I'm not even sure you've nailed "classic" stoicism. More than a few stoics have related stoicism to normalizing your reaction to something that happens to you as if it happened to someone else. It implies maintaining a perspective that the world just does and that it's largely impersonal.
- the Oregonian's newsroom is in all but open conflict with its editorial board, its credibility for breaking hard news was already in the shitter before it sold to ADVANCE, and for several years it stopped publishing a broadsheet edition and shuttered its print facility to cut costs
- the Merc sold out to a Seattle-based group run by a former Washington state legislator in July 2024 that's been buying out alt-weeklies in Seattle and Chicago
- Pamplin/Trib and EO groups got bought out by Carpenter, a Mississippi-based conglomerate, in June 2024 with a rep for cutting everything but sports coverage. Layoffs hit both in July 2025
Only the WWeek is still locally owned, and it started a non-profit and seeking donations in 2024. Maybe 20 full-time employees there, at best, and as of 2024 barely above water financially.
I live in Portland, OR. The Oregonian/Oregon Live actually broke the story that the mayor was quietly pushing shelters out. Their news broke before I got the city mandated postcard I should have received living next to the proposed shelter.
KGW broke that the shelter process was occurring without community involvement and feedback processes. Frankly, the Mayor and three district councilors came to our neighborhood meeting. That just doesn't happen in East Portland and was not possible without the involvement of local news.
Willamette Week is a gem, I agree. They broke the Shamaya Fagan story as well as numerous others. I'm saying it's not all bad, especially compared to other localities.
Imago Dei? KGW didn't break anything that the Oregonian hadn't run two weeks prior on Dec. 3, and they got scooped by OPB on it in November. The best coverage KGW (owned and operated by Virginia-based TEGNA, which TIL is in the process of getting Nexstar'd) has had of homelessness was covering their news van getting broken into by a homeless couple and stealing their gear.
Yes that one. They definitely did. I know the people who were interviewed and I know what they said. That neighborhood meeting was because the neighborhood learned that the Mayors office had side stepped the public input process. The mayor admitted it that night. Reporting can be better but my point was that politics does not move East of 205 and for the first time I saw it. The reporter and the photojournalist both lived in Portland. The difference was local media regardless of who they're owned or operated by.
A lot of these comments are indexing on ownership. While I agree ownership plays a factor I think whether the actual journalist is from here plays a more outsized role in how they present and investigate the news.
I don't actually think Claude Code is very good and this is exactly why. It's not really optimized to use its tools efficiently. I think Cursor probably does a better job of that but I imagine all of these coding assistants will come with some form of local tooling support in the way of vector DBs etc one day.
A lot of engineering disciplines are a mixture of math, art, and science. Programming was no different, but I do think some people built up an identity that reinforced a difference that wasn't there to begin with.
Yeah, after reading this I was thinking, "how is this different from agents using a combination of tools, resources, and prompts?" They do surprising things sometimes but it's not particularly novel of Claude Code.
i see it as skills being logical grouping of a set of prompts, which achieve a goal. Like my optimize-critical-path skill.
It's more than a single prompt, but less than an entire agent. I find skills to be the tools you use on the fly. Like how I might have a wrench,screw-driver, hammer in my tool box.
tools vs skills is all about context efficiency from what I see. and yes, this isn't novel of claude. but they are the first to offer this abstraction.
My point is that Skills are not the first to do this. Well written MCPs are dynamic workflow engines. Skills are like a more user focused and slimmed down version of MCPs.
It'd be interesting to see a comparison of a well written MCP compared to a skill in terms of task competency.
Now that you mention it, i can see a future where claude may offer a "skills" feature and codex offers a "talent" feature. where they are essentially the same things, but specific to that vendor.
reminds me how each cloud has the same offerings but different products.
