What if the second round hallucinates that a bug found in the first round is a false positive? Would we ever know?
> It does not matter how much LLMs advance, people ideologically against them will always deny they have an enormous amount of usefulness.
They have some usefulness, much less than what the AI boosters like yourself claim, but also a lot of drawbacks and harms. Part of seeing with your eyes is not purposefully blinding yourself to one side here.
The only real difference between the "spaceflight" in the 1960's and today is that these pictures don't need to be hand painted - you can render them in Blender in a single day.
But yeah, sure. With the amount of fake stuff on the internet including AI image generation, we're expected to believe that the US government dumped billions of dollars into going to space when they could give the appearance of doing so for a few bucks in nano banana credits? Hah.
They couldn't do that for "a few bucks of nano banana credits" though. You could generate the imagery but that's only one line of evidence. A launch is easily detectable through multiple signals.
Why would Russia and China and any other country with any degree of astronomic capability that the US has an adversarial relationship with just let them get away with lying to the world? Why wouldn't they take the opportunity to humiliate the US by revealing that no launch happened and that they cannot detect the spacecraft?
How would they prove that no launch happened? There isn't conclusive evidence of an absence of launch, and if there were it would be accused as being fake and a ploy from American enemies to discredit them.
> There isn't conclusive evidence of an absence of launch, ...
A launch is detectable seismically, visually, on radar, etc. There's a lot of investment in being able to detect launches (to detect the launch of nuclear weapons). It would be screamingly obvious if the launch was fake. It would absolutely be conclusive if there were no seismic activity, no radar return, they couldn't detect the spacecraft presently, etc. At least for a definition of "conclusive" that can be operationalized - conclusiveness is a judgement call about when evidence is sufficient and not reaching some theoretical 100% certainty. Which can't possibly be reached for any claim for the reason you outlined; you can always invent some negative counterclaim that can't be entirely dismissed, even for claims like "the sky is blue".
It's also pretty easy to find people who were physically there to witness the launch. This wasn't a secret bunker or a barge in the middle of the ocean. It was in Florida in the late afternoon.
> ...it would be accused as being fake and a ploy from American enemies to discredit them.
Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have access to this data. Astronomers, geologists, petroleum engineers, backyard amateurs. The conspirators could muddy the waters but they couldn't ultimately prevail. It is many orders of magnitude easier to go to the moon than to convincingly fake it.
> A launch is detectable seismically, visually, on radar, etc.
Does that rocket have an "escape chute", just like the shuttle did, that conveniently allows the "astronauts" to slide down to safety before the rocket launches? I'm betting it does.
> It is many orders of magnitude easier to go to the moon than to convincingly fake it.
Completely wrong. Wasn't true in the 1960s, and isn't true now.
People are easily convinced by lies, as you have demonstrated just now.
We do not, at this point in time, possess the technology to go to the moon. It may be decades before such tech is actually developed.
I don't have anything to say to your argument, not because I don't think it's worth addressing, but because it doesn't address my argument, and because I find this statement more interesting:
> People are easily convinced by lies, as you have demonstrated just now.
You can't have known this but there was a time in my life I was very open to these theories and eventually came to the conclusion they didn't comport with the evidence. You seem to be assuming my position is reflexive rather than considered.
Cynicism, contrarianism, the assumption opposing positions are unconsidered - that is not what "free thinking" looks like. That's just being dependent on the "mainstream narrative" in reverse. If you can't imagine someone examining the evidence and coming to a different conclusion than you, you are engaging in the dogmatism you criticize.
It also does not make you less gullible. Cynicism is the dual of naivete. Both are equally exploitable. Cynicism can feel rational and rigorous because it has a hard edge to it, and because it feels like legitimate skepticism. But that's merely aesthetic. People can and do pull the wool over cynical eyes by tailoring lies to that aesthetic; instead of saying, "experts say X is true, and you can trust them" they say "experts say X is false, and you can't trust them" and the outcome is the same.
Propaganda and lies are real, you aren't wrong to protect yourself from them, but I genuinely think this mechanism does not.
> I don't have anything to say to your argument, not because I don't think it's worth addressing,
...but simply because you have no argument. Just a lot of vague handwaving that amounts to nothing and seems designed to fill the air full of noise more than anything. No statement you have just uttered is of use to anyone.
