It's so depressing that the entire Mamdani debate has become mired in Israeli politics. You can completely ignore that issue, and still have plenty of questionable stuff to talk about. He has repeatedly talked about defunding the police. Literally, not figuratively, and not that long ago [1a-c].
He said he wanted to close down Rikers Island, right in the middle of the debates [2]. He said that prisons are unnecessary [3]. He said he wants to empty jails [4-6]. His comments on crime and policing, in general, are quite extreme. I could set literally every other topic to the side, and this would be a voting issue for me.
These are his words. I'm not taking them out of context or reinterpreting them. About the only response to this stuff a reasonable person can muster is "he doesn't believe that now". Yeah, OK. I guess we'll find out...
[1] does not mean no more police. The NYPD has $11 billion in funding and has offices all over the world for some reason when they should really just be city-sized for NY. They are overfunded, and he believes they should not be.
[2-6] indicate that our current prison system is punitive and does nothing in the way of rehabilitation or reform. No, he will not close every prison. Yes, in an ideal world we would not need hundreds of prisons full to the brim because we would actually rehabilitate and release people. This is hardly a fringe opinion and it is in fact a very common criticism of our prison system. Interpreting these statements as "he is just going to stop prisons and let all the violent criminals out in one go!!!" with no further though IS reinterpreting his words uncharitably because obviously that would be stupid.
Re [1], he explicitly says the opposite in the posts I linked to. You're just ignoring what he literally says and writes, and substituting your own feelings on the matter.
Regarding prisons, again, he is explicitly talking about closing down prisons. He has moderated his rhetoric more recently on this issue, but no, your interpretation of the subject is not what he's saying here, and it clearly isn't what he means, even today.
He has a long history on these topics. I'm not misinterpreting his comments.
He does not literally say the opposite. Either way, you'll see what I mean when none of this goes the way you think that it will. He's in office now anyways.
He literally says the opposite. It's why I quoted what I did. Very first link:
> We don't need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.
> What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.
> But your deal with @NYCMayor uses budget tricks to keep as many cops as possible on the beat.
> NO to fake cuts - defund the police.
The only way you can say this doesn't mean "defund the police" is by re-defining his words using Orwellian double-speak ("he doesn't really mean defund"), and then, when you get to the last line, ignore the part where he explicitly tells you not to do that. No fake cuts! Defund!
I mean, yes...but having lived in multiple states with various forms of state monopoly on alcohol sales: state-run liquor stores suck. Citing them as an argument in favor of state-run anything is sort of making the case for the other side.
There isn't a market failure in groceries in NYC. There's a huge number and diversity of stores, and profit margins are as low as anywhere else in the world. Also, of course, see the sibling comment who is complaining about grocery stores while using Amazon Fresh. There's a competitive delivery market.
Of all of his policies, I actually don't really care if he wants to try to put some grocery stores in grocery deserts. It probably won't work, but whatever.
If you roll a 401k into an IRA, those will be pretax dollars in the IRA. It doesn't take a very big rollover to completely swamp the tax benefits of a 7k annual Roth contribution limit.
Uncertainty and tolerance implies that you have a predictable distribution in the first place.
Engineers are not just dealing with a world of total chaos, observing the output of the chaos, and cargo culting incantations that seem to work for right now [1]…oh wait nevermind we’re doing a different thing today! Have you tried paying for a different tool, because all of the real engineers are using Qwghlm v5 Dystopic now?
There’s actually real engineering going on in the training and refining of these models, but I personally wouldn’t include the prompting fad of the week to fall under that umbrella.
[1] I hesitate to write that sentence because there was a period where, say, bridges and buildings were constructed in this manner. They fell down a lot, and eventually we made predictable, consistent theoretical models that guide actual engineering, as it is practiced today. Will LLM stuff eventually get there? Maybe! But right now we’re still plainly in the phase of trying random shit and seeing what falls down.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with the article - it’s a superficial summary of stuff that has historically happened in the world of LLM context windows.
