DanHulton

That is just one thing an intelligent actor can do. That is not intelligence.

I think we're both somewhat right, somewhat wrong. _Some_ peasants -- serfs -- were considered property of their lords, or well, of the land that the lord oversaw. If they ran away, they were rounded up and brought back, usually with a beating or worse. But there were also free peasants that rented said land. I didn't really mention them, because they deliberately chose to rent said land - they _could_ have tried their luck anywhere, but they _decided_ to try their luck on this lord's lands, and so, I thought, weren't really relevant to the conversation.

But it's not exactly irrelevant, either, right? It does add to the confusion to leave it out, so, my bad.

As far as the black plague, what gave even serfs so much leverage was the fact that there were so few people in all categories around anymore. Fewer peasants to work the land, so the prices of the free peasants went up commensurately. But even serfs who wants to run far away and set themselves up as free peasants elsewhere could frequently get away with it because a) fewer men on horseback to spare to chase them down, and b) the other lord they went and rented land from didn't have enough peasants to work his land either, and had a real vested interest in making sure they weren't caught and brought back to their original lord.

It might be eventually doable, as an experiment or as a flex, sure. But it's never going to come close to being cost-reasonable versus the equivalent infrastructure here on earth.

> Those peasants could have tried their luck planting a field in the middle of nowhere, far from any village.

Except not really. Peasants were considered the property of their lords. If they decided to go and “try their luck” at a neutral location and that was reported to their lord, armed men on horseback would be very likely to show up not long after, to return them back to the lord’s land, but not without a solid beating and/or maiming first.

Sometimes, certain forms of civilization just are oppressive, rather than collaborative. They tend to be out-competed by forms that are less oppressive, true, but it’s not guaranteed and not always fast and not always permanent.

I’ll even go one step further - I don’t even like saying “Artificial Intelligence”. I think even that anthropomorphizes the machine too much. I prefer “Simulated Intelligence”, and I feel like that describes what is going on much better.

We are, through this process, simulating intelligence. These models aren’t intelligent, but they can simulate it. Every simulation has a degree of fidelity, and we’re not at 100%, not even with the top models. When you think about it in those terms, I find it becomes a lot easier to keep their limitations in mind. Additionally, it becomes easier to remember that this is an algorithm that you are running, and are responsible for, not another being that you can ascribe blame to.

Every time LLM-defenders get upset that people apparently don't understand how LLMs work, why is it they _immediately_ pivot into examples and statements that demonstrate that they don't understand how _people_ work?

"you would be autocomplete too" "thoughts are just tokens" etc

You're not helping your case the way you think you are.

15% more price for 25% more battery is worth it alone. Add in that every time I adjust the volume without needing to dig out my phone, and I’ll feel even better.

$20 is a single meal at a fast food restaurant, which I’ll have forgotten about the very next day. This is a much better long term investment.

Not saying this is what’s going on, but you can ABSOLUTELY have nostalgia for a time that wasn’t your own, too.

>Starting September 14, we're permanently raising standard weekly limits in Claude Code by 25% for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans. Until then, the current 50% increase will be in place.

> Compared to today, this works out to a 17% reduction in weekly limits on Claude Code. We’re working on exciting changes that will make it feel like you’re getting more from Claude, while having more visibility and control of your usage. Can’t wait to share them.

They are both raising the limits by 25% and apparently reducing them by 17%. I think they mean to say you can do more, but what a terrible press release.

Exactly this. You still have to understand the abstraction layer the LLM is working at in order to be able to form an opinion about the quality of the code. (If you DON’T care about the quality of the code, there’s always been ways to get an extra 1000% short-term speed improvement by just not giving a shit.)

AI isn’t “a code abstraction layer” any more than Jira is, or the engineer themselves is.

Damn, can you imagine a world where it would be so easy to convince one of these companies to stop poisoning the minds of an entire country like that?

Like, I kinda jest, but also kinda don’t. Would that really be so bad of an outcome? The net positives don’t really seem to bear up under all the negatives just… going away.

It's exactly this - "coding was never the hard part" translates more directly to "coding was never was slowing me down". It's nailing down requirements, it's cross-functional team meetings, it's planning the testing and rollout, it's integrating with all the other parts of the product and systems, etc etc etc. Optimizing coding was just aiming at the fastest part of the job already.

Because I wanted to ask a human who’s job it is to know, instead of an AI that might make things up and waste all our time.

Not just malformed, they have MULTIPLE malformed tails!

I feel like it’s been understood that we live in a low trust society for a while now. If not for all of us, at least for a LOT of us.

Not necessarily!

If you have a semi-recent MacBook with even 32GB, you can run 20GB models that are pretty damn smart, with room to spare for the rest of your toolchain.

