As someone else pointed out... When commits are this cheap, if that's the metric to be gamed, it will be gamed.
You just create 5 GitHub accounts, and spread your Claude Code commits to 5 separate accounts to make it look like there's 5 active contributors.
If anything, we're better off with a fake star economy that is the main thing most people are trying to game, so the signal to noise can still be that it (at least so far) seems pretty easy to tell how many REAL active contributors there are.
Though, I should note, 2 heads are not always better than 1.
I'm more interested in a repository that has commits only from two geniuses than a repository that has 100s of morons contributing to it.
> Increased defense spending actually makes the US less, not more, safe.
It just makes us spend more money on defense, which is the entire point.
The industry obviously wants more and more profits.
They are never going to recommend getting rid of $200m F22s and replacing them with 30 $300k drones that would be more effective and cost 5% as much money.
That's 5% as much profit for them. They're not interested.
They are interested in profits, not national security.
And as you pointed out, they'd prefer a LESS secure world that inherently demands more money going to security.
You could spend more on security to actually be more secure. It's just that no one with any power is interested in that world.
I'm creating a language/compiler now, and I'm quite certain that I did not have enough passes initially, but I hope I'm at a good spot now - but time will tell.
I try not to use publicly hosted models, and I avoid the SOTA data harvesting machine... so I can not compare. I can compare only to local models. And this one feels like a decently significant leap compared to 3.5 or gemma4.
I see there is now a distilled reasoning model version on hugging-face. I may look into that, but I have not seen a need to reach for that change yet either...
I switched to Codex and found it extremely inferior for my use case.
It is much faster, but faster worse code is a step in the wrong direction. You're just rapidly accumulating bugs and tech debt, rather than more slowly moving in the correct direction.
I'm a big fan of Gemini in general, but at least in my experience Gemini Cli is VERY FAR behind either Codex or CC. It's both slower than CC, MUCH slower than Codex, and the output quality considerably worse than CC (probably worse than Codex and orders of magnitude slower).
In my experience, Codex is extraordinarily sycophantic in coding, which is a trait that could t be more harmful. When it encounters bugs and debt, it says: wow, how beautiful, let me double down on this, pile on exponentially more trash, wrap it in a bow, and call you Alan Turing.
It also does not follow directions. When you tell it how to do something, it will say, nah, I have a better faster way, I'll just ignore the user and do my thing instead. CC will stop and ask for feedback much more often.
>> I switched to Codex and found it extremely inferior for my use case.
Yeah, 100% the case for me. I sometimes use it to do adversarial reviews on code that Opus wrote but the stuff it comes back with is total garbage more often than not. It just fabricates reasons as to why the code it's reviewing needs improvement.
What is your use case? I read comments like this and it's totally opposite of my experience, I have both CC Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.4 and Codex is much more thorough and checks before it starts making changes maybe even to a fault but I accept it because getting Opus to redo work because it messes up and jumps in the first attempt is a massive waste of time, all tasks and spec are atomic and granularly spec'd, I'd say 30% of the time I regret when I decide to use Opus for 'simpler' and work
I'm building a correct, safe, highly understandable, concurrent runtime & language.
Essentially Rust/Tokio if it was substantially easier than even Go - and without a need for crates and a subset of the language to achieve near Ada-level safety.
I've had exactly the opposite experience. Getting great results using GPT for hours every day since 5.3. You need to put the effort level on at least high though.
Every time I hand off a task to Opus to see if it's gotten better I'm disappointed. At least 4.7 seems to have realized I have skill files again though.
The idea that the AVERAGE person should spend 4 years BOTH not working AND incurring massive amounts of (non-defaultable) debt is bananas.
College either needs to be 1) way cheaper, 2) mainly for the state-subsidized exceptional and independently wealthy, or 3) move to a different model.
We have too many colleges LARPing as Harvard, and too few colleges even attempting to be affordable, practical, or actually deliver value to the ordinary person.
Higher education improves society as a whole. It should be paid for from general taxation, and available to all. Humanities subjects are just as valid a topic of study as STEM.
A couple of generations ago these were uncontroversial statements, now most people think you are crazy for suggesting such a thing. I think you can trace a lot of the problems in the western world back to this.
