foltik

It would be silly for a cached GET request to have to wait in line behind a bunch of POST requests blocked in serialized database transactions. A cache hit is basically free so it’s not starving any other requests.

Surely you realize most people would disagree?

There’s a _very_ good reason. Humans have a much richer mental mental model of the codebase, design decisions, external factors, etc.

Of course Humans can make errors when translating that to English. But if you’ve read any amount of Claudish it should be obvious that interpolating the code to documentation with an LLM typically produces a significantly worse result in almost every way. Except for superficially “sounding” correct.

You’re engaging in bad faith, and parroting the same false equivalence between security and user freedom that Apple uses to keep a chokehold on their software distribution monopoly.

Having some way to unlock an iPhone doesn’t at all imply it must be done in a way that reduces security, or trusts the average user with upholding it.

Use your imagination. They could require you to have an apple developer account. Or visit an apple store. Or even limit it to a special developer unlocked iPhone flavor.

You’re missing the point. Hackers (in the tinkerer sense) just want to program their own devices, with full access to the capabilities of the underlying hardware. Apple could obviously allow that if they wanted to, in a convenient way that doesn’t increase the attack surface for malware.

Uhh, what? Clearly nobody is arguing that "arbitrary remote execution is good." Apple could easily satisfy everyone by simply allowing users to unlock their own bootloader.

Consider that their point is not just about this specific use case.

Apple spends a huge amount of effort maintaining two different operating systems for what is pretty much the same machine under the hood. Don’t be naive and try to rationalize their bad behavior. They clearly just want to maintain their lucrative software distribution monopoly.

And this is of the typical quality of what you’d get.

80% incoherent narration of random numbers, all down to the 1’s place so it looks super duper precise and impressive if you squint and don’t think too hard, like the “author” seems to have done.

I use them every day, in systems programming. They produce a solution, but it’s often several orders of magnitude away from an optimal one in various dimensions. That’s still quite useful, but for some problems that doesn’t cut it.

To reach a more optimal solution, significant human steering is reqiured for every tiny decision. It’s the same as how early models needed hand holding on the basics, playing out again in the finer details. Human experts need to inject “eureka moments” from the outside.

And no feedback loop that I’ve tried has been able to conjure an understanding of these finer details that, as far as I can tell, just aren’t represented in the weights.

Modeling the basics of software engineering was easy, since things like writing code that passes some tests is easy to RL. But for anything not easily RL-able, we’ve basically ran out of human generated tokens to distill from.

Without some breakthrough in generalization, I remain unconvinced that we’ll be able to model the finer details of software engineering by looping the existing training corpus back into itself. Garbage in, garbage out.

Maybe you think there’s no reason for you to be writing code by hand anymore, but it doesn’t follow that the entire skill is obsolete.

You must not be looking very closely yourself then.

Thanks for clarifying, Claude.

Complying in a way that follows the letter of the law, while clearly contradicting the intent.

For example, finding a loophole to keep it difficult unsubscribe. Or making it easy to unsubscribe, but adding an egregious cancellation fee to all subscriptions.

Another good example is when NYC passed minimum pay laws for delivery drivers, and the big delivery companies immediately all colluded to hide the normal tip screen behind a bunch of submenus (until eventually forced to change it back).

Is it really unclear to you what the intent is here? What specifically about the rule do you think is ambiguous?

How do you think Cloudflare gets this bot traffic metric?

Making it more specific only invites malicious compliance. If businesses TRULY make a good faith effort, they’ve got nothing to worry about.

It feels like everything has endless fractal depth to it, and art is what we call it the act of compressing that down to something simple.

But you need some understanding of the underlying complexity to appreciate compression. We’ve all seen and tasted stuff, so a beautiful painting or a great pizza are easy to recognize.

Programming is tricky because the complexity is hidden. To laypeople it’s confusing, “why is this simple feature so complicated??” Even to other programmers it’s often non obvious. Someone could have spent days factoring the solution to a difficult problem down from 1000s to 10s of LoC, but unless you've also wrestled with that particular problem, it just looks like simple code anyone could have written. But really that’s the beauty of it. Programming is a massive space to explore that’s hard to fully comprehend.

Writing comments with an LLM helps posting efficiency, but for most HN accounts, the bottleneck remains having something worth saying, not the typing.

It does during reasoning. You could even put it in a loop and force it to reflect at every step. Or spawn a bunch of review agents.

And yet you still just get slop.

Exactly. In my experience, even giving VERY specific design guidelines and aesthetic criteria, these models always produce subpar overcomplicated code (and writing). Unless excruciatingly spoonfed at every step.

Ciechanowski’s works of art are in a completely different league than this AI slop.

It’s all just surface level complexity with no intention behind it. A clumsy approximation at best.

So we should judge each piece of evidence in a vacuum?

Facebook has broken its promises about user data many times before. I don't buy anything they say about Muse, and nobody in their right mind should. Unless they’re getting paid to, of course.

Aside, if “a skill file organizing purchase history in markdown format” is the only thing you took away from that thread, you might want to take a closer look.

We all know exactly what it’s for, don’t pretend you don’t.

Again, the statute says nothing about "dictating terms." It covers an adversary who might sabotage or subvert a system. And no, Anthropic did not cancel anything, did not pull any capabilities, and has no backdoor into deployed models. There was no "um actually." It wrote two prominent usage restrictions into a contract, the military read and signed it, and then later demanded the terms be removed.

As a sanity check, I’d highly recommend trying out your own line of reasoning in cases which you think you might feel differently about. For example, imagine it's instead a certain authoritarian state saying "obey the Party or get blacklisted as a national security threat."

It might feel good in the moment, like "yeah, Anthropic, don't tell the military what to do," because you agree with this particular call. But the government doesn't give that power back, and you might not be so happy about the next way it gets used.

Where did you get "trying to dictate" from? The text is "the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert [...]"

A mutually agreed upon "you may not use our product for X or Y purpose" in a contract clearly doesn't pose any such risk.

> I'm an IT consultant working for a private company

Makes sense for GP locally, I guess, but globally we’re all worse off when nobody is motivated to break free from the path of least resistance.

That seems like a bit of an arbitrary line to draw, no? Would you say the same about webhooks?

Let’s not kid ourselves, Anthropic would be running their own distillation “attacks” too if _they_ were the ones playing catch-up. They’ve already shown as much with their illegal scraping of pirated books ($1.5B settlement).

I say just let them duke it out. After a decade of regulatory capture and enshittification, it’s nice to see some actual competition again.

Not that I have a solution, but isn’t that kind of disappointing? Why don’t we just do it directly, rather than only as a side effect of needless conflicts?

Whatever gets the humans to work harder I guess.