cvwright

Right. It’s things like Baltimore (when I lived there) requiring that high speed internet had to roll out in poor areas first, before it could go into the rich neighborhoods.

But this was the early 2000s and the internet was still “new”. Only the richer areas cared and were willing to pay the price. Letting them have first (or even equal!) access would have made it easier to fund the rollout in low income areas.

I thought that was kind of how the hard sciences work already?

My grad school friend who was a physicist would write his talk just before his conferences, and then submit the paper later. My experience in CS was totally backwards from that.

Find-then-patch only works if you can fix the bugs quicker than you’re creating new ones.

Some orgs will be able to do this, some won’t.

You’re conveniently ignoring the Olympic boxing champion from 2024 who beat the absolute shit out of the female competitors.

Or maybe this is like fondly remembering the busted economy car that you drove around with your friends? I have my first 386DX sitting on my desk right now and it looks exactly like the top left of that photo.

The hot car that we all lusted after was maybe something like a SGI Indy or an O2.

You’re not wrong, but you probably could have built the thing with Claude in the time it took you to write this comment.

The closest thing we have is, in security / privacy / cryptography, you can write "attack" papers.

It's not perfect. You don't get any credit unless you can demonstrate a substantial break of the prior work. But it's better than in a lot of other fields.

Several people have tried over the years. We all failed, because it doesn’t work.

The economics don’t work because no one is willing to pay.

The network effect doesn’t exist, because real people don’t post enough to get the flywheel started.

All the dark patterns exist because that is what users reward.

Sucks but it’s true.

Very likely they got the causality backwards. Every time there’s a big war, technology advances because governments pour resources into it.

Just burn the tokens. It’s an upfront cost that you pay once at the beginning of a project, or on a smaller scale at the beginning of a major feature.

For context, I’ve built about 15k loc since Christmas on the $20 plan, plus $18 of extra usage. Since this is a side project, I only hit the limits once or twice per week.

It’s really not. For anything substantial, the things that you do to manage an LLM are the same things that you should be doing to manage a team of human devs, even if the team is just yourself.

Documentation. Comments. Writing a plan and/or a spec before you begin coding. Being smart with git commits and branches.

Having someone else pay for your national defense for 80 years sure doesn’t hurt.

What an understatement :)

It’s a lovely language but the compiler has got to be the most unreliable I’ve ever seen.

It crashes semi-frequently. And it will sometimes try to run analyses that are way beyond O(n). So you can have perfectly valid code that it can’t compile, until you simplify or reduce the size of some function.

They made a couple of Intel boxes in the very late 90s / very early 00s, but the company was already on the way out by that point.

I think Claude’s estimates are biased towards huge enterprise projects.

I asked it to estimate a timeline for a feature in my hobby project and it confidently replied, “4.5 weeks to code completion”.

Less than 4 hours later, the feature was done. I asked it to compare this against its initial estimate and it replied, “Right on schedule!”

I have completely given up on using it to estimate anything that actually matters.

By that logic, the European members who didn’t meet their defense spending obligations for years and years have already left NATO too.

Unfortunately you can’t even get the RAM for $400 anymore.

But mining all the tracking data in order to show profitable targeted ads is extremely intensive. That’s what kicked off the era of “big data” 15-20 years ago.

The redneck version that I heard as a kid was way worse than that. Things I won’t repeat…

Don’t blame the user - blame Matrix for designing the system like this.

> They have to be stored somewhere. You want private keys on the public server?

Yes. Encrypted. The feature is called “dehydrated devices” and the Matrix team has been working on it for quite a while now.

Well but then they spent 100 years telling us that the toddler stuff was the good stuff. Just as long as it was created by a “real artist”.

Usually in this context it means “the max effort that you can sustain for 2 minutes”.

Same thing goes for a 20-minute max effort or even an hour etc.

The contradictions are difficult but wisdom has always been like that. See for example the book of Proverbs, it’s full of contradictory advice.

“Do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you also be like him.”

Versus

“Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.”

The skill is to understand the truth of both statements, and to discern when to apply each one.

A big part of modern discourse is people tactically pretending to not know stuff

So you’re telling me that, in the past 10 years, this was the only speech on network TV that the Trump crowd didn’t like?

Kimmel got caught spreading blatant falsehood about who the shooter was. That has always been against the rules for public airwaves.

How are the grades of a student in a prestigious position at Oxford not relevant to the academic reputation of Oxford?

And it’s being reported that the new president of the Oxford Union only had A B B.

Safety is the much bigger challenge for public transit in the US right now. Since the pandemic, most cities have really eased off of any enforcement of rules or laws in public spaces.

Driving in rush hour traffic sucks, but it beats getting randomly stabbed in the neck by some psycho who didn’t even pay his fare.

It’s the end of the postwar consensus and the return of the “strong gods”.

Before: hands-off economic liberalism.

Now: doing what seems best for ones own nation state.

See “Return of the Strong Gods” by RR Reno for an interesting explanation of lots of puzzling behavior from major political parties.

Good news. We’ve waited so long that AES is pretty damn lightweight now too.