metacritic12

If I didn't know any better, I would think this is a thinly veiled marketing piece by "Codeberg", a company that I never heard of until this headline.

https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Possibly because OP might have one-shot vibe-coded this app with a single sentence as an LLM wrapper.

Flagging for clickbait title. It's deliberately obfuscating to intrigue users into clicking.

A better plain title would be

Strata: An LLM App that Tells You If Your Hiking Route Today is Likely Safe.

"Accidentally taking someone's bike thinking it was your"

How often does this actually happen in reality versus it being trotted out as a backstory after being caught?

Seems like it's not pleasant, and the author says in theory it could be as low of a bar as getting into a heated argument; but the author never discloses his actual charge, which I think is critical context.

If he stabbed someone and got this treatment, it would be very different than if he had a loud but normal argument you might see in any big box store in the US.

That he doesn't go on to protest why he got locked up makes me think it was something more serious.

Some time ago (can't easily find it anymore) there was a expose on UK prisons, which was interesting without even knowing what crime the prisoner was convicted of, but turns out it was abuse of a relative.

When I go to their homepage, I get a Cloudflare SSL handshake failed error -- feels like a classical vibecode bug.

^ For what it's worth, just a note that the above paragraphs are AI generated, as can be easily inferred by the author's replies below.

Given the lack of denial to the straightforward question, you're probably safe in reading this as "yes it was indeed AI generated".

Good catch. Additionally, one of the authors on this is just a student at UWisc, and the other author is also not a professional researcher but instead an author of popular books.

This is not an ad-hominum, but does put into question the statistical training backgrounds of both of these authors to accurate assess the data.

Anthropic has also been the biggest anti-China LLM in a long while, so it's possible they're using an opportunistic hack (potentially involving actual Chinese IP addresses) as another way to push their agenda.

Honestly, I'm fine with Google doing it. If not them, then some regulatory arbitrage startup will do it with way more de-facto scam and fraud. Google is not some morale arbiter for the long arc of technology -- look at how they gatekept their LLM technology and got wrecked by the people who actually commericalized it: OpenAI.

I was surprised to note at the end of the article it's written by Cade Metz, the same writer who doxxed Scott Alexander. I wonder if this turn to human interest pieces is a fallout from that scandal.

Would it also be true to say:

AI will change the world, but not in the way the OP (Thomas Hunter) thinks.

--

The first statement, AI will change the world, is low surprise and clearly true already.

The second statement, not in the way X thinks, is also low surprise, because most technologies have very unpredictable impacts, especially if it is "close to singularity" or the singularity.

The guide starts with the presumption they gained power through democratic elections. Neither China nor most other historic authoritarian regimes started this way.

(Nazi Germany and Putin's Russia being the classical examples of democracies going authoritarian).

Is this really an authoritarian regime survival guide or a not-too-hidden jab at the Trump presidency?

Like I don't see too many of the items applying to classically authoritarian regimes like China.

Let's apply the guide's own advice:

Always think critically, fact-check and point out the truth, expose ignorance with facts.

The guide after all is written by Eastern / Europeans, the people is getting expropriated the most by Trump, in January 2017, right as Trump got elected and the democratic "resistance" movement was all the range. (Surprisingly, Trump 2 is even more extreme, and no more talk of resistance).

But everyone will upgrade to AES-256 (many system already has), and that truly will be the final symmetric algo even with moore's law.

Yeah it has terrible optics, yet it's clearly going to be normalized and come. The question is who does it and what is the organization of it. If this company doesn't do it, the next will.

In certain roles, AI micromanagement clearly will create higher performance. Add the marketplace of capitalism and it'll all compete away.

There are certain roles, like artists, where this is the wrong solution wholly: monitoring whether an artist is at her desk will create badly performing artists, and this will show. In these roles, these tools won't apply.

I would say the critics are already on average proven wrong in the sense that they were betting on something that had a prior of 90% chance of being true. And now those odds might be say 50%. If they were betting people, they would have lost half their money already, while the people betting it would come true have already made 4x. In that competitive sense, they're already wrong.

