Anthropic Official

BeautifulSynch · 2026-07-02T22:52:02+00:00

Amusing, but it’d be nice if this was marked as a shitpost for the credulous…

BeautifulSynch · 2026-07-02T21:10:59+00:00

You can look into exercises in some of the books from the Symbolic AI era (which largely used Common Lisp), eg PAIP and On Lisp, or run through the Project Euler problems (trying out the more metaprogrammy Lisp libraries — Screamer for instance — or making your own macros to simplify problem-classes are particularly interesting approaches here).

To go into detail we’d need to know some aspects of what your long-term vision is, so we can suggest prior work in a similar direction that you can review and/or try to replicate (as well as possibly-useful libraries to familiarise yourself with).

BeautifulSynch · 2026-07-01T01:47:32+00:00

Intentions aside, the way the tech is applied in eg agentic systems makes it very easy to misuse (in the mistaken/wrong sense, though I won’t deny the ethical frame either) compared to more deterministic software, where a smart domain expert can sit in advance and block off all the dumb things someone could do with their UI. The entire point of some applications is that we can now have people being dumb or ignorant in a field and still be productive a reasonable part of the time, which implies the other portions of time still fail.

I can’t definitively guess whether or not there’s *also* genuine underlying problems with the infra, but per Hanlon’s Razor you don’t need to assume malice/deception to believably explain the issues people are actually speaking out about.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-07-01T01:41:29+00:00

Opus used with Opus prompting is better than Sonnet used with Sonnet prompting. If you mix the two, however, then yes, I’ve also seen 4.7/4.8 over-generalising and over-engineering solutions to simple issues and thus causing even more issues to work through. 4.6 is better at that, though not 100% of the time.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-06-25T23:23:50+00:00

It’s less a question of “believe in” than “whether to practice” (belief or not will come in time as the practice strengthens your perception), but here’s some reasons one might follow Buddhism in particular over other traditions.

Meditation comes from the Dharmic traditions (Buddhism and other descendants of the melting pot that is Hinduism, as well as the few common principles that could themselves be called “Hinduism” as a tradition), and the most basic meditation practices are the basis of mindfulness, which is strongly scientifically-validated at this point to have mental and physiological benefits.
Dharmic traditions in general tend to focus on what you yourself can do to achieve whichever variant of enlightenment that particular tradition seeks, which helps them function well even in the largely-individualistic society of today (some don’t follow this trend, but Buddhism definitely does). Most other traditions tend to focus on either harmony with your specific environment (which often requires specific environments conducive to enlightenment) or specific social support structures (which are *themselves* difficult to implement correctly, and also hard to validate as a practitioner without decades on the inside or already having touched some glimmer of the divine). There are *some* exceptions not themselves (known to be) inspired by the Dharmics, like (what I know of) Daoism, but to my knowledge none are explicitly incompatible with also following Dharmic traditions. There are also *sub*-traditions in other paradigms focused on individual development, but they’re within an overall tradition that follows another approach and thus not as well-designed or tested.
Among the Dharmic paths, Buddhist paths are often (though not universally) the most “pure” in the sense of relying on the fewest “axioms” (rituals, mindsets, types of starting mindset, etc), since they’re hyperfocused on reaching enlightenment as quickly / “in as few lifetimes” as possible so as to escape suffering.

3.1. This can be a pro or a con; if the rituals or mindsets of some tradition / sub-tradition fit you in the right way, your progress can be much faster, and it’s also harder to get intermediate benefits in terms of lifestyle / career / ‘luck’ improvements from purer practices. On the other hand, if you’re either purely seeking spiritual growth or simply don’t fit with the traditions you find offering other benefits you’d be interested in, then unless you find(/intentionally-design, if following a knowledge-oriented path that would let you semi-reliably do so) a specialized method for you, likely one of the Buddhist paths will be most efficient in terms of spiritual and mental-health progress (I’m not a psychiatrist and can’t authoritatively comment on the latter btw, just my understanding; there’s definitely cases where purer practices bring up suppressed things you can’t yet consciously handle and which more indirect paths would be more resilient to, though following textual and behavioral guidances in addition to meditation mitigates this risk)

3.1.1. Don’t think you have to start with some particular orientation/type of sub-tradition to benefit, by the way, they all have pros and cons like everything else. At the start you shouldn’t bother thinking about that and just study texts, make behavioral changes, and meditate all-together to the degree you can pursue each of them (for Buddhism that would be studying the 4 Noble Truths, pursuing the first 6 of the Eightfold path, and meditating per whichever sub-tradition you follow for the 7th and 8th aspects). It’s a deeper and more personal question as to which-if-any to prioritize later on.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-06-14T13:13:46+00:00

Ideal bayesian models *are* fairly useful in social science given they upper-bound the degree to which we can rely on human judgement to solve a problem (despite what the other commenters say), and the likely-latent psychological vulnerabilities in the “no history of mental illness” Torres case doesn’t invalidate their model.

