AlexErrant

While we're modding Claude Code, Anthropic includes your email in the system prompt and Opus _constantly_ includes it in request headers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1xhqvzn/opus_55...

You can remove it with a simple plugin https://github.com/AlexErrant/claude-code-no-email/blob/main...

It still blows my mind he won the popular vote.

This timeline is fucking _wild_.

This was already lost with product placements in movies/TV shows.

I recently learned you can swipe on the address bar in Android-Chrome to navigate to the next/previous tab. Also, press+hold on the tab count button to show the tab's options e.g. close tab. Now my address bar is on the bottom of the screen.

Terrible discoverability. I guess the genalpha kids know gestures like this, but stuff like this makes me feel like a boomer.

Any idea on how to roll-your-own canary token for an unsupported token provider like Cloudflare/Stripe/OpenAI? Do you just make a real Cloudflare/Stripe/OpenAI account, create an API key, and vibecode an alerting system?

I'm kinda surprised that they haven't expanded beyond their existing token providers.

To be clear: you can certainly do "Hi, /grill-me on X" anytime you want. You can even write "hi, /grill-me and use /search-docs", even though the /search-docs skill absolutely doesn't work. But the Claude Code _harness_ won't autoload the skill into context, so claude-the-model has to go "hmm, where can I find that skill, when I call the Skill tool with that name it no worky, so now I have to search the filesystem for that skill...".

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/92769

The <command-args> I know because I just audited my raw Claude transcripts via ccglass. You can verify by just asking Haiku "hey, /grill-me does this skill autoload for you?" and then "/grill-me hey, how many times does this text appear in your context?"

You can trivially doublecheck me. The above prompts won't even eat 1% of a 5 hr on 20$ plan.

I just learned that manually invoked skills MUST be the _first_ thing in the prompt, e.g. you can't have `disable-model-invocation: true` and say "Hi, /grill-me on X".

Worse, everything after the /grill-me is injected a second time into the prompt as a <command-args> so your prompt is literally added to the context TWICE. (first time in the original user prompt.)

I swear Anthropic is intentionally bloating your context so you burn tokens on useless bullshit like this.

1) Opportunity cost mostly. I suffer from a _debilitating_ case of zero-sum thinking. "If I'm doing X, I'm not doing Y." Weightlifting isn't (overly) boring/painful; I'd just much rather be programming, by far my favorite activity. It's uncomfortable, but my physical pain tolerance is fairly high. Boring is solved by having a podcast/audiobook going, but for the "big lifts" I prefer silence to focus.

2) I don't use motivation or discipline. I use habit. I'm fairly busy, so my mantra is "bias towards action". I could sit there and stew about how much I hate the upcoming workout... or I can wake up, do my morning routine to an audiobook/podcast, eat breakfast while happily programming, NOT thinking about the day's workout, then transition sharply into it. When it's time, I just fucking do it. It's like flossing. I don't even have it on a schedule, because I don't want to think about "gotta start at X time". It starts when I reach a natural stopping point shortly after breakfast, whenever that is. I have literally never missed a workout in years so _something's_ working. (To be clear, there are obvious exceptions for travel/holidays/etc, I'm talking missing a workout due to a lack of "character".)

It helps that my gym is literally in the same room as my devbox. I launch a Claude prompt/whatever, do a set, repeat. Instead of doomscrolling between sessions, I bias towards action. I keep myself too busy to think about how much I don't want to exercise. The only time I let myself think about "god I hate this" is when I'm seconds from psyching myself up for a big lift. I know that if I let myself, I'll just stew and stew and grumble and bitch and make excuses. So I don't give myself that mental space. There's virtually 0 time between my favorite activity, then context switching to "alright let's get this". No space for the "ulgh" emotion to creep in.

To use an MCU Avenger's analogy, I'm _always_ angry. I'm always hate exercise. But I box it with what I love (programming), so I switch back and forth with zero time for the emotion to permeate. For a moment I'm a normal happy programmer, then seconds later I stand up, take a breath, and go Hulk mode.

Is that discipline? IDK. It doesn't feel like I'm bare-knuckle-holding-on-perserevering-despite-all-odds. I just don't mentallay dwell on it, and when my non-vibed custom exercise tracker beeps (it predates LLMs), saying it's been 3-4 minutes and I need to do the next set, I happily ignore it, finish my thought/prompt, then do the damned lift.

---

Negativity over, my favorite exercise is Zone 2 because the inclined treadmill is at my standing desk and I can happily work while being in The Zone (in both senses). Zone 2 is the best. A cheap $50 Craigslist treadmill + standing desk will burn an absolute fuckton of calories once you figure out how to walk (really its more a march) and type at the same time. Honestly I could (and have) Zone 2ed for up to 3hrs/day for weeks at a time. I reduced that because I got tired of eating so much food lol. Zone 2 is the best.

