Happy pi day! Though maybe we should celebrate tau instead…

Devin enters the scene as your friendly neighbourhood AI software developer 💻

Maybe the days of software engineers being automated out of a job is closer than I thought! Cognition Labs just announced Devin, an autonomous AI agent that can complete complicated long form coding and research tasks by itself. The examples in the thread include:

• Ability to use unfamiliar technologies by browsing the web to read documentation and synthesize information

• Contribute to mature codebases with bugfixes

• Train and fine tune its own AI models

With all of these wrapped up and completed with context, this seems like a massive leap forward in the development of autonomous agents. Imagine that today, with this, is the worst this technology will ever be in history. Absolutely astounding.

Now taken to the realm of construction, I’ve always advocated that each consultant or contracting firm should have a small team of software engineers to work on bridging the gaps and pushing the bounds of the things that come up in the daily work of engineers. With this development, maybe that day will come much much sooner (and with much less cost).

The complete antithesis of the Paris 2024 Olympics mandate, construction on NEOM’s THE LINE continues

We’ve achieved perfect balance: with the last feel-good post about the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics’ mandate, this time, we’re talking about the actually pharaonic megastructure that is The Line by NEOM.

The Line is just a LOT and I do not have enough time and space to explain it all here, unfortunately. The tl;dr version is that NEOM, a region in Saudi Arabia, was committed $500 billion by the Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to develop several regions as the “land of the future”. The Line, a city/megastructure hybrid, is one of those regions. It will be built out of two 500m high linear skyscrapers spanning a total 170km distance with a total width of only 200m. Yes, you read that right. Here, I will put write it again. It will be built out of two 500m high linear skyscrapers spanning a total 170km distance with a total width of only 200m. Absolutely absurd. There’s been lots of discussion from all sides (architectural, structural, societal, technological) condemning this dystopian mess, but alas, it seems like it continues forward.