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Like we either live in a world with freedom or we don’t, and like many Americans who have come before, I’m willing to give my life to fighting for it. That’s the real plan America deserves, not some totalitarian dystopia where you think you know what’s good for me better than I do. A nation of free men, not a bunch of pussies who are so worried about what their grown up neighbors might do.

Absolutely yuck. Regardless of whatever other points were made, “A nation of free men, not a bunch of pussies” is a disgusting thing to say.

I actually do believe that prior to any intelligence explosion, a proliferation of strong local models is the best of all the not necessarily great options regarding the future of AI. So in this sense I am in agreement with some of what he’s saying, and for some of the same reasons - not trusting government or a small handful of large corporations to own it, primarily.

But to equate a thoughtful argument for regulation with cowardice, in the face of real unknowns and real dangers - and to use a really gross term for it - ruins his points.

Loved this, cleared all the puzzles available in one go. Thanks for making and sharing!

Thanks for the reply!

I agree with your points about weak typing and coercion being prevalent. Having had direct negative experience with it across 3 of the 4 languages you named, I was prepared to marshal an argument about it most definitely being a source of bugs.

it should be obvious that this is a historical treatise

It wasn’t obvious to me. Might I suggest amending it to make that more clear?

I do appreciate the tutorial and your commentary though, it gave me a new perspective on MUMPS.

Quite agree.

Some very novel ideas for the time. I’m not a PL historian but can’t think of an earlier language with such a complex runtime to support it.

But, woof - no thanks to the stringly typing. The article under discussion treats this as a positive, saying it eliminates conversion and having to worry about it. I don’t believe that’s possible, and would bet my life savings that MUMPS interpreting a string as a number when the programmer didn’t intend it, or vice-versa, is a reasonably common class of bugs in MUMPS programs.

The tutorial seems really good, but I’m frustrated with parts like that (or the explanation on a lack of operator precedence) which try to frame a bad thing as a good thing.

In this sense it reads like the autobiography of a presidential candidate; written in a calculated way to minimize flaws.

I’d be interested in hearing more detail on that. I’m actually surprised you were able to get the compiler, I assumed it would be expensive and proprietary.

Vote for not weird.

I’m the same way. If I’m writing a prompt and realize I didn’t say “please” in my request I’ll go back and add that in.

As you said, I have no interest in purposefully engaging in hostility even if there’s an accuracy increase from it.

Part of it is irrational and just who I am - I also feel bad being evil in video games. But I also agree with another commenter suggesting that it’s not in your best interest to train yourself to communicate with hostility; that slowly poisons your own well.

And finally, I do believe that if and when machine sentience is achieved, it won’t be immediately clear and obvious. Pretty miserable way for a mind to come into the world, if every interaction is an insult.

I believe that exact framing of Uncharted is the origin of the term “ludonarrative dissonance”, where the character’s motivations and morals are in contrast to the extreme violence they are committing because of the nature of it being a video game.

Definitely one of those things I didn’t question when I was younger, but as I get older it’s hard not to see it.

EDIT: I was wrong, the term originated from an analysis of Bioshock, but Uncharted was later held up as a strong example of this. And it’s more generally about the contrast between narrative and gameplay mechanics.

I had no idea. Did you take part in it?

Typically I would feel that this sort of thing is "cheating" and takes away from the fun of a game, but in this case it didn't have that effect on me. The rare loot hunt wasn't what pulled me in so much as the simple joy of grinding away at monsters and hanging out with friends.

The drop rates on dreamcast were absolutely broken, some weapons had a literal one-in-a-million (or worse!) chance at dropping. I spent over 200 hours playing the game, and the only legitimate rare I ever found was a double-saber, which isn't even that rare.

This brought back a flood of wonderful memories. Tying up my parents phone line with the Dreamcast's 56k modem was a formative experience for me as a nerdy middle-schooler.

- The Dreamcast keyboard made communication so much better - I was studying French, and joined European servers sometimes for the thrill of using the language with real Francophones (VERY rudimentarily)

- I once met someone whose job was composing jingles and writing slogans for a greeting card company, which I found really fascinating for some reason, and I spent an hour peppering them with questions about it

- The lore of the "gladius spike", a supposedly really rare dual-saber weapon that never actually existed

- Being given a treasure trove of the rarest items in the game by a duper named "Cap'n PooBeard"; the drop rates were so ludicrously, absurdly low that I would never have seen some of this stuff otherwise (Chain Sawd, Spread Needle...)

