I think it's NP hard, maybe from Sparsest Cut. But you could probably find the min-cut and then iterate by adding capacity on edges in the min cut until you find a cut of the right size. (if the desired cut-size is close to the min cut size at least).
It's NP-hard from Minimum s–t Cut with at least k Vertices. That's the edge version, but since the grid graph is 4-regular(-ish), the problem is trivially convertible to the vertex version.
The US spend years building the UN and the system of international law and it benefits a lot from it. The US is like 4% of the world population and 2% of the area, but dominates pretty much anything you care to measure. It is really not in US interest to overthrow the current system. Its wild that the main threat to international order is coming from the US. Not just this latests development, but the talk of annexing Canada and Greenland, the undermining WTO and WHO etc. Read Hobbes, even the strong do not benefit from “jungle law”.
People who drive policy believe it has already collapsed; now it’s just about asserting control over the resources that will let US(or them personally) thrive in an isolationist, post-AGI world.
The lunatic fringe has long seen global institutions as arms of a shadowy conspiracy to destroy national sovereignty and impose a world government. Far from being instruments for exerting US control, they’re seen as holding us down.
It’s just like vaccines. Why would a country deliberately weaken and sicken its population by discouraging the most effective medical interventions ever devised? Because the nuts have take over and conspiracy theories have gone mainstream.
Yeah, I’ve noticed the classic line showing up on shelves and they seem a ton better, but I don’t recall seeing them several years ago when we were doing lots of Lego-buying. Really limited selection and mostly big, expensive sets too, not many mid-sized ones. But glad to see them releasing sets that seem more focused on play than sitting on a shelf.
Sure, not that exact hierarchy. But a hierarchy. At other places it might be Senior, Principal, Director, etc. at some places they’re given, at other places you fight for it. Variations of leveling.
Why do you need a truck? Serious question, in europe professionals have a van, like the Ford e-transit, and if you just need to haul some stuff from your summerhouse sometimes you hitch a trailer to your car. Why do you need a truck? Couldn’t you buy an electric van instead?
For personal use, like you mention, people use a small trailer. You own one or borrow it freely from many places, hitch it to your car, haul dirt, and then detach it. No need to drive a truck everywhere because you need to haul some stuff once a month.
> But this idea that no normal person needs a pickup truck a dozen times a year is just weird.
Yet the US is the only country where office workers own trucks. The only real use of a F150 style truck is offroad hauling, which is not something most people have to regularly do.
You borrow it freely in places where you don’t need it. In rural areas they aren’t available. And getting a trailer and towing it is t as convenient as just driving a truck.
> Do people load their Transits with piles of dirt and mulch? I doubt it.
I am from the UK but live in Canada. I only see three types of businesses using those Transit style vans here in North America: food delivery, parcel delivery and landscaping businesses. I assume the landscapers are carrying dirt at least some of the time.
I see carpenters and electricians who trick them out with a little workshop, but that's really it. Landscapers it makes sense because you're hauling equipment and storing it in the van, so you can probably both store more and protect from the elements
The split for the rest of the world is: Transit-like van for almost everything in places with real roads, Hilux-sized truck in places without roads and contractors who mostly carry dirt, gravel etc. Only the US and Canada use F150-sized trucks.
Not sold (really) in the US. There's the VW electric van but that's more of a gimmick than anything else.
In the US, there's also just a pretty big infrastructure around tooling trucks for professional work. Not that that doesn't exist for vans in the US, it's just somewhat more common to see trucks having full toolsets on the side for quick access with a decent sized bed. The F350 is a major workhorse for that sort of thing.
>> "VW electric van but that's more of a gimmick than anything else."
Really? ... I'm seeing them adopted more widely in Europe now by businesses. Perhaps as second hand or lease prices are coming down. Maybe that doesn't translate to the US ...
Quite nostalgic seeing them run around Central London with business signs on their side... much like the originals. My point: not a gimmick in my experience.
I live in rural northern New England, and as well on-road I have plenty of either off road or unmaintained road usage year round, and a number of loads in those conditions that exceed the width of the vehicle (so wouldn't be public road legal). Also equipment and loads that exceed the height of the vehicle (which is road legal if properly secured). In principle a van with sufficient towing capacity and off road capability could use a trailer of some kind for those roles, I have nothing against vans per se, but since I don't need extra "interior space" the bonuses of vans don't help much vs the reduced flexibility and extra complications. I do keep my eye on them too because the line between "truck" and "van" can be fuzzy and if something sorta convertible or with some innovative ways to straddle the sufficient for my purposes came along I'd certainly consider it, but it hasn't been the case yet and the truck form factor is just really handy for making do with a surprise need on the spot far from anything with sufficient straps and bungie cords, without needing any other equipment.
