modriano

Offloading cognition is what one does when they use abstractions that other people made through intense cognition. And it's fine to do that; people can build great things with great abstractions. A woodworker doesn't have to design and construct a tool to make great things with it.

But developing the people [who can build great new abstractions or the people who can build those abstractions into ergonomic tooling] involves a lot of cognitive struggle through which these people learn how to push knowledge forward.

Forming the mental models for how things work takes struggle. Debugging errors in your code forces you to figure out the disconnect between your mental model and reality.

Claude can figure out most errors I show to it much faster than I can, but when we're building something I could build from scratch, I regularly find even Opus 4.7 regularly provides vastly overcomplicated and inferior solutions and I have to redirect it. I assume this is also the case when we're building stuff that's new to me and I just can't recognize all of the overcomplicated suboptimal solutions until I get to testing the behaviors I need to be correct. If I got a tool like this at the start of my career or education, I just don't know how I wouldn't end up completely stunted.

Laws against impersonating law enforcement exist so that law enforcement officers can get compliance from people that they wouldn't be obligated to provide to regular civilians.

You can't impersonate something to a text editor as there's no special compliance you could get; WYSIWYG. But to a chatbot, you could get special compliance based on your identity.

Maybe he's never heard of Google.

So, what will AGI be able to do that will make that bet pay off? Human-like intelligence is already very common. Vastly better than human intelligence seems like it would be worth the expense, but I don't know where we'd get suitable training data.

I can't imagine the bots could ever cost McDonald's less than people cost.

15 years ago I worked at McDonald's for a few months after graduating into the Great recession. I worked from 5am to 1pm-ish 5 days a week. They paid workers weekly and I remember getting those checks for ~$235 each week (for 38 to 39.5 hours a week; they were vigilant about never letting anyone get overtime). About $47 per day.

The federal minimum wage has not risen since then, remaining at $7.25/hr. Inflation adjusted, $7.25 today would have been just under $5 then, so I guess I had it good.

Anyway, I would be shocked if bots could cost less than labor in min wage jobs.

Imagine there's a camera continuously recording a cookie jar. A child eats all of the cookies and then deletes the footage from the time they ate the cookies. A parent returns to find their child covered in crumbs, loudly proclaiming they haven't eaten a cookie in years and actively interferes with the parent's investigation and tries to distract from it by throwing a brick through the window of an Iranian family down the street.

Are any of the facts in this hypothetical "evidence"? With the knowledge of the truth (that the kid ate the cookies), it's clear these are all relevant pieces of evidence. If we take knowledge of the truth out of the equation, would these facts still be evidence? Unambiguously they would.

He had a very close, decades long friendship with the most notorious sex-trafficker-of-children-to-rich-creeps in modern history for decades. And when imprisoned, that infamous pedophile died while in a federal prison under Trump's control, with a strange gap in the CCTV video footage. And Trump's handling of the entire Epstein Files saga makes it clear that Trump is described extensively in those files and he desperately wants to conceal it. What could be in there that he would use the entire justice department to try and redact? Trump is shameless about things that are legal even if they're salacious (like sleeping with porn star Stormy Daniels), so you have to wonder, what could Jeffery Epstein's good friend be trying to conceal?

Also, he owned the Miss Universe org (including Miss USA and Miss Teen USA) for decades, and he was known to walk into the dressing rooms of teen contestants as young as 15 while they were undressed. [0]

Also, he bragged about molesting women, and a court of law found that he sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll.

I haven't proven the case that Trump had sex with a minor, but there's way more than enough probable cause to believe it's more likely than not.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200111171647/https://www.rolli...

*was

> You can do that interactively with LLMs. Instead of aiming for a finished product you ask a question, then refine your understanding with more questions.

Yeah, I regularly spend a lot of time with Claude fleshing out ideas and scoping out features. I'm behind the times and just use the chat interface rather than Claude Code, so perhaps there are controls I'm not aware of, but there can't be any that make it correctly understand an under-specified idea, or even correctly understand an adequately specified idea.

For example, I've been playing around building a side-project that involves building out a safety-weighted graph to support generating safer bike routes. I was recently working on integrating traffic control devices (represented on OpenStreetMaps nodes) into the model where I calculate weights for my graph (I essentially join the penalty for the traffic control device onto the destination end of an edge) and Claude kept wanting to average that penalty by the length of the edge (as that makes sense for some other factors in my model like crashes, surface material, max speed, etc), but doesn't make sense for traffic control signals at intersections (as the length of an edge shouldn't change the risk a cyclist experiences going through an intersection). If I didn't have a well-developed ability to closely parse words to ideas, I could have very easily just taken the working model Claude generated and built more on top of it, setting up a dangerous situation where the routing algo would promote routes running a user through more intersections (which are the most dangerous place for cyclists).

I hope a comparable proportion of kids coming up today will spend the time and energy to understand the ideas behind the text and the code, but I really doubt 18-year old me would have had that wisdom. I would have been underspecifying what I wanted out of a lack of prerequisite knowledge, receiving slop, and either promptly getting lost in debugging hell or more likely the worse case of erroneously believing the slop satisfied the brief.

