Asides
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I spent the afternoon going down an AI rabbit hole researching the state of AI coding tools and vibe coding in the last 2 years since I last tried this for myself. Obviously, it has come a long way with Claude Code looking very helpful, being more ‘agentic’ and solving some (but not all) of the forgetfulness and context window problems I saw before. The biggest change might just be that everyone is using better prompt to plan and guide their work than before.
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Thinking about hiring, the typical process for screening candidates using written applications is likely to become far less effective as it becomes a game of adversarial bots both creating applications for positions and evaluating them. In light of this I see one possibility being less emphasis on written applications going forward, resulting in more emphasis on the strength and scope of one’s personal connections in turn. This could be a big step backwards for equality and inclusion as it would increase the barriers to moving outside of one’s current social circle.
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Today I took Dima to see Banff’s ghost town: Bankhead. Through some odd coincidence, we arrived just as a Remembrance Day ceremony was starting at a nearby monument to the residents of Bankhead who lost their lives in war.
It made for a surreal experience, walking through the foundations of old buildings, in the middle of the woods, with a bugle sounding through the trees.
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Multi-unit infill housing is becoming very popular for developers in Calgary, but are the prices of the new individual units more or less affordable than the former residence which was bulldozed?
Idea: Analyze the pre-teardown sale price and post-construction sales prices to determine if infill housing is driving inflation of prices at a housing-unit level.
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There’s talk of having AI agents which are trained on one’s own work to assist with tasks. The interesting question is who would have ownership and control of these models, the worker or the employer. Imagine a world where your current and former employers maintain models of you in perpetuity after you leave positions, and continue to use them to complete tasks.