Yeah, I regularly spend a lot of time with Claude fleshing out ideas and scoping out features. I'm behind the times and just use the chat interface rather than Claude Code, so perhaps there are controls I'm not aware of, but there can't be any that make it correctly understand an under-specified idea, or even correctly understand an adequately specified idea.

For example, I've been playing around building a side-project that involves building out a safety-weighted graph to support generating safer bike routes. I was recently working on integrating traffic control devices (represented on OpenStreetMaps nodes) into the model where I calculate weights for my graph (I essentially join the penalty for the traffic control device onto the destination end of an edge) and Claude kept wanting to average that penalty by the length of the edge (as that makes sense for some other factors in my model like crashes, surface material, max speed, etc), but doesn't make sense for traffic control signals at intersections (as the length of an edge shouldn't change the risk a cyclist experiences going through an intersection). If I didn't have a well-developed ability to closely parse words to ideas, I could have very easily just taken the working model Claude generated and built more on top of it, setting up a dangerous situation where the routing algo would promote routes running a user through more intersections (which are the most dangerous place for cyclists).

I hope a comparable proportion of kids coming up today will spend the time and energy to understand the ideas behind the text and the code, but I really doubt 18-year old me would have had that wisdom. I would have been underspecifying what I wanted out of a lack of prerequisite knowledge, receiving slop, and either promptly getting lost in debugging hell or more likely the worse case of erroneously believing the slop satisfied the brief.

> There are lines between writing as a persuasive medium, writing as a didactic medium for teaching, writing as a creative/poetic medium, writing as the process of creation of marketable products, writing as a shared summary of specialist niche knowledge, and writing as an aid to personal comprehension. > Those are fundamentally different activities, They happen to use the same medium and there are some overlapping areas. But they're essentially different activities with different requirements and different processes.

In all of those areas, if you take away the human who can develop value-creating ideas into an accurate and high-fidelity written representation, you will just get slop. Developing ideas and representing them in words is the skill. There is no substitute.

Words / language are the great technology we've made for representing ideas, and representing those ideas in the written word enables us to evaluate, edit, and compose those smaller ideas into bigger ideas. Kind of like how teachers would ask for an explanation in my own words, writing down my understanding of something I'd heard or read forced me to really evaluate the idea, focus on the parts I cared about, and record that understanding. Without the writing step, ideas would easily just float through my mind like a phantasm, shapeless and out of focus and useless when I had a tangible need for the idea.

I am glad I learned to write (both code and text) long before Claude came online. It would have been very hard to struggle through translating ideas from my head into words and words (back) into ideas in my head if I knew there was an "Easy button" I could hit to get something cogent-sounding. I hope a large enough proportion of kids today will still put in the work and won't just end up with a stunted ability to write/think.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM

The US government manages a more diverse array of problems (critical, life and death problems) than any other US organization (and probably more than any other org in the world). Amazon has only a tiny fraction of the competence of the US government and is not nearly as reliable. Remember the last time a significant portion of the social security system went down? I can't, but I can remember the last time AWS went down.

I wasn't ever able to really develop deep intuition about/understanding of a calculation until I did it by hand once or twice. I often just plugged in new models and algos just to see if performance was above a threshold, but when I wanted to productionize a new winner, I'd have to run through the algo by hand for a few steps to understand and tune it. And through doing it by hand, the complex became the simple.

Spyware like Pegasus [0] has been able to use zero-click exploits to penetrate target phones and read messages as though they were the phone's owner.

The US has the best SigInt capacity in the world. The leaders of the US government know that phones are not secure against sophisticated adversaries and they know that we have very sophisticated adversaries. It's deeply troubling that so many of our leaders were so comfortable discussing Secret level plans in such a reckless and illegal way, and it's extremely likely that hostile adversaries have fly-on-the-wall level access to extremely sensitive US planning.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)

[0] https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/entityRelationshipDiagram.html

[1] https://github.blog/developer-skills/github/include-diagrams...

Thanks!

Cleaning up the mess Trump left was painful. The unavoidable consequences of global disruption of the economy (ie reduced supplies of goods) was a bit of inflation, and while Biden achieved the best recovery of any developed nation with the lowest inflation and very high wage growth among the bottom 40% of income earners, enough voters were turned off by inflation and by rightwing efforts to make voting harder that Donald Trump was able to just barely pull out a victory.

Trump is eliminating guardrails left and right and unsurprisingly is crashing things much faster this time around.

I don't know how any auto designer could both regularly drive a car and not immediately reject the idea of eliminating physical controls for wipers/lights/temp control/sound system.

While we now do have a suburban-centric subculture, the car is just a tool that enables that subculture to easily access economic opportunities without having to interact with the classes segregated out of desirable locations by contemporary (explicitly racist) federal housing policies [0]. Although, I guess now that I look at it in that light (and noting the fact that every major city is still very racially segregated), I suppose that is just who we largely are and historically have been.

[0] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Feder...

Toasters are so cheap that I can't imagine repairing them could be cost effective (ie "financially optimal") unless you assign no value to your time. A new, good-enough toaster costs in the ballpark of $30. I love taking things apart and fixing them, but if the repair involves figuring out the part I have to order or soldering anything, it will take far more than $30 of my time.

This kind of project is for people who love to tinker. The economics do not make sense.

What was Trump good at?

I don't have any evidence that it's the case, but if the claim about a surge of govt infrastructure appearing on shodan is accurate, I don't have any other hypotheses to explain it.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/trump-says-elon-musk-...