If you wear nice clothes and exercise, then are you just trying to manipulate people into thinking you have taste and are attractive?

If you work hard at your job and are responsive to your boss's requests, then are you just manipulating them into thinking you're a good worker and giving you a raise?

These tools can certainly be misused (see shitty salespeople), but I don't "attempting to convince others that you are cool and likable" is problematic and manipulative.

Just don't fake it. That's the part people have a problem with. I just read it as "if you want people to care about your shit, then it's only fair you care about theirs first."

If 95% of people are using $100 of value a month, the whales may not be hurting them that badly.

But as other commenters have pointed out — a lot of it is NIMBYism (plus a heavy dose of overregulation).

Conservatives tend to point at projects like this as examples of why our incompetent government shouldn't be allowed to build large projects.

But other countries can do this (including a good chunk of Europe), so I think it's really valuable to dig in and understand why we struggle.

Comment sections on paid substacks tend to be much better than free ones. And on Hackernews (and Reddit, a decade ago), the old-school, text-heavy approach (complete with voting) help ensure that quality content rises.

I find the balance fascinating — exactly how much friction do you need to create a healthy online community? And what are the best ways of doing that without making people pay?

It's not because AI-generated music inherently sucks. It's generally C-grade professional music. It's just not novel or especially interesting, and the low barrier to entry means there's a ton of slop in the space.

A lot of people have always wanted to make music, never made it past the barrier of "music is hard," and therefore have no clue as to what makes truly good music. And now that they have AI, they think they can just skip all the boring parts and make great songs.

And while they can skip a lot of steps in the creative process — those skipped steps also help musicians develop their artistic taste and judgment.

And just because these AI "creators" can't tell the difference, they assume others can't either. And then they get mad when critics recognize their uninspired, derivative slop for what it is.

That's not limited to music, either. You see it in coding, graphic design, writing, and pretty much any other LLM-assisted content generation. Maybe it'll change one day as models get better. Maybe not.

This project is original, stylish, technically clever, aesthetically pleasing, and well-crafted. There's a level of polish and intention behind it, and people here recognize that.

And selfishly — I'd rather not run into a scenario where my boss pulls up GitHub, sees Claude credited for hundreds of commits, and then he impulsively decides that perhaps Claude's doing the real work here and that we could downsize our dev team or replace with cheaper, younger developers.

I (unfortunately) just don't think it's pragmatic/reasonable to expect enough people to make personal sacrifices/reduce QOL to make a dent. It's a tragedy of the commons, and we need some form of reasonable regulation to cut down on the worst offenders (probably carbon taxes) while we invest heavily in improving the technology so it makes financial sense to switch.

Renewables have come so far in the past decade and are now competitive with fossil fuels in terms of pricing. As the technology continues to become more efficient and cheaper, we'll likely start to see significant drops in emissions in addition to cheaper energy.*

*Assuming the US elects a rational adult to the presidency in 2028.

Haven't heard that. Regardless, as someone who works with these models daily (as well as company leadership that loves AI more than they understand it) - Anthropic is absolutely right to say that the military shouldn't be allowed to use it for lethal, autonomous force.

No, a non-engineer can't just spin up the next great app. Even with the newest models and a great prompting/testing system, I don't think you can just spit out high quality, maintainable, reliable code. But as a generalist - I'm absolutely able to ship software and tools that solve our business problems.

Right now, my company identified an expensive software platform that was set to cost us around $250k/year. People in the industry are raving about it.

I've spent 1-2 weeks recreating the core functionality (with a significantly enhanced integration into our CRM and internal analytics) in both a web app and mobile application. And it's gone far smoother than I expected. It's not done - and maybe we'll run into some blocker. But this would have taken me 6 months, at least, to build half as well.

I was an AI skeptic for most of last year. It provided value, sure, but it felt like we were plateauing. Slowing down.

I'd hoped we might be slowing down to some sort of invisible ceiling. I was faster than ever - but it very much required a level of experience that felt reasonable and fair.

It feels different now.

I'd say ~70% of my Claude Opus results just work. I tweak the UI and refactor when possible. And it runs into issues I have to solve occasionally. But otherwise? If I'm specific, if I have it brainstorm, then plan, and then implement - then it usually just works.

But when was the last time our "democratic values" were under attack by a foreign country and actually needed defending?

9/11? Pearl Harbor?

Maybe I'm missing something. We have a giant military and a tendency to use it. On occasion, against democratically elected leaders in other countries.

You're right; freedom isn't free. But foreign countries aren't exactly the biggest threats to American democracy at the moment.

I'm curious how crashes are reported for humans, because it sounds like 3 of the 5 examples listed happened at like 1-4 mph, and the fourth probably wasn't Tesla's fault (it was stationary at the time). The most damning one was a collision with a fixed object at a whopping 17 mph.

Tesla sucks, but this feels like clickbait.

We don't care who the specific users are - but the tracking gives us an idea of how many people use the site? do they have a good experience? are they giving us money? do we have a bug somewhere we're missing? etc.

All that is valuable as a business.

We're naturally wired to engage with negative content - and that's a must-use recipe for success in an economy that increasingly relies on grabbing your attention.

It's no wonder that depression and anxiety rates are higher than ever, despite our world being much, much safer than it was 100-200 years ago.

Even being aware of this doesn't help all that much.

Trump did a new, unbelievably dumb thing that's going to ruin people's lives? Instant click from me.

Malaria rates down 20% over the past 10 years in the DRC?* I'm still scrolling.

*Fake example, but you get the gist.