To some extent I'd say it is indeed reasonable. I had observed the effect for a while: if I walked away from a session I noticed that my next prompt would chew up a bunch of context. And that led me to do some digging, at which point I discovered their prompt caching.
So while I'd agree with your sarcasm that expecting users to be experts of the system is a big ask, where I disagree with you is that users should be curious and actively attempting to understand how it works around them. Given that the tooling changes often, this is an endless job.
> users should be curious and actively attempting to understand how it works
Have you ever talked with users?
> this is an endless job
Indeed. If we spend all our time learning what changed with all our tooling when it changes without proper documentation then we spend all our working lives keeping up instead of doing our actual jobs.
There are general users of the average SaaS, and there are claude code users. There's no doubt in my mind that our expectations should be somewhat higher for CC users re: memory. I'm personally not completely convinced that cache eviction should be part of their thought process while using CC, but it's not _that_ much of a stretch.
Personally I've never thought about cache eviction as it pertains to CC. It's just not something that I ever needed to think about. Maybe I'm just not a power user but I just use the product the way I want to and it just works.
This oversells how obfuscated it is. I'm far from a power user, and the opposite of a vibe coder. Yet I noticed the effect on my own just from general usage. If I can do it, anyone can do it.
My point is the opposite. I don't think my observation was smart, and I'm surprised to so many people here, a venue with a lot of people who use this stuff far more than I do, think it wasn't an easy to grok thing.
I’m not. Why would anyone believe marketing speak for any product? One should always assume that at best they’re fluffing their product up and more likely that they’re telling straight up lies
1. False advertisement is a thing, to the point there are laws against it
2. They were caught blatantly lying, and you're literally telling everyone it's the users' fault for not digging into the black box that is Claude Code (and more so Anthropic's servers) and figuring its behavior for themselves. A behavior that suddenly changed on a March day [1] and which previously very few people ever needed to investigate.
I believe if one were to read my post it'd have been clear that I *am* a user.
This *is* "hacker" news after all. I think it's a safe assumption that people sitting here discussing CC are an inquisitive sort who want to understand what's under the hood of their tools and are likely to put in some extra time to figure it out.
We're inquisitive but at the end of the day many of us just want to get our work done. If it's a toy project, sure. Tinker away, dissect away. When my boss is breathing down my neck on why a feature is taking so long? No time for inquiries.
Agreed. systems work the way they work. Its up to the user to determining what those limitations are. I don't like the concept of molding software based on every expectation a user has. Sometimes that expectation is unwarranted. You can see this in game development. Regardless of expressed criticism, sometimes gamers don't know what they want or what they need. A game should be developed by the design goals of the team, not cater to every whim the player base wants. We have seen were that can go.
The first amendment has never been held to give immunity for libel or slander. So if you think it's a first amendment violation, you need to learn that the first amendment does not give blanket immunity for speech that harms others.
Suppose I decide to do some target shooting in my yard and set up a target. One of my shots misses and goes past the target and hits your house where it causes a surprising amount of damage and you sue me.
Would you say that if a court allows that and awards you damages it is a violation of my 2nd Amendment rights with more steps?
That's not really the reason. Even in a civil case, the first amendment certainly would apply to whatever laws allow the civil case to happen.
However, the first amendment is not absolute. Defamation is still a thing in the US. The first amendment creates a higher bar than many other countries (especially for public figures, but the victims in this case aren't public figures), but it is still possible.
How is a ruling in a civil court not a form of government prosecution? It would be more correct to say that your first amendment rights stop at defaming others.
The state enforces property rights too. Let's say someone won't let me build a place of worship on their land. Is that a "first amendment violation but with more steps"?
You could make any instance of "government upholds the law" into "constitutional violation" that way.
A ruling in a civil court is very obviously not a prosecution. Because prosecutors can't, by definition, make rulings.
Laws that force the government to violate the constitution are unconstitutional. So yes, a violation but with more steps.
A ruling in a civil court that is enforced by a government is the same thing as the government ruling it, but through transitive properties. It can't be not enforced and enforced at the same time (the argument that civil is somehow not judicial).
In reality we are just griping that our government is too pussy to amend the constitution, and we've already written laws that subvert it, and those are being upheld by a corrupt/politicized supreme court and bullshit case law.
If I were to bring a civil suit against you because the comment above offended my sensibilities, it would be quickly thrown out of court because it is your first amendment right to say anything you like, with certain exceptions that the government recognizes as limitations of this right.
