csallen

2. Lots of people are used to Claude Code's interface/commands/etc. and don't feel like paying the cost of learning something new. The benefits would have to outweigh those switching costs, and it's unclear that they do.

3. Claude Code already works with your Claude MAX subscription[0], which gives you an incredible amount of usage of the top-tier models for cheap, which can't be matched by any open-source options. And most people won't exhaust this usage, so they have no real need to use open-source models.

4. Although it's hard to 100% confirm this, there's reason to believe that Claude itself works better with Claude Code than with other harnesses.

5. There's no real lock-in. If tomorrow you decide you don't want to use Claude Code, you can just switch to something else ezpz. So there's no reason to worry that you're digging a hole and locking yourself in. Thus, there's no urgency to switch away.

[0] Yes, open-source harnesses can use your Claude MAX subscription, but does this "benefit" of open-source harnesses really outweigh the costs of #1, #2, and #4 above?

And Meta Muse

I'm guessing mostly because they subsidize a lot of the costs

Also, this idea that it's bad or weird to anonymously discuss customers is strange. I've known cops, doctors, dentists, and all sorts of other people who routinely share stories about weird things that happen with people and customers at work, anonymously. This is the norm in the world and always has been.

It's also the norm for the companies who own your data to look at it, when asked to. What do you think customer support even is?

It's only really a small corner of the tech world that treats these things as strange and sacrilege.

1. Product decisions require far more knowledge than coding and architecture decisions, and that knowledge is harder to come by. It often requires research, talking to customers, understanding the organization of the company, the company's mission, the company's employees, their performance, stakeholders, the competitive landscape, funding, growth/sales/marketing strategies and budgets, customer buying patterns, company strategy, etc. Not to mention the code, the coding backlog, etc. Companies have to compete in a hostile, competitive, capitalistic market, which means they're trying to beat other companies, which means a seemingly very good product decision can actually be bad solely because other people are doing it better. Imagine if your perfectly functional code failed to compile simply by nature of the fact that better programmers exist.

2. Product design requires taste, and taste is partly a function of novelty, but there aren't that many LLMs, so everyone's using the same few LLMs, therefore everyone's getting the same designs, therefore the designs look like clones of each other rather than novel thoughtful design, therefore they fail the taste bar. In addition, LLMs simply weren't trained on good vs. bad visual or product design nearly as much as they've been trained on good vs. bad, functional vs. non-functional code.

Obviously there are upsides to that too. It leads to more accountability. But there are downsides which include having a world with less innovation, less technology, and more expensive technology. Generally, the mass is when, when there's more businesses competing to create ever better and cheaper products. So there's a tradeoff there. And it's very difficult to draw the line at the perfect point.

There are countless cases of executives going to jail when they've crossed that line, beyond reckless experimentation and into willful negligence or harm. Still, I think we would mostly all agree that the line has been pushed too far in the other direction.People are incentivized, if they're running corporations, to lobby and try to push this line as far as possible in order to provide cover for themselves, and that's the problem with money playing such a big role in politics.

But still, it's a bit silly to be comparing this to your own personal responsibilities with your car. There's pretty much no societal benefit to creating laws that protect people from being reckless with their own possessions.

Also, for what it's worth, LLM research is hardly the first scientific research to have accidents with negative external consequences.

(Yes, there will be individual exceptions to this, just like with everything else in life.)

I think that's true for low value code. But the more important and crucial and high-stakes code is, the more effort people put into it, generally. Even with LLMs.

I mean, every complex large-scale change to society has upsides and downsides. Very few things are purely good. So it makes very little sense just to name the upsides and pretend it's all good, or just to name the downsides and pretend it's all bad. You need to do the actual cost-benefit analysis.

And when you do, net-net, generally speaking, technological progress does does much more good for humanity than bad, even though there is some bad.

We tend to get things that make our lives easier, more efficient, safer, and more comfortable at ever cheaper prices.

I also don't even know if it's really true. Sure, maybe it's not coherent enough that a person understands it, but if an LLM wrote it, you can be ~99% certain (in my experience) that that LLM will understand it, and usually in less than the time it took to write it. And unlike humans, the LLMs don't die and take their knowledge with them, or change companies, or get ornery when you ask them to explain.

Also, in my experience, Claude doesn't really do what the parent is saying and dive head-first into complex problems and bork your code. It is fairly humble in the face of complexity. It constantly recommends breaking down larger problems into smaller ones that are more easy to grok.

But most importantly, anyone who's a decently skilled software engineer and who's using LLMs to write code is going to be thoughtful. Especially when they're writing code that's important. Unless you're an AI researcher pushing the bounds of what LLMs can do, which let's face it, the vast majority of programmers are not, it's almost always the case that you'll have your LLM writing intelligible code that you can understand and have it explain easily enough.

