He was recently interviewed on Pragmatic Engineer, a podcast whose guests almost always have very impressive technical careers (the episode before him was Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, the VP of Data and Analytics at AWS and the episode after him is Brady Gooch, the Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at IBM)
I agree that summarizing Peter as a "vibe coder" is unfair and disingenuous. The podcast paints his career as being interesting because we went from an impressive software developer, to an entrepreneur, to taking a significant break, to kind of obsessively creating Clawdbot.
Interesting that very few (any?) people in the pictures are wearing helmets. In the US, I think it's a lot more common for cyclers to wear helmets. Maybe that comes with a fear of getting clobbered by a car.
From what I can remember, the overseeing bodies (whatever they are) are not convinced that requiring helmets would reduce serious incident rates, and in fact convinced that this would decrease overall bike ridership.
I'd speculate that the metric of "injuries per kilometer cycled" wouldn't budge because of a helmets requirement.
Can't find a good summary of this now, but some bits of this are googleable.
[1]: "Cycling UK wants to keep helmets an optional choice. Forcing - or strongly encouraging - people to wear helmets deters people from cycling and undermines the public health benefits of cycling. This campaign seeks to educate policy makers and block misguided attempts at legislation."
[2]: "Even if helmets are 85% effective (and assuming q = 0.5 as above), the number of cyclists’ lives saved will still be outnumbered by deaths to non-cyclists if there is a reduction in cycle use of more than 2%"
[3]: "Enforced helmet laws and helmet promotion have consistently caused substantial reductions in cycle use (30-40% in Perth, Western Australia). Although they have also increased the proportion of the remaining cyclists who wear helmets, the safety of these cyclists has not improved relative to other road user groups (for example, in New Zealand).
The resulting loss of cycling’s health benefits alone (that is, before taking account of its environmental, economic and societal benefits) is very much greater than any possible injury prevention benefit."
[...]
"Evidence also suggests that even the voluntary promotion of helmet wearing may reduce cycle use."
[...]
"Even with very optimistic assumptions as to the efficacy of helmets, relatively minor reductions in cycling on account of a helmet law are sufficient to cancel out, in population average terms, all head injury health benefits."
[4]: "With 290 cyclist fatalities in 2022, cyclists were the largest group of road casualties. Of these, most were killed by collision with a vehicle (206 bicycle deaths)."
[5]: "Cycling levels in the Netherlands have substantial population-level health benefits: about 6500 deaths are prevented annually, and Dutch people have half-a-year-longer life expectancy. These large population-level health benefits translate into economic benefits of €19 billion per year, which represents more than 3% of the Dutch gross domestic product between 2010 and 2013.3.
The 6500 deaths that are prevented annually as a result of cycling becomes even more impressive when compared with the population health effects of other preventive measures. In an overview, Mackenbach et al.11 showed that the 22 new preventive interventions that have been introduced in the Netherlands between 1970 and 2010 (e.g., tobacco control, population-based screening for cancer, and road safety measures) altogether prevent about 16 000 deaths per year.
Still, our results are likely to be an underestimation of the true total health and economic benefits."
[6]: "Riding a bicycle to work every day reduces the risk of premature death by 41% (risk of dying from heart disease: -52%; risk of dying from cancer: -40%)."
[...]
"Regular cycling boosts physical fitness and compares to 1 to 2 weekly gym sessions."
[...]
"Bicycle use not only improves physical health, but also has a positive impact on mental health and subjective well-being."
I don’t know where people get the idea that pesticides are forever chemicals. All of them denature, The problem is sometimes not before they reach your table
Chloripyriphos (sp?) are probably the longest lasting one and they don’t use them in any first world country and they’re half-life is something like 60 days
Assuming and making up numbers for pesticide XYZ degrades in 6 months.
First what is degrades is that 100% or 50%? Is that based on just because it’s no longer effective? Does your statement change if considering dumping huge amounts in a highly concentrated area? Does that concentrate what small percentage remains after 6 months, 6 years etc and does that change the conditions of decay for the stuff at the bottom of the pile, middle, top?
Just seems like dumping a 1000 trucks worth of something might introduce some new factors into the equation. But yeah, I’d be more worried about living near or down stream of a rotting orange sludge landfill that’s pulsating with fly larvae I guess in the end than the pesticides, not that people who tend to live near these dump sites really have a choice one way or another.
Yes, modern pesticides degrade. Farmers keep very detailed spray records and fields have essentially "lock out, tag out" times after certain spray applications. Other sprays can't be applied X number of days before harvest, because the application's degradation isn't complete. After harvest, produce who's skin is consumed, like apples, go through a "drencher" and later "dump tank", to perform more washing of the produce's skin.
Congrats on adding a project supposedly using an LLM to you resume, but it doesn't seem to do anything useful. "fox" and "beta" both led to a small shake, which as a user I would think indicates they are not words in the English language.
"Flowery" returned a definition of: "full of, resembling, or smelling of flowers—e.g., a flowery meadow, flowery wallpaper"
This app appears to be a limited but somewhat artsy front-end for an (incomplete) dictionary
I agree that summarizing Peter as a "vibe coder" is unfair and disingenuous. The podcast paints his career as being interesting because we went from an impressive software developer, to an entrepreneur, to taking a significant break, to kind of obsessively creating Clawdbot.
Worth a listen https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-creator-of-cl...