Even though this is a civil matter, it is still a judgement on government law. This is not some contract dispute where the parties are simply seeking arbitration, with no government involvement except as a "service provider" for this arbitration.
Alex Jones will not have a criminal record as a result of this. He has not been declared as committing a crime.
He did take actions that, by civil law, created civil liabilities. He was sued over those liabilities. He failed to participate in the civil litigation process and lost badly as a result.
Civil and criminal law are not the same thing and your insistence otherwise doesn't change the reality.
Civil and criminal law are separate things, absolutely. But the first ammendment applies to both civil and criminal law - it is a limitation on the government's ability to create laws, not just a limitation on the government's ability to pursue criminal penalties.
Alex Jones is only liable because there exists a law that the government created that says that defamation is illegal. Since this is a law, it could have been in conflict with the first ammendment - and, in fact, there have been legal challenges on this very line that reached the SC. But the Supreme Court has found that this is an acceptable limitation on the first amendment rights, with the specific limitations.
But, for example, if the US government wanted to adopt the English law on defamation, it would not be constitutional in the USA, it would run foul of the first ammendment.
> But the Supreme Court has found that this is an acceptable limitation on the first amendment rights, with the specific limitations.
Right, and I think this example is more about maintaining a civil society than it is strictly about freedom of speech. I think it's pretty clear to say that "freedom of speech" has limitations, making the word "freedom" contextually debatable.
What happens if you don't pay your civil liabilities? Civil vs criminal is a silly distinction when it comes to discussing right suppression. Jail time is not the only way to suppress a right.
You go to jail for failure to abide by a court order. Which is still distinct from going to jail for your speech.
Alex Jones can continue to say whatever he wants, from a criminal perspective. He may be somewhat more aware of the potential costs of being a professional liar now, which might cause him to make different decisions as he analyzes the cost/benefit ratio for something he wants to say.
The government won't stop him from saying whatever he chooses to say. The government might enforce costs, should he be sued for what he says and is found liable.
This is not how freedom of speech works. The civil or criminal nature of any law limiting speech is irrelevant. What is relevant is if a law limiting speech is narrow enough and if it serves a purpose that is aligned with the constitution. Anti-defamation laws clearly do serve such a prupsoe (they limit only specific types of speech that is not of public interest, and they exist to protect the victim's constitutional rights where they conflict with the a user's free speech right), so they are compatible with the first amendment, and would have still been if they added criminal penalties and not just civil effects.
The government/congress/states can't make a law or regulation that says "you have a right to never hear anyone signing in the rain". Even if such a law somehow passes, when you bring a civil suit against someone singing in the rain because you claim they violated your right (enshrined in this law) to not hear such singing, you will lose your case, as the law you based it on infringes on the first amendment rights of the singer.
Note that things would be very different if, instead of a law, you had a HOA which enacted a rule saying "singing in the rain is not allowed on the premises; violators will be fined 1000$". Assuming any signage about this is clear enough and so on, you could be forced in court to pay such a fine to the HOA, and may even end up doing jail time if you refuse even after losing a lawsuit with the HOA. The first amendment is a limitation of the state's ability to create laws, it doesn't limit private entities from limiting speech, nor the government's ability to enforce property rights behind such an ability.
> What is relevant is if a law limiting speech is narrow enough and if it serves a purpose that is aligned with the constitution. Anti-defamation laws clearly do serve such a prupsoe (they limit only specific types of speech that is not of public interest, and they exist to protect the victim's constitutional rights where they conflict with the a user's free speech right
I'm sorry, is there something in the constitution that gives you the right to not be defamed?
> is there something in the constitution that gives you the right to not be defamed
Have you considered that there's a significant cultural difference between you and the framers of the Constitution?
Those guys were mostly "gentlemen" in the 18th and 19th century sense. Lying, sullying someone's good name, and otherwise dragging them into disrepute was decidedly "ungentlemanly" conduct. I don't think most of them would consider it "free speech" that could pass without censure, no matter what the text of the constitution said. Let's not forget Alexander Hamilton died in a duel because of some words he didn't even recall saying.
> The government won't stop him from saying whatever he chooses to say. The government might enforce costs, should he be sued for what he says and is found liable.
IANAL but I think of a civil suit as a substitute for the injured party extracting justice by less civilized methods. If you wreck my fence, I can come wreck your fence in retaliation. Or I can sue you. The government is only providing the venue for resolving the dispute.
