What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

For a while I've had a habit of collecting hobbies and moving from one thing to another. Sometimes I stay in the hobby for a long time, but eventually I move on. Even within a hobby I have some subhobbies that I move between (in TCG's I've moved from MTG to Flesh and Blood to now Riftbound, but I'll still jam some MTG games too of course). I used to be more into weightlifting, now I only go to the gym for chest day because I've been doing rock climbing for a year and have recently picked up archery.

For people who kinda do similar things, what's a favorite hobby you've collected? Have you dropped it or pulled back from it once you found a new hobby? What's your latest hobby that you've been into? Do you still keep your old ones, and how do you balance everything and find new hobbies to try?

I've found myself replying to different people about the early 2025 METR study kind of often. So I thought I'd try posting a top level thread, consider it an unsolicitied public service announcement.

You might be familiar with the study because it has been showing up alongside discussions about AI and coding for about a year. It found that LLMs actually decreased developer productivity and so people love to use it to suggest that the whole AI coding thing is really a big lie and the people who think it makes them more productive are hallucinating.

Here's the thing about that study... No one seems to have even glanced at it!

First, it's from early 2025, they used Claude Sonnet 3.5 or 3.7. Those models are no way comparable to current gen coding agents. The commonly cited inflection point didn't happen until later in 2025 with, depending on who you ask, Sonnet 4.5 or Opus 4.5

The study was comprised of 16 people! If those 16 were even vaguely representative of the developer population at the time most of them wouldn't have had significant experience with LLMs for coding.

These are not tools that just work out of the box, especially back then. It takes time and experimentation, or instruction, to use them well.

It was cool that they did the study, trying to understand LLMs was a good idea. But it's not what anyone would consider a representative, or even well thought out, study. 16 people!

But wait! They did a follow up study later in 2025.

This time with about 60 people and newer models and tools. In that study they found the opposite effect, AI tools sped developers up (which is a shock to no one who has used these tools long enough to get a feel for them). They also mentioned:

However the true speedup could be much higher among the developers and tasks which are selected out of the experiment.

In addition they had some, kind of entertaining, issues:

Due to the severity of these selection effects, we are working on changes to the design of our study.

Back to the drawing board, because:

Recruitment and retention of developers has become more difficult. An increased share of developers say they would not want to do 50% of their work without AI, even though our study pays them $50/hour to work on tasks of their own choosing. Our study is thus systematically missing developers who have the most optimistic expectations about AI’s value.

And...

Developers have become more selective in which tasks they submit. When surveyed, 30% to 50% of developers told us that they were choosing not to submit some tasks because they did not want to do them without AI. This implies we are systematically missing tasks which have high expected uplift from AI.

And so...

Together, these effects make it likely that our estimate reported above is a lower-bound on the true productivity effects of AI on these developers.

[...]

Some developers were less likely to complete tasks that they submitted if they were assigned to the AI-disallowed condition. One developer did not complete any of the tasks that were assigned to the AI-disallowed condition.

[...]

Altogether, these issues make it challenging to interpret our central estimate, and we believe it is likely a bad proxy for the real productivity impact of AI tools on these developers.

So to summarize, the new study showed a productivity increase and they estimate it's larger than the ~20% increase the study found. Cheers to them for being honest about the issues they encountered. For my part I know for sure that the increase is significantly more than 20%. The caveat, though, is that is only true after you've had some experience with the tools.

The truth is that we don't need a study for this, any experienced engineer can readily see it for themselves and you can find them talking about it pretty much everywhere. It would be interesting, though, to see a well designed study that attempted to quantify how big the average productivity increase actually is.

For that the participants using AI would need to be experienced with it and allowed to use their existing setups.

I want to add that this is not an attempt to evangelize for AI. I find the tools useful but I'm not selling anything. I'm interested in them and I stay up to date on the conversations surrounding them and the underlying technology. I use them frequently both for my own projects and to help less technical people improve their business productivity.

Whether AI agents are a good thing or not, from a larger perspective, is a very different, and complicated, conversation. The important thing is that utility and impact are two different conversations. There isn't a debate anymore about utility.

I know this probably won't stop people from continuing to derail conversations with the claim that developers are wrong about utility, but I had to try. It's just hard to let it pass by when someone claims the sky is green.

I understand that AI makes people angry and I think they have good reason to be angry. There are a lot of aspects of the AI revolution that I'm not thrilled about. The hype foremost, the FOMO as part of the hype, the potential for increased wealth consolidation really sucks, though I lay that at the feet of systems that existed before LLMs came along.

It's messy, but let's consider giving the benefit of the doubt to professionals who say a tool works instead of claiming they're wrong. Let them enjoy it. We can still be angry at AI at the same time.

