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I don’t think so. My favorite tool is Codex with the 5.2-codex model. I use Github Copilot and Codex at work and Codex and Cursor at home. Codex is better for harder and bigger tasks. I’ll use Copilot or Cursor for small easy things. I think Codex is better than Claude Code as well.

Are you using the same models and thinking levels for each?

I too have found Codex better than Copilot, even for simple tasks. But I don't have the same models available since my work limits the models in copilot to the stupid ones.


They’re miserable because they think this way. They think this way because they spend time with others spreading cynicism. Dismal economic perspectives and a poisoned political system is a point of view and a talking point and in reality not true for most people. If you know even a little bit about history you likely won’t have this perspective. Get off social media and look around at real life and you’ll see all sorts of great things!

I don't use algorithmic social media and I'm looking at dozens of history books in my shelf as I type this. I can do without the patronising tone, thanks very much.

Then you’d at least be aware of the standard of living even the poorest among us enjoy compared to someone in say manchuria or eastern europe in 1941. The irony of the grandchildren and great grand children of actual holocaust survivors claiming the world today is simply too screwed up to bring kids into is astounding.

> claiming the world today is simply too screwed up to bring kids into is astounding.

But that's not what I'm saying, so there's that.

Anyway, everybody (barring the global ultra-poor) is obviously aware that their standard of living is much higher than that of most of history. This is not novel, not hard to realise, and certainly not a discussion-terminating point.

In the Western world every single generation since WWII has roughly speaking lived better than their parents. For people currently in their 20s, this is on track not to be the case. The "democratic normalcy" is under attack. Wealth inequality was reaching literal Gilded Age levels... and has now barreled past that with no sign of stopping. And yes, algorithmic social media running anger-maximisation machines on a planetary scale. Shall I go on? The point being that "medieval peasants didn't have microwaves" is immaterial to the discussion.


Realistically, we know that no-one’s level of happiness here in the present is determined by standards of living in Manchuria in 1941. You can argue the point intellectually that we are all very well off compared to most humans who have ever lived. Nonetheless, psychologically speaking, people’s satisfaction in life is determined by more local comparisons. (If new historical research showed that Manchurians in the 1940s were actually having a whale of a time, would that make you correspondingly miserable? Of course not!)

I disagree. The point of playing a shooter game is to have fun and be competitive while abiding by the rules of the game. Using aimbot is circumventing the whole purpose.

The purpose of making music is to make music. So why does it matter what tool you use to do it? Because tools like Logic or Garageband can create lots of sounds for you is that removing creativity? Really shouldn’t music be recorded with a live band every time? Those music production tools are destroying creativity… No. Obviously not. AI does enable creativity. Turns out it also requires a lot of skill to use it to get something good.


People just enjoy and value the process of making music. Just like you could enjoy the process of drawing, or doing sports. Given the amount of talented musicians that do not live off their art, most of the time they value the process and the result and if other people like it too and pay for it it’s even better. Most music is not produced to give emotions to other but to the musician. It happens we share the same emotions that the musician sometimes. So if you remove the process or devalue it, it’s touching the artist in its heart and values because most of them worked on their craft for years.

One person using more software to "make" music does not remove the process or devalue music for another person who wants to use less software to make music. Replace music with anything in this reasoning.

Actually with AI the music is made for you. I don’t have to learn how to play the piano the guitar or anything. I just prompt what kind of instrument I want to. Is that still « making music » ? Idk, for me it’s not the same. In the end I’m not a musician. I just enjoy music. But I can understand that the reality of some people is different from mine as regards to what is « making music ». My view or use of AI does not invalidates theirs.

> My view or use of AI does not invalidates theirs.

This reads like you agree with my sentiment.


Absolutely and I hope you understand my point as well. Actually I’ve never been able to learn an instrument and I always wanted to make music. I’m all in to make music without having to learn anything complicated. Other people might not have the same definition of mine or like what I could produce without their craft.

Exactly right. It's like arguing there is only one way to make food for enjoyment. It's pure snobbery to proclaim there's only one proper way to do X thing along these lines. Making art is just the same, there is no right way to do it.

The HN crowd wants everybody sitting at home on UBI suffering trying to be creative. It's like arguing for hand washing clothes to get that full, proper, drawn-out, brain smashing experience.

