9 pregnant women produce one baby/month on average (assuming no miscarriages or late births,etc).
On paper your CPU can execute at least one instruction per core per cycle but that's on average too, if you actually only have one instruction to run it takes several cycles.
You're assuming all women in your cohort start not pregnant. However, given a random sampling of women across the entire human race, if you have approximately 14,000 women, statistics says you'll have a baby in a month. That is to say, the chances of one of those woman being 8 months pregnant reaches close enough to 1, given about 14,000 randomly selected women.
Also, you can get a baby tonight if you steal one from the maternity ward.
The real question is, how do LLMs turn the mythical man month on its head. If we accept AI generated code, can an agentic AI swarm make software faster simply by parallelizing in a way that 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month because they're am AI, not human, and communicate in a different way.
The pitfall of AI coding is that previously every shiny tangent that was a distraction, is now a rabbit hole to be leaped into for an afternoon, if you feel like it. It's like that ancient Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times. Everybody can recreate an MVP of Twitter in a weekend now when previously that was just a claim a certain type of people made.
> You're assuming all women in your cohort start not pregnant. However, given a random sampling of women across the entire human race, if you have approximately 14,000 women, statistics says you'll have a baby in a month. That is to say, the chances of one of those woman being 8 months pregnant reaches close enough to 1, given about 14,000 randomly selected women.
There's a good point in here along the lines of "if you need X in a month, and someone else has something that's 90% of what you want X to be, can you buy it from them before starting any crazy internal death marches instead?"
> The real question is, how do LLMs turn the mythical man month on its head. If we accept AI generated code, can an agentic AI swarm make software faster simply by parallelizing in a way that 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month because they're am AI, not human, and communicate in a different way.
This is quite possibly only a one-time switch from a changed baseline, though. Give it a few years and "the fastest way an LLM tool can do it" will be what gets tossed out a an estimate, and stakeholders will still want you to do it in a tenth the time...
Actually, I like quite a lot of the subtle jokes on HN. It is harder to notice, fewer to find, and I don’t get it many a times. But when I get it (or someone explains it to me, perhaps out of pity), I chuckle, laugh, and laugh again. And I remember those comments.
I think the occasional joke is fine but when you have too many then the comments get diluted. It's exactly that kind of thing that makes me hate Reddit and so many other places: spam.
Are you sure that x is an ecks and not a chi that straightened up a bit?
The thing about script and type is they only really work by prior agreement.
There is a set of marks on the page that we all agree on "is" an axolotl. How we choose to say that out loud is up to the individual. On the other hand, if we were to converse with you directly ... vocally ... then you could tell us how you say the name and if we were convinced that you were at least Mexican, we might follow your lead.
Script, type and sounds rarely match up precisely, ever.
I live in a town called Yeovil (Somerset, UK). I have a mug with at least 65 different spellings of the name over the last ~1900 odd years. It started off as Gifle "bend in the river" in a Saxon language. We have had a "great vowel shift" in "english" and three different varieties of "english" noted since then, just in these parts, let alone elsewhere.
The place name was spelt as Evil or Euil for a while! No-one batted an eyelid because the concept of the grammar nazi was a long way in the future and spelling was pretty random in general. Ivel, Ivol, Givelle and many more have been documented.
Please record how you say the name and make it available. Fiddling with text will never cut it.
When I were a nipper lag/latency over 30ms was considered a bit crap for voice unless satellite links were involved. That's for circuit switched networks. Human conversation works best with a sub 25ms latency and you will start to notice lag at 30ms.
Nowadays with all our massively more powerful links (Gb vs Kb) but packet switched, we often end up resorting to a form of half duplex radio protocol. That's just voice, let alone video.
That's what you get when you abrogate your comms to a hyper scaler that will never scale to the point of what you would like because it will damage profits upstream.
Whilst your end will be a phone or laptop or whatever - with gobs of capacity, the hyper scaler bit will be woefully under powered for your call but just enough to keep comms going and your subscription dumping cash into the coffers.
You end up re-inventing how to talk to someone over a satellite link in the 1970-80s ... in 2026! I (UK, 55 y/o) can clearly remember my parents telling me how to talk to great aunt Maye in Australia on the blower. Nowadays we have the internet to packet switch instead of circuit switch which is generally capable of ~10-50ms latency nearly anywhere, where mostly copper is involved. However call quality seems to be shit!
How much did a phone call cost per minute from UK to Australia in the 70's and 80's ?
The modern experience is not perfect but audio is usually far better than the 70's and 80's, video is often an option, and in general the experience is orders of magnitude cheaper.
