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The correct solution for most users of Claude is to refuse to do things like: `performing logins, handling credentials on behalf of the user, etc`. It is not to find a way to hand your agent the keys to the kingdom.

Guiding them toward solutions like building a tool that your agent can use safely and and then have the agent use that is what most people should be doing. If you are a security researcher then there are reasonable reasons to do that but they are doing the arguably good thing for the average user here.


They also survive because they invest those resources in some amount of mitigation ahead of time. They don't survive when they don't scale their mitigations along with the business.

No they didn't? I use these continuously and it's pretty obvious to me that they do not at the level of a human except in the most surface level ways. Human's as compared to an LLM remain a special category. We have not in fact cracked human level intelligence.

What if one day they do? Or appears to be, in the way that you couldn't distinguish? Will you update your priors?

Sure. But I'm also not going to assume they will just because this they seem to sort of mimic it now.

I am admittedly not an expert here but this does not at all sound like something that Apple can force Shopify to do. I was under the impression that when Apple does something like this it's primarily because the seller was positioning themselves as an official Apple reseller in some way which they do pretty aggressively police. Did Shopify give you any more details on why they believed they had to delist you?

The same thing happened with our other store.

Because we were in electronic recycling, many items came without batteries or chargers due to fire-risk concerns, so we had to source replacements ourselves. We eventually launched a private-label brand for generic camera batteries, drone batteries, power-tool batteries, chargers, and similar accessories.

Then Shopify unpublished those products too after Canon contacted them, claiming we were not allowed to sell them. But these were generic replacement products, the same kind of items sold by Anker and countless other electronics brands online.

If Canon believed we were doing something illegal, they could have sent a cease-and-desist and gone through the normal legal process. Instead, they went through Shopify’s back channels and effectively skirted due process, using platform pressure to remove products they simply did not want us selling.

But don’t worry, companies like Anker who have resources and pull can still sell them and have online websites. Again, the market is being manipulated and winners chosen.


Or were you doing something shady that was legitimate grounds for Shopify to remove those products? There's a big difference between what you personally think should be appropriate and what laws and compliance requirements consider. It's like the annual HN post about someone that claims Cloudflare shut down their account and eventually it turns out they were clearly doing something against the TOS.

Nope we’re electronic recyclers and work with real certified Apple refurbished sellers across the US. Let me know if you find any Shopify stores selling refurbished MacBooks like we and many other sell on Amazon and eBay legally. Same with generic batteries and chargers.

We ditched Shopify years ago and sell the same things on our Shopify alternative. Host on Railway and haven’t faced issues in more than 5 years, no need for a high risk payment processor either.


[flagged]


Please link them.

Yes, first I built Openship, an order management system, that worked with Shopify. Then it was easy to move off Shopify and build my own alternative. Any e-commerce seller knows all you need is an OMS. I also built a custom storefront so that was easy to migrate.

Are those sellers on Shop.app established? Try launching your own and get back to me. Apple will be on Shopify trying to shut you down immediately. Just like so many websites on the web, it’s hard to make accounts now and that’s the same with e-commerce. Shopify is essentially choosing winners based on who they allow to sell what.


You're welcome to do the search yourself, but I'm guessing you won't because it too conveniently debunks your claim/marketing pitch.

I've sold close to $1B on Shopify in the last decade and have never had a problem with them.


It's not really a rule of thumb that "Tell others the truth, tell yourself the truth" means you have to barely scrape by. Plenty of people make good money that way.

It pays to be suspicious of those who tell you you can’t make an honest living.

Huh, I've always been suspicious of folks claiming the opposite.

For the downvoters, have you ever tried to explicitly map your externalities?


What does mapping your externalities have to do with honesty? Is this a poor attempt to suggest that no one can actually be honest because no one has a full understanding of the entire universe? Because that's just a lazy excuse for not trying to be honest and not really worth being in the debate.

Having externalities does not mean you are dishonest. Hell, you can even ignore your externalities and still be honest. You can even outright steal from people and still be honest.

Yeah on the contrary, it’s been my experience that finding other truth tellers tends to lead to a supportive community, where everyone is relieved they don’t have to put up with bullshitters.

Feels to opposite to me. GPT-1 would have exploded the word count to about 10x and made it sound way more breathlessly influencer coded. GPT-1 would have written something that was 180 degrees opposite of what the post is communicating.