I have a friend who recently started reading fiction books for the first time since he was a teenager. It's been great recommending him some books, and he is currently exploring different genres to find ones he likes with a goal of one book a month this year. I was chatting with him about his reading today and this got me thinking about the books I enjoy and associated tropes of different genres.

This made me think it might be fun seeing what my fellows tilders think about tropes in books.

• Do you have any tropes in books that you love?
• On the flip side, do you have any tropes that you can't stand?
• Are there any novels that execute these tropes well/poorly?
• Do you find yourself enjoying tropes being subverted?
• Anything else trope related you want to chat about!

I’m in the process of helping someone come up with lore and I was wondering if there was a website to help with suffixes related to lore and mythology. Things like adding ist, kin, age, folk, etc to try and make new words for beings or creatures.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Picture:

1. Wild Horse Nine
2. Digger
3. Project Hail Mary
4. The Odyssey
5. The Social Reckoning
6. Fjord
7. Cry to Heaven
8. Narnia: The Magician's Nephew
9. The Entertainment System is Down
10. All of a Sudden

Director:

1. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu - Digger
2. Martin McDonagh - Wild Horse Nine
3. Ruyuski Hamaguchi - All of a Sudden
4. Tom Ford - Cry to Heaven
5. Ruben Ostlund - The Entertainment System is Down

Original Screenplay:

1. Wild Horse Nine
2. Digger
3. Fjord
4. No One Cares
5. The Entertainment System is Down

Adapted Screenplay:

1. Project Hail Mary
2. The Social Reckoning
3. Narnia: The Magician's Nephew
4. All of a Sudden
5. Cry to Heaven

Lead Actor:

1. Tom Cruise - Digger
2. Sebastian Stan - Fjord
3. Nicolas Hoult - Cry to Heaven
4. Ryan Gosling - Project Hail Mary
5. Sam Rockwell - Wild Horse Nine

Lead Actress:

1. Renate Reinsve - Fjord
2. Kirsten Dusnt - The Entertainment System is Down
3. Sandra Huller - 1949
4. Mikey Madison - The Social Reckoning
5. Juliann Moore - No One Cares

Supporting Actor:

1. Mark Ruffalo - Being Heumann
2. Steve Buscemi - Wild Horse Nine
3. Jesse Plemmons - Digger
4. Aaron Taylor Johnson - Cry to Heaven
5. Colman Domingo - Michael

Supporting Actress:

1. Parker Posey - Wild Horse Nine
2. Adele - Cry to Heaven
3. Sandra Huller - Digger
4. Giuliani Nahmany - Fjord
5. Samantha Morton - The Entertainment System is Down

No one’s sure if The Entertainment System is Down is coming out this year, Ostlund decided to skip Cannes so it could be set for a 2027 Cannes premiere or he could skip the festival entirely. He’s won two Palmes for The Square and Triangle of Sadnes.

Cry to Heaven seems to be a big contender everyone has pegged. I was initially against it because Anne Rice + Tom Ford seems too campy for the Academy but I also felt that way early on about Conclave and Hamnet and the people initially hyping it up were right. Plus I love Adele so I will be stanning that.

Don’t think Dune 3 is happening because it’s got the been there done that problem. Part two got less nominations than Part one despite having better critical reception and higher box office. Avatar Fire and Ash dropped off from Way of Water so I’m assuming the same sci fi trilogy trajectory here.

so like most of the community, I wanted to do a dance when I saw https://tildes.net/~tech/1t09/motorola_and_grapheneos_foundation_partnership_announced. However I have a Google Pixel 6 and according to this page, that stops getting security updates this October.

now what I can't tell is is it a better idea to wait for the new moto+grapheneOS phone or bite the bullet and buy a supported pixel. I don't know if anyone know how long until a moto+grapheneOS phone actually hits the market. If it's next year, not a big deal to wait. If it's 2+ years, I get worried about missing out on security updates.

Not sure the best course of action, security wise.

I’m having a problem finding landscape architects and designers who use watercolor in their plans. I’ve used several search engines and AIs. The problem seems to be twofold: the word watercolor in my search brings up results that use digital watercolor, and the word landscape brings up artists of landscapes. I’m looking for example work not just names of artists. I’m currently studying landscape design and am enjoying hand rendering plans. A friend gave me some watercolors to try after I complained about not really liking colored pencil or markers. My watercolor rendered plans look way better, but I don’t really know what I’m doing or what I’m striving for because I can’t find a lot of examples. Can anyone help me out? I thought I was good at search, but this has me rethinking that assumption :(

(Didn’t know what group to put this in)

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.