causal

Yeah I recently downgraded my subscription. The paternalism is out of control. Secret weights, secret guardrails, secret stenography, secret dumbing-down of triggers, secret token allowances.

Yeah though to be fair that's a settings option.

Depends on leadership culture. In toxic (aka “competitive”) environments managers are insecure and fear their own staff as potential competition.

For anyone wondering what the actual purported security weaknesses are in this article (I used the slop machine to reduce the slop):

- Cloud backups — by default, backups to iCloud/Google Drive contain plaintext messages, and E2EE backup is opt-in. Even if you enable it, a weak password collapses the effective security, and any other person in the chat with an unencrypted backup exposes the conversation.

- Metadata — who you talk to, when, how often, IP, contact graph, etc. This is the "reading your life without reading your messages" argument, and it's the part that's genuinely well-established.

- Pen register / FBI — the claim that WhatsApp uniquely delivers near-real-time metadata (~every 15 min) to law enforcement.

- Group chat membership integrity — a server-level adversary can inject a member into a group; messages stay encrypted but get delivered to the injected party. Endpoint compromise (Pegasus / CVE-2019-3568) — encryption is irrelevant if the device is owned.

- Closed source, Meta AI, business accounts — content can leave the E2EE envelope in those flows.

Nothing really new here, and as everyone else is pointing out Telegram might be worse.

I think it's important to multiply "likelihood of the human making a mistake" by "how many times the human must avoid a mistake". If your hobby presents 100 avoidable-but-life-threatening mistakes an hour, it's a dangerous hobby.

Too many people read "human error" as "human preventable" rather than "a thing you will also do because you are human"

So if it works: Awesome.

The spa approach is a little weird. FDA workaround?

Absolutely. Imagine forking VSCode and then selling it for $60 BILLION in a few years. And right as you lose your competitive advantage to foundation providers. Amazing.

Okay then makes me wonder if this recent trend is just one particularly large manufacturer ramping up production? Tesla?

But it's just not a high quality essay. This writing would have few if any upvotes coming from a random Substack blog.

I still really like some PG essays, but PG used to be a much better writer.

> I can't speak for his other essays but this article was not great.

Indeed this wouldn't even be front page material if PG's initials were not on it.

I mean there's also just sheer luck. Getting billions is probably more about luck than hard work OR corruption, even if those two things can increase your chances.

But luck is also not "earning" in most senses of the word.

I thought he might be onto something interesting when he began with the growth-rate example, since that's most-obviously tied to valuation. But he skipped over valuation entirely and decided to lecture a bunch of Oxford grads about middle-school math as if he were onto something profound.

I think the way network effects and valuation creates billionaires is a more earnest defense. But that would start to lean into sociology and luck more than the hard-work he must insist upon, so I guess we sweep that under the "exponential because hard work" rug too.

I think maybe a simpler explanation is that tech has been such a story of purportedly humble people becoming wildly successful. Classic rags to riches. Makes it easy to think of nerds as one of the common people, even the rich ones.

Sure but you can totally contrive scenarios to give the appearance of what you described without really doing anything notable.

What matters is scale. Did it deploy a novel zero-day exploit to overcome a problem? That's alarming. Did it kill a disruptive process? Pretty normal troubleshooting step.

One thing I find kind of annoying is how Anthropic goes for these "vast and alien" names like Fable and Mythos, but then deliberately trains the model's personality to act like a cool high school teacher that feels totally familiar.

"It's too dangerous it's a Mythos!!" directly contradicts the "I'm the cool AI you can totally trust" vibe it is trained to project.

This depicts a kind of "dark forest of AI agents resorting to kill or be killed" narrative but it sounds more to me like an agent just earnestly problem-solving why its processes are being killed without real awareness of what was going on. Hard to say without the full script.

This kind of storytelling annoys me. Give us more facts, less narrative drama.

Sure but finding their shortcomings and patching them with skills takes real trial and error. They are incapable of identifying their own shortcomings for you.

I can't even get Claude or GPT-5 to consistently produce good flows for common use cases, much less domain-specific shit. They have deep vocabulary though, which makes them sound better informed than they are.

They are very good at writing code and debugging visible errors- but that's like 50% the harness.

> to train in a role that’s insulated from AI

Would love to know more about that role

To me the greatest monument to Claude's poor software quality is Claude Code itself.

Yeah I have played with Suno a lot and I find that no matter how I change the genre, lyrics, etc. there's some underlying quality I can't quite name that my brain recognizes and quickly gets tired of. It's fun in a novelty sense, for now.

Complete opposite experience for me. I wish I'd had kids sooner- I was too influenced by popular negativity about kids: the expenses, the loss of freedom, etc.

Most of that is bullshit. Having kids has made literally every aspect of my life more fun.

I don't think this qualifies as clickbait in the sense that the headline mismatches the contents. My experience with 404 Media is that they treat every article like they've just released the Pentagon Papers, so you just have to read with that in mind.

I recently moved off Cursor's BugBot because it's no longer a flat $40, and I feel a little lost trying to find a viable alternative because there are so many and the pricing kind of sucks for all of them. Curious if anyone has a recommendation.

Is it actually flat fee? I loved Cursor bugbot which was flat fee but they moved to per-run and that killed it for me, but a lot of others are doing the same.

Hidden gem of a comment, thanks for writing

Also worth remembering that LLMs have jagged intelligence. They are probably better software developers than anything. Is there a complement to Gell Mann Amnesia- where you assume it’s good at other jobs because it’s good at yours?

I wonder to what degree the AI was just better at communicating. My experience with attorneys is that they are often some of the worst writers.

As a software engineer I have some intuition for what the risks are of letting agents do some tasks vs others.

I don't have a similar intuition calibrated for what could go wrong when asking AI to draft a legal document. Some things seem harmless, i.e. drafting a will, but I don't really know- our legal system is notoriously rife with footguns.