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We can't even tell for certain the we have existence in time beyond just this moment - our only source of that is a memory of time passing, which we can't validate.

A shell company complete with directors of your preferred nationality is trivial to procure for relatively small amounts of money.

> - Jon Richelieu-Booth for posting a picture of himself with a gun in the US

A quick search suggests that the photo with the gun wasn't the sole cause of the arrest, given there were stalking allegations "involving serious alarm or distress" from someone he had a conflict with, where the gun was one part of what caused the complainint to (claim to) feel threatened. Police may well have overreacted due to the gun post, but your framing leaves out rather relevant details.

> - Jordan Parlour for Facebook posts that were deemed ‘hateful.’

Appears to have incited violence by advocating an attack on a hotel, something he pleaded guilty to.

> - Bernadette Spofforth for a post with a “mild inaccuracy”

Was arrested for posting a fake name for an attacker, but released and faced no further action.

Calling potentially putting a target on the back of someone innocent by connecting them to a violent crime a "mild inaccuracy" is at best wildly misleading.

> Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine

These people did get a wrongful arrest payout, but the claim was most certainly not just raising concerns in a private parent's WhatsApp group. The claims including harassment, and causing a nuisance on the school premises. The claim was still wrong, and the payout reflects that the police should not have been so quick to believe the allegations before making an arrest. But your claim is still hyperbole.

> - Lucy Connolly, for a post calling for mass deportation and to set fire to hotels housing immigrants

At least in this one you admitted the arrest was over incitement to violence.

> - Norbert Gyurcsik, for having “extreme right wing music”

No, for buying and distributing albums whose lyrics breach terrorism legislation and intended to incite racial hatred.

I have plenty of issues with UK terror legislation, which I believe is being abused to shut down legitimate speech at times, but framing this the way you did is again wildly misleading and hyperbolic.

But even if none of your claims were wildly misleading, none of them support your initial claim:

> You are allowed to say it. Unlike UK, you won’t be arrested. But you won’t be allowed in.

... about a comment referring to criticism of the government.

None of the cases above were relevant to that. Most of them are relating to classes of speech that are not protected in the US either.


Yes, but few other countries are as draconian about this as the US seems to want to be, and it is relevant to want to discuss how it will affect the US to make itself a less attractive place to travel to.

Try travel to Europe on an African passport…

I don't doubt there are worse countries/scenarios. We're dealing specifically though with the downward slide of the U.S.

I have in-laws who do that regularly. I'm aware there are plenty of complications with that. I still stand by what I wrote.

> there are plenty of complications with that

What are some of the complications?


Do you have an actual point that doesn't involve me divulging private information of people who are not part of this conversation? My identity is on my profile; identifying the people in question would be rather easy.

If what you're suggesting is that the US is not being more draconian than most, you're free to make an actual claim about how.

I'll note that this article is about people eligible for the visa waiver program, which does not include any African countries - travelling to the US from African countries is also far more draconian than what is outlined in the article, so it's unclear why you think the comparison is relevant.


For one: the US is way more permissive than the EU when it comes to visa duration.

Common to get a 10 year US visa. Schengen visa? For the duration of your visit (for which you have to have bought plane tickets and accommodation before showing up for a visa appointment). The EU also charges pretty hefty fees for a Schengen visa, which I view as a racket and/or xenophobia.

Don’t even get me started on the requirement to hand over your passport at hotels in Europe!

My point is that characterizing the US as “more draconian than most” is quite far from reality, which is a lot more nuanced.


> Common to get a 10 year US visa. Schengen visa? For the duration of your visit

Both of these are possible. Neither are nearly that simple.

For starters the validity period depends on the country, and the type of visa, and since you mentioned Africa, applicants from the vast majority of African states are limited to single entry visas with 3 months validity for B-visas. A few can get 4-5 years, and a handful (I think Morocco, Botswana, South Africa) can get 10 years.

Given that, it's rather odd that you used specifically African countries as the basis for comparison and then pulled out 10 year duration.

On the other side, it is reasonably uncommon to be limited to just the stay for Schengen visas, though it can certainly happen, especially for applicants from poorer countries. And validity can be up to 5 years. But you certainly can

> The EU also charges pretty hefty fees for a Schengen visa, which I view as a racket and/or xenophobia.

The standard cost for a Schengen visa is 90 euros or 105 USD. If you've paid more that has been service fees to application centres, not the EU fees.

The application fee for a US B-visa is 185 USD, in addition there is an issuance fee for some countries, most of them African.


or try to travel to an islamic country with an Israeli stamp on your passport or an Israeli passport.

I've quoted Marx on HN on more than one occasion. I'm not sure they'd like my social media profile, despite having also been consistent in arguing for liberal freedoms that the US used to like to claim to favour.

I've visited the US many times, but I have no intention of going back under the current regime.

I transited through China earlier this year, and I frankly felt less concerned doing that - despite having criticised the Chinese government online many times over the years - than I would feel about entering the US at this point.


I live in the UK and have said worse than that about UK governments under full name with no negative effects.

The idea you'll be arrested for mere criticism of the government in the UK is utter nonsense.