The problem is - and it’s a problem common to AI right now - you can’t generalize anything from it. The next thing that drives LLMs forward could be an extension of what you read about here, or it could be a totally random other thing. There are a million monkeys tapping on keyboards, and the hope is that someone taps out Shakespeare’s brain.
I don't really understand this line of criticism, in this context.
What would "generalizing" the information in this article mean? I think the author does a good job of contextualizing most of the techniques under the general umbrella of in-context learning. What would it mean to generalize further beyond that?
There’s really no functional difference. The VSC agent mode can do everything you want an agent to do, and you can use Claude if you like. If you want to use the CLI instead, you can use Claude Code (or the GitHub one, or Codex, or Aider, or…)
I suspect that a lot of the “try using Claude code” feedback is just another version of “you’re holding it wrong” by people who have never tried VSC (parent is not in this group however). If you’re bought into a particular model system, of course, it might make more sense to use their own tool.
Edit: I will say that if you’re the YOLO type who wants your bots to be working a bunch of different forks in parallel, VSC isn’t so great for that.
I think a lot of that feedback is simply an element of how fast the space is moving, and people forming their impressions at different stages of the race. VSCode Copilot today is a wholly different experience than when it first launched as an advanced auto-complete.
No, there’s pretty noticeable difference between different tools even when they use the same model and interaction pattern. For instance I’ve used both GitHub Copilot and Cursor interactive agents (which are basically the same UX) aplenty in the past couple months for comparison, and GH Copilot is almost always dumber then Cursor, sometimes getting stuck on the stupidest issues. I assume context construction is likely the biggest culprit; Cursor charges by tokens while GH Copilot charges by request, so GHC attempts to pass as little as possible (see all the greps) and then fail a lot more. Plus its patching algorithm has always been shit (I’ve used GHC since it came out as better autocomplete).
Meh. The context stuff is changing by the day, so whatever you're saying now will be out of date by next week. Regardless, you're basically saying that GHC is trying to optimize for cost, which is true for any provider.
Even if there's some slight immediate performance advantage for Cursor over GHC, the ability to trivially switch models more than makes up for it, IMO.
The question was whether Claude Code's better than GHC. "They may release a new version that bridges the gap any moment now" is a completely useless answer to that. And your argument is "people either have never tried it, or tried it a long time ago when it was something else", and I told you I'm comparing it right now, and have done the same a year ago, and many points in between, and GHC is inferior at every single point, and it's not slight. Cursor etc. wouldn’t have been this big if GHC was only slightly behind when it has such a huge early mover advantage and enormous backing.
I've used both, and you're exaggerating. Whatever difference in performance there is between providers changes constantly, and like I said, it's more than offset for me by the practical advantage of being able to switch models regularly.
That article is a classic example of a prevalent error in this line of commentary: indiscriminately taking a "possibly harmful chemical", translating it to a totally different context (say, touching it instead of eating it), and then assuming that any interaction with the chemical is therefore bad.
The article specifically calls out pthalates and bisphenols (both common in plastics), but there's absolutely no reason to believe -- unless you're regularly eating your headphones -- that this is a problem.
Totally agree with you - the dermal exposure is a different pathway, and that could be more clearly mentioned. The fact that these materials are present are not automatically hazards (but they do state that!). I also wouldn't automatically assume that the products marked as red are not safe to use. For me it's just interesting to see that some manufacturers can do without, or less of those components.
Well, plastics generally require plasticizers. The Bisphenol A kerfuffle has largely resulted in the use of different plasticizers, which has in turn caused the sort of people who are fearful of chemicals to expand their definitions of “harmful” to include those new chemicals. It’s a never-ending cycle, but the evidence never really gets any better.
Let me just save you the effort of further rounds of responses here: if you chew on plastic, you will be exposed to the chemicals in plastic. If you’re truly worried about this, don’t buy plastic items.
Right, and I agree and I don’t. I’d o my best to explain to my kids they should never put anything in their mouth that isn’t made to be eaten.
But this should be considered when we make blanket claims about it’s okay because we’re just touching them, not eating them. We have to think about how people actually behave, not ideal usage.
By the way, headphones are required in elementary school here and are used at least an hour a day.
