So you’re not missing anything if you use Claude by yourself. You just update your local system prompt.
Instead it’s a problem when you’re part of a team and you’re using skills for standards like code style or architectural patterns. You can’t ask everyone to constantly update their system prompt.
Web tech encompasses a wide berth of performance requirements depending on the stack used. React requires more overhead than Windows 95-2000 era HTML and javascript.
People without taste hide behind skill. They do everything technically correctly and still make something bad. This is the threat of new mediums to them — it takes away their only strength.
But at the same time, something like AI suddenly enables people with neither taste nor skill to produce. I don’t want to see AI art right now — AI art is currently a lot of noise.
The sentiment of photography not being real art hasn’t been a thing for a while now though.
The founders were skeptical of direct democracy because it assumes people have time and expertise they mostly don’t. People should not be voting based on their understanding of tariffs. It’s why we ended up with a republic.
But social media changes the equation entirely. It gives us the speed of direct democracy without any of the structure or responsibility. It pushes people to judge candidates issue-by-issue, often on topics they don’t understand well, while eroding the deliberative layers a republic is supposed to have.
The problem isn’t people or education — America didn’t get this far because Americans are any smarter or dumber than anyone else. It’s the design of the systems. The founding fathers built a system that has so far lasted almost 250 years.
You cannot expect people to change — safety protocols, procedures, govenments — it’s about the systems.
In my book it is the duty of a democratic state to keep its population educated to make educated decisions. If you look at countries with more direct democracy like Switzerland not all the decisions are perfect, but they are by no means worse than if you had replaced the public vote with politicians that are heavily lobbied by corporate interest and have a time horizon that ends at their next election.
In fact you will find that in many cases the population will even vote for unpopular measures if they are discussed and understood well ahead of the decision.
But in the end that requires a decent education of the masses, a well functioning and uncaptured media landscape and a certain amount of democratic practise, all of which are missing in big parts of the US.
Democracy is something everybody actively needs to work on, otherwise it withers. If you want to have a nice village it works best if everybody perceives themselves as an agent of creating a nice village. If you want a shit village, you best give everybody the impression it is somebody elses task.
Looks like a Frecciarossa 1000 derailed in 2020 but it was due to a manufacturer defect in a track switch replaced the night before.
The defect was not caught by the manufacturer or the system operator. It was due to two crossed wires in an assembly.
I know a lot more engineering goes into these trains due to the higher stakes. Japan’s high speed rail hasn’t had a fatal accident in 60 years. I’m wondering what the cause of this will turn out to be.
Japan's shinkansen system has never had a fatal accident, except for one incident in 1995 where someone got killed at a station because he was caught in a door as the train departed the station (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishima_Station_incident). No one has ever died in a derailing, crash, etc.
Actually the defect was detected by the operators, who installed it that night. They disabled the switch, but apparently this didn't reach the day shift.
The problem with Gas Town is how it was presented. The heavy metaphor and branding felt distracting.
It’s a bit like reading the Dune book, where you have to learn a whole vocabulary of new terms before you can get to the interesting mechanics, which is a tough ask in an already crowded AI space.
I think you have to remove an awful lot of what makes Gastown Gastown to find something sensible – at the minimum you need to restructure and simplify the roles, restructure the memory system, remove tmux, ...
The best bit about it was the agentic coding maturity model he presented. That was actually great.
I don't think it's at all like reading Dune. Dune is creative fiction, Gastown is. Oh ok wait, if you consider Gastown to be creative fiction then I guess I agree. As a software tool though I don't think this analogy works.
1. People’s beliefs are strongly shaped by upbringing and social environment.
2. A belief feeling “natural” or common does not make it correct or benign.
3. What’s most commendable is the effort to examine and revise inherited beliefs, especially when they cause harm.
4. This framework lets me understand how any individual arrived at their views without endorsing those views.
I think this is why responses often split: some treat explanation as endorsement, others don’t. Both reactions are understandable, but the tension disappears once you treat explanation and moral evaluation as separate and compatible steps.
this is a great way of articulating it; something I've felt for a long time as a transplant from the Bible Belt who occasionally has to listen to New Englanders sweepingly denigrate the South or Midwest.
People had already ditched writing HTML for years before Markdown came out.
People were just using other markup languages like rST.
Other attempts had already proven HTML to be a bad language for rough documentation. Someone then just needed to write a spec that was easy to implement and Markdown was that.
Instead it’s a problem when you’re part of a team and you’re using skills for standards like code style or architectural patterns. You can’t ask everyone to constantly update their system prompt.
Claude skill adherence is very low.
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