Setting lines (or 'boundaries' as is the popular word in today's pop psychology) is not something you should do lightly. At the end of the day, a boundary is an ultimatum you're setting on someone else's behavior. Treat it that way. Sometimes ultimatums are necessary. Sometimes they're toxic. Don't be that person with a minefield full of unnecessary boundaries you expect everyone else to dance around and jump through as a condition of interacting with you.
> a boundary is an ultimatum you're setting on someone else's behavior
No, it's not.
A boundary is something you're saying about your behavior. "If you use racist language at me, I will have to end this conversation."
And much, much worse than someone with "a minefield full of unnecessary boundaries" is someone who has boundaries they don't tell you about.
You should only set boundaries that are real boundaries for you, not just whims or arbitrary decisions. But if you do have boundaries—and everyone does; if you think you don't, then you just haven't had someone cross them (or haven't realized that's what happened when they did)—you must communicate them in contexts where there's a real chance of them being crossed.
To do otherwise is unfair to everyone else and to yourself.
I successfully did this the other day. There was a web app I used quite a bit with an annoying performance issue (in some cases its graphics code would spin my CPU at 100% constantly, fans full-blast). I asked Claude to fetch the code and fed it a few performance traces I took through Firefox, and it cut through all those obfuscated variables like they weren't even there, easily re-interpreting what each function actually did, finding a plausible root cause and workaround (which worked).
Can you generally trust it to de-obfuscate reliably? No idea. My sample size is 1.
I did something similar yesterday. I'm playing a little idle game, and wanted to optimise my playthrough. I pointed claude at the game's data files, and in a few short minutes it reverse engineered the game data and extracted it to CSV / JSON files for analysis.
In this case, it turned out the data - and source code for the game - was in a big minified javascript file. Claude extracted all the data I wanted in about 2 minutes.
I’d argue that NASA should not have ever got into studying climate science, it should be a responsibility of NOAA. NASA should be focusing on NEP, atmospheric satellites, better aircraft, making life interplanetary and astronomy.
Right wingers and generating creating nude images of girls and women who post on xitter, without their consent? Those are the only things I even associate with Grok anymore. The venn diagram may line up pretty nicely between them, too.
It's because router defaults have been bad for a long time and NAT accidentally made them better.
I finally have IPv6 at home but I am being very cautious about enabling it because I don't really know what the implications are, and I do not trust the defaults.
The thing I can't stand is the absolute certainty of the boosters. It's almost religious.
AI is the future. AI will do this. AI will cause that. It is inevitable. Everything is obviously changing.
They leave no room left for debate. No openness to pushback. And no evidence or proof. It just is because it is, and if you don't believe it, you're simply wrong. We saw the same sort of attitudes with blockchain and NFTs.
Any quality, useful (commercial) piece of software made with only AI code would suffice. Any successful AI-written indie game. Any successful AI-written library.
The proof should be in the pudding. Claude Code has been out for a year, and the boosters are saying they are orders of magnitude more productive, so we should have seen some kind of successful output within an order of magnitude of the time it would have taken to develop using traditional, non-LLM tools.
Where is the agent-coded Photoshop clone eating Adobe's lunch? Where is the agent-coded Quicken clone which puts the original out of business? Where is the agent-coded hit video game? All we are seeing so far are "Show HN" level projects.
The only thing LLMs seem to be speeding up is people's mouths.
I mean, the promise of perfect AI and perfect robotics is that humans would no longer have to do anything. They could live a life of leisure. Unfortunately, we're going to get these perfect AI and perfect robotics before we transition socially into a post-scarcity, post-ownership society. So what will happen is that ownership of the AI and robots will be consolidated into the hands of the few, the vast rest of us will have nothing economically relevant to do, and we'll probably just subsist or die.
We're already seeing this today. Every year, thousands of people are becoming essentially irrelevant to the economy. They don't own much, they don't invest much, they don't spend much money, they don't make much money, and they are invisible to economics.
> They don't own much, they don't invest much, they don't spend much money, they don't make much money, and they are invisible to economics.
Indeed. Sometimes I think the so-called “lower classes” end up functioning more like crops to be farmed by the rich. Think, dollar stores that sell tiny packages of things at worse unit cost, checking account fees, rent-a-center, 15% interest auto loans and store credit cards with 30% interest…
I've definitely felt this kind of way in the past. But these days I'm not so sure.
Setting aside the AI point about it, the idea of people becoming essentially irrelevant to the economy is an indictment on society. But I'd argue that the indictment really is towards what constitutes measurement in the economy. Not an indictment on society itself, or technology.
Sure, someone may not spend much money or produce much money, but if they produce scientific research or cultural work that is intangibly valuable it is still valuable regardless of whether economists can point to a metric or not. Same goes for the infinite amounts of contributions to our world from nature: what is the economic value of a garden snake or a beetle? A meaningless question when the economy can only see things in dollars.
You’re getting downvoted, but a win is a win, and reduced birthrate/fertility is a huge and clear win on the planetary scale. Fewer people = less waste/pollution = smaller ecological impact = less competition over finite resources. If we find policies that reduce birthrates, we should always implement them.
This policy only reduces the birthrates of wealthy people who follow laws, so it's self-defeating, in that the future generations of poor people who don't care about laws also won't care about reducing their ecological impact.
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