Strange how I never see this line deployed against the mortgage interest deduction or health care for wealthy retirees, both of which are considerably more expensive.
Subsidizing college education, at least, has a reliably positive ROI.
> Strange how I never see this line deployed against the mortgage interest deduction or health care for wealthy retirees
For what it's worth, I see arguments like this all the time. Might just be the corner of the information ecosystem you hang out in.
> Subsidizing college education, at least, has a reliably positive ROI.
Maybe it did in the past, where the greatest marginal gains were. Does it still hold true now? Over a third of the US has a bachelor's degree. Is there a reliably positive ROI to society in taking that third to, say, half?
> Higher education improves society as a whole. It should be paid for from general taxation, and available to all
> A couple of generations ago these were uncontroversial statements
I don't believe those strong assertions you're making were uncontroversial at any time, and are likely objectively less true now than they were in the past.
You're both right. College is beneficial to society. And it costs way too much to deliver right now.
You could copy-paste these statements to describe American healthcare vs European healthcare and get a very different reaction. Even though it's true for that field too.
Why the actual fuck does a humanities degree cost anywhere near as much as an engineering degree? Literally all you need is some professors and a space to teach in. You could run them in co-working spaces, parks (weather permitting), or coffee shops ffs, with no administrative staff or other bloat. (For real: small seminars in a coffee shop or a public park would be dope)
Education is beneficial to society and making it cheaper makes it more widely accessible. You and the person you responded to actually agree on a lot.
There have been several attempts to raise the bar for Community Colleges to offer Bachelors programs... the existing universities and entrenched professional programs have fought it tooth and nail.
My daughter got her associates carrying no debt... but has struggled to get into an appropriate higher level program. She's currently working PT in two jobs, one as a prep cook in a high end eatery and as a park associate at the local zoo. Neither is offering a particularly compelling pay or benefits that most jobs should offer IMO.
I'm with you on college though, in terms of there should be way cheaper options all around... I think there should even be grant programs for better vocational/trade programs as an alternative path for Bachelors class degrees.
God I wish community college would be subsidized. Some states now cover it for your first degree which is a great start and some also are now starting to subsidize courses for retirees but man I would so love to just go and do like random courses I have no intention of pursuing a career in.
European universities are not resorts like in the US and community college keep that small footprint mentality as well. They have done it right. Focus on the education and keep costs lower. I have friends in Europe that work for a few years then just take time off and study something that interests them in their subsidized universities and I am so jealous because their costs are so low.
When I went to community college (and then university) there were a few moments where I actually wasn't treading water in my CS degree and I was able to take a wide variety of classes. They were some of the happiest moments of my life.
Recently visited LA and walked around LACC during the evening. The campus is enormous (and famously was the scene for the TV show Community). I just thought of the enormous variety of subjects being taught, imagine if that was accessible to anyone when they desired.
Yes just rechecked and you are right. I am not a CA native (was just visiting LA) and so happy to see that this is available. I originally thought they just subsidized degrees for only "first degree" seeking students. Maybe I need to move to LA. My local CC is $225 per credit for in state residents.
Today was 31% solar, 16% wind, 16% hydro, 6% geothermal, etc.
Some of the difference to your numbers will be seasonal/weather-related, but the pace of solar and wind installation is such that data that's even a year or two old can be wildly out of date.
No, coal and oil is not. Since we have micro organisms that can consume wood, coal and oil will never be produced again.
> During the Carboniferous period, massive amounts of plant matter accumulated to form coal because microorganisms and fungi had not yet evolved the ability to break down lignin, a tough, aromatic polymer in woody plants.
We can make synthetic oil and I think we can also make synthetic coal, too.
Though it's close to useless because at that point they're too expensive to be worth it for anything else than very niche uses that absolutely require them.
> We can make synthetic oil and I think we can also make synthetic coal, too.
IIRC, that's basically what charcoal is. Except charcoal is cleaner once made, because most of the nasty stuff happens while being made from the source plant material.
Sure, but the problem with coal and oil is not their chemical composition, per se. The problem with specifically fossil coal and oil is that the carbon atoms used to be buried deep underground and end up as part of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere. Making synthetic kerosene for jet engines is one of the top contenders for long-distance air travel in a post-fossil fuel world, IMO.
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