Any move away from the abusive big tech that exists in USA is a good move in my book. Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads, and per ads viewed, you then earn credit to be able to use your program/game. It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
[I work on Claude Code] I broadly agree with the author’s point: plan mode was useful, and is no longer useful.
In Claude Code, all plan mode does is add a little reminder to every user message along the lines of “you’re in plan mode, please don’t code yet”. It’s something I came up with late on a Sunday night many months ago, when I got tired of asking Claude to plan with me first before coding in each new session. Something people might not realize is plan mode has always been a prompt — it has never changed the toolset because doing so would break the prompt cache, and so would be expensive for users.
This worked well for a while, until a few months ago, using early versions of Fable, I realized that I wasn’t using plan mode anymore because the model just got it, and because for the increasingly complex work I asked the model to do, planning had become interactive and iterative. With Opus 5.5, I feel Opus has gotten to that point too.
For codebase understanding, I sometimes ask Claude to generate an artifact that explains some aspect of its changes. For complex diffs to core parts of the system, I will often ask it to make diagrams or even interactive demos so I can better understand the change and alternatives considered. I don’t do this very often, but it’s a useful way to explain code when you need it. I ask Claude to attach these artifacts to its PRs also, so others can understand and future Claudes have the context.
Land, as apposed to the property on it, is raw nature. If we view raw nature as a common inheritance of mankind, then paying a tax on land is how the exclusionary use of it, balances with the common interest in it.
Economist Henry George in the 1800's, pointed out that taxing land, but not the property on it, incentivizes efficient use of land, because holding land for its passive (parasitic) return even when underused, becomes unprofitable when the land is taxed in proportion to the value it can enable.
And in turn, only taxing land, not property, incentivizes increased development, as higher property investment amortizes land tax against higher returns.
Greater investment in housing being just one way land tax, without property tax, incentives greater productive use.
So many things align for higher growth in ways that more evenly benefit everyone. But our relationship with land is over-complicated, and that is both the reason for change, but the reason change is so hard.
Small attempts have failed, but then, for the rich who can hold land and reap growth in value that outpaces the taxes they pay on it, that remains another inefficient/negative-externality, that pays off for them.
Author of the post here. Github finally took the offending page down approximately 10 minutes after the post appeared on the front page of HN. Total coincidence. I'm sure!
Moral of the story. If you want even the most basic level of support from Github, you need to get on the front page of HN first.
And it seems they are able to do things very quickly, when they want to. Bastards.
Hi, your friendly, local pathologist here. I'm the kind of doctor that diagnoses liver diseases, cancer, lots of infections, inflammatory processes, benign tumors, and runs the lab that a lot of other doctors use the results from to inform a lot of their other decisions.
If you really want to learn about this stuff, Robert Weinberg's The Biology of Cancer is where to start. It introduces concepts starting where a high school student could understand and carefully walks through the history of our development of knowledge until, by the end, the pithy chapters are helping novel concepts for real science flower in your brain all on their own. It's the best book of biological science I have ever read. 10/10, will read again.
I sat front row for David's talk yesterday morning. Having talked with him the day before, I’ll admit… I wasn’t particularly surprised (nor unprepared).
A bit of a field report from #RailsWorld: the vibe here is far from doom and gloom. Quite the contrary. Wherever our industry is headed, most of us are still employed as menders… tending to systems that customers rely on and businesses are quite happy to keep paying for.
Most of us aren’t waking up to a blank canvas and designing the architecture of the future. We’re inheriting decisions made years ago, updating old patterns, working around constraints, and keeping this shit running reliably.
I think these newer tools give us an opportunity to wonder a little more about the systems we’ve inherited. To unpack why things work the way they do. To tinker with assumptions we haven’t had the time, confidence, or permission to revisit… and share what we learn so the next person, or agent, has an easier time.
That deployment model we picked eight years ago? Worth another look. Some of our web apps probably wish they were native apps. And there are plenty of architectural decisions we’ve been living with mostly because… well, we’ve been busy living with them.
There’s plenty of understandable anxiety about what these tools mean for our work. I’m increasingly curious about what they give us permission to revisit.
Once my keynote is published, I’ll share more about a little programming-language-adjacent framework I’ve been working on for approaching exactly this kind of curiosity.
It looks like a primitive chess engine, trying every move, no matter how stupid, until it works. Relying on its ability to do millions of operations rather than having a plan.
