Rabbit used to be the meat of the poor where I grew up. If you could not afford meat (beef/pork), you could always raise 5 to 10 rabbits in boxes in your garden and feed them with the grass from the road sides.
I have lived in many cities across different countries with dramatically varying economies, and the price of chicken has always been a good proxy for the cost of living. And maintains the same ratio to the price of a bus ticket (and similar things).
In the rural UK area where I live farmers will often be happy to have you shoot them with an airgun, if you seek permission. Nice (if stewed) cheap meat.
> (2)The occupier of any land in a rabbit clearance area shall take such steps as may from time to time be necessary for the killing or taking of wild rabbits living on or resorting to the land
IIRC all of England and Wales is designated a Rabbit Clearance Area.
You have to shoot them in the head, just aft of the eyes. About a 1 inch diameter target. That always kills them.
But if you miss, either by poor shooting or because they bob their head just as you shoot, then they often run off and you never find them. I reckon I get >> 90% kill rate, but that still means a few get away and suffer from the wound.
Price of chicken dropped steeply (and consumption exploded) in the second half of the 20th century after the introduction of broiler breeds and what’s essentially muscle tissue factories. Before that chicken was neither particularly cheap nor eaten that much.
Rabbit is comparatively cheap to produce, and available at low price wherever it is produced in larger quantities. Apparently no significant economies of scale where you live.
The parallel is real, but in math the "cash value" of the results often won't appear for years, if at all, and so the teaching and "intellectual fortification" is the primary point of the whole enterprise (at least, a major part of it).
In contrast, the value of a program is typically just the "black box" service it provides. Indeed, the program itself has always been opaque to most business stakeholders. Before, they paid human programmers and got back a program they didn't understand but could use; now, they pay an LLM provider and get back a program they don't understand but can use. In the pre-LLM era, the economic value of "understanding" and "shared knowledge" about the programs themselves was only that it made maintenance and changes cheaper. It never had intrinsic value, except as intellectual satisfaction to programmers (I was... am... one of those who found that value).
Only if you assume that all software works the way that product managers think it does.
They come up with the features and the implementation is an unimportant detail in realizing their designs.
In reality implementation details frequently drive design and in most cases they are at least highly intertwined.
I can’t count how many products and features I’ve built that ended working completely differently than the initial design, or how many times I was able to simplify a workflow after spending a days thinking about the implementation details.
You can kinda do something similar by spending days or weeks going back and forth with an LLM, but at least in my experience that doesn’t really save much time and I don’t understand the problem quite as well by the end of it.
I don't disagree with the points you've made but what are they rebutting?
The economic value is still the product you delivered. Your understanding of the implementation meant you participated in the work of the "product manager". I think most good devs do. That might be an argument for devs to transition into designer/PM roles. That is effectively happening already, whether or not role titles have caught up.
But in any case the value isn't in the understanding itself. It just happens that the understanding still helps create better block box products. Also, I wouldn't count on this "human advantage" lasting long. I hope it does, but ime LLMs are now good enough to do this "co-design" too, and will only get better.
> In the pre-LLM era, the economic value of "understanding" and "shared knowledge" about the programs themselves was only that it made maintenance and changes cheaper.
This only holds if there is a bright line separation between the problem, the solution, and the implementation of the solution. And that is not the case.
Understanding the implementation frequently improves your understanding of the solution, which improves your understanding of the problem, which leads to better solutions. Sometimes it leads to realizing that there is a completely different problem you should be solving.
So what I’m refuting is that there is no value to understanding the program.
But beyond that black box products that users know how to use but don’t understand is also a vast oversimplification.
Frequently software is useful specifically because it forces users to adopt a process not just because it allows them to do something they were previously doing faster. In those cases the process is usually informed by the implementation, so the user needs to understand parts of the implementation even if it’s indirectly.
Yes, you're right, understanding informs the constraints and the possible solution spaces. That should be added to the list.
Practically speaking, I don't think the "black box" metaphor is as broken as you're saying, though I like the point you made. There is still a ton of software (the majority, I think -- crud apps of all flavors) where an unthinking, untechnical PM wants something they can specify, and an LLM can give it to them, and it will more or less solve their problem. It won't be the best possible thing, but it will be good enough.
That's definitely true, but on the other hand I can produce with a month of literal non-stop vibe coding (agents running overnight, with checklists of what to qa for when I'm up) what took years for others to do, working in teams of tens or hundreds. At that scale, it's not a question of "doing it faster and not learning" or "doing it slowly"; the alternative is it not happening at all.
I don't think that's insane, at least not in the game dev world. I was big into the Bethesda game modding scene 15-ish years ago, and did some work on e.g. Tamriel Rebuilt, and saw the scale and man-hours that went into that- and that was even using a premade modding toolkit, and I compare that to what I can build with Claude...
To be fair, in the game dev world there are a lot of things you can do now that would have been impossible, or required 10,000x the number of devs that it does now, e.g. making No Man's Sky without the proc-gen tools that can exist now would have been physically impossible. Point being, it's perfectly normal to be able to say, "using the tools available now, I can build what would have taken tens or hundreds of devs years of work in the past", in game dev.
The project I'm building rn is a black-box rebuild of a client that has been being developed for ~22 years, and I've rebuilt significant portions of it over the last 2 weeks. That was, quite literally, equivalent to tens or hundreds of peoples' labor.
> a client that has been being developed for ~22 years, and I've rebuilt significant portions of it over the last 2 weeks.