Perhaps you need to read it again a little more carefully?


I think it was hyperbole, and that the GP does not literally believe this was written by GPT-1, which did not produce coherent sentences.

   The article shows off an strace TUI, and it's not like I can't see the benefits of making strace output more browsable. What I don't understand is why that must happen inside a terminal window where (for instance) all text must have the same font and size.
It doesn't technically have to. But if you want to do it in a different location than the terminal window and have it be cross-platform and easy to develop for your options are limited. There are not really very many text-first UI frameworks out there that are cross platform. It's similar I think to the way that the browser has become the dominant GUI platform for development. The Terminal standards are fast becoming the dominant platform for Text First Interfaces.

Nearly every argument that hinges on the word "yet" is just an example of over-extrapolation[0] at play.

0: https://www.fallacyfiles.org/overxtra.html


Moreover we haven’t seen all the effects of today’s tech to understand the net benefits.

E.g ‘productivity’ is seemingly increasing but what is the effect on a firms financial position? It’s all speculative and experimental right now.


But saying "LLMs are not good at architecture so software engineering has a bright future" is _also_ extrapolation.


Anyone who claims to know the correct strategy to be best positioned for the future is lying or misinformed. The most you can reasonably say is that for the moment an LLM in the hand of an non-expert or naive user is unlikely to produce high quality results or create an absurd boost in productivity. We can make reasoned decisions now and continue to monitor things.

It would be just as unwise to ignore the progression of LLM agents as it would be to over-index on them.


I think be both agree that the future of software engineering is very uncertain right now (and likely will be for years). For me personally that alone is enough to recommend not investing money and time to get into software engineering anymore.


You're probably on point there.


I have begun using the acronym TL;DP (Too long didn't prompt) For when someone sends a wall of text and I didn't want to waste tokens having an agent summarize it for me when the sender could have done that for me with their own agent.


Statistical likelihood is a measurement of the known data at the time. If you engage with the content otherwise then it's on you if you have the wrong takeaway. No one who makes a prediction based on a statistical model is going to be right every time. That doesn't mean it's not right to make a prediction. The statistical modeling can help you to be correct more often than not. And if you were going to be truly fair you would note that Nate in fact repeatedly said that it was still very much possible for Trump to win but that the current known polling data and other factors in his model pointed to a loss.

538's own post-mortem's on the event highlight that Trump was a very unusual candidate running in a very unusual election and as such the model was missing a lot of important information. They learned from the experience and adjusted the model going forward. Anyone complaining about that event is really just highlighting that they don't understand how statistical modeling works and are upset about how the model misled them or others which isn't Nate or 538's fault and is entirely on the consumer of their reporting. It's not like they didn't try to educate their consumers in their reporting.


I know what statistical likelihood is. I don't have a problem with them using a model or models and doing some statistics on it to develop these predictions, or even necessarily with the way they report their predictions as a % chance to win. I have a problem with the insinuation that "70% Clinton" is somehow a prediction of a singular real event or that Trump winning is consistent with said prediction "because if we held another 99 of those 2016 elections then Clinton probably would have won about 70 of them therefore I was right".

The prediction is for one single outcome at one point in time. The prediction can not be that Clinton 70% wins it, or wins it 70 out of every 100 times because there is no 100 2016 elections. Those things may apply to his mathematical models, but obviously the models are attempting to predict the real world. Try to weasel out of it as much as you like, but the prediction was that Clinton would win, and the prediction was wrong.

"Oh he was only giving the odds for his model, you don't understand it's your fault he mislead you" -- no. Every analyst and pundit has a model or a system, obviously nobody thinks any of them can see the future. Nate Silver was very explicitly predicting the outcome of the election. As you can see from all his commentary articles that came out along with the numbers.

And yes, 538's vaunted models and data science fell over when encountering situations that had not been seen or anticipated or built on before, obviously. We didn't need Einstein or even Nate Silver to tell us that. That's the problem isn't it. All this hamming up of "data science" and "mathematical models" is meaningless. Your data and math can be perfect and correct, but if they fail to provide an understanding of the world, then they are perfectly useless.


You are asserting an insinuation that 538 never made. That is the disconnect here.


No I'm not.


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