> Models may perform better with other harnesses than with their own. So it turns out that your Claude models may not need Claude Code…
This is interesting. We built our own harness (CodeBot, an agent for Delphi) and it currently uses OpenAI models; we tuned it for specific behaviours and patterns and I find its behaviour better than Codex. Same models underneath.
1. Letters That Produced Miraculous Results - cut because correspondence norms had massively changed between 1936 and 1981
2. Seven Rules for Making Your Home Life Happier - cut because its 1930s-era perspectives on marriage and domestic life didn't age that well
Personally, I think some of the edits in the remaining sections are more controversial than the removal of those two sections. I think the revision lost quite a bit of Dale's charm and just felt a bit less idiosyncratic in a bad way.
Something fascinating that you may not know: traditional architecture is one of those things that is simultaneously:
a) Genuinely widely preferred, with many articles on this, ranging from aesthetic preferences through to scientific studies of how eyes move and what causes fatigue. There is genuine value to architecture before modern architecture -- and...
b) A stalking horse for right-wing thinking.
It's really interesting how this happens and it mirrors other right-wing techniques. A common way to get people into right-wing thinking is to find something that is genuinely unpopular or that people have concerns about, yet which has constrained discourse. Examples: lower incomes. You then talk about the good old days, and reframe it: lower incomes becomes, 'people taking your income, agh those immigrants'. Architecture becomes, '1940 and before were better, oh and everyone was white then'. You get the idea.
Another popular one on social media is the Greek and classical world, especially its comparative lack in modern education compared to, say, 1900. That's an easy intro to colonialism and racism, disguised in the neutral or even interesting format of ancient history.
Once you recognise this, you see it everywhere.
But don't let this fool you re older architecture having genuine value. We just have to avoid saying people have no taste, or referring to their preferences as 'pabulum'. That is condescending, makes normal people feel unheard, and then when someone does hear them on the innocuous subject of architecture, they pay attention to what else that person says.
Very well put. I've also heard it said like this, "abusing the truth is the easiest way to lie".
The pattern is 1. take something that's true then 2. use it to imply the Truth. Step 3. is if anyone doubts 2, challenge them to disprove 1. Even if you don't deny that 1 is true and just challenging that 2 doesn't follow from 1, the waters have already been muddied in the eyes of many onlookers.
It's silly that this works but there's so much over-communication now that simplicity is very effective. People often repeat the fallacies verbatim too.
I might object that being right-wing, or having fear of the effects of immigrants even, does not necessarily entail racism. But it would be more interesting to say that they are related, and that valuable ideas about nice traditional architecture and nostalgia for the good old days are also genuinely related to racism and colonialism and fascism, which means that there's something of value to extract from all that garbage before you can do a clean separation of the ideas. Mercifully I don't have time to write this comment right now, but it was probably going to include the word "culture" in several places.
> The people who did feel unheard learned to not respond
When politics exclude a group, or a group feels excluded, it's easy to lure the group into supporting anti-politics, which is a nice way to say "fascism".
This is kind of where we are now, with the far-right preying on the most vulnerable people that feel ignored by politicians.
So? Many people (not all) are right-wing because they want to preserve beauty. Being a right-wing is not a rare thing, it's the second most popular belief system in the West.
>Another popular one on social media is the Greek and classical world, especially its comparative lack in modern education compared to, say, 1900. That's an easy intro to colonialism and racism
Racism is much less of a thing in Europe, compared to the USA, yet fascination with Antiquity is just the same or even higher.
I remembered the 1967 Outer Space Treaty as preventing militarisation of space. It turns out, not wholly. Celestial bodies (the moon, asteroids, etc) are out of bounds completely and are only for 'peaceful purposes'. For space itself, the ban is on WMDs, like nuclear weapons, in space anywhere.[0]
But the US has maintained a polite fiction that space is not weaponised/militarised. This is a break from that. The wording[1],
> The United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action.
is stated as 'That phrase was very well thought out.'. It looks like they're positioning it as purely defensive.
Which is allowed but being open about it legitimises the concept of weapons in space. It's worrying, and potentially destabilising. I expect they mean it as a deterrent but I frankly this it's irresponsible in that it invites an open presence from other countries too.
It's something an LLM would never be able to come up with because it requires a depth of experience that LLMs just don't have. It's authentically human.
You're right, though I'm not sure about all modern software quite to that extent. VS does have a reputation for being bloated. Even startup is not super fast IMO.
I checked just now. A recent Delphi with a project open: 175-200MB. Water (our IDE, I work at RemObjects) about 300MB.
Is Simon Tatham’s site still online? It would not respond when I clicked the link.
The day Paul Bourke’s site goes offline is the day the internet dies. Only slightly kidding: I read it as a teenager and yet it’s still there providing solid code and answers. https://paulbourke.net/miscellaneous/interpolation/ is still there as I read it in 2001.
This is interesting. We built our own harness (CodeBot, an agent for Delphi) and it currently uses OpenAI models; we tuned it for specific behaviours and patterns and I find its behaviour better than Codex. Same models underneath.
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