It'd be nice if it could be a reasonable price too and not include a lot of the bling, though I'm perfectly aware a huge percentage of the truck buying audience cares about that a great deal vs having their truck all beat up and just wanting it to go forwards/backwards/left/right on demand reliably with a bunch of random stuff every day. But it'd be good to see anything at all that tried to work with the advantages of electric vs the limitations and both give a good truck experience and improve the experience for others that share the land, like with greatly enhanced visibility and better shapes that enhance safety for pedestrians. Don't need a ginormous engine to have very good torque with electric. I'm hopeful somebody will get there eventually but I guess the path has proven more winding then I'd once thought it'd be, I'd expected the iteration to be going pretty hard and fast by now (in America/EU I mean, it does seem to be moving real quick now in China).
Anyway, hope that gives some answer to your question. Just one solitary data point, I don't mean to do any extrapolation from this to the wider market, but I do actually use my truck pretty hard for truck things. We have compact efficient cars as well though for long distance travel and the like, my truck at least will spend 99% of its time within a 150 mile radius for work or any other use.
On the flip side, as a van owner (though not a professional "working van") ...
1. you don't need straps and bungees for the van - ours can take pipework, framing lumber and other "long" stuff up to 16', straight on the floor, fully interior.
2. you don't need the gate down - it handles 4x8' sheet goods with all the doors closed, either vertical or horizontal
3. security concerns are much better
4. weather concerns are much better
5. for some folks, you can have highly effective work space inside the van (granted, I've seen some loose equivalents on custom work trucks)
6. mileage is generally significantly better
From my POV, the two wins of the truck form factor are (a) easy of loading/unloading bulk material (e.g. the van is 100% useless for gravel) (b) tall loads. That said, I don't think I've ever need to move anything that was too tall for our Sprinter - worst comes to worst, it gets laid down.
That's not a "flip side" just different uses. I said wide as well as tall, not just long. Truck is also useful for loose loads, including that I can put stuff (sand/gravel/soil) directly into the bed from my tractor bucket as well. And the form factor does feel better sometimes too imo. Like, just 3 days ago I moved around 1100 lbs of concrete mix for a small job, and even though I could have fit them into a van in principle for loading/unloading and cleaning of all the nasty dust it's nice just to have a truck bed. Security is whatever here, and I don't think weather is actually much of an impact either since you can easily add a basic cover if you want (and then have it out of the way when unneeded). They're useful and at least in the past could be had pretty utilitarian and cheap. Small little things too, like just plain less volume for environmental control in a no-cab or half-cab vs a full or van, always seemed a little easier/faster to heat up or cool down. But this is all really personal, and as they've turned more and more into show vehicles the value has gotten worse for sure.
People buy them _because_ they are ginormous and hostile. It's part of the marketing. Ford could make a pedestrian safe work vehicle but they won't because selfish people love these. Especially when it becomes an arms race when half the population drive them. Oversized vehicles need to be taxed more and regulated properly.
I did, although a long time ago, so maybe I need to try it again. But it still seems to be stuck in a chat-like interface instead of something tailored to software development. Think IDE but better.
When I think "IDE but better", a Claude Code-like interface is increasingly what I want.
If you babysit every interaction, rather than reviewing a completed unit of work of some size, you're wasting your time second-guessing that the model won't "recover" from stupid mistakes. Sometimes that's right, but more often than not it corrects itself faster than you can.
And so it's far more effective to interact with it far more async, where the UI is more for figuring out what it did if something doesn't seem right, than for working live. I have Claude writing a game engine in another window right now, while writing this, and I have no interest in reviewing every little change, because I know the finished change will look nothing like the initial draft (it did just start the demo game right now, though, and it's getting there). So I review no smaller units of change than 30m-1h, often it will be hours, sometimes days, between each time I review the output, when working on something well specified.
It has a new “watch files” mode where you can work interactively. You just code normally but can send commands to the llm via a special string. Its a great way if interacting with LLMs, if only they where much faster.
