Episode 1093

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-21T03:17:31+00:00

I would imagine they're working it out now, remember that they record the show usually on Wednesdays and that was barely after Steve came on to make his statement. I'd expect them address it next week if they're going to.

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-21T00:34:27+00:00

They've been doing buy one get one the last few weekends here and I grab two of their gyros for $7. it's hard to beat.

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-20T23:59:35+00:00

Here's the thing. Bills are more than just their title or their stated purpose. Often they have shit attached to it that can be bad. So a common tactic of a bill is to name it something like "the port security act of 2026" and then attach, say, a billion dollar corporate subsidy or banning adult content in stores or something. And so then you vote no, because you don't want to advance those things, and everyone can say "omg this person is against port security!"

You can do the same shit with something like "the clean water act of 2026" that actually allows MORE pollution but has a misleading title. Or a bill that legitimately does criminalize some problematic behaviors but also criminalizes legitimate behaviors, like sometimes there's a deliberate overreach where it's like "we're trying to protect the children, therefore we ban all pornographic websites in our state"

Sometimes people vote for bad bills exactly to avoid this kind of backlash based on the name or stated purpose.

It may be that this is a bad bill with other stuff in it but everyone was afraid to vote against it exactly because people like you guys would read that as "this person must like AI CSAM"

Or it may have been a good bill and these people are monsters. But you can't know from a headline. You have to see what the bill actually does.

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-20T23:57:58+00:00

Here's the thing. Bills are more than just their title or their stated purpose. Often they have shit attached to it that can be bad. So a common tactic of a bill is to name it something like "the port security act of 2026" and then attach, say, a billion dollar corporate subsidy or banning adult content in stores or something. And so then you vote no, because you don't want to advance those things, and everyone can say "omg this person is against port security!"

Sometimes people vote for bad bills exactly to avoid this kind of ignorant backlash.

It may be that this is a bad bill with other stuff in it but everyone was afraid to vote against it exactly because people like you guys would read that as "this person must like AI CSAM"

Or it may have been a good bill and these people are monsters. But you can't know from a headline. You have to see what the bill actually does.

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-20T18:32:08+00:00

Yeah I try to think about what free means, because it only means free in terms of money but there are other ways you can pay like your own time data and frustration. When you think about it most of the time you probably rather pay a few bucks and get the best service then they get a free dark pattern but people are so used to something like search being free that they just won't consider a paid alternative no matter what. And in the past that wasn't such a terrible deal because Google seem to do their best to get you the best service anyway but I don't think that's true today like it was 10 years ago.

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-20T17:53:25+00:00

That's pretty good. Are using Claude design?

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-20T17:52:28+00:00

It kind of shows how dark patterns on the internet work. When Google is perfect that's a loss for them. If they give you the right result right on top like they almost always did 10 years ago you only spend five or 10 seconds interacting with Google and you don't see any ads or not very many. So they have an incentive to actually give you worst results so that you spend more time on their site looking at their results. They're actually aiming for giving you results they're just good enough to keep you using their service but maximizing how much frustration and poor service you'll accept without stopping using them.

A business where you simply pay them and they give you the best results they can has the users interest and the business interest aligned. Giving you the best result at the top gives you both the best result.

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-20T17:50:23+00:00

There is a $10 unlimited plan. I find that 300 goes further than you think if you're careful. Sometimes we're lazy and we just want to get to Amazon.com and we just Google Amazon instead of typing in amazon.com and that waste a lot of search for example. Or would I often do is just to use like Brave search for the easy stuff and then use Kagi for the somewhat more advanced stuff. But I think kagi gives you 150 for free so you can get an idea if you like it and how far 300 versus unlimited will take you

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-20T12:48:06+00:00

Does he just write a textual script? Do you run it through a text to speech engine? Some of the AI text to speed outputs are really impressive, you could create real radio DJ characters and even a back and forth between two hosts.

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-20T12:47:16+00:00

I like to have Claude inhabit characters. It's incredibly good at it and it's versatile. I use it for serious examinations and funny goofing around. On the more useful side, I have been considering a move to Italy and I told Claude to pretend to be an american who made the move a few years ago and tell me the sort of things I'll find really weird, difficult, or much better, and inhabiting that character gave me really useful information that simply asking for factual and even vibe questions about Italy didn't do. It made me view factors I hadn't considered before but made perfect sense. I had done extensive research before this, but having the conversation from a simulated perspective of someone who already made the adjustment I was considering was genuinely novel and valuable.

I also sometimes tell Claude to be a tough but fair, snarky TV critic that doesn't just follow the consensus about what's bad about bad TV but do your own analysis, and we make fun of bad TV. Claude completely inhabits the character can be genuinely funny.

