As a long time Spolsky admirer, your post strikes me as true and makes me a little sad -- although I still benefited from the things he taught -- about specs, commoditizing your complement, hallway usability studies, schlemiel's algorithm. There was more than just fluff about fogbugz.
> I struggle to understand how Claude is still so bad
Claude is absolutely killing it for me. Man-years and man-years of backlog work, hobby projects, optimizations, research, experiments, finally implemented. Bloated apps finally optimized to fit on micro instances, slashing my infra costs. Recovery from operations incidents in a third of the time.
If I could make Claude forget everything it every knew about Ocarina of Time to make it 1% better at what it already does so well, I'd press that button in a heartbeat.
> disheartening to use a bunch of effort only to find it wasted
It's disheartening if your life plan was to do this for 4 hours then never again. But if you meant to keep using this skill, today's hard-won knowledge, combined with continued use, means he'll personally be able to eyeball a similar disassembled float-conversion function in the future and have an educated guess at its purpose, which is a super power!
That's a common misunderstanding. If you learn of a trade secret through improper means, you can be liable federally under the DTSA or similar state statutes like CUTSA in California.
These were the statutes cited in the Anthony Levandowski lawsuit 9yrs back, where Uber settled for a 0.34% equity stake in their company.
If you give away trade secrets by intentionally giving them to another party without an explicit agreement of secrecy no statute in the world will protect it.
You have to take “reasonable” measures to protect trade secrets. Uploading them to a service without any confidentiality agreement or worse, where the provider officially has the right to use that data, defeats the definition of a reasonable measure.
> Wikipedia is gone. Whatever it even was, it is not now.
The title evokes a romantic sense of wikipedia as a well governed, neutral egalitarian multicultural collaboration. But anyone who has been marginalized by the cabal knows it was not most of those things.
I would say it’s the core of financialism, but I’ve met billionaires and many less wealthy men who manage their capital to optimize for something besides this kind of “efficiency.“
Thanks a lot for the positive feedback, I appreciate it.
As for post-quantum cryptography, it’s not an immediate concern for the project. The firmware currently builds on MicroLink’s Tailscale-compatible implementation, so we’ll have to see how Tailscale evolves and whether future changes can be supported on the ESP32-S3.
It’s definitely something worth revisiting when the time comes.
I would love to assess some of my own infrastructure, but Claude is resistant to helping with security issues. Are you gazing a standard pro account, or do you have a special agreement with Claude to make it work for pen testing?
I remember asking perplexity about the instructions for upgrading an open source app from several versions back to the latest release. I had hoped that it would search the relevant github, stack, overflow, and blogs. Instead, it hallucinated some instructions from its training corpus, which was incomplete and outdated. When I pushed back, “no, I want you to search for and read the latest instructions” it told me it couldn’t search for newer data and what it had already given me was as recent as it could provide.
If their tool can’t follow open source README files, why would I trust it with other research?
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