If you're interested in much faster LLM coding, GLM 4.6 on Cerebras is pretty mind blowing. It's not quite as smart as the latest Claude and Gemini, but it generates code so fast it's kind of comical if you're used to the other models. Good with Aider since you can keep it on a tighter leash than with a fully agentic tool.
If your goal is to edit code and not discuss it aider also supports a watch mode. You can keep adding comments about what you want it to do in a minimal format and it will make changes to the files and you can diff/revert them.
The chat interface is optimal to me because you often are asking questions and seeking guidance or proposals as you are making actual code changes. On reason I do like it is that its default mode of operation is to make a commit for each change it makes. So it is extremely clear what the AI did vs what you did vs what is a hodge podge of both.
As others have mentioned, you can integrate with your IDE through the watch mode. It's somewhat crude but still useful way. But I find myself more often than not just running Aider in a terminal under the code editor window and chatting with it about what's in the window.
Seems very much not, if it's still a chat interface :) Figuring out a chat UX is easy compared to something that was creating with letting LLM fill in some parts from the beginning. I guess I'm searching for something with a different paradigm than just "chat + $Something".
the question is, how do you want to provide instructions for what the AI is to do? You might not like calling it "chat" but somehow you need to communicate that, right? With aider you can write a comment for a function and then instruct it to finish the function inline (see other comments). But unless you just want pure autocomplete based on it guessing things, you need to provide guidance to it somehow.
I don't know exactly, but I guess in a more declarative manner rather than anything. Maybe we set goals/milestones/concrete objectives, or similar, rather than imperatively steer it, give it space to experiment yet make it very easy to understand exactly what important tradeoffs everything is doing.
I find a good compromise on that front is not to use the chat primarily, but to create files like 'ARCHITECTURE.md', 'REQUIREMENTS.md' and put information in there describing how the application works. Then you add those to the chat as context docs.From the chat interface then you are just referring to those not just describing features willy nilly. So the nice thing is you are building documentation for the application in a formal sense as part of instructing the LLM.
But that is the typical agentic LLM coder style program I was initially referring to, saying we maybe should explore other alternatives to. It's too basic and primitive, with some imagination.
I think the problem is that models are just not that good yet. At least for my usage at work, the CLI tools are the fastest way to get something useful, but if you can't describe basically exactly what you want, you get garbage.
They are good enough, but people aren't exploring other UIs enough. The TUI tools (which I think you're referring to, Codex, Claude Code et al) are a good start, but they feel like a prototype compared to a completely different UI. You'd still describe what you want, but not imperative in a chat window, but some other manner.
The typical "best practice" for these tools tend to be to ask it something like
"I want you to do feature X. Analyse the code for me and make suggestions how to implement this feature."
Then it will go off and work for a while and typically come back after a bit with some suggestions. Then iterate on those if needed and end with.
"Ok. Now take these decided upon ideas and create a plan for how to implement. And create new tests where appropriate."
Then it will go off and come back with a plan for what to do. And then you send it off with.
"Ok, start implementing."
So sure. You probably can work on this to make it easier to use than with a CLI chat. It would likely be less like an IDE and more like a planning tool you'd use with human colleagues though.
Aider can be a chat interface and it's great for that but you can also use it from your editor by telling it to watch your files.[1]
So you'd write a function name and then tell it to flesh it out.
function factorial(n) // Implement this. AI!
Becomes:
function factorial(n) {
if (n === 0 || n === 1) {
return 1;
} else {
return n \* factorial(n - 1);
}
}
Last I looked Aider's maintainer has had to focus on other things recently, but aider-ce is a fantastic fork.
I'm really curious to try Mistral's vibe, but even though I'm a big fanboi I don't want to be tied to just one model. Aider lets tier your models such that your big, expensive model can do all the thinking and then stuff like code reviews can run through a smaller model. It's a pretty capable tool
Very much this for me - I really don't get why, given a new models are popping out every month from different providers, people are so happy to sink themselves into provider ecosystems when there are open source alternatives that work with any model.
The main problem with Aider is it isn't agentic enough for a lot of people but to me that's a benefit.
They do compete on content. How many billions did Spotify spend on Joe Rogan? And it happens with music too, some bands moved away from Spotify in rage recently and at least one person switched to Tidal to keep listening to KGLW https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jul/26/king-gizzard-a...
That said, my interpretation is that bands don’t really make a lot of money from streaming, it’s more of a promotional platform for them so it makes sense to just be everywhere to be seen. This is not true for tv/films.
reply