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kaoD

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But that's not very informative.

Levenshtein distance is not only a well-understood problem, it's small, self-contained, and extremely well-represented in the training data. The kind of problem where even small/bad models can excel. The golden standard for those tasks is just "use a library" so no wonder the beefy models are expensive: you're chartering a commercial airplane to go grocery shopping.

My personal benchmarks are software engineering tasks (ideally spanning multiple packages in a monorepo) composed of many small decisions that, compounded, make or break the implementation and long-term maintainability.

There's where even frontier models struggle, which makes comparisons meaningful.

A few words on DS4 2 months ago

nobody is sitting their waiting / watching the LLM code anyway

My personal experience is that for production-grade code you need to steer the agent more often than not... so yes, at least some of us are watching the LLM code.

Don't do that, and this problem evaporates.

Don't do that, and you solved nothing.

Either I'm missing what you mean, or half the comments here are missing the point of idempotency.

Let's say your server received this request twice within one minute:

    {
      items: [ { id: 123, amount: 1 } ],
      creditCardInfo: { ... }
    }
How can you tell from the server if that's a retry (think e.g. some reverse proxy crashed and the first request timed out, but the payment already went through to the user's CC)... or if the user just trying to purchase another item 123 because they forgot they needed 2?

There is simply no way to make the requests idempotent without an idempotency key. The only way to tell both situations apart is to key the requests by some UID. The HTTP verb is irrelevant.

Did I misunderstand what you meant?

You have to join the Union, after all

Uh, how? This might be a country thing but you don't have to join any union in my country. You do, if they represent your interests. Big companies have multiple, competing unions, and the anarchists (which refuse state subsidies and are fully self-funded) are pretty good at what they do.

If you have to join a union isn't that essentially a racket?

DeepSeek v4 3 months ago

There are different coalitions with varying compromises between them.

They all failed and were subsumed by the two (read: one) big groups in Europe. Far left and libertarians were crushed in the past two legislatures.

Now it's PfE's turn but the antibodies are already in the bloodstream (the two big groups are already signing their covenants to protect the oligarchy) and Trump did them dirty (they're now scrambling to distance themselvesb from USA's and Israel's ties) so they're DoA and will fail too.

This said: I understand your points, and thanks for the civil discussion.

DeepSeek v4 3 months ago

and they are wildly different

As someone from the "whole rest of the west", no, they're not different at all. Very minor details change, but the net outcome is the exact same and suffer from the exact same problems.

You can't escape the iron law of oligarchy.

Democracies are good at crushing dissent?

They're not only good: they are the best. You don't need to curb dissent by violence if you discourage dissent by social manipulation. It's the cheapest and most effective tactic: keeping the populace docile.

If you manage to equate "democracy" (again, quotes intended) with democracy (lack of quotes intended), most of the work is already done.

"What are you, antidemocratic!?"

"Don't blame me - I voted for Kodos"

There's a reason my country's system trembled when the bipartisan system was challenged as new parties emerged... but it was curbed within two legislatures without a single shot fired and now we're back to an even stronger bipartisan representation. Quite the fine job, actually.

We even have a name for this: "the state's sewers". They're very effective. There's a reason the state's armed forces routinely infiltrate unions and other citizens participation platforms.

DeepSeek v4 3 months ago

No, but believing our so-called "democracy" (quotes intended, read: "21st century western systems") is how you give people "a choice" is the moral high ground. That is your axiom, but it's often touted as a tautology.

The name says "demos" and "kratos" but names are names, not facts.

There are many ways to give people a choice and this one has proven to be quite ineffective at that, as it slowly devolved into a plutocracy/oligarchy. Iron law of oligarchy, yadda yadda.

What they are very effective at though: crushing dissent, calming the masses with a reassuring illusion of choice, and touting itself as the "one true way".

When I look at the outcomes I don't see any semblance of democracy, only a ritual dance/theatre show every 4 years. A farce as big as the "democratic" instruments on the PRC.

There's a reason this "democracy" is very diligent at discouraging association and unionizing. Those give actual power to the people (and with power comes choice). That's dangerous. People might start believing they can actually influence the outcomes.

"Don't blame me - I voted for Kodos"

everyone seems to have a radically different experience

What people have is radically different expectations.

I noticed engineers will review Claude's output and go "holy crap that's junior-level code". Coders will just commit because looking at the code is a waste of time. Move fast, break things, disrupt, drown yourself into tech debt: the investors won't care anyways.

And no, telling the agent to "be less shit" doesn't work. I have to painstakingly point every single shit architectural decision so Claude can even see and fix it. "Git gud" didn't work for people and doesn't work for LLMs.

It's not that the code isn't DRY, it's just DRY at the wrong points of abstraction, which is even worse than not being DRY. I manage to find better patterns in each and every single task I tell Claude or Copilot to autonomously work on, dropping tons of code in the process (DRY or not). You can't prompt Claude out of making these wrong decisions (at best from very basic mistakes) since they are too granular to even extract a rule.

This is what separates a senior from a junior.

If you think Claude writes good code either you're very lucky, I'm very bad at prompting, or your standards are too low.

Don't get me wrong. I love Claude Code, but it's just a tool in my belt, not an autonomous engineer. Seeing all these "Claude wrote 97% of my code" makes me shudder at the amount of crap I will have to maintain 5 years down the line.

I wonder if the child safety section "leaks" behavior into other risky topics, like malware analysis. I see overlap in how the reports mention that once the safety has been tripped it becomes even more reluctant to work, which seems to match the instructions here for child safety.