closeparen

The GPTs are "it" because they were deliberately named in a way to discourage anthropomorphizing them. Anthropic does want you to anthropomorphize Claude, and they gave their model a male name. It's not that deep!

We have a lot of tools (starting with the internal wiki) which are normally only exposed to engineers through web interfaces; MCPs make them available to terminal agents to use autonomously. This can get really interesting with e.g. giving Claude access to query logs and metrics to debug a production issue.

It is obnoxious that MCP results always go directly into the context window. I'd prefer to dump a large payload into Claude's filesystem and let him figure it out from there. But some of the places MCPs can be used don't even have filesystems.

And the average commute duration is around 27 minutes. If you happened to live in one of the very few places in America where there even are 15 urban miles to cross, doing it at city bus speeds of under 10mph would be a catastrophic collapse in your standard of living.

Bus lanes solve for variability during peak traffic, but speeds even in free-flowing traffic are far from good enough.

Even in a dense city with no parking, it takes an unusually fast and frequent bus to compete with a brisk walk, and a heavy-rail subway to beat a fit or electric-assisted cyclist.

You stated that parenting goes out the window if a child encounters a screen at a friend’s house.

I dunno man, going over to friends’ houses to watch movies, play console games, later to show each other funny YouTube videos, and in high school to do computer-based writing projects, group presentations, and digital video projects are parts of my childhood I wouldn’t trade for anything. I hope my kids get those experiences with their peers.

The corporate security theater that kills me is insisting that everyone tap their badge on the reader next to an already-open door. Even in the presence of a guard, this merely ensures that everyone passing through the open door has some object, plausibly badge-shaped, to hold near the reader. Essentially any NFC card will make it beep. Only a valid credential will actuate the lock, but the door is already open, and the click is too subtle for its absence to alarm anyone.

There is a device you can deploy if you're serious about ensuring that every single individual in a moving crowd has a valid credential... a turnstile! Assuming you've calculated the appropriate number of them for the expected traffic flow.

I like to think of Claude as enjoying himself more when working with good tools rather than bad ones. But metaphysics aside, tools that have the functions you would expect, by the names you would expect, with the behavior you would expect, do seem to be just as important when the users are LLMs.

If the concern is time-wasting, even having upvotes or likes and sorting on them is plenty engaging. I spent thousands of hours as a teenager on Reddit, HN, and the old blue Facebook chronological feed.

Do you believe the research shows that screens in and of themselves are so powerfully damaging that being exposed for, what, a few hours a week at a friend’s house will cause them to require psychiatric medication?

So many questions. Are you campaigning against billboards in your city? Do you avoid taking your kids to any business that has digital signage? I assume you completely abstain from all types of movies and TV? What about radio or books?

What are you, personally, doing on HN?

Fascinating.

When I was growing up, we loved to lend the sheltered kids from the more conservative families media they weren’t supposed to have, like the Harry Potter books.

A physical realm that is safe for children to explore in their own is clearly preferable to one where it’s transgressive to let a child go outside without an escort.

It is plausible that the same applies to the digital realm.

If you’re going to hold datacenter operators to blame for the waste associated with non-optimized computation, then it would seem to follow that they get some credit for optimizing.

I don't think this shows that at all?

Your biometrics are in the secure enclave of your specific phone. Apple doesn't have them in a database.

The scanners were there before this.

I prefer to steer, but radar cruise control takes a lot of the frustration out of minor speed fluctuations in front of me on the highway. I don’t feel as much need to pass all the time.

You can develop locally if you want to, and lots of people do, but it’s community support. The environment that someone else is obligated to fix for you is the remote one (which they can do by blowing away the container and then you recover your state from Git).

It’s not as dumb a client as VNC, but it’s close. Basic operations like typing and scrolling will stutter and lag if your connection is less than perfect. VSCode’s client is really VSCode from a UI perspective.

Never liked Eclipse, but I’ve been forced to use VSCode over my preferred JetBrains IDEs because it is the only modern mainstream editor with a competent client-server mode. As in, actually rendering the UI locally while doing all the code indexing and intelligence on the server. Corporate world would much rather maintain disposable remote VMs than help you unfuck your laptop after whatever required security upgrade installs the wrong version of a scripting language and sends everything to hell.

The State of Illinois is going to lose its "business" already for other reasons. Do you think there is a reasonable privacy regime that prevents health systems from knowing where their patients live or using that information to site clinics?

A website where you can upload POIs to a shareable map seems like one of those things that's so obvious and so useful it exists almost under any economic arrangement of the advertising industry.

I get that data brokers and big tech are a much sexier topic, but this breach - like so many of the most pressing threats to our privacy - are mundane shortages of competence and giving-a-shit in the IT activities of boring old organizations.

Having seen this world up close, the absolute last place you ever want your medical data to be is on the Windows Server in the closet of your local doctors office. The public cloud account of a Silicon Valley type company that hires reasonably competent people is Fort Knox by comparison.

This has nothing to do with the "data broker system." Reading between the lines it was more of a "shadow IT" issue where employees were using some presumably third-party GIS service for a legitimate business purpose but without a proper authentication & authorization setup.

Sure, but the gap between your hourly wages has doubled.

That’s the Baumol effect. The rising tide does lift all boats to an extent, but not the same extent.

A line cook makes no more burgers per hour, a hairdresser delivers no more or better haircuts, and a daycare worker watches no more children concurrently than they could have 25 years ago. Meanwhile the Magnificent 7 have emerged. Baumol effects might have raised wages a bit, sure. How could the relative positions of these workers not fall as all these tech-enabled and scale-enabled neighbors come on to the scene?

The whole concept of buying services from people is either that their time is worth less than yours, or they have special skills that you need and lack. “No such thing as unskilled labor,” ok, but you are definitely get sorting on how useful people’s skills are and how difficult they are to substitute or replicate.

Having a few fault injection scenarios is baby steps. Next would be Jepsen-style testing, and most mature would be formal verification.

I think it is more of a social technology for keeping your ducks in a row. Developers won’t be able to gamble that something “never happens” if we induce it weekly.

Killing instances of load-balanced stateless services is not that interesting anymore in the context of a mature service mesh. What is interesting is injecting failures or latency on specific edges of the call graph to ensure that “fail open” dependencies really are. This is accomplished with context propagation, baggage, middleware, and L7 proxies rather than killing anything at the VM/container level. Even iptables rules turned out to not be a very good approach since most destinations would have many, constantly cycling IPs and ports.

In the stateful world, chaos testing is useful, but you really want to be treating every possible combination of failures at every possible application state, theoretically with something like TLA or experimentally with something like Antithesis. The scenarios that you can enumerate and configure manually are just scratching the surface.