mikkupikku

In Germany, this sort of thinking is the reason you can't release anything into the public domain. People are presumed to be too stupid to be trusted with the decision to renounce their copyright and so they are "protected" from this possibility.

It wouldn't really surprise me if their automatic systems are, one way or another, looking for that sleep period. Those ostensibly human users who use the service with no breaks for sleep would be naturally suspect.

In the Eastern Bloc states, it used to be so common for workers to steal from the workplace that new moral norms were established around this; if you're not stealing from work, you're stealing from your own family!

Goes to show just how fragile a high-trust society is. Theft and corruption can easily be normalized to such an extent that not participanting gets reframed as immoral.

Lol, you're probably not wrong. But have you ever noticed that the most important papers tend to be on the clear and readable side of things? It's as if researchers understand that being understood is important, but deemphasize that when the paper itself isn't important in the first place. (Maybe if they're only publishing to not perish, not being understood is actually a goof thing from their perspective?)

Objective one should be to communicate effectively, not confuse everybody.

I'd rather read a hundred comments like that than one more like yours.

Man, I run 3-5 sessions an evening for 5-6 hours, and longer on weekends and feel like I'm barely using what I paid for. I've only hit five hour limits a small number of times. Genuinely baffled when I hear people blow through tokens apparently several times faster than me. Are you going out of your way to design complex subagent workflows or something? I just let claude code use subagents when it wants to but don't give it any extra direction to use them.

I had an idea to use `claude -p` to break apart books and annotate all dialogue with estimated speaker meta-data. The tips displaying in interactive claude sessions keep seeming to advocate for such experimentation with claude -p, but despite this I have deliberately held back because after reading the TOS (weeks ago) I couldn't clearly make out where the line is meant to be. The existence of `claude -p` is confusing to me.

Or, they should not globo-homogenize themselves, wiping out their cultures in the process (are you even human? How can you so casually recommend the eradication of Europe's varied cultures?), but should instead ban a handful of American corps which would then create market space for small local competitors.

Haven't you heard? Google is changing their traditional policy on """side loading""" apps and are, quite soon from now, planning to lock the whole thing down and make users submit to anal probing to opt out. Android has been good but times are changing and we need to stop trusting old institutions.

Brilliant idea, my appreciation for Doctorow has grown even more than before.

I don't know if that Paypal story is true, but that definitely is the situation with Intuit/TurboTax in America.

> How do Americans transfer money? Don't your banking apps allow that?

If the exchange isn't online and is a fairly large amount of money, something like buying a car, checks (cheques) or even envelopes of cash are a lot more common than PayPal. Online, those aren't easy so that's where Paypal and their competitors shine. Americans also now use other apps for small money exchanges, like paying somebody for mowing your lawn, although refusing the app and offering/demanding cash is still relatively normal.

Yes absolutely.

After decades of trying and broadly failing to regulate American tech corps, at what point does the EU admit that leveling fines against Meta will never stop Meta from being Meta, that American megacorps are essentially ungovernable in Europe (or elsewhere for that matter) and the best course of action is to ban and block them in Europe?

Just more fines. Bigger fines, surely this will work eventually... It's been 20 years, its not working. A new approach is needed.

I'm not selling capitalism. I'm telling you that society is indifferent to your desire to program in the old ways, we're not going to start a worker's revolution for the sake of programmers who don't like coding agents. You can either adapt, or get left behind.

From the article: "These days some at TDF seem to emphasize equality instead."

I'm not sure exactly what is meant by that. My guess, having some experience with board-sitter parasites, is they're just appealing to empty principles to create the illusion of being important to the organization, because they're unable or unwilling to make more tangible and substantial contributions.

When somebody can't justify their role with the quality of their work, they look for other justifications instead. Ideological justifications work best because they aren't provable and anybody who questions the value of the supposed ideological contributions can simply be dismissed as being ideologically opposed (see: the sibling comment accusing you of ideological alignment with gamergate, even though libreoffice has nothing to do with gaming.)

For instance, suppose I am a useless parasite who decides to embed myself into the local school board; I have nothing of real value to contribute to such an organization, but maybe I want the role for the clout. Instead of doing something real, I could instead say that my role on the board is to advance the cause of equality. Anybody who says I'm useless can be construed as opposing equality. Anybody who tried to measure the actual equality in the org before and after my arrival can be dismissed because measuring equality is hard to do objectively.

(I learned most of this from a few relatives of mine, who are such board-seeking parasites. By the way, parasite board sitters can use opposition to "woke" in the way they use championing the cause of equality; both cynical empty words used to distract people from the lack of real, substantial and demonstrable contributions. Anybody who complains can be accused of being woke. It works exactly the same regardless of what flavor of disguise the parasite chooses.)

