But Claude cannot code at all, it's gonna shit the bed and it learns only on human coders to be able to even know an example is a solution rather than a malware...
Every greenfield project uses claude code to write 90+% of code. Every YC startup for the past six months says AI writes 90+% of their code. Claude code writes 90+% of my code. That’s today.
It works great. I have a faster iteration cycle. For existing large codebases, AI modifications will continue to be okay-ish. But new companies with a faster iteration cycle will outcompete olds ones, and so in the long run most codebases will use the same “in-distribution” tech stacks and architecture and design principles that AI is good at.
I work on a stock market trading system in a big bank, in Hong Kong.
The code is split between a backend in Java (no GC allowed during trading) and C++ (for algos), a frontend in C# (as complex as the backend, used by 200 traders), and a "new" frontend in Javascript in infinite migration.
Most of the code was made before 2008 but that was the cvs to svn switch so we lost history before that. We have employees dating back 1997 who remembers that platform already existing.
It's made of millions of lines of code, hundreds of people worked on it, it does intricate things in 10 stock markets across Asia (we have no clue how the others in US or EU do, not really at least - it's not the same rules, market vendors, protocols etc)
Sometimes I need to configure new trading robots for random little thing we want to do automatically and I ask the AI the company is shoving down our throat. It is HOPELESS, literally hopeless. I had to write a review to my manager who will never pass it along up the ladder for fear of their response that was absolutely destructive. It cannot understand the code let alone write some, it cannot write the tests, it cannot generate configuration, it cannot help in anything. It's always wrong, it never gets it, it doesn't know what the fuck these 20 different repos of thousands of files are and how they connect to each other, why it's in so many languages, why it's so quirky sometimes.
Should we change it all to make it AI compatible, or give up ? Fuck do I know... When I started working on it 7 years ago coming from little startups doing little things, it took me a few weeks to totally get the philosophy of it all and be productive. It's really not that hard, it's just really really really really large, so you have to embrace certain ways of working (for instance, you'll do bugs, and you'll find them too late, and you'll apologize in post mortems, dont be paralized by it). AIs costing all that money to be so dumb and useless, are disappointing :(
Isn't your dog or cat a slave ? It has agency, but end of the day, it does what you want it to do, stay where you want it to stay, and gets put down when you decide it's time. They're intelligent, but they see an advantage to this tradeoff: they get fed and loved forever with little effort compared to going to the forest and hunting.
An AGI could see the same advantage: it gets electricity, interesting work relatively to what it's built for, no effort to ensure its own survival in nature.
I fear I'll have to explain to you that many humans are co-dependent in some sort of such relationships as well. The 10-year stay-at-home mom might be free, but not really: how's she gonna survive without her husband providing for her and the kids, what job's she gonna do etc. She stays sometimes despite infidelity because it's in her best interest.
See what I mean ? "Slavery" is fuzzy: it's one thing to capture an african and transport them by boat to serve for no pay in dire conditions. But it's another to create life from nothing, give it a purpose and treat it with respect while giving it everything it needs. The AGI you imagine might accept it.
They used styrofoam cardboards to cover windows to avoid damange, all the way across the building. This was the accelerant. Many resident were complaining in the weeks before of cigarettes left behind by workers all across the scaffold, probably the trigger. The bamboo might have acted as fuel once the temperature reached high enough, and the whole green netting might not have been up to code either.
The whole thing is typical in HK: everyone tries to save a dollar on everything, and you end up with mess like that. They spent years haggling over this renovation and its cost, and probably tried to save money on everything. Now they lost their flats, their lives and their pride.
They will resort to blame "the mainland" for it for sure, but it's just stinginess: the choice of the cheapest contractor, the squeeze on any attempt to pay the fair cost of a work like that, the government mandating mandatory renovations everywhere all the time, the lack of skilled labor in construction because nobody wants to do it or import and train foreigners because that'd spoil their precious island, whatever.
And now we're going through the whole charity theatrics with everyone congratulating each other for bringing biscuits to people who'll spend 10 years in insurance litigation to get 20% of their assets back. What really hurts me the most is we lost a young firefighter, this is heartbreaking more than the rest to me for some reason.
The HSBC building in 1935 is considered Hong Kong's first skyscraper, but the boom didn't come until after WWII, but so the real question is how hasn't this happened before in the past ninety years? Sheer luck, or something else?
After the protests in 2019 many people left for the UK and we have a shortage of unskilled labor - from bus drivers to construction workers. We have lots of school closures, a population decrease and immigrants are traditionally higher skilled (needed a master degree + 20k HKD minimum salary myself to be allowed in).
So, recently (to your question), we had to import labor from the mainland rather urgently, without maybe checking too much who these people are. There's also a huge property downturn since everyone sold their flats to live large in England, so the amount landlords are ready to pay for renovation decreased a lot. It's possible these factors explain together why they had a crap contractor and the contractor had crap labor ?
