I think it’s because in the early 2010’s these companies were doing truly awesome things, at least in my pov. Google search felt like magic and a portal to a web you could only imagine, facebook actually connected you with friends, nothing like amazon ecommerce had existed yet, cloud shit was insanely cool. Hell, my primary motivation in pursuing my degree was to work at google. I recoil in horror thinking about it now.
I think the trust gained there will be hard to break from people, that in my experience, genuinely do not realize what a complete 180 these companies have done. I sometimes wonder and am fearful at what type of thing would need to happen before people en masse realize it.
I'm not sure this is a regression, at least how I use it - you can hit control + o to expand, and usually the commands it runs show the file path(s) it's using, and I'm really paranoid with it, and I didn't even notice this change.
i've never had to use control + o before but with the latest changes, i give Opus a simple task that should take a few seconds and it's like "used 15k tokens" and "thinking" for three minutes with absolutely zero indication or visibility as to what it's actually doing and i have to ESC ESC it to stop and ask what the FUCK are you actually doing claude?
Yes, I’ve been evaluating since the start of the year and since 4.6 suddenly the most innocuous requests will sit there “thinking” for 5+ minutes and if I can get it to show me the thinking it’s just going round in circles.
Or, it decided it needs to get API documentation out and spends tens of thousands of tokens fetching every file in a repo with separate tool use instead of reading the documentation.
Profitable, if you are charging for token usage, I suspect.
But I’m reaching the point where I can’t recommend claude to people who are interesting in skeptically trying it out, because of the default model.
I guess I engineered around this before 4.6 - I did notice a regression in it wanting to search deeper than I wanted and had specified, but just restricted it with tooling I wrote that would enforce what I wanted. In that respect, I feel comfortable running 4.6 with the guardrails I already have, but did notice some squirrelyness I didnt anticipate in my utility scripts.
Yeah after my switch to Opus 4.6 I noticed a lot of this. I've been wary that eventually models are going to optimize for token usage increases, since that's how the company makes money. I told it to read the files in my directory (4 files, longest was like 380 lines) and caught it using 14 tool uses- including head -n 20 and tail -n 20 on a file. Definitely a what are you doing moment.
OTOH I find it pretty funny that the instant they manage to make a model that breaks general containment of popularity and usefulness (4.5), the toxicity of the business model kicks in and they instantly enshittify.
Just a weird, completely unscientific personal metric I've used to note that the economy seems like it's shrinking - last year was the first year I've seen since the release of the original switch where switch/switch 2 was not constantly sold out (usually poached by resellers early in the AM) every time I visit target. There's a full shelf of them since late last summer. Unless nintendo actually produced enough units for the first time in recent company history, I suspect it indicates something.
Gaming technology is kind of stagnant, and there aren't the sort of technical leaps between generations anymore. Games today look and feel like games from 2014 with slightly better graphics (and more aggressive monetization).
The Switch has been out since 2017 and has probably reached market saturation at this point. Keep in mind that consoles are pretty durable and lots of people buy used. The Switch 2 isn't selling well yet since it has the PS3 disease (no games).
Anyways, the economy is probably bad but I don't think Nintendo Switch sales are much of an indicator for that.
> Sales figures collated by The Game Business last month showed that U.S. Switch 2 sales over the holiday period were down around 35% versus the Switch 1's first holiday sales performance back in 2017. In the UK, a similar comparison saw Switch 2 lagging Switch 1 by 16%. Even in Nintendo's homeland of Japan, Switch 2 holiday sales couldn't match Switch 1, and were down by 5.5% over the year's final nine weeks.
> In France, 2025's final tally of Switch 2 sales was down by "over 30%" versus the amount Switch 1 notched up back in 2017
Switch 2 is the fastest selling console of all time right now. [0]
They sold more than 17 million units in less than a year. The Wii U only sold 13 million over its entire lifetime. The Switch 1 took 2 years to reach 20 million, and the Switch 2 will very likely reach that number in less than half the time.