If you’re reasonably connected to the code you’re writing and prompting the AI at the level of the code, not the level of the feature, you can get some fantastic results.

Sure, it’s not the completely automated dreamland that’s been sold, but it’s still a speed-up on par from going from assembler to a higher-level language, which is still immense.

And for effectively free, if you have a machine that would otherwise have been considered “developer-grade” for a lot of tasks anyway.

I would say that the more-exhausting way to live would be to be unaware of this, to accept the “we’re a family here” lie at face value, and to be passed over and screwed over at frequent intervals without knowing or understanding why.

You don’t have to go full Patrick Bateman corp-bro, but keeping in mind the phrase “we don’t fire family” and adjusting your approach based on that counter-example can help you to keep things appropriately transactional and not be taken advantage of.

If your threat model means you can’t afford for border security to view your device, wipe the damn thing yourself before crossing the border and restore it from an encrypted online backup on the other side.

You’re just carrying a blank phone that you intend to set up and use later, and they can’t force you to install your backup onto a phone.

Now, this is sus as hell, and you’ll probably draw all kinds of extra attention, but if border security wants access to your phone in the first place, you’re already in a weird place.

That’s brave, and I don’t mean that shittily, but more cautiously. Like, I’m thinking of the Simpsons shirt-tugging meme when I read this.

I’ve always been hesitant to short stocks because of the old adage “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” and the market has a REAL vested interest in seeing these companies not explode.

Good luck on this one, genuinely, because you may need it.

(That said, if you DO win big on this one, I think we’re all fucked, so maybe I shouldn’t be wishing you TOO much luck. =) )

One of the big dead giveaways for AI videos is the sequence of slow pan shots without any sort of real action or focus. Once you start seeing it in a few of them, you'll start seeing it in _all_ of them. Just shot after shot of a slow pan of a scene with minimal action happening in only a few areas.

We are speedrunning the various phases of learning about victim-blaming, as a community.

It’s kind of wild to watch in real time, instead of over the decades it took society for SA.

Switch vs Switch OLED is fine, comparatively, because you are forgetting about the worst (non-Microsoft) naming choice of all consoles: the New 3DS.

This lead to situations where you could have a new 3DS that wasn’t a new New 3DS, and didn’t play the games you bought with it. You could also, somehow, have an old New 3DS, a logical impossibility.

Anyone in charge of naming anything that just calls it the “new” thing should be fired for not taking their job seriously.

I mean, the first one was just called Xbox.

(Tiny rant - and even THAT name sucked. Internally, since it ran on DirectX (already a name that only a mother could love), it was called the DirectX Box. And rather than come up with a real name, they got attached to their lazy idea and shortened it to Xbox. They have made miserable naming choices for this thing since day one. Since BEFORE day one.)

There’s certainly a debate as to whether animals are conscious or not, and if we’ve just been engaging in a kind of human chauvinism all this time, but I mean consciousness definitely exists. There’s an “I” in here that perceives, and it’s reasonable to extrapolate that I’m not particularly special, that others that have the same parts as me have the same properties (consciousness).

No, that’s a fair point. I definitely have certain coffees I still quite enjoy after they’ve cooled, and others that I really, really don’t.

It’s not an absolute. The fallacy doesn’t imply that every building would be better with a doorman. But it does suggest that buildings that DO have them aren’t necessarily making a wise choice by getting rid of them.

At this point, though, I mean if you don’t get it, you don’t get it.

This is what I run on an M5 MacBook Air 32GB. Works great.

I’m not having it build whole features from scratch, though. I give it pretty explicit instructions closer to the class or function level, and it still saves me an immense amount of time, while I’m very connected to the code that’s written.

Definitely the sweet spot for me.

> What the article misses is that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user.

What? No, you're making the Doorman fallacy here, explicitly.

The company THINKS they're saving money by pushing the work to the customer/end user, but there's more to wait staff than just taking orders and payment - they provide the ability to smooth over any difficulties experienced during the meal, they signal status, etc, which would theoretically allow the restaurant to charge more than if they force customers to do all this work themselves.

Not to mention, if I had an experience this miserable at a restaurant, I wouldn't be back, which is a direct loss in revenue.

Restaurants aren't monopolies, except in really extreme cases.

Nothing on that list sounds like a particular hardship. Your "Oh, and" is unfortunate and ought to be addressed, but then again, that was intended as your cherry-topper, not your main course.

This is people's _homes_ we're talking about here, not a baseball card where privileging the owner is without too much consequence. If you lack the empathy to understand why this is a special case, maybe don't be a landlord.

Call it what you want, but it certainly becomes less enjoyable.