Now sit at home and be a good boy, take that UBI, create and be productive - but don't make it too easy, don't you dare use AI, bleed for that UBI.


>Now sit at home and be a good boy, take that UBI, create and be productive

Honestly i prefer that listening marketing bro's on linkedin posting about how AI means X is finished and everyone who learned X needs to pay for their webinar on writing prompts.


> Turns out it also requires a lot of skill to use it to get something good.

I agree. I don't like blaming/crediting a tool, for how it is used.

Some tools may be too dangerous for "just anyone" to use, and there may be justification in restricting access, but I'm not sure the tools should always be banned.

I was just talking about this, with a friend who leans conservative (but not nuttily so). He was telling me about watching all these shows about folks living north of the Arctic Circle, and how everyone walks around with guns, because polar bears look at us as walking snacks. In those cases, the gun is an absolutely necessary tool, and no one even thinks twice about it.

Not so, New York City.

But it would be a life-endangering mistake for someone in NYC to dictate to an Alaskan Inuit, that they can't carry a gun, and it might be a life-endangering mistake for an Alaskan to insist that everyone in NYC walk around with a gun (I won't get into the political arguments, there, be draggones).


I agree. My problem with AI produced media is that a lot of the things I've seen are really bad. If someone uses AI, but has taste and takes the time to curate and fix the output, then the output can be fine.

Just like with digital effects in movies, plastic surgery, and makeup - if it's done well, there's a good chance I didn't even notice it. If it's clearly noticeable, it's often because it's not done well.

I think you can compare to another "uncreative" way of making music: sampling. The way the Timelords do it in "Doctorin' the Tardis" is pretty terrible (in their case on purpose, I believe). There are plenty of hip hop examples where I think musically not much is added to the music, but the lyrics and maybe the act do add a lot. And then there are bands like Daft Punk that will chop up and recontextualize the samples to the point that it's clearly a completely new thing.


There were plenty of hiphop examples where the samples are recontextualized as well, then Puff Daddy came along and attempted to rap over virtually unchanged Led Zeppelin songs and everyone ate it up. AI Is doing the same thing to music that he did decades ago. ruin it.

I didn't mean to say all hiphop is like what I mention. I'm 100% sure that hiphop also does sampling in really interesting ways, I'm just not as familiar with the examples. This was not not meant as a diss, and I wasn't saying all hiphop does things the same way. I was just mentioning examples that I'm personally familiar with of "Sampling Slop", "Different kind of creativity", and "Using Sampling as a completely new instrument".

For the middle category, I meant things like Gangsta's Paradise. I really like the song, I think Coolio really adds something. But you can hear much more of "Pasttime Paradise" in there than you can hear "More Spell On You" in Daft Punk's "One More time"

I mention Daft Punk because it's really accessible: there are videos on youtube that can show a layperson like me exactly how they chopped up the samples.


The purpose of eating is to ingest nutrients, but that's not why most chefs enjoy cooking, or why people pay more for nicer meals.

Come to think of it, AI Stans do remind me of people bending over backwards to justify how their Soylent farts made them more skilled at living life.

During Christmas shopping, I saw several books and board games with illustrations in the signature ChatGPT cartoon style [1, 2] as cover art. (As well as a coloring book that was literally only ChatGPT images) They were sold both in comic shops and large book stores.

I found it just sad, honestly. Nothing against using some AI help to create good cover art, but not even bothering to change the default style screams "low effort".

That's the effect I'm fearing. Sure, AI could probably be used to create new high-quality content by people who really put in the effort, but in reality, it just seems to define a new level of "good enough" that lowers the overall level of quality.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1o0sfzz/chatgpt...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kmao1t/i_asked_ch...


AI isn't being used the same way as a drum loop or an electronic instrument, It's being used to vertically integrate services like Spotify so that they don't have to pay as much for content. Maybe you have found a place for generative AI in your workflow that fosters creativity, but this is not how it's being used the vast majority of the time.

It's not real music if you aren't hand crafting the atoms that make up the molecules of the medium you are vibrating to create sound waves.

I feel like there should be an XKCD for this


Nah. It is the same but at a different scale.

You give a calculator a problem and it gives an easy answer thus involving no further work from the human brain which causes it to atrophy just like any other underused muscle.

Just like a calculator can easily solve some problems so can AI. Sure the set of problems it can solve is bigger than a calculator. AI just enables you to work on bigger problems because you’re not spending so much time “calculating by hand”.

