nirava

"historically rare high-trust"? You are wrong.

Most self-forming human societies are high-trust and more loyal to each other than to truth (as the models have so eloquently regurgitated). Look anywhere from the hunter-gatherer tribes to villages to small towns. I have traveled my small, poor country extensively and the only place the fundamental idea of altruism had to be "consciously invented, built and protected" was in the big cities. In the rest of the places, it came to them as naturally as hunger. We've found skeletons from thousands of years ago that indicate that the whole society came together to care for the disabled individual for nothing in return, leading them to live as long as a modern disabled person with healthcare might.

Societies become low trust driven by specific factors: resource scarcity, something forcing a lot of different groups of people into the same area without integration. This is not a defense of humanity. I'd say the case of the returned wallet is more an example of class-loyalty than general human altruism. Humans have an instinct for exclusion of the non-conforming.

But the idea that civilization has to be invented and maintained is a debunked, regressive, even dangerous idea in that this line of thinking was used to justify a lot of atrocities historically.

when reading personal blogs, it's best to assume any statement as a reflection of their experiences and world-bubble rather than as verified facts. This is a blog, not a technical doc. while your frustration may be well founded, it's also self inflicted to a degree, you're expecting the wrong thing from the wrong place.

"Analysis of commercially available satellite images from ... 2018 shows brightly painted walls, soccer fields, assembly rows and play markings."

"Some US analysts took notice as early as 2019 ... logged remarks in a system"

> Iranian authorities failed their own people. Again.

Killing children with taxpayer money vs evacuating a school was part of a military base more than 8 years ago. It is clear what government is failing their people, and it isn't Iran in this context.

Fwiw these harnesses run appropriate tests before pushing anyway, so CI CD pass is almost a guarantee. Correctness is another matter.

I've been watching chess videos for many years but my own chess playing is just recreational.

Writing/programming as a specialization of just going through the damn thing is actually sacrosanct IMO. Spectatorship as a generalization of reading is second-class. You do become a worse programmer as you move to "higher order thinking", it just matters less in a world where LLMs exist.

> And reading and adjusting AI output requires substantial thinking.

It does, but less of that thinking translates to skills transferred. What amount of the creativity and magic of Tolkien transferred to his editor? I'm sure it took substantial thinking to edit Tolkien's work.

beyond a point of absolute comfort, the point of money is to accumulate power and power can be spent to make more money. musk doesn't need more money, he needs more power. dangling starlink to ukraine treasonously is that power that money can't buy but space x can.

moonshots are the external story told to maintain social acceptance. tax credits for spacex would be lot harder to sell to taxpayers if everyone unambiguously knew its just another profit seeking private company. tesla gets a lot of lenience because of its supposed pushing of frontiers.

musk can exchange his social capital to manipulate stocks to make others money in exchange for backchannel favors.

idk if musk actually believes mankind will terraform mars but he sure seems to be getting a lot back on earth from saying it.

You're wrong in comparing LLMs to a spell/grammar-checker (Syntax v Semantics) If LLM is a tool so is a ghost writer (not)

You're probably extending the logic from the idea that a programmer-llm is a tool. That is at least a defensible position. A written program isn't written to be experienced by people (usually), rather to create certain outcomes.

On the other hand, the written word is the entire experience of the person reading your thing, and that can all be created by an AI without your input. It has it's own biases and motivations and "alignments" (so to speak). Thus it is not a tool and actually a writer itself. And when it writes, you miss out on the experience of having written it, thus actually you end up becoming the tool (pun intended) that LLM is using to express itself.

I've found the only good way to write with LLMs is to absolutely not use it for the first few drafts, the using it as a tool to list specific kinds of problems in text (word repetition, unnatural hard to read sentences etc) and approaching those points with caution and skepticism. Even copy pasting a single sentence, I've found, is a slippery slope.

This is a completely reasonable take from a normal human being. YK some people become journalists because they enjoy the act of research, writing and investigating. And in all honesty, LLMs are still INCREDIBLY bad at communication. They get stuff done, sure, but god, for something named "large language model" all their attempts at human style communication makes me want to turn off the computer for good.

this is pointless pedantry. there's an implicit "functionally equivalent, for modern (apple) devices" bit.

> It would really help perspective sometimes

It objectively and absolutely doesn't help this discussion at all. Even if taken as hyperbole, the frustration with Apple charging $200 for 256 added gigs, and filling up ~20gigs of it without consent or requirement, is unaffected by floppy prices in the 80s.

This has been my line of thinking as well. I have developed a sort of paranoia when I'm working using AI on my projects. Who's to say Claude or OpenAI isn't using the final conclusion of all my ideas, trial and error, and adding it to their database of insights to be offered to the next subscriber for a price?

They have demonstrated both the intelligence at scale and the lack of morals for this to not be a problem at all.

load some games you think you'll enjoy. carry it around in your pocket. pull it out when bored. don't put a case on it, let it gather scratches and dirt.

I can lose 10 mins to a sudoku game or chase a highscore in some arcade-ish game without coming away with an impending sense of doom (which tends to happen with doomscrolling).

I'd compare it more with the iphone of micro handhelds than a LV bag. Tried Ambernic first, it was annoying and it randomly stopped working anyway. Steam deck and such are too much, they're for gamers and I'm no gamer. I just need a toy, and playdate happens to be the iphone of this weird niche I seem to enjoy.

Also, the devex is good, and I can build tools and apps in a weekend if I have to, and enjoy the experience.

fwiw yeah it's expensive and i much rather enjoy simple classics than most of the art projects pretending to be games in the catalog.

Not web devs per se, I’d be hard pressed to find a serious web dev who wanted to “forcefully sodomize users”. Thats a management thing

I've been enjoying his videos for years atp, does really cool stuff, and has the same fascination with flight as I do.

I remember Flowise app being well-intended but bad. I evaluated the self-hosted version to be used as a component in an internal tool so non-technical people can tweak their prompt chains without writing code. As far as I remember:

1. it became increasingly slow as I added flows (felt like a O(n^2) ish bottleneck)

2. There were many bugs and bad UX

3. the flow variable system was underbaked and underdocumented

4. feature gaps

I decided I was probably not the target audience for their app and moved on.