If you are, here's some useful info:

Every city in the United States has what could be categorized as a standing army in the form of a police force. They are ready and highly trained to violently stop civil unrest.

The police force deploys sophisticated technology and dragnet methodology to track and build profiles on all citizens that attend protests.

Similarly, the media and status quo is captured so thoroughly that all forms of mass protest appear eventually degenerate into lawless havoc to onlookers, which perpetuates a cycle of violence.

The state has no problem in engaging in mass arrests. And when the cultural moment has moved on, individuals are stuck fighting extreme charges and face having to make the difficult choice of pleaing out to resume what semblance of life remains. And if you want to fight, risk facing some of the most inhumane conditions in the developed world by spending some time in a federal prison.

So, "where is the entire US population?"

Mostly surviving and scared.

My strategy is to go until I can't take anymore pain, then just walk away guilt free.

Maybe I'm just out of touch, but it feels like every day I look at hackernews, there's another articulate response patiently explaining why it's ok for companies to sell you things you don't own, and dictate how to use the things you think you own.

I just fundamentally don't accept it, and find it exhausting to engage in the constant overton window shifting.

We can't really know what the truth is, because Anthropic is tightly controlling how you interact with their product and provides their service through opaque processes. So all we can do is speculate. And in that speculation there's a lot of room (for the company) to bullshit or provide equally speculative responses, and (for outsiders) to search for all plausible explanations within the solution space. So there's not much to action on. We're effectively stuck with imprecise heuristics and vibes.

But consider what we do know: the promise is that Anthropic is providing a black-box service that solves large portions of the SDLC. Maybe all of it. They are "making the market" here, and their company growth depends on this bet. This is why these processes are opaque: they have to be. Anthropic, OpenAI and a few others see this as a zero-sum game. The winner "owns" the SDLC (and really, if they get their way the entire PDLC). So the competitive advantage lies in tightly controlling and tweaking their hidden parameters to squeeze as much value and growth as possible.

The downside is that we're handing over the magic for convenience and cost. A lot of people are maybe rightly criticizing the OP of the issue because they're staking their business on Claude Code in a way that's very risky. But this is essentially what these companies are asking for. The business model end game is: here's the token factory, we control it and you pay for the pleasure of using it. Effectively, rent-seeking for software development. And if something changes and it disrupts your business, you're just using it incorrectly. Try turning effort to max.

Reading responses like this from these company representatives makes me increasingly uneasy because it's indicative of how much of writing software is being taken out from under our feet. The glimmer of promise in all of this though is that we are seeing equity in the form of open source. Maybe the answer is: use pi-mono, a smattering of self hosted and open weights models (gemma4, kimi, minimax are extremely capable) and escalate to the private lab models through api calls when encountering hard problems.

Let the best model win, not the best end to end black box solution.

Corpo is very careful to show empathy that can be perceived in some way as accepting blame in a way that would open them to litigation.

Most people on HN aren't scientists, even if they fancy themselves as such.

When I appealed the ban, I was told that I couldn't be told exactly why I was banned, but if I wrote a written apology and "promised to never do it again" my ban could be appealed.

I asked for an update on the ban via email every month for over a year.

Maybe you could tell me a little bit about that process?

I can't really think of a statement that resonates with me less.

On a scale from "not worried" to "let them eat shit", how is the product team thinking about the breakage you'll get from people moving off platform?

No.

> Like I said, deplorable.

> And have you even seen Dario speak with reporters?

> Like, he doesn't make eye contact, and he talks really fast.

> I don't know. I just don't like him.

Be better.

Because it's just not the world we live in. I don't care to enumerate this here.

But I agree with you that part of the problem is politics of power. I just happen to think there is more nuance.

Criminality, there are a handful of stats we could looks at. For example gendered differences in sentencing.

> When examining all sentences imposed, females received sentences 29.2 percent shorter than males. Females of all races were 39.6 percent more likely to receive a probation sentence than males. When examining only sentences of incarceration, females received lengths of incarceration 11.3 percent shorter than males.

https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/2023-demograp...

But instead of arguing about stats, in general -- and this goes back to the social transgression bit. In the real world, women can do things to men that men can't do to women. This is largely due to the politics of power. Im not particularly preoccupied by it, but I do acknowledge that it exists.

Your response is _precisely_ what I'm calling out: two people talking past one another. I do not feel that youve interpreted anything I've said with grace. Instead it's more along the lines of, "yeah yeah yeah, but it's really about power"

Maybe. Hacker news is probably disproportionately powerful white males. I try not to assume bad intent with these things.

I'm merely pointing out that culturally, we will only get worst by trying to shame "normal" people (men) into feeling ways. In fact, I think the "cultural moment" as they say is indicative on how much that has failed.

Culturally, the response has been to celebrate reactive perceptions, like women proudly declaring that they'd prefer to encounter a bear in the woods over a man. Or just generally dismissing or subverting the desire to be masculine.

This imbalance enables women to be socially transgressive (even criminally so) with impunity. That discussion is shot down with pithy remarks like, "well, men kill women."

I'm not really too concerned with any of this, I'm just pointing out that it does to some degree culturally exist. In some ways, it makes sense.

These threads are always filled with two sides talking past one another around this general power imbalance.

I do think this kind of surface level divisiveness is what has fueled some of the counter-reaction reactionary movements we're dealing with today.

A lot of what is disappointing to you is imo a more personal reaction to other problems that are happening.

For example, the loneliness epidemic. Culturally, immediate solutions to immediate problems can be at odds with other problems that we have limited understanding of.

I'm rambling. There is something that I want to tease out, but it's difficult to articulate.

Something like, the discourse around this has to change if we want things to actually improve. It probably includes (uncomfortably) acknowledging that we need to have healthy and positive outlets for masculinity. My sense is that it can't be good to continue down this technologically empowered segregation path, that companies will be more than willing to enable if it improves their bottom line.

Explore, summarize, plan, handoff. That info distillation loop seems to be quite effective at keeping agents on task. I've been considering adding memories between agents, but haven't thought of a good data model yet.

The problem with something like memories is I've observed that when context gets polluted agents get confused. Especially these distilled models like minimax and kimi. So the challenge is ensuring that only "relevant" memories are pulled into context for a given task.