chunky1994

> It basically requires no hand holding from me

> given a sufficiently articulated prompt

Are these two statements not at odds with each other? You can always say a prompt is not sufficiently articulated if you need to add additional handholding and vice versa, thereby invalidating any meaning of measurement.

As a counterpoint I haven't seen opus doing that much better than the latest gpt models? Astra is definitely comparable to fable and sol has been as good as opus for me. So this rings a bit anecdotal and that's probably what people will be seeing affect the growth trajectory too.

Whenever this topic comes up I always wonder if people mean reading as all long-form reading (including pop fiction) or if they mean “serious” reading. To me it’s actually quite strange but I feel like I have “lessened” as a reader over the past decades.

I used to be able to read some of the more classic novels a bit easier and now I just find them…a tad tedious? Is that the decline of reading that people are mentioning, or just… not reading at all?

I find it remarkably easy to read the popcorn fiction novels or anything very plot driven where characterization and world building is only in the service of the plot, but somehow this just feels like watching a movie but in book form. Is that also considered “reading”?

Holding a PhD at the very least means you can spend a sustained long amount of time on (potentially) intractable problems and try to arrive at solutions for them. That's a good skill to have when...you've been elected to solve problems.

There are two largely non-overlapping skillsets when it comes to politics and governance. The soft skills being effective means you can get elected, that does not mean they are good at governing (and is often a detriment to having good solutions and governance).

I don't currently have any data that says otherwise and the counterfactual remains unexplored (but it will be with this parliament!), but things that people do and say to get elected often are things that if implemented...would not solve the problems the populace that elected is having.

I don't think we need schmoozers, we need people who understand the problems of their populace and have the structural power to implement their solutions. We shall see if they need more than this, but this would be the first exploration of the counterfactual.

People who have their "own" priorities don't end up upsetting the apple cart when we make success in implementing those solutions the same as their success (which if we are effective problem solvers, should be possible. See Deng Xiaoping)

Apparently it is public: https://cursor.com/help/customization/extensions

They use a proxy in front of OpenVSX…purportedly for better security, the irony writes itself.

It’s not typo-squatting. The extension is owned by Igor (the Anthropic employee): https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/10-30-2026-claude-cod...

They yanked the openVSX version as well. Until we hear from Anthropic better to assume compromise.

It affects their VSCode marketplace extension which in turn affects their cursor extension. Their official published version. This is plenty of reason to panic.

Do you have a source that these low income Americans are the ones who are ordering food? My understanding was this was largely people with additional disposable income who were doing it for convenience and not necessity as the product for the price was a good enough trade off. I find it hard to believe low income Americans are getting their groceries delivered when they can’t afford the base prices for the most part.

(numbers are just to illustrate a point, not accurate) Now assume you can't buy a 5lb bag of potatoes and you can only buy 10,000 lb bag. Now also assume that you can't buy this 10,000 lb bag unless you know someone else will pay for fries for the other 9,995 lb because you can't eat that many fries. That's the kind of scale the token inference market is efficient at.

People thought the same thing about nuclear proliferation. Turns out we can do hard things if we make the effort as a populace. I’m all for being a realist but 1984 is not inevitable, it’s just very difficult to prevent.

How are they fleecing anybody if their rating is junk?

They can lobby all they want but until we see ratings agencies bending to their lobbying in the face of extreme scrutiny from anyone who would buy these corporate bonds I wouldn't go about worrying too much.

No, to be more specific, banks selling the collateralized mortgages that were subprime in risk as if they were prime and these risk ratings being accepted at their word and via collusion with the ratings agencies is what caused this.

There is no issue with collateralized debt as long as the risk is properly assessed, the whole point of securitization is that you can take on higher risk for higher reward of an asset that was previously just one single piece of risk.

Variable rate (loans) track the Fed rate. Fixed rate (loans) track the long term treasury yields.