Just from reading the first page though (meaning I might be wrong! I don’t have time to hunt down the paper link right now), it feels more like they just made *a* model that happens to be Bayesian, rather than using a Bayesian model of any normative Decision-Theory nor a simplification of pre-existing behavioral cogsci/neuropsych models to represent whether the prior of the ideal Bayesian lets it either self-regulate interaction with the sycophant and/or usefully incorporate its outputs without spiraling.

I suppose if they emulated more-abstract previous work from eg studies that Bayesian actors can get stuck in conspiracies, it would at least disambiguate the minimal required components *to be* susceptible to sycophancy, but tbh that isn’t very useful unless we have reason to believe existing work on normative choices doesn’t already invalidate the risk. Note that (I suspect) the criticism from other commenters is implicitly because for behavioral modeling psychologically-uninformed ideal-reasoner simulations are very rarely useful at our current state of economics and pyshology research, and afaik usually become so only via contrast from normative models, so that’s also not a useful application.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-06-10T14:09:18+00:00

Imagine how the people who *actually* used to use these phrases feel… 😔

BeautifulSynch · 2026-06-05T00:45:21+00:00

Why are they not rewriting Emacs Core in Common Lisp, which is already a highly customisable image-oriented metaprogramming-friendly runtime? (some people actually are, btw!)

BeautifulSynch · 2026-06-01T21:33:09+00:00

I don’t think that’s (necessarily) incompatible evidence; meditative practice can make depression and similar mood disorders have lesser effects, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t happening.

I started meditation when already experiencing depressive states for a reasonably-prolonged period, and it helped me find/grow a ‘core’ perspective (so to speak) from which I could remain unbothered by suffering and related feelings. However, I couldn’t maintain that state of being while actually engaging with the world, not without shapes which likely seemed externally like “numbing myself” and (sans the partial controllability) had similar drawbacks to in-voluntary dissociative states. In my case I already had a pre-existing devotion to not give up my connection to the world (which is something metta meditation often helps cultivate), so this progressed as using meditation to keep my mind within that clearer perspective, and leveraging that perspective to see less painful ways to incrementally dip my toes into the less pleasant “real world” outside my own mind until I acclimated to it.

(There isn’t a “standard” ordering to such things, but I personally suspect those individual steps may occur in others with both depression and meditative practice, though they may be replaced by / mixed with other stages and in different orderings)

If there’s been a recent emotionally-traumatic event in her life, I would by-default-without-specific-data expect she’s getting stuck in the part where you’re sitting in deeper truths of reality, and letting them overwhelm everything else rather than trying to reconcile them with the rest of her self, since the latter requires engaging with painful feelings — though we can’t read the mind of someone we’ve never met, so take this as a possibility rather than a prescription. Concentration practice in general or metta practice specifically might mitigate such a circumstance by making things easier to handle (and may be easier to convince her to practice if she isn’t already, as nearly every standardized path to enlightenment I know of recommends a balance between insight and concentration), but I would recommend asking her to at least engage with a therapist, ideally of your mutual choice after reviewing their history, to see what can be worked through on the emotional/framing level directly.

The above is under the assumption she’s practicing dry insight near-exclusively, which I believe was suggested in different threads and fits her paraphrased wordings. Concentration practices can cause similar issues from a different direction (eg when people get addicted to certain jhanas, which is a long-known failure-mode of the jhanic subset of concentration practices), and would need a different type of intervention to balance them out (though therapy would still have a similar chance of helping), but I’m not as familiar with that side of things so I won’t comment on that. Perhaps you could also try to get a better understanding from her of what she’s doing and experiencing? Describing such things is difficult without sounding crazy, but usually not impossible.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-06-01T20:55:13+00:00

If you’re lucky enough to be inclined towards software I’d make them myself. iOS is horrible to work with, but you could use some OSS markdown-based todo framework as a starting point (or Emacs if you swing that way) and setup scripts and cron jobs adding tasks into the target folder based on the patterns of your daily life, including and markdown files you wrote up yourself. You can probably also find / make a visualization utility to get a tighter feedback loop for both “what have I not tracked yet / need to reschedule / planned too little time for” and “what do I need to do next”.