Nintendo may have expected even higher sales numbers but saying that
Nintendo indicated when the Switch 2 was launching that they were going to do their best to ensure a large supply and make sure actual players were prioritized. They did not want resellers to be profitable and did not want to create a situation like the PlayStation.
It still sold out and was a little difficult to get on release, but consoles came out at a pretty quick pace and resellers basically could not unload their stock for a profit. It became a bit of a joke about the resellers not being able to unload their stock because stores were getting replenishment stocks so often and Nintendo was constantly sending out emails to players saying they had been selected to buy directly from Nintendo.
I had my personal Switch 2 from the store within about a month of casual checking around and got one for a Christmas gift directly from Nintendo the next week.
>last year was the first year I've seen since the release of the original switch where switch/switch 2 was not constantly sold out (usually poached by resellers early in the AM) every time I visit target. There's a full shelf of them since late last summer.
Don't you expect demand to taper off as more people get their hands on it? It also doesn't help that the switch 2 is basically "the switch, but better".
This never happened with the switch. I am not kidding. 2023 I was trying to buy one for my sister, and it took me months of waiting for target to open and beating the resellers to it, because I didn't want to overspend online (plus online stock frequently sold out). It was released in 2017!
Nintendo is notorious for under producing their consoles vs demand in recent years - the worst example was the mini NES or whatever they called it, they could not keep it on shelves for that one either.
Either people are waking up that Nintendo is selling nostalgia or the economy is not doing well.
I hope the former, there is something that feels sick to think Nintendo force fed corporate mascots to me when I was under the age of 1. To this day, I religiously buy Zelda games, even though I haven't enjoyed them since N64. FOMO mind control.
What are you talking about? The WiiU sold like crap! It was a disaster! And a big reason it was a disaster was because the Wii itself was not selling anymore. It was over and out, people were fed up with it. Nintendo is a very very very bad economic indicator, they're on their own planet, and they're far from selling nostalgia. They're selling well known characters in new environments. They completely redesigned Donkey Kong, that's not what a company coasting on nostalgia would do!
> They're selling well known characters in new environments. They completely redesigned Donkey Kong, that's not what a company coasting on nostalgia would do!
> last year was the first year I've seen since the release of the original switch where switch/switch 2 was not constantly sold out (usually poached by resellers early in the AM) every time I visit target. There's a full shelf of them since late last summer. Unless nintendo actually produced enough units for the first time in recent company history, I suspect it indicates something.
Well, I remember the same thing happening with the Wii for a long time, and then eventually it was easily available.
But now I can't find a Wii at a Target anywhere, so the economy must be booming?
Predefined or human-borrowed tactics will eventually run out.
What really fascinates me is this: when both sides are AIs trained to predict the opponent’s next move — and they know the opponent is also an AI doing the same — what emerges then?
At that point it’s not human vs machine anymore. It’s Sherlock vs Sherlock.
But to read someone else's strategy from just a document, and then implement it, that is new. The old civ did not do that, each AI just had pre-programmed rules.
For linking activity back to your person? Without name, payment details, photos of face, or IRL social graph the easiest path that comes to mind is IP address. But that's going to involve additional inquiries and is likely ambiguous (unless you live alone, but determining that is again more work).
“allow google to search for devices on your network?”
I’m not trying to be condescending here, but I’m just asking what someone thinks is happening here and what they can do with information scanned on your network.
I don't follow how that's relevant? In terms of the information yielded by an administrative subpoena of an account will that even appear? I'm not clear how the result of the scan is being used.
Suppose the data is retained in association with your pseudonymous account. So now in addition to my IP they have, what, the internal IPs and device names from my LAN? How does that lead directly to me without significant additional effort? I think their best option is still hitting up my ISP to get the billing info and service address of the account.
use it as a thought experiment i guess. your devices will advertise themselves to your local network and are easily fingerprintable to any device with network permissions and talk back a lot more than they should. The only point I’m trying to make is that you can’t fool this kind of with filling in form that’s wrong.
