It doesn’t help that a frequent recommendation on HN whenever someone complains about Claude not following a prompt correctly is to “ask Claude itself how to rewrite a prompt to get the result you want”.

Which sure, can be helpful, but it’s kinda just a coincidence (plus some RLHF probably) that question happens to generate output text that can be used as a better prompt. There’s no actual introspection or awareness of its internal state or architecture beyond whatever high level summary Anthropic gives it in its “soul” document et al.

But given how often I’ve read that advice on here and Reddit, it’s not hard to imagine how someone could form an impression that Claude has some kind of visibility into its own thinking or precise engineering. Instead of just being as much of a black box to itself as it is to us.

That doesn't sound like it would help while reviewing a PR full of verbose slop in your day job.

  "Among his accomplishments has been establishing the department’s Real Time Crime Center that leverages technology and data to support officers in responding more effectively to incidents," the city's release said. "Zibolski also prioritized officer wellness initiatives to strengthen mental health resources and resilience within the department. He reinstituted the Traffic Safety Team to focus on roadway safety and proactive enforcement, and ... played an active role in statewide discussions on various issues affecting law enforcement."

The technology seems highly relevant here. Plus, as we've seen in the software world, when a mandate comes from the top to use the shiny new magic AI tools as much as possible, the officer may have felt pressured to make arrests using the new system they paid a bunch of money for instead of second guessing whatever it spits out.

Not saying it’s actually linked to cancer but it definitely does increase the risk of hemorrhoids, rectal prolapse and bleeding from straining. Which could mean chronic stress at a cellular level repairing damage over the long term.

That seems like wishful thinking, IMO. Seems more likely we will find it’s due a complex constellation of genetics, diet, lifestyle factors like exercise, environmental exposure, etc associated eith a modern sedentary lifestyle with no clear smoking gun or single preventative intervention.

It sort of reminds me of when Lesswrong was fixated on a hypothesis that lithium levels in the water supply was the cause of the obesity epidemic. There was a lot of enthusiasm for the idea at the time, and somewhat understandably as it would have been a single variable that could be tweaked for massive societal benefits.

But there wasn’t really any credible evidence to support it. Trying to reduce the complexity of human biology and lifestyle to single cause/effect relationship is an easy and tempting trap to fall into to explain unknowns in medicine.