christiangenco

will they give me free tokens

My understanding of injecting money in education is that it's proven to be extremely ineffective at improving outcomes.

Schools just hire more administrators and build nicer gyms.

Perhaps you could, but you probably always could've built a clone of any SaaS app you wanted, it's just become faster.

I'm reminded of the infamous Dropbox Hacker News comment[1]. If you're looking at stuff like this thinking "what's the point? I could just make that myself" then you're not the target audience in the same sort of way Ikea isn't trying to sell stuff to carpenters.

This is true even when the barrier to entry in making these sorts of systems has gotten way lower.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Wow, what an exquisite piece of writing.

The core idea of modernity's tendency to take a Good Thing and chop it up into tiny pieces and bind it into Something Resembling Good Thing[1] hit me hard. I've long felt a discomfort with things that pretend to be other things[2]; just be the thing that you are! There's something particularly macabre about the fake version of the thing being built from the ground up bones of the actual thing.

Also: the Incas invented a natural freeze drying method‽ Totally tracks that would lead to a big military advantage before there were many effective ways to preserve food. But also like, what? It took ~500 years for us to rediscover that.

1. examples from the article: McNuggets, American cheese, instant coffee, deli ham, Pringles, particle board, sheetrock, video compilations, gig economy jobs

2. like fake window shutters on houses, brick siding that's meant to look like the house is made of brick, artificial food dyes, the fiberglass shell on the outside of cars, things painted look like they're a different color.

To those who have everything more will be given; from those who have nothing everything will be taken.

Looks like there's still no support for the M50. I hope with the revitalized development it's on the roadmap!

Hah, I'm curious if this is legally possible. I've never seen that on any non-ThinkPad laptop.

I'm with you on desktop but I've been craving some sort of way to interact with Claude Code from my phone while I'm out and about.

What I want at the core is to be able to open up access to my laptop's currently running Claude Code instance (without all these hacky backdoors that fork the chat with every message by using `--print`; I want a first class API that lets me append messages to the current chat), then I want to be able to send messages (with voice transcription) and approve/deny permissions and see the code diffs and all of that.

Maybe something like a Telegram bot? I had hopes for Claude Code UI[1] but the web interface is too clunky on mobile.

1. https://github.com/siteboon/claudecodeui

Preordered! I'm so excited; I had a pebble way back in the day and I remember liking the vibe of it way more than any Apple Watch/fitbit I've owned since. It feels the closest to the watch I would make if I made watches.

Where might I find the SDK or developer docs for how to make apps for this thing?

The world is a slot machine.

There’s a reason intermittent rewards are so intoxicating to naturally evolved brains: exploiting systems that give intermittent rewards is a great resource acquisition strategy.

I was surprised recently to see that gemini-cli[0] and codex[1] each have way more GitHub stars than Claude Code[3]. Currently 62k, 31k, and 25k respectively.

Stars are only a proxy for use, of course, but I'm not sure what a closer public indicator might be.

1. https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli

2. https://github.com/openai/codex

3. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code

> I would argue that there are very few benefits of AI, if any at all. What it actually does is create a prisoner's dilemma situation where some use it to become more efficient only because it makes them faster and then others do the same to keep up. But I think everyone would be FAR better off without AI.

Personally, my life has significantly improved in meaningful ways with AI. Apart from the obvious work benefits (I'm shipping code ~10x faster than pre-AI), LLMs act as my personal nutritionist, trainer, therapist, research assistant, executive assistant (triaging email, doing SEO-related work, researching purchases, etc.), and a much better/faster way to search for and synthesize information than my old method of using Google.

The benefits I've gotten are much more than conveniences and the only argument I can find that anyone else is worse off because of these benefits is that I don't hire junior developers anymore (at max I was working with 3 for a contracting job). At the same time, though, all of them are also using LLMs in similar ways for similar benefits (and working on their own projects) so I'd argue they're net much better off.

I think the idea with unregistry is that you're still building somewhere else once but then instead of pushing everything to a registry once you push your unique layers directly to each server you're deploying.

I think it'd be a perfect fit. We'll see what happens: https://github.com/basecamp/kamal/issues/1588

I'm a big fan of Mochi[1] (also unaffiliated) after getting frustrated with the clunkiness of Anki.

Mochi has great native apps on macOS and iOS (and maybe more?), the cards are formatted in markdown so I can generate them with LLMs with a custom system prompt, and I just found out today they have an API so I might try my hand at getting an LLM to push new cards on its own via. an MCP server.

1. https://mochi.cards/

I solve this problem with a system prompt in my LLMs[1].

ChatGPT is the main spot where I'm going to be trying to understand a new concept, so after groking it I'll ask it to make flashcards which I can then just copy and paste into Mochi.

An improvement would be some sort of MCP integration between the LLM and Mochi so it can just add the card directly. I'm sure we'll get there soon.

1. https://gist.github.com/christiangenco/db4b61c315b93fc2a404a...

I've had the same sort of difficulty with phrases like "most" or "almost all" or "hardly any"—I crave for these to map to unambiguous numbers like the probability yardstick referenced in this article.

I spun up a quick survey[1] that I sent out to friends and family to try to get some numbers on these sorts of phrases. Results so far are inconclusive.

1. https://www.vaguequantifiers.com/

My wife and I have a daughter in the demographic of these shows, though she's a little young for Bluey. There's a YouTube (and now Netflix) show called Ms. Rachel for a younger audience that I'd put in the same positive category as Bluey.

