Would you agree with the claim that emacs/vim is an inadequate tool, since it has such a high learning curve?

Prior to LLMs, my impression was "high learning curve, high results" was a pretty popular sweet-spot with a large portion of the tech crowd. It seems weird how much LLMs seem to be an exception to this.

Emacs and vim have complex interfaces that have been stable for decades. Seems like every new flavor of LLM requires learning its warts and blind spots from scratch.

How is it "implicit" to click "I agree" to a large pop-up that takes up most of the screen?

Courts in various jurisdictions have found clickwrap agreements to be generally only valid for what one would expect to be common provisions within such agreements.

Essentially, because they are presented in a form that is so easy to bypass and so very common in our modern online life, provisions that give up too much to the service provider or would be too unusual or unexpected to find in such an agreement are unenforceable.

Every day cashiers accept $100 bills on the basis that they pass the counterfeit tests, and every day society has failed to collapse from what you posit is a "hazard to the social contract"

Wow… that’s your counterargument?

First you are confusing the passing of a test with the actual non-occurrence of crime. My point is that passing a test for counterfeit money doesn’t make passing counterfeit bills legally or morally acceptable. Your point is what? That the tests on $100 bills always work, or when they don’t work that’s okay?

Surely you don’t mean that. I’m saying that I reject your AI-soaked fake work product even if I can’t see anything wrong with the work itself— because lying and stealing is not okay, but that’s what you are doing when you pass AI work off as your own thing.

Lots of criminals believe crime is no big deal. I am not trying to convince them, nor you, if bullshit is your creed.

Maybe this is clearer?

> Imagine if I handed you a $100 bill and asked you to examine it carefully. Is it real money? Perhaps you immediately suspect it is counterfeit, and subject it to stringent tests. Let’s say all the tests pass. Okay, given that it is indistinguishable from a legit $100 bill, is it therefore correct and ethical for me to spend this money?

This "hypothetical" happens thousands of times a day at any retail outlet that accepts cash" - the cashier is handed a $100 bill, they carefully inspect it, and if all the tests pass, they accept it as a legitimate bill.

A single additional $100 bill is meaningless in the grand scheme of things. I have already accepted hundreds of them in my life time - why should I feel any ethical concerns about this?

So, yeah, when the tests don't work, that's okay? Or at least, it's not my problem. There's government agencies that deal with this, but the ethical issue is with the person making the bills and the obligation to act is on the government agencies. I have absolutely no obligation, and this is an established cornerstone of society.

Whatever supposed "hazard" you have in mind is one that society is already dealing with, on a regular basis, and... again: society has not collapsed simply because retail shops accept cash

Where do you put the line? What do you do with the ambiguous categories?

Clearly a trucker does not "deliver goods" and a Taxi Driver is not in the business of ferrying passengers - the vehicle does all of that, right?

Writers these days rarely bother with the actual act of writing now that we have typing.

I've rarely heard a musician, but I've heard lots of CDs and they're really quite good - much cheaper than musicians, too.

Is my camera an artist, or is it just plagiarizing the landscape and architecture?

I'm not sure it makes sense to assume the creative act of a person writing to other people, which is fundamentally about a consciousness communicating to others, is anything like delivering goods.

The distinction I pointed out, applied to people producing writing intended for other people to read, seems to give a really clear "line". Syntactic tools, you're still fully producing the writing, semantic tools, you're not. You can find some small amount of blurriness if you really want, like does using a thesaurus count as semantic, but it seems disingenuous to pretend that has even close to the same impact on the authorship of the piece as using AI.

Worth noting: an edited branch still has most of the context - everything up to the edited message. So this just sets an upper-bound on how much abuse can be in one context window.

The NEW termination method, from the article, will just say "Claude ended the conversation"

If you get "This conversation was ended due to our Acceptable Usage Policy", that's a different termination. It's been VERY glitchy the past couple of weeks. I've had the most random topics get flagged here - at one point I couldn't say "ROT13" without it flagging me, despite discussing that exact topic in depth the day before, and then the day after!

If you hit "EDIT" on your last message, you can branch to an un-terminated conversation.

Clearly you're planning something nefarious, if you're investigating such dangerous encryption techniques as ROT13.

Just imagine how it might react to ROT26!

Humans are also notoriously bad at this, so we have plenty of evidence that this lack of consistency does indeed cause failures on larger problems.

Yes, humans fail at this, that's why we need technology tnat doesn't simply emulate humans, but tries to be more reliable than us.

Are you under the assumption that this is new?

A few cherry-picked examples seems like a really weird way to try and prove cherry-picking is happening, much less establish "cherry picking has become worse since a certain date"

> Obviously the article intends to make the case that this is a cult

The author is a self-identified rationalist. This is explicitly established in the second sentence of the article. Given that, why in the world would you think they're trying to claim the whole movement is a cult?

Obviously you and I have very different definitions of "obvious"

When I read the article in its entirety, I was pretty disappointed in its top-level introspection.

It seems to not be true, but I still maintain that it was obvious. Sometimes people don't pick the low-hanging fruit.