Might be time to go back to a second, air-gapped machine so I can actually use all the software I paid for.

As a non-American, the only thing I could probably argue against in good faith with enough context is Point 2.

I took from the 10 stories that everybody knew what was happening, and still nobody did anything (with one exception after-the-fact). The media today is certainly broadcasting what is happening, but I'm not sure it's actually solving the "let's do something about it" problem.

A critical but empathetic look at how fascism rises and spreads through, and alongside, ordinary people in ordinary society. Excellent book, incredibly relevant.

An excerpt, if you don't want to commit to the whole thing: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

- Dynamic libraries (e.g. for calling into the kernel, but also user space dynamic libraries) are OS-specific (.so for Linux, .dylib for macOS, .dll for Windows)

- Executable format is OS-specific (ELF for Linux, Mach-O for macOS, PE for Windows)

- Dynamic loading and linkage of both the above are also therefore OS-specific

See above.

"Oh well, we were in an anomalous time of social growth, time to go backwards! We won't even need to read or write or think! It's all just too bad, but that's just the way the world works, like it did in 1800." [or pick your date before any current person was alive]

Lots of people have started considering a time of significant "progress" as "an anomaly", as if the world should always just be the way it was in, say, 1800, like that was actually the realistic pinnacle of human society. You also seem to be loosely basing this argument on the availability of "rich nerds", which seems like a bizarre non-sequitur. Computing once didn't exist, and we still valued reading, writing and thinking.

I'm kind of baffled by how regularly I see comments like this. Like, come on. This is basically the AI black pill, no?

Or a lawsuit, given macOS is a trademark.

Given that (allegedly) "your salary" won't be the answer for a significant chunk of the population soon, and all that money will instead (allegedly) go to the bosses doing the firings, and the AI companies they employ instead.

I'm considering "actual power", rather than "actual income".

Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others... The distinction has no practical use.

(And before someone says "that's the government's job!", consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies who know the domain best and are agitating for better financial and social safeguards for all. None, naturally.)

It is possible to build things that don't hurt people.

It is possible to reduce the harms of things that are likely to hurt people.

It is possible to not treat hurt as a foregone conclusion.

It is possible not to use this foregone conclusion to defend strangers who not only create things that actively harm people, but promote this harm as a good thing, without also providing the support to reduce or avoid those harms.

> If the result is something you can't explain than slow down and follow the steps it takes as they are taken.

The problem is I can explain it. But it's rote and not malleable. I didn't do the work to prove it to myself. Its primary form is on the page, not in my head, as it were.

How this plays out:

I use Claude to write some moderately complex code and raise a PR. Someone asks me to change something. I look at the review and think, yeah, that makes sense, I missed that and Claude missed that. The code works, but it's not quite right. I'll make some changes.

Except I can't.

For me, it turns out having decisions made for you and fed to you is not the same as making the decisions and moving the code from your brain to your hands yourself. Certainly every decision made was fine: I reviewed Claude's output, got it to ask questions, answered them, and it got everything right. I reviewed its code before I raised the PR. Everything looked fine within the bounds of my knowledge, and this review was simply something I didn't know about.

But I didn't make any of those decisions. And when I have to come back to the code to make updates - perhaps tomorrow - I have nothing to grab onto in my mind. Nothing is in my own mental cache. I know what decisions were made, but I merely checked them, I didn't decide them. I know where the code was written, but I merely verified it, I didn't write it.

And so I suffer an immediate and extreme slow-down, basically re-doing all of Claude's work in my mind to reach a point where I can make manual changes correctly.

But wait, I could just use Claude for this! But for now I don't, because I've seen this before. Just a few moments ago. Using Claude has just made it significantly slower when I need to use my own knowledge and skills.

I'm still figuring out whether this problem is transient (because this is a brand new system that I don't have years of experience with), or whether it will actually be a hard blocker to me using Claude long-term. Assuming I want to be at my new workplace for many years and be successful, it will cost me a lot in time and knowledge to NOT build the castle in the sky myself.

It's like telling someone they can paint a masterpiece because they understand Fe4[Fe(CN)6]3 makes an aesthetically pleasant blue pigment.

I agree with some of what you said, but just want to point out that you're doing the very thing you criticise here.

I think lots of people genuinely don't want change. Hopefully you have great answers to my objection.

In general, I've found the question of "who needs to provide evidence first?" is one of the most casually ignored and maliciously manipulated questions in so much professional discourse. The answer is often implicitly "the person with less role power" which by itself is a terrible answer.