ibramGaunt

No one is giving the real answer to this question which is that these laws touch on the legality of capabilities the US does not want to acknowledge it has, and so it won't. Secret information in the US is like glitter - if you touch it, it spreads to you too.

It's not just "here's this law about spying in the abstract," which can be talked about in the open; it's "we're using the MIND READER 5000 under Title XVII powers delegated by the President to the Mind Reading Organization to conduct mind reading on persons X, Y, and Z." The legal briefings and rulings on the facts will by necessity reveal the nature of the technology or technique in question, and so, they are classified. If I recall correctly it was a big deal for the ACLU to get a lawyer a security clearance so they could interact with these courts, but I could be misremembering.

A lot of the frustration I've seen with PowerShell from longtime Linux users is that there's an expectation that everything is a file in the linux/bash idiom, and can be interacted with that way (tangent, I think this is where a lot of vexation with systemd comes from), where Windows and the NT kernel enforce the concept of everything is an object.

It's a much more powerful system, but users who are used to being able to do, well, whatever they want with no rules get frustrated with the syntax and "correct way" to do a thing when you just want a stupid string (it's me I'm users). It's very similar to Rust in that way, where once you stop fighting the borrow checker life becomes so much easier; once you stop fighting the objects, you stop getting in your own way and it becomes a much more productive experience.

This is appetizing in the abstract until you're in the middle of New Jersey and its horrendously cold and rainy and the pump jockey hates your guts because he had to leave his heated hut where the Bruins were on, and makes a half hearted wipe at your icy windshield to guilt you into tipping him for doing something you'd be happier doing yourself.

My token usage on Claude models has dropped by 83% over the last month - I'm pretty much only using it for quick one off questions or reading papers. it feels impossible for me to get Opus models to stop entering into cyclic loops, and my work is too security adjacent for Fable.

Codex has been an excellent workhorse - doesn't feel like I have to dance around the guardrails, doesn't lose _everything_ when it compacts, and doesn't litter the workspace with a million and one planning to plan files.

For those interested, Neal Stephenson writes about this in _Anathem_, where there is an arcane technical class (the I.T. Administration) that has developed programs over the years to sift through the misinformation, sentient viruses, and general overrun of the Internet to determine what is probably true/accurate.