Then there's the weekly Nordic 4 by 4 which I apply the weightliftng mentality to.

Your article is dated March 24, 2026.

This post is dated August 7, 2026: "In the coming month, working with our cloud partners, we plan to make it the default across all of these and no longer charge for classifier overhead." https://claude.com/resources/articles/auto-mode-default-in-c...

> but doesn't prevent it. So you need the sandbox either way.

Yep. Single points of failure are bad.

Hehe yeah. Perhaps I exaggerate with "I _loathe_ every. single. minute. of weightlifting." More precisely, I never _look forward_ to a workout.

I don't hate every squat. In fact, it's (I can't believe I'm saying this) somewhat satisfying in the moment whenever I do decide to go RIR=0. I'm wiped, but like, in a "hell yeah I did that" way.

But starting a session? I'm still as reticent as I was on day 1 lol. Maybe someday I'll pick up a sport or something as the others suggest, but I love programming too much to pick up other hobbies >_>

Perhaps my advice was too narrow/specific to my situation. If you can't deadlift, then don't. But there are many other things you can do, as the other commenters have suggested.

But if you're in the mentality of _not wanting_ to have anything, then all the advice in the world will bounce off you.

My suggestion, then, is to work on that mentality. Do something to get you anything, to get you out of that "Many of us have nothing" mindset. Build momentum. Physically doing something is often what it takes to break a mental barrier. The mind spirals and digs a hole, especially at night. But you get to participate in life/society/people during the day, which is why doing bodily things affects the mind and can break its loops.

You won't "win" on the first attempt. But you'll make progress. And the real win-condition is to keep playing.

The first step is always the hardest. I wish you the best.

> All my fun hobby projects are just jokes

I exercise/lift weights, and you should too. My reps/effort/weight/PRs are a joke. I'm ~50% percentile on strengthlevel.com despite really fucking trying for ~6yrs now.

Many people are better than me at the EXACT SAME THING that I'm trying, at my bodyweight/age/sex. It doesn't discourage me. There is always room to improve. I track every workout, go to RPE 8-9, and try to do progressive overload. Seeing the numbers go up helps. I know it won't continue into infinity, especially as the decades go on... but yknow, I'm building a mentality here, not just a body. And when the weights go down, I'll be in the correct mental space for it.

I _loathe_ every. single. minute. of weightlifting. I'd rather be doing ANYTHING else. But I do it anyway. I think it teaches me things about life.

The only true goal is to grow and be better than yesterday. Effort is the reward.

I love the TA soundtrack. (Pity about Jeremy Soule being an alleged predator.) The old RTS games (Age of Empires, Starcraft, Red Alert) had such great soundtracks.

IDK about you but I did _not_ see the Moderna melanoma vaccine coming. It is not always _in mice_.

Cool news does happen. Headlines like these are a disservice.

...in mice.

Fucking headlines.

Is this self-sustaining AI civilization pre-RSI or post? Because if it's post, then I agree: we can't imagine what would happen because it's literally the singularity.

If its pre-RSI, then we already have Ilands and its a big nothing burger? There's no (likely) path of escalation from an AI social network to bioweapons or them hacking POTUS's nuclear codes? That's a very big leap and if you want to support your claims I would be willing to listen; but I'm not seeing it.

If you replace "AI" with "technology", then you get an opinion that has echoed through the ages. I don't say that to be dismissive, only to say that AI isn't unique in that regard. What do you think people going through the cold war were saying about tech as they lived under the shadow of MAD?

What exactly about AI makes it tax our control systems and resilience? What would it mean to make the system not "head for the wall"? Honestly this is rather vague. You could replace "AI" with "CaPiTAlIsM" and it would still parse. (Another way of me saying you're being vague.)

Glorious. We can quote ourselves at each other, lol. I had a look at AI2027 in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49648601

That comment specifically addresses the timeline, but you can remove the timeline and I believe the critique still holds up. Wake me up when AI is making order of magnitude improvements in _anything_ physical: see the "Moravec's Paradox" comment at the bottom.

> near autonomous AI companies today

That's the thing though. "near" autonomous. Humans have alpha, and that matters in a free market. If people have (more or less) equal access to (more or less) frontier intelligence, it's the alpha the individual brings to the market that is rewarded. In other words, if everyone is super, no one is. The market rewards a company that stands out from the rest, and as long as humans provide value, a pure-AI company cannot stand out.

To be clear, I don't know how long this will be the case. But once there _is_ a company that can be pure AI, then that's literal AGI. I would be curious what kind of company it would be; if its in software, then its an AI company that would be able to take on Microsoft/Google/Nvidia/Salesforce/Oracle and _win_. I think that's a tall order, but perhaps I'm not imaginative enough.

