RickS

Really rewarding keyboard UX on this. Typing felt great. I couldn't figure out how to shuffle or give up via the keyboard. Shuffle with escape would make sense.

Barring the retry thing, n=1 on all models? Am I misreading, or is this a joke?

Variance in quality on these things is so, so high.

US citizens to remain nonviolent at any cost, issue strongly worded internet comments, and find themselves a little less free every day.

Toggle the "prefer reduced motion" accessibility setting if on mac

I regret not signing up for Discord when they first introduced facial recognition and middle schoolers were trivially spoofing their ID checks with meme pics.

There's really something to be said for greedily signing up for most things and trying to get grandfathered before the zipcuffs tighten.

IRL, though, fuck this. Home depot added flock cams and broad facial recognition, grocery store installed turnstiles, haven't stepped foot in either since. I'm just dropping out of the IRL retail economy left and right.

If you watch the video (which is classic and the real content here), the lawyer cedes the second half to a career detective, who agrees with him in full.

What happened was the set of available moves and rewards has incrementally changed. What has not changed is that nerds are humans, and humans are terrible at resisting increases in status, power, wealth, etc. If the glorified nerds of the past had been offered the same roads to status and power, they would have taken them.

This reminds me of the way people think of the olden days when stuff was made of real wood and metal as "we had integrity! people built things to last!", projecting intentionality and generosity onto to the same machinery that built agent orange or rube goldberg machines for cigarette smoke to avoid liability for killing millions of people. We didn't build things out of metal because we had integrity, we did it because we didn't yet have advanced petroleum-derived plastics and shit. If they did, they'd have done that instead.

Reminds me of the difference between "peaceful" (capable of harm, electing not to be harmful) and "harmless" (incapable of harm even if you wanted to). I think it's a mistake to imagine the nerds of the past as peaceful. In terms of status, power acquisition, etc, they were harmless. Had you handed them the tools and understanding of today, they'd have acted no different, IMO.

It is hard. Much harder than regular software work. A few things need to line up: model iteration speed, task chunk size, and your own context window and comprehension abilities. Too slow and you lose interest. Too easy and it's just tedious riffing. Too large and you're burned out by reviewing giant complicated walls of text. Etc. The bites have to be the right size and speed for both you and the LLM.

In the few instances I've been able to achieve really joyful flow state, there are usually two simultaneous workstreams, plus or minus one. They're usually working towards a large goal that I roughly know how to judge, in digestible bites.

For example, sequentially modifying the UI in a series of operations towards an overarching goal, where it's easy to tell if a step worked, and what the next step should be, but where you're not sure exactly what you want, so there's some curiosity and discovery rather than just feeding the bot tiny instructions. I try to keep the two workstreams from overlapping. If both streams start fighting over a file they both dirty, things go south fast.

Adjusting your prefs/harness/etc for model terseness goes a LONG way. Context quality is absolutely everything. A good context "seed" can go back and forth for many turns cleanly and with focus, and even compact successfully once or twice. A bad seed will be annoying to work with from the jump, will thrash towards compaction faster, at which point it gets even worse. This is difficult to troubleshoot objectively, but I'll frequently restart conversations if I don't like the vibe of the first couple turns. It's made harder by constant model churn. Until opus 4.8, I ran opus/sonnet 4.5 high for a long time in large part for continuity of intuition, if that makes sense.

There are also many elements of human knowledge management that make a difference. I've found "append only" to be a magic word, generating markdown logs of changes, or learnings, etc. Whatever workflows create visibility and resumability so that you can return from a spell away and get up to speed effectively. Manually keeping your own dev log alongside the session sometimes helps, makes things sticky and ensures you understand what's happening.

But it's hard. Feels incredible when it goes well, but going well feels very nearly random, and whittling towards reproducibility can be very mentally draining, in terms of both energy and morale.

Lesswrong for both sidebars: the heading based TOC on the left, and the margin notes on the right: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bJ2haLkcGeLtTWaD5/welcome-to...

For interactive / code snippets Maxime Heckel: https://blog.maximeheckel.com/posts/the-study-of-shaders-wit...

Honorable mentions Maggie Applebaum https://maggieappleton.com/ai-enlightenment Marek Chotoborski https://zanlib.dev/blog/number-inputs-in-react/

Line width, sane fonts, avoiding clever shit unless very polished, gets you a long way.

