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Is it? Because plenty of other hoax-based bullshit, like Flat Earth Conspiracy Theorists and those who believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old continue on in their bubbles regardless of how much evidence is provided to the contrary.

There’s no possible evidence against so called “last Thursdayism”, so you are certainly misrepresenting the state of affairs.

What's strange is that many people who believe in a Mature Creation (as I've heard it; "Last Thursdayism" is new to me) will readily accept it as the explanation for ancient starlight but then deny evolution and claim that the fossil record is actually evidence of the biblical flood. Which is an unnecessarily weak position to take when you have already accepted a perfectly unfalsifiable cop-out! The truth is that most of them don't want to think too hard about it.

Of course. It's not about being reasonable, it's chasing some emotional need that's unrelated to the truthfulness of the belief. But keep alert for the faith-based beliefs you yourself might find yourself defending with flimsy logic too. It's easy to get sucked into the belief that since all the authorities you respect tell you something is true, then it must be, and you don't have to bother much with how valid your justification is because you already believe the conclusion.

A good self-test is asking yourself how you know the Earth isn't flat. Don't do any research, just try to work it out from what you've already observed and think what makes you believe that conclusion.


There's nothing wrong with Last Thursdayism. It's unfalsifiable. You're welcome to hold it.

Most people find that it's more complicated to work with, since it requires a vastly more complicated set of initial conditions. But if you find that it works for you it isn't actually wrong.


I've always assumed that committed conspiracy theorists are just trolls rolling with it (because nobody could be so stupid as to actually believe in the conspiracy's premise). So no amount of evidence is going to "convince" them, because they already know the truth, and don't care.

But then perhaps over time, they somehow attracted people who genuinely are that stupid, and uncritically believe? That demographic is obviously going to be too stupid to critically assess any new evidence either.


Do you think the same way about religious believers? This is a rhetorical question to help you understand why people hold false beliefs. Of course Mohammed wasn't really the messenger of God, but it's a popular false belief for some reason that isn't stupidity or trolling.

> I've always assumed that committed conspiracy theorists are just trolls rolling with it

As a schoolkid, our physics teacher was a flat earther. He drove us kids mad arguing with him that the earth is spherical.

Canny bloke.


and this is your theory for…all theories?

or just the “obviously stupid” ones?


Plenty (most?) of the people you interact with every day primarily form their worldview based on what feels good emotionally. It's not a matter of stupidity, plenty of smart people delude themselves into thinking easily falsifiable things.

We are barely sentient shit slinging apes.


> And this also pretty much ruins any attempt to research Claude Code's long term effectiveness in an organisation. Any negative result can now be thrown straight into the trash because of the chance Anthropic put you on the wrong side of an A/B test.

LLMs are non-deterministic anyway, as you note above with your comment on the 'reproducibility' issue. So; any sort of research into CC's long-term effectiveness would already have taken into account that you can run it 15x in a row and get a different response every time.


For me, Claude was like that until about 2m ago. Now it rarely gets dumb after compaction like it did before.

oh, ive found that something about compaction has been dropping everything that might be useful. exact opposite experience

Or, just show us in an animated GIF how the product works in practice. Then, should we somehow find benefit in a visual representation of a swarm's workflow, we could sign up rather than having to, unintuitively, scroll down to watch a YouTube video.

e: 'be' to 'we'; oops.


Good call and noted. We're working on making the product experience more visible upfront.

Correct; NIST recommended (~10 years ago) they be used together: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1721355115

What’s baffling to me is how they’re going to attempt to spin the colossal fuck up this is from a “Best Military in the World” perspective, particularly after their unapproved relabeling of the DoD to the DoW.

It doesn't matter how good the military is if the political leadership is incompetent and the strategic objectives are incoherent. You'd think that after Vietnam, Iraq 2, and Afghanistan this lesson would have been learned, but apparently not.

Including starting with murdering 100+ kids based on stale intelligence, according to the NY times.

I do Rover for extra fun money and I get to watch other peoples dogs when I don’t have one myself right now.

Several folks have noted that my immediate reply threw them for loops. One told me she thought it was spam that I responded so quickly.

Rover has a “Star Sitter” designation and response time is one of the metrics. Star Sitters show up at the top of the algorithm’s results so I’m incentivized to keep it up. Plus; I absolutely despise waiting forever for others to reply and I want to make sure I get bookings, knowing there are MANY available sitters in my area.

I never would have thought it was spammy or suspicious AI behavior. Thank you for cementing it in my mind that maybe I’m a little too eager. Considering I’m entirely booked out until mid-October, I’m either doing something right or people are that desperate for a good human to watch their pup for them.


Is this suspicious, probably:

“ps— hope I hit my goal of responding in <5min like I said in my ad!”

(w/biz hours mentioned in ad)


I found a good cat-sitter through Rover and would do crime if she made it a condition of her next visit.

It was a great story, right up until the lack of an ending. As someone who reads lots of books, I will NEVER understand authors who don’t wrap up a story.

It’s like someone telling you a story and you ask, “and then what happened,” and they reply, “nothing; that’s the end of the story.” No one appreciates that, but people rave about authors who leave “open-ended interpretations!”


https://github.com/jpoehnelt

jpoehnelt/README.md

About

I am a Developer Relations Engineer at Google. Currently I am on the Google Workspace DevRel team and was on the Google Maps Platform before that. Previously I worked at Descartes Labs and the US Geological Survey.

Check out my website at https://justin.poehnelt.com.


Thank you!


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