slfnflctd (u/slfnflctd)

slfnflctd commented on The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/alephnerd

andrewla · 2 hours ago

What can I say, I contain multitudes.

I think that yes, they should be deported. This is not a punishment.

If your solution is that they should not be deported, but employers should be prosecuted, then you're saying that you want the immigrants to starve.

If your solution is that they should not be deported, but we should extend labor protections to them and force employers to hire them legally, then I think there is some merit to this. This is closer to the libertarian open borders argument, and I once found it very appealing. Entitlement abuse is the main argument against here in my mind.

slfnflctd · 2 hours ago

My thoughts on this have always been a blend of your two 'they should not be deported' scenarios, with a slow, measured rollout.

Sudden changes cause too much chaos, and you don't always know what works until you try it. Avoiding entitlement abuse is always going to be part of the conversation, and it seems to me the fix for this (and nearly any other issue) needs to be approached carefully from both the supply and demand sides until what's effective is more clear.

slfnflctd commented on Eight more months of agents crawshaw.io/blog/eight-mo... · Posted by u/arrowsmith

happytoexplain · a day ago

I don't trust the idea of "not getting", "not understanding", or "being out of touch" with anti-LLM (or pro-LLM) sentiment. There is nothing complicated about this divide. The pros and cons are both as plain as anything has ever been. You can disagree - even strongly - with either side. You can't "not understand".

slfnflctd · a day ago

> There is nothing complicated about this divide [...] You can't "not understand"

I beg to differ. There are a whole lot of folks with astonishingly incomplete understanding about all the facts here who are going to continue to make things very, very complicated. Disagreement is meaningless when the relevant parties are not working from the same assumption of basic knowledge.

slfnflctd commented on Eddie Bauer declares bankruptcy cbsnews.com/news/eddie-ba... · Posted by u/mgh2

slfnflctd · a day ago

You know, I'm past middle age, have seen this brand everywhere for many years, and I only just now read about the individual Eddie Bauer for the first time. Interesting dude.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Bauer_(outdoorsman)

slfnflctd commented on Slop Terrifies Me ezhik.jp/ai-slop-terrifie... · Posted by u/Ezhik

lbreakjai · 2 days ago

If quality matters then why is everything crap? Price has a quality of its own.

slfnflctd · 2 days ago

As I said in my edit, "because people are irrational animals who too often prioritize our current feelings over everything else."

Marginal improvements in quality which result in a marginal increase of cost/price often provide much better overall returns than just using a series of cheap substitutes that fail quickly. In some areas, this doesn't work, but I think shortsightedness is blocking truly better solutions in a great many cases. Particularly when true costs are being externalized.

slfnflctd commented on LLMs as the new high level language federicopereiro.com/llm-h... · Posted by u/swah

manuelabeledo · 2 days ago

After re-reading the post once again, because I honestly thought I was missing something obvious that would make the whole thing make sense, I started to wonder if the author actually understands the scope of a computer language. When he says:

> LLMs are far more nondeterministic than previous higher level languages. They also can help you figure out things at the high level (descriptions) in a way that no previous layer could help you dealing with itself. […] What about quality and understandability? If instead of a big stack, we use a good substrate, the line count of the LLM output will be much less, and more understandable. If this is the case, we can vastly increase the quality and performance of the systems we build.

How does this even work? There is no universe I can imagine where a natural language can be universal, self descriptive, non ambiguous, and have a smaller footprint than any purpose specific language that came before it.

slfnflctd · 2 days ago

To be generous and steelman the author, perhaps what they're saying is that at each layer of abstraction, there may be some new low-hanging fruit.

Whether this is doable through orchestration or through carefully guided HITL by various specialists in their fields - or maybe not at all! - I suspect will depend on which domain you're operating in.

slfnflctd commented on Slop Terrifies Me ezhik.jp/ai-slop-terrifie... · Posted by u/Ezhik

roxolotl · 2 days ago

LLM are an embodiment of the Pareto principle. Turns out that if you can get an 80% solution in 1% of the time no one gives a shit about the remaining 20%. I agree that’s terrifying. The existential AI risk crowd is afraid we’ll produce gods to destroy us. The reality is we’ve instead exposed a major weakness in our culture where we’ve trained ourselves to care nothing about quality but instead to maximize consumption.