We probably watch one or two hours of Ms. Rachel videos a day with our daughter. We've got several family friends with a household rule of "no screens at all for kids" who would scoff at that but their rule seems both draconian and technophobic to me. Our daughter has picked up many words and concepts from the show and we've learned a lot of the songs as a family and sing them when the context comes up (ex: "baby put your pants on..."). Ms. Rachel has been a hugely positive parenting tool for us.

Every once in a while, though, YouTube will try to autoplay some Cocomelon after a Ms. Rachel video and wow it's just absolute garbage. I think this article captures it well: it feels like slop engineered to keep young eyeballs glued to the screen with no higher purpose than increasing the number of engaged minutes.

Instead of "no screens," the more granular "you can choose from this menu of approved content on your screen for a reasonable amount of time per day" is the better parenting move for our family.

IMO it's all about privacy. Perhaps also availability if the main LLM providers start pulling shenanigans but it seems like that's not going to be a huge problem with how many big players are in the space.

I think a great use case for this would be in a company that doesn't want all of their employees sending LLM queries about what they're working on outside the company. Buy one or two of these and give everybody a client to connect to it and hey presto you've got a secure private LLM everybody in the company can use while keeping data private.

Hacker News is such a cool website.

Hi thank you for writing this!

I love this! I was similarly inspired by the Wait But Why article[1] and made a chrome plugin several years ago that shows this for my life every time I open a new Chrome window[2]. It's also a handy countdown for big events like vacations or The Singularity (which starts in 7,259 days) that I want some time to prepare for.

Life is precious and finite. Memento mori.

1. https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html

2. https://res.cloudinary.com/genco/image/upload/w_1200/v173967...

I freakin' love Sublime Text but the AI chat features of Cursor make all of the benefits in this post irrelevant.

It's fast? Not as fast as an LLM.

LSP code completion? Not as good as LLM completions aware of your entire codebase at once.

Snippets? These don't matter if an LLM can just make them up on the fly.

We've entered a new paradigm of what it means to be a good code editor. I'd love if Sublime added the LLM chat and code diff from Cursor but I think the new way to edit code is going to look a lot more like having a conversation (text or voice) with an LLM that's making the changes for you.

I'm new to ClickHouse. Why is this necessary? Isn't there a native way to do ClickHouse migrations?

Television in particular seems ripe to be reallocated. Didn't we go through a whole analog-to-digital conversion over a decade ago that led to TV going through wires instead of through the air?

> in my book that's as bad as it gets.

In the book of world history things have been way worse[0].

In the book of world futures things could get way way worse[1].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust

This is neat!

I have a few thoughts:

- my intuitive sense of animals that are thin or fat is totally off. I think of cows as being fat (ex: "fat cow") but their body fat percentage is only 6%! I think of Gorillas being super fit and muscular but they're at 31%!

- I hate that I can't hit enter after changing the body fat percentage value and have it change

- on that note I'd prefer if there wasn't a "find my match" button at all—after changing the body fat percentage value the match should immediately update

- better than that would be a sliding scale of every animal and the one that matches gets highlighted and centered

- real-world pictures would be better and even better than that would be an image of the animal and a cross section/MRI of the animal where you can see the fat distribution

I think verbal abuse is terrible and should be prevented by the state, just not under the umbrella of limiting free speech.

For me verbal abuse is in the same sort of category as rigging up a bomb to detonate when I've tweeted a keyword. The crime isn't really about the ideas being expressed (which I believe should be protected), the crimes just happen to involve speech.

Where abusive speech gets tricky for me is when people feel that ideas being publicly expressed are harming them (ex: a twitter discussion perpetuating hateful stereotyoes of people like me). In my current position that sort of speech is some of the most important to protect because I don't like it.

In my personal experience on X it seems like the platform has become way more tolerant of more types of speech from more diverse perspectives. I feel this change has been an improvement. I’m curious about accounts you’ve noticed get censored more.

What I mean by the current set of ideas we’re stuck with is the total set of every mainstream idea we have about everything. There have been a few recent examples of ideas that used to be considered misinformation worthy of censorship that have since gotten unstuck and are now part of the new accepted set (ex: the idea that COVID might be a lab leak, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Ivermectin). Without free speech that lets extremists explore “unacceptable” fringe ideas our society gets to the actual truth much slower.

Oh that was fascinating! Thank you for bringing those standards up—it seems like the US legal system landed in a similar place as my intuition. “Imminent Lawless Action” is where I’d also draw the line.

I've been thinking a lot recently about where I would personally draw the line on what sorts of speech should be criminal.

If someone publicly called for specific violence (ex: "let's all meet at Joe's house to burn it down—I'll bring the lighter") that feels to me like the sort of thing that would be useful to do something about instead of waiting for the actual crime to be committed.

But publicly stating that you support a violent act that somebody else did? Criticizing widely accepted beliefs? Expressing that you don't like a particular sort of person? I don't see how we could possibly criminalize anything like that without neutering the ability for a society to come up with new ideas.

Tim Urban's "What's Our Problem" has a great framing of this question: the sort of discourse needed for a high-rung "idea lab" requires that people are about to speak publicly in ways that appear to be "spreading lies online" (one of the crimes Shanbehzadeh, the Iranian writer, was apparently charged with). Without that freedom we all descend into tribal barbarism that leaves us stuck in the current set of ideas we happen to have right now.