> You can't have known this but there was a time in my life I was very open to these theories and eventually came to the conclusion they didn't comport with the evidence.
So you watched the multiple videos of the US flag waving in the breeze on the moon and learned nothing?
You saw the flat, unblemished surface of the moon right beneath the lander's giant rocket engine, which had just shut off moments before leaving no trace of any disturbance--not a speck of dust disturbed--and learned nothing?
You watched the Apollo 11 press conference where, far from acting like returning heroes fresh from walking on the moon, they seemed somber and ashamed?
You saw the 'rock' with the letter "C" written on it? The converging shadows? All the other discrepancies? The seams where photos were joined together to make a fake? You studied all the obvious lies being told about "space is cold", "you can't see stars up there", "a thin plate of aluminum is plenty of radiation shielding", etc, and learned nothing?
You saw the pictures of all the supposed Challenger astronauts who are still alive to this day, one of whom (Judith Resnik) is even still living under her real name, teaching law at the University of Minnesota? And you learned nothing.
It seems your "studies" didn't help you much.
Really, the evidence is so clear and obvious that to make a post as you have just written weighs the odds heavily in favor of you being a disinformation agent.
I'm not going to address your arguments if you're not going to address mine; that's me working overtime while you simply handwave with skepticism. I certainly do have points to make, but if you're not going to explain why Russia and China are carrying water for the USA, even through the collapse of the USSR, no, I am not going to respond to your points.
Yes, I studied the evidence and came to a conclusion. You've come to a different conclusion. That's not because you're smarter or less gullible. It seems to it's because you are cynical and, to be frank, over indexing on dubious evidence. If you're scrutinizing people's facial expressions to determine whether a gigantic physical event has taken place, you've taken a be wrong turn. Facial expressions are about the lowest quality evidence I can imagine to answer a question about spaceflight. It's way too far removed and there are way too many alternative explanations.
You're complaining that people dismiss you without taking you seriously while being completely unserious. You cannot preach against dogma while literally calling those who disagree with you cultists and paid agitators. You cannot complain that people refuse to engage with your arguments when you refuse to engage with theirs. (You didn't express these complaints to me but I see them in your other comments.)
Or rather, you can, but it seems like being closer to the truth is an important value to you. And if that's the case I think you are doing yourself a great disservice.
But I've enjoyed our conversation and I wish you well.
It's a big number, but it's often tied up in housing in VHCOL/HCOL areas. It also doesn't mean much re: not needing to work in these areas.
Also given retirement in US is self-funded via saving/investment instead of pension, someone who wants a comfortable retirement in many areas of this country needs $1M NW by 65 to generate a $40k/year income (above the social security payments which don't go so far) at safe withdrawal rates.
Yes this is a stupid idea, but commentators are forgetting everyone has stupid ideas. I would imagine the vast majority of commentators in this thread hold one, like
- Socialism / Communism is a good idea
- Functional or OOP programming is a good idea
- LLM's will replace programmers
- Languages like Javascript, Typescript, or Python are actually good and should be used
- CLI apps are better than GUI apps
- Spaces are better than tabs
- Religion is stupid
The list honestly goes on. The only difference is that Andreessen has a platform and we don't.
I really dislike this push away from augmentation and towards agents. I get that people want to be lazy and just have the LLM do all of their work, but using the AI as an augmentation means you are the driver and can prevent it from making mistakes, and you still have knowledge of the codebase. I think there is so much more we could be doing in the editor with AI, but instead every company just builds a chatbot. Sigh.
Claude Code proves you don't need quality code — you just need hundreds of billions of dollars to produce a best-in-class LLM and then use your legal team to force the extreamly subsidised usage of it through your own agent harness. Or in other words, shitty software + massive moat = users.
Seriously, if Anthropic were like oAI and let you use their subscription plans with any agent harness, how many users would CC instantly start bleeding? They're #39 in terminal bench and they get beaten by a harness that provides a single tool: tmux. You can literally get better results by giving Opus 4.6 only a tmux session and having it do everything with bash commands.
It seems premature to make sweeping claims about code quality, especially since the main reason to desire a well architected codebase is for development over the long haul.
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