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In the original sense of the word, vibe coding means neither reading nor caring about the code: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/

Some would use the term "Agent Engineering" for what OP did.


There's a trend where people go around claiming they built something and just happen to conveniently omit everywhere that everything was "built" using an LLM and the author doesn't even understand what the code does. That's the crux of my objection.

FWIW I agree with your post and perhaps we need a separate name for people who just instructed an LLM to build something, but then took the trouble to understand how the thing actually works.

It seems to me that this is not the case here. The author used LLM to build the whole thing and left it at that. Which is completely fair, I'd do the same if I just wanted to scratch an itch with the minimal amount of effort, but then I wouldn't go around claiming "I built it".


Me neither, and it was the first thing I looked for. Instead I saw: "No ads. No hype. Just quiet wisdom". Okay then

I wish. The small inconvenience of putting in an IBAN and a matching name instead of just an email address is already enough for many people to default to paypal. Just happened to me again yesterday, the guy preferred to bring cash next time we see each other instead of just receiving my info via text.

"The guy" probably let you know in a polite way that you were behaving immaturely. You're not supposed to ask your friends for money to split bills etc. The way grown ups do it is "I pay this time, you pay next time".

No, he didn't. He offered to cover a case of beer for after our game at the park, but he didn't have a car, so he asked me to bring it and he'll pay for it. Afterwards he came to me (I never brought up the topic of money) and asked for my Paypal details. How am I in the wrong here?

The whole "I pay this time you pay next time" is already covered by "everybody brings a case once in a while", but if the guys without cars just ask someone else to pay for it when it's their turn it won't add up.

If you're going to make assumptions, perhaps start with those that don't paint me in a bad light.


You weren't in the wrong, he was. He shouldn't have asked somebody to pay for something and bring it if he didn't have the money at hand to cover for it. PayPal isn't real money in this case.

If this was a long time friend, I'd let it slide. It's just a case of beer, and in Germany beer is dirt cheap. If this was a new acquaintance, I'd let it slide and take note that it's not a person to make friends with.

> If you're going to make assumptions, perhaps start with those that don't paint me in a bad light.

Good point. But all of this isn't a problem of payment systems, but of people's behaviour.


This seems likely to be cultural, possibly even microcultural.

I know many adults who believe that splitting bills is a normal and reasonable thing to do.


Splitting bills, where each pay a part in the restaurant, fine. Splitting bills where one pays and the other sends him money, not.

Who is making these rules up? Why do you think they apply universally?

God made them, as far as I know. Humanity lived in gift economies long before the invention of barter and trade.

These are etiquette rules, which have their benefits. Since nobody is forced to follow etiquette, they help you to learn things about people.

Generosity is one of the easiest life hacks to find out who is friendly towards you and who is not. If you buy them a drink and they won't buy you a drink back, that's a tiny cost for you to know what kind of fellow you're dealing with. If they buy you a drink and then asks you to transfer money to them, you also learn something about them. If people splitting bills want to sit and count to make sure that everybody pays exactly for what they had, then you learn something. And so on.

If you invite people for dinner a few times, you will learn something about that person whether you wanted to or not.


The presence of social constructs is advantageous to group survival, and an individual operating within a given set of such constructs may choose to adhere to or reject the norms of those constructs. As you say, you do learn things about people through interacting with them. I think ideally this interaction includes discovering what their norms are, whether they believe they are conforming/rejecting/otherwise to a status quo, and the reason for it. The action itself is may not be sufficient to infer an individual's values without the context and reasoning, especially in the absence of clear communication. Social constructs are local to social groups and subgroups, with differing levels of conservation and generalization between groups.

This is not how German culture works.

> Germany has reported more than 5,000 excess deaths this year.

We're up to more than 15,000: https://www.rki.de/DE/Themen/Gesundheit-und-Gesellschaft/Ges...


Hard to keep up with lots of sites. At least provide a common interface, like an atom feed.

Are you supposed to keep up with lots of sites? Which ones would you want to keep up with?

