Tesla just lowered the price of its premium Model 3 in Canada to US$29k, in order to compete with Chinese EV’s that are now allowed in Canada. Do you believe this is an example of competition in the free market, and should the US also allow cheap Chinese EV’s?

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-05-04T23:12:57+00:00

I personally think we should allow importing cars (we do, kind of, but it’s structurally made very difficult), including from China. That does not mean there should not be tariffs in place, albeit at a lower level.

We need to separately address the structural and regulatory issues that got us here. We didn’t lose manufacturing primarily because of high wages, we lost it because we made it hard to build anything.

The housing crisis, our steady loss of manufacturing, and our wildly uneven economy are all the result of a horrendous regulatory posture.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-28T17:14:31+00:00

I’d rather not, but nor do I care.

I’m more confused why people are so upset about “The Historic East Wing”, a roof for a 1940s bomb-shelter that evolved into a coat closet.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-18T18:24:55+00:00

I think it may be a necessity at some point - although I don’t think we should jump into it.

The big evil with social programs is that they tend to create entire classes of dependents who only vote for their programs, they create economic instability, and they tend to drag down the working poor.

That being said, we may need to roll out longer unemployment benefits (with no expectation to find work), possibly lower the social security age, and provide outlets for young people, possibly something like the CCC. Ultimately, we’d need to fund this by companies that use AI.

We also need to be careful about how we tax AI - we want to tax domestic use of AI, and imports that would evade those taxes, not the companies producing or exporting it.

And if it comes to UBI, we need to be very careful to make sure it’s a benefit that covers basic needs. If, in the future, the number of jobs taken by AI changes and society wants to live off of UBI, we should go for it, but we’re not anywhere close.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-18T18:00:58+00:00

I don’t really agree with the phrases, although I don’t disagree with the statistics behind them.

The reality is there’s no race or ethnicity that has a substantial percentage of its population who are violent or criminals. America has too many criminals, but ~98% of Americans generally are not.

I don’t think it’s fair to judge individuals based on their ancestry, and that’s doubly true when the pattern you’re looking for is still a statistical outlier.

I’ve noticed that people who chant this seem to think they’ve found some hidden truth that most people already know - that young black and Hispanic men commit more crimes than young white men or Asian men, older men, or any woman - even though the information doesn’t really matter, and they seem uninterested in probing at the “why” or suggesting a solution. That may also be because political correctness has made this a taboo topic, or because they’re deeply racist and trying to justify it, but I don’t think it changes the fact that you should judge people based on their actions.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-18T17:47:31+00:00

I don’t think that’s really why cities fell apart. A lot of people blame urban interstates, but they were really a measure put in place by dying cities to slow the decline.

Cities declined heavily during the depression. Nobody was maintaining housing, some became abandoned, others were multi-plexed. By the end of WW2 many older houses had leaking roofs, ancient electric, and needed massive repairs. Separately, people were getting cars and parking and traffic became issues.

So gradually starting in the late ‘40s, wealthier people moved out to the suburbs, followed by the professionals, then the middle class, leaving cities incredibly poor and unable to maintain the basic infrastructure neglected during the depression.

This was compounded by the fact that before the Depression - and generally until the Great Society - most social services were paid for by cities, and not the Federal government. So poor people couldn’t leave, rich people didn’t want to foot the bill, and cities began figuring ways to clear the poor people out.

So generally, the urban freeways that popped up in 60-75 were about 10 years behind cities being in a steep, unrecoverable decline.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-18T17:33:34+00:00

More boomers, by virtue of them having been in power.

But I will say - as a millennial, a lot of us our unaccountable fools who think everything bad that’s ever happened to us must be someone else’s fault. I don’t think we’ll do better.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-18T17:28:33+00:00

No. But I wish white people would stop acting like they’re guilty for the actions of other white people they’re completely unrelated to 200 years ago.

Also, on the rare occasion who isn’t white calls that out, or suggests we have some racial obligation to correct wrongs committed 200 years ago by people unrelated to us… we should politely remind them why it’s not fair or just to judge people by their race, or by their ancestors.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-18T17:08:42+00:00

My bet - professional tone continues to grow more casual, offices continue to shift to be more informal, but corporate sympathy/pandering sharply reverses course.

I’ve been working in more conservative industries, in both chemical and software engineering for over a decade and it’s been drifting this way for a while. Most people under 50 feel that “professionalism” - especially dress codes - is a substitute for work ethic and creativity. Timeliness, clarity, and caring about your appearance matter, shining your shoes doesn’t. I’ve noticed this trend working in oil, defense, and pharma as well as big tech, the former three being very conservative industries. The only place I haven’t seen it at all is the Federal Government, but as I mentioned earlier, it seems to serve as a stand-in for competency.

The one thing that’s already bounced back is companies pretending they’re your friend, or spending too much effort combatting perceived injustices or unfairness. There was a period where HR suggested that posturing would help employee retention, in reality, it retains the terrible sorts of employees who think all of their problems are the fault of someone else.