> There are lines between writing as a persuasive medium, writing as a didactic medium for teaching, writing as a creative/poetic medium, writing as the process of creation of marketable products, writing as a shared summary of specialist niche knowledge, and writing as an aid to personal comprehension. > Those are fundamentally different activities, They happen to use the same medium and there are some overlapping areas. But they're essentially different activities with different requirements and different processes.

In all of those areas, if you take away the human who can develop value-creating ideas into an accurate and high-fidelity written representation, you will just get slop. Developing ideas and representing them in words is the skill. There is no substitute.

This reminds me of a talk I attended many years ago given by the director of UChicago's writing program (and found a recording of the talk [0]), and his thesis was that writing IS the process of thinking. That talk changed the way I write and made writing a primary tool I reach for when I want to learn something new.

Words / language are the great technology we've made for representing ideas, and representing those ideas in the written word enables us to evaluate, edit, and compose those smaller ideas into bigger ideas. Kind of like how teachers would ask for an explanation in my own words, writing down my understanding of something I'd heard or read forced me to really evaluate the idea, focus on the parts I cared about, and record that understanding. Without the writing step, ideas would easily just float through my mind like a phantasm, shapeless and out of focus and useless when I had a tangible need for the idea.

I am glad I learned to write (both code and text) long before Claude came online. It would have been very hard to struggle through translating ideas from my head into words and words (back) into ideas in my head if I knew there was an "Easy button" I could hit to get something cogent-sounding. I hope a large enough proportion of kids today will still put in the work and won't just end up with a stunted ability to write/think.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM

> The government has less competency than small businesses with 5 employees. And not just a bit less, a lot less.

The US government manages a more diverse array of problems (critical, life and death problems) than any other US organization (and probably more than any other org in the world). Amazon has only a tiny fraction of the competence of the US government and is not nearly as reliable. Remember the last time a significant portion of the social security system went down? I can't, but I can remember the last time AWS went down.

I learned math long after the advent of the calculator and went on to study math-heavy fields (physics, mechanical engineering, and data science).

I wasn't ever able to really develop deep intuition about/understanding of a calculation until I did it by hand once or twice. I often just plugged in new models and algos just to see if performance was above a threshold, but when I wanted to productionize a new winner, I'd have to run through the algo by hand for a few steps to understand and tune it. And through doing it by hand, the complex became the simple.

The prices may be falling, but if you can still make more profit (per unit time) building in Austin than elsewhere (due to less red tape or more local builders or whatever), building will occur.

That sounds like most social media over the past decade.

Gambling is frying the brains of a disturbing proportion of genZ and millennial men. It's destroying sports and infecting politics. It's quite detrimental to society.

What are you talking about? Fatal alcohol poisoning hits long before infinite self-administration. And there actually are many other far safer painkillers than alcohol.

Are we talking about survivorship bias or are you comparing comparably important levels of papers?

For the threat profile of top leadership of the US government, yes, Signal is not secure. Signal runs on phones and phones can be compromised or lost, which can grant non-authorized individuals the ability to read the messages.

Spyware like Pegasus [0] has been able to use zero-click exploits to penetrate target phones and read messages as though they were the phone's owner.

The US has the best SigInt capacity in the world. The leaders of the US government know that phones are not secure against sophisticated adversaries and they know that we have very sophisticated adversaries. It's deeply troubling that so many of our leaders were so comfortable discussing Secret level plans in such a reckless and illegal way, and it's extremely likely that hostile adversaries have fly-on-the-wall level access to extremely sensitive US planning.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)

I'm not OP, but he used mermaid.js's Entity Relationship Diagram model [0]. GitHub renders it automatically [1].

[0] https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/entityRelationshipDiagram.html

[1] https://github.blog/developer-skills/github/include-diagrams...

Thank you for this excellent post! I've been developing [my own platform](https://github.com/MattTriano/analytics_data_where_house) that curates a data warehouse mostly of census and socrata datasets but I haven't really had a good way to share the products with anyone as it's a bit too heavyweight. I've been trying to find alternate solutions to that issue (I'm currently building out a much smaller [platform](https://github.com/MattTriano/fbi_cde_data) to process the FBI's NIBRS datasets), and your post has given me a few great implementations to study and experiment with.

Thanks!

If the majority of voting Americans' lives got better in Trump's first term, then Trump would have won in 2020, but he got blown out losing by 7 million votes.

Cleaning up the mess Trump left was painful. The unavoidable consequences of global disruption of the economy (ie reduced supplies of goods) was a bit of inflation, and while Biden achieved the best recovery of any developed nation with the lowest inflation and very high wage growth among the bottom 40% of income earners, enough voters were turned off by inflation and by rightwing efforts to make voting harder that Donald Trump was able to just barely pull out a victory.

Trump is eliminating guardrails left and right and unsurprisingly is crashing things much faster this time around.

How did it take this long. I was a regular reader of Car and Driver magazine from 2002 to 2006 when I was in high school (in a Detroit suburb) and I remember them absolutely dragging the BMW iDrive system that eliminated a ton of physical controls and took the driver's attention off the road. I've kept my 2010 car largely to avoid getting a system without knobs and buttons that I can learn and use without looking.

