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In the UK you can send someone a Monzo link allowing them to pay directly and instantly into your account.

They might have meant to put that point in the Go section?

Interesting. Was it persistent, or just once? Their post about this functionality says:

> This ability is intended for use in rare, extreme cases of persistently harmful or abusive user interactions.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/end-subset-conversations

Regardless of the correctness of it, I'm curious to know why you thought such language was actually going to be helpful!

What's more, you have little difficulty falling asleep any time, any place!

Isn't that "conventional wisdom"?

Yes and no. I think it's perfectly legitimate for someone to enjoy coding in assembly but not Python. And if someone comes over and talks about how much faster they can build things in C, it's fair enough for them to question whether that person had enjoyed writing assembly in the first place.

Aside: there's a clip on YouTube of Linus responding to someone asking if he'd consider using other languages for Linux. His response is that he likes to be close to the metal, and he likes C because you can look at C code and know well enough what the compiled assembly code will look like. You can't really say that with LLMs. You can understand C and you can understand the prompt for building a program in C which will achieve xyz. But you can't actually know what the output of the prompt will look like.

> that doesn't make you or "democracy" better than a non-reader that may be a movie watcher addict

I dunno. There's something to be said for having the focus to sit down and read through a book. It suggests someone is a little more comfortable with their own thoughts and doesn't succumb to constant tech distractions. Which in turn suggests an ability to think more clearly and less emotively about politics.

I don't think the joy of coding comes simply from writing lots of code. It's the act of precisely expressing one's internal thoughts into an physical medium, and watching it take effect. Using AI as an intermediary makes it less enjoyable. It's like a painter telling his speedy assistant what he wants to paint, and reviewing every attempt until it looks like what he was aiming for. Obviously the painter won't find that as fulfilling and meaningful. And a skilled painter probably won't be quite as happy as if they'd done it personally. The act of painting is a primary driver, not just having a finished painting at the end.

It's a nice self-referential loop. The definition of factoid is, itself, a factoid.

Sounds a little like the Thieves' Guild in Discworld.

> The Thieves' Guild was established early in Lord Havelock Vetinari's rule of Ankh-Morpork. Lord Vetinari realised that what people crave is stability, and that, while it is impossible to stamp out crime altogether, it is possible to regulate it. The major gang leaders of the city were therefore called to the Patrician's Palace, where they agreed to be held responsible for ensuring a socially acceptable number of thefts.

> While initially the main money-making venture of Thieves' Guild members remained theft, albeit under strict guidelines and leaving a receipt, more recent books show a system of "insurance", whereby people may pay a fee directly to the Guild and therefore become immune to robbery for a specified period.

I'd be interested to know how almond butter gets to $22 per jar in a country that produces over 80% of the world's almonds.

Years back I stayed in Davis California for a few months, and was astonished at how expensive fresh fruit and veg were. I vaguely remember bell peppers costing 2-3 times what they would in the UK. Again, in a state that produces so many of them. I wish I could understand what was going on behind that.

Speeches only show projected intent.

I had to put this one through Claude, but it boils down to:

> A culture's felt sense of proportion, ratio, and spatial order manifest directly through the hands of masons and sculptors, without necessarily needing the mathematical formalism of proofs, axioms, and treatises.

Not sure how I feel about this, as the Familia was absolutely built in a context of formalised mathematical sciences.

UK and France are possibly more likely to retaliate, given the proximity.

As with many modern wars, it's hard to say whether the Iraq war was won or lost, because the goals are difficult to discern.

Wow, I just looked up how self-sufficient the island is and the answer is barely at all. Which initially seems surprising given the continual threat. But I guess they're counting on global support as a tech chokepoint.

Addictive behaviour is rarely cured by telling the addict to "just stop doing it".

> Walk around Burton and everything is named after beer: Cooper this, Brewer that.

I recently learnt that a "cooper" is someone that makes wooden casks or barrels.

nla made a reply which I think is worth considering. It got flagged and killed and I don't know why.

nla ------------

You’re eliding two very different things: personal conscience and actual consequence.

The author is obviously free to resign for any reason. But once he publishes a moral indictment of Google and, implicitly, of people who remain there, it is fair to ask what concrete harm his resignation reduces.

The post does not really answer that. In fact, it makes the opposite case. He lists a long set of valuable security and privacy improvements that happened precisely because he was inside Google. Then he concludes that the ethical move is to remove people like himself from the institution.

That may satisfy a personal purity boundary, but it is not obviously harm reduction. It is closer to moral hygiene: “I do not want to be associated, even transitively, with something I dislike.” Fine as a private decision, but not the same thing as improving the world.

That is what I meant by identity politics: career choices framed less around practical impact and more around preserving a morally coherent self-image.

my response ---------------

Practical impact is a useful way to explore ethics, but it's not the only way. I think it's reasonable to refuse to profit from an institution that does harm, even though removing yourself won't change anything. And I think a lot of people would agree if the choice was made stark. For example, suppose someone offered me £1k to go and keep them company while they tortured an innocent person. It's all somehow legal, and if I don't do it they'll just offer the money to someone else who will. Do I take the money? It won't make any difference if it's me or someone else. But I believe most people wouldn't. Or at least they'd duck out as soon as it got real.

