mcv

Those were all centralised. I don't think handing most of the internet over to a handful of big tech giants is the same as democratisation.

For democratisation, I think of open source, open weight models you can run at home, the Fediverse, running your own stuff. I think those are all positive, at least compared to the centralisation.

There's that, but also that if God exists, there's not anything we can do about it. About AI, we can. That gives us the responsibility to figure out the right direction.

Are you? I'm pretty sure when I bought my 7800x3d, everybody was saying you had to be very careful about heat, because these damage more easily from high temperatures than regular CPUs. I just checked, and they do throttle at a lower temperature than others: 89 vs 95 degrees C.

I'm not sure focusing on just 3 processors is enough to claim that Ryzen got 50% faster. There were already other, faster Ryzen processors available without the additional cache. The extra cache was a very new thing (and very temperature sensitive), so it makes sense that they start carefully and then get a lot of improvement quickly). And the 5800x3d was for an older chipset, with all the limitations that come with that.

Bug reports aren't so high-stakes (although poorly written bug reports can often be useless). I've got something to sell, and I want this expert to confirm that what I've built is better than what's currently available. That's a much harder approach. You want people to send bug reports. You don't want everybody to try to sell something to you. But I really think that I've solved the problem that she identified, so I want her to take a look at it instead of dismissing it as most people would probably do when a random nobody claims to have solved something. It doesn't help that this entire issue is way out of my comfort zone.

I feel the same way, and yet I'm also guilty of this. I'm trying to reach out to an expert, and because of the stakes, I want to write it exactly right. I'm using Claude to write it, but I don't like how Claude writes, so I rewrite it in my own words, and I still don't like it. I've iterated over this for several days. Finally I talk to my wife, she gives me some pointers, and I just write it down perfectly.

And yet, every person high up in business that I talk to, including my wife, advises me to use Claude for this sort of thing. I don't get it. Claude text sucks, and it hurts my eyes when I'm forced to read it.

Sounds like solid advice. Those typical Claude turns of phrase are really grating on me. And I now see them everywhere. Many YouTube channels that are presented by a real human, still sound fake because their script is blatantly written by AI. I hate it.

And yet, I'm stuck having to write an important message to someone that has real stakes riding on it, so I use Claude to refine it, and I see myself succumbing to Claude's pressure to use its words instead of my own. I hate it, but my words aren't very good.

And finally Claude proclaims the message perfect and I let my wife take a look at it, and she rejects the entire thing, restoring some semblance of sanity again.

Mountain states? Can't they use hydro power?

It's still a complex and more abstract function than map or filter. Those do a single thing that's easy to grasp. reduce/fold can be easily abused to duplicate the effect of most other collection functions, at the cost of making the code less readable. Although for slightly-too-clever people, that could mean you only need to know one function instead of all of them.

But it hurts readability. If you're going to do it, at least don't use it anonymously, but give it a name that clearly describes what's going on.

But even then, there can be hidden performance traps. I've often seen javascript that used reduce and created the new accumulator by using a spread on the old accumulator and adding the new one: `[...acc, newValue]`. But that spread is another iteration inside a loop, turning it from O(n) to O(n^2). A for loop where you append it is much faster.

I would expect it's not caused by genes themselves, but by control DNA. That's where a lot of the subtle structural stuff happens. But that's also hard to test for. It's like how you can't test how tall someone is going to be.

I've also read ages ago in Scientific American that the difference between our brains and chimp brains is almost entirely in control DNA, not in genes. It matters a lot, but is often overlooked. (It used to be called "junk DNA", before people realised how important it was.)

Fair point. What we really need of course is more renewables, and that is happening, but not fast enough, so we still need oil. And I'd rather get our oil in a way that doesn't fuel the Russian war machine, even if it does cost a bit more.

How much oil is Europe still importing from Russia? I'd rather have Canadian.

Turkey has been a candidate member since forever, but instead of addressing the many problems they need to fix before entry, they're making it worse.