This isn’t news really. Content farms already existed. Amusing Ourselves to Death was written in 1985. Critiques of the culture exist way before that. But the reality of seeing the end game of such a culture laid bare in the waste of the data center buildout is shocking and repulsive.

slfnflctd · 2 days ago

Very well put, one of the more compelling insights I've seen about this whole situation. I feel like it gets at something I've been trying to say but couldn't find the right words for yet.

Quality. Matters.

It always has, and it always will. If you're telling yourself otherwise, you are part of a doomed way of thinking and will eventually be outcompeted by those who understand the implications of thinking further ahead. [ETA: Unfortunately, 'eventually' in this context could be an impossibly long time, or never, because people are irrational animals who too often prioritize our current feelings over everything else.]

slfnflctd commented on Show HN: One-click AI employee with its own cloud desktop cloudbot-ai.com... · Posted by u/fainir

slfnflctd · 3 days ago

Interesting business model.

I have two questions:

1) Who do you see as primary competitors in this niche?

2) What is your model for managing liability in a situation where a naive, less technical (or plain lazy) customer lets one of these run a business without sufficiently verifying output? Your definition of due diligence may differ from theirs.

slfnflctd commented on Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions code.claude.com/docs/en/a... · Posted by u/davidbarker

cstejerean · 5 days ago

the problem with gastown is it tries to use agents for supervision when it should be possible to use much simpler and deterministic approaches to supervision, and also being a lot more token efficient

slfnflctd · 4 days ago

I strongly believe we will need both agentic and deterministic approaches. Agentic to catch edge cases & the like, deterministic as those problems (along with the simpler ones early on) are continually turned into hard coded solutions to the maximum extent possible.

Ideally you could eventually remove the agentic supervisor. But for some cases you would want to keep it around, or at least a smaller model which suffices.

slfnflctd commented on A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw brandon.wang/2026/clawdbo... · Posted by u/brdd

defgeneric · 6 days ago

You mention the technical aspect (readability) and others have suggested the aesthetic, but you could also look at it as a form of rhetoric. I'm not sure it's really effective because it sort of grates on the ear for anyone over 35, but maybe there's a point in distinguishing itself from AI sloptext.

Incidentally, millenials also used the "no caps" style but mainly for "marginalia" (at most paragraph-length notes, observations), while for older generations it was almost always associated with a modernist aesthetic and thus appeared primarily in functional or environmental text (restaurant menus, signage, your business card, bloomingdales, etc.). It may be interesting to note that the inverse ALL CAPS style conveyed modernity in the last tech revolution (the evolution of the Microsoft logo, for example).

slfnflctd · 6 days ago

I was using all lowercase as my default for internet comments (and personal journal entries) for at least a solid decade, starting from some point in the 90s. I saw it as a way to take a step back from being pretentious.

I eventually ran into so much resistance and hate about it that I decided conforming to writing in a way that people aren't actively hostile to was a better approach to communicating my thoughts than getting hung up on an aesthetic choice.

Having started out as a counterculture type, that will always be in my blood, but I've relearned this lesson over and over again in many situations-- it's usually better to focus on clear communication and getting things done unless your non-standard format is a critical part of whatever message you're trying to send at the moment.

slfnflctd commented on Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers wpr.org/news/4-wisconsin-... · Posted by u/sseagull

e40 · 11 days ago

The idea that data centers have to be built near homes (or anywhere people live or work) is absurd. The US is huge and vast amounts of open spaces.

slfnflctd · 11 days ago

The people who work in the datacenters don't want a long commute.

Also, in a remote area, the third parties the owners require for continual maintenance will be fewer, take longer to respond, likely cost more, and may be less qualified than those you can find in a more populated area.