TeMPOraL

Indeed, you need to insure from the risk of brick-rain where this weather phenomenon occurs!

Yeah. My impression is, small players exploit the loopholes like there's no tomorrow, big players hire external consultants to give them least-effort playbook and take over liability, as anything more clever is exponentially more expensive.

I remeber the book differently - I remember it being primarily about getting exactly this right. Lot of space spent discussing efficiency and losses and comparing apples to apples.

(Admittedly, I read it many years ago, my memory may be off, though I strongly doubt it.)

Probably, yeah. N=1 and Europe, but that's what I remember from my university years. Wines were for dating; cheap beers and vodka with cola or juices was for general socializing. Cost was a factor for everyone; cheaper means more people could participate more often.

Question is, is it being responsible, or apathetic and lethargic? How do you distinguish responsible character from clinical depression?

With US legal drinking age being 21, this eats into drinking at university/drinking after work, which is very much where bulk of socializing for young adults happens. Can't imagine it's not hugely affecting adulthood habits.

That's true of organic food in general.

"EA cult members" do take it very seriously, and for the moment, this was actually something they became more interested in.

And then we raced ahead straight into materializing the x-risk everyone thought is still a few decades away, speedrunning through all the mistakes LW folks itemized and worried about over the past two decades.

Depends on the angle. It's easy to manipulate someone once you exceed their ability to keep up with you. People "living in symbols" aren't easy to manipulate about easy things, but you can ramp up complexity until they lose track and accept an unwarranted reasoning leap without realizing it.

With people "living in dirt", you can't pull that off because you'll jump ahead so far they'll immediately realize they can't possibly understand what you're selling right now, and shut the argument down. But they can get confused about things outside their direct area of direct experience.

Note: I'm not saying either is smarter or less smart. Rather, "living in symbols" get confused "higher up", while "living in dirt" get confused "low and to the sides", but they probably have more solid grounding.

I mean, on the one hand the tool may be vibecoded crap - I don't know, haven't checked, taking it at your word.

On the other hand, Opus 5.5 cracked zero-shotting proper LCARS interfaces that near-perfectly adhere to the franchise "design language" even in tiny details, while simultaneously being 100% functional following my admonitions about Airbus cockpit design rules and nuclear reactor control room standards.

So yeah, why wouldn't I use it? It works spectacularly well.

Sure I would. I use it every day. Most software is crap, and it got worse once everything became a SaaS or embedded Chrome pretending to be a desktop app (or the worst, embedded Chrome loading a SaaS pretending to be a desktop app).

Hell, half of my use of LLMs these days is bypassing around crap in software written by people[0].

The metric in question is not how it's built. It's whether it solves a problem. Particularly for single or sub-100-users software, what matters is whether it does the job the user(s) like, the exact way they like it.

Speculating here, but maybe I'm also hitting at a disconnect between perspectives: I look at a product as tool to solve a problem. But some look at it as something to sell for money or Internet fame. For the former, distribution doesn't matter. For the latter, distribution is everything, and then, perceived code quality/effort signals actually start making sense.

TL;DR: I don't mind using shoddy software, but I agree it's a bit harder to sell obviously shoddy software.

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[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49875994 I started calling this "Bypass-Driven Development".

So it figures out better what to search for you and how to present results?

Or so it's better at the million other things LLMs are useful for?

I mean if you're trying to mimic human-like interactions, then you have to remember that human interactions involve constant trivial miscommunications and correction of them.

Except why would you waste your time on projects like these, if an LLM can zero-shot them for you?

> If you are just comparing to Sonnet or you aren't paying (your case) then your advice makes perfect sense.

Also if you aren't hitting capacity.

Off-work, I use LLMs regularly for both design/coding and non-technical work, but the volume is not enough to trip the weekly limits, and rarely enough to trip the daily limits. So I just go with whatever's current best SOTA available on my Claude & ChatGPT subscriptions and don't worry about limits. If I hit one, I do some household stuff or relax for a few hours (or just turn in for the day), and then the limit is refreshed.

