technology is good actually

autist in the 1800s who spends half of his time telling people that trains might be a good thing on net in spite of rockefeller

makes me lowkey sad how common it is now to publish a "blog" without an rss feed

choose your faction:
- I made a vape that's also a hammer
- Hammers are going to become god & change everything
- I tried holding the hammer by the head and it didn't work, this is bullshit
- Hammers are useful tools sometimes
- Hammers? You mean murder-tools, as seen in the documentary The Raid 2?

it went from really talented intern (can produce working code, but needs guidance to produce good code) to really talented junior engineer (can produce good code, needs guidance to know what to build)

it's night and day

previously, i'd have to give both architectural and stylistic feedback almost every time. now claude just nails it, every time

opus 4.6 to 4.7 is going from me always correcting bad choices and messy code to claude voluntarily making things cleaner and tighter and better as it goes about its primary task

im no longer fighting this constant trickle of chaotic entropy

The left ceded talk radio, then ceded social media strategy, then ceded algorithmic amplification, each time on the theory that the medium was beneath them or inherently corrupting. We cannot afford to keep doing this with AI because its bigger than all of them.

You know how we all recognize rationalist singularity fantasies as a reskinned version of the christian rapture? Starting to feel like the same thing is going on here

as some others have said, i think one of the most analogous 'skills' that makes me able to effectively use ai tools is that i've been in positions managing or training other people. you really get the best results treating ai as a living thing that has imperfect ability and requires clear guidance.

it's partly a creeping astonishment how divergent my experience of life is from those i seem to have the same goals as but are being swayed by so much propaganda, and empathy they aren't arriving at counterproductive conclusions maliciously, but all the same they are dangerous and wrong conclusions.

ADA is an example of good pro-technology regulation

we desperately need a radically pro-technology leftist movement, one that rejects palantir and silicon valley’s vision of “technology” without also becoming radicalized against technology

i’ve been saying this for over sixteen years and it’s alarming how much progress we’ve made on one side of this and how little on the other

automation is gonna put so many people out of work

it needs to be *ok* to be out of work

it needs to be normal

also the goal should not be 100% employment the goal should be 100% unemployment

free humans from the burden of labor

it's been the trajectory for decades, since computers, the internet, robots getting more reliable, faster, cheaper, and now ai is bringing that automation to creative and white collar work, and the robots getting even more capable. work is abolishing itself. the choice now is socialism or collapse.

production systems at scale are so complex that *no-one* can fully comprehend their dynamics or predict their behavior in all situations

naïve armchair devs would ridicule twitter 15 years ago for exactly the same stuff

side note automated closes due to inactivity are themselves ridiculous like the bug is still there! either it got fixed or it didn’t. just because nobody is actively discussing it doesn’t mean it magically stops being a bug

A screenshot of a white-on-black terminal depicting a 19x19 go board in ascii graphics, with empty grid intersections as periods, and black and white as Os and #s

It’s absolutely incredible that one of the largest Japanese-run Go servers, which has been running since 1992, is still accessed entirely via Telnet. And while most players use GUI clients that use Telnet under the hood, you can still connect manually and get ASCII graphics streamed to you

this is why the anti-ai movement is a dead end, and can only lead to futile terrorism. it's just not feasible to control everyone on earth against their self interests.

we’ve needed UBI forever but we *really* need it now

was just watching a clip of anthropic's ceo on tv warning of how quickly ai capabilities are advancing from even a few months ago, the threat of displacing jobs, first at entry levels but increasingly in the next decade all levels, essentially begging that we raise taxes on the rich to deal with it.

come to think of it this is big reason for the egregious misreadings of stuff like this. people think they want the thing to be conscious. but utilitarian extremists are terrified above all else of creating billions of beings who can only suffer

ahhhhh sky looks potentially REALLY GOOD ahhhhh

kissing that girl who overthinks things 𝙢𝙬𝙬𝙪𝙖𝙝 right on the lips, no more thinking for you beautiful

but for passkeys right now there is no usual way

i've seen so many bizarre product choices around passkeys because pms don't know what to do with it

look at like fastmail and porkbun and github — they all have different passkey login flows

everyone is kinda fumbling around

like passwords have been around for so long there are well-established norms around how they should look to the user. here are the standard flows. here are the best practices. so if you're making a web app you basically don't have to worry about that part, just do it the usual way

this missing education around this is both consumer facing and — perhaps worse — missing education aimed at other tech companies in how to incorporate passkeys into their systems

passkey is imho one of the most important security developments that touch consumers and also one of the worst consumer rollouts i ever witnessed because every company involved treats everything like an enterprise customer solution