moribvndvs

Claude’s tone and style has gotten worse with the recent models, not that it was ever very good. It’s both too concise (stringing together a bunch of jargon/acronyms together in weird ways that aren’t familiar even in areas where you have expertise – with no ramp up, context, or clarity) and too verbose (printing out reams of the word salad mentioned above, often just restating things repeatedly). It feels like writing from someone who really doesn’t know where to start or where to end on a topic so they try to cover their ass by saturation. I suppose that’s not far from reality. Asking it a dozen different ways to speak plainly, use STE, ELI5, whatever has little appreciable effect.

I recently started a new consulting gig and got a 36 page architectural white paper that was authored by Claude. It took me an entire business day and a monstrous headache to decipher and distill it down to a 1 pager. This shit is unsustainable.

I don’t care about media – whether it’s on a disc, thumb drive, hard disk, cassette, in the cloud, sitting on a nas, it doesn’t matter - I simply want the rights to use the thing I bought, irrevocably and irrespective of the media it’s conveyed on. I get that physical media is an easy target because traditional physical media requires someone to come into your house and remove or destroy it, but this is one of those issues where treating a symptom rather than the cause will not solve the greater problem.

They do make HRV and ERV, but not exactly a simple retrofit for existing houses.

It’s true that humans are unreliable, even if we could guarantee a consistent set of moral and ethical standards as well as the appropriate tools and authority to enforce them at all times. We do, however, have to deal with 100% of the implications, one way or another. Machines don’t. Vasily Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov had to consider the world they would condemn their children to if they pushed the button, the missiles didn’t. These are imperfect devices made by imperfect beings, whose rules and goals can be changed more or less at will by whomever wields them. Offloading the responsibility of pulling a trigger or trampling someone’s legal or human rights to such a machine while insulating those in command from consequences threatens to make things worse at a speed and scale I don’t think we’ve seen before in all of our dark history. Meanwhile, it further concentrates immense and unchecked power in the hands of a relative scant handful of elites, all of whom exhibit the lack of ethical and moral fiber we were talking about to begin with.

Teaching something or someone to pull a trigger is trivial compared to teaching them not to. I have no reason to believe that automated weapons and surveillance will be more reliable than our world leaders or that the world will be safer with them in it.

What happened to the common sense adage: your opponent only has to be lucky once, you have to be lucky every time.

Anecdotal experience amongst my small team:

- spending exorbitant amounts of time up front planning, surfacing every milestone, subtask, and individual change, burning tons of tokens in addition to man hours fixing minute but important mistakes or derivations despite explicit instructions, CLAUDE.md, memory subsystems, agent and skill instructions, etc.

- executing and reviewing results compared to the plan and finding even more mistakes and derivations from the plan often takes a lot of time - the relative rapidity produces a lot of output for the team which stresses our lifecycle and introduces feelings the whole process is on the verge of flying off the rails

- individual developers have different expectations, definitions of acceptable, skills/experience to detect and deal with problems, and patience. I might spend hours to days meticulously planning and executing a ticket and another guy might yolo it in 30 minutes. Other than bug escape rate and tracking review failures I’m struggling with how to track people who are “doing it wrong” let alone telling them the “right” way to do it.

- growing exhaustion, lack of ownership and confidence, frustration, and a generalized feeling of endlessly fighting your tools but in a weird way they never seem to really improve despite all your efforts to do so

- taking humans out of the loop and letting the agents be more autonomous in hopes that we’ll reduce the bottleneck and produce better results has not helped.

- I find even myself fighting (and sometimes failing) the urge to give in even though the proposed or implemented solution doesn’t feel right. Scale that across your team

- experience has not really changed despite changes in models and harnesses

- there’s a deep feeling that I’m doing something wrong and fomo since so many people in the industry boast of incredible results. I probably am, but everything I’ve read about and tried has not really moved the needle much and it’s introducing another dimension of exhaustion and frustration

overall, I don’t feel like we’re being much more productive when you factor in quality and accountability (which should be a given, but this industry increasingly overtaken by a reckless philosophy of speed over everything else). I do think it has helped parallelize tasks, produce higher quality PoCs to explore more options and do it faster, offload joyless but necessary tasks that are narrow in scope and measurable, do exploratory work and act as a generalized interactive knowledge base, and make shallow techniques, technologies, etc. that you don’t yet have experience with. Maybe I’m just missing a critical component or two in the process (formal specification, etc). Maybe it’s growing pains, or maybe there’s a looming rot. Either way job satisfaction and confidence in my work is much lower than I would have expected.

I recently got a task to sift through a daily drop of parquet files that need to be processed and given a UI for arbitrary queries by a non-technical team. Naively I started by looking at redshift, Athena/glue, etc. I spun my wheels for a week and barely made progress, resulting in a miserably fragile, slow, overly complicated, and/or expensive set of underwhelming PoCs. So I decided to give DuckDB a shot and I got the whole project done in under a day. It was so intuitive and runs so fast I was sure I was missing something. I wasn’t. What an absolute joy to use, and the supporting documentation is outstanding. My problem now is it’s my favorite hammer and I want everything to be a nail.

Same except insert some insomnia forks/clones. Silver lining: if/when Bruno goes, I’ll finally be annoyed enough write my own.

