QuercusMax

Do we have an idea of when the physical capability for vocal language originated? Other great apes have all kinds of vocalizations they can produce, and you don't need THAT many different sounds to support language.

Crystal Caves! I've been trying to remember the name of that game for ages! I never bought the full version but played the shareware endlessly...

I've been reading Wengrow and Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything", and one of the main points they've made so far is that once modern humans became recognizable as such, we were doing all the human-type things we do now: thinking about our place in the world, debating different ways to live and their pros and cons, and so forth.

We tend to think of prehistoric humans as being stupid cavemen, but I suspect we'd find them to basically the same as us, just with a different context and level of knowledge about some things - but also far greater understanding of other things.

Not really much different than many of our close mammalian relatives, like beavers (rodents and primates are very closely related).

The more interesting thing is the use of "exoskeleton" type tools like excavators , automobiles, or even things like forks. Our brains basically consider them an extension of our body once we learn to use them. Fascinating stuff!

Private education for the wealthy is a cancer on society - having even rich kids go to the same schools as everyone else is an equalizing effect.

I don't see how capitalism help this at all, in fact it seems to make it much worse.

Wasn't the only company I heard from after that long a time. I assume their hiring process was just very broken and slow.

Even Google in 2015 took their sweet time getting back to me after my interviews. At one point the recruiter told me that my offer letter took a week going thru interoffice mail waiting for a signature, and then it took 2 more weeks before they actually sent me the offer.

I took a paper coding test in 2004 when I was job hunting. It was pretty hilarious to me, really, since it was so incredibly easy (multiple choice data-structures type questions) for anybody who had any skills at all.

They finally offered me a job 3 months later after I already had started working somewhere else.

Prior to LLMs I never considered that I might have to make a resource-usage decision between hiring Star Trek's Data vs. his stupider brother B4...

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/B-4

I remember watching a video (something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo, but probably not that exact one) where they did the analysis and determined that Mexican cane-sugar coke contains the exact same proportion of sugars as HFCS coke - and it's because of the chemistry of how the sugars break apart in the presence of acid in the liquid.

So in theory an extremely fresh mexican coke might be different, but in practice you're getting the same thing.

I'm 43 and do mostly stretchy band exercises for upper body workouts to help my neck, shoulder, and arms where I have chronic pain. Takes up very little space, I can do 5-10 minutes throughout the day, and 20 minutes after doing a few sets my pain is much better.

You can actually build some muscle this way - nothing impressive, but way more than I had when I wasn't doing any upper body work.

The stuff which causes you to have diarrhea that gets on the news is caused by the contents of the digestive tract being spread over your meat. Whether it's technically fecal matter or not doesn't really matter if it's stuff that will cause YOU to lose control of our bowels.

Proper butchering SHOULDN'T spread the contents of the digestive tract on the large muscles.

This is like saying that playing guitar while sitting in a chair is cheating, because a proper display of skill is playing while riding a unicycle.

It might be more impressive, but I don't see how reverse sear is cheating.

"bacteria can travel to the surface of the muscles during the butchering process"

This way undersells what's actually happening: fecal matter from the intestines gets onto your meat. This shouldn't happen with proper practices.

I've gotten into a situation multiple times where an LLM (usually a low-end free model) will write a whole bunch of code and then be unable to make any more correct changes to it because it can't hold enough context. Super easy to get into a duplicative spaghetti mess - exactly like I've seen human developers do countless times, but even worse.

I started developing webapps back in the late 90s when I was in high school using Perl, and I've worked with tons of technologies up till around 2014 or so when I shifted into almost pure backend work and lost touch with modern frontend development.

I'm now learning how modern frontend development is done (for both personal and professional projects), so I may not know the specific tools, technologies, or terms but I can say "whatever the equivalent of XYZ is" and the models will translate for me. If I say "run pytype" it will tell me "we're using mypy - i'll run that checker for you".

If you can express what problem you're trying to solve, that will get you most of the way - and then you can refine by asking questions. "I think I need something like Redis for caching things - do people still use that? Is there a simpler more modern version that is the new standard? Do we already have company docs suggesting what to use?"

For sure. On a personal coding project I said "I'm a professional software engineer, and while this is a hobby project I'm not just vibe-coding and want to build reliable software" and the agent suddenly started suggesting all kinds of things to make its code more robust.

Heat can't be converted losslessly to useful energy, but converting to heat to other forms of energy is extremely common. What do you think a steam turbine, boiler, internal combustion engine, etc. do?

The word you're looking for is "authoritarianism". The current regime loves fascism, which is a much better fit for what's happening.

Russians and Germans were authoritarian before and after communism and Nazism. That didn't really change.

It's actually quoting South Park

Or even just compilers / assemblers. They'll find all kinds of errors humans routinely overlook!

Or they could just explain in the ticket why it's important instead of trying to trick an AI? AIs and humans will both read your explanation of why we should care and use that to prioritize.

If you have to lie to get your tickets fixed, that sounds like either you're bad at explaining why things are important, or you're working on things you shouldn't be.

This was my experience with some of the stupider models, but I haven't had Claude do this type of thing since I started using it for work about 6mo ago.

Claude will do some boneheaded things for sure, but it's pretty good about writing tests that are useful, and not removing or modifying tests just because they're in the way.

Claude is pretty bad about assuming that it couldn't have broken a test it didn't know about, as it has often told me "this is already broken on main" which is definitely NOT true.

How does the cursor harness help here compared to something more basic like pi coder? I'm talking specifics.

Also skills can often include helper scripts or other binaries which the agent can use to do things it couldn't otherwise.

If you want to properly isolate things, use containers. That's not what worktrees are for.

That's the one!

We've already seen that it's possible to trick models into seeing user input as their own "thinking" if you make it sound like what the model writes. While it may appear that it's looking at the tags on the input, in practice that's not as strong a guarantee as you'd hope.

Exactly.

I don't want a "smart" washer / dryer / fridge / toaster. I want a standard interface I can build my own system around, or use someone else's that they've already built.

Many keyboard players will play stacked keyboards today - I've got a big Nord plus a bunch of little Reface keyboards, and they often each have their own pedals attached to control sustain, rotary speaker, etc. This is basically the same situation as what you're describing (except I'm not playing notes with my feet).

I've seen pretty much every model including Claude bypass commit hooks constantly if there's even a tiny bit of friction, instead of pausing and asking me to help fix why it can't run the hooks (usually something that needs to be done outside the sandbox like `npm ci`).

That's why it's critical to have these checks run in a context that the model can't bypass, such as via github actions that block PR merges. Generally works pretty well for stuff at work (where we have all this stuff set up as part of continuous integration checks), but it means that for personal stuff I have to set up quite a bit more infrastructure to ensure that models don't just skip running tests (which they LOVE to do).