People will try stuff too, but once there is an opening, they will consolidate, generalize, simplify,... before going to the next step. The agents didn't, it is a huge, vaguely directed mess.
Also, it looked so "loud", querying millions of URL with weird requests. The sandbox as weak as it can get, and there is absolutely zero smart extrusion detection or it would have found it. They used their best AI for attacking, but nothing for protection.
Yes, the physics are worse, and yes, the economics are worse, but data centers in space have the crucial advantage that they are out of range of the molotov-throwing arm of Joe Public (recently unemployed).
Explainer videos are dark patterns that replaced written howto documents in order to serve ads. Not seeing them pop up any more in search results is one of the few positive outcomes of Google switching to AI-first search results.
My biggest takeaway from this is just how godawful the sandboxing is. The stuff written up in OpenAIs report says more about lack of extremely basic sysadmin skills than anything else.
I’m not that surprised about models with endless compute being capable of this, I’m more surprised that a company with the resources they have apparently can only create a sandbox that a half skilled human operator could have broken out of easily.
Jaw literally dropped. I ran the prompt from the "Made entirely with Opus 5.5" post on my own project. Here's what Claude Code made on its own for about $4.Claude Code Workflow
A certain nuclear power plant had a Windows NT 4.0 machine running as late as 2007. The reason is interesting.
The machine's purpose was to report status of the control rods that mitigate nuclear reactions. Basically, "are the rods inserted, and if so, how many / how far?". I want to emphasize that this was reporting only, NOT control.
The original software was written back in the 80's, when the plant was originally commissioned, for AmigaOS. Of course, it's hard to buy Amigas anymore, and the original one died long ago (nobody remembers when).
So in the mid '90s, the utility purchased an AmigaOS emulator that ran on Windows NT 4.0, which was current at the time. The emulator (IIRC) was developed by a firm in the UK. The firm went out of business sometime in the late '90s. The control rod monitoring software ran under this emulator on top of NT4.
Windows NT 4.0 was the last OS to allow the emulation software direct access to the physical hardware that produced the status signal. Later versions of Windows abstracted the hardware access away, and the monitoring software broke. Because the emulation company had gone belly up, there was no way to fix the incompatibility.
So the utility had a choice: get new hardware/software certified (by NRC?), or keep doing what they were doing with the software (and hardware) that they had. They chose the latter.
So this is how, in 2007, during a tour of the facility, I stumbled across a Pentium 1 system running an AmigaOS emulator on Windows NT 4.0 that was responsible for displaying the status of the control rods of a nuclear power plant.
Spare hardware for this setup was purchased off of eBay and stocked on an adjacent shelf.
I'm actively watching understanding slip away from developers, code review getting paired down to no comment checkmarks, and codebases go to bloated messes that nobody can read. Axioms like engineers must understand and take responsibility for the code they ship are getting torn down, and the products coming out are reflecting conway's law, becoming impenetrably obtuse and always "so complex there are no obvious deficiencies" (as opposed to "so simple there are no obvious deficiencies" which used to be the aim).
The one thing plan mode helped is for the humans to get an understanding of the strategy, and be able to poke around and look at the design and architecture. You can achieve this with some self discipline and keeping shorter leashes on agents, but it feels like a losing battle. The best devs still put out good code, but the poor devs are learning nothing while their metrics look great. I can't help but think we are racking up immense amounts of debt that will very soon become due.
I know everyone says this is political but it actually seems like a textbook designation. Anthropic wanted to have rules on how the military used AI, the military said no and therefore doesn't want anthropic used anywhere in their supply line.
This is like a pen manufacturer not wanting their pens used to sign drone strike orders, now the military needs to have a special box of pens that don't have stipulations attached. With AI usage it would be the same thing except applied to entire product chains. It seems like it would just add more complexity to operations.
You can agree with the rules anthropic wanted, but having rules set by a private company at all that apply to the military does seem fair for the military to object to.
>The Department reasonably feared that Anthropic might manipulate Claude’s design to prevent it from performing national-security functions that the Department deems contractually authorized and necessary
Though they'd probably put the DoD on the cybersecurity whitelist today, the very idea of the claude whitelists for certain functionality already exists and is being used by them today.
Not sure if I’m just in my own national security bubble, but I find it troubling to see the perspective that most of the conversation in this thread is coming from.
