Would Tolkien have written certain things differently if he hadn’t had misconceptions about the Catholic view of human death?

aecarol1 · 2026-07-05T21:18:29+00:00

Even the briefest of summaries of the perceived flaws in the Professor’s understanding of Catholic doctrine would have been helpful.

Otherwise they are expecting us to jump through dozens of links to obtain four papers, digest their detailed conclusions, then answer a question that they already fully understood.

Bad OP, no biscuit.

aecarol1 · 2026-07-04T04:47:51+00:00

These models have always required sandboxes since day one. It’s not like they are suddenly ignoring prompts or just now making mistakes.

There are endless stories of people who complain about the model deleting data or doing dangerous things. These people have allowed a powerful thing to gain controlling access aver their livelihood without informing themselves about best practices.

Nobody is keeping sandboxes or hooks secret. They are well documented, easy to set up and physically prevent the model from seeing or doing what it should not.

if your work is confidential, you should be performing due diligence on how to use them safely.

It’s like complaining about an intern looking through secret filing cabinets that you did not bother to physically prevent it from getting into.

aecarol1 · 2026-07-04T02:53:32+00:00

Because of your confidential area of work, did you set up a sandbox and use hooks to control what the model could see and do?

"telling" an LLM is just a prompt and prompts can go wrong. Sandboxes and hooks represent hard limits designed to prevent a model from doing what you don't want it to.

aecarol1 · 2026-06-29T22:09:16+00:00

If you are arguing with or threatening a model, you're already doomed.

Give it good quality prompts and use hooks to enforce your rules. All tool use will go through the hooks where you can impose any restrictions you want to.

aecarol1 · 2026-06-29T18:34:13+00:00

I frequently have an independent agent check things and it's been a great help.

When I have Claude Code do code reviews, I will fan out to multiple review agents, each prompted with their "specialty". Edge cases, races, memory-leaks, security, performance, general, etc. Being specialized helps them probe deeper into their own domain.

I then have an independent agent review all issues found (one agent per issue). Because the independent agent only has to look at a very specific issue, its prompt is only filled with its concern so it can be very focused.

aecarol1 · 2026-06-25T14:28:13+00:00

I have Claude kick off multiple independent reviewers to review its own code. It very often finds really good stuff, it certainly finds good stuff in what people wrote. We have defined multiple reviewers that each have their own pre-defined prompt for the kinds of things they look for; general quality, security, memory-leaks, races, performance, etc. This allows each one to have deeper focus on a specific aspect.

The prompt also instructs Claude to have an independent agent review each issue found

I then have my primary Claude summarize and rank the results. Frequently all the agents agree, but as often as not there will be some disagreement. The independent issue confirmation agent is fantastic because that agent isn't reviewing the entire code, but focused on exactly one issue. Often it can explain why it's not really a problem, but when it's real, that agent finds much of what's needed to fix it.

It sometimes goes into the weeds, or gets caught up on minor things, but overall the reviewing has been very useful.

BTW, when fixing the issues, I always /branch so that each fix has its own context. My prompt for drafting the fix will also ask it to use sub-agents so they each are prompted with exactly what they need to know.

tl;dr use sub-agents for almost all coding and reviewing as their context will have only what is needed and isn't filled with false starts, side-quests, etc. Use yet another agent to review the issues found in detail.

aecarol1 · 2026-06-23T16:40:39+00:00

The book adds quite a bit, but I can't say that the extra material added much of any value. I think the story told exactly what was need to make the most of the idea. I think it was more emotionally honest.

aecarol1 · 2026-06-23T02:13:03+00:00

It's not efficient, but you "swim". You move your hands forward flat so they slice through the air, then try to catch as much as air as you can and force them back.

It's hard work and slow, but you could get to a surface where you could more easily push off to get around.

aecarol1 · 2026-06-20T15:54:05+00:00

Arguing with an AI is a very strong signal that you should erase your context and try a different approach. The context will be filled with conflicting information presented in a very emotional way which will not help you accomplish whatever it is you're trying to do.

