If your tactics disrupt the order of things under capitalism, you may well be accused of violence, because “violence” is an elastic term often deployed to vilify people who threaten the status quo. Conditions that the state characterizes as "peaceful’ are, in reality, quite violent. Even as people experience the violence of poverty, the torture of imprisonment, the brutality of policing, the denial of health care, and many other violent functions of this system, we are told we are experiencing peace, so long as everyone is cooperating. When state actors refer to “peace,” they are really talking about order. And when they refer to “peaceful protest,” they are talking about cooperative protest that obediently stays within the lines drawn by the state. The more uncooperative you are, the more you will be accused of aggression and violence. It is therefore imperative that the state not be the arbiter of what violence means among people seeking justice. In the past, activists frequently leveraged the violence of police, taking actions they believed police would likely respond to with violence, in order to expose the brutality of policing and force the public to witness and confront it. Many of those actions, including protests carried out by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the Student Nonviolen Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement, took place in a context that was very different from today’s world of pervasive mass media. Today, people are much more accustomed to witnessing violence, including violence against protesters, as such imagery is shared widely on a regular basis, particularly through social media. The public has largely become inured to such imagery. The violence of the state in response to protest is rarely scrutinized to the degree that protesters are scrutinized. The idea that if you are defiant in the face of authority you should expect to incur its wrath is firmly entrenched in our culture. When people who defy police are abused, we often hear people ask, “What did they think was going to happen?” The ubiquity of the abuse puts the onus on the abused to avoid it, because they simply “should have known better.” Protesters are expected to remain “nonviolent” at all times, regardless of the circumstances, while the state is assumed to be justified, at leas sometimes, in inflicting violence to quell “unrest.”

What is “better” and what is “100% better”?

I feel like most other European languages I have heard do not either. (Well, what is “proper” anyways?) Care to share a language that does?

Do most countries’ education systems include a lot of propaganda? I have a hard time discerning between a general claim or US defaultism

Not that I agree with the following, but I feel like many say piracy is theft because one is “stealing” potential income, not stealing the material itself. I vaguely remember someone on YouTube even said using Adblock is akin to piracy, as one is watching content without paying for it (and the assumption is one should pay)

Thank you!

I think we disagree on the nature of a tool. Or maybe I am thinking about more than a “tool”, but not using the appropriate word for it.

Image riding a very fast horse. There is no perfect repeatability, it might veer off, or react to something you didn’t see, but a good rider would probably manage to arrive at the intended destination. I think I view it the same with agentic coding.

Now, I agree a horse is not a tool, and that’s why I mentioned that my language is perhaps a bit imprecise. (I guess you could even call it an agent.) But maybe an “instrument” or an “implement” fits, although that’s a bit cold wording for a horse in general, as they have other qualities, as being cute etc… But I think you get my point.

I very much think LLMs can fall under the description of “useful implement for coding” today. But I do think it is a very poor knowledge retrieval implement. In fact I sucks for all these one-off questions, I my opinion.

I think the more interesting discussion is about how these AI companies consolidate power even more, how they steal data, how they pollute like crazy. But I think people who dismiss their use in coding perhaps view LLMs more like a flashlight and less like a very fast horse moving you from A to B.

Following my analogy with the archer, promting the right way is like accounting for wind. And again, no matter how much the best archers in the world account for wind, they do sometimes miss. Still very impressive how high their skill is, even with randomness involved. And with agentic coding, one can always shoot twice.

I both agree and disagree.

As for having little control, I feel like that happens in other disciplines too. The best archers need to account for the stochastic nature of wind patterns, and thus they do not always hit their intended target. But still, their accuracy is far greater than a novice. There is both skill and “luck” - if you will - involved in the process. You definitely can hone a skill you have little control over in the beginning, I believe. Maybe this is the analogy that should’ve been made.

I will say, “knowing how to prompt” feels like a weird skill, and I think the way we interface with these tools is kinda wacky. Regular text feels to fuzzy.

But it does help immensely, I find, to take every wrong agentic coding output as a learning experience. When I know the answer, and the agent failed, I ask myself why it didn’t fint it. Taking these opportunities has led me to be more proficient in the use of skill files, agent files, subagents, context window management, etc., all which have improved the agents output massively. I feel like a year ago, it was just prompting and copy-pasting (at least for me), but now, with tools like OpenCode, I can get a better looping effect with fewer errors.

I am curious about your findings

Take it easy. And don’t just take my one comment as anecdotal evidence of reading comprehension. I will say, first off, I wrote the above shortly after waking up - perhaps not my most analytical piece ever. Furthermore, English is not my first language (kinda not even second). And finally, I have dyslexia, so I literally have worse than average reading comprehension skills.

