deepsummer

Sounds to me like the models really read Scott Adam’s blog and books, in which he essentially said the same again and again (before he dedicated the end of his life to his tribe). People decide with their gut, are loyal to their tribe, and then invent reasons that sound like they support the fact. That’s why changing someone’s opinion is so hard, and people must be tricked into it by framing the opinion in the right way. Which only a few „master persuaders“ were effective at it, including Donald Trump.

That's a bad example: it did not hallucinate about the codebase (which it had access to), but about a rule outside the codebase (which is not in the context, I assume). Yeah, missing requirements can cause it to rely on things it thinks are true. Same as humans do all the time when they lack context.

Can you write 10k LOC a day without a coding agent?

It's the same issue. You can walk 100 miles. Just not in a day. And you can create 10k LOC without a coding agent. Just not in a day.

I don't think that coding agents enable technical possibilities. They just allow things that wouldn't be economically possible without them.

But you could still arrive if you walk instead of using the bicycle. And I am sure you can do the same stitches by hand, it just takes forever.

Same with coding agents. I could do it by hand. It just would take much longer. Often so long that it would be impractical.

Have you really used the latest models (say Opus 4.8+ or Fable)? When was the last time they gave a wrong answer to a question about the code base? Half a year ago that could have happened. But not today.

I usually do so I understand what I am replying, but seriously, the latest Opus and Fable versions get it right more often than I would. The time of AI hallucinations is over, as long as they have the context.

I did that the first time. But how often do you want to say that (in a public chat that their supervisors can read)?

I am a software engineer. Most of the times, the people asking are from product management or devops. Devops contractors are the most difficult ones. They have access to the code, they have access to Claude. But they don't use it.

Sometimes I do that. The problem is that it makes them look bad.

In my life, the bigger issue are people who are not asking Claude, but asking me.

Because it would take 15 minutes to find out the answer myself, and 3 minutes to let Claude find it, I ask Claude. So how should I answer? Should I disclose that I used Claude to find the answer? Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess?

I only see „This deployment is temporarily paused“.

Max comment nesting reached. Instead of going through your response one by one, let me just say one thing: the premise and promise of the whole energy transition are based on studies that completely underestimated the physical and engineering challenges in practice. That's why we are where we are. Energy costs have gone up; CO2 emissions have not. I wouldn't believe any study before it has been implemented at scale, at least in a region or small country.

> The Atlantic continental shelf isn't correlated with the Baltic.

How do you transmit the power? Do the countries on the Atlantic even want wind power, set up the transmission lines, and pay for it?

> Offshore Dunkelflaute is much shorter than on-shore.

That reduces the storage requirements a bit, but there is not nearly enough offshore. And offshore is expensive. That's why it's getting harder to find investors.

> The required quantities even of batteries is comparable to electrification of road transport.

That doesn't prove it's possible, but makes it even harder to get the required quantities.

> hydro plants come in two flavours that people often mix up: generation, and storage

Hydro requires the right geography. Is there any potential for hydro left in central Europe?

> EU can be converted to around 13 TWh of pumped storage

That would be a good amount of storage. But has this ever been tried? I would guess that's quite dangerous: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LseK5gp66u8

870 MWh? It would take about 500 of them to make it through a 1-2 week dunkelflaute.

How can you be sure of that before even having a practical and proven solution for the required scale of storage?

If you mean hydrogen, this video explains the issues better than I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zklo4Z1SqkE

Yet there are whole weeks practically without wind in winter. And most climate models estimate that global warming reduces wind further. Storage in the required dimensions is an unsolved problem.

Storage of energy in the dimensions required for weeks with almost no wind is an unsolved problem. Right now, we can't store enough to make it through a single night without using fossil fuels. Most countries don't even have the capacity to store the energy for a single hour.

Countries like UK, Ireland, Germany, Danmark, Netherland, Poland also have dark winters. Solar in winter is only about a fifth of production in summer months.

Iceland has geothermal, which is amazing, but won't help central Europe.

In countries with dark winters and without enough hydro power, the only reliable alternative are fossil fuels...

Claude's analysis: "it skips logged-in WordPress users (wordpress_logged_in_* cookie), skips /wp-admin and /wp-login.php, and rate-limits to once per day per visitor via localStorage. That's why site admins don't see it — and why you only saw it on first load."

