Every once in a while I'll send a false positive security alert to Claude, one that isn't even very subtle its just obviously incorrectly flagged, and every time it freaks out and tells me I have an active intruder and it actually gets itself worked up in a panic.

I have high hopes for our future.

The reddit bots are quite nefarious. Even in technical communities where no advertisement is happening there are so many posts made by bots either recycling old posts or masquerading as humans doing banal things like complaining about end users or something. Hundreds of bots that do nothing more than pretend to be people complaining about work, really curious what the goal of the operators is with these ones. Makes me wonder if they are bots supplied by reddit to artificially boost engagement.

Reddit has made it impossible to check the history of accounts this past week. They certainly want to make it as difficult as possible to see if someone is 'real'.

Points are often presented as a proxy for trustworthiness. They're even implicit on sites like HN where certain features only become available once you've crossed a threshold.

It's a bad tool. I always think of the Bill Bur joke talking about Netflix going from 1-5 stars to thumbs up/down. "It's like.. stubbed my toe.. thumbs down. Hitler.. thumbs down. There's too big of a gap in 'thumbs down.'"

I guess when your user base is dying it makes sense to resort to necromancy.

We will work more and more, endlessly, until we render ourselves useless through our own efforts. That is the quest.

I'm sure they will mourn this crippling loss of a few hours worth of revenue.

Hopefully this is the first fine of many. That's where well written laws typically stack up fines as violations persist. This way you don't send some small company into bankruptcy for an actual error, and you eventually start stinging willing offenders so badly they stop at some point.

Probably more like 90 minutes, tops.

This is part of the reason that alternative medicine has become so popular, there are definitely still some trustworthy doctors out there, but I share the same experience as you where I feel left with no recourse but to take care of things myself after seeing multiple doctors who make it very clear that they have no interest or time to listen to me.

Social media has long stopped being an actual social outlet and is filled with either bots or influencer types trying to be the loudest voice shouting into the void. I recall going to Reddit in like 2010-2012, back when there was pretty much only college kids on it, and the posts were often witty and interesting. That no longer exists anywhere on the major sites and trying for any kind of conversation is a dead end.

Eternal September combined with profit focused engineering has created a wasteland.

Facebook is next to useless. I'm on it for work. It continually boosts one person's posts on my feed — not someone I dislike but am not close friends with — and then tells me about people's birthdays and bereavements weeks after they happened.

Like YouTube, the promoted content seems to be designed to pull me in particular political directions I am not interested in.

> I recall going to Reddit in like 2010-2012, back when there was pretty much only college kids on it, and the posts were often witty and interesting.

Well, there was also narwhal bacon and Streetlamp Le Moose.

In 2012 post on Facebook was from my friends.

Now they are from influencer pages.

AI has only made it worse. I stopped using instagram for a while but went back on it last week. The number of AI videos was just incredible. What happened to the place where I could see the photos from my friends? Why does Meta think I want to see AI slop instead?

Hemingway was still a master of word choice. I recall an entire class spent on a few lines that conveyed a sense of heaviness to the scene. 'Plodding' was given a lot of attention.

I remember a college English class where a good part of the lecture was on this sentence from Big Two-Hearted River: "He liked to open cans." Forget the details but it got into the difference between achievement and accomplishment.

> 3. Gears, pistons, linkages, pulleys, wheels, etc forming elaborate moving mechanisms...

This is a really interesting phenomenon. Elaborate machinescapes are present in a lot of psychedelic closed eye visuals. Its unusual because we typically don't have a lot of interaction with these things, yet there's this shared experience. I wonder if the experiences we have had seeing complex machinery in real life have embedded some primal response to them.

I commonly see blobs of light, but a particularly frequent recurring visualization is circus imagery. If I'm listening to music I seem to be more prone to seeing something like cardboard cutouts of the Beatles in their Sgt Pepper outfits sort of bouncing up and down moving off to the side.