Because any addictive thing is on a spectrum and you don't want the people with incentives to go all the way up the spectrum to be the operator of the harmful thing, a là the dose makes the poison. (See alcohol, cigarettes, any class of drugs etc.)

Some things are just wholly harmful where no small amount provides any benefits, some are harmful in large doses, but not so harmful in small doses that they cannot provide other uses.

Governments (ideally) don't exist to maximize profit so they are (generally) not incentivized to increase the addictions of their populace.

In what sense?

By and large it is independent of the whims of the administration because of its goals (specific inflation and unemployment targets) being more or less contraindicative to what administrations want to do (spend money)

OpenAI's shareholders, and only them.

I doubt any consumer of ChatGPT wants ads, and even if they did, it would be a specific kind of ad. They specifically would not want ads if they cannot identify them as ads (like google has eventually done on the search page) or if they are not good ads.

The problem is the differences are asymmetric. Canadian labour mobility is a lot more impactful when the pool of skilled labour is just overall smaller.

Doctors can move pretty much freely between 44 American states. Doctors can't do that in Canada, and here we need more specific kinds of doctors in rural populations and there is absolutely no reason to not have a harmonized licensing regime.

We also have non-uniform regulation on stuff like the manufacture of construction goods (for example door sizing) which can cause a big drag in trade. This might be harder to fix but it exists and is not comparable to the US market.

This is really well written and exposes a core tension between science and something akin to engineering. The "engineering" of proofs has become "easy" (a compute and $) problem, rather than hard (a time and conception problem).

Without the ability to do things the "hard" way it is difficult to figure out if doing things the "easy" way will help us advance the frontier of math and science.

I may be wrong but historically we had this version of science discovery for a long while (empirical observation and brute force application) rather than first principles leading to applications (tools, the wheel, mills etc). Then somewhere along the way it flipped after Newton and the enlightenment period and started understanding first principles before they become engineering applications.

Perhaps it is not required, and we can just keep doing things the "easy" way like we used to, or we might find ourselves out of the ability to brute force things and then we go back to needing to do this the hard way, at which point this period of AI brute forcing would be seen as a detriment.

Its clear that you are taking great offence to that particular quote and determined to misunderstand my point due to your pre-existing bias, despite my many attempts to clarify it, so let me finish the quote for you.

I doubt, that someone smart (as you put it) ..and not as GP put it..who..would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it..are..the same people that GP is talking about when they say there are advantages to being "like this".

This is no longer fruitful, but I only hope that this thread might to be a reason to more charitable in your interpretation next time regarding such a discussion.

That's just an artifact of the graphical display. This paper shows that's not the case (see fig 2): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02513-9

You seem to be imputing a lot of intent into my comment and then extending that to value judgements about smartness etc. I don't know what any of this has to do with what GP was saying. Yeah, there's a balance between questioning everything and questioning nothing, but there are a lot of bureaucratic things that happen in organizations and its generally a good thing to question certain things that don't have clear explanations, isn't there?

The doubt was simply about whether or not what GP is saying is smart behaviour to exhibit - Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people. is the same behaviour that you are saying you've experienced ( i.e you are talking about different things).

I'm not even questioning if you can tell if someone is smart or not - its just obvious that forcing decisions based off things that are not understood is not a smart thing to do - which..we all agree on -, and neither I nor GP were saying people should do this?

Maybe I could've phrased it better but my whole point was GP says X, you are saying Y. I think there is a distinction between X and Y and I doubt that the people GP is talking about are the same people you are talking about (hence, smart as you put it vs smart as GP put it).

Yes it is annoying, however I find that it gives me a much better grasp on the things I am explaining to a "proxy" Claude person. Basically, I would never have stumbled upon the arguments that I'm being presented with as I would never have prompted Claude in the specific way that a proxy Claude person would.

I find a lot of value in understanding how they have misunderstood things and clarifying those concepts.

I'm being nice too and all I've been trying to do in this thread is point at a distinction between GP's point and yours which you seem unwilling to engage with.