Taking the end result of a 22 year old dev process and telling Claude to rewrite it, is in no way equivalent to doing 22 years worth of the work put in by the developers working on it.
That’s like saying replicating a paper that was the result of 22 years of research is the equivalent of 22 years of the author’s labor.
No Man’s Sky isn’t the equivalent of 10,000x the devs who made it. Because the procedurally generated content isn’t equivalent to handcrafted content. I’m also not aware of any procedural generation techniques in No Man’s Sky that weren’t possible 30 years ago.
As far as Tamriel rebuilt goes, if you’re talking just about just reimplementing Daggerfall in the
Morrowind engine, you might be able to do that in a month of vibecoding.
But that’s not hundreds of dev years worth of work.
I feel like this is just an emotional argument, because if I asked a human team to black-box recreate a complex piece of software, it would absolutely be thousands of hours of work. Pretending that the ability to look at a piece of software and recreate it is straightforward or simple is just false.
And no, the procgen techniques and capabilities utilized by NMS were not available 30 years before NMS (important distinction, because NMS is already 10 years old, and 2006 vs 1996 is quite a big jump in game complexity as well).
Saying, "isn't equivalent to handcrafted content" is a fallacy, because hand authoring doesn't denote any particular level of quality or outcome. You can absolutely hand craft the NMS assets and game systems, but not at the scale that NMS did using procgen.
Wrt TR, it literally has tens of years (if not hundreds) of labor hours that have gone into it.
I'm not sure where you got the idea it's about recreating Daggerfall- it's not, it's about implementing the rest of the Morrowind province beyond just the island of Vvardenfell- but it's a massive, multi-decade project with hundreds of contributors.
I disagree. Humans still learn to read despite other humans reading at an objectively higher level since the beginning of writing.
Learning is not an output-efficient process but is a fantastic outcome. AI lowers some portions of the development workflow but not yet every part, and, efficiently produced outputs aren't always the major outcome desired. In the real world / outside the benchmark lab, you care about robustness, reusability, composability, security, and more. Targeting speed to acceptable average output inferred from a prompt or similar benchmark metrics miss a big part of the game.
One interesting thing about printers, for me I really don't need much at all.
Occasionally I need to print things mostly tickets, boarding passes, simple shipping documents or even my own headed paper.
None of these need high quality printing, even the headed paper is not complex.
My sister in law has an art company and she's very happy with her large format commercial inkjet, which seems to work through buckets of inks and use 6 or so inks at once.
Our printers at work churn through huge amounts of printing without issue. I'm sure they are eye wateringly expensive, and maintaince is necessary and included in the ink subscription.
The pain of printing is confined to the day to day home user.
I don't use it much, I don't use much ink, I don't need much.
This would be fine. For a few years I got by just with one of those simple thermal printers that print only vaguely A4 sheets. But of course alcohol hand wash or friction ruin those prints and they fade in short order (weeks).
To amuse myself I bought a modern Epson dot matrix printer with all the convince features like USB and tractor feed. Yes it works no matter what but it’s a good reminder that we do actually care about the quality of print jobs.
We have the solution it's just not practicable. Cryptocurrencies and hardware wallets have solved this problem. But they operate at the scale of people in their bedrooms not hundreds of millions of people voting over one day all over a country.
Passports would need to become like hardware wallets with screens such as Trezor. Who's firmware and design are open source.
The screen means I can see what I'm signing and later be shown what I signed.
Now, I don't want people to know who I vote for. So we make it e-passport gate so that no one can enter with me.
Now I want to be able to verify my vote at a later date but not let others know it was me.
Well this too is solved by multiple cryptocurrencies like monero and z-cash.
I can go to my local town hall enter a room alone using a e-passport style gate and check my vote at the machine. My device can verify my vote.
Someone with the vote can only see that 1 of N voters did it. Where N is so large they can't identify me.
To show you the user something and no one else without leaving a paper trail.
The ability to enter a single person voting booth through a e-passport style gate and security to check your devices screen again so a perk that could be implemented.
The public ledger of all votes that could be checked to enforce no duplicate voting, generate a full list of who voted if desirable, and you with your device in a secure room check your vote.
Are all features of cryptocurrency systems that exist allow.
All of that could be optionally allowed or disallowed for a future cryptography enabled voting system.
The e-passport style gate to single person voting room is the physical security needed to ensure people don't coerce each other more than today. And optionally make coercion impossible at the cost of some people not being able to vote (people who need someone in the room with them as they do in the booth with them today).
Yes, coercing the voter in the polling station where there are people monitoring the situation, and police, is more difficult than in supervisor's office in the factory where you just call the employee and order them to vote. No witnesses, no evidence.
There is a reason monero and z-cash are being banned in Europe.
I can't claim to be a crypto expert.
But hiding a transaction and it's value among other transactions is perfect for voting.
As I understand it Monero uses ring signatures to make it so it's not possible to know which individual of a group initiated a transaction, and it's zero knowledge proof system means it can be verified that a particular transaction is valid despite this.
To my layman mind that seems to be good enough, every vote can be verified by any party as valid (no double spending or double voting took place).
You can never narrow down who made a particular vote beyond a large pool of people.
You can't tell where any transaction went (you don't know who was voted for).
At the same time with my private key I can see my vote.
The only thing needed for voting is the e-passport style gates.
Certainly it won't just get a case of use monero, they would need to design the system for voting.
The Simps on AI
The Simpson AI?
And then the 3 eyes fish makes a reference to Blinky
https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Two_Cars_in_Every_Garage_an...
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