kaashif

I think going down side quests is good, that's how I learnt lots of what I know.

But if my goal was to run daily and my first step was to make an open source step tracker with a raspberry pi dock...

There isn't any joke in my comment. Apologies for the confusion.

Well if it's strangely hostile I'm sorry but "I need to focus on writing so I spent a few days stripping down a Linux distro" seems pretty disconnected.

I mean it's a fun project!

But it really reminds me of something I would do that isn't entirely positive.

This reads like someone with ADHD took Adderall and accidentally focused hard for a day on the wrong thing. It has happened to me.

I guess if this writerdeck works persistently for many projects then fine. But if every 2 projects the writerdeck gets revamped then it seems like a way to get a dopamine hit or distract ones self. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't seem like it's a net benefit in terms of focus.

Indeed. At least an LLM would've read the article and realized that.

#6 in usage by tokens. It obviously has some use case. My experience is that Gemini is much more token efficient than other models. Measuring tokens is like measuring distance travelled by measuring fuel consumption.

I mostly use Codex though, I can't be bothered to have more than one subscription.

Also, if you are doing something other than maximising returns then you'll be outcompeted and irrelevant in the long run unless you attract many billions in inflows, or the government tips the scales in your favour e.g. ESG.

There isn't anything functionally special about the human brain - why is there some reason to expect the human brain is capable of innovation but no program, even one far more powerful than the brain, is not?

You admit this possibility so I'm not arguing with you, but it seems far more plausible to me that we can build something better than the brain.

In the limit we can just grow brains and put them in computers anyway, then the debate is moot. That's a really hard problem but of course not physically impossible.

Have you considered that utilitarians actually exist?

If 20% more medical knowledge would save more lives long term, there are actually people, probably some browsing this website right now, maybe the person you're responding to, that actually think killing people up to the expected number of lives saved is justified.

I would personally call that evil, but it is thought through.

Children have better neuroplasticity but worse persistence than adults.

As an adult I just practiced writing with my left hand loads for basically no reason, it's not that useful, but I still did it for some reason. Now I can write illegibly with either hand :)

Trading firms are surely not hiring for the broad founder-like skill set Anthropic is. Trading firms want narrow extreme technical brilliance.

I've also seen this. But I'll extend it to saying that giving Claude to a bad programmer gives bad results.

And seeing how people use it: good programmers review output and iterate to get better output. But bad programmers simply trust the output is good: they have no ability to review it themselves and often don't try.

Why does whether we're in a simulation or not matter for whether anything is explorable?

You can explore how the simulation works, there's just some other layer you can't explore. Or maybe you can somehow.

When you look at the stars, are they real or a simulation in your brain? Does that mean you can't explore them?

As a leader, I can just tell people literally that: if you can't go away and work independently on a problem, it puts a ceiling on how well you're going to do. Then I ask people what they've tried before asking me.

Just being upfront with people can break low performance patterns of behavior.

It appears that you are saying that because someone is an Afrikaner, they must be a member of the apartheid regime or a proponent thereof.

If you are not saying this, then it's unclear how this is related to your previous comment.

You could write a comment that makes sense by saying "Afrikaners usually believed in weird corporal punishments because that was normal in their culture" or something and that would be perfectly acceptable.

Or perhaps, you have some specific knowledge that this guy was actually a proponent of apartheid, which you should share.

Something interesting: for me, that comment was the 6th Google result for "medior". Interesting term.

It's not, but token peddlers will say it is. It's good to interact with everything through buying tokens.

The primary way to increase reliability is to automate. Instead of humans producing some output manually, humans producing machines which produce that output.

I've seen a disturbing trend where a process that could've been a script or a requirement that could've been enforced deterministically is in fact "automated" through a set of instructions for an LLM.

If you are saying that what we had previously was actually as easy as literally writing "make me a web app for arranging seats at a wedding and put it on Vercel" then you are very divorced from reality.

I know how to do all of these things and even find them easy, but it's just much faster now. These are personal one task toy apps, but they are useful.

One would be completely wrong.

AI is a tool that may make copyright violations more likely, but whether the output violates copyright is a property of the output, not how it was produced.

If you copy and paste leaked closed source code or if your AI produces it verbatim, you're in trouble either way. Change it up a bit and you're fine in practice in both cases.

Workers are necessary but not sufficient for most businesses. You also need capital. This can be provided by the workers and is for many worker owners businesses, but when the business is very capital intensive that's just not feasible.

Are workers going to be able to fund Apple's factories or ExxonMobil's oil exploration? No, so they're not in charge.

You absolutely can start a worker owned business right now, or go work for one.

This can be the mindset now with a lot of things.

If you want a certain app with a feature and the app isn't open source, then you may as well just clone the app and add the feature.

Claude Code and Codex (and other tools) have computer use and are perfectly capable of navigating, experimenting, cloning functionality, writing tests...

If the app is open source it's probably easier to just fork and add your features though. And cheaper.

Maybe they mean you can be not employed and build products yourself? Technically true, but that's like running your own surgeries or something, you're still doing surgery.

Somehow despite travelling a lot for work, I've never had this happen.

I just do personal stuff on my phone.

Yeah, memorization is very underrated.

Memorization increases the size of the building blocks you can use.

Mathematics is where I see this most clearly. Why memorize hundreds of theorems? Because then you can just cite them on the fly when doing real mathematics. If you had to re-derive everything, you'd be stuck doing undergrad level math forever.

I write because I just find it hard to form long, coherent thoughts without writing.

When trying to think on the fly, I often say something jumbled and nonsensical, then make another attempt after thinking for a second.

I need that editing step to even get my paragraphs or long sentences just right.

But why am I writing this comment? I don't know.

I'm not American or in America, but I wouldn't use a work laptop for anything personal.

I mean I have my own laptop and phone, why would I use a work device for that stuff?

Lucely absolutely does not catch the hard c. Surely there is no word in the English language where "ce" has a hard c, only loanwords like celt.

Massive selection bias - only the good quality ones remain standing, the low quality ones are not.

You have to get a representative sample, that's the tricky part.

So there's that!

I'm interested in how one would prove that one way or another.

It seems to me that in the past there probably was lots of shoddy workmanship and just no-one paid attention to it.

But I have no proof of that.