As someone who spent a lot of time in engineering meetings with bg in the 90s, I am thoroughly disgusted. I've always been critical of his business decisions, but the human being I knew wouldn't have acted this way. It seems that most people who achieve this level of success/wealth just go off the rails. It is heartbreaking to hear Melinda's side of this fiasco.
I think we know Gates had dinner with Epstein a few times, we don't know that he was involved with Epstein's wrongdoing or that he knew about it but of course we don't know that he wasn't or didn't. I think anybody involved with Epstein, however, demonstrated that they were bad judge of character and could have bad judgement in general.
I am not so offended by Bill Gates having affairs but I am offended with him having affairs with Microsoft employees.
Nothing special? A sitting US President posted the following on Easter Sunday.
> Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP
There was a point in time when Trump would have been instantly impeached or sent to a hospital for observation for making that post. Today? It will fall out of the news cycle the next time he says something insane.
Can you imagine what past presidents would have typed if twitter existed 100 years ago? we had 2 world wars roughly that time, trump is only insane by modern standards, but modern time is if anything unusually sane, not unusually stupid, we are not living in the most special time.
Tweets are low effort and short, you can even do it while taking a dump, there is a lot more friction to being unhinged when you are writing a book or taking an interview, for reference trumps most unhinged stuff is tweets, not interviews and not books. Not all forms of writing are equal.
Trump's tweets are low effort. Just like most of his rally speeches, which are also unhinged. Other presidents, especially e.g. FDR, put effort into all of their communications. Including speeches and, when available, tweets.
I cant reply to jacquesm for some reason, cap on reply chain length maybe? anyway
>There are multiple years of archives of presidential tweets and Trump's stand out, and not in a good way.
When I refer to modern times I mean multiple dozens of years, not mere "multiple years", I already stated these times are unusually sane by historical standards.
Not being able to reply is to stop people coming here, making new accounts and then spouting lots of unhelpful messages, messages intended to downplay insane fascists evil portents of their war crimes, say.
As I said, if a previous President started saying things like "Praised be to Allah!" on Easter Sunday, they would have been removed from office instantly. We are watching one of the most immoral people on the planet have a full-on mental breakdown. And Trump supporters don't care.
Maybe the world was fed up with puppets who are controlled by PR agencies so that they (at least in US) welcomed someone who just speaks to them without middlemen...
I was a developer at Microsoft in the 90s (Visual Studio (Boston) and Windows teams). I won't claim that software back then was "better," but what is definitely true is that we had to think about everything at a much lower level.
For example, you had to know which Win32 functions caused ring-3 -> ring-0 transitions because those transitions could be incredibly costly. You couldn't just "find the right function" and move on. You had to find the right function that wouldn't bring your app (and entire system) to its knees.
I specifically remember hating my life whenever we ran into a KiUserExceptionDispatcher [0] issue, because even something as simple as an exception could kill your app's performance.
Additionally, we didn't get to just patch flaws as they arose. We either had to send out patches on floppy disks, post them to BBSs, or even send them to PC Magazine.
From the user perspective, Windows and Office certainly crashed more frequently back then. I don't mean that as a criticism of the Microsoft developers at the time: they did some great work within severe constraints. But overall the product quality is far better now.
I wouldn't take that as criticism; you are 100% correct. But that instability was a direct result of the issues I mentioned above: the ring transition protection/implementation was absolutely horrible; 3rd-party developers would discover a useful function in NTDLL and start using it in unintended ways, etc.
Do you remember the CSRSS Backspace Bug? [0]
A simple: printf("hung up\t\t\b\b\b\b\b\b"); from ring-3 would result in a BSOD. That was a pretty major embarrassment.
After retiring, I started volunteering my time to mentor CS students at two local universities. I work with juniors and seniors who have no idea what "heap memory" is because, for the most part, they don't need to know. For many developers, the web browser is the "operating system".
I absolutely love using Python because I don't have to worry about the details that were major issues back in the 90s. But, at the same time, when I run into an issue, I fully understand what the operating system is doing and can still debug it down to assembly if need be.
I can't imagine how much of a breath of fresh air Python / Java must have been if you were used to write typical business crud apps (and server software) in C/C++ (with no sanitizers / modern tooling to speak of).
It wasn’t. Java was very different from its current state before roughly Java 5. It felt like a downgrade from C++ to me at the time. C++ had templates and RAII and smart pointers, all of which Java lacked (and in some respects still lacks today). Not having something like the C preprocessor was quite annoying. Java performance wasn’t great. Tooling was better in some ways, worse in others. Linters did exist in C/C++, as did debug versions of libraries. You could load a crash dump into a debugger and could often get a pretty good picture of what went wrong. While Java certainly became preferable for business code, it wasn’t a sudden breath of fresh air, it was trade-offs that gradually became more favorable to it over the years.
I used to joke that using something like Python or C# felt like "programming with oven mitts". I never felt like I had any control. But that eventually morphed into "Well, I don't need that control and can focus on other things."
I spent the last few months building a toy LLM from scratch. I can't believe that within my lifetime I've gone from using punch cards to arguing with Claude when it does something ridiculous.
The oven mitts metaphor probably works really well, if you shift it into metal working. Yes, it takes getting used to wearing heavy gloves when working. No, you don't want to skip out on them.
Edit: Honestly, any job where gloves are standard works. Gardening. Sailing. Many sports.
I just downloaded your app and ran it through hopper. There is a LOT of embedded Apple Script. I would never run an app like this with SIP disabled or without an active network blocker.
Your app requires direct access to major OS components: code signing, even during alpha should be a requirement.
I use a series of stop hook [0] scripts. For example, I have a script [1] that forces Claude to execute tests whenever code files are changed. The stop hook runs automatically and will force Claude to continue working until the script passes.
I also have a script that forces Claude to generate a summary of work [2] if it hadn't done so on it's own.
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. If, during a session, Claude makes any change to a source file, the stop hook script FORCES Claude to run the existing tests. There is literally no way Claude can get around running the tests because the prompt will not stop being processed until the stop hook script passes.
There is no contradiction. Stop hooks (as well as all the other hook types) are the only way to force Claude to work deterministically.
Hook scripts can be as simple or as complex as you like: you define the success criteria. For example, if Claude just added a new feature but didn't create a test for it, then a stop hook would prevent Claude from stopping until the test was written.
stop hook forces the claude to run the existing tests. Fine
if claude added a new feature but didn't created a test for it. It will wait for it to perform that action. Fine.
We can adjust the complexitiy of hook scripts. That's ok.
Tell me if I'm wrong, I am understanding it more like a compiler like if the syntax is ok, just pass. Similarly here, if the test were ran, it will look for a marker file in /tmp, it found it, and pass.
I did not understood the part of tests. Maybe my question is more clear now.
This is one of the simplest and most fundamental ways to manage Claude’s behavior. I genuinely can’t make it clearer. The issue you’re describing seems to center on situations where Claude becomes “stubborn” and doesn’t follow instructions.
When that happens, the solution is straightforward: create a hook script that explicitly enforces the behavior you want. By doing so, you remove ambiguity and leave Claude no option but to comply.
If you can share a specific case where Claude isn’t following your prompts, I can help you craft an appropriate hook to correct it.
This is awesome. I've was a dev on the C++ team at MS in the 90s and was sure that RTTI was the closest the language would ever get to having a true reflection system.
reply