Oh wait, they said genocide-*supporting*. So the stances they claimed it's a hotbed of are "right, right, middle, hard right", and then they said it's far left. Baffling.

(As a side note, far-left supporters of Russia, aka internet commies who still think of Russia as the USSR, are some of the dumbest people on Earth)

Racism is a classic right wing associated political position (far right: immigrants, minorities, deviants, and the far left cause all our problems; far left: rich people and the far right cause all our problems). Anti-muslim racism in particular is associated strongly with the right (including, one can mention, there are 4 US representatives who are Muslims - all Democrats). On China the divide isn't as stark but is still pretty strong, with the right usually more hawkish and the left more dovish. On Russia, it used to be strongly hawkish on the right, dovish on the left, but these days you have both the far left and far right liking Russia and the centre hating it.

Genocide, I can only assume they're talking about Israel. Parties used to both be pretty pro-Israel, but these days Republicans are nearly evenly split, while Democrats are increasingly strongly against Israel (but there's still a very large minority of Israel-supporting Democrats). While opposition to Israel is now majority in the US, on the specific question of "Has Israel committed genocide", it's still a minority view, but growing, with about 3 in 10 Americans (and 5 in 10 Democrats) saying yes (interesting to note, 3 in 10 Jewish Americans also said "yes"). It's a policy viewpoint that's in the process of segregating in the US by party but which didn't use to be that way, and still has a long way to go to reach a fully partisan split.

In short, their statement describing Fark as left-wing but then saying it's a hotbed of "left, right, middle, hard right" made no sense.

Just the opposite. The court ruled that Claude had the rights to train using books that they bought. The standard now is buying used/surplus books and mass scanning them.

From a nominal flat-panel perspective, yes (gets as high as 6,5x in some parts of the desert southwest). But this isn't a flat panel, it's curved, so your 0-degree-angle values get depressed and your tangential-light numbers get boosted. 5 mi/h and 40mi/day are quite reasonable for the desert southwest.

Obviously you won't get that in, say, Reykjavík ;)

I do agree that for whatever use a simple left-right axis is (obviously politics is vastly multidimensional) "left vs. right" is a circle, not a horseshoe. You look at people like Greenwald, Assange, etc and it's easy to see how people loop around the back end.

Basically toward the centre you tend to have the attitude of "the fundamental system is not wrong, but we need to fix X and Y" (just with disagreements over what is right, what is wrong, and what the fixes are). Whereas the more polarized you get to the left and right, the more convinced you are that everything is wrong and it doesn't just need fixes, it needs to be torn down and rebuilt in some new glorious utopian form. So as you approach the backside, you have some unifying attitudes of hating the country and global systems, more prone to supporting demagogues, anti-democratic tendencies, militarism, demonization of the centre (usually under the mistaken belief that the centre actually supports them, whereas actual centrist views are represented only by oppressive minority), etc. The enemies of your country get treated as heroes (for example, the like of both the far-left and far-right of Russia), even when they not only want to see your country destroyed, but are actually ideologically quite different from you. Also, misogyny often starts to creep in through the backdoor of militarism and demogoguery.

Certain sides may be more prone to certain aspects - for example, the right, with its love of guns, is usually an easier slide into militancy, whereas the left, coming from having been in the opposition during the Cold War, usually has an easier route into hating the country, for example. But there gets to be enough unifying aspects on the backend between the far-left and the far-right that some people can swing all the way around.

It sounds like you said it is simultaneously far left and far right?

This is so weird. I haven't visited the site the early Afghan War, maybe early Iraq War era, but I remember it being rather US-jingoistic, pretty right wing? And the site tilt was pretty heavily "white American male" not a famously left-wing demographic.

Meh, I knew of Fark back when all that was at the site was a single photo of a squirrel with large genitals.

I used to play on the mud Three Kingdoms in the mid '90s, and Drew was a Wizard (admin) there (named "Cletus"). When Fark became a link aggregator, I used to visit for the Photoshop contests (then ended up drifting off to Worth1000 when that became a thing). I'm not surprised that he ended up launching a porn site, because, well, Drew, but they launched a TV service that ended up getting gobbled up by Adult Swim? Weird.

Crazy to see all of the stuff that's happened with the site since I left; it entirely dropped off my radar.

> I think this is the result of their trainers trying to reduce hallucination.

Most probably. I don't like LLMs burning my precious tokens blathering on about being honest, but I will accept the tradeoff. Grudgingly haha.

> My iron rule is that Claude is not allowed to modify git state, not even to stage or unstage, and definitely not to commit. As long as that rule is followed, any mistakes can be cleaned up easily.

I have a repo in a sandbox with no remote. Claude is quite good at pushing commits to this repo during its own milestones during development, and it will use it to hunt down bugs when tests fail after a commit, stepping back to a commit before this session's work to see if this is a new bug , or a new way to expose an existing bug. If it sees that it is a new way to exercise an existing bug, it will binary search its way through the commits until it narrows down what changed, and then looks at how to fix it.

I disagree with all your assertions.

> AI has access to your command line to autonomously execute commands. No no no.

Ok, I must admit that I did cast that line off the back of the good ship ColaMan without any further information in order to see if anyone would bite.

