rhines

You convey tone through word choice and sentence structure - trying to convey tone through casing or other means is unnecessary and often just jarring.

Like look at the sentence "it has felt to me like all threads of conversation have veered towards the extreme and indefensible." The casing actually conflicts with the tone of the sentence. It's not written like a casual text - if the sentence was "ppl talking about this are crazy" then sure, the casing would match the tone. But the stodgy sentence structure and use of more precise vocabulary like "veered" indicates that more effort has gone into this than the casing suggests.

Fair play if the author just wants to have a style like this. It's his prerogative to do so, just as anyone can choose to communicate exclusively in leetspeak, or use all caps everywhere, or write everything like script dialogue, whatever. Or if it's a tool to signal that he's part of an in-group with certain people who do the same, great. But he is sacrificing readability by ignoring conventions.

What matters is content, not communication. They could build a platform to chat with each other, but they could just use WhatsApp or text or email for that. But they can't build a platform with an infinite stream of targeted content (until AI generates content I guess).

Not if there's no reputation. If you see someone liked your post and then you go check out their posts, or if people recognize commenters and remember things about them, then it's social. Think engaging with friends on Facebook or participating in a hobby forum. But there's nothing social about engaging with a popular Reddit post or some celebrity's Twitter feed.

Yeah that's really the issue with all social media. If you restrict yourself to just checking what friends post on Facebook, or what people you subscribe to post on YouTube, those platforms are pretty healthy too. It's when you go to the infinite content feed that sites become an issue.

How are you using it? I'm curious if you hit the limit so quickly because you're running it with Claude Code and so it's loading your whole project into its context, making tons of iterations, etc., or if you're using the chat and just asking focused questions and having it build out small functions or validate code quality of a file, and still hitting the limit with that.

Not because I think either way is better, just because personally I work well with AI in the latter capacity and have been considering subscribing to Claude, but don't know how limiting the usage limits are.

Yeah I can definitely see that being a threat model. In the gaming case I think it's harder because it's more of a general reputation system and it's based on how people feel while playing with you, whereas for a website every post can be reviewed by multiple parties and the evidence is right there. But certainly I would still expect some people to try to maximize their reputation and use that to push through content that should be more heavily moderated, and in the degenerate case the bad actors comprise so much of the userbase that they peer review their own content.

I'm not sure I agree - on the one hand yes, it's trivial to generate pages stuffed with keywords. But on the other hand Google is already interpreting search intent, and while this is okay for some things it is extraordinarily frustrating when trying to look for something specific.

Often I do want exact matches, and Google refuses to show them no matter what special characters you use to try to modify the search behaviour.

Personally I'd rather search engines continue to return exact matches and just de-rank content that has poor reputation, and if I want to have a more free-form experience I'll use LLMs instead.

Something that's been on my mind for a while now is shared moderation - instead of having a few moderators who deal with everything, distribute the moderation load across all users. Every user might only have to review a couple posts a day or whatever, so it should be a negligible burden, and send each post that requires moderation to multiple users so that if there's disagreement it can be pushed to more senior/trusted users.

This is specifically in the context of a niche hobby website where the rules are simple and identifying rule-breaking content is easy. I'm not sure it would work on something with universal scope like Reddit or Facebook, but I'd rather we see more focused communities anyway.

I see this kind of testing as more for regression prevention than anything. The tests pass if the code handles all possible return values of the dependencies correctly, so if someone goes and changes your code such that the tests fail they have to either fix the errors they've introduced or go change the tests if the desired code functionality has really changed.

These tests won't detect if a dependency has changed, but that's not what they're meant for. You want infrastructure to monitor that as well.

Mass market SAAS will generally just use other products to handle this stuff. And if there does happen to be a leak, they just say sorry and move on, there are very few consequences for security failures.

I see tests as more of a test of the programmer's understanding of their project than anything. If you deeply understand the project requirements, API surface, failure modes, etc. you will write tests that enforce correct behaviour. If you don't really understand the project, your tests will likely not catch all regressions.

AI can write good test boilerplate, but it cannot understand your project for you. If you just tell it to write tests for some code, it will likely fail you. If you use it to scaffold out mocks or test data or boilerplate code for tests which you already know need to exist, it's fantastic.

Well Wang used to live with Altman. What value that actually provides, I don't know. But it seems to be why he's worth this much.

Or upvotes might be a better example, at least for Reddit/Hackernews. But the idea being that the comments are sorted based on some algorithm, whether than be popularity or something else, and commenters are trying to optimize for that. In traditional forums where comments are sorted linearly and it's more about having a discussion with others, but when comments are surfaced by other metrics then it's less about the discussion and more about gaming those metrics.

ToS didn't stop the companies that built those models and it won't stop the companies that bootstrap off them. Until an AI company eats a multi billion dollar lawsuit for unlawful data use they will continue to operate this way.

Social media is no longer social - it's just media. At least for most people anyway. The average user, and probably kids even more so, are just scrolling through.

If you're posting as well, or at least commenting on stuff and having discussions with people you know (even if you just know them online), I think that's fine. Like forums, or being in group chats with friends on Facebook, or sharing photos you take with a specific community.

It's when you're only consuming (like scrolling TikTok or Instagram), or when your comments are written for the algorithm rather than for actual discussion (like on Reddit, or even Hackernews to an extent), that social media is an issue.

Thanks for sharing this, looks like a useful overview of the field. I wish the first edition had come out a year or two earlier - this would have been a great resource for my undergrad research work. Back then there were no books covering CMA-ES, surrogate models, and gaussian processes all in one book, everything was scattered across different books and papers, with varying levels of technical depth and differing notations.

I could see it building habits that persist even when no longer using the drugs. They've found other things to fill their time instead of eating, and things which would previously trigger them to start eating now trigger them to do other things.

