Maduro is obviously authoritarian. But if the US want to make the world a more democratic place by going to war I could think of a long list of countries they could attack before Venezuela.
To me, the current UK administration, silencing "bad things" and telling you which opinions are right and which are wrong is closer to fascism than the US administration.
>Now, I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don't go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.
>Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years, we've been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values.
>Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy, but when we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we're holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say "ourselves" because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them.
>Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that canceled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not, and thank God they lost the Cold War.
>They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty, the freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, to invent, to build.
Veeeery selective choices, arent there? The cancelled Romanian elections he talks about were cancelled and rerun for a good reasons. This was literally defending democracy against meddling.
The churches were not closed by some hostile state forces. People stopped being christians out of their own choices.
> We must do more than talk about democratic values.
This is dishonest to the maximum. Vance does not believe in democracy. Not in the USA and not in the Europe. He is trying to dismantle it and replace it with authoritarian fascism. He does not care about laws either, he cares about making his own thugs unreachable by law.
The Romania stuff is a complete farse. The campaign for Georgescu wasn't funded by Russia. It was funded by a member of the same ruling coalition whose judges cancelled the vote. [1] They launched a PR campaign that horribly backfired as they were skirting bounds of campaign law, so they couldn't actively name a candidate. The influencers followed their script, but didn't exactly have the same candidate in mind. It's like an equal but opposite of Bud Light hiring Dylan Mulvaney for PR.
Imagine in Hungary if a sort of pro-establishment (NATO/EU/Ukraine/etc) type won, and then they cancelled the election, banned this candidate, and reran it after making some mostly unprovable (and ultimately false) claims of foreign meddling. Can you imagine how you would feel about this? Can you imagine how the unelected EU bureaucrats would act, or what they would be calling it? For people on the other side of the political aisle, you just had an act carried out that would more than justify all the rather hyperbolic rhetoric you're using about the US. And when it's reality, and not just rhetoric, this ends up shaping the views of people for decades.
There's nothing Vance said in the speech which was literal defense of fascism, as alleged. It's a case of two competing narratives of what "democracy" means.
To be fair we don’t know the atrocities the US would have committed in those regions if the UN didn’t exist. I’m not saying I know either obviously! But it’s not like the world seemed to be a better place before the UN.
I mean you saw the code above? It looks like gibberish and regex had a child. Many things in computing are complicated, but doesn’t look like that code. I make my living in media related programming and the code above is messy and extremely hard to read.
I don’t think Claude is a bad choice for those tasks. The dev team can also build skills for management to help improve the AI functionality for management. And Claude in Excel is available as preview.
I have no idea why I’m about to defend OpenAI here. BUT OpenAI have released some open weight models like gpt-oss and whisper. But sure open weight not open source. And yeah I really don’t like OpenAI as a company to be clear.
They have but it does feel like they are developing a closed platform aka Apple.
Apple has shortcuts, but they haven’t propped it up like a standard that other people can use.
To contrast this is something you can use even if you have nothing to do with Claude, and your tools created will be compatible with the wider ecosystem.
Isn’t it more that they have a contract with the developers of the GPL:ed code? But sure they can decide to break that contract and take the consequences of committing copyright infringement.
I think it is a big stretch calling this visual effect lying.
I don’t know if it is a cultural American thing or just difference in interpretation but I had no difficulty understanding that this was a visual effect. But in my country ads don’t come with disclaimers. Do you feel like these disclaimers are truly helpful?
I think slash commands are great to help Claude with this. I have many like /code:dry /code:clean-code etc that has a semi long prompt and references to longer docs to review code from a specific perspective. I think it atleast improves Claude a bit in this area. Like processes or templates for thinking in broader ways. But yes I agree it struggles a lot in this area.
Somewhat tangential but interestingly I'd hate for Claude to make any changes with the intent of sticking to "DRY" or "Clean Code".
Neither of those are things I follow, and either way design is better informed by the specific problems that need to be solved rather than by such general, prescriptive principles.
I agree, so obviously I direct it with more info and point it to code that I believe needs more of specific principles. But generally I would like Claude to produce more DRY code, it is great at reimplementing the same thing in five places instead of making a shared utility module.
I see, and I definitely agree with that last statement. It tends to rewrite stuff. I feel like it should pay me back 10,000 tokens each time it increases the API surface
I'm not sure how to interpret someone saying they don't follow DRY. Do you meant taking it to the Zealous extreme, or do you abhor helper functions? Is this a "No True Scottsman" thing?
I just think DRY is overblown. I just let code grow. When parts of it become obvious to abstract, I refactor them into something self contained. I learned this from an ice wizard.
When I was younger, writing Python rather than Rust, I used to go out of my way to make everything DRY, DRY, DRY everywhere from the outset. Class-based views in Django come to mind.
Today, I just write code, and after it's working I go back and clean things up where applicable. Not because I'm "following a principle", but because it's what makes sense in that specific instance.
I feel very strongly after 20+ years of development that DRY is a good guideline, but I have also seen many, many times that trying to follow it to the letter is actually detrimental and results in too complex solutions.
Not GP but I can strongly relate to it. Most of the programming I do is related to me making a game.
I follow WET principles (write everything twice at least) because the abstraction penalty is huge, both in terms of performance and design, a bad abstraction causes all subsequent content to be made much slower. Which I can't afford as a small developer.
Same with most other "clean code" principles. My codebase is ~70K LoC right now, and I can keep most of it in my head. I used to try to make more functional, more isolated and encapsulated code, but it was hard to work with and most importantly, hard to modify. I replaced most of it with global variables, shit works so much better.
I do use partial classes pretty heavily though - helps LLMs not go batshit insane from context overload whenever they try to read "the entire file".
Models sometimes try to institute these clean code practices but it almost always just makes things worse.
OK, I can follow WET before you DRY, to me that's just a non-zealous version of Don't Repeat Yourself.
I think, if you're writing code where you know the entire code base, a lot of the clean principles seem less important, but once you get someone who doesn't, and that can be you coming back to the project in three months, suddenly they have value.
I try to be optimistic as well. But obviously horses are almost exclusively a hobby today. The work horse is gone. I think the problem is political to a part, if we manage to spread the wealth AI can create we are fine. If we let it concentrate power even more it looks very grim.
