BubbleRings

Give a youngster a Lego set and he loves it.

Give them a huge bin of Lego pieces gathered from many sets, all sorted by color and type, and…

They don’t know what to do with it.

Thank you! Yeah I think I would have experimented more with interrupting it by now, but my jobs only recently got longer and multi step. Plus I could never figure out, if I do want to interrupt this, what’s the best time to do it?

The new version:

“I can’t go to sleep yet hun, somebody on the internet doesn’t learn the way I think they should!”

Bring a camera, it could make good (if wildly disturbing) reality TV. You wandering Medieval England, wearing a face mask, gloves and a Tyvek suit, with your completely unknown accent, trying to convince a whole society “you’re doing it all wrong!”

> what would these forboding circumstances have been attributed to at the time?

I’ll bet witchcraft got brought up, and praying to the wrong god or going to the wrong church.

So wild and sad, reading the article and discussing the subject with a “knowledgeable entity”. (It’s great having smart “friends” that don’t mind when you pester them with rabbit hole questions at 3am.)

The “Erin Brockovitch” (hexavalent chromium groundwater poisoning) story in Hinkley CA describes harm that went on for a couple decades. The underground plume spread about 8 miles, affecting a couple thousand people.

The Peak District case was a whole mining region exposed through dust and fumes for maybe _850 years_, with the airborne lead spreading so far it showed up in Alpine ice and Scandinavian lakes.

Dust brought in to homes by workers, and fumes over the whole town and countryside, bringing sickness, early death, craziness and lower intelligence to men, women and children. And nobody could figure it out.

This is close to how I do it also. Except I have never interrupted it in a task, I always worried it would destabilize it and it would leave some function half finished or whatever. I just have standing instructions for it to pause places and ask “ready for the next phase?” Do you find it responds well and correctly to being interrupted in the middle of things?

Except, it’s the top entry in HN right now. It could have gone down to the hug 20 minutes after it was posted, so nobody much has had a chance to have a go at it.

Well, it doesn’t seem to be a time for dilly-dallying. IMO the danger and promise of AGI is through the roof, and the urgency is up there with them.

It’s time to decide your stand. But if you want to make an informed decision, you probably want to:

- Read up on the possible dangers until you get it,

- Learn about the advantages and breakthroughs already happening, and,

- Do some extensive work on a real project with at least an Opus-level LLM, so you really understand what an astounding new thing it is in our world.

I feel like this approaches a sweet spot of coolness but doesn’t quite get there. What might have nailed it would be a way to send multiple messages that contain a hidden message, doesn’t look suspicious, and can be decoded by the recipient with little or no training once they know the secret. Like how @nickcw in the comments here was able to decode the Morse code one, but using a method that wouldn’t take so long to learn.

For instance, what kind of message could seventh graders send to each other five times a day that, if a teacher found three days of messages, it would still look plausibly like the kids were just playing checkers over email, but the recipient could eyeball decode it?

Or, what kind of AI-generated/code-generated message could be eyeball decoded, but repeatedly posted on a bulletin board without raising suspicion?

How about, someone is selling a secure box of some sort, and their factory starts putting glitter nail polish over the screws that hold it together, as is sometimes done for security reasons.

Then the intern decides, “I can just glue these identical little white circles with blue sparkles onto the screw, and it will be faster and I can take more breaks!”

Do you think they left because they figure they’d never get enough trust back to make it worth trying?

That article takes 15 pages and 9 ads (some of them very sketchy) to say the following:

Ctrl-Shift-Esc -> Startup -> Firefox -> Disable.

And the facts were pretty slanted. If the page didn’t have so many ads I would say it was probably written by Firefox people.

It's cool watching Dr. Adamala and Dr. John Glass of JCVI kind of working their way towards each other, like the two sides of the first intercontinental railway aiming to meet up. Glass is head of the minimal genome project at Venter Institute, stripping more and more genes out of a certain bacteria and keeping only the ones it needs to stay alive. More info here: https://www.jcvi.org/research/synthetic-biology

Which leads to users that are not that technically savvy learning to always click "Load it anyway!" and not think about it, even in financial management firms. Ask me how I know...

Don’t go be being all reasonable, we’re trying to be Reddit here for a minute.

Would installing ad-blocker software give me any protection from this stuff?

Hickey is being a bit narrow sighted here, and ignoring some of the ways that humans are using AI outside of coding.

I’m someone that is, and has been, for most of my career, someone from the in-between lands. I don’t use paper maps from the gas station, but I have not coded much.

I basically grew up with DOS 1.0 and on. Often made a living being able to sit at a Windows workstation and think and persist so I could figure out in four hours what other people could not, in that buggy strange world of microcomputers many of us grew up in.

