Pruning code is to software engineers what cancelling plans is to introverts :)
I think I need to work up a Claude skill named marie-kondo, so that when it breathlessly presents its triumphant solution, I can go “yes, but does it spark joy?” And have it go into an aggressive refactor loop with me.
Hypothetical future callers, "for extensibility" abstractions, single-use helpers, ceremonial try/except blocks, and options dicts with one key all get culled.
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But this is never the problem. Claude WILL NOT abstract and WILL NOT use your abstractions. It finds them all “ceremonial” and the idea that you could add something that might seem indirect that actually dramatically reduces the problem space is almost impossible to convey.
You can watch this in action for any API whose design you’re familiar with in a domain you understand well. If you attempt to design the same API with Claude, your will invariably get a mess of flat, insane types and no reuse. I’m talking an array of tuples of maps of set to map type insanity.
What has been helping is a mandatory pass of “Claudisms”, but even then it can only find the problem and never the solution.
Remember that this is disclosed spend. There are many things players especially in the media and tech space do that can have far more impact on public opinion via undisclosed “in-kind” spending and agenda-setting, it’s just that their manipulation doesn’t fall under any political transparency laws.
Every media mogul puts their thumb on the scale of public opinion. Broadcast media aligns and controls talking points, while new media manipulates visibility of user generated content via algorithmic weights.
Yeah, it’s the same reason that Alex Karp goes on those unhinged apocalyptic rants about Palantir. It’s not for public consumption, it’s for defense insiders. The old logic prevails: a world destroying system is bound to exist, so WE must control it. Spare no expense.
> The old logic prevails: a world destroying system is bound to exist, so WE must control it. Spare no expense.
Except it is both true AND it works. Keeping your foot down on who can produce weapons-grade fissile materials is working out pretty damn well so far.
And the Russo-Ukranian War is proving any idiot with a few rubles can cobble together incredibly efficient combat drones. We need to be probing the limits of that yesterday.
It can both feel bad and be the right thing to do because the alternatives are worse.
Sadly, polarization pushes people towards either wholesale “burn it down” anti-capitalism or full throated corporate bootlicking and I don’t think either tact is particularly useful. There’s a more subtle critique about our indoctrination in the west towards concepts like the “efficiency of the free market” demanding that we overlook rampant alienation among the working population that is more what a lot of people are vibing on, but it’s being expressed as diet anarchism because that feels more poignant online.
I think most folks do, in fact, want to “perform a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe”, but find themselves railroaded into bullshit office jobs full of performative nonsense, soul crushing frontline service work, or body destroying blue collar work with no safety net, all of which are recipes for burnout later in life. Compare Keynes’ “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” [1] to what we ended up with and you’ll find the root of the discontent is perhaps warranted.
I don’t think being anti-capitalist necessitates being anti “perform a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe”. To me, that’s the big benefit- under capitalism you’re not working for your tribe, you’re working for a tiny few shareholders.
I’m pretty sure the world overall and certainly “my tribe” would be better off if the job I’m working just never got done
> under capitalism you’re not working for your tribe, you’re working for a tiny few shareholders
The first half of this sentence is false, but the second half is true.
I don't know about you, but when I look at my window every day, I see thousands of people working for their job: making delicious food that others can eat, stocking store shelves so others can shop, trimming trees so the city will look nice, driving trucks full of goods that others can have, designing good website UX for others to use better, repairing broken cars, etc. It's an intricate dance of millions of people waking up every day and doing selfless things for others in their tribe, in just the right amounts, because we've (miraculously) given them an incentive to do so.
To me what's depressing is that we can live in such a wonderful world, but with a cynical pessimistic culture in which it's commonplace to ignore the chief output of everyone's work.
The ‘little incentive’ that it you don’t do it you starve to death.
There’s tons of work being done because it feels meaningful, later today I’m cooking a meal for a potluck, etc. but if you want your Job to be meaningful that comes at a huge premium.
Good on you for cooking for the potluck! I think that's meaningful.
I don't think having a meaningful job comes at a huge premium, though:
1. I don't think it's true that if you don't work, you'll starve to death. At least, not in the west. You won't have the high quality things compared to your peers, but the state will provide you with housing, food, and resources, so long as you're psychologically capable of using them.
2. But even so, is there any other creature on earth that doesn't have to do some sort of work so it won't starve to death? Even hunter gatherers had to hunt, forage, raise kids, make tools, or otherwise contribute to their tribes, in an endless grind, just to get enough calories to survive.
3. And that doesn't seem… wrong? Many of us enjoy an incredible abundance of options for food, shelter, safety, entertainment, etc., produced by our peers in our tribes and communities. Why shouldn't we have to contribute as well if we want to partake?
4. The idea that "meaning" comes at a premium is the story I want to contradict. It's just that: a story. I know someone who delivers the mail. He loves delivering mail. He feels a ton of meaning. He says, "Yeah there's a lot of junk, but without me, people wouldn't get their wedding invitations. And they wouldn't get their bills paid." Most jobs contribute something, and contribution is meaning. The sad thing to me is we have so many voices telling everyone, "Your job is meaningless!" that people are starting to believe it, and they're ignoring the lives that their work touches.
Delivering mail is meaningful for sure! So is teaching, people want to do these things and sometimes it lines up that there’s a market for it too.
The premium is that stuff like my job where I’m fiddling on Azure is to the benefit of no one and making four times as much.
If you want something meaningful you have to accept worse conditions because all the wonderful lovely people of the world who care and want to make a difference want to work there and not somewhere else.
And it’s interesting you picked mail as an example, when at least in the USA it’s run by the state ;p
I don’t really think it’s horrible that it’s not possible to mooch off your community and give back nothing forever but I don’t think ‘a little incentive’ is the right way of putting it, especially for all the people that hate their jobs for reasonable reasons but stay at it because of the alternative.
Here’s everyone’s daily reminder that the Luddites were an anti-exploitation movement that were retconned into knuckle dragging technophobes by Capitalist propaganda. It is, was, and always will be, about the fair distribution of returns from productivity gains.
And there should be a daily reminder that as long as we live in a Capitalist society, what befell the Luddites will also befall those that try to resist an economic force of this magnitude.
Would you rather feel justified in the knowledge that the Luddites were principally right and resist, or would you rather learn the lesson of their fate and adapt?
How would you even resist? Say the entire US population pushes back and gets protectionist regulations passed; there will always be hungry people just a few 100ms ping away willing to outcompete you using AI.
Really, at this point there are only two choices: change society to move beyond Capitalism, or adapt to the new economic reality. Either choice is valid, and I suspect eventually one will lead to the other, but there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.
> Would you rather feel justified in the knowledge that the Luddites were principally right and resist, or would you rather learn the lesson of their fate and adapt?
Keep your poison. If everyone adapted this way, we would not have worker rights, and our children would still work in mines and factories for pennies.
Where the commenter is right is that luddites didn't have (or had they?) a global competitor more than happy to push their entire system aside. Not that they personally thought about this argument, just that the context and possible consequences were different.
Yeah, the more I learn about American history, the more I realize American elites were never bought in to the “moral project”, but were happy to use it as PR to a largely religious public.
Though I’m not particularly looking forward to living through the decline of the empire, I cling to the hope that a post-imperial America can emerge and attempt to live up to the dream of FDR, MLK, and that Jesus guy everyone seems to like so much but ignores all the inconvenient tolerance and sharing stuff he was so obsessed with.
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