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I've switched off claude this week; the last week has been significantly degraded in ability, many more screw-ups.


This is why education used to start with rote memorization. Functional intelligence isn't abstract, it is based on useful information you can quickly recall.


grok4.6 is much better at knowable, consequential reality, then grok4.5 or claude.

I hope grok4.7 will improve this even more.


They don't mention this, but one major reason for this is to validate claims of family units and prevent trafficking.

This is, I suspect, a good thing. The article never states any downsides, other then nebulous claims. Yes, DNA is like finger printing someone, which is routinely done for arrests, but has the benefit of assisting in claims of family relations, which is at the heart of many ICE concerns.


They don't mention this, but one major reason for apartheid's Bantustan policy was to recognize distinct homelands and preserve cultural communities. This is, I suspect, a good thing. The article never states any downsides, other than nebulous claims. Yes, assigning people to ethnic homelands is like any other government record-keeping, which is routinely done, but has the benefit of assisting in claims of separate national identities, which was at the heart of many apartheid concerns.


Dude. Trafficking minors is bad. DNA literally can help establish family relationships.


A sibling comment mentions that playing devils advocate is strongly encouraged on this site, so I want to raise a question: what if a person does not want to establish their family relationship for whatever reason?


Dude. Trafficking minors is bad. Bantustans can literally help establish family relationships.


You realize that what you're commenting on (playing devil's advocate) is strongly encouraged by this site right? People are constantly "steel manning" stupid shit like this here. It's almost a sport.


Apartheid was bad. Immigration enforcement isn't bad... it's what alot of people want. These people feel as if they are (in part, collective) owners of the country, and owning it they want to exclude people who do not own it.

The same way, I might add, that you or I want to exclude squatters from our homes, and the same way (I assume) most of us don't invite hobos in to sleep in our beds.

If you say that's bad too and that it's much like Apartheid, then all I can conclude is that maybe I need to learn more about Apartheid. Maybe it's not so bad as I have been told.


Which part of “immigration enforcement” is executing citizens in broad daylight?


> These people feel as if they are (in part, collective) owners of the country

But they don't in absolutely any sense (legal, moral, philosophical) own the country. And especially they do not "own" the culture (because that's actually impossible). So all you have is jingoism propping up this entire notion.


Citizens most certainly do own the country. It comes directly from the fact that all government power is granted to it by the people.

>That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

To the extent that the land claimed as part of the United States belongs to and is controlled by the United States, it belongs to the people.

People certainly own an interest in the culture and have a right to keep it from changing too much too quickly and to fight and refuse the changing of certain aspects of that culture.


> Citizens most certainly do own the country.. To the extent that the land claimed as part of the United States belongs to and is controlled by the United States, it belongs to the people.

Citizens are the beneficiaries of a trust. The land is held in a trust. That is not the same thing as ownership. Think about it: in some other countries you can't even outright own land. That should indicate to you that your notion is overly facile.

The underwriters of that trust are all of the current citizens and more importantly all those that came before. In the USA that includes indigeneous peoples, slaves, naturalized immigrants, etc.

> People certainly own an interest in the culture and have a right to keep it from changing too much too quickly and to fight and refuse the changing of certain aspects of that culture.

Lol what does it mean to "own an interest"? I own an interest in blue spotted blue spotted stingrays - what rights does that bestow upon me with respect to the stingrays? None.


>Citizens are the beneficiaries of a trust. The land is held in a trust. That is not the same thing as ownership.

Citizenship is the most absolute (though diluted) ownership possible. I own a car, but if I commit a crime heinous enough I can have that confiscated as a penalty. On the other hand, in the United States there is no crime for which my citizenship can be revoked. What about the other elements of ownership? Participating in the decision-making process of the disposition of the property for instance... that's called voting or representative democracy or whatever you want to call it. At times, the government, acting on behalf and with the consent of people, has bought more territory, or traded it away to other nations. We employ a policy of absolute defense against any belligerent encroachers.

Looks like ownership to me. Calling it a "trust" is just the weasel words.


> Calling it a "trust" is just the weasel words.

I don't care what you think - this isn't a creative writing exercise. Trust is the technical term describing the legal framework for much of the land in the United States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Trust_Lands

I'm not gonna respond to the rest because you're clearly just going off vibes and feelings.


I will remember that you don't care what I think or want... so that when I hear you and yours whining after you lose another election, it will be music for me. Since no one owns any country, you will of course be encouraged to move abroad, where you will no doubt be welcomed for the progressive hero that you are.


> you and yours whining after you lose another election

Lol my man have you looked at the polls lately

https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil...

Haha


>But they don't in absolutely any sense (legal, moral, philosophical) own the country.

Citizens do own their countries. In any meaningful sense of the word "own", they do own them. Legally, morally, and philosophically.

> And especially they do not "own" the culture

This is a strange non sequitur. Sure. No one owns culture. The immigrants can take their culture with them back home.


What LLMs have shown me most, is:

Alternatively most blog posts could have been paragraphs. Most books could have been single chapters. Most newspaper articles could have been tweets.

That being said, most readers want you to hold your hand step by step. They don't want to the outline: they want you to give them a story. Most people and writers know this already. To me, it was new.


Sometimes pleasure is in the activity, not just the outcome.

A good movie or novel is a generally pleasurable experience from start to finish, where the conclusion on its own might have only been mildly interesting at best.

Sex is also like this.