> the synopsis for the book has a mistake, and the entirety of the book builds on it

Not sure what you mean here. I asked ansari.chat [EDIT turns out I used the new version ansari.ai] for an overall assessment of the book as well as a critical analysis of the synopsis. It praised the book but highlighted some tensions between its findings and Islamic theological assumptions: https://askansari.ai/share/de25f788-60fd-4bdd-9383-ac6752f06...

The summary assessment of the synopsis is:

> The synopsis accurately represents a work of brilliant linguistic reconstruction that is highly supportive of the Quran’s historical authenticity, yet challenging to certain traditional theological assumptions about the transmission of the Qira’at.

If anything, it vindicates my statement that there is "ongoing debate" over the historical nature of Qira'at.

--------------------------

EDIT

I realised that I was using the "new" version ansari.ai. Perhaps you went with the "old" version? I asked the old version as well, although it did not know about the book so I could only ask about the synopsis: https://ansari.chat/share/6a4780a6623c605140a58f76

The conclusion:

> From a Sunni Islamic perspective, this synopsis appears to approach the Quran through a secular academic lens that is incompatible with Islamic beliefs ...

> While academic study of Quranic Arabic linguistics can be beneficial, it must be grounded in the Islamic understanding that the Quran is the preserved Word of Allah, not a text that evolved through human linguistic processes.

I don't find this compelling. We must be able to challenge theological assumptions and "because I say so" type arguments.

Companies that allow this will quickly lose control over code quality. The company should have PR size guidelines, and/or developers need to feel confident that they can say "please split into smaller PRs"

That probably does happen, but I don't feel like it's happening here.

Agreed. There's a whole checklist of what to look out for:

- Does it functionally achieve what it sets out to (as per tacker issue or PR description)?

- Does it have extraneous code? Leftover debug prints, private API keys etc...

- Does it have any obvious defects? Memory leaks, un-handled edge cases, security flaws, obsolete API calls, etc...

- Could it be more understandable? Add/remove abstractions, better variable/method names, more/less functional etc...

- Is the style consistent with the codebase and/or style guidelines?

- Are there obvious performance improvements? Hashset instead of list, lazy evaluations, etc...

- Is it sufficiently well tested?

I'm not even sure I agree that if I can't understand the code then it shouldn't go through. Some code is just really hard to understand. The aim is to make it as easy as possible to understand, while being functionally correct.

I can't imagine ignoring personal ethics in career decisions. I also find it troubling when personal ethics are inaccurately dismissed as "identity politics". Supporting carbon-neutrality and rejecting military applications are clearly matters of personal ethics.

This is worth treating carefully. There are sources like Ibn Kathir and al-Tabari writing centuries later which claimed that Zakat collectors would return with unspent funds because eligible recipients could not be found. Even if we take this at face value, that's a leap from there being no poor people left. Did it apply to the entire empire or only a few regions? How likely was the collector to actually find recipients if they existed in a given region? etc...

> I'm not quite sure where you read there is a debate

I think the debate is less about how the Qira'aat vary, more about how genuinely/accurately they reflect pre-Islamic dialects. For example, Marijn van Putten has a book "Quranic Arabic" where he apparently advances the argument that the Quran was originally composed in Hijazi Arabic, and subsequently evolved into the reading traditions we have today.

> For example, the letter ق is never pronounced as /g/ when reciting the Quran, even though that pronunciation existed, and exists today in spoken Arabic.

Indeed; one side of my family is Iraqi :)

I always knew this but used to wonder why 12?, as I'm sure a lot of people did. It turns out of course to be a human choice, but the convenience of that choice can be codified mathematically.

On a piano you move up an octave by going up by 8 white keys, or 12 semitones (white and black keys). Going up by 4 semitones is called a "major third", which multiplies the frequency of the note by 5/4. If you do three major thirds you get an octave. However, notice that (5/4) multiplied by itself three times is 125/64 which is actually slightly less than 2.

In fact there is no way to tune a piano perfectly - there has to be a compromise in the intervals somewhere. The reason for this is exactly that no rational number (fraction) equals 2 when raised to an integer power.

At the end of every workday I shut all the windows and shut down my laptop. Unless I'm in a rush. It's soothing!

Thanks for the info! You've inspired me to research the topic a little more. My impression is that there's debate over whether the qira'aat represent pre-Islamic dialects or a curated set of recitation variations.

Nevertheless, at least from a secular standpoint it feels more like Arabic was standardised using the Qur'an as a primary anchor, rather than the Qur'an stepping in to "perfect" Arabic and give it rules.

Just to clarify. The UK police can assist you in ejecting trespassers, whom you have told to leave your house, in order to "prevent a breach of the peace". They won't arrest or charge trespassers unless they have reason to suspect criminal activity.

In this case the Belgian police might have been justified in escorting the journalists off the premises. But I'm not sure what grounds they had to detain and question them.