It bothered me in theory, but when I started writing lua it quickly became clear that it really doesn't matter. It's just another quirk, like significant whitespace: I don't prefer it, but it's so far down my list of language priorities that it basically doesn't matter.
I wouldn't expect so. These machines have been trained on natural language, after all. They see the world through an anthropomorphic lens. IME & from what I've heard, they struggle with inexpressive code in much the same way humans do.
One truism about coding agents is that they struggle to work with bad code. Code quality matters as much as always, the experts say, and AI agents (left unfettered) produce bad code at an unprecedented rate. That's why good practices matter so much! If you use specs and test it like so and blah blah blah, that makes it all sustainable. And if anyone knows how to do it right, presumably it's Anthropic.
This codebase has existed for maybe 18 months, written by THE experts on agentic coding. If it is already unintelligible, that bodes poorly for how much it is possible to "accelerate" coding without taking on substantial technical debt.
i think you are conflating anthropic (the startup) with claude code (the leaked source of one of said startup's products)
i.e., the claude code codebase doesn't need to be good right now [^1] — so i don't think the assumption that this is an exemplary product / artifact of expert agentic coding actually holds up here specifically
[^1]: the startup graveyard is full of dead startups with good code
That's actually a good point, haha. The worst-case scenario of computers being thin clients for other people's servers dissolves when you realize that chromium/electron IS, nominally, a thin client for HTTP servers, and it'll gladly eat up as much memory as you throw at it. In the long term, modulo the current RAM shortage, it turns out it's cheaper to ship beefy hardware than it is to ship lean software.
I think "design by committee" is a better target for criticism than collaboration in general.
If you get a bunch of people in a room and ask them for a design, one person is going to write the design while everyone else gets in the way. That's simply the nature of groups. The one person who writes it isn't even necessarily the best designer—they're just the one most willing to grab the whiteboard marker.
Conversely, if you ask one person to produce a preliminary design, they can leave, gather requirements, do research, produce a plan, and then convene everyone in a room to review it. Now all the abstract hypotheticals have been put to bed, the nebulous directionlessness has been replaced with a proposal, and the group can actually provide useful feedback and have a discussion that will inform the next draft of the design. And once the design is finished, everyone can easily work together to implement it as written. Collaboration is great, after someone has proposed a design.
That's part of what I like about the idea of Amazon's "culture of writing," though I've never worked in an environment like that in practice. Every idea needs to be preprocessed into an actionable memo before anyone tries to have a meeting about it.
"It's UNFAIR!" is the anthem of whiny children. If these people would benefit from access to Youtube, and we can provide it to them trivially, then by all means, let them have it. If it upsets you when people are given things for free, that's really a "you problem."
They genuinely benefit from YouTube. I saw one guy watching a video on how to use a debit card since he'd never even held one before. They use them to figure out how to fill out paperwork at the SSA and state agencies etc.
Squatting is something you do to someone else's property. It implies that there is someone else out there with a more legitimate claim to the @hac handle, which there isn't. It's not as if we're talking about @google or something.
If I stole your house and sold it because I didn't think you were using it properly, that would clearly be illegitimate. I don't see why the rules change when we talk about someone's twitter handle. Nobody needs @hac. X merely wants it and has the power to take it.
But you don't own it. X does. It's their service, they are free to apportion handles as they see fit. It is nothing like a house where you have an actual ownership claim through the deed.
It's less like having the house taken away, and more like having your house's street address reassigned to someone else's house. Sure, no one's taken your land. Your deed gives you ownership of parcel #530453080, not of the identifier "123 Vine Street", so nothing you legally own has been taken from you.
But it's your identity. It's the way you've been putting yourself into the world and telling people they can reach you there. It used to be that if someone sent a message to that address, or tried to navigate to that address, they would reach you; but now, they'll be taken to somewhere else, and they perhaps won't even realize what's happened.
And for the ownership issue, sheesh. Yes X, in a literal sense, owns all the usernames. We're talking about whether it's morally right for them to do, not about whether it's illegal. If they had held back these short "valuable" usernames from the beginning, no one would care; it's the act of taking away someone's established identity that is problematic.
This "ownership" or rather "identification" is a significant part of the service though.
It wouldn't have been so successful if everybody be called "Anonymous" meaning that they wouldn't be able to make money with it.
They've started to take this away now. Today it's some account with obviously few words. Tomorrow it might be one with wrong words. What you counted as value is nothing. It might be lost tomorrow, so why bother?
God, how I hate all those "well ackchyually" idiots who think TOS are the only contract there ever was ignoring social norms that were there for literally decades.
Internet monolithic social services are run by private companies with TOS that no one reads and change, services that barely anyone pays for (except through their data).
We should definitely normalize this so that people see what the internet actually is for the vast majority of people.
> but there's something of a grand social contract that keeps the concept of accounts on websites working
no there's not. this is complete and utter fiction. the things that keep it working are ads and normal users putting their eye in front of them, and the tos to make any silly claims of "social contracts" legally and absolutely moot.
It’s playing stupid to pretend that the theft of a hardly used handle has anything to do with an actual user account. I’m sure if @hac had a presence online, their handle wouldn’t have been sold from under them.