These kind of condescending comments are a bit much, especially when not everyone has the luxury or know-how to deFAANG their lives. For instance, whether or not (I) personally want to avoid it, I use some of this for actual work, and there is no alternative. Comments like this seem to imply then I have no right to complain about it, which is frankly ridiculous - there is a world where FAANGs can exist without being far reaching apparatuses of an authoritarian regime. They do so because it is convenient and the existing power structure incentivizes it.
Like what am I gonna do in a job interview - "Oh, you guys use gsuite? Sorry, I deFAANGed."
We're on the forum where people are most capable of doing this for themselves.
And if your company uses GMail that is less than ideal for de-Googling, but it does not meaningfully impact the benefits of de-Googling your personal life.
Refusing to run all your search history, personal transactions, and correspondences through one of the fascist state's pet companies is still beneficial.
It's almost like there should be some third party that represents people who could regulate companies like Google and prevent them from becoming too big. Maybe there are some examples from US history where some such third party existed.
I'm ~40ish but middle career and not in management. I envy this author, whatever joy he found in solving little puzzles and systems was extinguished in me very early in my career in an intense corporate environment. I was never one to love fussing much with code, but I do love solving system scale problems, which also involve code. I don't feel I am losing anything, the most annoying parts of code I deal with are now abstracted into human language and specs, and I can now architect/build more creatively than before. So I am happy. But, I was one of those types that never had a true passion for "code" and have meant plenty of people that do have that, and I feel for them. I worry for people that carved out being really good at programming as a niche, but you enter a point in your career where that becomes much less important than being able to execute and define requirements and understand business logic. And yea, that isn't very romantic or magical, but I find passion outside of what pays my bills, so I lost that ennui feeling a while ago.
Some may feel that it is a luxury to feel passionate about one’s profession, but for me a life without that is pretty depressing. A society should strive to make fulfillment in a profession possible for everyone.
To me it feels the opposite of miserable. I can give work my full attention because it allows me freedom (mostly) to pursue other passionate things. This 40 hour a week (speaking generally, for me it can triple that sometimes) cost to me is far smaller than the depression I’d feel caring deeply about my particular craft in a field that doesn’t give a shit about it. That was proven to me very early in my career and is definitely cynical, but I don’t know where all the bright eyed bushy tailed opinions out there are coming from. probably completely different domains than my viewpoint.
Of course society should be a lot of things but that’s not a reality. Like, imagine a world exists soon where not every person (or even the majority of people) are useful, even formerly useful people - we already live in this world! If raw intellectual output is the value generator in the world we live in, and is a meritocracy, the simple fact by statistics is most will be left behind. what society already does to the disabled, and the sick is proof of this already. These people take professions to suit their circumstances. I am one, and I am fine with it. but by the parameters of the game, this is how to best maximize my passion output. Many people have many ideas how to change “society” I personally think is a waste of time, society adapts to circumstances most of the time. Except the people at the bottom usually get a raw deal.
When you are flying a foreign flag docked in a port you are complex legal situation - in international law, you follow the laws of the flag country, in addition to being under local jurisdiction (most of the time). And if you’re flying a flag for a boat that’s not registered under that flag, which as this article explains is easily verifiable, who is going to buy the oil, and how? not to mention any possible international sanctions on the oil, customs, the crew getting paid and wanting to return home, wherever that may be, and you get situations that can last for a long time. For this case a boat to boat transfer may be the only real way.
Your comment hints at another problem, which is that allowing the cargo into a port possibly could be exploited as a loophole to break sanctions.
Yet another big problem is that cargo might be too low in value, or even undesirable. Like the cargo of Ammonium Nitrate that exploded in Beirut a few years ago (it had been taken off the docked ship which then sank in the port. The cargo was stored in the port, then stuck in legal and payment disputes, and the result was horrific).