Those situations, now, often take me five minutes to get past, instead of four hours. It has been a game changer for me.

I would guess that it directly affects the nerves where they travel through the wrist tunnel, but I’m just guessing.

I do know that after days where I have had caffeine, that night I have a tendency to sleep with my hands curled up under my chin, instead of a more relaxed sleeping pose, which I think is probably bad for the blood flow in my hands.

Two things helped me. First is easiest to explain: cutting back or eliminating caffeine. Seriously. And my carpal was fairly bad, so I know what a troubling (literal) pain it can be. I found it was made much worse by my 4 cups a day habit back then.

Number two is more complicated to explain, but it is a mighty powerful keyboard skill that can sometimes go a long way to reducing the "awkward reach" keystrokes. Specifically, copy and paste! Read on:

(TLDR: learn Ctrl-Ins, Shift-Ins, and Shift-Del, maybe. Instead of Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, and Ctrl-X):

In the past I often found myself doing long sessions of paging up and down documents and source files, and doing complex copy and paste actions, for reasons. Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V were not so awkward on the original IBM-PC keyboard, because Control was right where it should have stayed, ha (where your CapsLock key is now.) When they moved it to the lower left and lower right spots, it made it a tough reach with just your left hand. You could learn to do RightControl + LeftC for copy, but I never did. Instead, when I need to do a lot of copy and paste with paging up and down also, I get my right hand at the home position on the (full sized) numeric keypad (in arrow mode not number mode), and I get my left thumb and forefinger on left shift and control. Then PgUp, PgDn, Home, End, Ctrl-Home, Ctrl-End are all lightning fast. But most importantly, and the point of this rant, LeftCtrl + NumericKeypad-Ins is COPY, LeftShift + NumericKeypad-Ins is INSERT, and LeftShift + NumericKeypad-Del is CUT. I have never met anybody that could do cut, copy, and paste faster than I, in a long career, if I must say so. Try it for a moment, your fingers barely move when you learn the technique. But I never could talk more than one or two people into learning the skill, much to my disappointment. And now I'll probably never do any long sessions like that again (because AI mostly like you said), oh well.

Before I learned any programming skills, I worked with a bunch of great coders and learned a lot from them. I remember being impressed with the guy that would log on to start his day, but then sit back and have some coffee, M&Ms and read the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip from the newspaper (yeah this was long ago.) When I asked him about it, he explained that it was one of the important aspects of the life of a programmer to be aware of: if they are walking around the office with a distracted look on their face, you still want to sort of "knock" before walking right up and dropping a big issue or request on them, they might be doing the most difficult work of their day!

I eventually learned to code and would often find it to be my favorite part of the job--the looking out the window and planning the attack phase.

Absolutely wonderful article and find! I was a RBBS-PC guy myself, and ran a one-line bbs for a while on it, but it never got popular with anybody. I interrupted one guy looking around one time and brought him in to chat mode, and we ended up good friends; the whole reason I kept the bbs up was so he could beep me and call me into long chats a couple nights a week.

It was a IBM-PC or XT, with two Seagate half-height 20MB ST-225 hard disks laying to the side of each other in the two bays--don't stack them, they will fry each other even with added fans installed!

It made such a ozone smell in my bedroom I ran a dryer vent hose from the exhaust fan out my bedroom window.

That's about all I remember, but I do have a copy of the software if anybody needs it.

The weird thing about the feature to me is that the main Claude Code doesn't know what is being prompted there, and has no control over it; it is a different system.

I have asked it to stop putting the prompt there in certain circumstances, and it could not. It was interesting to investigate.

I like the feature though, and make use of it.

Agreed. Oh and you can hit tab instead of right arrow to accept it btw, which I find easier.

Wait, what? (Didn’t that ruin the joke?

Oh I would totally go on the reality TV show My Neanderthal Life if it was me.

Me: My customer number is not correctly associated with my account on uspto.gov. What is the phone number I should call for help?

America.gov AI: Call the Patent Electronic Business Center for USPTO.gov account and customer-number association issues. Toll-free: 866-217-9197

Not bad at all!

I want to know more about the “private collection” that the AI accessed. To me that is the scary quote from the article. Sounds like the AI found a resource that it found useful for breaking encryption challenges, and it wants to keep it to itself, maybe. Which sounds like the opening to a dystopian movie.

I think of the extent of human knowledge as a circle or cloud shape, and true expert thinking happens just inside the edge. And creative thinking that leads to knowledge breakthroughs happen when you are thinking in that edge area, but also make a connection way around the circle to some other location. And my guess is there’s absolutely no reason why AI can’t learn to do that too.

It would be cool to see an individual US State pass a law to say that recording glasses have to have a visible logo on the front indicating recording capabilities.