Now in reality there are political and other influences on court behavior. But the government is neither a plaintiff nor a defendant.
This is only part of civil law. Civil law also governs numerous government regulations as well. If you're fined for illegal parking, that happens in a civil court too - but it's still a suit between you and the state. Even in your example of a destroyed fence, the reason you can bring such a suit in court is that there are state or federal laws that I broke by destroying your fence. If such laws didn't exist, a judge would not help you.
What you're thinking more of is contract law - where two parties go before a judge simply to adjudicate a matter that is entirely of their own invention. If we had signed a contract that said I can touch your fence but in touching it I left a hand print on it, I might think the contract allowed me to do so, while you may think that the hand print constitutes wrecking your fence, and we can go before a judge to decide and enforce said decision. The judge then won't look at any state/federal laws, they will look only at the terms of our contract (assuming the contract itself doesn't violate any laws, of course).
> The government is only providing the venue for resolving the dispute.
The government provides the venue, the decider, the rules of engagement, and enforces the decision. The government stands on the side of the plaintiff, ready to turn the resolution (that the government decided) into the same result as if it were law.
> What a wild take. I guess that explains the massive and growing popularity of iOS over that same time period.
Wild take, indeed.
I seem to recall something about Apple releasing a sub-$600 laptop so popular that weeks after it was announced it's backordered for more than 30 days.
Apple has not flopped on AI as you say. They are just focused on privacy and are likely waiting for the time when local models become efficient enough to run on iPhones (which is quickly becoming a reality).
Google could probably train models for orders of magnitude less money as you say, but they aren't. They are not capable of creating high quality models like OpenAI and Anthropic are. Their company is just too disorganized and chaotic.
Anecdotally, I don't know a single person who uses Gemini on purpose.
> hey are just focused on privacy and are likely waiting for the time when local models become efficient enough to run on iPhones (which is quickly becoming a reality).
This is such revisionist history. They were not strategicially waiting. They tried, really really hard. The entire iPhone 16 pro was built on AI. Heck, they even (re)named it as Apple Intelligence.
Remember, this is the same time when Microsoft launched Copilot (RIP), Google launched Gemini, OpenAI with ChatGPT etc.
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They had to walk back hard because it was a flop. They might be accidentally successful because they are a company with multiple strengths, but dont think of it as they were sitting AI out.
Is that why they rushed out introducing AI summaries etc in order to play catch-up and then backpedaled when they exploded in customers' faces/individuals concerned in false headlines threatened to sue?
I use Gemini on purpose all the time. It can start timers for me, add calendar entries without having to type it out, convert email to calendar or reminders etc. I'd use it even more if it had more access to other bits of my phone.
The "waiting for local LLMs" came up re: Apple and IMHO that's too passive for company where if someone else has a better AI assistant, it's going to be a huge problem.
What if somebody cracks the problem if splitting inference between local and remote? What if someone else manages so modularize learning so your local LLM doesn't need to have been trained on how to compute integrals? Obviously we can't disect a current LLM and say "we can remove these weights because they do math" but there's no guarantee there isn't an architecture that will allow for that.
Apple could also be training an LLM Siri 2.0 that knows enough to do the things you want. Setting alarms, sending messages, etc. Apple would have all the information on what the major use cases are and where Siri is currently failing. They can increase Siri's capabilities as local LLM inference improves.
As for Google creating high quality models, I personally believe the models are going to be commoditized. I don't believe a single company is going to have a model "moat" to sustain itself as a trillion dollar company. I base two reasons for this:
1. At the end of the day, it's just software and software is infinitely reproducible and distributable. I mean we already saw one significant Anthropic leak this year; and
2. China is going to make sure we're not all dependent on one US tech company who "owns" AI. DeepSeek was just the first shot across the bow for that. It's going to be too important to China's national security for that not to happen.
And OpenAI's entire funding is predicated on that happening and OpenAI "winning".
Still, attributing that progress to "years of research at Google" alone is simplifying the facts to the point of being just plain wrong. That kind of research was always very much in the open and cooperative, with deep levels of standing-on-shoulders.
Attention e.g. was developed by Dzmitry Bahdanau et al. (those being Kyunghyun Cho and Yoshua Bengio) in 2014 while interning at the University of Montreal.
The insight of the paper you point to was that with attention you could dispense of the RNN that attention was initially developed to support.
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