> have said worse than that about UK governments under full name with no negative effects.

... that you know of.


This is hysterical. What actions is it you imagine the UK government would have taken to disadvantage me in secret because of what I've said about them that have been so inconsequential that I haven't noticed them?

I'd guess you'd find out if you applied for a job with that govt.

Claude at times feels like it's mildly manic and has ADHD... I absolutely prefers that to Codex...

Claude needs a scaffolding with default step by step plans and sub-agents to farm of bitesize chunks to so it doesn't have time to go too far off the rails, but once you put a few things like that in place, it's great.


When I think "IDE but better", a Claude Code-like interface is increasingly what I want.

If you babysit every interaction, rather than reviewing a completed unit of work of some size, you're wasting your time second-guessing that the model won't "recover" from stupid mistakes. Sometimes that's right, but more often than not it corrects itself faster than you can.

And so it's far more effective to interact with it far more async, where the UI is more for figuring out what it did if something doesn't seem right, than for working live. I have Claude writing a game engine in another window right now, while writing this, and I have no interest in reviewing every little change, because I know the finished change will look nothing like the initial draft (it did just start the demo game right now, though, and it's getting there). So I review no smaller units of change than 30m-1h, often it will be hours, sometimes days, between each time I review the output, when working on something well specified.


I really do not want those things in Claude COde - I much prefer choosing my own diff tools etc. and running them in a separate terminal. If they start stuffing too much into the TUI they'd ruin it - if you want all that stuff built in, they have the VS Code integration.

Me neither, hence the stated preference for something completely new and different, a stab in the different direction instead of the same boring iteration on yet another agentic TUI coder.

Mind elaborating a bit on the diff tool / flow you’re using? Trying to follow along better with what CC is doing

I don't want/use anything fancy - I just use git diff in a separate terminal. I don't care about the individual changes Claude is making during a unit of work. I'll review a final change. Sometimes not even that - if the tests pass I may way until it's committed a bunch of changes, and review them as a whole.

Trying to follow along better is exactly the opposite of what I'd advocate - it's a waste of time especially with Claude, as Claude tends to favour trying lots of things, seeing what works, and revising its approach multiple times for complex tasks. If you follow along every step, you'll be tearing your hair out over stupid choices that it'll undo within seconds if you just let it work.


That makes sense. Thanks for explaining

Claude code run in a VS Code terminal window pops up a diff in VSCode before making changes. Not sure if that helps. I do have the Claude Code extension installed too.

I find the flow works bc if it starts going off piste I just end it. Plus I then get my pre-commit hooks etc. I still like being relatively hands on though.


using claude code via the VS Code plugin gives you side by side diffs as it works.

I very specifically do not want to run it in an IDE. I'm perfectly happy with it in the terminal, running diffs separately, and very specifically NOT as it is working.

I thought the page was a hilarious joke, not a bad prediction. A lot of these are fantastic observational humour about HN and tech. Gary Marcus still insisting AI progress is stalling 10 years from now, for example. Several digs at language rewrites. ITER hardly having nudged forwards. Google killing another service. And so on.

Wait, wouldn't sustained net positive energy be huge? (Though I don't think that's actually possible from ITER unless there were some serious upgrades over the next decade!)

It would be huge, but only 20 minutes would also still mean it's still far away from making fusion workable, so it fits neatly into the standard joke that fusion is perpetually 10 years away.

True I suppose, though I also expect we're considerably more than 10 years away from 20 minutes of overall net positive output!

I totally agree that it was a funny joke.

But I've noticed that a lot of people think of LLM's as being _good_ at predicting the future and that's what I find concerning.


That's a valid concern about the number of people who think people are good at predicting the future too.

(I'll make my prediction: 10 years from now, most things will be more similar to what things are today than most people expected them to be)


Does the prompt say anything about being funny, about a joke? If yes, great. If no, terrible.

And the answer is no.


The prompt is funny, in itself. The notion of predicting the future is itself not a serious prompt, because there is no meaningful way of giving a serious response. But the addition of "Writ it into form!" makes it sound even more jokey.

If I gave a prompt like that and got the response I did, I'd be very pleased with the result. If I somehow intended something serious, I'd have a second look at the prompt, go mea culpa, and write a far longer prompt with parameters to make something somewhat like a serious prediction possible.


If you honestly can't see why this prompt from the get go was a joke, them you may have to cede that LLM have a better grasp as the subtleties of language than you expect.

That's what makes this so funny: the AI was earnestly attempting to predict the future, but it's so bad at truly out-of-distribution predictions that an AI-generated 2035 HN frontpage is hilariously stuck in the past. "The more things change, the more they stay the same" is a source of great amusement to us, but deliberately capitalizing on this was certainly not the "intent" of the AI.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume the AI was earnestly attempting to predict the future, it’s just as likely attempting to make jokes here for the user who prompted it, or neither of those things.

Apparently it views HN as a humorous website, and made a comical response to the prompt.

I wouldn’t go that far

There is just no reason whatsoever to believe this is someone "earnestly attempting to predict the future", and ending up with this.

There's no chance "google kills gemini cloud" was an earnest predication. That was 100% a joke

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