Well, let's make a revoltingly fun analogy: say a hamburger restaurant opened in your city, that openly admits it puts (ethically acquired) human meat in some of its products. You don't have to worry about the legality of the venture, it's all 100% compliant with the original persons donating their bodies to feed the world. Now, the hamburgers are extraordinarily good tasting, some say the best in town. The price is also good - they have a great hook up for the main ingredient, after all.
By the same logic, would you say that people refusing to eat there have "a disconnect between their culinary tastes and their values?" Or, if people have a visceral reaction to some other fast food joints surreptitiously introducing the same magic ingredient in their diet, would you also tell them to _just eat it_ and _fucking enjoy it_?
The source matters, both for meat and art. It's part of the product itself, you cannot disentangle the taste and sound of the performance from the way it was produced. AI art trying to pass as human art is simply a form fraud, and some people will always reject it, while others are of course free to embrace it and enjoy it.
> You don't have to worry about the legality of the venture, it's all 100% compliant with the original persons donating their bodies to feed the world. Now, the hamburgers are extraordinary good tasting, some say the best in town. The price is also good - they have a great hook up for the main ingredient, after all.
Halfway through this paragraph I started hearing it in the Trump cadence.
> The source matters, both for meat and art.
Yes, exactly. This is why people care about things like DOC, fair trade certifications, UFLPA clothing, cruelty-free cosmetics, and so on.
To deepen the analogy slightly: is the AI "ethically acquired"? Do the people collating the training data have consent for every piece of music they trained it on?
CaMeL is imho safer, but hard to implement into modern agents like OpenClaw. Its core idea is that a privileged LLM plans from the (trusted) user request only, while a restricted interpreter executes that plan (and enforces policies). Untrusted content is parsed separately and is not fed back into the privileged LLM.
Modern agents are useful exactly because they run a feedback loop (observe, reason, adapt, use tools, repeat). CaMeL breaks that loop, which improves security but makes it a poor fit for highly general agents like OpenClaw.
Basically, I think the most optimistic possible outcome from of this is returning to something like the nuclear deal, but with way better terms for Iran.
I don't see any realistic path for this fuck up to be unfucked. Aggressive foreign policy is seldom reversible, there is no way to get back to the previous save game.
The fundamental issue in dealing with Iranians was that they were strongly ideological and not very realpolitk - this is exactly what drove them into a conflict with US in the first place, a series of ruinous foreign policy moves - the hostages crisis, the Beirut bombing, proxy wars - that served no strategic long term purpose for Iran other than signaling ideological commitment within the regime.
So whatever you negotiated with Iran, you could only extract at gunpoint threatening their destruction (which even they understand is bad for their ideological goals), and you could never fully trust them to see their own-self interest and follow through. Their nuclear program was, in this context, more of a bargaining chip than an ideological regime goal, a way to put something on the table while maintaining their ideologically-mandated tools for power projection in the region, missiles and drones programs, various proxy fronts etc. This was a state of affairs that Israel was strongly opposed to, so they applied lobby pressure to kill the deal.
Well, having now actually attempted to destroy the regime and failed, whatever leverage you had for a non-nuclear Iran is gone. You have demonstrated to the Islamic republic that the only way to continue to exist is to obtain nuclear weapons, that no negotiated compromise can exist. You have also replaced the older, conservative, nuclear skeptic Ayatollah with his son, who's entire family was hit: father, wife, teenage son, sister and her toddler son and husband were all killed. Does he sound like a man who accepted to succeed his father's because he wants to correct the late Khamenei's mistakes and make a bid for peace?
The refreshed Islamic republic might sign various treaties or truces and accept nuclear deals, but they will surely break them because obtaining nukes has become existential. My expectation is that, if the regime does not collapse, either as a result of a ground invasion, internal uprising, or some combination (civil war etc.), then they will get nuclear weapons in the next decade. They are too easy to procure and the regime has now too little to lose.
No, Iran started helping the US against Taliban only to be put on the axis of evil list by Bush. Signed a deal with the US only to be torn and Trump placed maximum pressure.
US foreign policy in the Middle East is run by Israel.
On the other hand, the productivity gains from AI automation are so large that you are forced to use it to compete in the workplace, even if you strongly dislike the terminal, you will dislike homelessness more.
Let me give you a counterexample. I'm working on a product for the national market, and i need to do all financial tasks, invoicing, submit to national fiscal databse etc. through a local accounting firm. So i integrate their API in the backend; this is a 100% custom API developed by this small european firm, with a few dozen restful enpoints supporting various accounting operations, and I need to use it programmatically to maintain sync for legal compliance. No LLM ever heard of it. It has a few hundred KB of HTML documentation that Claude can ingest perfectly fine and generate a curl command for, but i don't want to blow my token use and context on every interaction.
So I naturally felt the need to (tell Claude to) build a MCP for this accounting API, and now I ask it to do accounting tasks, and then it just does them. It's really ducking sweet.
Another thing I did was, after a particularly grueling accounting month close out, I've told Claude to extract the general tasks that we accomplished, and build a skill that does it at the end of the month, and now it's like having a junior accountant in at my disposal - it just DOES the things a professional would charge me thousands for.
