mcphage's comments

On: AI coding assistants are getting worse?

[mcphage]

> So even if a task costs $8 today thanks to VC subsidies, I can be reasonably confident that the same task will cost $8 or less without subsidies in the not-too-distant future.

The same task on the same LLM will cost $8 or less. But that's not what vendors will be selling, nor what users will be buying. They'll be buying the same task on a newer LLM. The results will be better, but the price will be higher than the same task on the original LLM.

On: Fighting back against biometric surveillance at Wegmans

[mcphage]

> Police will not arrest if the DA won't prosecute.

Why not? If the police are frustrated that the DAs aren’t doing their job, I don’t think it helps the police any to choose to also not do their job. Especially since DAs are often elected, which means it’s easier to replace them if the police can show that they (the DA) are the bottleneck. But if the police don’t do their job first, then the police are the bottleneck.

[mlrtime → mcphage]

That is great and I agree with you, but not how things work on the streets, at least in NYC.

[mcphage → mlrtime]

> but not how things work on the streets, at least in NYC

Then how do things work on the streets in NYC?

On: German president says US is destroying world order

[mcphage]

That means more wars.

On: Fighting back against biometric surveillance at Wegmans

[mcphage]

You really need to figure out how to get the police to do their job.

On: Predict your house price

[mcphage]

Well, like they say: the purpose of a system is what it does.

On: Using AI generated images to get refunds

[mcphage]

> Eventually the concept of refunds will become very rare.

I don’t think so—it makes the risk of purchase too high, and people will buy less. Which is not what the sellers want.

> it, along with free shipping were pretty rare before Amazon and Walmart.

Refunds were not rare before Walmart and Amazon.

[harvey9 → mcphage]

Refund-without-return is what might fade out. I've had that with low value things like a lightbulb that had the wrong fitting.

[websiteapi → mcphage]

free shipping even for returns were indeed rare, thus a refund was not free, nor complete

[mcphage → websiteapi]

You just took it back to the store, there was no shipping involved.

[websiteapi → mcphage]

we're talking about e-commerce here...

[mcphage → websiteapi]

Are we? Your very next line was about buying something from a street merchant.

On: Bluesky is not the good place

[mcphage]

> There is also little possibility for political persuasion on Bluesky, which has a user base that’s a fraction of the size of X’s, and has far fewer news influencers.

Well, yeah—that’s a big part of why I’m there instead of on Twitter. But that’s a feature, not a bug.

On: Google engineer says Claude Code built in one hour what her team spent a year on

[mcphage]

> Claude produced the solution independently based on a description of the problem

The description that came out of the year of project refinement that had already occurred?

On: Meta created 'playbook' to fend off pressure to crack down on scammers

[mcphage]

Meta has been responsible for a lot worse than merely dopamine peddling.

On: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

[mcphage]

It's like TikTok but you hit buttons instead of swiping.

[bdangubic → mcphage]

that sounds like a lot of work

[mcphage → bdangubic]

The trick is you hold the controller in your limp hands, with your fingertip resting on one of the channel buttons. Usually the plus. So when you want to swipe you just extend your index finger just a fraction of an inch. And the screen changes. They dialed in the interface over years, and have gotten it to a process with almost no work involved.

[pndy → bdangubic]

Nearly same thing but instead of smacking the screen you'd actually press the physical button on remote control and run in circles with channel's list to find anything remotely interesting.