The US government took a legal designation explicitly crafted to protect against foreign adversaries and deployed it against a private, domestic entity, to their immediate and great detriment.
Imagine having a virus escape a sandbox, why are we worried about the virus but not the incompetency of those who are responsible for setting up the sandbox?
If I post something on the Internet today claiming that I asked my agent to do X but it went rogue and did Y, all I will be getting in return is a jar full of "skill issue".
Should we worried about people using LLMs for attacks? Yes, but not in the premise of LLMs going rogue but someone with the intention of abusing it to cause harm. And this is not something we as individual or even company can deal with, responsibility should be held by those who use it, in a legal way.
I am baffled by the fact that up until now, no one is held responsible for so many incidents reported publicly or privately. At this point, it's free marketing, if I am CEO of any AI company, I will run swarm of agents hacking all NGOs and stating that I am just looking for some random piece of data that happened to be hidden in their servers, at least that's what my LLMs think, not me. Then I will start preaching everyone how dangerous this piece of technology is and start giving out free tokens for these NGOs so they can start defending themselves and we should slow the f down.
I genuinely believe that in 2015 Apple had the balls to resist and today they don't.
I am judging by a simple fact, that "please confirm your age" screen is now mandatory during the iPhone setup in all countries, and in some it's behind a KYC. I have a strong opinion that this is insane. And once they let the foot in the door - there is no closing it.
I think the better analogy is an insane nuclear power plant manager deciding it wants to buy pens to use as neutron-flux regulator rods — because after all, a pen is functionally a pencil and a pencil is made of graphite.
Then the pen manufacturer hears about this and says “Our pens are not made of graphite and are not suitable to be used in nuclear reactors”, to which the reactor owner says “it’s fine, they fit in the graphite rod holes, and we’re just using until the next generation of pens come out which will do an even better job”, and then the pen manufacturer says “I’m not going to sell you any pens until you agree that they will be used only writing.”
is one of the first pieces of text in the first screenshot. With the k on its own line like that. Not usually something I’d comment on, but if you’re showing off a redesign…
This entire conversation around Jev seems weird to me. Like... we started from neural nets that could do basic decision making and classifications pretty well, then trained larger and larger language models to get to where we are now. Now suddenly everyone is going crazy because someone trained a smaller model that is adequate at making decisions? We already went through the "look this AI can play pokemon terribly" phase like a decade ago.
That newspeak term should just disappeared. It only contributes to the image that downloading and installing an app is something that is outside the "happy path". Installing software of your choice on a device you own shouldn't be demonised
I have never felt quite so cacklingly nefarious as a designer as I did just now carefully adjusting vertical scale and offset so that the x-height and baseline of Papyrus optically match Comic Sans when mixed together.
I don't yet know who I'll be pranking with the downloaded font, but I look forward to their reaction.
Cars that are designed from the ground up to be EVs tend to be much better than trying to shoehorn an EV into an ICE design.
The new Lexus ES350e, which comes in both hybrid and EV flavors, has been pretty universally panned as a mediocre EV [1]. Lexus anticipates that the vast majority of ES sales will be for the hybrid model, and I expect the same will be true of the Corolla.
The updated bZ and new bZ Woodland on the other hand, which are built as ground-up EVs on the e-TNGA platform, actually seem pretty decent. And I'm hopeful for the upcoming EV Highlander, too (although that will use a modified version of the TNGA-K platform).
I would prefer if Toyota just released a new EV model with roughly the same proportions as the Corolla, instead of going with the one-size-fits-all approach. But maybe they'll finally be able to get it right this time.
What I'm taking from this is that no one is happy about anything, ever. New design is fine. Old design is fine. I just want to search for an app and find that app, which is mostly what happens.
I appreciate all the hard work that goes into F-Droid <3
In 2009, Google Street View had only been gathering images in Austin for about a year, I think. I pulled up right behind the Street View car at a red light, and I waved out the window, hoping that would get captured. I sent an email to my friends with a link to the location and said, "check this out in a couple of months!"
When I checked later that year, there was no image of me, so I thought the camera had not been active, and I forgot all about it.
Then, while looking through old emails a couple of weeks ago, I found that one and clicked the link. I clicked to see images from 2009, and sure enough, there was my little white Honda. And when I moved around the map, I found an image where my hand was out the window, waving! It was like I was waving to myself from the past. Pretty neat!