If you delegate all your thinking to AI or you use AI when the point of the activity is to do the activity (ie homework at school) then I think you’ll see problems. Just like using a calculator when you’re supposed to be learning how to add will stunt your growth.


Most mysterious are pretty mundane when you solve them.

Also, for people that don’t use bilingual keyboards this is a pretty interesting finding.


What is this AppleTV box running TS that you speak of? Sounds awesome.


Check out the instructions from Tailscale: https://tailscale.com/kb/1280/appletv


I wish there was a way to use the tailscale app to connect to my own vanilla WireGuard endpoint at home. I don’t want to use and pay for tailscale when I can run WireGuard myself. But there seems to be no good WireGuard app for tvOS (there is for iOS and macOS though) and if the TS app works as well as it says, I’m jealous I can’t use it with my setup.

(There’s another really shitty VPN app for tvOS that I tried, but it also costs money so screw that. It’s also buggy as hell and crashes all the time.)

I should add that my use case is the occasional trip where we take the Apple TV with us places and want to access my media library. Or being able to share my media library with extended family (setting their Apple TV up with a vpn to my house.) More complex things like travel routers can work, but are more hassle than I want, although I’m increasingly leaning towards taking the plunge there…


Personal-level Tailscale is free for up to 3 users. So your immediate family is covered even on trips.

You could create an account with any one of their identity providers (or roll your own OIDC, it's possible) and just have it not have a linked credit card. The account you use to authenticate Tailscale doesn't have to be the Apple account that you use to log into the hardware device itself - my wife's laptop, phone, and iPads are logged in under my Tailscale account but separate Apple/iCloud accounts (we have family sharing for our apps, etc., but the TS is usually going to be up to me, so I haven't created another account for her). Free gets you 100 devices, so we're nowhere close to running out of those.


I’m reading that from a departure lounge.

Wish I’d read this a few hours ago and the AppleTV would be coming with me.


Doesn’t have to be an apple box either. A raspberry pi is what I’m using. I’m in the exact same situation, living in one country temporarily but citizen of another, and I have an exit point in my home country at my parents place on a raspberry pi. Basically any computer will work.


The advantage of the AppleTV is that it's basic consumer hardware that a lot of people have, that you can provide for them at a reasonably low cost if they don't, and that doesn't really require much in the way of tech skill for the person whose house it's in to keep it up to date. You don't even have to do anything to update versions - tvOS will do it automatically.

I can't find it right now but there was a post announcing the port to tvOS on their blog where a developer from the UK (but living in the US) talked about how it let him buy, configure, and ship a simple consumer box that uses little power and needs minimal hands-on maintenance to his parents' house as a replacement for a server he had been running in their house as a VPN endpoint for this sort of thing - so he could watch BBC, etc.

I wouldn't want to update a RPi that's in someone else's house on the other side of the ocean.


Android TV works great as well. I have it running on an old Chromecast that cost less than $50 new.

While I still prefer running a plain Wireguard VPN if possible (i.e. when there's a publicly reachable UDP port), the really big advantage of Tailscale over other solutions is that it has great NAT traversal, so it's possible to run a routing node behind all kinds of nasty topologies (CG-NAT, double NAT, restrictive firewalls etc.)


I have run into the firewall problems before. Even seen them that block authentication but -if already connected to the tailnet before joining the WiFi in question - will continue to pass data. OpenVPN would not connect and couldn’t handle the IP address switch.

At worst, I turn on phone hotspot, authenticate, then switch back to WiFi. A purely serendipitous discovery on my part, but a very welcome one.


Interesting, maybe they block the orchestration servers of Tailscale, but not the actual data plane (which is almost always P2P, i.e., it usually does not involve Tailscale servers/IPs at all)?


I'm sure they do, but the question is, why did OpenVPN fail? It's pure P2P. I've got a dynamic DNS through afraid.org, and that resolves on that network, so it's not just DNS-level blocking. I effectively have a static IP anyway; there's no CGNAT going on, so I've discovered that I misconfigured my DDNS once or twice only when afraid.org emailed to tell me that I hadn't updated in X months.


Were you using the semi-well-known port (1194)? Otherwise, maybe it's just more fingerprint-able, or whatever DPI the firewall uses hasn't caught up to Wireguard yet?


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