Mention "workflow" in a prompt and Claude will dynamically create an orchestration plan that it strictly follows, allowing you to confidently trust that every stage happens in the right order even across 100s of agents.

Previously, on Lobsters, we considered the degree to which Claude Code is configured via hard prompts instead of something more effective. Claude Code also often gets confused about its status in its internal workflow, the one which multiplexes chain-of-thought utterances ("thinking"), user input, and generated output ("confabulated bullshit"). Next time Claude Code source is leaked, I expect that we'll see how poorly it "strictly follows" user-provided workflows, too.

If Schneider had talked to a lawyer before doing half of what he did, he might have accomplished more with less collateral damage. Though it might not have made such "good content."

Congratulations, Mike! You figured out why pranktubers do pranks and post videos of those pranks! It's for clicks and attention and ad money. You're such a smart guy, Mike.

All summaries of this topic are going to get a lot of things wrong because they are legislating too many details. We can simplify this to what actually matters: a pranktuber got a lot of footage of legal First Amendment activity and they are going to use it to simultaneously destroy a mid-sized Lego pawn-shop franchise and extract a settlement from the police department of American Fork, Utah. In the process, they revealed that there is a whisper network of Mormon good old boys who will willingly lie on police reports, escalate situations to violence, abuse the legal system in any way they can to disenfranchise others, and generally don't feel any fealty towards the Constitution or its rule of law. This story is about MLM: Mormon Lego Mafia.

It's been a while since we've heard anything related to books3. Copyright attorney Leonard French has a news update (video) on Nazemian et al v. nVidia. nVidia requested that any mention of Bittorrent be removed; really, they just asked for one sentence to be removed, but the judge thought that it was like "asking to strike paintbrush allegations from a case about dolphin paintings" (sic; I don't have the transcript) and refused. The theory is that nVidia could have argued that they were not contributory infringers and then appealed to Cox v. Sony, where Cox said that it's not their fault that some of their customers are pirates. However, it seems like any sort of Cox appeal is not possible here because the judge recognizes that Bittorrent isn't a dumb network.

If you're anti-copyright like me: Oh look, Cox wasn't a big sweeping get-out-of-trouble card for non-ISPs. I still don't think judges actually understand networks, but this is definitely better than a lack of understanding. If you're one of the pro-copyright-because-anti-AI sickos: nVidia took a big loss here. This was their only shot at keeping their usage of books3, Anna's Archive, and other shadow libraries out of court. Like Anthropic before them in Bartz v. Anthropic, they may have to come to the judge with an offering of a settlement paying a few hundred USD/author to each member of the class. This sucks for the popular authors but might be more cash in hand than the long tail would otherwise receive in royalties.

I'm pretty sure that this was triggered by Rich Felker (musl) telling her to go away last week. She's finally asked a search engine for her legacy; previously, on Awful, we discussed the degree to which she's done this to herself by loudly espousing corporate fascism.

Well, that might be the first package that I have to locally pin to a pre-slop commit. Thanks for the heads-up. I've never bothered to implement rsync myself even though the algorithm is documented; maybe this will be the push I need.

Okay guys, I rolled my character. His name is Traveliezer Interdimensky and he has 18 INT (19 on skill checks, see my sheet.) He's a breeding stud who can handle twenty women at once despite having only 10 STR and CON. I was thinking that we'd start with Interdimensky trapped in Hell where he's forced to breed with all these beautiful women and get them pregnant, and the rest of the party is like outside or whatever, they don't have to go rescue me, I mean rescue him. Anyway I wanted to numerically quantify how much Hell wants me, I mean him, to stay and breed all these beautiful women, because that's something they'd totally do.

The orange site has a thread. Best sneer so far is this post:

So you know when you're playing rocket ship in the living room but then your mom calls out "dinner time" and the rocket ship becomes an Amazon cardboard box again? Well this guy is an adult, and he's playing rocket ship with chatGPT. The only difference is he doesn't know it and there's no mommy calling him for dinner time to help him snap out of it.

Somebody pointed out that HN's management is partially to blame for the situation in general, on HN. Copying their comment here because it's the sort of thing Dan might blank:

but I don't want to get hellbanned by dang.

Who gives a fuck about HN. Consider the notion that dang is, in fact, partially to blame for this entire fiasco. He runs an easy-to-propagandize platform due how much control of information is exerted by upvotes/downvotes and unchecked flagging. It's caused a very noticeable shift over the past decade among tech/SV/hacker voices -- the dogmatic following of anything that Musk or Thiel shit out or say, this community laps it up without hesitation. Users on HN learn what sentiment on a given topic is rewarded and repeat it in exchange for upvotes.

I look forward to all of it burning down so we can, collectively, learn our lessons and realize that building platforms where discourse itself is gamified (hn, twitter, facebook, and reddit) is exactly what led us down this path today.

Every person I talk to — well, every smart person I talk to — no, wait, every smart person in tech — okay, almost every smart person I talk to in tech is a eugenicist. Ha, see, everybody agrees with me! Well, almost everybody…

Meanwhile, actual Pastafarians (hi!) know that the Russian Federation openly persecutes the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster for failing to help the government in its authoritarian activities, and also that we're called to be anti-authoritarian. The Fifth Rather:

I'd really rather you didn't challenge the bigoted, misogynist, hateful ideas of others on an empty stomach. Eat, then go after the bastards.

May you never run out of breadsticks, travelers.

He's talking like it's 2010. He really must feel like he deserves attention, and it's not likely fun for him to learn that the actual practitioners have advanced past the need for his philosophical musings. He wanted to be the foundation, but he was scaffolding, and now he's lining the floors of hamster cages.

This is some of the most corporate-brained reasoning I've ever seen. To recap:

• NYC elects a cop as mayor
• Cop-mayor decrees that NYC will be great again, because of businesses
• Cops and other oinkers get extra cash even though they aren't business
• Commercial real estate is still cratering and cops can't find anybody to stop/frisk/arrest/blame for it
• Folks over in New Jersey are giggling at the cop-mayor, something must be done
• NYC invites folks to become small-business owners, landlords, realtors, etc.
• Cop-mayor doesn't understand how to fund it (whaddaya mean, I can't hire cops to give accounting advice!?)
• Cop-mayor's CTO (yes, the city has corporate officers) suggests a fancy chatbot instead of hiring people

It's a fucking pattern, ain't it.