hakunin

Honestly, I've felt this way before (gaming since the 90s), but try watching somebody play RTwP a bit to get a feel for it. It can become very smooth and comfortable. The hardest part is to learn to trust the timings.

It's funny that when I re-read my own message it kinda resembles slop, but I promise it's all human.

The real question is: do abstractions make sense.

I realize (having been back and forth on this) that the answer is a very strong yes.

LLMs are based on language. The concepts/"nodes" LLMs tie together are useful because humans have created these nodes over the entire history of language, culture, and science. Humans naturally over millennia have been filtering out useful concepts from useless ones, refining language to efficiently carry meaning.

If we broke down all abstractions to fundamentals, there would be billions of things that would need to be tied together to make any useful product, almost impossible. Abstractions are required for solving problems efficiently. A high level abstraction that fits well in many solutions is insanely powerful.

LLMs are not immune to this effect, they need abstractions so that they don't have to prove every single thing they do from first principles, they can instead lean on language to shortcut a ton of thinking.

So when a framework gives you useful high level structure, patterns, and abstractions, you can do a lot less reasoning, and work a lot more efficiently, to solve a lot more problems. You could have one word (e.g. controller) mean a whole ton of useful things that you otherwise would've had to describe with multiple words. You could have references to existing concepts (e.g. `String#camelize`) that you no longer need to expand and define each time.

Bottom line, abstractions let LLMs solve problems faster, more correctly, with less reasoning.

P.S. Language is all abstractions, and we can solve problems well because we created these effective abstractions. The question I have about LLMs going forward is whether they can create new useful abstractions (new words, concepts, categories) that are actually time-tested and proven to contribute to good problem solving, without human input/verification.

Unfortunately, while this is a good story, police doesn't have the power to fish out and stop random internet trolls all around the country. I see a lot of this sentiment "why can't they just", but it's an unrealistic view of what's actually possible. I'm all for it in theory.

But almost every comment here is incredulously pointing out how inept police is to not be able to solve such an easy/obvious problem. There is nothing easy and obvious about it.

We need one of those "what every programmer should know about time zones" articles about common police and military misconceptions.

All you're saying is that likelihood of swatters committing additional crime is low, but there is still likelihood. There can be others taking advantage of this situation (or also mad at the couple), who are in fact willing to commit more serious crimes.

Serious crimes are generally a low percentage stat in society overall, which is part of the reason why it's so hard to judge "oh, this isn't serious". Most police encounters aren't, except the ones that are.

Police is not like most services, where you can hire and fire them at will. If you (or anyone else) called police to complain about a domestic situation, once they're involved, you are no longer in control of when they get uninvolved. I'm not saying "this is good" or "bad", but it is how it was setup, and there were good reasons for this.

This police work should be happening all the time, I agree, but it cannot happen during a swat call (there isn't enough time). And if it doesn't yield results, are you to stop showing up?

The fact that police shows up late doesn't change the fact that it's still a deterrent that they do show up, and you could be the unlucky one that had police show up in time.

But this seems like a good crime recipe:

1. Swat somebody for months.

2. Go into their house once police stops showing up.

Most of the world doesn't live in a country with second amendment.

So many replies here are blaming the police but despite how screwed up the situation is there isn’t much they can do. Not responding to a swat call is not really an option with the way the system is setup.

We can all say “well, if you get many calls about one location, maybe you should stop showing up” but wtf are you supposed to do if a real crime is being committed? The same couple getting swatted one day could get criminals breaking in another, possibly for the same reason even. How can you make the call not to show up if your entire existence and role in society is to show up?

What real solutions are there?

Edit: a bunch of identical responses to this comment with "just don't show up". I know it's easy to sit and judge from the comfort of your keyboard, but do a little bit of thinking. What should the rule be? When is it okay for police to receive a distress call and not show up in actual reality with actual lives at stake? Who's responsible for the consequences of not showing up?

Edit2: now people switched to "show up, but softer, knock on the door". Now we can agree, because this comment is about showing up, not about specifics. Yeah, more considerate approach is warranted. To be clear, I agree that police should be punished for violating laws and conduct policies. Yet there is the other side of it, there's still an alert and it could still be real. Police still have to be mind-f'ed into figuring out every time if there's real danger or not.

Edit3: People who say "police can catch the callers" and suggest other triumphant movie-esque feats make me feel like we need an article "Falsehoods programmers believe about police".

I've been thinking a lot about this. Many technical barriers that could justify businesses are much lower now, so we are left with other kinds of barriers: red tape, regulatory, legal, etc. If you have access to go past those barriers, you are worth something. If all you do is provide a technical solution, you are probably going to stop making sense.

Paseo allows you to start a daemon from command line, thereby passing your ENV credentials to the daemon from, say, your 1Password-based env. Then both local Mac GUI and their native iPhone app (through Tailscale) can connect to this daemon. This is the most ergonomic local and remote setup where I can start a session on my Mac and continue on my phone or vice versa, with any agent: Pi, Claude, Codex, OMP, all natively supported.

No affiliation, just arrived at Paseo after a bunch of research.

    Those who claim LLM-generated software is good enough:

    Haven’t written code in ages
    Cannot spot if their code figuratively had 6 fingers!
    Have a low bar for what good looks like
    Don’t care about quality or NFR
    Have difficulty understanding an S-curve

There are exceptions like antirez, but I think this does hold for many loud optimists out there.

Perhaps not that fantastically given the url doesn't load. :)