bakugo

Trying to fix falling birth rates with an official government dating app shows they don't understand the problem in the slightest, as dating apps are one of the main causes of declining birth rates in the first place.

They're just following the current AI marketing playbook. "Our new model is simply too dangerous to release to the public right away" is now standard practice.

They even gave their model a random nonsensical name suffix simply because OpenAI is now doing it, too. Monkey see, monkey do.

It's true that Google is still very successful, but simply calling their AI a successful product misses the full picture. Their flagship product has always been and continues to be advertising, the AI overview is only there to pull people away from ChatGPT and, similar to ChatGPT itself, is not a product the vast majority of people would be interested in paying for - it exists only as a sort of loss leader to keep people looking at ads, and is not making any sort of profit on its own (quite the contrary, I imagine it's pretty expensive to run every query through an LLM, even if it's a small one.)

AI labs have long since realized that the only real path to direct profitability is coding, and in this, Google have indeed fallen behind.

You can, of course, argue that none of this matters as long as the whole is making a profit, but I think the distinction is important.

It would be, if it wasn't intended. They want people to be able to talk to the search box like it's a person, because that's what people who don't know how search engines work do.

Finally, someone else talking about this.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I often use Google when I have some text I got from somewhere, and want to find pages containing that exact text. Sometimes the text in question sounds like something you'd say to someone else and, of course, the AI overview responds to it accordingly.

To me, there's something deeply unsettling about this... thing pretending to be a person, shoving itself in my face and responding to this random text as if it was a person responding to something I said to it, without my consent. I can't disable it, I'm just forced to have this fake human sitting there, listening in on everything I type into the search box and trying to talk to me about it. It's a sort of uncanny valley-like feeling.

I mean, if any of the people commenting on this post calling it censorship also believe Trump getting banned from Twitter was censorship, they're free to reply to me stating so, proving me wrong in the process. Nobody has done so, because I'm right.

I'm not conflating anything, I'm simply repeating what I was told hundreds of times in the past by others in their defense of social media censorship, such as when Twitter banned Trump. So, is it different now?

You don't understand, it's different. Back then, it was the bad guys being censored, so it was a good thing. Now it's the good guys being censored, so it's a bad thing.

When the left censors their political opponents, they're "protecting democracy". When the right does the same, they're "threatening democracy". Those are the rules.

> developers have been complaining about AI supposedly killing their jobs, yet they want to take away the main feature that lets them be an active collaborator and participator in the process.

Goomba fallacy. These are two distinct groups of people.

Don't know how you could possibly reach that conclusion, it makes no sense.

I'm referring to the fact that the author self-identifies as a "communist, feminist, antifascist," which implies a strict adherence to the exact same kind of cult-like conformism to something "completely off the rails" that he criticizes in the article.

For example, to him, the statement "Lake Ontario is now called Lake America" is absurd, but what do you think his thoughts on the statement "men can get pregnant" are?

> Donald Trump (I think more subconsciously than intentionally) is a master of this kind of test. It goes like this: You state something outrageous for example “Lake Ontario is now called Lake America”. People should laugh at you because that is absurd. But some people will instantly call it Lake America (like Google changing what Google Maps says). Those are the people who have passed the test. They have debased themselves in public by following something completely off the rails marking themselves as obedient to the person who started the whole thing.

> This is a typical kind of behavior you see in cults or for example right wing extremist groups: If you get people to tattoo a visible swastika on themselves they have not only declared their submission to the group but marked themselves as no longer part of the rest of society.

There's something deeply saddening about people who correctly call out such subversive behaviors and their effects on others, yet are completely blind to the way they themselves are not only falling victim to, but also perpetuating these exact same behaviors on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Or worse, maybe they are perfectly aware of it, and simply pretend not to be, in service of furthering their own agenda. Rules for thee, but not for me.

Horseshoe theory is alive and well.

Intent matters, and this is intentional. They didn't accidentally deploy these AI agents, and they didn't accidentally give them the tools required to send arbitrary requests to third party websites.

If you walk out onto a busy street, pull out a gun, close your eyes and start randomly shooting around you until you hit someone, you don't get to go "whoops, didn't mean to" afterwards, it's still murder.

There's no surprising behaviors in that situation. Someone who is aware of the change would most likely delete CLAUDE.md. Someone who is unaware of the change would assume CLAUDE.md is still the one being read by CC, which would hold true.

> Read CLAUDE.md if it doesn't exist read AGENTS.md

> Some people might have a different CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md

How exactly do these two conflict? If you have both, nothing changes.

