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pllbnk

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Also, where do I store the backup Yubikey, or any other pass key owning device for that matter? It has to be easily accessible to set up the pass keys, but also safe from accidents like house fire.

There's a strange tension where I want to use pass keys because they are easy to use but also they are easy to lose, so I choose a KeePass synced over cloud and deal with a bit of a hassle by having to copy/paste my passwords.

I'm in Europe. I have been tracking my all expenses to the cent religiously since 2010 in Excel sheets. I also haven't changed my grocery habits much since around 2020, except very recently when I actually started looking at the deals (discounts) and buying more generic stuff. We haven't been eating out much (~5 times per month on average) Obviously, it varies month-by-month but my family's (2 adults, not counting the child) expenses on food have risen by around 100% since 2022.

Thanks for the perspective. I have intuitively thought adults live at their parents' mostly out of need and much less often out of choice. The dynamics change in the latter case as two independent adults can make an agreement on how they see their relationship.

I understand that such a game of life might be beneficial for a child. But I would like to understand the reasoning to do that with an adult.

I know other fathers that charge their adult children rent, keep the money, and then gift it to them at the wedding or to help them buy a house.

This looks like a game which should have ended by the time a child is an adult.

I am raising a very young child so I am very concerned about the future and constantly thinking what's the right way to raise him.

I can’t understand morally or financially how can parents charge anything of their children. Not judging it, just honestly can’t understand it. Isn’t it the parents’ responsibility to build the foundation for their children and keep building it until it’s there? I am viewing it from a moral angle where it’s the parents’ selfish choice to have a child so they must take full responsibility until a child is or feels that they can be independent.

I think it's an important distinction whether crime stops happening after all criminals are locked up or after preventative measures are taken to prevent criminal activity happening in the first place.

When criminals are locked up, they will get released and many of them don't have anything else to do other than returning to do crimes, with gained experience from the previous failures.

But it's possible to reduce crime by preventing it. Do not let dangerous districts form, build communities, reduce access to weapons and so on.

Precursor 9 days ago

I have been noticing a lot of Cloudflare false positives where it keeps spinning on my sessions never actually redirecting me to the underlying page. If they keep just vibe coding and releasing a new solution every day, I am afraid it will be reflected in their services quality.

Exactly. AAA games are not needed to have fun. I and my wife are having a lot of fun playing Dr. Mario or Street Fighter (the original one) on our 4K TV.

Meta is a private organization subject to the laws of the countries it operates in. Concentration camps are government entities, legalized by the country. Even then it's not always the choice of a person whether to comply the orders. But let's not go into extremes, they don't help the discussion.

I think that Anthropic is gaslighting us with their new model releases. Specifically, I think they have some good base model and are just fine-tuning it until they achieve desired outcome, or the desired outcome is achieved accidentally as part of fine-tuning. My theory is based on the fact that as a long-term (if you can call it that way) Claude user I keep noticing the same patterns it outputs. It's not trivial but certainly possible to see when something has been written by Claude because it has a different style than GPT.

However they have quite good harness in their backend which is the actual model.

Eventually the costs of running inference will catch up to us, then we will see. But LLMs are really expensive and it is possible that with the incredible amounts of code they generatr it might become too expensive for them to keep up with it. There should be some kind of equilibrium which might take a while to reach but I think knowledge work won't disappear.

However many people have rightfully been saying it for years before LLMs that many so-called software engineers had no business in this field because for a lot of them it was just a way to earn more money than peers. It's not an issue by itself, just a rational human choice but the fact that it was possible was just because of unhealthy economic conditions.

I have been wondering whether Anthropic are just gaslighting everyone with new model releases while in reality it's just the same base model with some internal knobs tuned more and more up with every new release to provide longer and longer thinking threads and outputs.

My speculative assumption is that these long thinking threads and self-checking tend to produce somewhat better output at the price of huge price increases due to the token burn.

My experience is that with every new release it's getting slower but not necessarily better. I have some projects where I review everything that the agents code - these projects look generally fine because I keep them in line. There are also a few projects that I just vibe code and focus on the result (sometimes I want to pull my hair out because of constant stream of stupid bugs) and don't look at the code.

Well, today I gave Fable a try on one of the vibe-coded projects. It simply had to write a couple Python scripts 400-500 lines each. It did and they worked after a few iterations but I decided to look at the code it produced. There were weird constants that might (and will) break the code when the requirements will change. The code itself is unreadable and a total mess. If it would write a well-structured code in the first place, I believe it would be more efficient in working with that code too.