Waymo: *locks doors, chorus to Floods by Pantera starts playing, guns it into the water*

“Wash away maaaaan, take him with the floooood”

I was in the Boy Scouts and a lot of it was appealing at first, but it eventually became ugly to me. I loved the aspects that focused on nature, exploration, self-reliance, and to a degree the quasi-military sense of duty, brotherhood, structure, and (at least the illusion) of support which I craved. As I got older though, I became impatient if not infuriated with the organization’s preoccupation with dogma, ideological loyalty, and increasing focus on establishing in and out groups. The leaders and scouts that flourished where rigid top down authoritarian types that epitomized what I grew to strongly dislike about the rest of American patriarchal society that I was increasingly struggling with in day to day life: bullying, hypocrisy, cruelty, and fearful of anything that doesn’t conform to an embarrassingly narrow and ignorant standard. Of course, I understood that it perhaps said more about the fact a lot of dads in my community were assholes, but organizationally it seemed to reward those sorts of people and shit all over everyone else. I just wanted to camp and respect nature, not join the Hitler Youth and get bullied more. I was/am annoyed by people being surprised by the BSA’s problems with abuse, as logically and historically these sorts of institutions are fertile ground for abuse.

While we’re adding antiquated and shitty ways to interface with your agent, can we add fax support? Maybe direct-to-mail service for postcards and flyers?

Has this changed recently? I started playing at launch, and while initially it was a lot of fun and I had predominantly positive experiences, after a couple of weeks I quit because it devolved into little more than griefing. I don’t mind it getting a little sweaty here and there but I don’t have time for nonstop edgelords going lord of the flies in front of their 3 twitch viewers.

You’d have to run a lot of Electron-based apps to go from tepid to hot water.

So you’re saying I can go with a melee/stamina build and just whirlwind smash my boss in the face?

To me, it feels more like buying gems in a freemium mobile game :(

Even before AI, writing software isn’t even the “hardest” part. This is new enough that I wouldn’t be waving Mission Accomplished flags just because someone was able to dump out a react front end, wire up some managed services, and get paying users. Let’s see how this pans out long term when someone grapples with cost, reliability, security, growth, competition, and all the other actually hard parts. Also, using “I’ve heard this all before” and pointing to cloud, mobile, whatever as the basis of your argument is a bit awkward… yeah a lot of folks made a shit ton of money but the current tech landscape is increasingly a wasteland of broken and harmful things. I’m not sure I’m thrilled that we invented a machine to accelerate decline.

But the underlying point, I think, is that the right tool in the right hands is an extraordinary thing, especially when you bring execution closer to smart visionaries who aren’t otherwise technical. I can’t sit here in denial that LLMs have drastically changed things to that effect, whether I like it or not.

I’m learning Japanese, which is overall a difficult language for a native English speaker to learn. However, the rules for pronunciation are comparatively a big relief, as is hiragana/katakana

We lived in caves with no society before ICE?

This writing style where every section has multiple paragraphs of preamble, prolepsis, cold openers for cold openers, and tangents is infuriating. Get on to the point already.

Suggesting that the wholesale suffering wrought by humanity unto itself and all other life on this planet throughout its entire history is merely in my mind or a problem with my personal life is actually incredibly insulting on top of being willfully ignorant.

My first serious programming job was at a start up and the owner asked me this question. I was caught off guard, of course I wouldn’t! I couldn’t really explain why at the time, but it essentially revolved around the fact that I was young and optimistic. 25 years later, I’m not so sure. Now, said optimism has almost vanished and there are days pushing seems like the path to least suffering, but I also feel it’s unethical for one person to decide for everyone else.

> Elon Musk has recently stated that SpaceX will, at least right now, no longer be focusing on traveling to Mars

Wait you mean Elon has been full of shit all this time???

Leftism and OSS share a similar problem, being that good ideas, intentions, and works are squandered by petty drama and insecure egos.

Requires nextjs, :(

My dependabot queue is going to explode the next few days.

I’m relieved my electricity bill went up 50% so Brandon here can get a Slack message of what’s in his freezer rather than looking.

A whole bunch of this stuff that people are fawning over as life changing and it leaves me honestly wondering: how have some of you survived this long at all?

This is generally true, volume and low cost situations exacerbate it, but it’s not limited to Chinese manufacturing. You see it everywhere. As a completely unrelated example: home remodeling. The guy I contracted did wonderful work and charged a completely fair price, but there were many parts that I hand waved at “he knows best” “he’ll pick the most sensible approach that matches the quality of the rest of project”. Wrong. Cheapest, fastest thing, using materials on hand if possible every time. The economics are obvious and it doesn’t matter to him insofar as I acquiesce or don’t notice. Why should it be any different for low cost mass manufacturing?

Thanks for the response. So Stelvo’s sell is through its opinionated approach regarding architecture and defaults. I realize elevator pitches are tough especially when there are lots of competing solutions, but maybe some sort of short and sweet “us vs them” comparison on the home page would make that sell easier. Like many of my peers I’m sure, I’ll admit I have little time and patience to click through to get to the obligatory question of “why us”.

Anyways, not sure who went on the downvote spree or why (it wasn’t one account), and I admit it didn’t seem likely your team would be doing it since you folks were actively discussing, but I couldn’t think of why someone else would do it either. Anyways, sorry and thanks for your time.

Also where is this idea that it takes days to ship Python in CDK coming from?

Edit: great, getting downvoted for daring to ask the author to explain a claim. I’m noticing other people asking questions getting downvoted, too. Brigading isn’t a good look.

I still use my dad’s old HP 15C. Form factor is good, aesthetically it’s very appealing, it feels efficient to use, I like the tactile feel of the buttons, and I like thinking of my dad when I use it.