So both custom project MCPs and skills are super useful in my experience.
That's what you should be doing. Start from plain Claude, then add on to it for your specific use cases where needed. Skills are fantastic if used this way. The problem is people adding hundreds or thousands of skills that they download and will never use, but just bloat the entire system and drown out a useful system.
Your use is maybe more vanilla than you think. I think you are just getting shit done. Which is good.
Claude and an mcp and skill is plain to me. Writing your own agent connecting to LLMs to try to be better than Claude code, using Ralph loops and so on is the rabbit hole.
this is exactly how i use it too. i have a few custom MCP servers running on a mac mini homelab, one for permission management, one for infra gateway stuff. the key thing i learned is keeping CLAUDE.md updated with what each MCP server actually does and what inputs it expects. otherwise claude code will either not use the tool when it should, or call it with wrong params and waste a bunch of back and forth. once you document it properly it really does feel like having a team member who just knows how your stack works. the accounting use case is a great example because nobody else's generic tooling would ever cover that.
The basic problem is that the reporting and accounting rules are double plus bureaucratic and you need to have on hand multiple registers that show the financial situation at any time, submit them to the tax authority etc.
To give you a small taste: you need to issue an electronic invoice for each unique customer, and submit on the fly the tax authority - but these need to correlated monthly with the money in your business bank account. The paid invoices don't just go into your bank account, they are disbursed from time to time by the payment processor, on random dates that don't sync with the accounting month, so at end of month you have to have correlate precisely what invoice is paid or not. But wait, the card processor won't just send you the money in a lump sum, it will deduct from each payment some random fee that is determined by their internal formula, then, at the end of each month, add all those deducted fees (even for payments that have not been paid to you) and issue another invoice to you, which you need to account for in you books as being partially paid each month (from the fees deducted from payments already disbursed). You also have other payment channels, each with their fees etc. So I need to balance this whole overlapping intervals mess with all sort of edge cases, chargebacks and manual interventions I refuse to think about again.
This is one example, but there are also issues with wages and their taxation, random tax law changes in the middle of the month etc. The accountant can of course solve all this for you, but once you go a few hundred invoices per month (if you sell relatively cheap services) you are considered a "medium" business, so instead of paying for basic accounting services less than 100€ per month (have the certified accountant look over your books and sign them, as required by law), you will need more expensive packages which definitely add up to thousands in a few months.
Covert transmission is security. Think of a spy or North Korean dissident, mere detection of a transmission means compromise; Eve will extract the plain text using the trusty $10 wrench.
You are putting sentences together just like an LLM would - quite fitting for an AI generated article. You might want to get it checked out, these days you never know if you are a real person or not.
because it is an LLM account or at least someone responding by putting things through an LLM first im pretty sure. Reported it already earlier today somehow not banned. I guess HN is a bit dead, considering how many people are upvoting this slop.
It's hard to believe such an in depth overview of the anthropology of marriage skips the massive elephant in the room: that polygynous societies were widely found to be in a perpetual state of civil war and seem unable to develop stable, modern institutions. When a substantial part of your young men have no chance of ever buying themselves a wife, the only way they can be recognized and respected as adult men is to join a militia that promises one, or at least gives them guns so they can aquire by force the cows they need.
The corollary for western monogamous society should be clear: traditional marriage is not strictly repressive, it's also a form of egalitarianism and redistribution of social capital.
If we dismantle marriage and let raw pastoralist dynamics run rampant, we might very well see the same hypergamous tendencies and that many of those excluded from the love market take up "other", less peaceful pastimes.
It all makes sense when viewed through the economic lens.
Sexual freedom is a lot like capitalism. It leads to wealth concentration. Very few men attract the majority of women. This implies a class of sexually poor men. I suppose so called incels rising up and trying to seize the means of reproduction is a predictable outcome.
Many religions impose a sort of sexual communism: they try to stabilize society by imposing monogamous relationships, thereby ensuring availability of women for every man and preventing the accumulation of sexual capital. This explicitly counteracts the hypergamous dynamic mentioned in TFA where women would prefer to share a rich man than be in a monogamous relationship with a poor one.
China does not have a "massive" excess of males, just around 3-4% overall. The worst hit generations showed 15% more males than global averages, but this seems to be largely an administrative effect where girls were simply reported with a delay.
That being said, China does face a bride price crisis (caili), that has reached tens of thousands of dollars, an exorbitant sum for the the rural areas where it is common. This has led to unrest and public pressure on the government to intervene and regulate this market.
By the same logic, would you say that people refusing to eat there have "a disconnect between their culinary tastes and their values?" Or, if people have a visceral reaction to some other fast food joints surreptitiously introducing the same magic ingredient in their diet, would you also tell them to _just eat it_ and _fucking enjoy it_?
The source matters, both for meat and art. It's part of the product itself, you cannot disentangle the taste and sound of the performance from the way it was produced. AI art trying to pass as human art is simply a form fraud, and some people will always reject it, while others are of course free to embrace it and enjoy it.
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