IdiocyInAction

I am a really heavy Claude Code user but source control is still one area where I have regular bad experiences just using Claude.

Most of it is just blatant tax evasion.

Nurses in the US are actually very highly paid. Ask anyone how their week was. They'll all say it was crap.

Writing code can often just be the means to an end which is delivering value.

That still doesn't not make it not slavery. What if you don't agree with the social contract?

A new grad is not necessarily the same as a potential H1B hire. Tech workers are not fungible. A company might prefer to hire an Indian or Polish person who has won ICPC, has hard-to-acquire experience, etc. over a D-average new grad without internships from Georgia or something.

I think the idea of shaming people for being successful conquerers is ironically very western. Ask what the Mongols think about their conquests or the Han or what the Turks think about the Ottomans or the Russians about their history…

I don't know what you imagine perceptions of the British empire to be but most people don't think the UK sent 10000 ships to India to zerg rush the existing power structures.

He mentioned native allies at several points actually, though he doesn’t emphasise them and their purported numbers are still like 100x lower than the forces they are facing.

> And that they overemphasize planning and tactics and downplay being at the right place at the right time through no foresight of their own.

Mentioned by the author

> Another point is that the failed conquistadors are given little consideration.

Also addressed by the article.

> That book explicitly says that it is not a racist or chauvinistic history of how Europe became so successful. But critics claim that it still manages to be chauvinistic in how it wrongly claims that the conquistadors vanquished their enemies while being comically outnumbered.

I feel modern academia (and also Guns Germs and Steel FWIW) desperately try to do the opposite these days - to claim that the natives where not militarily, technologically or logistically inferior to Europeans despite getting conquered by Europeans in what look like very lopsided battles. I feel that is just as dishonest as the opposite. Nobody does this to the Mongols or Huns or whatever. Their superiority is accepted at face value.

> That's partly because inequality doesn't fit into their models.

Well Piketty being wrong doesn't fit in many people's models either. Economists routinely do talk about inequality and I think it's intellectually dishonest to paint the whole field as wrong just because some parts of it don't agree with your pet theory.

Iceland is in the EEA so EU FoM is already a thing.

AFAIK a lot of these ideas are not new (the JSON thing was done with OS models before) and OpenAI is possibly the hottest startup with the most funding this decade (maybe even past two decades?), so I think this is actually all within expectations.

> Since AI vision is not yet good enough, it’s possible that one reason the AIs do relatively poorly on this new test is because the verbal descriptions of the questions are not written as well as they could be, and further research could include multiple wordings of the questions, written by different people, to get a sense of how sensitive the AIs are to how the questions are described.

A more parsimonious theory might be that it had the other IQ test in its training set.

Still, even at that it's an impressive result; it having an actual IQ if about 100 would already be pretty substantial.

If you do a global comparison the US is incredibly richer rather than these countries being incredibly poor.