You think that particular command line has anything of worth in it? The only thing in there that I can't recreate with one command is the local Git repository that the LLM commits its changes to. And that's only because I manually copy it out of the LLM's sandbox on occasion. I should probably automate that one day.

> you enabled an LLM to do destructive things and then complain when there is destruction.

There has been no destruction in it's little sandbox that I care about. It created a faulty command that got escaped by the shell, and oh shit, nothing of importance happened, because even if that command had been 'rm -rf /' I just would have had to return to the last backed up git that I had. That takes about 5 minutes I suppose. The amount of effort that LLM has saved me over the last two months is probably about a year's worth of full time coding, so I'm going to look past any accidental nuclear holocausts where it turns all the sand in its sandbox to glass.

Look. LLMs are just tools. Some tools are great, some tools are shit. This particular class of tool is great at all that boilerplate stuff that can get you 50 - 80 percent of the way to completing a task that you need to do today, if you already have enough skill to know how to do the task. It's been quite useful going through all my old projects in 'code review' mode, because it can often see security/usability/structural issues or improvements that I frankly could not be arsed to deal with when I wrote them. It is in no way ready to replace a human for any sustained length of time, and anyone with a shred of intellect can see that.

Personally, I don't think the AI bubble is going to last much longer. So I'm quite happily burning up Anthropic's compute time finishing off/cleaning up heaps of small home and work projects before a single question costs $8.25 for the LLM to answer.

the vehicles start looking more like a wingless airplane than a car.

And what does the company's name mean? ;) (Hint: it's Greek)

It adds up to 40 miles per day, not 5. 5 would be a cloudy day.

I used to be anti-solar-panels-on-cars back when solar panels were expensive, and ones of reasonable efficiency were even more expensive - the argument was, "put it on your roof where it belongs". But that's just not the case any more. Adding solar is just not that much of a cost to the car. It adds some complexities, but mainly in the design / early manufacturing phase.

Also:

The average American drives 37 miles per day.

1) So if you're in a sunny climate, it covers all of said average-driver's driving. Otherwise, said average-driver has to plug in occasionally, but not nearly as often.

2) Most people drive less than the average (the average is skewed by a long-tail - small numbers of people who drive very far every year). What you actually should be meaning is the median US driver; the median drives 23 miles per day. Most Europeans, even less.

3) Even for said "average american", their daily average is skewed by long drives (e.g. road trips and similar). Wheren of course you're plugging in, you'd be plugging in even if the car was adding 80 miles a day. But when not on road trips, their daily average is lower.

4) Surely you can see the appeal of the tangential benefits, such as being unstrandable - where even if you run out in the middle of the desert 20 miles from the nearest town, you're still going to get there, just delayed (remember that EV ranges, if you drive very slowly, increase like 2x, so 40 miles a day becomes 80, so a 20 mile shortfall is only a ~4h delay on a sunny day).

5) Nobody is saying, "One car for everybody". Of course appeal varies by person and by location. Here in Iceland for example we have three problems. One, very little sun at all for a good chunk of the year. Two, even in the summer, when the days are long, the sun is mainly low and circles around you. Solar power just kinda sucks here in general. And three, the three-wheel config would mean that the centre wheel wouldn't align with tracks in the snow from other cars (although there is a slight advantage, in that it also wouldn't align with road ruts from studded tyres, which often fill with water in the rain and become hazardous).

But somewhere in the southern US, it's a great option.

I'm seeing more and more references to "Honest" in AI output, or AI-related comments.

The AI didn't make an "Honest" mistake. It does not have the capacity for honesty. The output from a LLM is phrased in such a manner to provoke empathy, in a similar way to how Microsoft re-jigged all their user interaction dialogs to include "We" to soften the blow of their crappy software failing the user for the 5th time today. (Side note: "Something went wrong" is the most infuriating error message ever.)

When I ask a LLM for a code review it often blurts out "Honest note:" about some shortcomings. I don't care about "honesty". I care about safe, working, robust, code. The fact that LLMs are tripping over themselves trying to be "Honest" about mistakes in their "path of most statistics" output is a concern if you care about trying to make them operate outside their sandbox in the real world.

Yesterday Claude quoted a word in backticks during an automatic git commit and my shell escaped it tried to execute it. Luckily the word was just an English word with nothing matching in my path. But this is basic, basic, basic stuff. It's been committing things to git ever since it was built, and yet, it keeps tripping over itself. In my code one of the tests keeps failing due to seed data timestamps not lining up with the datetime the test was run. I can see that. Every time Claude runs the tests, it burns up tokens going, "Oh this particular test failed I'll just dig into things and see what's going on, **$$**$$**$$** oh it's just a timestamp issue". Never once does it commit that to its memory file, so eventually I told it to remove the test, and it just added a comment to it saying "Ignore this test due to timestamp misalignment", which it could have done the very first time, if it actually had a brain.

LLMs are a very handy tool if used right. I can get huge chunks of boilerplate code out of them with just a few sentences and that's great when I'm hashing out a concept. But to promise the world (and your investors) that LLMs are ready to replace people out in the real world, where "Honest Mistakes" have Real World Repercussions, that's outright fraud at this stage.

> It will randomize over a surprisingly short time if it doesn't have power for data maintenance.

If you plug in a USB stick, you just power up the controller and the flash memory chip. You have to read everything and write everything to charge the cells back up again, there is no background refresh going on like in DRAM.