It takes little skill to predict something like "it won't snow on New York on 3/15/2025". Whereas if you said it will snow on 3/15/2025, and it's true, that's skill.

for those curious why an app would name itself Little Red Book despite the association, obviously they could have been better about the naming, but they're actually not the same name in either language:

The social media app Xiaohongshu (小红书) does literally translate to "little red book" in English. However, this is completely different from Mao's famous work, which was never called this in Chinese. Mao's book was informally known as "Hongbaoshu" (红宝书) meaning "red treasured book" and formally titled "Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong" (毛主席语录).

The apparent connection in English comes from translators using "Little Red Book" for both terms (maybe due to training or an agenda? who knows, choosing word-by-word translation for one and popular translation for another), even though they're distinct and unrelated in the original Chinese, and of course in the official desired English "RedNote" too.

Yeah but "little red book" (xiaohongshu) in mandarin is not actually how the original Mao Little Red Book is called in Mandarin, either formally or informally. Informally in mandarin it's called hongbaoshu (literally "red cover book" and formally, as you can imagine, is like Quotes from Chairman Mao).

So this is a case of translators with an agenda translating two phrases with different original mandarin renditions (hongbaoshu and xiaohongshu), and picking and choosing the style of translation (base on usage vs based on character) to get the English translation to merge both of them as "Little Red Book".

Doesn't this "explanation" just shift the question to what is stiffness? Like it refactored the question but didn't actually explain it.

Previously, we had statement "the weak force is short range". In order to explain it, we had to invent a new concept "stiffness" that is treated as a primitive and not explained in terms of other easy primitives, and then we get to "accurately" say that the weak force is short due to stiffness.

I grant the OP that stiffness might be hard to explain, but then why not just say "the weak force is short range -- and just take that as an axiom for now".

In practice it was a targetted ban probably because this video got traction.

Analogously, with a lot of grey area stuff, a person can almost surely get away with it ... but not if they post it online and it gets attention.

Probably some amount of customer service. Banks are at their distrection then on whether they want to tell you or not -- just like for any other reason for dropping you as a customer.

I guess more important than empirically whether banks tell you, it's that it should be their right to tell you if they want.

The middle ground seems to be allowing SARs (which are analogous to tips to police officers), but not requiring banks keep them secret from the customer. The bank could decide to do so, but also could decide not to, like any other speech.

Absolutely, it's one of the most undemocratic, potentially violative of 1st amendment laws that is out there.

This is from the point of view that money laundering as a law is essentially thoughtcrime. The police state has done an orwellian job of normalizing not privacy, but instead telling the government the reason you are doing every transaction. Then, any attempt to not tell the government is "money laundering".

Of course, if you are the state, the powers of this tool are alluring. Imagine if the state could compel citizens to write down what they're thinking, and compel justifications for everything they do in life. Think of how many crimes we could solve! Think of how many bad folks we can catch ahead of time!

The incoming administration doesn't seem to really be pro upregulating anything. In fact core members of their team believe the firefighters have had way too much political power already in building requirements, etc.

I don't think reciprocation can be analyzed in a dynamic setting like that.

Another version of this is, what happens if the younger generation doesn't take the deal -- do they get fired? Keeping them on is a form of reciprocation, even if bleak.

Likewise, is there an implicit deal where when the young get old, they get to work less? If so, it is eventually reciprocated.

I do think it is not reciprocated instantaneously.

Do you also think $40K a year for Hubspot is insane? What about people who pay $1k in order to work on a field for 4 hours hitting a small ball with a stick?

The truth is that there are people who value the marginal performance -- if you think it's insane, clearly it's not for you.

The sneeze example is contrived because in English, sneeze is both phonetic and a word with common occurence.

A better example might involve a common English word with a wierd, non-phonetic spelling. A word that you might imagine it forgivable for even someone who recieved an English PhD to misspell. After all Chinese is a seperate language from English and it is neccessary for it to be evaluated in its own context.

If you think this definetly couldn't happen in English, take a look again at this post -- for it contains eight outright, unambiguous, misspellings of common English words that I would not be surprised if even an English PhD from Harvard made on occassion, especially if your choice of three students were unlucky and they were having embarassingly bad days. (After all, English PhDs isn't the study of spelling, it's the study of literature).

Ars has gone down the ragebait rabbit hole, which is perfectly rational, though they do it with technical stories, which people don't expect so much baiting.

Basically the carriers are making the standard libertarian argument, which makes sense. If you block locking, you already know what happens: we already know cell phone prices unlocked. The cell carriers are in essence capital providers and they know how to collect money from their customers.