Under international law piracy has the for “private ends” clause when defining piracy meaning nation states can’t really do piracy but instead commerce raiding which is a form of warfere.
these are usually very poor crew trying to escape desperate circumstances. they arent in a bargaining position and are easy prey to pirates depending on the part of the world they are in. Since they’re ghost ships, anyone could basically take what they pleased without anyone knowing, not to mention whatever country is willing to take an unregistered ship to offload oil in amounts that someone annoying could notice.
it’s a bad situation for everyone but the seller that convinced the ship it could turn it around.
It isn't as easy as it sounds. It's a lot of fingerprinting, location, and metadata aggregation from an astounding variety of sources that is extremely difficult to fake - It can pinpoint you to an astounding degree. I have been working off and on the last 3 years in the privacy space (passion project) on a similar concept of adtech data obfuscation, and it's far more complex than just "put a fake birthday in a form" (although stuff like this can manifest in interesting ways).
Differential analysis is amazingly powerful. If you're in the US - 30 bits is all you need. And not all bits are equal - some come with implicit anchors, allowing you to segment and search efficiently.
If you know the state, the median number of bits needed is 23. If you know the city, around 10 bits is all you need to identify you as a unique individual.
A drunk raccoon with one eye and a missing paw can sieve out 10 bits of information about a particular person.
You can do probabilistic assumptions and segment the population by fuzzy characteristics you get, like stylometry, assumptions about native language, interests, etc. For a giant database like the spies and agencies have, they can do probablistic ID with extreme accuracy based on a tiny number of leaked bits.
If you snag a giant pile of readily available website data, then tag the person of interest based on that data, then any time you process new data, you can get a probability of that new data being associated with an already known person. Set a five nines threshold, or higher, and then assume those matches are legitimate, and you can chip away at all sorts of identity handles. From there, you can start doing contrastive searches, sieving out known quantities, improving the statistical accuracy of those fuzzy parameters.
Deanonymization and such is borderline trivial, consumer compute is about 5 generations past the threshold where a global database would be considered particularly difficult or challenging.
Fingerprinting is very easy, but obfuscating it is incredibly challenging, with all of the implicit, deliberately leaky data transactions that are imposed on us.
These technologies are easily and readily available for whoever wants to pay for it. I personally believe the scope of the privacy nightmare will result in a glut of faux “privacy” oriented services that just serve the monster more.
I can tell you know what you are talking about here, but communicating this to the masses is difficult to why this matters or how bad it is. Unfortunately there’s a strong industry incentive to keep the status quo.
I take the more cynical view privacy is impossible to participate online, let alone anonymity, and would love a disruptor in the space, but at this point, I’ve become so cynical that participating as minimally as possible in it seems the only real solution. But I am not fatalistic, and cannot expect people to consume things the way I do, so I keep trying. You can’t really fight it in any real way, so my approach has been monitoring, observing, informing, and learning.
I've made astoundingly little technical progress, not much to talk about. Mostly just observations and experiments, but then you look like a malicious user and I definitely ate a platform ban over it once and stopped that. My posting and submission favorites history probably indicate a bit where my interests lie. My most recent work is leveraging data broker removal services (and some letter writing sometimes) to get my address to disappear off the google front page on the barest search of my real name (which is very unique, and without asking google directly) - this is something I want to try to sell and is the most success I've had, but it's a total blackbox, doesn't even approach the scope of the real problem, and as a sibling comment gets at, the tech you are fighting is simply far too powerful and ubiquitous. You're better off at just looking "uninteresting" online, is what I'm slowly concluding, but what is uninteresting today can become extremely interesting to governments of tomorrow.
"Phone Swap Collective" ... You keep an extra smart phone... then just swap phones with people who commute to different areas of your city each day. Keep social media accounts that are effectively "bots" on the collective and post real BS multiple times a day via AI bot interactions.
Give a prepaid to homeless along with a month long bus pass... let 'em ride all over town.
I think the trust gained there will be hard to break from people, that in my experience, genuinely do not realize what a complete 180 these companies have done. I sometimes wonder and am fearful at what type of thing would need to happen before people en masse realize it.
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