Not this time. Go to crookedtimber dot org and you can still see it. Just don't follow the instructions... but clean your browser afterwards!

It even supports Macs. But the Mac clipboard content is just "Oops...".

P.S.: even worse: the crookedtimber site itself is infected. No third-party attack. It registers a service worker on the user's browser that stays even when you leave the site. Be sure to clean up the storage data after visiting that site.

The Amiga was a great computer when it came out, but it was not 10 years ahead of anything. Things progressed incredibly fast back then.

The graphics were not 10 years ahead, not even 3 years. First SVGA cards came out in 1987, with a 320x200 in 256 color mode that was far more practical than Amiga's 4096 color mode, and with resolutions of up to 800x600. By 1995, resolutions of 1280x1024 with 256 colors were widely available, and Nvidia released their first graphics accelerator.

The first SoundBlaster cards came out in the late 80s. The SoundBlaster 32 released in 1995 was far superior to the Amiga.

And the state-of-the-art CPU in 1995 was the Pentium 133, faster than a 7Mhz 68k by orders of magnitude.

The Amiga 1000 was an awesome computer. But technically obsolete by 1990.

I never had any issue like that, but I don’t use it in German. Not surprised it’s more stubborn on German. After all it’s only imitating people speaking that language. I wonder what the topic was though. Was it a legitimate request, or just some discussion?

An RSS (Atom...) feed for your blog would be nice.

I get your point, but the RSS format (and Atom, and JSON feed..) and the feeds are also partially to blame: there is just no common HTML subset specified for RSS. Some feeds are formatting their posts specifically for RSS. But they are in the minority. Most are just dumping whatever HTML they put on the website. With CMS-specific CSS classes and Tailwind CSS, without declaring them anywhere. Or even requiring JavaScript. RSS Readers have no chance but remove most styles from the HTML and apply their own, hoping it renders ok.

I think it's an interesting idea, and I would actually buy it, but there's one thing missing for me: a simple API. I use neither Stripe nor GA. All I would need is a simple REST URL that I can ping with the event type, data (amount or number) and my key. Create a small markdown description that my coding agent can read, and I could get it running far faster than by using any integration with third-party services.

Three more comments:

- My main concern with applications like that is memory and CPU consumption. I haven't registered it, but after starting, it consumes 85MB. That's tolerable these days, but more than other menu bar apps I am using, and they have far more functionality. I appreciate small applications being a small footprint.

- Maybe I am not the target group, but I really prefer the more 'family-friendly' sounds. I don't want to explain to my kids why my computer is moaning.

- There may be a market for notification tools that offer a bit more flexibility (like letting users configure the text that's displayed). Or even offering a widget. I am aware of free tools like Übersicht for that, but I don't want to waste 1 GB of RAM for a small 64x64 widget, just because it uses a full HTML+JS rendering engine.

I think the UBI experiments were one-sided. They may have proven that the receivers have profited. But did they show that the givers profited as well, or at least did not suffer enough to significantly reduce their economic output and therefore risk the financing of UBI?

You'd need to check something like take a group of high-earners, increase their tax rate by say 100%, increase their cost of living, and validate that they neither leave the experiment nor work significantly less.

The thing is, there is no hive mind called "society". Everybody works in their own interest. Always, and in every "society".

Individual workers work on failing initiatives as long as they get paid. The outcome of the initiative may be bad for "society". But was it good for the individuals working on it? Maybe they got paid well. Maybe they enjoyed the work? Maybe the work was easy because they knew that it would fail anyway, so they didn't have to put much effort into it?

Maybe it was also good for the management or politicians? Maybe it was a step up in their career. And maybe, if they could jump ship before the failure became obvious, they could climb up the ladder to get to an even better position? You can always blame your successors for ruining the project.

And maybe it was good for whoever ordered it? If it's a local project, maybe they got subsidies from federal government bodies, and they don't even care whether it succeeds, as long as it created employment and the illusion of progress? Or if it's a private project, maybe they just tried a moon shot that, if it fails, was useful as a tax write-off?

In real life, there are so many layers to a 'failed' project. It can be a failure for some and a success for others. And those for whom it is a success will defend it, maybe even deceive to keep it running.

The prosecutor's description of the "ICE protest" is "setting off fireworks, vandalizing property, and shooting at police officers who responded. One officer was struck in the neck with a bullet and survived.".

https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/ice-detention-attack-defe...