This just makes sense. A normal day contains dozens of experiences that could be bettered by cheap actions that I am awful at predicting or imagining. I had an argument with a partner at one point where I was baffled and basically at a loss, asked chatgpt, and it spit back a response that seemed... okay. I adapted it into my own voice, keeping only what was sincere, etc (not just dumping LLM slop at another human, which is fucked, more like using it to coarsely choose a vector/filter through a big cloud of things I actually believe). My partner's response was incredible. It completely diffused the situation and my they were pleasantly surprised. Without the LLM, I would have been entirely unable to conceive of and walk that happy path.

The problems we have with our psychology often involve deviation from the normal or desirable state, so a robot that spits out a cheap reversion to the mean can be really helpful.

My flavor of this is somewhat autism-coded, but it generalizes well. EG people who aren't used to negotiating, valuing themselves, etc. Obviously LLMs output hallucinated dogshit and occasionally dangerous nonsense.

But it must be admitted: a lot of our psychological hiccups can be solved by the thoughtless, typical advice.

38% putting them over professionals is nuts though. I would much rather have the real thing, but it's $200/hr and asleep at 3am.\

Worked great for me. Big recommend. "Cured" is mostly an unspecifiable state, and while certainly there's lots still wrong with me, I am healed far beyond my expectations at the outset, so increment your count by one.

There's a PG essay related to this: https://paulgraham.com/orth.html

Rich people aren't scared of plastic guns, that's completely unrelated. This is drone legislation in disguise. They passed a bunch of import laws on new parts, motors, etc from overseas within the last year or so too. The US is wholly unprepared for the drone warfare of 2020, let alone 2030, and is playing catchup, but cannot come out and say as much, because then everyone would get ideas. Just as "think of the children" is understood by all to be a fabricated excuse for what is actually "systematically deanonymize and surveil all inconvenient adults", this is using a less objectionable goal they don't care about as a foothold for a thing that would be difficult to argue for directly.

Google has given a public statement about this category of incident (to wit: cloud provider imperils customer's operations by way of automated decision deliberately designed to withhold recourse).

That statement is the last 15 or so years.

I agree, experience this, love it, etc.

The "0% product hunt, 100% show and tell" bit is one of the benefits of an ecosystem with painfully high upfront entry costs.

Does anyone know of an active forum of any kind (discord, reddit, phpbb, mailing list, whatever) for people who are building personal applications like this for love of the game, which takes hardline stances about desirable vs undesirable motives and behaviors, and enforces high entry/participation costs in exchange for unusually low quantities of transient grifters and self-interested status seeking by day-old accounts?

These comments are not only clearly, poorly botted, but they're uniquely botted, which IMO shifts blame away from general botting of HN, and towards ombedzi purposefully botting his own post after it failed to get organic traction.

This is worsened by ombedzi replying to most of these comments as though they were made in earnest: any person who can't identify these comments as bots is a person whose code I have no interest in running.

gtfo

I wonder if it's righthanded mouse users? I'm using a vertical ergo mouse beneath my monitor, and your comment made me realize that it's quite similar to if I just.. reached for the scrollbar and pulled it. As opposed to having to cross the whole screen, metaphorically.

There's also the distraction factor. Maybe having the bar moving on the left edge competes with moving from line to line, and the general anchoring edge of the F shaped reading pattern.

Total speculation on my part.

Given the iOS-ification of macOS, the macOS-ification of Android is a good thing. If this shrinks well and encourages more netbook form factors or desktop norms on tablets, even better.

For as cursed as our timeline is, "Linux desktop is solid, LLMs exempt you from the fiddly bits, and valve fixed gaming" was not on my bingo card 10 years ago, but hot damn, we just might be okay.

That's fair, I agree. But anything that can be contorted into a billboard will be, so that shortcoming is more feature than bug, at least for me. They're just a map, and that's it, which ~~keeps~~ kept them on the right-ish side of Goodhart's law.

That's a response to an opinion I don't hold, but I could have been more clear. The claim I'm making is about the fitness to hold office. Specifically: septo/octogenarians belong at the ballot box, but not on the ballot. If you'd like to dissuade me of something, that's the meat of it.

heh. Could the apple maps team ever be paid a higher compliment? They really, truly, made it. I remember 15 years ago when apple maps was an absolute laughingstock that couldn't hold a candle to the big guys. But look at them now.

They made it genuinely good. It'd been my only map app for years until I downloaded google maps for a road trip and was perplexed by all the squares I didn't ask for telling me about Arby's and Toyota dealers. "People tolerate this?!"

Long enough to be the villain.

I have trouble predicting how public sentiment will evolve over time.