There is not enough street lamps to charge a meaningful fraction of cars. I mean, look at the streets, there is so, so many cars, parked everywhere they can fit.

But I agree in principle - the power wiring is there already, it's a matter of spamming cheap low-power outlets wherever cars tend to congregate for a rest.

Normally. That's literally what SEO has been about, even pre-LLMs. It's not Google doing it, they don't benefit from their own AI suggestions being bad. Reddit doesn't have any obvious interest here too. But the millions of businesses and millions of people angry at AI, both have plenty of reasons to spam the life out of any site that allows users to post comments, and in both cases, LLMs themselves make it harder to filter and much easier to scale.

Thank you! Spent years perfecting that.

Business idea to solve all the battery complaints:

Make cars work off power tools batteries.

Take e.g. Bosch AMP Share 18V 8.8 Ah bricks[0] or equivalents. Back-of-the-napkin, you'd need about one per 1km of range (+/- various factors). Put them in racks of 5, and allow people to swap out dead racks for charged ones at gas stations[1].

This would give regular people back their favorite experience of gas stations, while preserving environmental and economical benefits. For example:

- People riding short routes could run with only 20%-40% of the racks in. Means they won't need to carry as much mass around. This is like people today who always keep their gas tank half empty or even emptier, to not waste fuel on carrying fuel around.

- People riding long routes could take extra racks in their trunk to exchange range; people operating other equipment could get extra racks for it at the station, too -- same as people today do when coming with gas canisters to the station.

- In case you run out of power in the middle of the road, for some reason, someone else can help you by lending you their battery pack - even easier than lending you gasoline.

- No more worry about battery life degradation - you're constantly swapping out packs, never using the same ones for more than few days or weeks, and it's an activity you are doing regularly - so people would finally realize that batteries are replaceable and stop complaining about used EVs being as good as used iPhones.

- Overall preserves established economics of gas stations and attached restaurants and service centers; every driver born in the last 100 years understands that and will find it intuitive.

- Bonus - the "power tool batteries" was more of a joke establishing scale; actual implementation would be probably sealed "rack-sized" packs with different trade-offs, but on the off chance it is made power-tool compatible, so much extra utility opens - from charging at home, to powering power tools :).

(I think the mistake of the OG idea of swappable battery packs of yore was to optimize for swapping time and keep battery as a unit. Breaking it down into pieces that weigh 5kg or less means you can reuse existing infrastructure.)

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[0] - Not an ad, I just have bunch of those and invent more and more silly ways to power things from them.

[1] - The new "battery passport" regulations around the world already solve some of the technical issues here.

Nobody is doing battery swaps yet? That sounds like an obvious thing? Or is the mobile "glued in battery not serviceable component" thinking spread like poison so much that people don't consider it?

If the rest of the car is fine, it should be one visit to a shop to swap out old battery for new (and the shop handling recycling/disposal of the old one), and off you go with car good as new.

> But nah. Not allowed.

Some of it, you are. At least for personal use. Our minds are our own jails here - we treat abstraction layers as more than suggestions, and vendor preferences as more than opinions. I recommend to try and challenge it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49875994

LLMs, whatever you think of them, currently alter equation a lot when it comes to one-off work like this. I have the skills too (for some of these things), but I don't have time/energy/capacity to do the things necessary to bypass around the obstacles. LLMs do.

> So many companies (including mine) built software to replace spreadsheets - but of course spreadsheets are great because you can do anything you want.

This is doubly ironic, because so, so many companies would be much more useful for the customers if delivered as a spreadsheet file for download.

I know, I worked for one too; said so in the meetings many times, especially watching the frontend side screwing up tables in SPA so they would choke rendering couple dozen rows of numbers.

So much time, effort and money is spent on designing subpar products and services, where spreadsheets would do better, simply because the value of using a spreadsheet goes 100% to users, and it cannot be that users reap all the value of their work, without a host of businesses capturing most of it along the way.

