boc

Highway driving is a bit different from complex city conditions. Just look at the difference between the telsa robotaxi performance vs Waymo. Only one of them is truly FSD.

I'm reading the same thread as you and seeing the same complaints, yes. Personally, I'm willing to giving the benefit of the doubt to a company that has demonstrated they will stand up for human rights principles at the expense of their bottom line, vs immediately jumping to a "they are stealing money in plain sight" conclusion from a bizarre bug that was not widely known or reported.

But that's just me. Vote with your dollars; I've voted with mine.

Iranian drones have done nothing to prevent the US and Israel dropping gravity bombs en-mass over their capital right now. JDAMs and unguided munitions are still far cheaper for the explosion size than any drone today. That's not the situation in the Ukraine war on either side.

The US has used one-way "drones" since the 80s or earlier. The entire Gulf War in the early 90s featured a ton of tomahawk cruise missiles. The only real change is that the new shaheeds are way cheaper, slower, and smaller, but can be spammed in larger numbers.

It simply snows a lot more in Tahoe from a SWE standpoint. Utah gets similar "inches" of snow, but fractions of the moisture, which if you've ever built a snowman you know the difference between the heavy thick stuff and the powder that doesn't clump. Utah gets the powder, Tahoe gets the sludge (and a ton of it).

I'd love for you to come along with me on a ski mountaineering trip to the eastern Sierra. It's a mountain range larger than Switzerland with basically one interstate highway to access and no roads that cross through in the winter. Very few year-round towns, and nearly zero services outside of those towns. This ain't the alps - there are no huts, no gondolas, no nothing. If you want to access it, you have to walk/ski your way there. That often means long drives (50-100+ miles), camping in your car, and bringing everything you need to survive with you.

I love the confidence with which you give your answer though! Europeans famously underestimate the American West, which is why they often get into serious trouble (or die[1]) at alarming rates out here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley_Germans

Seems to be back now (claude code at least)

Very fair points! I think I'll re-assess how I'm handling my setup. Unfortunately I don't have a dedicated devOps team, but still want to do my best to prevent those types of outcomes.

I've determined that my ultimate dream car would be something like a Rivian but with Waymo tech, so I can drive it manually when I want/need (snowstorms, off-road), but I can also let it drive me across the country at night while I camp in the back. Would absolutely change the way we move across the US, especially if you have hobbies that involve a lot of gear and equipment.

That's because market street is closed to cars now. It's essentially a pedestrian corridor with the trolley/busses.

Far, far bigger than any other US city. Why? IMO with AI it's basically an arms-race mentality and a lot of the startups/labs here are grinding 24/7 to snap up the industries before legacy businesses realize what's happening. It's a lot easier to feel that energy/pressure when everyone around you is doing the same thing, vs in NYC or wherever where everyone is out enjoying their weekends.

As someone who lives and works in SF, I think it depends quite a bit on your social scene and neighborhood. Where I'm at it's constantly alive with people in the parks, out for running/biking groups, going to farmer's markets, attending art fairs, bars overflowing, etc. I meet lots of interesting people and enjoy the scene quite a bit, but maybe I run in a younger crowd than your friend who complains about the city.

Not here to change your mind, but I'm "defending" SF because I've never experienced such a difference between the lived experience in a city and the online vitriol you see constantly about it. It's a true "don't believe your lying eyes" situation and it's honestly a bit disorienting.

Anybody who has tried to rent an apartment in SF in the past 6 months knows that the city is rebounding fast - avg rents are skyrocketing again and there are lines out the door for 1/2bds. People are locked-in to their covid specials that they outgrew, but can't afford to leave. I watched some friends offer to pay 12 months of rent up-front in cash for a place and still got outbid by another offer.

I honestly disagree with this article - it seems to be conflating "economic activity" with extremely high-end real estate sales data in certain neighborhoods. The city feels much more alive in the past 12 months than it was previously, and there is a lot more energy and public events. If there's anything specific to complain about, it's that the AI boom has led to the 996+ crowd staying inside and not contributing much to the local scene, but honestly that's probably fine with everyone involved.