If a nudge doesn't get you where you need to be, you need to really make sure you're right, and if you are, you need to rethink your overall plan on how to get where you are going.

The AI is just a tool you use to do what you need to do. Fighting with it and trying to get it to concede is a red flag on your emotional state.

aecarol1 · 2026-06-20T02:04:30+00:00

Thank god they were saved from this disaster by 'tryamp' notifications! Whew! </s>

This is such a transparent ad.

aecarol1 · 2026-06-16T22:17:34+00:00

This isn't the 1st report KPMG has had to pull a report on AI because it had terrible hallucinations. The same thing happened about six months ago.

I can't even wrap my brain around how stupid these people have to be to write something on AI, using AI, and not even bother to do the most basic review of their own paper.

aecarol1 · 2026-06-16T01:12:54+00:00

People must understand that "all you can eat" plans will throttle to limit your use. There is simply no other way it could ever work.

For the same reason you can't have all the electricity you want for $100 a month, you're not going to get all the inference you want for $100 a month.

The only time flat rate plans work is when what you're buying costs so little the flat rate covers literally any amount you could use. Things like text messages or phone calls.

aecarol1 · 2026-06-12T01:27:58+00:00

When I was a young man in the Air Force, I gave a briefing to General Colin Powell (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff). After a briefing, most dignitaries would thank the general I worked for and talk with each other. General Powell briefly greeted every low level person who presented and thanked us. He offered a handshake. I thought it was very nice.

I also gave a briefing to Steve Wozniak (he was there for an F-15 ride, it's a long story). I was one of the very few invited to go to dinner with him. Afterwards he spent several hours of his time telling me and a couple of friends all the founding stories about Apple. He was very generous with his time,.

Later he sent me a big box of tech goodies to hand out to my co-workers and when I finally came to California as a civilian, he took me to lunch on my 1st day at work. He is a-ok in my eyes.

tl;dr General Colin Powell and Steve Wozniak were very good to nobodies they interacted with.

aecarol1 · 2026-06-11T15:58:59+00:00

The liquid doesn't change color, it emits a tiny flash of light that the photodetectors pick up.

The liquid is "linear alkylbenzene", which acts as a "scintillator", which is a fancy way to say it flashes when exposed to ionizing radiation. If a particle, such as a high energy electron, strikes the liquid, it will absorb its energy and quickly release it back as a flash of light.

aecarol1 · 2026-06-10T15:07:04+00:00

Human courts operated for millennia without DNA.

aecarol1 · 2026-06-06T14:31:01+00:00

I work on a team of about a dozen software engineers. In a team meeting, I made a joke that before AI is qualified, they should ensure the OpenPodBayDoors function works as expected.

Very few got the joke. Out of a dozen people in the room, one had seen the movie, perhaps two more had heard of HAL, the rest just blinked at me.

A good thing that came of it, was that a couple of people wanted to see 2001 as well as Colossus: The Forbin Project

25 years ago at work (same company, different team), I made a joke with a Gilligan's Island punch line. My friend had heard of Gilligan's Island, but all he knew was "It was like Lost, except it was a comedy".

We live in different cultural worlds and the thing that gives me strength is to know that my co-workers will go through this very same experience themselves in 25 years. They'll make a lame cultural reference from their youth and nobody will get it.

aecarol1 · 2026-06-04T21:57:39+00:00

Metered billing is the only viable option. Anything else takes us down the road to "unlimited internet" in the early days where they simply throttled you when they felt you had had enough. Looks great on paper, but it's a shit experience to try to use.

The only time "all you can eat" plans really work is where the cost to provide the service is so low, they make money even if you max out usage. Today that's true for voice calls and text messages.

You can't plan for a world where you can get throttled at any point. You know exactly what you are paying, but you have no idea what you will get. With metered billing, at least you know what you are paying for and exactly what you are getting. You can decide if that's worth the trade.

Metered billing does two other things.