The whole point of replacing spreadsheets with a SaaS is usually to lock-in a specific "user journey" and force users to follow it, and this rarely if ever serves the user.

> I don't know what's wrong with people that they put up with this stuff voluntarily.

They have no other choice.

Tech is magic, it's near-pure supplier-driven market. Consumers don't understand it, barriers to entry are stupidly high[0], but the products/services are still necessary. Consumers are thus forced to choose from what's available on the market, not what would be actually useful. Companies know this very well.

This was true before computers, too - TVs, appliances - but is much stronger with computers (and every non-computer tech becoming a computer skeuomorphing as appliance).

That's why people "put up with this stuff voluntarily". They learn to cope, learn to not touch this if they can avoid it, and maybe silently complain to friends and family. That's why "can you fix my printer" is one of the most hated aspects of family life by computer people.

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[0] - Hardware is pretty much impenetrable, because the easy parts are high-capital, and the important parts are supplier contracts, which everyone who matters has cornered already. Software-side is technically one of the lowest barriers-to-entry economic activities in history, and LLMs help a lot, but in practice, software is rarely the valuable part of software (!) - it's usually network effects (e.g. social media) or supplier contracts (Spotify, etc.), or such.

If only it was possible to have that moat. Alas, optimizing quality of products and employment away is a competitive advantage.

> LLMs still can't do math nor count letters in words.

Humans still can't flap their hands and swim or fly.

Yeah, but even religion is not up to the task for how backwards people's thinking gets at times.

You have people here in this thread - and in every other AI thread - seeing themselves as exploited for information for LLM companies to profit. This is such a backwards, scale-inverting perspective that it shouldn't be possible to hold in a rational mind, and yet.

I'd suspect it's not source laundering, but rather sources themselves being adversarial - poisoned out of spite, or used as SEO.

People who handle this footgun properly tend to come from two groups:

- Those with safety training for this class of foot-pointed firearms, who know how dumb shit looks like and that they should not do it;

- Those with officer training who are able to recognize the higher-level categories, and take principled approach to safety - e.g. recognizing that "date", "timestamp, "duration", "time of day", "time of week", etc. are different concepts and should not be mixed.

This is true about most businesses, hence the dissonance. Pretty much every time a business creates "a moat", it's bad for consumers in some way.

I have my own take on this; I was meaning to write a blog post about it to "coin" the terms, but might as well do it here. My philosophy and attitude related to writing and using software have, in the past years, developed into distinct set of methodologies. There's "maintenance minimization engineering" aspect to creating products, but as a user/prosumer, I have a different approach:

Bypass-Driven Development: making progress by routing around obstructive abstractions instead of integrating on their preferred terms.

Motivating thought: often enough you already have all the pieces to solve your problem, and have legitimate right to use them, yet those pieces refuse to talk directly with each other because of a mix of technical and business reasons. API boundaries, OAuth walls that invite getting additional vendors (identity providers) involved for no good reason, platform purposefully preventing interoperability, enshittification, lack of "business need" to integrate - or worse, having a business need which means integration suddenly involves you being a third party to a contract between two service providers.

There's no technical limitation to prevent this, but I've noticed people started taking abstraction layers, API boundaries and "intended use" as holy writ, and assume you can't do something because "it's not how it's supposed to work".

BDD is my claim that an abstraction which obstructs a legitimate goal forfeits its right to be respected.

Subpattern of this, Bypass in Anger (BIA), when routing around becomes routing through. Evocative example: modern soldiers navigating dense urban environment by ignoring it entirely, and moving in straight lines, just blowing holes in any walls that are between them and their destination. That is my answer to when "the computer says no".

Kinda a pragmatic blend of Adversarial Interoperabiltiy/ComCom, "computational self-determination", good ol' hacker ethos, and a counterpoint to "security maximalist" doctrine that runs modern computing, with a hefty dose of defiant "you are not going to tell me what I can or cannot do with my data on my computer".