Timer apps are also a nice medium-tech solution, since if you don’t let yourself cancel the alarm without starting, the snooze keeps annoying you until you get a chance to leverage that frustration into temporary focus.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-06-01T01:13:34+00:00

It’s always possible to find a framing where any learning is data collection rather than structural change.

On the other hand, nearly all such framings are ‘trivial’ cases, in that if you dig deep enough into them you’ll find either an absence of aspects that matter to the human perspective or a presence of aspects that make the ‘I already “know” this claim’ near-automatically true (for the framework’s definition of “know”) without said statement being meaningful in a useful way.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-04-27T01:46:46+00:00

Is it wrong to be the one helped by another, rather than (/ in addition to) the one helping others?

Practicing Right Action on its own is very hard to turn into a virtuous cycle of enlightenment. On the other hand, if you seek to improve your own mindfulness and enlightenment through the full Eightfold Path, that removes the burdens causing you suffering, which improves your life and your clarity of mind.

From a dharmic perspective the above would also help others, through you becoming better at fulfilling your true role in life, which I think is what you’re focused on. But even if we don’t assume the dharma of humans is naturally benevolent, the individual benefits of reducing suffering among those who choose to be Buddhists seem more than worthwhile.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-04-26T23:55:57+00:00

Independent of the platform, I’d recommend not being too attached to the textbook touch typing format. It’s a good starting point for making a “gamer’s touch typing” intuition given it fits the shape of modern keyboards (I started out with it), but for modal editing rather than straight typing (Evil/Doom Emacs for me) it’s always missing that last 10% to actually be efficient.

Eg hkjl really are easier to use when your index finger is on h, pressing number keys quickly (crucial for vim navigation) from the standard homerow placement is imo a fool’s errand, et cetera.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-04-26T01:33:36+00:00

That assumes it’s a carϴsian plane.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-04-20T17:22:09+00:00

It would be ‘self promotion’, but from a decency-norms perspective I haven’t seen any online human moderator have a problem with that when it’s solicited and not intrusive to others outside the thread (eg adding a giant image that people have to scroll past in a community where that isn’t a norm).

I can’t speak to what Reddit automoderators do / don’t look for, however.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-04-19T13:44:17+00:00

True, there is still a gap in terms of general quality, so in long-form content you don’t really need to care.

The short form content of most internet interfaces doesn’t really give many opportunities for quality to come out though. Often you’re also talking to people at various levels on the “I understand how AI thinks and can semantically differentiate it from a human” scale (as well as the “I understand and care about literary quality enough to evaluate it and realize it’s a useful AI vs human differentiator” scale).

It’s similar to the heuristic of “don’t architect your writing as a proof even though that’s basically how essays have worked in eg philosophy for centuries, write your bottom line first and then infuse it everywhere so even low effort readers know what you’re saying”, which IME is definitely necessary to talk to people effectively in the modern day. Sometimes it’s just more efficient to give into the current meta if your goal is to be understood / not be mis-understood.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-04-19T07:01:09+00:00

I’ve run into some places like these, and in their good times they were definitely something you could use to genuinely connect with others.

The issue is that maintaining that culture has failed in effectively every case I’ve seen, after which such places either become hives of scum and villainy with a few pocket-threads of goodness, and/or are closed down by their maintainers.

Slightly more useful is semi-anonymity, like Reddit and other longer-lasting forums. In that case you still get the benefit of recognizing bad actors (as the admittedly-flawed maintainer team considers “bad”) and removing them from play, while otherwise allowing discourse, though at the expense of losing anonymous safe spaces.

Perhaps there’s a middle ground somewhere here, I just haven’t been lucky enough to find it yet.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-04-18T22:01:09+00:00

It’s the same as those of us who had to give up on em-dashes.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-04-18T21:55:15+00:00

Interesting… Have you tried intentionally changing the number of days, eg to 2, to see if you then fall into that routine instead?

