I'm also wondering what effect it'll have on all the people that have been declaring their primary residence in Florida for tax purposes yet actually live up here in NYC a good amount of the time. My neighborhood in Brooklyn is filled with cars registered in Florida. If all of a sudden your pied-a-terre condo in Williamsburg is getting hit with $40k+/year in property taxes it might no longer make sense to try and move your residence to Florida to avoid city/state income tax.
At least here in NYC, a large part of a NYPD officer's pension is calculated based on a 3-year look back from their retirement date, so there is a huge incentive to work as much overtime as possible in order to bump that number in your last few years of service. There are lots of stories of NYPD handing out easy overtime in massive numbers for each other, particularly when they are about to retire.
Teachers are the easy ones to point to, it is hard to be mad at an underpaid teacher who receives a reasonable pension for life. We certainly can be mad at NYPD scamming the system to get $100-200k/year for life.
At least in my union defined benefit pension it specifically excludes overtime since that obviously is ripe for abuse. It's just your basic calculation: average of your best 5 years of salary at 2% per year of service.
Is that not the case for police unions in the states?
FTA: "Although paying for excess hours can cost less than hiring new cops, overtime contributes to future pension costs.
“If your last few years before you retire, you work 300, 400 hours of overtime and bump up your pay by $40,000, that all goes into the salary that your pension is based on,” said Ana Champeny, director of city studies at New York’s Citizens Budget Commission."
So yeah, it seems like a bad idea to be able to scam the pension system like that.
Why are we mad at someone who has worked their whole life and is getting a decent retirement, when the article is talking about PE management fees being extracted from essential services at enormous rates?
And yes, pensions are a major part of the PE funding, but not all of it. There are a bunch of incredibly rich people who are also profiting from all of this at exorbitant rates. Can we be mad at them instead?
All seem trivial compared to the money sucked up by billionaires, who seem to do little good for society. I'm not going to get angry at a police officer trying to maximize their retirement when we live in a society that celebrates people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.
Those billionaires are not hoarding cash like a dragon in a lair, their wealth is mostly in stock in productive (FB is debatable at this point) companies many people use.
Boomers (only people I know receiving pensions) use pensions to fund lavish lifestyles without having build major companies.
Yeah. How dare they… give you one-day delivery of anything you might want like magic for the first time in human history and help use fewer fossil fuels to prolong your planet’s life while also providing ubiquitous connectivity anywhere on the planet’s surface. The selfish scoundrels.
> Code readability of Python isn't an advantage during write; it's an advantage while reviewing.
This is completely subjective though. I personally find that Python's lack of static types makes code very difficult to reason about. Yes, some devs will write decent comments and name things in a way that's easier to read, but most devs are lazy (myself included) and things get out of hand quickly.
But this is also a subjective opinion, and you could argue that I feel this way because I spend most of my time in TypeScript, Go, and Rust.
I would go even farther and say that static types are a tool designed specifically for a code reader.
When you're writing the code, you know what the types are, as you literally just created/wired/whatever them. Static types become a benefit only when you visit code without that fresh context. For instance, third party libraries are far easier to use when the interfaces are typed.
Yes, but:
a) they're a second class citizen, not guaranteed to be used in whatever niche of the python ecosystem you find yourself in and there's already an n+1 problem with multiple type checker written by third parties, rather than having 1st class language support tool that's consistent. You're not going to get it by default, you're usually going to have to do some configuration (and maybe bike shedding) to get it working;
b) they completely negate the idea of python being "easy to read", your code is now littered with `if TYPE_CHECKING:`, `Literal`, `TypeAliasType` and any number of workarounds needed to make your hints work out. Unfortunately the syntax was just not designed with typing in mind, and I think it shows;
c) the idea of "hinting" rather than enforced type checking means you have no guarantees that a type is what you need it to be, you have to do a lot of boundary work to make sure the edges of your code are coercing things to the right type. While I love pydantic and find it to be an excellent library, to me it's the kind of code smell you get in languages without strong typing. Also you're going to get a lot of spurious type errors along this path as well;
I will gladly use python's type hints, it's a whole lot better than nothing (IMHO better than typescript), but in it's current form it will always fall short of a language that was designed with strong typing in mind.