What are the plausible motivations for the TDF board members here? Do they pay themselves with org funds, or is it just a fight for turf and clout? I think identifying factors like this might be helpful, because if these factors could be eliminated or reduced it might save future orgs from infestations of the sort of people who seek out boards to sit on, as they'd find a better opportunity for parasitism in some other org.

The one I've never got is how so many people faint or become I'll when they see blood. Always seemed like a massive maladaptive that should create even more risk in a presumably dangerous situation. If a tiger attacks me in the night and the guy next to me faints because I'm getting eaten, we'll both end up dying.

> Strong opinions, loosely held.

Yes doctor, but enough about my stool.

Crapitalism didn't let up for the benifit of the old veteran framers who didn't want to use nailguns, why should it let up for the benifit of old veteran programmers who don't want to use LLMs? We aren't special. Expecting a shakeup of society's whole economic system just to preserve your preference for old tools is totally out to lunch.

> Yes you can write 1 line faster than Claude, but what about 10 lines? 100? 1000?

Bingo. One quick edit when you already know what needs to be done is trivial, that means nothing. What happens when you have to write a new feature and it will take hundreds of lines of code? Unless you're an elder god of programming, the LLM will lap you easily.

Times change, you have to learn new tools or get left behind. Nobody is asking if you like it, even expecting your personal preferences to matter and be taken seriously is a serious example of privilege.

I'm serious. Your boss comes to you and tells you to use AI, how is that any different from the foreman of an experienced carpentry / framing crew coming up to his old pros and handing them a pneumatic nail gun, and telling them to put down the hammers? You think they didn't complain, these men who pride themselves in being able to drive a nail with fewer swings than others? These men who are super fast and experienced with hammers and took pride in that, even enjoyed their work, do you think they were happy when their boss, some unskilled management bitch, showed that he could drive nails faster than they could just by pulling a trigger? They hated it! And it didn't matter, they had to adapt. Why should programmers be more privileged?

Your boss tells you to use AI because he gave it a task that took you a day to complete and the AI did it in five minutes. Your boss doesn't care about your skill with an obsolete craft, or the art or aesthetic qualities of coding by hand, or even the supposed quality benefits of doing it by hand. None of that matters when the new tool can demonstrably work faster. Your boss sees it himself, then sees you complaining, and he then sees you as an old veteran complaining about the new way of things. Complain all you want, you either learn to keep up or you'll get left behind.

It used to be that old farts made a big deal out of knowing the ins and outs of assembly programming and sneered at the kids who only knew "high level" languages like C, why, those damn kids didn't even understand the machine code their compilers emitted, didn't even know or care that it was so obviously suboptimal.

Really, your attitude is not new. Including even your "this is why it's different this time", its just a mirror reflecting the past.

> Both Algol and Lisp were from the 60s. I think programmers and computers scientists were already acquainted with high level programming languages enough to not equate using C as going soft

Most programmers didn't have access to anything so fancy as those, in fact most programmers considered access to a C compiler to be an extravagant flex well into the 80s. By the 90s they were well available and you had a new generation of programmers that started out with C, encountering older programmers who started out writing assembly for their z80s, the latter of whole were constantly sneering at kids going soft.

Starting when I was about 10, I learned BASIC (not a real language, I was constantly told), z80, then C (a "high level" language) for the m68k. I encountered all of the attitudes I know see ITT being thrown at programmers using coding agents. Hell, I would bet money on some of those exact same old farts still lurking IRC channels, occasionally waking up like Rip Van Winkle to grumble about kids taking old ubiquitous technology for granted now.

To be fair, the author phrased his point poorly in a way that invites confusion:

> "But for now, real programmers will always win."

"for now ... always", not a good phrasing.

Mocking? I'm quoting exactly the sort of thing that used to be said in earnest in the 80s and 90s. What you're doing now is exactly the same thing, there's no difference at all. Its the same reaction borne from the same old man instinct to bitch about the kids going soft. Yawn.

My thinking is that high level languages like C aren't real coding. If you don't even know what ISA the software will be run on, then you need to get the fuck off my lawn!

Attitude as old as time itself.

Sounds like you've got nothing to say for Grok besides meaningless benchmarks.

Illegal gambling at its peak was nothing compared to every store, restaurant and smartphone being a casino, advertised right out in the open.

Very few people gambled illegally. Putting some gangster out of business (Lol if you actually believe that) at the cost of addicting the entire working class to throwing away their money is bad math!