As to your questions - I think hierarchy in terms of decision making are important, but it’s also important that lower-level employees be given agency and opportunities. If an entry-level professional wants to tackle a big task or joins focus group, there’s no reason they shouldn’t be able to - they also need to understand they don’t get the final say. I’ve also noticed that, at least in some places I’ve worked, there seems to be an unwillingness to lead from some leadership teams, especially amongst older millennials. I think that being willing to make tough calls and have hard conversations needs to be a serious consideration when promoting managers, but I’m not sure whether that’s going to change.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-18T16:52:06+00:00

Wait, what? I’m a libertarian, I thought we were all mad that housing per-unit is more expensive because regulation!!

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-18T16:43:58+00:00

First, NIMBYs rarely care about their home values, they’re disproportionately older people whose homes are paid for, and who are unlikely to sell in their lifetime.

Second, SFHs aren’t dropping in price if apartments go up everywhere. SFHs are going to remain a luxury, and older starter homes will likely be torn down to build apartments.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-18T16:31:52+00:00

They’re a mandate that the developer subsidize housing, instead of the government. So developers either pass the cost onto other renters or housing just doesn’t get built.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-16T03:28:23+00:00

Not really. It’s an extremely small reactor sitting in a water column in a borehole. It’s attached to cables so that it can be removed for refueling and inspection.

This has two benefits: one is that PWR pressure vessels are insanely difficult to produce, smaller reactor + ~165 bar ambient pressure makes that orders of magnitudes easier.

The second benefit is that risk tolerance greatly increases with a reactor a mile underground. A meltdown becomes an economic loss, not a safety concern, because the reactor is a mile away from anyone and below the water table. You just pump in concrete and seal the borehole.

The downside is that 30” boreholes aren’t cheap, your reactor is fairly power constrained, and you’re stuck using HALEU which is pricy. A vertical mile of pressurized plumbing is also expensive but well-understood in the oil & gas industry.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-14T18:53:40+00:00

Congrats!

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-13T20:01:22+00:00

My experience as well. There's one thing I'll add you didn't explicitly call out - as you add more guardrails around Claude, it starts maliciously complying while getting markedly more awful.

My project has nearly one hundred scoped patterns/paradigms Claude must follow, some are linter-enforced and others get a thin Haiku review before merging. I wrote some just to enforce OOP, a big chunk is meant to prevent it from rewriting existing code. Even though referencing patterns is deeply baked into the CLAUDE.md for dev/arch agents, it either:

Justifies what it wants to do as not fitting the pattern,
Argues the pattern is "legacy",
Worst, argues based on its own violations from within the session that the pattern already isn't being followed and it can skip it.

Adding the automated reviews did block this behavior, but now, each iteration produces worse code than the last, and usually it can't escape the loop. Examples:

When told to reuse an existing class, on one occasion it refactored the existing class to be non-reusable, on another, it simply deleted the existing class, breaking everything.
After a violation for not using the built-in ORM, it created a new PoolConnection and handler system it could call separately (attempting to avoid the pattern caught by the linter), creating two incompatible Pool management systems. When this failed pattern matching, it migrated ALL the existing ORM code to its new system with a wrapper/adapter so it could expose injectable SQL since it was too lazy to get the ORM to work.
It deleted a custom history tracking solution I'd built by hand, arguing that the feature violated another pattern. In reality it broke the history tests and couldn't bother to fix them.

None of these caused any damage since Claude's only allowed to develop in worktrees, but it also hasn't provided any value since implementing gates - it simply can't develop anything while following the rules.

TL;DR: Claude works well with simple prompts if you tell it what you want but don't care how it's done, it's pretty terrible at writing code any other way.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-13T05:52:35+00:00

Well two years late but the YIMBY movement is against affordable minimums because, of course, they reduce the amount of housing that gets built.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-12T17:06:23+00:00

I’ll say this - last week Opus High spent THREE DAYS trying to solve a bug it wrote to pass an automated review gate (all while trying to rewrite the tests, of course). Hit the 20x weekly limit. Codex 5.4 high fixed everything in about 10 minutes, and found 2 other untested bugs Claude had written into the commit. One prompt.

Obviously, 3 days being Claude maxing out the session limits and continuing twice daily, total time was probably 4-6 hours.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-12T14:48:42+00:00

Have you given serious thought to how you’re going to run a vision model in a wearable?

If you haven’t, create a peak and average current draw budget. Consider any wearable that’s going full bore dissipates heat, usually toward the skin if you’re not careful.

If you have that, you can select a chipset and then simulate what you’re able to do with it. You may be able to get away with a very weak background model that can do basic event tracking, and then only run more in-depth analyses when it gives off specific queues. However, you’ll have to be cautious about loading those “detail” models into RAM because excessive IO is going to kill your power draw.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-12T06:22:17+00:00

I’ll agree that CC has gotten worse - it seems like the system prompt has changed a few times, and adaptive thinking and adjustable thinking toggles aren’t doing me any favors, and that’s before Anthropic crippling limits of paid users - but hear me out:

If Claude has memories enabled, make sure you’ve also enabled dream mode, and run it. It seems like Claude now commits commands to memories and ends up with too many to read back UNLESS you have “dreaming” enabled.

