The Frayed Edge of Bespoke Software in the Age of Agents Arthur Breitman’s blog. Mostly Tezos.

This post talks about that experience, but more generally about the frayed edge of bespoke software in the age of agents.

ex.rs/frayed-edge...

I spent 5 years managing a renovation in Italy across thousands of emails and attachments. This was a major chore until I built a harness with Claude Code that turned the chaos into a manageable timeline.

Jastrow illusion - Wikipedia

It's literally an optical illusion though

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jastrow...

If reports that Maduro has been captured are confirmed this is fantastic news. I hope Venezuela can finally reclaim prosperity and liberty. War is almost never morally clean; arresting tyrants and ending their rule almost always is.

It's not the new year unless it's in the GMT region of the globe, otherwise it's just sparkling midnight. Happy new year!

London has had some automated underground trains since 1968, on the Victoria line. In light of today's strike, some commentators talk about AI, but the obstacles to automation clearly aren't technological and haven't been for half a century.

7/ Sadly, the debate alone on the fact that the expected rate of appreciation for real estate is theoretically and empirically negative would be excruciating. And that's just a sliver of it.

6/ The trade-off is that the upfront tax can make homes much more expensive to buy, especially when long-term interest rates are low, but that’s also when mortgages are cheapest, and the premium is preserved in the resale value.

5/ The local government is therefore consistently long local real estate.

As a result, the government synthetically gets something akin to property-tax revenue, while people own their real estate free and clear in perpetuity.

4/ But what if the government spends it all at once? What if it needs revenue roughly proportional to property prices to accommodate different futures? Once collected, that 20% is mandated to be invested in a local REIT-like trust fund that distributes rental income.

3/ At a 1% property tax and 5% long-term interest rates, that comes to 20% of the selling price of the new construction.

2/ Frustratingly, the solution is economically simple—if likely politically infeasible: levy a one-time tax on each new construction equal to the expected net present value of the property taxes it would generate in perpetuity.

1/5 𝐈𝐅 taxes must be collected, property taxes are much better than other forms of taxation. But there is a valid argument that people should be able to own their homes free and clear, and that reassessments can be problematic.

ossia

2/ They think this idea is so radical and counterintuitive that when they hear the distinct concern of an omnicidal AI killing everything on the spot, they can only interpret it in that frame. That's the read I get from Sutton for instance, but also a bunch of e/acc affiliated people.

1/ There is a category of people who took a arduous mental journey to get comfortable with the idea of post humanism, uploads, and a gradual extinction of biological humans.

IMO gold is super impressive.

I just want to register a prediction, I'm 80% confident the inference run cost over $1M in compute.

Mostly because if they could do it for $1M they would, and they would be able to do it for $1M before they can do it for less.

ChatGPT voice mode, but it waits for you to say “over” before attempting to reply.

Apparently, using GPT-4o, you can give your images a " Studio Ghibli" style. I tried it, and it works very well.

Yes!

Any Tezos peeps here?

Hello Bluesky!