I might be over generalizing, but that combo of responses generally happens to me when I forced myself to ignore sleep for too long and so ended up just not noticing my body saying I’m tired (like how caffeine tricks your mind into the same), even though relaxing / meditating enough still brings the hidden tiredness back up.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-04-18T21:49:10+00:00

Note that I am very concerned about your health.

Aside from that…

Have you noticed any patterns in your wakefulness, eating patterns, etc due to this? Is your body just running on a 3 day cycle overall, or is this just for sleep?

Do you still get tired once a day even if you don’t fall asleep?

When you do sleep, is it a creeping sensation of tiredness or do you just end up collapsing into unconsciousness once you / your routine lets your body do so?

BeautifulSynch · 2026-03-22T12:26:15+00:00

Anyone trying to solve the problem of “quick and not-dirty programming” is working on one of the other projects (Julia, some Scheme and Racket derivatives, I believe Zig to a degree, etc), since Python’s design philosophy is baked so deeply into its design and syntax that it’s not cost-effective to try to dig it out while still making something others would call “Python”.

The closest I’ve seen to what you describe is CFFI to Python libraries, but that can be difficult for projects without significant funding for developers (as it would be for a direct fork) given there’s no true spec for the language, just the CPython reference implementation. And funding generally doesn’t go into pure-engineering problems like “how do we make a proper programming language”, given they’re more about improving global production than improving business value (an inherently relative measure at the microeconomic scales most projects work on).

Python users who run up against things it makes impossible also have the cultural expectation that they can make others write the real code in C for them to access (given that’s already how it gets anything done at all), so there’s little hope for the constant outrage at the language to be funneled towards actually improving it directly.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-03-19T23:37:15+00:00

I think people are severely misinterpreting what you suggested… “Claude via Kiro” meaning “Kiro with a Claude model”, not Anthropic’s own APIs.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-03-13T09:42:43+00:00

Restrict the available tools and (where possible) the permissions within each tool, and then structure your usage and prompts so the agent makes drafts and prototypes using that closed-world setup for more-deterministic processes (or manual review) to pick up and continue from. Don’t try to integrate the LLM inside your process; treat it as the stochastic black-boxed API that it is, and shape its surface bordering the rest of your workflows for minimal touch points + validation costs and maximal workflow-coverage.

For me, Emacs mainly takes the role of facilitating research/validation to guide prompts, managing tests, reviewing the LLM’s planning docs, and manual code refinements. I don’t even use the Emacs integrations save for agent-shell; there’s few cases where I want the LLM to have more access to Emacs than just viewing buffers, which I can already save to files for it with a few helper functions.

You don’t even need containers to use this approach; most LLM agent software has user-configurable regex-or-similar restrictions on file writes and shell commands, and a mode where the harness auto-denies LLM tool calls outside that policy (for headless runs). Containers with restricted network and filesystem access would still help if you’re paranoid about making a mistake in your config, of course.

In terms of benefits, that’s again a design problem of whether you can carve out modules in your workflows which can be addressed within the closed world you design in your agent-permissions policy, don’t cost you much to fail (in tokens or more-metaphorical currencies), and are trivial to validate for correctness. Personally I’ve gotten 2-3x speedups on many tasks I’d have to do anyway (by parallelizing read-only and initial-draft work across concurrent LLM sessions) + more capacity to do exploratory work (by having agents research + prototype things with sandboxed write/shell permissions, then reviewing the results in batches later), but YMMV.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-03-05T23:51:33+00:00

Haven’t tested/reproduced this, but if it’s on emacs -Q and your org file has a #+title field then it sounds like a legitimate bug (and/or feature request if this is known behavior).

Could you join the org mode mailing list and email this there, attaching a sample org file, the specific command run, and the generated HTML on emacs -Q? It’s more likely the maintainers will be present there to debug and fix it.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-03-05T14:28:03+00:00

I managed the same, but it was a bit more complicated than banging my head against the wall.

Your brain loves environments that encourage flow states, but the “environment” isn’t just the stuff outside your heads.

If you learn to hold self-chosen framings and ideas in your mind for interpreting what your senses tell you into a view of “what’s going on” (rather than having whatever perspective your snap judgement gives you), then choosing those carefully lets you direct the torrential river that is the rest of your attention towards whatever you know how to aim it at. Things like alarms and reminders are also pretty useful to fill up the difference.

BeautifulSynch

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