No one is "taking a term" and "trying to apply" it to anything. The word has multiple meanings/uses, full stop.

What you are objecting to is one of its meanings (attracting employees from a competitor), because you don't like the negative connotation of another of its meanings (stealing game). And that's because you believe that the latter meaning's negative connotation will make the former also feel more negative. But I submit that that's just in your head, and the heads of a few others, and the vast majority of people are able to keep two definitions quite separate.

Do you object if someone says, "I adopted a new strategy"? After all, children are adopted, and one could say that using this phrase trivializes a deeply important human relationship.

Do you object if someone says, "She's a fan of my work"? After all, a fan is a machine that blows air. It could be said that referring to a person as a fan reduces them to an appliance whose purpose is to serve someone else.

Do you object if someone says, "I have a date tonight"? After all, a date is a fruit. Someone could say that calling a romantic partner a "date" is to objectify them and reduce them to something consumed for pleasure.

Public shame and malice towards individuals who violate expected norms is actually a fairly good deterrent toward would-be bad actors. I'm sure there are many millions of instances per day where people decide not to do untoward things because they care about their reputations.

But on the flip side, you are also correct. It's important that public attention also be directed towards the systems that incentivize and enable bad behavior, and the people who create those systems. Patching laws, shaping incentives, and empowering a distributed system of judges and courts to handle violations is ultimately much cleaner, fairer, predictable, wide-reaching, and (therefore) more effective than disorganized mob-led shame campaigns.

Unfortunately, several things work against this:

1. It requires much more time, education, intelligence, and emotional self-control to care about system design over simply shaming others. These four things aren't abundantly common in most populaces.

2. Lawmakers and politicians have their own incentives to redirect public attention away from themselves. And they can take advantage of #1 to do this, which is basically what demagoguery is.

3. Similarly, media companies have their own incentive, which is to increase clicks and shares and subscribers. And appealing to base emotions with strong headlines works 100x better than discussing complex laws and systems. Research shows that the #1 emotion that leads to sharing online is outrage.

And this is not just theoretical. Larry Page has already sold and paid taxes on tons of stock in reality.

Why shouldn't they?

That's how pretty much every organization works. Every military, every government, every sports team, every space mission, every classroom, etc., they all have some person or small group up people with more more decision-making power, or "more say," as you put it.

I fail to see the problem with that. In fact, there's a very real benefit in that it's generally more effective. For example, today people are completely free to create organizations that work differently, and they rarely choose to, and when they do, they rarely out-compete the alternative. So the proof is in the pudding that there's something less effective about it.

If I had to wager a guess: decision-making isn't something that scales well. Bodies might have dozens of organs, but they only really need one brain to control them all.

> They will eventually die or sell their share, and in either case it will end up with people who care less about the company's long term health than the founder did. Profit maximizers with no ethics and no feeling of responsibility.

1. There are plenty of counterexamples where the leader of a company ensures its long-term success after their tenure ends.

2. Even if this were somehow a downside of owner-led companies, you always have to ask the question, "...compared to what?" It's not like the alternative doesn't have its own slew of downsides, as evidenced by the dearth of competitive co-ops that compete successfully with owner-led companies. In other words, organizations are always going to have issues and errors and flaws, no matter how you set up decision-making.

I was just talking with a friend the other day about how many problems and issues would be solved if people were more conditioned to asking, "...and then what?"

I think one could argue that taxation should be higher, and harder to dodge, and I would agree with that.

But once you start saying that some people shouldn't have more than others to some degree, that's a very slippery slope. Where do you draw the line? Why is it okay for middle class Americans to buy nicer clothes and move into bigger apartments when people are out there starving? If it's not okay for someone to have the net worth of Qatar, why would it be okay for someone to live in an apartment that's worth more than a poor township in South Africa?

At some point we have to accept that inequality exists, and that although almost everyone could do something to minimize it, there's an ethical and practical line that needs to also respect individuality to a large degree, if we want people to feel incentivized to do things, to feel ownership, to maintain autonomy. And where to draw that line is tough to say exactly, but it probably shouldn't be a line, it should probably be smooth, or at least smooth-ish. So I feel like we're just coming back around to progressive taxation. Which we already have.

Instead, pick out your own internet information diet. Make it a project. If you're not afraid to use AI, it can help with this tremendously.

Then you need to build habits that replace your unhealthy browsing with healthy browsing. IMO it's best to just install tools that make it difficult or even impossible to do the unhealthy browsing.