shmel

I'm not sure "subsidised" is the right word. If a government funds research and the results are released openly, that's just publicly funded research. It's how a lot of science works in the US and Europe too.

It'd be relevant if I could disable safeguards. As long as I can't, this is Opus 5.5 performance I have to deal with.

It reminds me of "640KB of RAM is enough for everyone". Look where we are right now. We always find a way to spend resources. I was frustrated with my last laptop because of frequent swapping/OOM, so I built a desktop with 64GB RAM during covid. I thought I would never have this problem again, I even disabled swap. Now I regret I didn't get 128GB instead to fit bigger local LLMs. But even without LLMs, my Firefox crashed with OOM just yesterday. Apparently I open too many tabs too quickly.

I used to think "wow, ADSL is so fast, I will never need faster internet connection" and now I need fiber to sync 500GB dataset fast enough so I don't get frustrated. Gosh, I remember the feeling when I upgraded from 14.4k to 56k dialup modem.

I think this quote is often misunderstood. It isn't really about machines, but about English definition of swimming (and thinking): a living creature moving in water. That makes debating whether submarines can swim rather pointless. You can replace it by "can airplanes fly?" and the meaning changes because we colloquially say that yes, airplanes fly. In Russian, for example, submarines definitely swim (I believe Dijkstra himself mentioned it at some point). I personally believe that defining thinking as something only humans are capable of is rather narrow.

Are you saying that publicly funded fundamental research is somehow a bad thing now?

or, hear me out, we can try the Irish way? Just let them fail ffs

It's certainly personal. I live alone for the last 11 years and I remember the pandemic as the worst period of my life exactly because I couldn't interact with people. Surely moving to another city just before played a role, but I realized that one week stuck at home was enough to drive me completely insane. While going to office doesn't replace normal social life, it's still something that helped me before. After the pandemic I kept WFH, but found a relatively big and diverse friend circle. Now I treat social life as something mandatory like food and sleep because I learned that even "going out" alone (grab a dinner somewhere and go to a cinema or something like that) barely helps when I need to connect with someone and have a meaningful conversation. And yet, some of my friends are exactly like you, they barely noticed the pandemic and were perfectly happy to stay at home and tinker with their side projects.

I admit I look at the code less and less now. But when I do want that I just ask Claude to show me the code verbatim. It is almost always faster than click in IDE because it greps with insane speed. After all, when it's fully AI-generated it's sort of someone else's codebase from my perspective, I end up grepping through it the same way it does.

Gradually I moved to asking questions about the code instead, something like "if X and Y, will Z still hold? did we not forget to check this?" I realized that this is what I am doing in my head when looking at the code. And Claude understands well enough what I mean and checks it.

What I found mind-blowing though is that surprisingly often it says me something like "while looking this up for you I think found a potential bug, would you like me to quickly check it?" or "I noticed that actually when X and Y true, Z holds indeed, but I believe there is a rare situation (...) when we don't want Z because it makes zero sense, what do you think?"

Do we still need an IDE though? I am very happy with Claude Code last 6 months. I can totally see why Google got rid of everything, but the dialog box. Perhaps it was stupid to do that without warning, but ultimately this is the future.

Right, because it totally worked with drugs. People just don't use them anymore. Weed is impossible to come by nowadays.

Not saying you are wrong, but I'd like to see some evidence on that. Just because your heart is pumping faster doesn't mean your cardio fitness is getting better. Otherwise we could all just snort cocaine and skip the gym. Alcohol does that too, anyone with a fitness tracker can check that.

I think it will be more similar to the cloud. I remember people predicted that once you move to the cloud, you'll realize how expensive it actually is, but the cost of migration back will be high. While, yes, the cloud is expensive, most people realized that it is kinda worth it.

There are even people who listen to music at home! They even buy expensive speakers just for this purpose =) I listen to music pretty much all the time except when I talk to other people and sleep.

I got insanely more productive with Claude Code since Opus 4.5. Perhaps it helps that I work in AI research and keep all my projects in small prototype repos. I imagine that all models are more polished for AI research workflow because that's what frontier labs do, but yeah, I don't write code anymore. I don't even read most of it, I just ask Claude questions about the implementation, sometimes ask to show me verbatim the important bits. Obviously it does mistakes sometimes, but so do I and everyone I have ever worked with. What scares me that it does overall fewer mistakes than I do. Plan mode helps tremendously, I skip it only for small things. Insisting on strict verification suite is also important (kind of like autoresearch project).