Government, municipalities, bank, large corporations, the list is endless. A curated RSS feed would work, but someone would have to do the curating.

I wish people had an intuitive understanding of probabilities. It seems the average person can only think in terms of "basically never happens", "fifty fifty" and "sure thing".

They do have an intuitive understanding! You just outlined it, and it works well enough for most things. Statistics is generally very useful, but for individuals it's not really important or useful to understand, because the data is rarely ever clear or trustworthy enough to use for making decisions about specific situations.

Probabilities might be more intuitive, statistics are intuitive only for the most straight forward topics. That's why it's so easy to present entirely correct but very misleading statistics.

And how people don’t get how probabilities work when run over repeated instances. Like it is only 0,1% risk that X happens everytime Y is done which sounds low but then it turns out Y is done Z number of times per day…

I hate that I have to talk to so many people about Russian Roulette just with more chambers. But it’s the only analogy that hits.

XCOM should be added to the curriculum.

XCOM probabilities are lies, just like Fire Emblem. Pretty much 0% of games that show you a "percent-to-hit" chance ever give an accurate number.

true for XCOM in all difficulties except the hardest iirc

1 tile in front of alient

96% chance of hit

miss. twice.

question sanity.


The word “most” is a mess. Strictly speaking the person with “the most” has the plurality, not even half. “Most people” can mean more than half, but is often used to mean or imply anything from a supermajority to “almost everyone”.

I think almost everyone threw a dice quite a few times while playing board games.

Maybe people would have a better understanding of percentages if 20-sided dice were used more. "This has a 95% chance to succeed" -> roll a d20, anything but 1 is a success

Meanwhile 6-sided dice don't map to nice numbers, and having two dice makes the maths even harder to intuit


I think 1/2 and 1/3 are quite nice as far as numbers go! Also 2/36 = 0.5555... is not that far from 5%

But (assuming two dice rolled at the same time) 2/36 is something like "roll a five and a six" or "roll either a pair of sixes or a pair of fives". Neither of which is quite as intuitive or commonly used in game design as "using one d20, roll a natural 20"

And yet they struggle with the abstract concept. They'll wonder why the candidate with a projected 20% chance of winning won. They won't know what to do with the information of a 70% chance of rain tomorrow. "Either it will rain or it won't, which is it!" Perhaps it's the frequentist approach that comes more natural than the Bayesian approach, who knows.

This isn't my original thought, by the way. Someone wrote more about it here: https://towardsdatascience.com/humans-are-bad-at-probability...


Nobody understands Bayesian approach. Look at Covid -- people FREAKED out when we updated guidance based on learning new information.

Fully agree. For example, I wish managers would be capable to handle the difference between a 40% and a 70% chance to meet the deadline.

One of the first managers I had who studied management theory commented once that if estimates were accurate, we’d get them done earlier than expected as often as we got them done later than expected, which is not true and thus we are doing something wrong.

A probability that isn't computed (or reasonably computable) is just a personal feeling. Your 40% or 70% aren't probabilities if you didn't compute the probability of at least the key events involved to arrive at the number. People say a number as their confidence to meet the deadline on a scale from 0-100.

They're credences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credence_(statistics)

Everybody has them, and they're not useless. Usually they're regularly updated when new information comes in.


I'm not saying they're useless, they're an educated guess, a valuable means of communicating an expert opinion. It can be replaced with "I have high confidence of success".

The assessment is subjective, includes personal beliefs, assumptions, etc. not just measurable objective points. The measurement uncertainty at every step and the confidence interval are disappointing despite people using percentages, suggesting confidence to the percent. A scale from 1 to 5 is most of the times just as accurate.

2 people looking at the same situation could have very different degrees of belief, which is why 2 engineers could give very different estimates. But if I say I believe the likelihood of something is 73.8% I might be more credible to the listener. Looks like I calculated, not like the guy who said "3 out of 5 we get it done".


Cue prediction markets etc. There are mechanisms to aggregate this and have a wisdom of crowd effect.