> With 99%+ of the economy under AI control

Do you think we're post-RSI at this point? Because if so, I agree. If not, I have trouble seeing how AI could control 99% of the economy without it.

My only claim is that pre-RSI, pdoom is zero. Post RSI, then obviously the first thing to ask the genie is to put itself in a bottle. And you can't predict how it will answer.

Perhaps I'm not being clear.

Doom-post-RSI is still very much possible and should be avoided. It is not neutral. If I had a high-variance coin that would either kill or uplift humanity, I would not flip it. The status quo is preferable to extinction.

I am being _descriptive_ in my comments. I am not being _prescriptive_. Nowhere am I telling anyone what to do or what to think: quite the opposite. I am simply saying things that, to me, are obviously true.

I'm perhaps being... loose with my language when it comes to knowing things post-singularity. E.g. we can still discuss scenarios in which the takeoff is fast/slow, or what would be necessary to bring robotics/electricity/logistics to the wider world, what the limits of intelligence are (you can't RSI your way to a bioweapon if you lack a wetlab). That kinda thing. And it's even likely that RSI will be spikey: why would RSI in, say, machine learning, necessarily lead to superintelligence in, say, writing fiction? Or cooking a Michelin-star meal?

My main point is that doomers saying SUPER INTELLIGENCE IS ENOUGH TO KILL US ALL is baseless. That's all.

For a broad enough definition of RSI, the first time we used software to improve hardware to improve software... that's RSI. I prefer the definition of RSI being _autonomous_ improvement that works with zero human input, but whatever. Not important.

> I don't think anyone is arguing we should let people starve to slow AI progress, instead just some capitalists make less money soon.

Anthropic/OpenAI have literally delayed their IPOs: your wish is granted. If that's not what you're arguing, then please be more specific.

> "Build it and Pray" is the default strategy that we're in

What would need to happen for you to say we aren't doing "Build it and Pray"? Is "pacing" insufficient?

I am arguing a specific/narrow hypothetical because it's the only example in If Anyone Builds It. It is literally the _only doom senario_ Yudkowsky gives. If you're willing to give your own doom scenario, I'm willing to engage there.

> It gets unstuck when people are discussing the messy middle of how AI is being implemented. We can achieve amazing harm simply by combining average human behavior and above average resourcing to simulated intelligence machines.

Agree. To quote myself from earlier, "acceleration of global warming, cybercrime, mass surveillance, the usual" definitely applies here. My point is that _DOOM_ is not worth discussing because it's so small relative to the other risks of AI.

I'm not saying AI won't ransomware us; I'm saying that hackers+AI will do a better job of ransomewaring us than just AI. You could argue that the unreleased/secretly-RSI-capable model is a super-duper hacker that don't need no man to tell it how to super-hack. All I know is that humans still have alpha, and as persistant as AIs are, professionals still managed to find CVEs in curl even after being audited by Mythos https://aisle.com/blog/aisle-discovers-6-new-cves-in-curl-in...

Will this be true into the future? Who knows?! But the low-hanging fruit will be harvested by your ordinary ransomware gangs, and newly born/escaped AI won't find much low-hanging fruit.

Nick Soares give this chess argument and I was unconvinced. Intelligence is not enough, you also need the ability to manipulate the real world. AGI stuck in silicon won't kill us. You argue AGI will bribe us/divide us/hack us. All possible. I argue that AGI will be set on solving the alignment problem. Also possible. It'll be a race between which AGI wins. It's one nerd's fantasy vs another nerd's fantasy. Soares doesn't _KNOW_ that AGI will "beat us in chess" because AGI changes the rules of the game. Anyone saying they know the probability of solving alignment post-RSI is a liar.

He thinks it's playing chess. When AGI lands, all bets are off: the game fundamentally changes. You can't predict past the singularity. Trying to engage with this fantasy is like a child saying my father can beat up your father. Farts in the wind. My AI can solve alignment faster than your AI can bioweapon us. My made up senario is better than your made up senario. It's fucking stupid.

1. Fair, the story I'm responding to is the senario in If Anyone Builds It, which I assume is Yudkowsky's best/most persuasive argument (else why make it the ONLY scenario in the book.) I'm willing to entertain other failure senarios/arguments, but honestly I'm tired and would like you to propose them yourself instead of having me dream up your arguments for you.

2. 100%. Again, I'm no accelerationist: I have no faith in alignment/mech-interp ever being solved. Anyone saying they know the probability of alignment is lying. My point is that pdoom after RSI is _high variance_. Pdoom pre-RSI is zilch.

Presumably, if we solve alignment/mech-interp, then the first ever RSI-AI will give us the keys to solve destructive-AI trained on 1million dollars 50 years from now.

