elephanlemon

I lost all my goodwill for Anthropic the moment I read the bit about how the model would intentionally degrade its performance without telling the user (in other words, sabotage) if it detected frontier level AI research. How could I know it wasn’t going to kick in as I used it to develop a regular ML model? How can I trust such a system? It’s good that they walked it back but I’m looking to jump ship now.

StackOverflow was great when I was a very junior dev working on JavaScript apps. Anytime I ran into a roadblock, there was often a relevant post there to help me. As I become more competent though, I realized that reading the documentation directly was usually a much better way to get answers to my questions, and I stopped visiting.

Any gun company caught funding anything remotely anti-2A would be met with an unbelievably negative reaction from the firearms community and face boycotts and massive reputational damage. It absolutely would not be worth it for them to do this. I can maybe see the arguments that perhaps it’s really a proxy for the anti right to repair groups, but absolutely not the firearms manufacturers.

Some examples of skills you could develop:

-formal verification

-computational fluid dynamics

-control theory

-materials science

-graphics

I think what I’m suggesting is: consider being more than just a software engineer. Become a software engineer with expertise in other fields. Or a software engineer AND a fluid simulation engineer. This might not make sense for someone who currently works at say a business SaaS company, but how much longer are those jobs going to be around?

But this is also a great time to be building your own business, in which case you may want to develop business related skills.

IMO we are currently in the ENIAC era of LLMs. Perhaps there will be a brief moment where things get worse, but long term the cost of these things will go way down.

Practicing code specifically is one of many options for engineers right now. How about other skills? For example, now seems like a good opportunity to start developing deep knowledge in a particular domain, so that when you build AI assisted software in that space, you’re competent enough to know if it’s doing the right thing. Or, develop a better understanding of a range of disciplines, so that when you go to solve problems, you’re aware of them and have more areas to draw from. (The combination is what Valve calls a T-shaped employee I believe.) Also a good opportunity to develop your interpersonal skills.

Frankly I think a lot of these people are politics first. How else do you explain the dissonance between Jesus’s teachings and their political opinions?

Shouldn’t the pharmaceutical company be held liable for insufficiently understanding the drug before releasing it? I don’t think I understand blaming a tool used in the process of designing it and not those who chose to release it.

Yeah, I feel that in most scenarios the liability should lie with the user of the LLM. If the developers of the LLMs become liable we can expect a much more over active refusal system, and very likely a robust chat surveillance system that looks for patterns in user requests. And likely more gate keeping of the premier models.

An unsecured loan just a straight cash loan. In my experience the interest rates are usually a fair bit higher than a vehicle loan, and I would assume the maximum amount is generally quite a bit lower.

amid rising demand for imaging

Okay so demand for imaging is up, so we should GET RID of the radiologists? How about we AUGMENT them with AI so that they can do their job better and faster? Why does it need to be either or?

Jeez, really gives you incentive not to use Gemini.

Google really needs to do something about this. It’s one thing for them to stop doing business with you, it’s another to withhold your data from you (in particular after they set up their services such that you’re inclined to store everything with them). Every time I read one of these stories it reminds me that I really need to break away from them.

I currently use Google Voice for almost all SMS 2FA after a nightmare scenario where I realized that the mobile carriers are entirely susceptible to social engineering and will happily port your number to an attacker’s phone. I planned to switch to Fi as they are probably the only one that this is not susceptible to… but if I were to lose both email and phone access I’d really be fucked.

Yesterday (pro plan) I ran one small conversation in which Claude did one set of three web searches, a very small conversation with no web search, and I added a single prompt to an existing long conversation. I was shocked to see after the last prompt that I had somehow hit my limit until 5:00pm. This account is not connected to an IDE or Code, super confusing.

Could someone (please not an LLM) attempt to steel man the following position for me:

Private equity is overall good for society

The entire blog is probably generated by OpenClawd or the like. I don’t think it’s a real story.

I’m confused by

This means on April 6, 2026, Gmail, LinkedIn, Microsoft and other Big Techs must stop scanning your private messages in the EU

It had already passed and started?

The haptic sensor is almost as good as the physical button, and the trade off of not having to worry about it breaking (which was likely after a few years with the physical ones) is well worth it for me.

Strongly disagree with this. Bad junior devs might be useless, but I’ve seen good ones absolutely tear through features. Junior devs fresh out of school typically have tons of energy, haven’t been burned out, and are serious about wanting to get work done.

Agree. I’d like more fine grained control of context and compaction. If you spend time debugging in the middle of a session, once you’ve fixed the bugs you ought to be able to remove everything related to fixing them out of context and continue as you had before you encountered them. (Right now depending on your IDE this can be quite annoying to do manually. And I’m not aware of any that allow you to snip it out if you’ve worked with the agent on other tasks afterwards.)

I think agents should manage their own context too. For example, if you’re working with a tool that dumps a lot of logged information into context, those logs should get pruned out after one or two more prompts.

Context should be thought of something that can be freely manipulated, rather than a stack that can only have things appended or removed from the end.

Interesting. I’m having anything on Gemini being profitable though, do you happen to have a source?

“You’re in luck if you’ve been hankering to have your wall connected to wifi.”

Great news, there’s finally going to be sufficient motivation for people to both build out and use open source alternatives.

Interesting how pedantic he is!

Then, too, Orwell had the technophobic fixation that every technological advance is a slide downhill. Thus, when his hero writes, he 'fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. He does so 'because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil'.

Presumably, the 'ink-pencil' is the ball-point pen that was coming into use at the time that 1984 was being written. This means that Orwell describes something as being written' with a real nib but being 'scratched' with a ball-point. This is, however, precisely the reverse of the truth. If you are old enough to remember steel pens, you will remember that they scratched fearsomely, and you know ball-points don't.

This is not science fiction, but a distorted nostalgia for a past that never was. I am surprised that Orwell stopped with the steel pen and that he didn't have Winston writing with a neat goose quill.

Intel Arc seems to be well liked, this seems to just be bad writing by Reuters. Unclear what is news here exactly as Demmers was hired a month ago…

“Gemini 3 Pro was often overloaded, which produced long spans of downtime that 2.5 Pro experienced much less often”

I was unclear if this meant that the API was overloaded or if he was on a subscription plan and had hit his limit for the moment. Although I think that the Gemini plans just use weekly limits, so I guess it must be API.

Double hyphen converts to em dash in Microsoft Word and I think some other places. I was taught that it was incorrect to use a hyphen in place of a dash, so I’ve always used em dashes -- sometimes I’ll just use two hyphens if the software doesn’t convert, like a forum :).

In Microsoft Word, double hyphens convert to em dashes. Seems to be the case on the iOS keyboard as well.

If you click through the lectures they are mentioned in several of them.

Damn, Microsoft really needs someone who cares to run Windows. Feels like they haven’t had that since 7. Seems like every change for the last 10+ years has just been to take high quality existing applications and replace them with modern junk that has half the functionality and none of the polish. Task manager, explorer, calculator, anything in control panel, even solitaire!