I'm not very familiar with how they work. Don't prediction markets give the individual gambler a boolean choice and this results in a picture of the split over the population? There's no granular option for the individual to bet 40% vs. 60% for something happening, the vote with 100% confidence that Spain wins the World Cup, they don't give 85% chance of winning.

The way to express a 85% confidence is to size your investment accordingly. For example, if the market is at 75%, then you buy yes-shares until the price is at 85%. If the market is at 90%, then buy no-shares instead until the price is down to 85%.

100 pages of dense mathematics created by Claude. It doesn't even have an abstract or a summary. What are we looking at here? Has anyone read this? Please explain like I'm not a math PhD.

I’m pretty sure no one (except perhaps Anthropic insiders who had prior access, and probably not even them) has properly digested this paper yet, and some caution is warranted given the notoriety of this problem and the history of claimed solutions that did not stand up to scrutiny. But if it stands up, it’s a really big deal.

Background: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/1973/is-there-a-complex-s...


for maybe undergrads,

complex structure in S^6 would mean an associative version of octonions (which are non associative "almost complex" versions of their cousins native to S^3, which you may know as (unit) "quaternions").

Also fancy cousins of unit vectors (that you can do a nonzero triple cross product with), ie "non associative vectors" living on S^2, the 2D surface of a sphere "with radius 1"

If you haven't quite got the PhD https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/quaternionic+structure

Big enough that Atiyah the godfather of this subfield, in 2016 claimed to have solved it (not sure if it was before or after the dementia)

This is not just any math PhD, it's the anthropic guy whom Claude helped find the Jacobian counterexample, which might be quite worthy of a fields medal (for impact if not notoriety or complexity) if it were human

Disclaimer: not a pure maths PhD myself, just someone who likes this stuff so..


> complex structure in S^6 would mean an associative version of octonions

where can one read more about that?


In TFA itself!

The multiplication they call an "alternating [skew-symmetric?] invariant form": Q0 in symbols I think?

Basically a polynomial function in the components of the "superoctonions" that go into the product.that how I'd vibesplain to a fellow non-pro, anyways

P10, sec 2.4 Lemma 2.8

The complex structure itself is much more complicated.. or else alpoge would have posted a one line verification of the result? But a summary that excites everybody can only be done by a pro...

The next relevant thing in the paper though, that I might be able to attempt to vibesplain using my uh consumer knowhow, is "integrability" (starting in the section labelled "Context")

Or one could just ask Fable/ChatGPT to ELI10


yep I have feet wet with complex geometry/analysis but not to decipher lemma 2.8. But instead of asking ELI10 I asked about S^6 complex structure helping to cure O non-associativity and got open research directions for sibling goals more than clear cut "yes, if the paper pass validation we've got some new associative octonions". That may need some healthy challenging.

chat: https://tinyurl.com/4acu6uc3


Well then what are you waiting for :)

You've got the tool, you've got the will


There's an abstract on page 3. But it's quite ... abstract.

By the end of the first sentence I'm pretty sure it would take me quite some time to understand what it's about (the first sentence of the abstract, not the whole paper)


Everybody can device an encryption algorithm that they can't break themselves. That is not sufficient.

yeah, but imagine every message has custom (but flawed) encryption… security by infinite obfuscation

Yes it is, for many use cases.

I'd argue the syntax is much simpler, more modern, and perhaps even more consistent (the fact that in TeX you can change the meaning of the escape symbol or the comment symbol is pure insanity IMHO). It can use any font, and the feature you know from LaTeX, a compiler, is free. Only the web application has some premium features. It's more like Overleaf. It's also several orders of magnitudes faster and has actually helpful error messages.

The fact that it was written in Rust is less than secondary.

Also, TeX was written in WEB, not C.


Fun fact: archive.is can even bypass a lot of hard paywalls and no one knows for sure how they do it. There's been at least on debate on HN with no clear conclusion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36060891

They probably use a combination of residential proxies, actually paying for a lot of subscriptions (including lots of small regional publications apparently) and cleverly removing the "My Account" link, referrer shenannigans, and who knows what else.


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