Two use-cases recently where Claude sucked for me:

1. Performance-critical code to featurize byte slices for use in a ML model. Claude kept trying to take multiple passes over the slice when the featurization can obviously be done in one. After I finally got it to do the featurization in one pass it was double-counting some bytes but not others (double counting all of them would have been fine since the feature vector gets normalized). Overall it was just very frustrating because this should have been straight-forward and instead it was dogshit.

2. Performance-critical code that iterates over lines of text and possibly applies transformations, similar to sed. Claude kept trying to allocate new Strings inside of the hot-loop for lines that were not transformed. When I told it to use Cow<'a, str> instead so that the untransformed lines, which make up the majority of processed lines, would not need a new allocation, Claude completely fucked up the named lifetimes. Importantly, my CLAUDE.md already tells Claude to use copy-on-write types to reduce allocations whenever possible. The agent just ignored it, which is _the_ issue with LLMs: they're non-deterministic and any guidance you provide is ultimately just a suggestion.

It's not just assuming that everyone learns the same way. It's assuming that everyone learns the way that all of the research literature on learning claims does not work.

Learning requires active recall/synthesis. Looking at solved examples instead of working them yourself does not suffice in math, physics, chemistry, or CS, but somehow it is supposed to work in this situation?

Machine learning people use "tensor" to just mean an N-dimensional array of numbers. The term is divorced from its meaning in Physics and Mathematics, which caused me some confusion when I started looked at machine learning papers coming from physics.

But the energy transported to Earth from your space power plant still creates waste heat when it is used to do work (and also when it is transported to earth). You cannot beat the second law.

They don't even decouple at high material standards of living. Recent increases to GDP produced emissions too but those new emissions were offset by reductions in emissions of existing industries.

This "decoupling" gets us basically nothing because it's not like we can just stop emissions tomorrow since GDP and emissions are "decoupled".