I don't know how any auto designer could both regularly drive a car and not immediately reject the idea of eliminating physical controls for wipers/lights/temp control/sound system.

> ... historically, the US is a car-centric suburban-centric culture, and that's just who we largely are.

While we now do have a suburban-centric subculture, the car is just a tool that enables that subculture to easily access economic opportunities without having to interact with the classes segregated out of desirable locations by contemporary (explicitly racist) federal housing policies [0]. Although, I guess now that I look at it in that light (and noting the fact that every major city is still very racially segregated), I suppose that is just who we largely are and historically have been.

[0] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Feder...

> Even if this thing is 30% more expensive than a non-repairable toaster, I bet many consumers would pick the cheaper one, despite it probably not being the long term financially optimal decision.

Toasters are so cheap that I can't imagine repairing them could be cost effective (ie "financially optimal") unless you assign no value to your time. A new, good-enough toaster costs in the ballpark of $30. I love taking things apart and fixing them, but if the repair involves figuring out the part I have to order or soldering anything, it will take far more than $30 of my time.

This kind of project is for people who love to tinker. The economics do not make sense.

In addition to looking like a terrible President, Trump is also very bad at governing, especially in a crisis. Last time he was President, he inherited a great economy that he was focused on looting (giving himself and other billionaires a massive tax cut and trying to kill the Affordable Care Act to steal even more). He left office with unemployment at 15%, the country $8T further in debt, crime skyrocketing to 30 year highs, cities were literally on fire, and everyone's quality of life was horribly harmed by his terrible management of pandemic.

What was Trump good at?

Nah, Trump was never going to offer Ukraine the security guarantee needed to end this conflict. Trump is just extending this "give us $500B in mineral rights in exchange for nothing" deal to manufacture an excuse to cease all aid to Ukraine and exonerate his administration from the holocaust that Putin will execute against Ukrainians after Trump gives Putin all of the intel the US military has accumulated aiding Ukraine to this point.

Trump announced DOGE on Nov 12th, 2024 [0] and the transition doesn't all just happen on Jan 20th. The Presidential Transition Act has provisions that allow some members of transition staff to get access to federal IT systems, and with both Congress turning over on Jan 3rd, 2025 and Biden already completely checked out, it wouldn't be even a bit surprising to me if Congressional staffers or DOGE staffers started opening things up as soon as they could.

I don't have any evidence that it's the case, but if the claim about a surge of govt infrastructure appearing on shodan is accurate, I don't have any other hypotheses to explain it.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/trump-says-elon-musk-...

> Roe v. Wade was objectively a bad ruling. It was a wild reach to suggest that the US constitution implied anything about abortion;

Wrong. The Constitution grants a right to privacy.

* The 3rd amendment secures our privacy in our homes against demand for quarter by soldiers.

* The 4th amendment grants us privacy in our persons, homes, papers, and effects against unreasonable search and seizure. ("The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...")

* The 5th amendment secures our privacy from compulsion to bear witness against ones self and secures our life, liberty, and property against deprivation without due process. ("nor shall any person ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;")

* The 14th amendment explicitly extends that protection to guard against action by States ("No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; ")

* And the 9th amendment makes it clear that not all rights are explicitly enumerated in the bill of rights.

It is incoherent to hold that the Constitution doesn't grant us a right of privacy and control over our bodies, and it follows that we have a right to remove things from our bodies. The aforementioned amendments limit the extent of rights when there's a compelling government interest, but our freedom to exercise the right must be balanced against that government interest and the right doesn't exist if the government can't just make it impossible for anyone to exercise the right.

Roe v Wade was an objectively good decision.

> the question is basically whether or not it counts as murder and in the US that is supposed to be resolved by state legislators.

No. Murder is the unlawful and malicious killing of a human being [0]. Not only are abortions not typically done with malice, but US code defines "person" and "human being" [1] (relevant text included below) and fetuses are explicitly not human beings. Further, the 14th amendment explicitly prohibits states from making or enforcing laws that abridge Constitutional privileges.

|§ 8. ‘‘Person’’, ‘‘human being’’, ‘‘child’’, and ‘‘individual’’ as including born-alive infant

| (a) In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the words ‘‘person’’, ‘‘human being’’, ‘‘child’’, and ‘‘individual’’, shall include every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development.

| (b) As used in this section, the term ‘‘born alive’’, with respect to a member of the species homo sapiens, means the complete expulsion or extraction from his or her mother of that member, at any stage of development, who after such expulsion or extraction breathes or has a beating heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or definite movement of voluntary muscles, regardless of whether the umbilical cord has been cut, and regardless of whether the expulsion or extraction occurs as a result of natural or induced labor, cesarean section, or induced abortion.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...

[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2023-title1/pdf/U...

> ...the doxxing _might_ be entirely justified and be in the public interest. I don't know.

No, you did express an opinion. Reporting on people carrying out unconstitutional and illegal orders is clearly in the public interest and framing that as "doxxing" reveals that opinion.

Journalists reporting on people abusing government power is good. These people should be deeply scrutinized and shouldn't be able to hide while they destroy the machinery that hundreds of millions of people depend on.