coffeemug

It took me a couple of days to find the right level of detail to prompt it. Too high level, and the codebase gets away from me/the tooling goes off the rails. Too low level, and I may as well do it myself. Maybe also learn the sorts of things Claude Code isn't good at yet. But once I got in the groove it was very easy from there. I think the whole process took 2-3 days.

I actually don't use it in the terminal, I use the vs code extension. It's a better experience (bringing up the file being edited, nicer diffs, etc.) But both are trivial to pick up.

Strongly disagree. Claude Code is the most intuitive technology I've ever used-- way easier than learning to use even VS Code for example. It doesn't even take weeks. Maybe a day or two to get the hang of it and you're off to the races.

Eh people get consumed by these things. It's very hard to resist when you have a platform and your own people are at war. Very very difficult to get past abstractions and just work to help in minute particulars.

Plus social media is a uniquely deranging technology. Persona on twitter is rarely who the person is in real life.

Know Amjad from years ago. We're on the opposite sides of ideological barricades, but he's no terrorist sympathizer. Just a man who loves his people. He seemed extremely pragmatic too-- if he ran Gaza it'd be an economic paradise by now.

Right-- talent isn't that useful in a vacuum. You need economic and legal infrastructure that talented people can plug into to be productive. That infrastructure (a) takes a very long time to build and (b) depends on cultural norms that take a long time to evolve and don't find fertile ground everywhere.

Two counterintuitive/surprising lessons I've come to appreciate:

1.Talent pools in nation states are extraordinarily deep-- much deeper than they appear. Countries can suffer from brain drain for decades (or centuries!) but when conditions call for it, superbly talented people somehow manifest.

2. The correlation between talent and conscience is weak. Nation states always manage to find superbly talented people to work on problems many of us would recoil from.

Not always, but sometimes, new things are just better.

One example is null-- a billion dollar mistake as Tony Hoare called it. A Maybe type with exhaustive pattern matching is so dramatically better, it can be worth switching just for that feature alone.

> nothing beats the comfort and security of one's parents home, especially during the holiday season.

A bit morbid, but reminds me of this passage by John Quincy Adams:

> Everything about the house is the same. I was not fully sensible of the change till I entered his bedchamber [...] That moment was inexpressibly painful, and struck me as if it had been an arrow to my heart. My father and mother have departed. The charm which has always made this house to me an abode of enchantment is dissolved; and yet my attachment to it, and to the whole region around, is stronger than I ever felt it before.

Hope you get to spend the next Christmas with your family!

Where did you move from (and to)?

Hope everyone has a healthy, rewarding and prosperous year. Special thanks to @dang and team for keeping this community a great place everyone wants to come back to. I love coming back here every day.

Merry Christmas to all!

In a universe where all AI investment goes to zero, wouldn’t you have the opposite effect? You can torch wealth but not the money supply, which ultimately _increases_ inflation, not decreases it.

There is only a short term inflation decrease while we produce what people mistakingly think is wealth. That can evaporate, but the money supply won’t.

IMO this view puts the cart before the horse. Suppose ChatGPT builds a UI that consumers prefer over web browsing to purchase products. How should merchants plug into that UI? This protocol is an easy way for merchants to do that. And once merchants are plugged in, consumers still need to be able to pay, and merchants need to get paid. Stripe makes that easy.

Consumers will only use the UI if it's better. Merchants will plug into the UI to make more money. So everyone wins-- consumers, merchants, OpenAI, and Stripe. And since the protocol is open, other chatbots and other payment processors can implement it too. Who loses?

(I agree that at scale these things tend to accrue to top players and you get all kinds of weird unsavory consequences. But I'd argue that's a critique of our regulatory apparatus, not of the companies building products and services.)

More importantly it would give parents options: - stay home with your child and take the income - hire a babysitter - hire a better babysitter by adding a little cash - take your child to daycare - take your child to better daycare by adding a little cash

If the government also runs daycare centers that adds another option of taking your child to gov daycare. It also forces the gov and private daycares to compete.

The current policy penalizes people on the margin-- maybe an extra $500/mo would get your child much better daycare, but you're stuck between (likely) low quality government care, or losing a huge chunk of income to solve the problem yourself.

I haven’t heard this before, this is incredible. Thanks for sharing. There were a bunch of phenomena that didn’t quite make sense to me before, which make perfect sense now that I read the quote.

idk man, I have the opposite experience. I've always followed my instincts, and am now stuck with consequences of bad decisions that are not easy to undo. My life is good, but I feel like I squandered a real shot to be world class and am now stuck in the top echelon of mediocrity, maybe permanently.

Grass is always greener, I guess.

In practice third world countries are very unproductive, and it's immediately visible to the naked eye. Many shops and restaurants have half a dozen people (or more!) taking the order and handling the check, there are entire extended families manning market stalls that barely sell anything, cabbies just hang out all day waiting for a ride, etc. You might be theoretically right, but I think that's not actually how it works out in reality.

That’s not the reason. Almost certainly people feel a strong reaction, then when asked why it’s selective reach for a plausible answer. “Israel is supported by the west” is plausible.

When I met you at Stripe you seemed to me the person with strategic foresight and iron discipline— the kind that gets endless opportunities without even trying. I was hopelessly floundering by comparison, and not in a good Kevin Kelly way. I don’t know if people will think of you in 300 years (the day is young!) but you were definitely a role model for what discipline and great execution look like.

Thomas Jefferson sent the U.S. navy to fight the Barbary war (in modern Libya) because he refused to pay tribute to protect our trading routes. This quote is simply false. We've had enemies in the Middle East pretty much since the founding of the American republic.

There is no myth. Both Trump and Elon have generational talent in their respective domains. This is the kind of talent that’s so unique, it creates its own domain that didn’t exist before, and that no one will be able to replicate after.

But they’re both unstable, and have many other negative features.

One can have an extraordinary talent in starting generational companies, and have a social media addiction (among possibly other addictions and problems) that makes one unstable. These aren’t mutually exclusive.

It would not be a reversion to 2020. If I were a rogue superhuman AI I'd hide my rogueness, wait until humans integrate me into most critical industries (food and energy production, sanitation, electric grid, etc.), and _then_ go rogue. They could still pull the plug, but it would take them back to 1700 (except much worse, because all easily accessible resources have been exploited, and access is now much harder).

People stare at their phones while walking, having dinner, and driving. It's not a big leap to imagine replacing that with subvocal conversations with AI.

AlphaGo.

I don’t understand this (or all the AI “skills” discourse). This is the most intuitive technology in the history of the world. You literally talk to it in your language and it does what you want! What is there to learn?

(You do need to adjust your communication a little. But you’ve got to do it with every human too. I don’t see how AI is any different.)

There's not enough information in your post to really help. I'm happy to talk you through it, I have enough experience to offer useful advice. Email in the profile, I'll keep convo anonymous of course.

Where did you pick this up? Is there a book that covers it that way?

What makes a labor market for agents that recognize problems and provide solutions special or different from markets for other kinds of labor? If AIs get to a point where they dramatically outperform humans in other forms of labor, why not in this one?

It isn't about funding. It's about denigrating our allies and attacking the victim of aggression, while praising our adversaries and aggressors. Realpolitik is (correctly) in vogue as a correction to bad policies, but ideas and justice still matter.

This may seem like a minor objection, but I think it's substantive. The term "their fair share" is a deliberately wordsmithed term designed to manipulate people's thinking process. (Not by you, but by the politicians; it's very easy for all of us to miss these terms.) It makes a substantive discussion harder and less likely. A much more objective way to state this question is "Why shouldn't corporations pay more".