The idea of the Pydantic-as-code-smell hinges on the objective being type-safety throughout the codebase. It isn't the aim when an agent creates the majority of the internal logic.
The winning architectural approach: enforcement at the borders, but flexibility within. The agent uses Pydantic for validating FastAPI schemas and models for the database—those are the contracts that need validation. The internal logic the agent produces is subject to line-by-line analysis, rather than being inferred from type propagation.
That's the right way to do things. It isn't some sort of a compromise. There is a clear boundary between validated "external input" and internal logic. And you aren't counting on type inference to propagate across the codebase. You catch errors at the border, where they come into or out of your codebase.
Your criticism of the type system in Python is spot on. The problem is that it is an add-on. It isn't consistent. And a language developed from the ground up for type annotations will do a far better job. However, this isn't the general case for agent-generated codebases.
Good point about subjectivity; it depends entirely on what you are reviewing for.
Static typing holds more ground while making assumptions about contracts between components in huge codebases written by many developers. But in the realm of agents, it all boils down to a simpler question, will this particular function generated by an agent do the job that was requested? Line-by-line readability of Python suffices in this case, regardless of whether type annotations are used throughout.
The pragmatic approach would be to enforce type rules where needed (i.e., when working with Pydantic schemas or in FastAPI routes), while not applying any constraints within the code itself.
There's (minimal) research on psilocybin doing just that. One of the tragedies of prohibition is that we just weren't able to study these psychedelic compounds easily for 50+ years.
Have any sources? I’d love to read what you are thinking about.
I haven’t used psilocybin in a clinical setting but have gone through an alternative psychedelic-assisted therapy process. Very interesting results and many positives.
There's not a lot, unfortunately. This paper is a literature review and the claims are weak, but there's something there that should be investigated further: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12392120/
Paul Stamets has evangelized psilocybin + lions mane + niacin for years in a microdosing format, but again, the research is lacking largely due to prohibition.
For sure, and lions mane is one of the three things Paul Stamets has been talking about for years to take in combination with niacin and psilocybin (microdose) to support neurogenesis. Low doses of psilocybin have only very mild perceptual changes, much less than smoking weed or drinking alcohol (for me). But again, there's not much science on it which will hopefully change.
American productions constantly feel like they think their audience are idiots these days. It's nice to watch a European production where they don't assume their viewers are going to also be doom-scrolling and feel the need to summarize what's going on by having a character say the summary out loud every episode.
Much like everything else in the US, products suffer and sink in quality for being sidelined by individual interests.
Marketing needs 4 second jokes to put in the trailer; sales needs a cute pet to sell toys; an actor demands dramatic moments aiming for an Oscar; market research needs a love story, a diverse character, and a specific geographic location to widen the audience; early screenings show that attention drops so story is simplified...
All of these roles should be working to support a product, but they should never interfere with its creation. Instead, they're the main creators. People in the industry genuinely believe that the plot is just an excuse to do all the above, and results show.
We've had decades to do something about it, but if Trump deciding to step into a completely unnecessary war and blundering the entire thing is what makes everyone wake up then I guess that's a silver lining.
Yes, "new research" is a misnomer here. The correct version is "people in lab coats have finally noticed ..."
Reminds me of the studies that say lobsters can feel pain. Like, no fucking shit. What multi-cellular (and even single-celled) organisms do not feel pain? Glad we're giving the western stamp of approval on these highly contested ideas.
I suggest you should drop the patronizing tone. People believe lots of things and a lot of them is completely bogus. That's why we need people in lab coats to evaluate them in systematic way.
And here I am sitting in Brooklyn and haven't had one apartment that has had fiber as an option. I get to pay Spectrum $90/month for "400/20" and in reality get 100/10.
> I've never liked the way meditation makes me feel
This is common. A true meditation practice brings up a lot of stuff, from general body aches and pains to deep emotional things you may be unconsciously suppressing. With time and persistence, and with the right teacher, it becomes liberating though.
Ah, I see, that's also very common. Taken all the way it can develop into nihilism, which is one of the two extreme views in Buddhism [1]. I fell into that early on and abandoned my practice for many years. I found that once I found the Mahayana teachings on emptiness [2] and then the stories of the Vajrayana masters [3] the practice became joyful again and not bogged down by some narrow view of what meditation is.
