jtr1

Quite something to see neither Jared nor his in-laws mentioned here

I realize this is not scalable, but I’ve come to the personal preference that sycophancy be overt. LLMs are always steering in a direction and I find it a good reminder that they are just as incapable of objectivity as humans. TBD, but I think I’d prefer that fact plainly visible where I can see it.

This tweet is written as parody, but it seems self-evident from reading Trump's tweets that they do not all come directly from the president himself. Most political offices delegate social media to an internal team, presenting as if from a unified "source" when really they speak for an organization. Given the fierce competing factions within the administration - and the sort of kreminology political reporting has been reduced to in the current environment - this is precisely the kind of modern situation where textual analysis is helpful in determining who is speaking.

Most programming best practices were created to solve for the same problem LLMs face: limited context. The principles around well-crafted code strove to make it modifiable by future agents who are not the author. Maintainable code stabilizes around the invariants of the domain it address while providing a spectrum of modifiability to future users, running from UI > configs > cleanly abstracted code > core.

I do wonder if there will be a convergence between sodium-ion battery architectures and cheaper, renewable-powered desalination. Could industrial seawater mining be competitive as a sodium feedstock source?

I think the limitation to team "let-people-do-what-they-want-even-if-it's-bad-for-them" is that it's rooted in outdated assumptions about what free will and coercion look like. Broadly speaking, libertarian notions of negative freedom assume a model of coercion with a very small footprint, primarily the threat of immanent physical violence. Similarly, it sees the exercise of free will as a binary action, rather than a spectrum of ability.

We entered this era a long time ago, where psychological insight and computational or chemical power can combine to override people's ability to make free choices. But I'm still not sure there is a widely shared philosophical or ideological framework that has fully digested and responded to these new realities yet.

I've been running Claude Pro at home, supplemented with Deepseek configured in Claude Code. I've had decent luck throwing Opus (and briefly Fable, RIP) at architecture / product problems and producing plans to hand off to Deepseek (I personally find v4 to operate somewhere between Opus and Sonnet in capability).

Lately I've been able to cut down on token usage with context-mode and codebase-memory to wring more out of my subscription, as well as doing things like make sure all terminal operations run in quiet mode. I've found codebase-memory particularly effective: it creates an index of your codebase that the agent can query for code tracing without reading all of the associated files, and I've also found it more accurate at analysis

This is the answer for me as well. My partner and I try to be intentional about giving each other at least an evening a week to go do something social, but it doesn't work out nearly that often because everyone else is juggling their own kids' schedules. So even if I didn't personally have kids, I would still be facing the same issue.

There is such a thing as "naive cynicism"

Yeah, I like the "get out of jail free" card approach. The thing I always used to hate before this era was getting stuck in a hole on something that would take days or worse to grind through. It's nice to drop a little plank bridge across those now

I have been building an iOS app that I had kicking around in my head for years but never had time to build. I have been a frontend UX engineer for the better part of a decade and went through a handful of tutorials on Swift. The project definitely sits in this uncanny valley for me. I have test suites for every aspect of the app and have the agent using TDD to avoid cheating - this has gotten me pretty far without having to look too close at the output other than general structure. As I'm reaching a more mature stage of the project though, I'm finding that I want to tweak a lot by hand in the code to get the details right without burning tokens.

This is appalling and I agree the technology is creepy. However, human verification is already a big problem that seems like it will only grow from here.

It does seem to me that this should be solvable at the device level by having a biometric scan produce a signed key on your device that can be used to issue a token of authenticity, similar to the way payment systems or certificate authorities work.

Then again, this only intensifies a different, growing problem where access to a smartphone or computer becomes a basic requirement for participation in society. No easy answers.

For many possible reasons, depending on where you live.