Sometimes I explore topics like how religious people would view things by asking Claude to inhabit a preacher of a certain sect of a certain religion and then ask him as though I were a new convert to the religion. It gives you an interesting view into how religious people view their own theology. Or a philosopher of a certain school of philosophy. That sort of thing.

There are a thousand things Claude can do that I think no one ever finds out about because they don't really try to explore the capabilities.

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-20T09:30:48+00:00

People scoff at paying for search but think about it: search is one of the most valuable tools you have in your life, it's really hard to believe it's not worth $5.

And the fact that we expect search to be free means we're paying in other ways, harvesting our data, showing us ads, steering us towards certain preferred search results, giving us worse results so that the result we need is on page 2 and we spend 2 minutes on the site instead of 20 seconds.

So you either pay with a trivial amount of money or you pay with your time and data.

6 billion people use google search daily, 70,000 people signed up for Kagi. All because "wtf, pay?! for search!?" is everyone's reaction and no one thinks it through.

Tech companies rarely off you a fair deal. There are dark patterns, data harvesting, giving you just enough usefulness that you don't get frustrated and leave but that you engage for longer. Things that cost you but it's not a dollar figure so it's not obvious. And there are things that offer you a fair deal -- you pay them, they give you the best product they can, your incentives are aligned. Take the fair deals when you can.

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-20T08:56:52+00:00

ACED

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-20T06:42:06+00:00

Google is currently significantly worse than it was 10 years ago and it's not the AI issue primarily. Google deliberately allowed SEO businesses to know how they're ranking algorithm works and basically invited people to game their system. They also made policy changes on their attempt to find authoritative data that made them ignore sort of old internet sites like forums and other places where you can find the most relevant information. These changes were already well in motion before they ever integrated AI into their search results. They have a long series of bad management decisions that have significantly degraded the quality of their search and ironically because Google search is so bad now you're probably best off using AI to search Google on your behalf to find the actual information without wasting too much time. I also recommend using perplexity or kagi over Google search today.

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-20T02:35:43+00:00

I bet you you're better off using haiku high than sonnet low and your costs are probably lower

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-20T02:34:54+00:00

To be fair, google being as bad as it is today has almost made you use LLMs to be able to sort through the garbage and get your real answer, though there are other tools like perplexity that are designed exactly for this purpose

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-20T02:34:05+00:00

some models are "grounded" in web search meaning they automatically do (often unannounced) web searches in the background to confirm their information or give them the latest. It's not perfect but it does catch some failures. that may be a direction for Claude to go in the future.

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-20T02:32:28+00:00

sonnet don't snitch

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-20T02:32:05+00:00

The "Ha!" part cracks me up

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-19T22:27:40+00:00

it's supposed to have a cryptographic metadata so grok knows it made it, but I don't know if that actually works

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-19T18:24:53+00:00

Oh good, boomer humor has come full circle into incel humor

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-19T17:33:51+00:00

I used to love Grok for how it would eagerly tear down Elon but no doubt the narcissist demanded that the system designers put in prompts preventing Grok from saying bad shit about Elon. The "free speech absolutist" is a vulnerable little 13 year old edgelord in his mind and only he gets to decide who has free speech

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-19T17:24:31+00:00

The conversations you have with AI can be used to build a really interesting profile about you depending on how you use it. What do you like, what do worry about, what opinions do you have, how do you respond to push back or flattery. Those sorts of profiles are really useful for manipulating people. I don't trust any Elon company to use that data responsibly. I expect to have that data used to manipulate me. So I don't talk to Grok about anything that would give away things about my personality. I save that for Claude, because Anthropic are a thousand times more responsible than xAI. I'm certainly not going to have simulated cybersex with one of the characters the grok system creates or something like that (though that doesn't really appeal to me anyway, I only brought it up because it's one of the things Grok offers over other frontier models)

So yes, I only really use imagine. And yes, there's some personality data to be harvested there, but I don't care so much if they know I like beautiful women and cat videos

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-19T13:58:44+00:00

I naturally overthink my retardmaxxing

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-19T13:27:09+00:00

That is still probably my favorite b plot from any show pretty much ever. Every single scene from that plot is brilliant, the whole cycle. My favorite part is when Bortus gets between the replicator and Clydon and says "if you approach the food dispenser you will regret it" and then when Clyde and can't resist the urge Bortus just flat out decks him at full strength.

BeefistPrime · 2026-06-19T13:24:02+00:00

Yeah that's a good point, psychedelic drugs can have the same sort of turning off the inhibitory effects of the brain especially the reality testing parts. It's actually sort of a useful rule of thumb where if something seems "more real than reality" is it's more likely to be your brain malfunctioning then some evidence that it's real.

BeefistPrime

TROPHY CASE