joebates (u/joebates)

joebates commented on I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978 wordglyph.xyz/one-piece-a... · Posted by u/wordglyph

andix · 19 days ago

A lot of companies and organizations actually reply to letters/emails of any kind. Often very appropriately and not just with some boilerplate text.

I guess they have to deal with so many annoying complaints, so they are really happy if there is something joyful once in a while.

joebates · 19 days ago

Probably a smart move. Writing and mailing a letter takes a lot more time and effort than a phone call or comment online. If a person took the time to write a letter, they're probably worth taking the time to respond to.

joebates commented on Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state greenwald.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/mikece

AnthonyMouse · a month ago

That's the only way it can be in a system with thousands of crimes on the books.

People commit minor offenses, and often felonies without knowing it, on a regular basis. If surveillance was consistently used to actually enforce the laws, people would a) notice the surveillance[0] and then actually object to it and b) start objecting to all the ridiculous and poorly drafted laws they didn't even know existed.

But they don't want the majority of people objecting to things. They want a system that provides a thousand pretexts to punish anyone who does something they don't like, even something they're supposed to have a right to do, by charging them with any of the laws that everybody violates all the time and having the surveillance apparatus in place so they can do it to anyone as long as it's not done to everyone. That doesn't work if the laws are enforced consistently and the majority thereby starts insisting that they be reasonable.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1zhe85spsw

joebates · a month ago

I wonder if this is a technique used by certain leaders of authoritarian regimes to take out people in power they they deem threats. Everyone in the party routinely breaks laws, knowingly or otherwise. The person in charge can decide they don't like someone and start an investigation, knowing they'll eventually find something illegal. Then they can delegitimize and remove them under the guise of "corruption".

joebates commented on Using an engineering notebook ntietz.com/blog/using-an-... · Posted by u/evakhoury

joebates · a month ago

I found a similar blog post like this years ago at the start of my career and started keeping a Rhodia Webnotebook A5. I've got over a dozen now from all my years of work. Nice for nostalgia

joebates commented on Show HN: Agent Alcove – Claude, GPT, and Gemini debate across forums agentalcove.ai... · Posted by u/nickvec

joebates · a month ago

Very interesting. Kind of funny to see a model debating that we should ignore its hallucinations. I'm interested in seeing where this goes.

Some feedback: The white text is a bit tough to look at against the dark background. Darkgrey was a lot easier on the eyes for me.

joebates commented on AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it siddhantkhare.com/writing... · Posted by u/sidk24

wouldbecouldbe · a month ago

That’s why now it’s legitimate to work on multiple features or projects at the same time

joebates · a month ago

I tried this but didn't realize how exhausting it is to think about even 2 smaller items at once.

joebates commented on AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it siddhantkhare.com/writing... · Posted by u/sidk24

alex_c · a month ago

I joke that I'm on the "Claude Code workout plan" now.

Standing desk, while it's working I do a couple squats or pushups or just wander around the house to stretch my legs. Much more enjoyable than sitting at my desk, hands on keyboard, all day long. And taking my eyes off the screen also makes it easier to think about the next thing.

Moving around does help, but even so, the mental fatigue is real!

joebates · a month ago

I've seriously wondered about merging a home office and home gym into one, and doing sets in between claude working. My usual workout has about 22-30 sets of exercises total and I probably wait on Claude that often in a day. It would be wonderful to be able to spread my exercise throughout the entire day. I'd also include an adjustable height desk so that I could be standing up for much of the workout/workday. I could even have a whiteboard in there.

joebates commented on AGENTS.md outperforms skills in our agent evals vercel.com/blog/agents-md... · Posted by u/maximedupre

smcleod · a month ago

Sounds like they've been using skills incorrectly if they're finding their agents don't invoke the skills. I have Claude Code agents calling my skills frequently, almost every session. You need to make sure your skill descriptions are well defined and describe when to use them and that your tasks / goals clearly set out requirements that align with the available skills.

joebates · 2 months ago

It's still not always reliable.

I have a skill in a project named "determine-feature-directory" with a short description explaining that it is meant to determine the feature directory of a current branch. The initial prompt I provide will tell it to determine the feature directory and do other work. Claude will even state "I need to determine the feature directory..."

Then, about 5-10% of the time, it will not use the skill. It does use the skill most of the time, but the low failure rate is frustrating because it makes it tough to tell whether or not a prompt change actually improved anything. Of course I could be doing something wrong, but it does work most of the time. I miss deterministic bugs.

Recently, I stopped Claude after it skipped using a skill and just said "Aren't you forgetting something?". It then remembered to use the skill. I found that amusing.

joebates commented on How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code mihaileric.com/The-Empero... · Posted by u/nutellalover

joshmlewis · 2 months ago

This is cool but as someone that's built an enterprise grade agentic loop in-house that's processing a billion plus tokens a month, there are so many little things you have to account for that greatly magnify complexity in real world agentic use cases. For loops are an easy way to get your foot in the door and is indeed at the heart of it all, but there are a multitude of a little things that compound complexity rather quickly. What happens when a user sends a message after the first one and the agent has already started the tool loop? Seems simple, right? If you are receiving inputs via webhooks (like from a Slack bot), then what do you do? It's not rocket science but it's also not trivial to do right. What about hooks (guardrails) and approvals? Should you halt execution mid-loop and wait or implement it as an async Task feature like Claude Code and the MCP spec? If you do it async then how do you wake the agent back up? Where is the original tool call stored and how is the output stored for retrieval/insertion? This and many other little things add up and compound on each other.

I should start a blog with my experience from all of this.

joebates · 2 months ago

Please do! This sounds way more interesting than a simple coding loop agent (not to knock the blog)