I have serious considerations how far will I be able to go with just the pure vibe coding. My projects are small one-person projects and so far I am able to push through but I hardly see how far will I be able to go before technical debt outgrows the value the code produces.

I fondly remember the times of Opus 4.5 where it was still (to my memory) reasonably fast and malleable.

I have been building a small web app for my family recently. I was planning to host it on my own server and not do any fancy reactive and asynchronous stuff. It was a simple multi-page app with simple forms and links. And it sucked because we didn’t know who was doing what live, we needed to refresh pages needlessly just to see if something has changed. Funny that it seemed fine while I have been the only user testing the app but once we got more family members in what seemed like “production ready” it was immediately obvious that it needed interactivity.

I see where they are going but have doubts regarding the long-term success. Currently I use LLMs (definitely not Google) and search (mostly Google) to verify what LLMs say if I care by finding trusted sources.

Maybe it will work in the beginning until non-technical users realize that LLMs hallucinate very often (unless Google solved it somehow, but probably they didn't because they would have said so), they will lose trust in the results and go back to good old indexed search engines.

Maybe I am coping but thinking from my own experience.

AI is too expensive 2 months ago

I don't know what it is but I feel there is some sort of logical fallacy here.

Ed Zitron is an analyst. His viewpoint is that AI is bad for whatever reasons and he does his job by trying to uncover those reasons and does a solid work. He presents a lot of insider knowledge that would otherwise be left unheard.

What are his alternatives? To stop claiming that AI is bad and pivot to "AI is good" writing? To quit writing entirely? To continue writing but in the beginning of each article list the things that he was wrong about in the past? What if it's too early for the things that seem to have been predicted incorrectly by him to materialize and in the end he will appear correct?

I think it's a benefit for society to hear the other side. There are plenty of pro-AI advocates.

capital will spread like plasmodium fungus into every unoccupied crag and niche in the economy not yet touched by AI

I guess it's a metaphor for the "hugely successful" trickle-down economics we have been witnessing.

Not necessarily. The government controls prices, the government assigns _everyone_ some work no matter how meaningless it is; so instead of one street sweeper we would get 10. Everybody is paid just enough to live and have work assigned to not slack (I don't believe in utopia where money is paid for doing nothing because this utopia sounds extremely dystopian). I know just a place where people lived like that for 40-something years - Soviet Union! It wasn't terrible for majority, it wasn't great either. Also, it didn't last that long because it was unsustainable.

Our AI overlords think that they will be able to just prompt their LLMs to optimize this regime and make it last but their stupid LLMs can't yet figure out whether to take a car to the carwash or to go by foot, so they are not even close to that.

What's bad for us is that they are now wealthy enough to keep dragging us into this dystopia for a while until something changes.

My guess is as good as anyone's. But I think NATO was used as an excuse for war because it's a military (although defense) alliance. It would be impossible to justify war for country joining the EU.

As for the golden ticket metaphor, I agree, but when the country is so economically and institutionally behind than the rest of the EU, this would still benefit them a lot. All Eastern countries experienced big emigration but a lot of the citizens previously having emigrated are now returning.

Simple - you ask an LLM to fix it. It would be the same hard dependency on a programmer if you hired someone to write code for you as they would need to maintain it and would cost you. LLMs might possibly be interchanged easier than human engineers.

I think it's simpler than that and isn't talked much. Ukraine has been on a direct path to join European Union. Russians and Ukrainians have had significant ties - parts of families living in one country, parts in another, marriages, shared language, given that all Ukrainians know Russian and a lot of them have even spoken Russian at home at least until the war broke out.

Putin couldn't let Ukrainians join the EU, start getting all the EU fund money and actually started living like Europeans. Russian population would see that at a large scale and start asking questions. He couldn't get back the influence over the country diplomatically so he resorted to terror.

Edit: I also wanted to add that this was the reason Putin and other Russian propagandists have been calling Ukrainians the brotherly nation (to show them how they care about them), the nazis (to show that their government is harmful) and that Ukraine doesn't even exist as a country (to show that they should all be the same people under the same borders).

Learning isn't. Models are not learning, it's just a metaphor for the lack of better words to describe the process of ingesting data and adjusting weights accordingly.

My point is, they took all this data for free without paying the authors and crammed it into the models. And once it's inside the model the proof of copyright violation disappears.

Claude has a research mode. I tried using it multiple times in the domains that I know quite well. Basically, used it with the hopes to save me time by aggregating the information I needed. I used it multiple times with different approaches and it never did anything useful. Full of factually incorrect and outdated information. I know that I could never hope to even slightly trust it for anything I don't have knowledge in.