The US was greenfield 2 centuries ago. It currently has a lot more technical (political?) debt than the EU. Some reforms are long overdue.

And that hurts the free market. A free market should be transparent, have low barriers to entry, and not be dominated by monopolies or cartels. There's nothing free about American capitalism.

I'd like to take a closer look at what exactly Canada is exporting to the US, and what exactly the EU is importing from elsewhere, to see if there's a match. I'd rather buy from Canada than from Russia. Or China. Or the US.

Exactly. The EU has plenty of faults, but I don't see anything better. Improving on the EU is better than abandoning it.

It's fine if it talks a lot to itself, I just don't want to read two pages of text for every question.

Really? I still find it too sycophantic at times.

This seems to be mostly about the way Claude talks, which is indeed very annoying. My experience was improved a lot by the 'i-have-adhd' plugin that was posted about here recently. That cuts a lot of the unnecessary verbosity.

This is absolutely an issue, and I've run into it several times myself, because I am doing Real Difficult Stuff that I don't think anyone has ever done quite like this before. But I'm leaning heavily on Claude for it. Mostly for the stuff that has already been done before but I need to redo in order to be able to improve on it (mostly various aspects of graph layout algorithms of for the Sugiyama framework), but it's also been surprisingly helpful at helping me write some of the complex new stuff. Those parts require a lot more direct guidance and careful review, but it's still helping me keep a firm grasp on the whole thing. Which I also find surprising, because in the past I've experienced many times that I was losing grasp on a project because I let LLMs do too much. But this time it's the opposite.

Same here. Mind you, I share the many concerns about AI. I agree the industry has gone nuts. I warn everybody that "use more AI" is terrible advice and a terrible strategy. And why are the people saying that AGI could kill us all, the same people who are racing to bring it about?

But: there's a complex business related project I care deeply about. Due to corporate red tape and office politics I couldn't fix it the way I wanted to when I actually worked there, but after I left, I built the solution I had in mind (mostly out of frustration at first, but it's starting to look like a viable product). And thanks to LLMs, I can tackle it on a much larger scale, build it faster, control it better (to my surprise), and I can also plan the really business aspects around it, including how to sell something like this, which is absolutely a first for me.

So I feel like thanks to Claude, I can actually solve problems more effectively, on a larger scale, and I feel like I'm now working on a higher level than ever before.

Compare it to the step from thinking about memory allocation and loop indices to thinking about algorithmic complexity, performance and memory footprint. From thinking about a single feature request to thinking about how the program can solve a complex business problem. Perhaps I'm more architect than programmer now, but I'm still deeply involved with the code, even if Claude now writes most of it. I'm still having fun. Although that might also partially be because I'm free from that restrictive corporate environment and can actually do what I want. (For now; eventually I do have to figure out how to make money from this.)

How would it make them worse off? If everybody agrees that AI is a threat to humanity, but also a possible edge over rivals, then the threat should be enough reason to get everybody to agree.

There are international agreements on tons of things that work the same way.

By international agreement, obviously. There are tons of international agreements to regulate all sorts of things. It's generally a pretty good way to prevent a race to the bottom. Or in this case, a potential race to the end of the world.

How u reliable personalised search results are depends on who controls the personalization and for what purpose.

I would love a search that lets me ban results from certain sites. I don't like search that's showing skewed results for reasons I don't know or control.

The manure already needs to be dealt with anyway. Does it really matter whether we're transporting oil or manure? Surplus manure is also causing environmental problems. Why are we using fertiliser if there's too much manure?

And high prices may also encourage alternatives.

Energy can be replaced by renewables. There are alternatives for various uses of plastics. And I thought manure was a pretty good fertiliser.

Not everything needs to be replaced, but it would help a lot if we replace what we can.

I would prefer to stop the demand rather than the supply. The high prices encourage production elsewhere.

If all of that is possible, why not just provide a reliable basic income? Why does it need to feel like a politician is bribing you for your vote?

Some people simply need to be banned from driving. Anyone intentionally trying to hit someone in traffic definitely qualifies.