Also, from my device, it seems only the first 2 paragraphs are in quotation, and everything after “yes” has regular formatting, which gave me the impression of that being the commenters own words, and with the weird line breaks. (I’ll add I know people who have typed like that but have switched, hence I made the remark.)

All I want to say is you shouldn’t use my misunderstanding of the comment I replied to as any evidence of general reading comprehension. It shouldn’t be. And you seem overly affected by this.

Yeah I think you’re right, when it comes to AI as a coding tool. I heard someone ask something like “where on the scale from flashlight to violin would you put LLM tools for coding”. By that, they meant, if you use a flashlight, and it doesn’t work, you’re pretty sure it’s not your lack of experience with the tool - the tool is just broken. But if you play a violin and it sounds like shit, it’s probably because you’re not versed enough to play it (or at the very least you don’t know if it’s you or the violin who’s at fault), assuming you don’t play the violin.

If one finds LLMs unhelpful for coding, is it them not knowing how to play it, or is the tool inherently broken? It’s very arrogant to believe one is so knowledgeable about a tool, one which is in constant development too, that it is not them who is using it wrong, but rather the tool that is wrong.

There’s a plethora of other areas of just criticism of the technology, but I think how useful it is for coding is not one of them.

Aside: your “manmade” line breaks make your comment harder to read on a phone. I guess it’s a hard habit to break, but I would suggest you try. Most places people type text to be read by other these days, one should account for vastly different resolutions and aspect ratios (e.g. vertical & horisontal monitors). Adding in line breaks where it looks good on your screen is like writing text for yourself to read. That’s my personal opinion at least

What limitations were you thinking of?

I agree with you, but just wanted to point out maybe they were calculating with the halftime break, so 45+15+45=105 and added some average extra time to get to their number

If you’re referring to the direction each boat is facing, this is just because they are anchored and there is wind and current in the water. If you watch a time lapse of boats parked in a bay, you will see they all eerily move synchronously over time.

I am far from an expert in the practical aspects of calculating wealth, but seems doable by the fact that wealth tax exists in countries today.

I too think it would be nice to tax capital gains higher than labour, but I am unsure how it would impact pension savers - both those who save by owning a home and those who invest in equities and bonds. I think I could only accept a very high capital gains tax if state funded retirement would cover full costs of living in cities, and reasonable lower bounds on retirement age. But this seems impossible with large shares of private ownership of homes in cities - they would likely be able to charge exorbitant prices for living if every old person had a comfortable pension. So I guess we shouldn’t have private ownership of homes. But I dunno.

Speaking of a one time wealth tax, would a 100% inheritance tax accomplish what you want? Just curious about how you see the redistribution of wealth happening, as I am myself unsure how it should happen in practice.

When you say we don’t need the rich, do you mean that we don’t need those particular individuals, or that we don’t need them having their wealth? Is getting rid of them achievable by getting rid of their wealth and the means to hoard?

Well put. A nice follow-up to the post, I think. Thanks

After skimming through the Country section of the Wikipedia article on capital gains tax, it seems that the rate of capital gains tax is commonly lower than that of labour. Quite a few places also had capital gains tax removed in favour of a total tax rate on income + capital gains.

Personally, I think it’s important to tax capital gains closer to labour tax rates, to better distribute wealth. But a more efficient way is maybe by wealth tax. I would even consider lowering taxes on businesses for a wealth tax (as to not cause exodus of the rich - the point is not to get rid of them, just their massive wealth and means of hoarding too much).

What are examples of indignities caused by social hierarchical structures I might experience but dismiss due to habit?

Edit: thanks, all! Were some examples I thought of before, but many “novel” ones too. Definitely nice to try to be explicit about it, I think

In the region of the world I’m from, waiter unions themselves are against tipping. The reasons I have heard are that

1. wage negotiations should not happen between customers and employees
2. the principle of everyone’s salary being enough to cover all costs of living
3. neither customer nor employee will benefit from service staff having too low wages
4. worker’s rights cannot practically be built using funds from tipping
5. normalising tipping will be used by the employer as an argument to pay below liveable wages

That being said, waiters are given a liveable wage here. And locals also sometimes tip for great service. But that’s just a bonus for the waiter, not the expectation.

I would personally suggest you reevaluate your pro-tipping stance given the above, but I don’t know where in the world you’re from, nor how waiters are treated or paid there

This is amazing! Thank you so much:) will look into these!