This "tiny feature" consists of hundreds of lines of code spread across 57 source files, many of which are less than 30 lines long, often contain more comments than code, and have no real reason to exist. It's the very definition of overengineering and overcomplexity.

That said, I do find it somewhat funny that Anthropic themselves are falling victim to their own model's tokenmaxxing.

Go download the leaked source code from earlier this year, search for all occurrences of the string `CLAUDE.md`, and be horrified.

It's not the users doing the communication, it's their AIs.

And you, as a human, were not meant to read it - you're supposed to instead feed it back into your own AI agent and have it create a groundbreaking new AI startup based on it. Give it your Cloudflare credentials, sit back, sip a latte, and within an hour or two you'll have a beautiful, fully functional website, complete with fancy fonts, 30 different "No X. No Y. Just Z" taglines, and a $20 monthly subscription, ready to show off to investors. You'll be a highly successful entrepreneur by the end of the week.

It's crazy to me that WP still doesn't make use of proper function type declarations, 11 years after they were added to PHP.

My favorite part of GNOME is how the Windows 8 start screen wannabe truncates the names of apps, and provides absolutely no way to see their full name.

Don't know if it's still the case on the latest version, but for like a decade, opening it on Ubuntu would greet you with an icon named "Software Upda..." and another one named "Software & Up...". Every time I saw it, I'd have to stop and scratch my head for a minute, wondering how such a thing could remain unchanged for so long.

Why do you expect people to not be hostile against something that exists to steal their work and replace them?

> Who cares? Who are these people writing these posts? Why should we give anything they have to say warrant? These posts are getting old, very quick.

Anyone could say the same about any post they don't agree with, doesn't seem very helpful.

I think the key distinction is that it's difficult to determine whether a single commit or pull request is bad code at a glance, but it's easy to determine when the codebase as a whole has gone bad due to many low quality commits.

The latter often doesn't even require looking at the code, you can usually feel it just by using the software. From my experience, all software primarily written by AI is full of little bugs and inconsistencies that reflect bad code architecture (such as two very similar pieces of functionality in two different places behaving in wildly different ways, due to the AI being unaware of the first when asked to implement the second and writing the code twice)

> Opensource is defined by it's licensing terms

Licensing terms that are now irrelevant, since anyone can use AI to rewrite it without the license.

> the community around it.

Open source communities are dying due to AI spam.

You should add "make no mistakes" too, just in case.

The product of an individual's mind is not the same as the mathematical average of the products of everyone's minds. The latter is obviously going to lack any of the uniqueness of the former.

Current models absolutely suck at writing fictional characters, by the way. And they're getting worse. Seriously, try it yourself: have Claude write a story with a decent amount of dialogue involving character A, then have it write another story involving a completely different character B, then compare the dialogue between the two. You'll quickly notice the same blatantly unnatural speech patterns in both.

> But there's a second hurdle that makes it hard for a small but important subset of humanity to understand that chatbots aren't people: the billionaires to whom nearly everyone isn't a real person. These solipsists see chatbots as being equivalent (or even superior) to humans, because they don't think most humans are fully people, either

Never thought about it that way before, but the more I do, the more sense it makes.

I'd take it a bit further, even - I don't think this is exclusive to billionaires. Many of the claims I've heard regarding AI output being indistinguishable from human creation start to make a lot more sense when you consider the person making those claims may not see the people around them as human, may not see themselves as human, or may not even have a concept of what makes a human different from any everyday object.

How so? Do you believe the average person will think twice when TikTok asks them to submit a picture of their ID? No, they'll do it without a second thought so they can go back to mindlessly scrolling through the slop.

The ones who will think twice are exactly the sort of people these laws are intended to punish: the dissenters, the wrong-thinkers, those who must be silenced. Either they choose not to verify and cease to use social media (successfully silenced), or they allow their wrong thoughts to be tied to their identity, such that they can be identified and punished accordingly.

I don't think I have ever seen anyone miss the point of free (as in freedom) software as hard as this before.

I feel like this is a generational comment, similar to that one from 2007 about Dropbox. I'm going to save it in a safe place. 20 years from now, when free software is a forgotten relic of the past and all computing devices that the average person may legally own are just thin clients into some sort of AI agent in the cloud, incapable of running any unapproved code, I'm going to look back at this and have a good laugh before crying.

There's something deeply ironic about calling someone selfish for not wanting billion dollar corporations to suck up everything they've ever created and then sell it back to them.

On the contrary, I think social media bans are poised to accomplish exactly what they're intended to: provide a convenient justification for forced identity verification across all websites.