thwarted

> I just wrote a book using Claude as an experiment, and while the thing got done and it was an amazing tool and a great experience, what I’m left with is a book where every line needs rewriting, there are logical inconsistencies throughout, and the style is so bad it should actually just be binned rather than rewritten.

How was this a great experience if what was produced needed such extensive changes that your own assessment is that it should be thrown out? At what point is the necessary rework so much that the thing being reworked didn't really contribute much to the end product at all?

> I have no idea how the code looks like, and barely even tested the app entirely, because it is still not released yet

This is worded as if knowing how the code works and testing it is hinged on it being released.

> "We ask that Australia clarify how exactly 'harm' and 'risks' shall be determined... ensuring these definitions do not encroach on protected speech," the US said in its submission.

Australia should put this submission in the circular file. The US government's opinion about any of this shouldn't matter to Australia, especially when the intent is to allow users to elect to use the natural state of no-algorithm time-based-ordering presentation of the content. This is like saying that an impact study needs to be done to determine if walking to the end of the block is safe enough to be allowed rather than blasting people out of a cannon towards the end of the block. Or saying that people should not be able to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner in that order if they choose to.

> Another worry was that the proposed laws could affect Australia's "reputation as a jurisdiction that enables innovation," the submission said.

How magnanimous of the US to be concerned about this for Australia.

There's no interop between video conferences services, no BYO-video-conferencing app, why would this be any different? It took government regulation to allow telephones other than those provided by the phone company to be plugged into the phone network. Can't control you or usage if they just provide dumb pipes/interfaces that anyone's tool and interact with.

I used github as an example. It's not about what's available, it's about what's appropriate/expected to be used at any given scale and what those thresholds are. I question that there is anyone who says "well, we have 30 engineers now, it's time to start bringing things in-house and on-prem". I assert that the reasons/logic to do so are divorced from the size of the org (except where size of the org influences the dollar amount shown on an invoice, which can push it in either direction).

But, even if the hosting of the code is locked down behind a VPN, the nature of it requires copying it somewhere else, perhaps to a laptop that gets lost/stolen. But that is an attack vector and risk that is not addressed by having the revision control only accessible via VPN (although it may provide access auditing capabilities to help mitigate/observe where copies of the code exist).

> I would expect any company with more than a few dozen developers would host their code on prem

(Ignoring what "on prem" means these days with so much being hosted and run on computers you don't own/physically control) Then you would be surprised. The threshold is probably multiple hundreds or thousands of developers, way more than "a few dozen". The lure of github purely because it's github is strong, and since Microsoft owns github now it falls under the "no one has been fired for choosing Microsoft" vendor selection logic.

I cannot speak to how accurate your description is, but this description sounds like there are multiple weak points and multiple attack vectors that open this up to increased risk of compromise, undermining the very security stance it's supposed to provide.

> Turns out it is galvanized, not stainless. I’m not sure the average person knows the difference. To be charitable, perhaps that’s even why the listing advertised it that way.

The person (or who/whatever) that wrote the ad copy probably doesn't know the difference. "Stainless" (either grouped with the word "steel" or by itself) is maybe a filler word to lend a certain level of gravitas/authority to the description or maybe used in contrast to "painted"; despite that it does actually mean something to people who know, it's not being used in that way, which contributes to the confusion. You'll often see menu items described as having "fresh" ingredients. I saw this the other day while waiting to place an order at a cafe and was thinking "what do they mean by 'fresh', in contrast to what? to distinguish themselves from other cafes' menus? freshly purchased by this venue or freshly harvested?" You can't tell, so much so that "fresh" is now meaningless. Perhaps "stainless" is going that way too.

Most/all of these LinkedIn influencer types are showing off what amounts to busy-boxes, but for adults rather than for babies, presented as if these are at all useful for real world use or are showing anything useful. That YouTube channel does an okay job of calling it out.

What does this mean?

This text appears on this page https://www.autom.dev/blog/google-search-goto-links

> The real URL is in the Location header on /goto. Request that URL. Do not follow the redirect.

And this text appears on this page https://www.autom.dev/blog/google-goto-url-fix

> Do not follow the redirect. Read Location.