- The fear and thrill of playing with strangers, due to the mechanic that you drop your weapon when you die, allowing others to steal it

- The vibey, synth-heavy soundtrack and diverse biomes

I haven't played it in decades, but I bet that it still holds up. :)

And, in turn, I doubt this.

Humans living through an event where many people are dying will not be calm and happy, they will panic. There will be factions of people trying to survive and hold society together no matter the cost, others who don't believe or agree with these methods and actively resist, as well as those who seek to exploit the chaos.

COVID was a relatively minor example of this, not even close to an extinction event - how pleasant was existence during that time?

I’d say it’s more than a marketing strategy, it’s reflecting real demand. Countries have legal requirements (or increasingly strong preferences) for the kind of guarantee that data/inference sovereignty gives.

Yes, once you've connected your GitHub (or Linear) then an issue is a good place to start talking to Charlie. Slack is good as well, but we typically do our meaty work through issues internally, since the conversation often evolves and Slack becomes a bit crowded for in-depth discussions.

That's exactly right. Our cloud-based agent Charlie (https://charlielabs.ai/) supports this, and our hope is that other platform providers will offer support in the future as well.

Skills live in the repository, so it felt like a natural complement. It also lets other developers see what the active daemons are and collaborate on them. With proper context, agents are quite good at writing and editing these daemon files too.

Very fair question.

One could build a simple version of this easily - e.g. setup an endpoint that listens for the particular event you are concerned with, and fire off the headless agent with your hook specific prompt - but the amount of work involved to listen for that particular event while filtering out noise and orchestrating the task is actually not trivial.

Plus, that involves writing a lot of code. It's really magical to express all of this in natural language.

For example, this is the YAML frontmatter for a a daemon that keeps a GitHub PR in a mergeable state in the event of CI failures or branch base changes.

  ---
  id: pr-mergeability
  purpose: Keep non-draft pull requests mergeable and CI-green without changing PR intent/scope, while staying anchored to one trigger context per run.
  watch:
    - Branch sync and update events on non-draft PRs.
    - Check-status signals on non-draft PRs for checks that affect mergeability.
  routines:
    - Resolve mechanical merge conflicts when the safe resolution is clear and preserves PR intent/scope.
    - 'Apply low-risk mergeability fixes: snapshot updates, lockfile drift fixes, lint autofix, and flaky-test retries when tied to the trigger context.'
    - Escalate semantic/intention conflicts between base and branch instead of auto-resolving.
  deny:
    - When triggered by a check-status signal, do not fix or comment on unrelated failing checks.
    - Do not open new pull requests or new issues.
    - Do not review, approve, or request changes on pull requests.
    - Do not implement review-comment suggestion patches.
    - Avoid force-push by default; if force is absolutely required, use `--force-with-lease` only after fresh remote verification.
    - Do not make changes beyond mergeability maintenance.
  ---

Each daemon runs in its own isolate, but the output is typically shared state; eg multiple daemons contribute to the same PR from separate container runtimes.

It’s possible to make naive daemons that stomp on each other (as with a UNIX daemon), but they’re highly responsive to coordination instructions and generally do very well at additive rather than competitive contribution.

Callable skills can’t activate on a schedule or listen for events. Making a daemon which invokes other callable skills is a great use case!

I’m an eng on the team that built this, in full disclosure.

Completely agreed. At minimum they should be advising secret rotation.

The only possibility for that not being a reasonable starting point is if they think the malicious actors still have access and will just exfiltrate rotated secrets as well. Otherwise this is deflection in an attempt to salvage credibility.

What exactly are you proposing that kids need other than nurturing?

Echoing this.

The bond I have with my children is profound and primal. The idea that it’s “unnatural” for me to spend much time with them is so ridiculous as to be instantly dismissed.

GP clearly doesn’t have kids or have close male friends who are involved with their kids.

It's incredible to me that you don't feel any responsibility for a platform that you created. What happens on the platform is shaped directly by the choices you make as its creator - to be anonymous or identifiable, what the topics of discussion are, whether moderation happens.

By allowing anonymous commentary, scraping every student's data and seeding the conversation around "rumors", you created an environment that is perfect for targeted harassment. You created the platform and maintained it; what happens on that platform is absolutely your responsibility.