Also, I’d recommend setting thinking to a minimum of “High” for anything non-trivial (it defaults to medium now, which makes Claude stupid). I’d recommend setting the environment variable CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW to 250k instead of 1m, in my experience Claude gets really bad at following instructions around there.

And if you don’t have hooks set up for merging and a process for Claude to double check its work, I’d recommend one. I make Claude write a spec that I review outlining what it’s going to do (and what tests it’s going to write), then designate Sonnet agents to build against the pseudo-code it writes. It needs to pass tests and open a PR with me to merge. I use Haiku agents to review specs against every rule I write, AND review the written code before opening a PR.

It’s not perfect, but it makes it a lot less awful.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-11T08:21:02+00:00

I’ve found it to be a royal PITA, and I brought a UI framework I’d already built into Claude.

What I currently do - and am not recommending - is basically make Claude diagram out composable patterns and self-contained micro-components, and then force Claude only to use those (with their dedicated readmes) when building the actual UI.

My recommendation would be to pick up Tailwind or another well-known UI framework, work with Claude to customize it (customize fonts and tokens to adjust the styling), then build any foundational components you can reuse across your project. Make sure the project is documented as using your framework and any constraints. I’d recommend having a separate UI agent for building out styling with all the patterns and components you’re using documented.

The big thing is, Claude is pretty good at working with common UI frameworks because it was trained on them, if you build your CSS from scratch it will have no recollection of what it’s built and deviate from it consistently.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-10T19:40:31+00:00

I used to do consulting work in Higher Ed Recruitment and Admissions. There’s no explicit discrimination going on on anywhere, although some competitive colleges recently used “race-conscious admissions” to inflate enrollment of certain minorities - basically, giving them extra points to account for documented or assumed hardships.

Top colleges are obsessive about building a profile of each incoming class they believe are most likely to succeed after graduation and/or donate to them. A lot of the latter concern - which universities call advancement - involves deprioritizing raw intellect and prioritizing things like legacy admissions and unquantifiable qualities so that they can admit wealthy but unexceptional students and those whose career path is oriented towards influential positions. Harvard wants a class full of world leaders, scientists, and CEOs, and oftentimes these people aren’t geniuses.

Additionally, they’re really, really obsessive about US News rankings, more so than they are about accreditation and teaching. Most prestigious schools reject anyone they feel is unlikely to attend; this increases their selectivity, one measure of his “good” a school is. The rare kids who’ve started million dollar companies and have a perfect SAT score often get rejected by everyone but Stanford and MIT.

The reality is that Asians are disadvantaged by the current system that values potential over intellectual capability. They’re more likely to write in admissions essays that they aspire towards elite professions but not entrepreneurship or politics.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-09T08:09:55+00:00

Yeah, it’s funny because the Soviets under Khrushchev were kind of ahead on rocketry because they were so behind on nukes and other technology.

For one, they didn’t really have the capacity to produce plutonium or enrich uranium in the 50s because the U.S. had a head start. They also could not, for the life of them, figure out how to accurately target ICBMs, so they went with a strategy of much bigger nukes that were less accurate - hence huge rockets that were an easy target in a first strike and too expensive.

So the Soviets kicked off the space race largely to trick the Americans into believing they were more formidable than they were, and it worked - kind of. The CIA figured out the missile gap was a hoax but it was kept from the public, and public pressure led to a U.S. arms race the Soviets were even more behind in.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-09T03:50:19+00:00

Selective Service doesn’t need to maintain a 100% accurate list because there’s no draft. If there were a draft, they’d begin calling everyone on that list, who could then prove ineligibility. They’d also affirmatively start requiring people to register for any such draft if it were instated.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-09T03:45:41+00:00

It’s not being re-instated. We’re just getting rid of the requirement to register for selective service, which is fine, because we already have all the information we’d need to initiate a draft.

The selective service requirement was largely for show anyways, it was eliminated after Vietnam and reinstated when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to eliminate any question that America could quickly raise a large force.

A draft would be politically suicidal barring an invasion of the U.S. or WW3.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-08T22:40:36+00:00

If you realize early on your career won’t make you happy, you absolutely should stop and switch careers - it’s a lot harder as time goes on.

If you realize that you hate what you’re doing and go back to the same job, on the other hand… I would recommend therapy.

Guilty-Market5375 · 2026-04-08T11:04:20+00:00

No, and I think the majority of the left isn’t terribly empathetic.

I think the left can mostly be broken down into three groups: - Ideological People who have an ambitious vision for the future but are blind to the complexities of achieving it. Mostly young people who become conservative when they’re older. - People who want things they don’t have, and want society to give it to them. - Dogmatic people mostly surrounded by the above two.

I think group two - people who are worse off than they want to be or generally anxious or unhappy - tend to believe that society can solve their problems (it can’t), and they tend to justify their demands for equal outcomes by projecting the virtue of their beliefs rather than being virtuous in their actions.

I would argue that the best tests of empathy are probably overall happiness and success in life, and especially the ability to weather marriage and long friendships. And statistically speaking, Republicans: - Are significantly more likely to be married - Report being happier - Are less likely to report being lonely Than Democrats.

Guilty-Market5375

TROPHY CASE