Hello! Cool tool, I'm going to give it a try on my personal assistant. The vector DB prices look a bit cynical to me, even incredible. Do you think you could break down how you arrived at the cost estimation both for competing vector DBs and Mantic? For example, I use Weaviate at the moment and I don't come close to this cost even at a years perspective with a generous amount of usage from multiple users (~60)
I actually didn't know this was coming up and just bought an electric. They all kind of suck except for the Ego and the Ego is like $250.
Portland has gotten quite a bit more expensive. We've begun rejecting taxes, which as the self-selected second highest taxed city in the nation is new. Our economy has struggled to return post-COVID lockdowns. There's a lot more I could say but people are really feeling the economic squeeze. I doubt this will help, but is pretty minor when you think about housing, electricity, gas, and water costs that continue to rise as wages go down in the city. I call this place the city of a thousand cuts, there's a lot to like, but there's a lot that hurts too.
In East Portland we're mostly dealing with needles from Douglas Firs. I'm not sure this will help much, or be easier. Most people I know that use a leaf blower around here use it to clear pathways and the streets after cones and needles drop because the city doesn't send street cleaning this far.
In just my neighborhood we have probably 30-40 large Douglas Firs and several types of pines and maples. It's a substantial amount, which is why the city has "leaf day". It just doesn't come out here.
Oh no, I cant annoy everyone in a 500m radius for 20 minutes once a week by blowing all the leaves that have fallen into my garden into my neighbours garden. Did I get it right?
My point was you can still buy the gas ones in the store and they're substantially cheaper than the Ego I bought. I live in East Portland, which is why I was talking about cost. I wish the kind of suburban problems you're describing are what we deal with.
They have 5 electric leaf blowers available right now. You mentioned you already bought one, but perhaps you could share this info with some of your friends or neighbors to save them the cost. :)
Hello! We do use the EPTL :) that did remind me to donate my old plugin blower though thank you. I will note that EPTL only has plugin blowers and there are good reasons I went with a more mobile blower.
Ah, yeah, I'd suspect they'd only have plugins. Def understand the need for mobility. I never want to miss a chance to share with folks about the existence of EPTL, though. :P
The electric backpack leaf blower isn’t that much more expensive than the gas ones. If you’re using it in a business, the extra cost really isn’t significant amortized over thousands of uses.
If you’re poor and using it on your own property, a corded electric is like $50 and works fine. The cord is a little bit of a hassle, but you don’t have to worry about mixing gas and oil, fuel stabilizer etc etc. electric has gotten to the point of being good enough, and it’s not reasonable to make so much noise in a residential area when there are good alternatives.
I don’t mean Dylibs like you find on macOS, I mean loading a binary lib from an arbitrary directory and being able to use it, without compiling it into the program.
It’s been some time since I looked into this so I wanted to be clear on what I meant. I’d be elated to be wrong though
Then by that argument Rust also supports dynamic linking. Actually it’s even better because that approach sacrifices less performance (if done well) than cgo inherently implies.
Well, Rust does support dynamic linking. It just doesn’t (yet) offer a stable ABI. So you need to either use C FFI over the dynamic linking bridge, or make sure all linked libraries are compiled with the same version of the rust compiler.
> It won't matter if I'm washing the dishes, walking the dog, driving to the supermarket, picking up my kids from school. I'll always be switched on, on my phone, continuously talking to an LLM, delivering questionable features and building meaningless products, destroying in the process the environment my kids are going to have to grow in.
I remember hearing similar criticisms of continuous delivery. On one end of the spectrum people who had to wait months to get changes out now got them out relatively quickly. On the other end of the spectrum, some person was going to push changes at midnight.
A decade on forward I've never actually worked at a shop that at scale did continuous delivery in its truest sense where changes go straight to production. Simply, nothing beats a human in the loop; it's always about balancing the costs of automation and a lower barrier to entry. I imagine this kind of thing, if it ever actually takes hold and can be adopted by a larger subset of engineers, will follow a similar path.
Long way of saying, I don't think you're Chicken Little but also don't start breathing into a bag just yet.
I write about technology and projects I'm working on. I also keep some posts up-to-date such as my How I Design Systems post.
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