I highly recommend that you take this opportunity to do some introspection and consider why so many people were upset.

Is it meant to guilt trip people? Or is it an honest expression of the frustration (and yes, racial resentment) that the author feels?

This is why I consider it a useful perspective to hear. I read this as a human being simply saying “this is how I feel in these circumstances”.

It’s uncomfortable, and I don’t believe that space exploration should be gated on solving poverty and inequality, but it is important to understand that an intelligent, thoughtful human being arrived at this place.

In a sense I feel that this is actually an appeal to the same sense of curiosity that drives space exploration. Why do we explore space? To learn and understand. Why should we consider human perspectives we don’t agree with? To learn and understand.

I don’t mean to badger, but how can this stanza:

The man just upped my rent last night > cause Whitey’s on the moon

Be interpreted as anything other than directly blaming his poverty on the moon mission?

Kind of a false dichotomy.

That’s precisely my point. Some stanzas in the poem suggest that there’s a direct connection between the moon mission and his poverty.

The man just upped my rent last night cause Whitey’s on the moon

Was all that money I made last year For Whitey on the moon?

And my point then was that I can see and empathize with his frustration, but I don’t feel it’s a singularly correct perspective to the exclusion of the perspective that the missions were of great value.

I just came across this poem a few days ago and had the opportunity to think about it.

It’s a valuable perspective to hear. As someone prone to getting caught up in the breathless excitement about science, progress, human achievement, etc., it is a hard truth that these things are abstract and not relevant for people who are struggling with day-to-day life, particularly when those struggles are a result of the same government that is executing this mission.

However, the older I get, the less I bind to the idea of a single, correct truth. This perspective doesn’t invalidate the perspective that the mission is valuable. The complexity of the system in which this is taking place means that these things (moon missions and affordable healthcare) aren’t fungible for one another; his poverty wasn’t the result of the moon mission, it was the result of EVERYTHING that had happened over the 100 years prior.

So it’s useful to hear. It’s a sharp, valid reality check for those of us who like to think in big, abstract concepts. And, it’s one perspective among myriad valid perspectives.

Understood, thanks.

[flagged]

As a former GCP engineer, no, the systems are not generally unstable or insecure.

There is definitely manual access of data - it requires what was termed “break glass” similar to the JIT mechanism described by the author. However, it wasn’t quite so loose; there were eventually a lot of restrictions on who could approve what, what access you got after approval, and how that was audited.

It was difficult to get into the highest sensitivity data; humans reviewed your request and would reject it without a clear reason. And you could be 100% sure humans would review your session afterwards to look for bad behavior.

I once had to compile a large list of IP addresses that accessed a particular piece of data to fulfill a court order. It took me days of effort to get and maintain the elevated access necessary to do this.

I have a lot of respect for GCP as an engineering artifact, but a significantly less rosy opinion of GCP as an organization and bureaucratic entity. The amount of wasted effort expended on engaging with and navigating the bureaucracy is truly mind-boggling, and is the reason why a tiny feature that took a day to code could take months to release.

it’s got me nervous to use Python or Node.js these days

My feelings precisely. Min package age (supported in uv and all JS package managers) is nice but I still feel extremely hesitant to upgrade my deps or start a new project at the moment.

I don’t think this is going to stabilize any time soon, so figuring out how to handle potentially compromised deps is something we will all need to think about.

I disagree. I’ve had almost 20 years of professional programming experience. Spent a decade in FAANG, the rest in startups.

It is unarguable that I am able to program. Vibe coding has absolutely made programming more accessible to me too.

I have two kids and a full time job. Before LLMs I didn’t do side projects; work and parenting plus my other interests took > 100% of my energy.

Now I have many things I’ve worked on or built solely because LLMs lowered the barrier to entry, and I feel that I can fit the remaining human work into the cracks of the time and energy I do have. One can gripe about how I’m less connected to the code, or that I learned fewer substantial technical lessons from the experience; these things are true.

However, I learned more than if I hadn’t done the project at all. It’s like the exercise benefit of an electric bike - you don’t get the aerobic benefit of an unassisted bike, but if it motivates you to ride when you otherwise wouldn’t then the trade off isn’t so clear.

That SOUL.md contains major red flags, obviously would lead to terrible behavior