Some details that might be relevant (in that I can imagine you'd get different results if the answers changed):

• What language(s) is your codebase in?
  • If it's an optionally-typed language, how much do you use types?
• How big is it?
• How familiar are you with it?
• How big are the changes you typically have to make, across how many files?
• How thorough are the existing tests?
• How much of what you do is fixing bugs versus implementing features versus refactoring versus other?
• Something like... how interesting is the code you write / how much boilerplate is there? Like I expect different amounts of help from the agent if a task looks like
  • Copy the 150 lines across five files that were used to implement this other feature, and change a few parameters.
  • Integrate with this new external API.
  • Improve performance of serializing and deserializing this data structure, when it's streamed over a slow connection.
  • Change the underlying storage of this particular type from a search tree to a hashmap (most places we use the type won't be affected, but a few places where we access internals need to be updated).

(Or if you think some of these aren't relevant, I'm interested to hear that too.)

Semaglutide (aka Ozempic and Wegovy) activates only GLP1Receptor. We’ve covered why that helps, but often comes at the cost of fatigue.

Hm, I'm missing why it comes at the cost of fatigue?

Both Willy and Toni had been swept off. In the fall, the rope had tangled itself around Willy's neck and strangled him. Edi, still at the top of the cliff face and tied to both the fallen men, had been smashed against a rock at the top, fracturing his skull before freezing to death soon after. But his frozen body remained pressed against the rock, saving Toni from certain death.

Not important, just something I noticed: wikipedia has it that these causes of death were the other way around.

[Willy] Angerer also fell and was killed when his body hit the rock face, while [Edi] Rainer quickly asphyxiated from the weight of the rope around his diaphragm.

But it doesn't source that claim specifically and I didn't go hunting.

Incidentally, there's a film called the Eiger Sanction involving an attempt to scale the Eigerwand, in which

During filming:

While the team was preparing to be helicoptered off the north face, [climbing advisor Mike] Hoover remembered they had not taken any footage from the climbers' point of view of the boulders crashing down on them. With his handheld camera, Hoover and 26-year-old British climber David Knowles rappelled down to the ledge and took the needed footage. As they were gathering their gear, a huge rock broke free and smashed into the climbers, killing Knowles and leaving Hoover with a fractured pelvis and severely bruised muscles. Following an impromptu wake for Knowles, [director Clint] Eastwood considered cancelling the production, but the climbers persuaded him to continue, assuring him that they all knew the risks of their trade and did not want Knowles' death to be meaningless.

Did you update the post? By my read, Mis-Understandings' comment still disagrees with it, in particular with

The entire business of selling flight tickets is actually a loss leader for the airlines' real business of selling miles.

But I'm not sure if I'm reading right.

By contrast the lives of factory farmed animals are incredibly gentle and easy, with almost no suffering

I find this believable for cows, but not chickens.

We have been breeding domestic animals for millennia to thrive in captivity

As I understand it, factory farming conditions in the past 100-200 years are very different to what farmed animals experienced prior to that. If people in 1700 had tried raising chickens in conditions we raise them in today, the chickens would have died of disease and vitamin deficiencies.

So sure, farmed chickens are probably very different from the wild chickens they're descended from. But farmed chickens aren't raised in the conditions we've been breeding them in for millennia.

As an audience member, I often passively judge people for responding to criticism intensely or angrily, or judge both parties in a long and bitter back and forth, and basically never judge anyone for not responding.

I rarely notice myself judging someone for not responding.

I do judge people for making mistakes, or for omitting important considerations. And when a person doesn't reply to criticism, I'm more likely to believe they've made a mistake or an important omission.

I’m glad the idea got through despite that.

Oh, I'd say it didn't. At least not to me, and judging from my memory of the comments, not to many others either.

That is, when I read the essay I thought: "Zack thinks that Oli and Duncan think X, and Zack thinks X is wrong. I think instead Oli and Duncan think X', which is obviously true."

Judging from this comment, you actually thought Oli and Duncan think X', and you think X' is wrong. And sure, after reading the essay I thought "Oli and Duncan think X'", so arguably the essay transmitted that to me. But it felt more like the essay pointed me in a direction that let me generate the hypothesis myself, rather than actually transmitting the hypothesis to me.

Not sure if this is particularly a meaningful distinction.

Different in what respect?

This is kind of hard to answer because the distributions overlap, but they still seem like clearly different distributions to me. For example:

• If I'm writing a post-like-thing, I need to come up with a topic, and I might change the topic half way through writing it. If I'm writing a comment-like-thing, I'm continuing with the topic that someone else started.
• Post-like-things are more likely to argue that some claim or idea that I've picked myself is true/useful, comment-like-things are more likely to argue that some claim or idea that someone else picked is false/useless-or-harmful.
• I'm more likely to try to come up with an analogy when writing a post-like-thing, and more likely to dive into an analogy when writing a comment-like-thing.
• A post-like-thing usually can't assume any one specific text as background knowledge. A comment-like-thing can typically assume the reader's also read the thing I'm commenting on and knows the argument it's making.
• A post-like-thing is more likely to be written in the form of "fiction that communicates an idea" than a comment-like-thing is.