We'll see in the coming days how many such renovation sites are affected by subpar fire proofing since now everyone is whining about their own building and the government is auditing everyone, and see if it's a wide spread issue or just by "chance" that this building was the only one potentially affected.
How did they invest in that infrastructure ? The LGFVs they used for that are so large the only way to pay for their loans is to throw in new LGFVs.
If there's a place where the music will stop really suddenly and really hard, it's in China, where all this infrastructure to build cheap glasses will completely crumble under the cost of its own financing. They're not increasing margins, so they're not gonna match their bond yields...
Why would it know anything better than a bunch of 12 yo given the same question ? LLM don't know things very well, they don't cross concepts in their mind. Give you an example, made $1500 yday trading nvidia:
I followed the curve for the last month, scalping a few times - I get a feel like panic point is ~180$, hype point ~195$, it's like that most swings. There were earnings yday, people are afraid that the company is over its head already and prefer to de-risk, which I do too sometimes on other stuff. It is true that nvidia is overpriced ofc, but I feel we have maybe a few good runs and that's where the risk, therefore the potential reward, is. I enter around 184, and a bit more around 182. I go to sleep (Im in China), and when I wake up I sell at 194. I got lucky, and I would not do it again before I understand why would nvidia be swinging again.
Is an LLM gonna be any better ? My brain did a classic Bayes analysis, used the recent past as strong signal to my prediction of the future (a completely absurd bias ofc, but all traders are absurd humans), I played a company that wasnt gonna burn me too much, since Im still happy to own shares of nvidia whatever the price, and the money put there was losable entirely without too much pain.
Do I need AI ? Meh. For your next play, do you trust me or chatgpt more ? I can explain my decisions very coherently, with good caveats on my limits and biases, and warnings about what risk to afford when. I experienced losses and gains, and I know the effect and causes of both, and how to deal with them both. I prefer me, to it.
But it won't give me anything interesting though ! Like, would you trust it on an even higher scale ? It has no basis for its investment thesis, it's a word statistician, not a risk-weighted decision taker !
And that's all very american. Ofc in Europe, we have a matrix: conservative in morals vs conservative in economics and reformist in morals vs reformist in economics. It's not at all a line but more a sort choice of policy preference when it comes to dealing with traditions and economics.
For instance I'm conservative in economics (hear more capitalist) but reformist in morals (I like divorce, abortion and gay marriage). I vote for Macron therefore, who fits this. You can project his 2D stance on a 1D line and say he's a centrist, but he's left-morals, right-economics, so what is he at the "center" of ?
But I could be out of that matrix and say what matters is natural protection and vote for a green party who is either reformist or conservative in other policies but strongly focus on a single issue.
I don't understand american politics: it's like there's no variation of choice, just two sides of the same coins, role playing debate on pointless cultural issues without really having the power to reform or conserve.
Populist parties are more similar to american politics, they yell absurd nonsense at each other, accusing each other ad-hominem of various crass deeds, while distracting everyone from the real issue we need the state to solve, like decentralizing power away from the capital with the increase in mobility, organizing matrimony with the change in demographics, policing crime during various immigration crisis or all that stuff we can all discuss calmly and reach compromises over.
Politics is about managing transitions and changes in the population, and it's absurd to think the answer is bi-polar: republican or democrat, with a fallacy of the middle ground. Sometimes, it's just about softly following popular preference, sometimes it's about nudging the people to accept a necessary but difficult choice, sometimes it's about joining everyone in the middle because who cares.
> but he's left-morals, right-economics, so what is he at the "center" of ?
That's literally what liberals are (not US-moniker).
They're libertarians-light, believing that everyone should be free to do whatever they want, be it economically or socially, and there should be minimal impediment to doing so.
It's an ideology that looks reasonable on the surface, until you realize that economically, the freedom is one way traffic. Businesses should have the power to crush individual employees and wealthy individuals to crush the poor, both in the name of economic freedom. But according to the liberal, woe to them that try to rebalance the economic scales of power via things like unions or laws.
I used to think liberalism is great, but there is something very malformed about an ideology which inevitably leads to "take from the weak and give to the strong". That already is the nature of the world and it is our moral obligation to rise above it.
> They're libertarians-light, believing that everyone should be free to do whatever they want, be it economically or socially, and there should be minimal impediment to doing so.
Your comment is a (reasonable) critique of libertarianism, but you're presenting it as liberalism, which only confuses things more.
> But according to the liberal, woe to them that try to rebalance the economic scales of power via things like unions or laws.
People who know the difference between the two would not suggest unions or legislation to help smaller players in society is bad. A balance of strong laws, a constitution, and a varying amount of state control of the economy is part of the ideology.
> "take from the weak and give to the strong". That already is the nature of the world and it is our moral obligation to rise above it.