It is valuable to ask questions about why things are the way they are in order to understand the fundamentals of it vs we should change these things because I am 'smarter than you' and I don't understand why things are done this way (which I called dumb, and not smart). Perhaps the issue is that these two behaviours are easily confused.

I had to write the long comment to illustrate this difference. I'm saying in mine and GP's definition doing what you are suggesting people usually do is not smart, its dumb, and that is not what GP or I are suggesting people do.

I was responding to you in the context of the GP.

> The flip side of being confidently wrong sometimes is that we treat understanding new systems as something approachable. So, yeah, it's annoying that we don't stay in our lane, but, from my boss's perspective, I'm the only one who's actually willing to just read code, investigate, possibly read a paper, and figure out what's going on instead of punting and saying it's someone else's turf I'm blocked until they get back to me.

Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people.

GP here is suggesting that accepting established status quo at face value (i.e relying solely on other people's experience/letting them deal with problems you face in their domain without being able to examine why they arrived at the decisions they did) can lead to worse outcomes, and I agree.

Your response was that it is frustrating to have someone walk in and question things (precisely what GP is suggesting), only to have the final product of whatever decisions these people make be worse than the status quo (not what GP is suggesting).

I responded by saying - there is a difference between not listening to experience and examining whether the resulting implementation/decisions based on the experience are actually valid.

You did not address that. Is there not a difference between these two things? GP is suggesting to do the latter, not the former. i.e question why things are the way they are, crucially not that people should make decisions based on things we don't understand about the status quo.

You only responded to - * I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it, that's a trait borne of arrogance not intelligence.*

Your response claimed that I am denying the validity of your experience, when I made no such statement. All I said was there is a difference between questioning things and forcing decisions based on things they dont understand - smart people don't do the latter, arrogant people do. Someone doing what you are suggesting, is not doing what GP is suggesting, they are different. The former is smart, and the latter is not smart.

When I pointed this out here: I was just trying to examine the problem - if this behaviour is something you see often exhibited by “smart” people then: either you are unable to convince them of your side of the argument for different reasons, or you are not actually arguing with smart people. Do you see the distinction?

You accuse me of gaslighting you.

> Intelligence and arrogance are somewhat contra-indicative.

There might be a trend of this in academia (which is where the xkcd joke stems from), but in my personal experience I dont see this much in industry, and you can disagree with that.

I also don't see an xkcd joke being an actual basis of anything either. You are making declarative statements - but a _lot_ that many physics (and pure mathematics) grads are enormously more arrogant than the general population, enough that the trend under discussion has actual basis. - without any backing of this other than anecdata, and I was pointing out a different anecdotal experience.

My point is that wanting things redone because you don’t understand it is dumb behaviour, not smart behaviour.

There wasn’t even a denial of the validity of experience, I was just trying to examine the problem - if this behaviour is something you see often exhibited by “smart” people then: either you are unable to convince them of your side of the argument for different reasons, or you are not actually arguing with smart people. Do you see the distinction?

> The two aren't mutually exclusive, far from it.

Intelligence and arrogance are somewhat contra-indicative. While you can be intelligent and arrogant, you can’t really learn things without the humility to say you don’t know stuff. In my experience, most physics grads I know constantly say they don’t know stuff, way more than people from other disciplines.

But isn't there value to refuting what Claude is saying if it deserves to be refuted?

The way I see it, if I was repeatedly getting sophisticated but subtly wrong arguments about my work that require me to understand why said argument is wrong, that's essentially drilling down to specifics of what precisely needs to be true to solve the problems I am aiming to solve. There is enormous value to this precision, isn't there?

But there is a difference between not listening to experience and examining whether the resulting implementation/decisions based on the experience are actually valid. I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it, that's a trait borne of arrogance not intelligence.

At least in my experience (as a physics grad), me and all my fellow grads are much more likely to apply Chesterton's fence and then make decisions than not doing that and steamrolling existing decisions.