Whataboutism, used effectively, is designed to change the subject and stop detailed exploration of the topic at hand. Which is what you're doing in this thread. We don't need to turn a news-relevant thread specifically about the CCP into a thread relitigating decades of American government and business behavior. You can make a separate submission to discuss the US if you'd like.

It's a good question. I think it's similar to the question about an employee having sensitive access, and whether they'll get blackout drunk one night and delete everything. Or they get spearfished and get owned (prob more likely).

In the future, I could see this solved by the same "nuclear launch key" style delegation of keys. Aka in order to run certain API or database commands, the service requires both the standard dev key (presumably used by the LLM) and a separate "human admin key" that gets requested whenever a specific operation is requested. It could be tied to a biometric request or something as well to avoid the LLM hacking its way around it. Honestly this is pretty out of my technical depth but just thinking out-loud.

More like, I expect this bomb can explode, so I've built contingency plans around it because the cost of not using the tooling is much higher than having downtime for my specific use-case.

As described, there are other failsafes as well. The ultimate being that I keep all code version-controlled, and all databases snapshotted offsite daily/hourly and can rebuild them from a complete delete in fewer than X min.

My broader point is that LLMs are going to need access to these keys whether we like it or not, and until we get extremely scoped API permissions (which would make a ton of sense, but most services aren't there), you have to live a bit on the edge to move quickly.

I'm just so confused why people aren't just using ghostty/kitty/terminal.app and claude code. Compared to the other approaches I've tried, it's by far the most effective way to get performance from opus 4.6/4.7

As soon as I read that line, I knew everything I needed about the author and his abilities.

LLMs can research what a tool does before calling it though - they'll sniff that one out pretty quick.

I think the better route is to be honest and say that database integrity is a primary foundation of the company, there's no task worth pursuing that would require touching the database, specifically ask it to think hard before doing anything that gets close to the production data, etc.

I run a much lower-stakes version where an LLM has a key that can delete a valuable product database if it were so inclined. I've built a strong framework around how and when destructive edits can be made (they cannot), but specifically I say that any of these destructive commands (DROP, -rm, etc) need to be handed to the user to implement. Between that framework and claude code via CLI, it's very cautious about running anything that writes to the database, and the new claude plan permissions system is pretty aggressive about reviewing any proposed action, even if I've given it blanket permission otherwise.

I've tested it a few times by telling it to go ahead, "I give you permission", but it still gets stopped by the global claude safety/permissions layer in opus 4.7. IMO it's pretty robust.

Food for thought.

It's mostly done because Iowa hosts (arguably) the most important primary election for presidential cycles.

Zed is snappy as an IDE, and ghostty for your CLI. I've done like 99% of my work in the past month just in ghostty + CC.

I think you're missing the larger point: software is about to be insanely easy to generate. Anthropic is churning out new products because they can basically spin these things up in a week, so there's really no "cost" to them in a traditional strategic sense.

The US had the atom bomb for a few years before anyone else had it. Anthropic has mythos now before anyone else - they are probably using it to churn out as many software clones as possible before someone else catches up.

Love the Flashbulb!

What's the point of living in an advanced society if you just sit around watching it decay around you? Our ancestors fought for our indifference today, and with attitudes like yours we'll watch our children fight for it again tomorrow.

Aka Claude Code.

Maybe, but destroying USAID was an unforgivable sin. Short of nukes, rapidly turning off direct medical and food aid that people in critical need have relied on for years is objectively one of the fastest way to kill millions of people.

Wamyos in SF are nearly indistinguishable from ubers/lyfts at this point. Maybe a bit slower if you don't have the highway mode enabled on your account, but they are everywhere and arrive within 5min most of the time I order one. I've ridden them so often I've lost count.

You'd have to pay me to ride in a Tesla robotaxi. That tech isn't anywhere near the same as Waymo.

Traffic lights can be tuned to create "green waves" that allows for efficient flow of traffic along arteries through a city. You can adjust the timing throughout the day to help alleviate congestion. In rural areas, heavy machinery/commercial vehicles may need to make a very wide turn through the intersection. Traffic circles are fine for a lot of applications but they aren't strictly better than lights in all circumstances.

Nominating this as the "most HN" comment of the year.