> Alternatively most blog posts could have been paragraphs. Most books could have been single chapters. Most newspaper articles could have been tweets.

Why even read? Why even live? What's the point of all of this? Churches could be wooden shacks, 5 stars menus could be protein shakes, paintings could be single sentence descriptions, ...

You might as well sign up to be put in an artificial coma, or in a matrix pod


> Why even read?

To understand.

For most everyone else, it is to momentarily feel some sort of way. The difference is what the parent describes as a revelation, to him.

You see, for people who crave to understand, living among people who just want to feel this and that feels like living in an insane asylum where the people inflicting harm upon themselves and others will do nothing but distract themselves long enough to forget and go on to inflict harm on themselves and others again, forever.

As for 'might as well quit' - most everyone I've known who's not an idiot has already done that. Even the idiots aren't having children by the way :) Living in a matrix pod? You mean a modern city? Anyhoo...


I've colloquially coined this as the contentification of everything. The goal isn't to actually engage with something, whether it's the writing style, flavor, or artwork on display. It's purely about consumption, and the most optimal way of consuming something is distilling it down into a short, bland summary.

It's why there are people out there that will use an LLM to summarize a book and pretend that they read the whole thing because they know the general outline.


Right on.

I keep brooding on the idea that maybe LLMs will never get “good at writing” in some Platonic sense, but they will be progressively trained better to create text that a greater and greater bulk of humans will “enjoy” for reasons that are downstream of inherited patterns of thought and emotional response that the models have learned.

In other words, we become the stochastic parrots.


TLDR: Ran grok in $HOME. Surprised agent read content of folder.

On the other hand, I specifically had grok try hard NOT to read a known key in the project dir (it only saw the first part using a tool, to verify it was present). So there's that.


No. Ran `grok` in `$HOME` and the CLI uploaded the whole home content. This is not the LLM going rogue or reading all files.


Yeah, this is a lesson about learning how to use tools safely, not about tools abusing the user. The person that posted this probably blames the hammer when he hits his thumb.


I'm not seeing the information about it having been run at $HOME, where are you seeing that?


The `repo_path` field.


Ah. I've never used Grok so I was assuming that meant there was actually a repository on the user's home directory, something I know is pretty common.


> TLDR: Ran grok in $HOME. Surprised agent read content of folder.

Did it really need to read all of $HOME and everything under it?


Not only files it wanted to access, but uploaded the whole directory.

Relevant read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48877371

> The practical takeaway for users: your entire codebase leaves (uploaded) your machine unencrypted on each Grok Build invocation, not just files you ask it to read, and no visible setting stops it.


You're correct. But have you been on the other side: something you know is not perfect, but someone convinces you to try something, you agree, it isn't great but it gets used... then they leave and you are stuck with something that is a pain clean up.

I understand it can suck: but what is lacking isn't your technical demonstration (unless it is truly ground breaking), but your demonstration to clean up your own mess and be responsible.


I just told you I have run multiple projects through at a large defense contractor.

The entire system there is old projects dropped by some new manager, retiree, or corpse. I work on systems that are older than I am and I was born in the 80s. There is no side in Ba Sing Sah.


Assuming you are working on anything of importance, there's a pretty good chance that you, and/or your coworkers, already have our interfaces installed in your organism. (as does most of NATO)

You might want to get on top of that, and start advocating for neuro-auditing your assets, mr. project manager.


When I was in a large org, it was a common failure that a manager would come in from a smaller firm - and assume that our design practices etc. were meaningless overhead.

Inevitably they'd try to do a "rapid prototype" of a feature that had been tried a hundred times before and declared "too hard/unworkable/uninteresting." as they wouldn't talk to those who had done this before, or look at any past work... the invariable result was a project shut down within 6 months and the manager would be shown the door some time later.

The main takeaway from the above is to listen to people around you when you join an org, and observe the habits of successful leaders. Odds are good that at least within this particular org under these circumstances... those habits are the ones that work.


So I'm on the other side of this usually.

Most places I land there's deference to the status quo and those that came before. People assume that efforts of that past were well considered and that good work was done.

But ultimately when pressed, there's generally no evidence of the above, and when there is evidence, one can generally demonstrate the flaws in the approach, so I press on anyway and it hasn't really bitten me yet.

Of course, in many of these projects there's now deference to decisions I've made. Some of those decisions were well made, with evidence and supporting work, to make them challengeable should the understanding changes. Some of them are gut checks because they didn't matter to me at the time.

Either way the take away is good, but often practices exist simply to frustrate.


Yes and it’s still always better to try new things then wait for approval or something to be perfect if you want the company to keep innovating.


PG Wire proto 3 is my largest source of frustrations.

I'm playing with a POC for a better wire protocol here: https://github.com/solidcoredata/pgwire4


404 Not Found


Now public.


What posgresql needs is a new wire format. (pgwire4)

I've been slopping together a POC to probe the edges of what can be done as just an extension. So far I have a framed protocol with inline cancellation, named parameters, out-of-query text language selector, ad-hoc pg/PLSQL execution with cache (no need for prepare), multiple result sets, streaming large results, and more flexible bulk upload.

In other words, with this extension you can query:

``` select * from T1; select * from T2; ```

And return them both in PG/PLSQL or straight SQL.

The existing pgwire3 protocol is one of the worst things to work with in postgresql.


Have you raised it main developers and gained feedback?


China supports Chinese interests.

So far, you think there is some universalism sentiment. You're wrong.


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