supern0va

I can't help but imagine that the sort of user choosing to use a service like this in lieu of their ISP default is also likely to support this bit of pain.

...also, it's probably their own PlayStation, that their kid uses. Speaking from personal experience.

Surprisingly, no. I've been using Fable and Astra both to orchestrate decompilation of a relatively modern game (delivered via Steam) and they have no qualms about it.

Where his argument falls apart for me is: why? Audit is intended to address misaligned incentives. It's a form of review done by an independent party, because the incentives are the same for everyone within an organization or with a vested interest in its survival.

The AI doing self-checks through sub-agents (or outsourcing to other models) is a form of review looking for errors, akin to getting a code review for your PRs. You don't need an outside firm or auditor. You need different incentives (a reviewer whose goal isn't to finish the work, but to find problems) and/or different blind spots (trained differently than the model doing the work, which might be more inclined towards that error).

We generally assume that humans can make mistakes and institute mechanisms to flag and correct those mistakes, but that doesn't mean we take that to the level of auditing every discrete action a human at a given job takes.

Likewise for agents, particularly as/if their error rate becomes lower than humans at the given task. They'll get a level of review tied to the importance of their work. And yes, if that's bookkeeping, then they'll probably need a proper audit, just like the humans directing them.

The metal cage that the plastic cubes sit in. On the corners where they bend, there's room to get fingers wrapped around. They're also rectangular and pretty chunky. It's not super comfortable, but it's secure.

Also, fun fact: they are literally held together with large metal zip ties.

> There’s a focus on the environment yet everything is disposable and people travel from all over the world to go.

There's a focus on LNT, not vague environmentalism. It is not materially worse than flying to another country in terms of environmental impact.

> There’s talk of safety but then they will literally kick you out of camp as soon as someone says you’re making them feel unsafe because of some normal thing you did. YES, it did literally happen to someone I know. It felt like a public lynching.

Oh boy, I can only imagine what sort of personality you are to have gone through this. I've seen this archetype before.

That said: Burning Man is a platform/blank slate that people bring things to. There are many camps with different ethos. Personally, I think the best way to burn is to get a group of friends and do a thing together.

Just dropping into a camp of people you don't know is bound to have the potential for complicated interpersonal dynamics, particularly in one of the harsher environments on the planet. Everything there is more difficult, and that extends to relationships.

> It’s supposed to be camping together but then there’s pages of rules, documents, charity companies, and letters written by lawyers (yes, still the above).

This is a choice. If you're part of a 200+ person theme camp, yes, you're opting into some bureaucracy needed to make sure the requisite cats get herded and the mission of that camp happens. Grab three friends to do your own thing and you can live blissfully paperwork free, if you so choose. Camps are not a one-size-fits-all model.

This is like joining a FAANG and then complaining about layers of management. Don't like it? Startups are callin'. Or even something in-between.

> It’s a celebration in mediocrity. Most things that happen are very mediocre at best. They just do it because you’re supposed to give something, so they give something mediocre.

Doing literally anything in that environment is hard, so mediocrity is sort of par for the course. That said, the best hot dog I've ever had was in many ways the shittiest hot dog. But it appeared out in deep playa when I was tired and starving and far from camp, and felt like a small miracle. It teaches you to appreciate the simple things and the kindness of strangers, if you let it.

> Obviously most of it is all about seeing and being seen, engaging in the pleasures of sensual experiences on offer.

I'm not sure how you managed to make it out there twice and come away thinking that this is the point. I feel like if you spent fifteen minutes reading about the burn, you'd immediately dispel yourself of this.

> The best thing about it imo is the cycling around where you can mostly just get away from the degeneracy that exists.

Reading between the lines at your conservatism, I can't really help but wonder what you thought you were going to get out of a counter-culture event that emphasizes freedom of expression. You didn't think us queerdos were going to be up in that shit makin' you uncomfortable, or telling you not to creep on your campmates? And then you did it TWICE? Big oofs.

The funny thing is that in spite of reinventing so much of it, the event still feels dangerous and leaves you to make your own decisions.

