I don't see how Claude helped the debugging at all. It seemed like the author knew what to do and it was more telling Claude to think about that.
I've used Claude a bit and it never speaks to me like that either, "Holy Cow!" etc. It sounds more annoying than interacting with real people. Perhaps AIs are good at sensing personalities from input text and doesn't act this way with my terse prompts..
Even if the chatbot served only as a Rubber Ducky [1], that's already valuable.
I've used Claude for debugging system behavior, and I kind of agree with the author. While Claude isn't always directly helpful (hallucinations remain, or at least outdated information), it helps me 1) spell out my understanding of the system (see [1]) and 2) help me keep momentum by supplying tasks.
A rubber ducky demands that you think about your own questions, rather than taking a mental back seat as you get pummeled with information that may or may not be relevant.
I assure you that if you rubber duck at another engineer that doesn't understand what you're doing, you will also be pummeled with information that may or may not be relevant. ;)
AIs are exceptional at sensing personalities from text. Claude nailed it here, the author felt so good about the "holy cow" comments that he even included them in the blog post. I'm not just poking this, but saying that the bots are fantastic sycophants.
Unfortunately the American companies are using their monopolies to price out everyone else. You're now in a situation where it's harder and harder to find people in the UK that can operate data centre services at the speed and quality of the cloud providers. The UK/EU needs it's own GCP/AWS/Azure alternatives. Unfortunately there's not really anyone close.
Sounds like you've already captiulated to big tech.
Governements could and absolutely should be subsidisng home-grown data centres. And taxing the hell out of every square metre of AWS and Google data centres. Why not have a data tax for foreign companies?
> The web has complexity also of client/server with long delays and syncing client/server and DOM state, and http protocol. Desktop apps and game engines don’t have these problems.
What part of hiding a comment requires a HTTP round trip? In 200ms you could do 20 round trips.
> It's the only usable form of reference! I want all the details to be presented in a reference. Where else?
I guess it's like a dictionary: it's only useful if you know the word you want to look up, rather than reading through every definition until you find the function/library/ability that you want. I do agree though, when I need to look something up, I do want it in great detail - it just isn't a very good learning resource.
> It seems to me the author is confusing lack of familiarity with lack of existence. There are lots of fantastic tools out there, you just need to learn them. They don't know them, so conclude they don't exist.
Can you give some examples? The author made a compelling argument on how easy it is to use the browser debugger. I would be of great interest for something similar.
> We already have all that.
I've only seen these for simple python applications or web development, never in any 'low level' space. And certainly not for doing anything interesting in the low level space (something that is not just a C++ language tutorial).
I think the original article wasn't just proposing the existence of language servers, but specifically that they (that do exist) should be used to help beginners to make the process of low level software development approach the level of ease as web development with it's tooling.
I'm not quite sure what they would look like in practise.
> AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs.
I guess the difference is proprietary code is mostly not used for training. It's going to be trained on code in the public. It's the inverse for music, where it's being trained on commercial work, not work that has been licensed freely.
People are seemingly very unhappy with the status quo, but also even unhappier when the Government tries to legislate around real issues. For example, people in hacker news seem to bring up grooming rape gangs specifically when talking about "Diversity" in the UK as a cudgel when the UK tries to introduce safety laws.
Meanwhile some of the most prolific child abusers are being sent to jail (who happened to be young 20s and white) who were only enabled to abuse hundreds of young people over a matter of months due to online platforms.
The latter example is the type of thing the UK Government is trying to tackle. The abuse is rife, but people would rather talk about "Diversity" and complain about laws clearly designed to protect children.
Do I want the laws? No. But other people have ruined it, and now we no longer live in a high trust society. I certainly want something that will try to lower the abuse women and children face from the Internet (and men).
I don't understand how comments like yours fundamentally misunderstand both complaints.
Regarding the Rape gangs. The complaint is "People migrated to the country and committed heinous crimes, the local authorities tried to cover it up". Therefore they want these people removed (in some cases they have not been deported) and be more picky about who is allowed to migrate. They also want the people involved in the cover up to face some sort of punishment.
They mention it because they believe it shows the establishments hypocrisy. I don't understand why you and others don't understand this.
> The latter example is the type of thing the UK Government is trying to tackle. The abuse is rife, but people would rather talk about "Diversity" and complain about laws clearly designed to protect children.
The problem is that the "think of the children" arguments are a tried and tested way of deflecting criticism when it comes to any argument about protecting privacy.
People aren't complaining about genuine attempts to catch online predators.
They are complaining about the fact that they have to put to put in their ID to go to Pornhub to watch some chick in her early 20s diddle herself.