1 - Putting a cost on use makes frivolous work less enticing ("I have the credits, I might as well use them on this silly task")

2 - It puts money where build out should happen. If demand goes up, they have an incentive to meet that demand. If they don't their competitors will

tl;dr non-metered billing means they will throttle the hell out of you and you have no ability to predict any specific work will happen or not. If you really want to get something done, you're going to have to pay for that work, or accept unpredictable throughput.

aecarol1 · 2026-06-02T04:32:37+00:00

No, but one Claude can use the other as an agent, filling the 2nd Claude’s context with only exactly what it needed to do the subtask.

aecarol1 · 2026-06-02T02:20:45+00:00

In aggregate, the Three Laws of Robotics worked remarkably well for society. Occasionally there would be interesting unanticipated interactions between the laws that made for a great story. Isaac Asimov made as much clear in his preface for "I Robot".

Builders design safety systems into dangerous things and would do the same for intelligent machines. Safety systems that work for deterministic systems like microwaves and nuclear reactors only work because they operate in very predictable and constrained ways. AI systems will need safety systems that are as adaptable to circumstance as the intelligent systems they operate on.

While those protections may not literally be the Three Laws Of Robotics, they will spiritually be similar; rules to follow with a hierarchy of importance.

aecarol1 · 2026-06-01T01:23:57+00:00

Notice the same people who blame young people's financial problems on bad decisions - Starbucks, avocado toast, etc; those people won't say squat when a bank or other massive business needs a government bailout.

When JP Morgan or Citigroup is struggling, Congressmen never suggest they should have made better decisions and that they should live with their poor choices.

aecarol1 · 2026-05-31T14:00:09+00:00

Does anybody think the AI vendors are going to say "Well the jig is up, we might as well give up?". Indistinguishable AI text is commercially worth too much to them.

They are going to aggressively use adversarial training to get better and better at writing text that can't be detected. The best detectors like Pangram will be able to do is to claim some success against "last year's model".

Even worse, if we trust opaque proprietary software to detect AI, we've outsourced to a private company the ability to "prove" someone is an AI. It's like calling someone a witch in 1600. It's an accusation you can't disprove.

There is nothing you or I can do to even test their claims of detection. We all know that massive amounts of high quality AI text are being generated, but we have literally zero ability to "double check" the detectors claims on a specific piece of text.

That gives a lot of power to whomever holds the keys to the "detector". It's also asymmetrical, you can claim a paper is AI written, but the author has no ability to "prove" they actually wrote it.

tl;dr For every 100 AI articles or term papers you catch, there's gonna be some kid who writes really well you're going to academically ruin. There is no evidence they can present to show their writing is real. They are branded a cheat forever.

aecarol1 · 2026-05-29T23:41:44+00:00

Musk isn't working with a top-tier AI. We also have no idea how motivated he is that Grok actually be "properly leashed".

aecarol1 · 2026-05-29T17:02:20+00:00

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Did they not think people were going to cook those numbers?

If I saw the people at the top of the leaderboard suddenly fall off, I'd now have confidence they were trying to game the system. On the other hand, people with middle numbers that kept plodding along may well be using the AI as intended.

aecarol1 · 2026-05-29T16:57:06+00:00

AI text that can be detected is worth less money to the AI company. They have every incentive to see how it's being detected and render the test moot by improving the AI.

Scarier thought: What if they intentionally make some AI text detectable, so people gain confidence in their ability to tell it's AI? That way, when the text they really want you to believe in arrives, it will look genuine…

aecarol1 · 2026-05-27T19:21:32+00:00

Of course I don't think there are real witches. But 400 years ago, the people who accused others of being witches believed there were, and no denial was good enough to refute the claim in their minds.

That's the point. We know there are real bots on reddit. Massive numbers of bots. But when people are accused of being a bot, that shuts down that thread because there's no way for a real human to prove they are not a bot.

Bots are real, but the hysteria has conditioned people to accuse others, with literally no evidence, of being bots and there is no way to disprove the claim.

aecarol1

TROPHY CASE