Burning Man still enables and allows dangerous art that you can fuck up your shit on. The organization has an interesting take on this: they allow dangerous art, so long as it looks as dangerous as it is. They don't want participants to be surprised that something was dangerous, because they want you to be able to do your own reasonable risk assessment.

(Though, I think the really impressive installations are the ones that look/feel more dangerous than they actually are.)

For what it's worth, I think this is a great exercise that should be undertaken now and again: you may not realize the ways in which a system is good or bad until you endeavor to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch.

In the case of Burning Man, there's structure that let's people be mostly safe by default, while supporting some reasonable risk taking. In the case of crypto, I think we've seen use cases where there's value in having a means of storing and transferring wealth outside of government control, which we saw the benefits of early on as governments tried to financially wall off groups like Wikileaks.

Does that mean we want all of the safe guards gone? No. Does that necessarily mean society and its structures are perfect and should never change? I think obviously, also no.

That's a great point, five minute old account.

>you used the word ‘shape’ in the abstract sense, something I never came across until Claude vibecoding came along. Was it common / did you use ‘shape’ in the abstract sense before say 2025?

As far as I can remember, this has been fairly common in tech (or at least where I've worked) for some time, though it's possible that my memory here is a bit fuzzy. I will say that my spouse has often commented that "Claude talks like you", which I suspect is because it is trained on a lot of language specific to the tech world.

>My question is, does your conception of data models in the abstract come from a formal academic course, like an algo’s & data structures course, or from trade-knowledge acquired through the practitioner grapevine?

I have worked for over a decade on the telemetry for a specific major product that most people have probably used, and shepherded it through a major re-architecture, so most of this is from my career. I came in right after it was built and witnessed the pain as things had been layered on over a long period of time as the product evolved, so I've just witnessed all the pointy bits where naive early decisions can come back to bite you later.

>But is it really what we want, machines with the same defects as humans?

Sort of, actually. I think we humans actually have some intuition that we'd be more effective if our cognition were augmented more directly by machine strengths: the ability to run precise calculations, more memory, ability to look facts in some sort of knowledge graph.

I think we're on the right track, but instead of augmenting humans with machine strengths, we're building intelligence in hardware in a way where it can access that augmentation. Plus, then we can quickly distribute updates, run parallel instances, etc.

If intelligence is compression, and hallucinations are essentially loss, then as the models grow in size performance (at least as far as hallucinations) should reduce. Or we'll get things fast enough that we can afford to stop relying on model weights for memory and check an increasingly larger set of discrete facts as part of reasoning.

Right now, the models are making trade-offs. As compute grows, and inference gets faster, we can make fewer of those trade-offs and start to use the unique strengths of machines to fill the gaps we're seeing, I suspect.

>Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do.

I was working on a side project recently. I had spent months designing the data model in my spare time, thinking through how to make it as elegant and durable to change as possible in the long term, since (if I launched it) the repercussions for getting it wrong would be significant.

Once I had a working design, it probably would have been several more months to build a working prototype and start testing it.

Instead, Claude knocked out the prototype for me in an afternoon. And it immediately became clear that it didn't work: not because the data model didn't solve all the problems I wanted it to solve, but because it didn't fit the shape of how I quickly learned a normal person would need/want to interact with the product. I was so focused on the long term, that I never thought about what the first five minutes of a user with hands on the thing would need. And the changes needed would be significant.

Maybe there's some variable reward mechanism. But I sure was glad to be able to pull that particular slot machine handle and learn that than waste even more of my time on what was a dead end.

Certainly. The singularity sort of assumes that there is not a fixed limit to intelligence, or at least that if there is, it's quite a ways away. That may not be true.

>No. People have an inner monologue, partial results and ideas and they remember that.

Yes, but the vast, vast majority of decisions you make either don't take place via an inner monologue, or include details that were not actively/consciously "thought" and reasoned with in your inner monologue.

And yet, when asked why you did something, you're not likely to respond "sorry, that decision was made subconsciously". Instead, you use your inner monologue to try to backfill in a reason why. That reason may be correct, or it may not be. You don't actually know, since you have new data that may be updating your own internal state as you try to rationalize it after the fact.

Exactly. I am becoming increasingly convinced that this is actually just a part of how intelligence/cognition works.

It doesn't imply that. The singularity is just the inflection point.