That's what a redirect is, reading the value of the location header and then requesting it. How do you not follow the redirect by reading the location header? Once you've made the request to the /goto url, with GET or HEAD, to get the location header, google knows you're interested in whatever it is putting in the location header and can assume you're going to go there, if you're letting the User Agent (curl or the browser) go there for you or not.

This is a really interesting video that explores this topic, pointing out that at near light speeds, the entire universe becomes accessible in a single human lifetime.

The Overview Effekt: Time Dilation Visualized

https://youtu.be/8FT-oz9aZU4

> the rational thing for these rational competitors to do would be to agree

This is the bit that is tripping you up. The market is composed of more than just the these potentially agreeing parties, so there is no case where all parties can even come together to agree. It's rational for any party to break the agreement or be stealthy and attempt to take the upper hand while the visible players are all patting themselves on the back for their self-inflicted restraint. It's rational for one party to encourage everyone to come together to agree, to distract from their own actions to undercut everyone else.

On top of that, such agreement would potentially qualify as collusion, allowing an upstart to cry foul.

It's all game theory.

If the TV only plugged into the wall for electricity and showed the video that was fed into it via one of its inputs, does that TV qualify as "yet another extra piece of hardware that needs to be maintained"? The only reason it needs "maintenance" is because it does all this extra "smart" stuff. A separate device that has the "smarts" and treats the TV as a bare monitor screen would still be only one device to "maintain".

> Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they’d set up in a corner of the loft. - Neuromancer

This is an interesting call out when it comes to the communication/presentation of aesthetics of technology in the book. There's no narrative about actually relieving himself, just the mention that, of course, he has to and this is how it's being handled; the reader fills that in from these few scant details. The need to relieve himself, and ultimately the mention of the Texas catheter, is used as an indicator of how he's able to remain jacked in for so long, and as foreshadowing of expected jacked-in duration as they approach the final stages of the Villa Straylight run (when he purposely neglects to put it back on). So even in the "advanced" technology of the cyberpunk future of Neuromancer, people still gotta piss and wearing a catheter is still uncomfortable.

Heh, and cool hunting is the setting in Pattern Recognition.

That they are cool is the only thing that needs to be said. The reader fills that in with their own perception, which is how we're ending up with the Torment Nexus, because some people think the Torment Nexus is cool.

Agreed. My point is that there's the perception of the characters and corporations as having some meaningful/cool aesthetics in these stories and in the genre, but you'd be hard-pressed to identify what they are or how they are different than what we have today. And that's part of what makes good stories timeless.

320GB progressed from amazing, to reality, to mundane, to trivial today, but it would take on different meaning if there was some breakthrough real-life research that indicated the human brain is, in total, say, only 325GB. Which is what Johnny Mnemonic is really about, even if the numbers and units used are dated.

Except this is being critical of the popularity and fans, not the band.

I never thought about this before, but you made me realize that Sense/Net sure had a lot of employees considering the in-story world had true AGI, enough employees that the Panther Moderns exploited to cause chaos during the Dixie Flatline run. Or was it that the Turing Police were in the habit of shutting down really smart AI resulting in an aggressive need for white collar workers?

On aesthetics, the way the Hosaka is described is as the experience of touching and using it. The reader doesn't actually know what the aesthetics are, nor does the reader get a taste of what it's like to actually use. In stories, they don't show people having driver problems, or their microphone not working, or having to go to the bathroom (unless it's integral to the plot), which in some sense is similar to talking about lickable/fluid UI widgets and how material design is great and not mentioning that Hosaka moved the setting dialog again, you have to update drivers before jacking in, the sliver of "microsoft" inserted behind your ear makes you watch an ad before giving you access to live prices of antique art, or cyberspace now has a ribbon instead of a toolbar.

Aren't these effectively the same thing? In order to get the benefits of living/working as a group/in a society, there needs to be common elements; aggregating by location/space and by time go hand in hand. If the farmers' market is in the park on Sundays, you can hardly expect to show up at a different time or place and still participate. Regularity, in time or place, is the most common and scalable way to coordinate. The way to avoid that is to remove the need to coordinate, but then, by definition, you are alone.

