Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49897817

Points: 10

# Comments: 1

I think this is the part I'm not following, and sorry if I've missed something. There are two ways to construct the request you showed. One is to mess with /etc/hosts. Another is to use `--resolve`. Just because the agent chose one doesn't mean it couldn't have done the other. What makes you think it couldn't have used `--resolve` as well?

How do we know that?

> Though some have questioned why anyone intending to blow up a plane would broadcast the word bomb, many terrorist acts have relied on the threat of a bomb as leverage during attempted hijackings or hostage situations.

There are also cases where I think I know the answer, and I ask the AI, and it produces a more complete answer than I would but I know enough to assess it. It seems like a waste of time to paraphrase the whole thing. That's the "Here's how Claude phrased it and I can attest that it's right" case.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48243331

https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-mach...

(Two different examples of a similar idea)

There are certainly _bad_ abstractions that ought not to exist, which I think is what you're getting at. There are poorly built abstractions, and leaky abstractions. But abstraction itself isn't the problem -- abstraction is what allows us to build anything at all without being crushed by the sheer complexity.

How does the Rust language team weigh the benefits of solving user problems with new language features against the resulting increased complexity? When I learned Rust, I found it to be quite complex, but I also got real value from most of the complexity. But it keeps growing and I'm not always sure people working on the language consider the real cost to new and existing users when the set of "things you have to know to be competent in the language" grows.

It's so easy to forget about the problems we don't have because of the (good) choices people have made in the past.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47377218

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

The phrase “it turns out” has a surprising way of disarming skepticism in readers. While surprising, it’s easy to understand: the phrase suggests a story of the author’s journey of believing one thing, investigating, and finding something different. That’s more credible than simply saying the thing they now believe. The touch of vulnerability (admitting being wrong) avoids the reader’s ego getting defensive when asked to admit they were wrong. The net result is that it’s surprisingly easy to be convinced without any real argument.

I’ve noticed this as well (often in podcasts and programs like Radiolab) and I think it’s quite valuable to just be aware of it as a reader/listener, if you care about thinking critically about your own beliefs.

Is this a trick question? Humanity survived by having enough people with enough other useful traits (like thinking, including the ability to reason about disease and how to prevent it) to overcome the numbers lost to disease. Humans died to disease in enormous numbers.

> nor that they're all good for _me_ as an individual.

Herd immunity presents a real challenge to idea that people should generally be allowed to make their own choices. One's choice here affects everyone else, in a minuscule way that nonetheless adds up to many thousands of lives saved. I'm not sure what the answer is for this, but generally I come down on the side of: if a democratic process creates rules requiring us all to be immunized for the common good, that's okay with me.

> It's the parents obligation to educate their child.

> It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely.

Two obvious things complicate this:

- You weren't taught how to use a real gun at 6 months old, right?

- Would it not follow from what you said above that if you had accidentally shot and killed yourself at age 7, then it would be your own fault and nobody else's? That seems (to me, at least) like an absurd conclusion.

I think about it like this: as a parent, my jobs include identifying when my child is capable of learning about something new, providing the guidance they need to learn it (which is probably not all up front, but involves some supervision, since it's usually an iterative process), allowing them to make mistakes, accepting some acceptable risks of injury, and preventing catastrophe. I'll use cooking as an example. My kids got a "toddler knife" very young (basically a wooden wedge that's not very sharp). We showed them how to cut up avocados (already split) and other soft things. As they get older, we give them sharper knives and trickier tasks. We watch to see if they're understanding what we've told them. We give more guidance as needed. It's okay if they nick themselves along the way. But we haven't given them a sharpened chef's knife yet! And if they'd taken that toddler knife and repeatedly tried to jam it into their sibling's eye despite "educating" them several times, while I wouldn't regret having made the choice to see if they were ready, I would certainly conclude that they weren't yet ready. That's on me, not them.

You allude to this when you say:

> I am very much for showing kids how to use the internet responsibly, but I'm not of the opinion that parental controls are particularly desirable beyond an initial learning period.

Yes, the goal should be to teach kids how to operate safely, not keep them from all the dangerous things. But I'd say that devices and the internet are more like "the kitchen". There are lots of different risks there and it's going to take many years to become competent (or even safe). Giving them an ordinary device would be like teaching my 2-year-old their first knife skills next to a hot stove in a restaurant kitchen with chefs flying around with sharp knives and hot pots. By contrast, without doing any particular child-proofing, our home kitchen is a much more controlled environment where I can decide which risks they're exposed to when. This allows me to supervise without watching every moment to see if they're about to stab themselves -- which also gives them the autonomy they need to really learn. The OP, like other parents, wants something similar from their device and the internet: to gradually expose elements of these things as the parents are able to usefully guide the children, all while avoiding catastrophe.