nico λ

There’s an old joke that you can tell what kind of conservative a person is by what year they want to go back to. I’d say the decline of a shared morality happened over the past 60 years with the rise of hyper-individualism and moral relativism. MacIntyre, by contrast, argued that the loss of moral coherence was baked into the Enlightenment from... See more

Good thinking is about pushing past your current understanding and reaching the thought behind the thought. This often requires breaking old ideas, which is much easier to do when the ideas are as rigid as they get on the page. In a fluid medium like thought or conversation, you can always go, “Well, I didn’t mean it like that ” or rely on the fact... See more

• This is gonna be game-changing for the next 2-4 weeks before they nerf the model.
  
  Then for the next 2-3 months people complaining about the degradation will be labeled “skill issue”.
  
  Then a sacrificial Anthropic engineer will “discover” a couple obscure bugs that “in some cases” might have lead to less than optimal performance. Still largely a user

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1. Clearly describe the problem and symptoms. Begin your prompt by describing what is going wrong and what the code is supposed to do. Always include the exact error message or incorrect behavior. For example, instead of just saying “My code doesn’t work,” you might prompt: “I have a function in JavaScript that should calculate the sum of an array... See more

Performance is about using resources efficiently to deliver fast, responsive software. Prioritizing performance early helps you design systems that meet or exceed user expectations.

Strauss therefore argued that political philosophy must re-open the “theological-political problem” rather than declare it settled. That does not mean re-imposing dogma; it means rediscovering, through thinkers such as Plato, Maimonides, and even Hobbes and Spinoza at their best, the ways in which reason and revelation, liberty and moral limits,... See more

More and more, I think my issues with conventional productivity advice – indeed, with the very notion of productivity – boil down to this: Spending your days trying to get through a list of things you feel you have to do is a fundamentally joyless and soul-destroying way to live; and most productivity problems, like distraction or procrastination... See more

Anyone who’s spent a few months at a sizable tech company can tell you that a lot of software seems to exist primarily because companies have hired people to write and maintain them. In some ways, the software serves not the business, but the people who have written it, and then those who need to maintain it. This is stupid, but also very, very... See more