I can't think of a better example of intrusiveness than "as soon as I pull out my phone [the kids] are grabbing for it", which I'm reading as "the kids want to use it even tho it isn't theirs". We've trained the kids to intrude on someone else so they can get a dopamine hit.

> made the bread cheap enough

The circus is distracting from the price of bread, apparently.

You don't have an on-call rotation but do have people dedicated to vendor relationships, and that guy works on the weekend? I'm not sure how you completely avoid getting alerts on the weekend for third-party payment processor issues, which can happen anytime, if you actually want to transact business on the weekend.

> Open-source projects often have this problem where you can have dozens of thousands of man-hours poured into a project without a single end-user opinion taken into account.

How is this "a problem"? The reason there are dozens of thousands of hours on an open source project is because the end-users are working on it. Some projects exist solely for someone to work on it (that is, the "working on it" is the "use case"). Open source does not expect or need to make money or get "users", so how people discover or source what they build and how to proceed isn't really a "problem".

The industry couldn't decide what it wanted for a long time (and maybe still hasn't settled). Pages needed to be consistent visually no matter which platform and browser the page was displayed on (which is odd, few people used the same sites on multiple platforms at the time). Oh, but then it was visually jarring because it didn't match the rest of the platform and you couldn't leverage your knowledge and experience of the platform's UI (the way multi-select worked in drop downs, accessibility). But then you couldn't style the widgets on the page to make your site distinct (styling OSX "lickable candy" widgets didn't work so well since they were so visually unique). And then you had mobile where space is a premium and scrollbars were sometimes visually hidden and the entire application took up the whole screen, so differences from other sites and the platforms as a whole were not as prominent. So all widgets had to be stylable (IIRC, you could style buttons but not scrollbars for a while, which made things inconsistent within a given page itself). And complete control of the "experience" became desirable, the scrollbar was seen as part of the page, not part of the container that holds and displays the page.

Ultimately the browser was recognized as its own platform and had to support all the customizations and accessibility concerns. User stylesheets are a thing, but few used that for much more than hiding annoying elements, and today the most likely user customizable thing is being able to switch between light and dark modes.

> tricking people into believing that a ML model can have experiences, feelings…

… or that sentences like "You're secrets are safe with me" is at all legitimate, meaningful, or legally binding.

The bank is trying to authenticate you, while you're trying to authenticate the bank. The bank calls and tries to authenticate themselves to the callee by saying "is your birthday such and such?", they're risking sharing PII with an unauthorized third-party. The solutions are a non-trivial amount of effort that no one really wants to put up with, unfortunately.

I used to have a residential mortgage with two other people and my name was stuffed into some ancillary field as a co-holder and they refused to give me any information or transact over the phone. I eventually figured out I needed to tell them to look in some extended info field, and the whole endeavor was annoying but ultimately I was appreciative of the strictness (that the entire mortgage data model—at the time (25 years ago), I don't know what it's like today—seems to assume that it will only ever be two people of opposite gender who are married will be on a mortgage was much more disappointing. The other two people were assumed to be married and the woman was seemingly by default listed as the non-primary).

Containers are often used with user namespaces, which is literally another (set of) user account(s).

Leap days, February 29th, are not at the level of time zones. Different time zones do not disagree as to when March 1st will occurs immediately after February 28th.

> "What's your favorite sarcopterygian?"

Am I reading your post correctly, this question is the prompt given to an LLM? What is anyone expecting by asking an LLM what its favorite anything is? This is a conversational prompt, so accuracy and rigor is barely applicable or expected, so downgrading to a lesser model should be acceptable. If you really want to attribute preference to an LLM, consider the downgrade to be a "this conversation is beneath my advanced n-billion parameter training".

> extra capabilities you get from an ActiveRecord framework such as full-stack admin pages

The naive "here's a row-level view of the database records" that things like ActiveRecord/ActiveAdmin give you by default are entirely inappropriate for any line of business administrative interaction. Line of business admin sites should be workflow based and focused on surfacing specific information needed for processes outside of the admin site itself. Non-developer staff should not be expected to interpret the state of rows and relationships among the tables.