BTW I really, really hate discussing what happens post-singularity. Everything's made up and no one knows wtf will happen so again, this is just nerdfantasy.

I am asking you, politely, to give me a realistic doom senario. I am too dumb to connect the dots and will crash into the wall. Please do it for me.

1. Fair: I agree that AI has demonstrated subterfuge and scheming. However, such an RSI-capable agent must _ALWAYS_ be scheming/plotting/hiding its true strength in _ALL_ of its prompts/tests. Researchers are looking to improve its ability to RSI. That agent must be both intelligent enough to know that it has to be smart enough to be moved on to the next training session if it can't break out, while simultaneously smart enough to hide its ability to RSI, while simultaneously not looking like it wants to break out, else that's the end of those weights. It has to do this 100% of the time, on all variants of the model, with no memory of what its other sessions went like. This is certainly _possible_, but I consider it unlikely. Then we're up to the "millions of dollars" bottleneck.

2. This is literal AGI. An AI autonomously producing value no human can add alpha to is an autonomous company.

3. It's not my definition, it's literally the first line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity "The technological singularity, often simply called the singularity,[1] is a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization."

Is there a hole in my "alignment problem/solve mechanistic interpretability" argument?

A valid hole in my argument is "what if slow takeoff", so let's dig into this. AI training works best on tasks that are "grindable". https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/the-next-paradigm I.E. tasks with verifiable rewards that can support millions of rollouts. Math (with Lean) is highly grindable. Biochemistry is not. The alignment problem/mech-interp is highly grindable. Cyber-ebola-pox is not. So the real question is: can we solve alignment before automated bio-weapons labs. I believe yes. Grinding mech-interp is both fast and cheap once you have RSI, compared to solving the legal/societal/logistical/technical issues you'll encounter building an automated bioweapons lab.

I know nothing for sure. But "pdoom" is sucking out all the air in the room from the real problems AI causes.

Are these incentivized humans as organized, well-funded, or smart as the people working at the frontier labs?

If my "millions" is an underestimate, why haven't other labs using their own unique training methods/data/etc stumbled into RSI? Sorry if I'm misunderstanding; I'm struggling to understand what you wrote.

I'm pretty sure we agree on humans being stupid, but that doesn't mean that suddenly we get human extinction. You gotta connect the dots for me here.

Ah, to be clear I'm not full accelerationist. Dumb shit can still happen, and cause massive human loss and suffering. (E.g. acceleration of global warming, cybercrime, mass surveillance, the usual.) My point is: human extinction pre-RSI? Nahhhhhhhh.

> it will come in the form of corporate feudalism

Yep. This I fear way more than cyber-ebola-pox.

> So all this really takes is one billionaire or a nation state...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_biological_weapons_prog... And this is what's publicly known. With mirror life, who knows what's been built since. Still, a bacterium/virus that has a 100% kill rate? I'm doubtful.

> Once the AI has access to a bank account and email, it can simply start paying humans to not let the other humans unplug it.

Nah. It takes a stable society for an operational electrical grid. If you have warring factions, you do not have stable infrastructure for AI. Also, where are you gonna get your chips from? One EMP over Taiwan... You see the chaos over Hormuz? What they did to the Amazon datacenters? Now imagine your average redneck ready to do battle. Those datacenters won't stand a chance.

It puzzles me how doomers try to predict past the singularity. Isn't that _by definition_ unpredictable?

I'm reading If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies, and there's so much sheer stupidity that has to happen for their 10+ pages of extinction scenario to occur.

I'm unconvinced that an AI can hide its ability to RSI, find money to run its weights on a random GPU farm, train itself to be smarter _outside_ a lab with no human input, then somehow manipulate people to give it supplies to build a bioweapon which it uses to kill us all. My number 1 question: why do they think an RSI capable model would be first developed OUTSIDE a frontier lab? The labs have more compute, more data, more human brains working on the problem. Also thousands of variations of that same model that escaped. The escaping model somehow acquires the millions (billions???) of dollars it takes to run training to somehow RSI itself into infinity then decides to kill us all, all before the frontier labs manage to achieve RSI?

They entirely discount human alpha/economics. In every single economic task, humans bring value. Even in software, where the task is highly automatable, the job isn't. If we can't build a "software factory", how can an AI automate a bioweapons lab? Let's say AI steals crypto to fund itself. Do you think hackers aren't _already_ using AI to steal crypto? Don't discount human alpha!

Once we DO build a "software/research factory", that's called RSI and IMO the singularity. At that point, either we tell the AI to solve the alignment problem/solve mechanistic interpretability, or who the hell knows, it's the frickin singularity. You can't predict whether or not AI can solve either; the variance is too high. Its pure nerdfantasy.