Hypothesis: even when you (i.e. Zack) write top-level posts, they're typically towards the comment-like side of things, and that's part of why it's not clear to you that there's a difference. For example, this top-level post is fairly comment-like.

It doesn’t need to, but should it?

Meh, not a conversation I feel like having.

To reiterate: you made an obviously-wrong argument for an obviously-wrong conclusion. ("For a given comment, the same bytes are written to the database regardless of the author. So the text screens off the author; that is, given the text, the effect on the reader can't change depending on the author.") And you know the conclusion is wrong, but you still left the wrong argument in the text, without pointing out where the mistake was or even that there must be a mistake, and that bugged me.

This isn't necessarily a flaw in the post, but I felt like pointing at it and grumbling anyway.

Hm, to clarify...

Like, we can imagine that I (in the UK) might flirt with someone by telling her "you're very pretty", and she'd likely receive subtext like "philh is possibly interested in going on a date with me, or kissing me, or having sex with me". (Or something. I don't claim to be an expert in flirting.)

Is it that in France, it's common for a man to tell a woman "you're very pretty" (or "tu es très jolie" according to Google translate), and it would still have that subtext? And maybe additional stuff like "in the UK there's a higher bar for expressing that subtext than in France; in the UK you're not supposed to express that subtext if you're in a relationship with someone else, where in France it's fine"?

I sometimes see people express disapproval of critical blog comments by commenters who don’t write many blog posts of their own. Such meta-criticism is not infrequently couched in terms of metaphors to some non-blogging domain.

The paragraphs you quote are both metaphors analogizing some non-blogging domain to... something. It's not clear to me that the thing they're analogizing to is "writing posts on LW, specifically as opposed to comments on LW". Like, it seems that you think in Habryka's comment

The situation seems more similar to having a competitive team where anyone gets screamed at for basically any motion, with a coach who doesn’t themselves perform the sport, but just complaints [sic] in long tirades any time anyone does anything, making references to methods of practice and training long-outdated, with a constant air of superiority.

the analogy is that the coach writes blog comments and the team members write blog posts. But skimming a few comments up and down in that thread, that's not a hypothesis I'd generate. (I've read the thread previously but don't remember it in detail.) Possibly the post it's on makes it more plausible as a hypothesis, but like, the comment in question is very deep into a thread.

And similarly, in Duncan's comment

There’s only so much withering critique a given builder is interested in receiving (frequently from those who do not themselves even build!) before eventually they will either stop building entirely, or leave to go somewhere where buildery is appreciated, rewarded, and (importantly) defended.

It seems you think the builders are meant to be the blog posters and the people criticizing them are the blog commentators. But again, if I re-skim the post, this isn't clear. I think the strongest short-snippet evidence for it comes from the line

the commenter most frequently complained about by the former authors was a person who did not themselves write posts

...but this line was written by Vaniver. Duncan quoted it in bold, but I don't think that means Duncan would necessarily draw the line at "people who write posts versus people who write comments". I'd guess he wouldn't, and for that matter that nor would Vaniver.

It seems to me that posts-versus-comments is a helpful stand in for the actual distinction that people care about here, which is...

...well, it's hard to pin down, which I think is part of why people use metaphor. Writing "words that stand by themselves, that provide value to a broad spectrum of people even if they haven't read certain specific other words" versus "words that are mostly only worth reading if you've read some specific other words and didn't happen to spot a specific mistake in them"? I don't think that's quite right, but pointing in the right general direction. (E.g. "part five in an ongoing sequence" might need parts 1-4 as context, but still be in the category that I'm trying to gesture at with the stand-by-themselves description.)

Obviously both kinds of writing can be written as both comments and posts, but there's clear correlation for which is written as which. Describing them as posts versus comments probably isn't ideal, but I think it's mostly okay.

And if we assume people are talking about these other categories, instead of as posts and comments, then:

it’s not even clear to what extent comment-writing and post-writing are even different activities, rather than just being the same activity, writing.

I claim that yes, these two different types of writing are significantly different activities.

Because it would be the same sequence of bytes, the effect of rendering those bytes as text on a monitor and showing them to a human would be the same. The human reading the comment has no way of knowing who or what wrote those bytes to the database. In in the language of causal graphical models, we can say that the text of the comment “screens off” the process that produced it.

Who wrote this comment" is also written into the database, and rendered on the page! You can e.g. choose whether or not to read the words after looking at my username! The effect of rendering these bytes as text preceded by my username does not need to be the same as the effect of rendering these bytes as text preceded by another username!

...I'm pretty sure you know this? At any rate, later down you seem to know that it is possible to know who a comment was authored by. But I found it weirdly frustrating to have this obviously-wrong argument for an obviously-wrong conclusion lying around.