Since when do you "own" social media handles? Maybe you should, but that's not reflected in the laws of our countries or the policies of these platforms. They own your presence, your content, and your reach. This is our "solution" to self-publishing. Do you want change? Advocate for it.
Of course, if you advocate for a system with no equivalent to eminent domain you'll quickly discover why the rule exists.
The onset of the pandemic in 2020 left me more isolated than I'd even been before in my life. I was single, I was working remotely, and the lock-downs finally killed what was left of my preexisting friend group. I have a naturally solitary disposition, but even for me, it was hard.
Here are some coping strategies you can apply right away:
→ Listen to podcasts, especially podcasts in a chatty & informal style. It really helps to just hear people talking. If you're looking for recommendations, I'm very fond of If Books Could Kill.
→ A lot of podcasts have Discord servers associated with them, where fans of the show congregate & talk. Sometimes you have to pay a couple bucks on Patreon to get access. These can be good places to go for a very easy, low-effort social space. You can keep it open on another monitor & let it serve as background chatter that you can dip into at any time.
→ Do stuff. Go to museums, go to movies, go to dinner. Some people have hangups about (e.g.) eating at restaurants alone, but you must overcome this psychological hurdle immediately. You will feel much more alive if you go outside.
→ Read a book. If it doesn't grab you, then set it down and start another. Beauty is good for the soul, and the wonderful thing about a paperback novel is that, unlike TV and movies, you cannot pull out your phone and multitask. With practice, you can stay immersed in a text for longer & longer periods of time. Eventually, a good novel will be able to eat up your whole weekend and leave you feeling great afterwards.
→ Start a journal. Without an intimate partner to talk to, it can feel like your head is heavy with half-formed thoughts that you just can't get rid of. Getting them down on paper is almost as good as voicing them to another person. The podcasts are nice, but spending all your time listening to podcasts can gradually teach you to be uncomfortable when left with your own thoughts. Keeping a journal helps you stay on good terms with yourself. I can't recommend it enough.
Now I'll get into some longer-term lifestyle changes. These can take a while to come to fruition and may require leaving your comfort zone, but they're worthwhile.
→ For me, there is nothing better for my mental health than a 90-minute park run on a breezy day in late spring. Even a 30-minute stint on a treadmill in the dead of winter will clear my mind. I don't know what your relationship to exercise is, so I can't really call this a quick fix, but think about ways to incorporate exercise into your routine in ways that you'll enjoy. Personally, I suggest running.
→ There's a broad stratum of fun social events designed for meeting people and developing shared hobbies. Pottery classes, choir programs, ultimate frisbee. You pay a couple hundred bucks to sign up, then you go to the event on Thursday nights and maybe get drinks with some of the other members afterwards. You won't be best friends right away, and you'll probably never get that close with most of them, but having a loose community like this is nice, and if you stay in contact with people after the course ends, you may take away some lasting friendships.
→ Undertake a creative project. I wrote a novel during the pandemic. It sucked, but I put a lot of time and love into it and I really felt like I did something. (The trouble with writing a novel, of course, is that nobody will want to read it. If you're smarter than me, you'll pick up something like painting, which produces stuff you can hang up, show off, and give away. Pottery and music I mentioned earlier, but I'll mention them here again.) Creativity is extremely fulfilling. It takes time to feel like you're producing anything valuable, but when you do, it'll mean a lot.
> You've got to die of something; so you might as well die for something
It's very easy to die "for something" when you're already dying. The question is how much of your life you're willing to give up for something by dying right now.
People talk about "dying for your country" as if it's all one and the same, but some people die for the people in their country and some people merely die for the interests of their state.
If I was malware, one of the first things I'd do is check that scratch files directory for secrets.
The default behavior of Notepad++ is a very real security risk. So many system admins and developers will throw passwords and API keys into there and just forget about it. The scratch files are all sitting there unencrypted and with easy to exploit permissions.
Alas, my first thought after seeing TextAdept was that it could serve as a more secure alternative to Notepad++.
Legitimately curious, how would you implement a “secure” scratch file functionality? Or is it just that the whole notion of scratch files is insecure?
The great thing about Textadept’s extensibility (and use of Lua specifically) is that it’s easy to pull in other Lua modules to add functionality. I don’t think it would be much work to modify the scratch file extension to prompt you for an encryption key on startup and then run the scratch files through libsodium (via luasodium) if you want to have your cake (scratch files) and eat it (some cursory level of security).
I use Joplin, which is a cross-platform FOSS notes app featuring E2EE. It's not a perfect solution and not much of a text editor, but it's the right direction.
Everything else is explicitly saved (without secrets) or just an ephemeral buffer in Neovim.
I have this view as well. After years of Notepad++, the last security problem made me want to switch, not because of just that, but that, overall, since the author has an active voice expressing his political views (which is totally fine), I have this unease feeling that it makes him, and his products, a notorious target.
Searching for alternatives, Textadept seemed to fill the gap between features, speed and simplicity.
The plugin mentioned by the parent is really easy to grasp and tailor to my needs, which would not be the case with Notepad++, well, not for me at least.
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