I wonder how many people are actually from the UK on these threads. There is always comments about "diversity" and "grooming rape gangs" and how everything labour do is bad, or about how the UK is an oppressive regime or somehow fundamentally anti-freedom. This always reads like fear mongering / Russian psy-ops propaganda to me.
I have many bones to pick with the UK government but a large number of people sprinting to these talking points at every chance they get is highly suspicious to me.
I'm also surprised by the tone of this thread. HN discussions usually involve more nuanced debate, but many comments here are hitting very specific talking point. Comparisons to China, sarcastic references to 'diversity,' grooming gangs, that I more commonly see in certain Reddit communities rather than in typical HN discussions about tech policy or civil liberties.
There are legitimate concerns about UK surveillance, protest policing, and speech regulations worth discussing. But when the same cluster of talking points appears with this particular framing, it makes me wonder about the makeup of who's participating in this thread versus other HN discussions.
Well, yes, because it is designed to protect UK citizens. As much as GDPR applies "everywhere in the world" when interacting with EU citizens.
Just as much as my communications are scanned when interacting with US citizens with PRISM. I'd argue that is exponentially more dangerous and nefarious given it's apparently illegality and (once) top secrecy.
And as far as the PRISM comparison goes, I'd rather mass surveillance not be done at all, but if it's being done no matter what I'd rather it be illegitimate than official policy. At least they have to jump through some hoops for parallel construction that way, and it doesn't normalize the practice as morally/socially acceptable- it's a "secret" because its embarrassing and shameful for it to exist in a "free" society. If its not a secret and nobody is ashamed of it then you dont even have the pretense of a free society anymore
If it's done in the open they can be taken to court. When done in secret, the first challenge is when their defense attorney tells the prosecution to prove it even happens.
Can you give one example of that happening that's not coached in some context? These claims always seem pretty far fetched to me, bordering conspiratorial.
British politicians are weenies who can't handle American banter. They get all bent out of shape when Americans tell British people that their government is replacing them with third worlders and they should start killing their politicians. The British government wants to ban this kind of criticism (probably because they're failing to refute it in the public's eye), but are powerless to stop Americans who are well within their legal rights to say things like this. In the past they relied on American corporations cooperating with their censorious requests even though it wasn't legally required, but now that you have people like Elon Musk openly defying the British government and even seeming to side with the aforementioned critics, the British government is all kinds of pissed.
I don't think you're commenting in good faith at all.
> They get all bent out of shape when Americans tell British people that their government is replacing them with third worlders and they should start killing their politicians.
>but are powerless to stop Americans who are well within their legal rights to say things like this.
> Yep, that's life, if something bothers you and it's already a crime then report it.
I think that's the issue with this, and why we are seeing new laws introduced.
If someone is assaulted in real life, the police can intervene.
If people are constantly assaulted at a premises, that premise can lose it's license (for example a pub or bar).
When moving to the online space, you are now potentially in contact with billions of people, and 'assaults' can be automated. You could send a dick pic to every woman on a platform for example.
At this point the normal policing, and normal 'crime', goes out of the window and becomes entirely unenforcable.
Hence we have these laws pushing this on to the platforms - you can't operate a platform that does not tackle abuse. And for the most part, most platforms know this and have tried to police this themselves, probably because they saw themselves more like 'pubs' in real life where people would interact in mostly good faith.
We've entered an age now of bad faith by default, every interaction is now framed as 'free speech', but they never receive the consequences. I have a feeling that's how the US has ended up with their current administration.
And now the tech platforms are sprinting towards the line of free speech absolutism and removing protections.
And now countries have to implement laws to solve issues that should have just been platform policy enforcement.
Believe it or not, when a crime has been committed these providers universally defer to the police whose remit is enforcement, a role they seem reluctant to undertake, I'm unconvinced this is anything other than a convenient revenue stream, an opportunity to steer public opinion, and a means of quashing dissent.
Frankly, a few dick pics here and there seems wildly low-stakes for such expensive draconian authoritarianism.
I don't think the fine is automatic like that, it's more if you don't have an appropriate mechanism to manage it. In other words you need a content policy that is enforced.
A mod who deletes nude pictures is probably enough to not get fined.
I think the real issue is what I just said... "probably enough"; that's the real problem with the online safety act. People are mostly illiterate on the law, and now asking them to understand a complex law and implement it (even when the actual implementation is not that much effort or any effort at all for well run spaces) is the real issue.
As far as I am aware, 'probably' is about the best you can do, since the OSA is so vaguely defined, it's actually difficult to actually know what is and what isn't valid.
I've used Claude a bit and it never speaks to me like that either, "Holy Cow!" etc. It sounds more annoying than interacting with real people. Perhaps AIs are good at sensing personalities from input text and doesn't act this way with my terse prompts..
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