What happened to one country, two systems?

If they think they're anywhere close to being far enough "in the lead" to force ads on paying customers, they're mistaken.

Also, stop with the "wE FeLlL ShOrT", corporate platitudes mean nothing in 2025. We know you don't feel that way, you know you don't feel that way, cut the bs.

I do legit wonder about K abuse in this whole crowd.

Anyone hear any excerpts from Thiel’s Antichrist lectures? I’ve never been on the same page as him politically but this wasn’t “wow I really disagree” material. This was “are you… okay, man?” material. It was just askew and bizarre. I’m not a big Thunberg fan either but I cannot replicate the thought process that would lead to mentioning her as a potential Antichrist prototype. And that wasn’t even the weirdest thing, just the easiest to explain.

One thing I learned way back in college: if someone seems like they are on drugs, they may be on drugs.

Either that or these guys are in some weird echo chambers.

Having wrangled many spreadsheets personally, and worked with CFOs who use them to run small-ish businesses, and all the way up to one of top 3 brokerage houses world-wide using them to model complex fixed income instruments... this is a disaster waiting to happen.

Spreadsheet UI is already a nightmare. The formula editing and relationship visioning is not there at all. Mistakes are rampant in spreadsheets, even my own carefully curated ones.

Claude is not going to improve this. It is going to make it far, far worse with subtle and not so subtle hallucinations happening left and right.

The key is really this - all LLMs that I know of rely on entropy and randomness to emulate human creativity. This works pretty well for pretty pictures and creating fan fiction or emulating someone's voice.

It is not a basis for getting correct spreadsheets that show what you want to show. I don't want my spreadsheet correctness to start from a random seed. I want it to spring from first principles.

I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains.

I haven’t seen a company convincingly demonstrate that this affects them at all. Lots of fluff but nothing compelling. But I have seen many examples by individuals, including myself.

For years I’ve loved poking at video game dev for fun. The main problem has always been art assets. I’m terrible at art and I have a budget of about $0. So I get asset packs off Itch.io and they generally drive the direction of my games because I get what I get (and I don’t get upset). But that’s changed dramatically this year. I’ll spend an hour working through graphics design and generation and then I’ll have what I need. I tweak as I go. So now I can have assets for whatever game I’m thinking of.

Mind you this is barrier to entry. These are shovelware quality assets and I’m not running a business. But now I’m some guy on the internet who can fulfil a hobby of his and develop a skill. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll hit a goldmine idea and commit some real money to it and get a real artist to help!

It reminds me of what GarageBand or iMovie and YouTube and such did for making music and videos so accessible to people who didn’t go to school for any of that, let alone owned complex equipment or expensive licenses to Adobe Thisandthat.

Irrespective of how good Claude code actually is (I haven’t used it, but I think this article makes a really cogent case), here’s something that bothers me: I’m very junior, I have a big slow ugly codebase of gdscript (basically python) that I’m going to convert to C# to both clean it up and speed it up.

This is for a personal project, I haven’t written a ton of C# or done this amount of refactoring before, so this could be educational in multiple ways.

If I were to use Claude for this Id feel like I was robbing myself of something that could teach me a lot (and maybe motivate me to start out with structuring my code better in the future). If I don’t use Claude I feel like Im wasting my (very sparse) free time on a pretty uninspiring task that may very well be automated away in most future jobs, mostly out of some (misplaced? Masochistic?) belief about programming craft.

This sort of back and forth happens a lot in my head now with projects.

Nobody would like these kinds of games just like nobody has ever liked "educational" games.

Why?

Because they try too hard, since their main objective is not to be a good game.

It's like reading a novel and immediately noticing the story is just some thinly veiled bullshit so that the author can vomit their own personal view of the world. It makes you lose interest real fast.