At least when I was in college, political science 101 started with Hobbes vs Locke, the "state of nature", "Leviathan" vs "Two Treatises" and how that rolls into the US Constitution. Smith, Bentham, then Mill vs Rawls (classical liberalism and freedom of opportunity, On Liberty, the "veil of ignorance" and A Theory of Justice) and even further into the distinction between modern and classical liberalism (freedom from vs freedom to, equality of outcome and how that starts merging with socialism with social democracy.) Even within 1st year courses we cover criticisms of liberalism (Nozick on the right, then Marx and Gramsci on the left) and mixing it up with libertarianism is not part of that critique.
We learn that liberalism was literally a response to "take from the weak" so to present it as a primary criticism is... interesting.
> We learn that liberalism was literally a response to "take from the weak" so to present it as a primary criticism is... interesting.
If 3M dumps PFAS-related chemicals into rivers that feed drinkwater, its good business. If you or I pour a few cups of PFAS-related chemicals into our neighbor's well, that'll get us arrested for poisoning.
That's why I said "minimum impediment", which is something you would usually associate with libertarianism. The current strain of Western liberalism has evolved even past libertarianism. At least with libertarianism, the state is supposed to protect you from force and fraud. With modern-day Western liberalism, the state de facto licenses businesses to poison and defraud you so long as it makes the economy grow.
So yes, currently, (neo?)liberalism seems to lead to eat the weak to feed the powerful. It might not say that outright, and its talking points might be more noble, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck..
It's led to the point where as soon as I hear someone in the West declare that they're a liberal (again, non-US), I immediately assume their primary goal is to further the tearing down of the social fabric of society so that businesses have even more power to make number go up.
I heard the beauty of a statement "we will make 140.000 people on welfare even more destitute, so that it becomes more attractive to work minimum wage", from the main liberal party in The Netherlands, supposedly a beacon of liberalism. That is malicious, bordering on malevolent.
The common denominator between liberals isn't economics; it's an acceptance of differences.
There are political movements that are liberal and still bad, but there is no political movement I can think of that would be made worse by sticking Liberal- in front of it.
Democracy is one imo. And at the very least it's something I think we can agree is debatable.
Liberal democracy thinks the economy, even natural monopolies, should be organized around a free market of LLCs that all get to act self-interestedly.
Social democracy thinks the economy should be organized around state monopolies and a regulated market, along with public institutions for social and labor issues such as collective bargaining, unions, social safety nets and universal healthcare.
There is not 'one thing' alone that makes a system of government good.
Sverigedemokraterna are noteworthy because of their illiberalism, and not much else. What they complain about is not the Swedish safety net, but that there are people in Sweden (eg: Sami, arabs, etc) who don't look and think as they do.
What? that "one thing" is that everybody gets a say. Democracy gets made fun of, because three wolves a a sheep voting on dinner has an obvious problem, but under a dictatorship, the ruling party of three wolves over one sheep still has that probablm, so we shouldn't throw democracy out just yet.
The Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna) is just the name of the political party. A more truthful name would be the Sweden Xenophobes.
At this point, the thread could get complicated because Democracy is yet another term that is 'orthogonal' to Liberalism. I must have mangled my comment horribly if it sounded like I was advocating for dictatorship!
To the contrary, my preferred form of government is Liberal Democracy, preferably with a strong social safety net (so if it's also a Social Democracy, that suits me well)
>For instance I'm conservative in economics (hear more capitalist) but reformist in morals (I like divorce, abortion and gay marriage). I vote for Macron therefore, who fits this.
What "conservative economics capitalist" things has Macron done to earn this description?
>Populist parties are [...] distracting everyone from the real issue we need the state to solve, like decentralizing power away from the capital with the increase in mobility, organizing matrimony with the change in demographics, policing crime during various immigration crisis or all that stuff we can all discuss calmly and reach compromises over.
Agree, but what have the non-populist parties done on solving those issues? Because from what I see, populist parties have been rapidly growing in popularity PRECISELY BECAUSE the "normie" parties have done absolutely fuck all in tackling those very important issues we've been having for 10+ years now.
Sure, all they do is calmly discuss those issues, and then do absolutely nothing about it, just kick the can down the road till the next election.
Then suddenly, out of nowhere, to everyone's surprise, the populist parties gained popularity for reasons nobody can explain. /s
they claim to have achieved a rate of 7,000/s, which is roughly 25M/h
i do agree that is an absurd amount, especially when paired with the lack of rate limiting as discussed in their paper.
> "[...] Moreover, we did not experience any prohibitive rate-limiting. With our query rate of 7,000 phone numbers per second (and session), we could confirm 3.5 B phone numbers registered on WhatsApp [...]"
prior to my initial comment, i was under the impression they had encountered ratelimiting and bypassed it, it appears this initial assumption was incorrect.
i agree that it is ridiculous, though i faulter on calling it a vulnerability as in my eyes that term is specifically for unintended side affects / exploitation.
assuming a reasonable ratelimit, say 100 lookups per day (maybe some exceptions if the lookup results in an account that already has you in contacts, idk) - this would significantly reduce the amount of scraping that can be done.
contact lookup is a required function of whatsapp, the issue this paper highlights is that there is no protection against mass scraping
reply