)

LLMs love duplicating logic. Unfortunately they are not formal systems so we actually have to read their output

Can LLMs not do this for you? Or would they go too far?

No, the problem is they're still really dumb, and lack the ability to make logical connections that are obvious to us. "should I walk or drive to the carwash" being a very recent example of the larger problem.

But they are very good at identifying patterns though. This task requires little logic IMO. So why not leverage LLM to perform redundancy analysis?

They add and add new code to the point when adding more is going to become very messy and then spagetti

What I was suggesting is to ask the LLM to compare function usage across files to identify overlap/redundancy.

The idea is to use the LLM to analyse the code base first before taking any action.

I think I'm suggesting a centaur approach.

I am both a career developer and experienced team manager. from first hand experience the 1.5x im getting from AI is not flowing down to my team / org because why would i output 50% more when the pay environment and leadership are already underwhelming. That additional 50% productivity goes completely to side projects built on my second computer between 9-5 tasks

Actually, the METR report speculates that some of the overreported productivity uplift comes from grabbing unnecessary low-hanging fruit, things like "oh I'll make a web dashboard to keep track of this stuff // wow that would have taken all day without Claude!" But in the olden days they would have just used a notepad. Yet psychologically they built a real thing and saved a lot of time.

True I have made a few low tier apps that just hit apis that were previously obfuscated deep in menus that have had an outsized impact

> But in the olden days they would have just used a notepad. Yet psychologically they built a real thing and saved a lot of time.

There was an old Onion article about the monetary savings from buying clothes on sale as computed by (a) the women buying the clothes; and (b) their male relatives.

That’s what I’ve heard from my dev team too. They’re using it to give themselves free time while still being on the clock, not to produce more output for the company. Roughly thinking about hours spent on projects I think have gone up per task, the opposite that should be happening.

I'm finding it almost impossible to fill that free time with work, unless it's just reading emails and chat messages.

I can context switch between two or three chats, but doing so speeds up my agent use at the cost of making reviews and discovery harder, so it might come out in the wash.

>I can context switch between two or three chats

I'm finding this is a skill which I'm slowwwwwwly improving but, for now, my level means I tend to miss mistakes I'd notice if just working on one task. I also had to make accommodations to the way I work to make it achievable, including telling my employer that a 500 GiB disk just isn't enough any more when I need multiple builds in parallel.

Your comment makes total sense to me but generally, in regards to productivity gains from AI, I can never understand where these are realized for people. Maybe I'm just a laggard but never found myself 25%-50% behind on anything or that much more work/items/tickets available.

> Devs have relatively no incentive to be more productive for their orgs, and all the incentive to be more productive on their own personal work.

AI definitely supercharges the side project myth, but I think we’re going to see waves of developers quitting or losing their jobs because they’re chasing dreams of running a side code project that isn’t going to turn into a business.

The incentive to be more productive at work is that they get to keep their job and not be replaced by a cheaper junior. I think we’re in for a reckoning across the industry as companies realize that there’s little difference between a lazy senior armed with Claude and a halfway motivated junior who has aspirations of growing into something more. The latter costs less and might grow into a better dev.

If the salaries fall then there would be no highly motivated juniors.

Lazy senior vs motivated junior tension has always existed. I was one then became the other. I don’t see llm changing this dynamic!

> because why would i output 50% more when the pay environment and leadership are already underwhelming

The productivity uplift measured in some of these reports is from more tasks being done, not from developers giving themselves more idle time during the day.

If we do see job losses from AI, my feeling is that it’s going to be concentrated in people with an attitude like this one where workers try to remain anchored to their old delivery pace. It’s becoming easier than ever to replace a worker in that position with a lower paid junior equipped with Claude who has an interest in learning. There’s no reason to keep a higher paid worker around to copy and paste between Jira and Claude.

thats absolutely true regarding wysiwyg projects like a small website. aside from temporary cost savings, systematically ignoring institutional knowledge in favor of mass output is not gonna do humanity any favors ..

Yeah institutional knowledge is hard to capture, even more with agentic coding.

I just compressed what would take a team a few months to deliver in one or two months, the amount of gotcha I spot from the existing system we work on everyday is staggering.

How to deliver and keep these feedback is difficult, the other teams are overwhelmed by other tasks, so any tickets or communications will be forgotten in a few months.

And as an external ressources allowed to use frontier model, I have a hard time to keep up with my own pace, and all that institutional knowledge will be lost both by my employer and client.