There's of course a risk that when they stop the drugs that hunger will drive them to re-establish those habits, but now that they have new habits that fight that hunger they are in a much better position to resist it than they were when they'd initially established their eating patterns.

I watched this interview when I first heard about Alexandr Wang. I'd seen he was the youngest self made billionaire, which is a pretty impressive credential to have under your belt, and I wanted to see if I could get a read on what sets him apart.

Unfortunately he doesn't reveal any particular intelligence, insight, or drive in the interview, nor does he in other videos I found. Possibly he hides it, or possibly his genius is beyond me. Or possibly he had good timing on starting a data labelling company and then leveraged his connections in SV (including being roommates with Sam Altman) to massively inflate Scale AI's valuation and snag a Meta acquisition.

I'm not sure I agree. If I go to a photography forum, there will be one thread for photos taken with a specific camera. Those threads are easily found and I can browse them to get huge amounts of relevant info if I'm interested in that camera. If I want to find that on Reddit or Discord, god help me. At best I can hope for a specific subreddit or server dedicated to that. But mostly I'll find hundreds of posts or comments mentioning or asking about that camera, all by people I don't know and have no way of judging if they know their stuff.

Discord and Reddit have so much repetition and fragmentation because there's no real organization of content, and people with no expertise often weigh in and even get upvoted because the average user is not particularly knowledgeable and the experts aren't on 24/7 looking for new posts to contribute to. On forums topics are stickier and get bumped when there's activity so experts more often find relevant threads and it's easier to judge reputations on forums.

Granted, badly managed forums are bad. If question threads from new users are mixed in with everything else they can quickly dominate search results. You need to be able to filter, but IME most forums do have pretty decent filters.

I strongly disagree. But maybe because of a difference of perspective. If you're imagining a Reddit-scale forum, with millions of people with no sense of community and no knowledge of the content they're consuming, then yeah a traditional forum format is awful.

Forums shine as spaces for focused communities, where people have reputations and care about the subject matter. Time-sorted discussions are great because that's what's happening - a discussion in the community. You don't want to read someone's quip first, you want to get the whole context. You don't want there to be upvotes that people try to earn - there's already your reputation in the community. If someone's a troll or gives bad advice or is wrong, they'll get called out, or banned, or simply ignored as everyone knows they aren't respected.

Forums just aren't meant for generic content and it's not because of the UI, it's because the entire concept is not compatible with masses of semi-anonymous users with no commonalities.

It's also IMO valid. CRUD isn't derogatory. It's also not particularly illuminating though. Almost everything is a CRUD app. If you get the fundamental data structures, access patterns, and control flow right for those CRUD operations, you have the foundations for what can be a successful app. And then you enhance it further - games add nice graphics, collaborative workspaces add good conflict resolution, social media sites add addictive recommendation systems. The core is CRUD but that doesn't mean the work stops there.

I could be mistaken, but my read is that years of dealing with cat turds day in day out has numbed the author to their stench. His once prized chocolates now have become themselves cat turds, and he lacks the senses to even realize it. Note how dusty the container was - the author didn't care to maintain his chocolates, and now here he is. The forgotten side projects, the tech we wanted to learn... things we lost the motivation for or now execute with the same cat turd quality as we've grown accustomed to.

We've reached the point where people without devices or common online services are so rare that society no longer accommodates them. It's similar to how we need legislation to ensure that disabled people have accessible infrastructure, except I doubt there will ever be legislation mandating offline/off-app accessibility.

Experienced that today with 2.5 Pro. Though I was amused that all the links were links to Google searches for the source, rather than direct links.

The comparison to art is apt. Generated art gets the job done for most people. It's good enough. Maybe it's derivative, maybe there are small inaccuracies, but it is available instantly for free and that's what matters most. Same with code, to many people.

And the knock-on effect is that there is less menial work. Artists are commissioned less for the local fair, their friend's D&D character portrait, etc. Programmers find less work building websites for small businesses, fixing broken widgets, etc.

I wonder if this will result in fewer experts, or less capable ones. As we lose the jobs that were previously used to hone our skills will people go out of their way to train themselves for free or will we just regress?

100% agreed with games being designed for online aids. Some of the quests in Oldschool Runescape make me wonder if I'd ever have completed them without guides - it's like they're designed to be a challenge for the whole community upon release, rather than for individual players.

Location: Halifax, NS, Canada

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Email: lauchlantoal@gmail.com

I took time after my previous role to focus on my relationships, family, and personal interests. Now I'm looking to bounce back and get involved with a company that will push me to deliver both high impact and high quality work. With over 3 years of working with ETL pipelines and REST API integrations and development, I understand how to develop and maintain robust and scalable data systems. I'm ready to leverage past experience to help improve back-end systems, and take on more responsibilities that position me to learn, grow, and deliver value.

I wonder if we need teams generating dozens of UIs or whatever every day though. There may (or may not) be a limit to how much value-adding work is available to do, or at least diminishing returns that no longer justify high salaries.

Depends on your perspective I guess, personally I find YT far more valuable than any streaming platform. University lectures from hundreds of professors, conference recordings, music videos, millions of independent creators covering nearly any niche you could think of - YouTube's service of hosting that and making it available is worth so much more to me than whatever shows Neflix currently has on rotation.

But since I have the option to not pay, I don't. If it was paywalled I'd be willing to pay probably 3-5x what a normal streaming service charges though.

Plenty of university students around me who will order a $8 boba tea and be disappointed that the boba is cooked poorly or the milk ratio isn't good, and then do it again a couple days later.

But the difference is that food elicits cravings - you buy it because you imagine how good it'll be if it's done right this time and your body pressures you to buy it. Apps don't do that.