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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25172 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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I also firmly believe in the idea of learning by doing. Just looking at a guide and reading it, even thoroughly won't be nearly as effective as following the same guide step by step and keying in the inputs. Even if your hand is held and you only do exactly as you are told, it still activates certain mental circuits. The same goes for copying down notes. Even if you never once look at them again, simply the act of copying off the blackboard does something, at least for some people.

I think this is a fantastic use case for AI, by the by. I recently was working on a complicated (Bane voice: "for you") Excel project and was in uncharted waters. My options were, basically

  1. Assemble the right collection of Youtube videos that fit my specific needs, or
  2. Get Claude to walk me through it

For opsec reasons I wasn't actually willing to upload the spreadsheet and have Fable one-shot it, but even if I had been, I vastly preferred what I ended up doing: the entire thing, manually, bit by bit. And I think I learned more than if I had just handed it off and had AI (or a coworker) do it.

People are extremely enamored of the generative capabilities of AI, but in many ways I actually think its contextual understanding skills are much more interesting and (I would like to say) useful.

For opsec reasons I wasn't actually willing to upload the spreadsheet and have Fable one-shot it

I think "opsec reasons" are ultimately one of the big limiting factors for OpenAI, Anthropic, et al: lots of situations will really prefer something in-house, or at least an ironclad contract about confidentiality.

In the past I've wondered about the long-term market for server-side AI: I'm sure it's non-zero, but I suspect any organization of sufficient size will find themselves rolling out internal hardware and models in the medium term unless the big players keep sufficiently ahead of the commodity models and hardware prices stay high. I've heard of it being done with open weight models already.

Even without seeing the content the AI models see, I've been curious how much intelligence Google (or governments, presumably) could glean from search queries on an aggregate basis. Hypothetically, "Wow, internal Microsoft searches about WINE and Linux are up 100x in the last month, I wonder what they're working on?" gives away potential insider information. Querying the local AI server doesn't give that away.

I think "opsec reasons" are ultimately one of the big limiting factors for OpenAI, Anthropic, et al: lots of situations will really prefer something in-house, or at least an ironclad contract about confidentiality.

The "ironclad contract about confidentiality" thing is an option, and IMHO from their point of view it's just a great way to do price discrimination. "Oh, you want the This Goes On Secured Systems And Never In The Training Set plan? We should talk."

Properly cleaned data is an additional option.

I would have thought that would be more trouble than it's worth, in general. But yesterday I heard the story of an institution that has the capability to strip all confidential and personal data from a core dump so that tech consultants (including, in at least the latest case, an LLM-based agent) can analyze software problems without having any access to user data. Anonymized story, so I'm not sure whether these were national defense secrets or credit card databases or what, but in hindsight I was left with the impression that I shouldn't have been surprised regardless, that institutions large enough to have masses of such data are often also large enough to have such capabilities.

I think "opsec reasons" are ultimately one of the big limiting factors for OpenAI, Anthropic, et al: lots of situations will really prefer something in-house, or at least an ironclad contract about confidentiality.

Yes, I think Anthropic kinda shot itself in the foot by nixing privacy settings for Fable.

I've heard of it being done with open weight models already.

I would not be surprised if that becomes commonplace for many applications - maybe not coding, where people will want the really high end stuff, but coding is not all people do with AI. In my [very AI related portion of my job] using Fable or Opus for the stuff we want to scale is like calling in an airstrike on a rat; stuff like Sonnet is plenty good, and my guess is that open weight models would do just fine. I could totally see switching to open weight models on a locally run server for that sort of thing.

I've been curious how much intelligence Google (or governments, presumably) could glean from search queries on an aggregate basis.

My guess is "a lot."

Get Claude to walk me through it

This option is good in theory, but in practice requires a good amount of self discipline. It is just so easy to prompt the AI in a way that straight up gives you the answer, then convince yourself that you were the one to think about it following the LLM's guidance. If you are mindful of the pitfalls it can work, but I am not sure I would trust the average person to do it properly.

I've found LLMs the most useful in identifying bugs I caused by embarrassing typos (or cooy paste errors where I didn't change the value of something after pasting). Just 10 minutes wgo it solved a bug by pointing out that I had transposed two letters in a variable name. Though in fairness if I was using a real language instead of a toy language like Python the IDE could have caught it for me.

You type in variable names? Like every letter manually? I type in the first letter or two and hit tab. It automatically fills in or a drop down menu shows me the names starting with that.

Same thing with file paths. First few letters, tab, first few letters, tab.

You type in variable names? Like every letter manually?

Not usually, no. I have the misfortune to work on a Python project right now and we're using SQLAlchemy as an ORM. The parameters get passed in a dictionary where you need the name of the dictionary keys to match the names of the parameters in the query. I transposed 2 letters between what the query had and what the parameter dictionary had. In C#/.NET (my preferred language) this would be impossible with EF Core, and the tooling around Dapper is much better than whatever crap SQLAlchemy has so I'm pretty sure the IDE would have detected it for Dapper.

This is the largest Python project I've ever done significant work on and I hate it. 99% of the pain points I've had are due to the terrible type system. Also I miss LINQ every time I write a loop.

Python can get slightly better with type annotations - which is also something that claude is woefully incapable of doing well.

Yeah, we're using type annotations, and they're still pretty garbage too. "Expected type str, actually found 'property'" even though the property is a str lol. Or "Expected List[SomeClass] actually found List[type[SomeClass]]" and the documentation for the type system for how to fix this crap is awful.

Two mandatory tools for writing typed python:

  1. Vscode. You need the realtime feedback on errors and it also tells you what the computer thinks every variable is.

  2. Ironically, an LLM. They are great at telling you what you screwed up to get an error. Yet horrible at actually fixing the issue.

It works very well for walking you through how to use a particular tool, app, or device. (e.g. Excel). Because if AI is doing a walkthrough, you still need to press the buttons and key in the inputs to complete the task.

Walking you through solving a math problem - that's extremely dubious.

Walking you through solving a math problem - that's extremely dubious.

I've mentioned this before but just a couple of months ago I wanted to solve a simple first year university level math problem (a system of two first order differential equations). I got three different solutions depending on how I wrote the problem (eg. using abstract variables or ones based on the actual problem). Every explanation was very confident, detailed and of course wrong in a way that was apparent if you understood the domain or verified the solution by hand. And this is pretty much as simple as real world university level math can get.

Then I googled the proper syntax for how to input the problem into Matlab and got the correct result in much less time than it took to ask AI and verify it, even had AI given the correct answer.

You could ask AI how to input the problem into matlab

Google was faster and more reliable. I just wanted to see first if AI could solve a simple but not entirely trivial non-coding problem.

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