"How much did a phone call cost per minute from UK to Australia in the 70's and 80's ?"
I think around £5 per minute or more. A quick search found this: https://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/tia/576_image.html#Table%... so my memory is not too far off and that is the other way. Bear in mind that a squid (£1) was worth rather more in the '70s, than now.
A circuit switched call in the '70s - '90s (at least) within the UK was nigh on perfect. There was no noticeable latency. Call quality was way better than a modern Teams or Zoom call (with no video). Your £500 laptop has shit microphones and speakers but you do insist on not using them like a "dog and bone" but instead as a "comms solution".
Standards such as G.711 and co don't "enforce" a latency because they can't. Latency is a property of the network, not the traffic.
You cannot use terms such as "PCMU and PCMA voice frames are 20ms or 40ms" because that makes no sense whatsoever. PCMU and PCMA are protocols that traverse a network - they do not define it.
I'm old enough to have used circuit switched telephony for some years and perhaps you are too. I recall it as being largely latency free, in that a call never sounded weird unless a satellite was involved, in which case the call costs were horrific and you ended up doing a sort of informal form of radio protocol to talk, which generally ended up in a rather scrambled mess of a conversation.
I can remember amassing a stack of 20 10p coins and calling my mum from the UK to West Germany in the '80s and having to feed the coins faster than I could talk. I sent an aerogram later.
.... I'm not the person you're asking but I can give curious anecdata on a home purchase....
When I bought my home, I had a purchase agreement that said 'I will pay up to 1500$ cash if the property assesses for less than X' (X being the amount I told the realtor I was willing to pay.)
And the property happened to assess EXACTLY for X.
Collusion in markets is nothing new, and even when we regulate people find ways around it.
It is very telling especially in light of the Palantir manifesto, that all of this technology is being applied against individuals instead of towards ensuring business compliance.
Hmmm. Property purchase agreements are rather different in your neck of the woods than mine!
Here (UK) we do have a bit of variety, thanks to devolution and bloody mindedness. I'm talking about English here (possibly Welsh too), rather than British (England + Wales + Scotland) or even UK (England + Wales + Northern Ireland). Wales is actually a bit more complicated than that but let's keep it simple.
Here (England), you advertise a house price and invite buyers. You generally engage one or more estate agents (realtors) I think it is called an "invitation to treat" in legal terms.
... negotiations ...
Once a price is "agreed", contracts are drawn up by both sides and "exchanged". When the exchanged contracts are both accepted, then the contract is binding on both sides. Basically: the Buyer will Buy and the Seller will Sell etc.
I think the US is fairly similar in that you do have to agree to something before it becomes a binding agreement.
"Gas" prices are hiking up here - its about £1.90 per litre of diesel at the moment and petrol isn't much less.
In contrast, my cheaper 'leccy rate is now about 25% less at 5.2p per kWh than it was. Electricity is weird in the UK - its pinned to the price of gas and is currently (lol) rather expensive "on peak" at 27.87p per kWh and there is a day standing charge of 47.71p. That's from Octopus.
We also have a petrol car - an elderly Renault Clio. It does just run and run and is pretty economic for a pretty shagged out ICE.
My EV is cheaper to run, by far. However, its unlikely the battery will last 20 odd years. I haven't yet sat down and done some whole life costs for ICE vs EV yet.
My Saic MG4 can do 300+ miles on a 100% charge of its 78kWh battery. After two years, it still manages to exceed its WLTP (with care, when required) and I quite like the ridiculous 0-30 acceleration etc.
When I was a lad, 30ms was considered the worst latency allowable for telephony unless you were dealing with satellite links, in which case you taught people to use a simple variety of radio protocol (over).
Nowadays with all our fancy crappy comms, 200+ms is considered normal. Ever noticed the lag on a Teams call?
"The real reason why they are unhappy with you having an unsupported browser"
I tend to encourage Firefox over Cr flavoured browsers because FF (for me) are the absolute last to dive in with fads and will boneheadedly argue against useful stuff until the cows come home ... Web Serial springs to mind (which should finally be rocking up real soon now).
Oh and they are not sponsored by Google errm ... 8)
I'm old enough to remember having to use telnet to access the www (when it finally rocked up and looked rather like Gopher and WAIS) (via a X.25 PAD) and I have seen the word "unsupported" bandied around way too often since to basically mean "walled garden".
I think that when you end up using the term "unsupported browser" you have lost any possible argument based on reason or common decency.
It still takes roughly nine months to make a human baby, regardless of how many women or babies are involved!
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