I'm not that young, and still and the last 10 years have left me with an absolutely blistering distrust of the 70+ crowd on any matter pertaining to positions of authority. I'd like to see ~67 and ~72 become the other 18 and 21: hard lines beyond which the law progressively rescinds the presumption of total competence.

It's not a pretty solution. There are certainly some 14 year olds who are more deserving of a drivers license than many of legal age. I would welcome a world where we can actually establish and enforce criteria that allow us to move beyond such crude numeric thresholds. But in the meantime, the bulk of us need protection from statistics. Desperately.

Is that a claudeism? IMO that's a perfectly natural trope that'd be at home in my voice or any of a million generic blog people I've read since long before AI. It is a linguistic trope, sure, but that's an unrelated criticism.

The tone of this article is genuinely repulsive to me.

I would be excited to read more about this exact set of topics, but only from an author who is not so purposefully snide.

Yikes. This author wrote a thing to make people feel bad and it worked. Logging off for awhile.

That chart is comparing point in present time, not point in generation-relative time. IE zoomers at ~25 mills at ~40. If you were to approximately age sync the red and yellow lines on that chart, by moving their start dates to the same point, the red line is higher.

lmao at the idea of figma integrations, categorically. I don't ever want to look at figma again in my life. figma is what people used to ideate quickly because they couldn't build directly in the browser. we can now ideate quickly while working directly in the browser. figma's entire raison d'etre is dinosaur tier over.

With that said, this seems like it's just claude code + simplified devtools in a container? Will need to spend more time with it to see how EG commenting influences things, but 5 minutes in, this seems like it's needless formalization on top of how I already used claude for deisgn

I gotta say, jj was not something that interested me before, but that's a compelling pitch.

Can't believe there aren't more comments on this. I see you've retried at least once too. Fair IMO, this is a good post. Maybe something like "Claude Code binary reveals intentional plan mode degradation" or similar, since IMO the interesting bits are 1. exploring the binary to find this info and 2. actually having receipts.

With that said... do you have receipts? You have a screenshot of what looks like LLM output. For an accusation in this category, I'd expect more info on what exactly is necessary to replicate these findings, ideally in a way that's not susceptible to LLM hallucination / confirmation bias. As a bonus, that depth will probably make it a more compelling post in general.

Hope this gets some viz.

I (36) feel simultaneously as old and as young as I've felt since being an actual fresh grad / student.

Old because I can see behind the curtain now. Things feel different than they did when I first started working in tech around 2006-2008. So much of the fixation on recurring revenue, rent-seeking, optimization at all costs, dark patterns, manufactured addiction... I watched the industry as it slowly stumbled into these ideas, leaned in, and ultimately perfected them. But when I read accounts from people older than I am, they all have their version of this comment. The early days of the PC era and browser wars had no shortage of dark shit. It's not like corporate fuckery wasn't rampant in the 80s or 90s. I was just too young and dumb and optimistic to understand most of it. I've gotten much more cynical in the last ~15 years.

I feel young because AI tech actually feels new and promising and exciting in ways I haven't seen since the dawn of mobile and web2.0. There's suddenly this vast new surface area for innovation, a bleak geopolitical landscape, and a palpable rush to create. 2008-2012ish kinda sucked, economically. The fallout from GWOT + GFC, OWS, snowden leaks, etc. The nerdosphere had this collective feeling that the jaws were tightening around us. And yet the technology was moving so fast, was enabling whole new ways of interacting between people and machines. You could tell that the future was going to be completely wild, but it was early enough that it had to be built, and there was a frenzy of excitement, like we'd just been set loose across the louisiana purchase to figure out what was possible in a whole new kind of environment.

It was an oasis. A refuge from everything else that felt broken in every other part of the world. You could just duck down and build shit nobody had ever seen before in a week, and people would take it seriously because there was this shared understanding that nobody knew what the new rules were yet, and the next big idea might come from anyone.

It feels like the best time in a long time for technologists who thrive on curiosity, optimism, and inventiveness. We've finally got a gold rush for experimental tinkerers! Crypto is just grift tech, NFTs were transparently stupid, AR/VR has mostly felt like a gimmick, etc. AI is already so useful, and it's only the beginning.

The market's delusional, the US government is horrific, megacorps are squeezing every drop out of anyone they can stuff in their mouth... but did anyone really think we had a future where that doesn't happen? That snowball's been rolling since long before I was born. I'm just stoked at the chance to get to experience technology as magic again for a little while along the way. Maybe that's a cope. Or escapism. IDK, fuck it. So far, it's nice. The bad shit I've been expecting for many years. The good shit surprised me.