I often gesture towards this phenomenology when religious folk casually attempt to claim "spirit" as some form of belief they hold over me. I honestly don't know if I've developed the position well, it is almost entirely through the lens of continental philosophy absorbing Hegel, but I use it to illustrate that my concept of spirit, as an atheist, may not be a different phenomenological occurrence than that of a religious framing and even shares the quality of a rich historical lineage I can draw from. I could just as easily retreat into untranslated German that sounds poetic or prophetic to the uninitiated, but that would be doing exactly what I'm asking them not to do, leaning on a vocabulary the other person can't engage with without first conceding the ground it's built on. This seems to effectively persuade them to adjust their vocabulary to a register I can actually engage with without needing to hedge for the axiomatic differences we have.
This is a comfortable mode of engagement and it is one I can share with religious folk, but I do find they often refuse this register and I will admit I can't always articulate why I find their refusal frustrating either.
I think Heidegger provides a framing for why these are just musings in, as you put it, a firm entrenchment and the whole ordeal is looking quite bleak. I honestly can't imagine a way out of the technological frame and I am simply not seeing my generation in common spaces. Even my ability to meaningfully connect with my peers through conversation is deteriorating by product of the sheer scale of potential engagements one has at any moment. It is quite overwhelming and I am afraid there is no technological answer here.
Will you still think I'm fucking with you if I call your comparison a lot more insightful than I think you realize?
White nerdy kids have just been relatively less desperate up to now, socioeconomically speaking. You used to have to be a real hardcore loser, as a not otherwise messed up white boy, to embrace Crowley or hermeticism or any of that other shit that's only interesting to the poor kids and the crime kids and the kids from fucked-up families, who hang around smoking cigarettes together just off school property. (Hello.)
But now, as we exit the second "gilded age" for the second "great depression," the prospect of success in "straight" life, the white folks standard college/job/marry/kids/Epstein-client script, proves a mirage, and the same immiseration of opportunity comes for American whites that American blacks have always known. Thus proliferate get-rich-quick schemes among those certain they are deserving - i.e., con games among suckers, Crowley's native element. Given how much his speed habit led him to write, it's no surprise he comes roaring back. (He did have a sense of character and of history, hence making sure he left behind an appealing - as appalling! - set of lies.)
I have a lot more respect for B.I.G., who at least in my recollection never pretended he was other than one in a million. But when somebody like any of these guys starts saying he sees himself in you or vice versa, you had better keep your knees tightly together and a hand over your drink.
No this was much more substantial and I quite enjoyed it, I was thinking along these lines when offering the comparison, but you have a flowery way to put it.
That is to say, this is the first I'm hearing of this Crowley guy directly, but I have heard murmurs of "magick" down stream in video game culture. So while I agree with the broad social analysis, and have even brushed the aesthetic diffuse through culture, I don't really see any practitioners or other indicators to suggest this is being taken seriously.
In the data science scenario you should just have proper tooling, for you it sounds like a REPL the agent can interface with. I do this with nREPL/CIDER; in Python-land a Jupyter kernel over MCP maybe. For stateful introspection where you don't control the tooling, tmux plus trivial glue gets you most of the way.
edit: There are much better solutions for Python-land below it seems :)
This can be true I suppose, but equally I have a few friends who practically play characters as if they've resigned themselves to a role in a sitcom. For instance: one of my friends is late to just about everything and treats everyone as if we are on-call. We plainly note this repeatedly, the friend is, I hope, equally frustrated and embarrassed by it, and in spite of this nothing changes. This is obviously a critical element to their broader character.
Perhaps you mean to distinguish social groups without much intimacy? To which I'm sure we could provide some convincing cases, but this seems like a silly heuristic generally.
I have been in or next to a number of social circles with such missing stairs, where for various reasons people in the groups have decided to not directly acknowledge certain Facts that are known about some members, because it would involve them confronting their hypocrisy.
Someone cheating regularly on their partner, flagrant substance use problems, controlling people who ostracize anyone who doesn't agree with their sometimes insane perspectives...
People will go along with quite a lot to avoid friction, especially as they get older and picking up new social circles becomes higher cost.
It's possibly the most telling thing, when you see what people say is a hard line versus how they actually respond to it.
To be clear, I am ADHD (executive-type) and am empathetic to my friend. All considered I am quite fond of my time spent with them. But in regards to developing a model for ones character I don't think it is very helpful to allow disabilities to shape them. It is simply impossible to share the individual essence related and is better understood through the manifestation which is ultimately shared. And regardless I would hope they would seek this diagnosis as a function of their own introspection according to my account of the phenomenon, not some extrapolation. [0]
To engage with your curiosity of their situation though, they spend a lot of time at poker tables, sitting for 8+ hours. I would assume this is not a common enjoyment for most ADHD minds. From my experience as soon as I'm out the action for a string of hands I'm completely checked out of any rigid strategy. Now sit me at a blackjack table and I can crank hands until the morning! But here I am being fed action and drinks basically on demand.
[0] I'm just thinking out loud here, not accusing you of making any claim related
that's not ADHD. People with ADHD would improve - it may take a LOT of time, but it will happen. Quite often they will go to the extreme and come in way too early. My bet would be on Cluster B personality trait e.g. lack of empathy and constant need for attention and validation.
That is not always true and not always with everyone. Many people who have ADHD have unsolvable time blindness. They don't mean to do it but their brain chemistry literally disallows them from not doing so in many cases.
Correct. It's been a lifelong struggle for me. I have found outside ways to address it, but even in my 30's I will forget to eat meals or do chores if I don't set disruptive alarms to do so.
That's exactly my point! you do set alarms, you seek the solution. You feel bad when running late so you mask or compensate. If you lack empathy or seek attention, you wouldn't do those things.
I would say I didn't mean the statement that generally - it was contextual to the topic.
i.e. If your friends wont remark on your penmanship, who cares? If they wont remark on how you treat service workers at a restaurant, that's probably concerning.
I should've edited my comment, on reflection my example doesn't fit! I think rincebrain had a nice way of wording what I now believe to be your intent!
I'll add Oreck to the list! Their commercial vacs [0] are robust (the design is dead simple) and overall a refreshing packaging in a bizzaro land where lights and sensors are prioritized over weight and profile! Although I did hear they have fallen from prestige as result from an international buyout some-time ago. Leaving this here for the chance someone can provide an account! Mine from the mid 2000s is still a beast!
I think you are still speaking in the lower abstraction in terms of zwaps' provided understanding. "Tagging specific code" or "files" is likely the type of interfacing most Claude Code users are _not_ doing.
Instead they are defining architecture through specs and verification-loops and attempting to one-shot solutions fitting clear tests. On reflection, I personally don't have many prompts with CC referencing files or code directly, rather I speak in specifications I can then track to a given instance of work in review.
This isn't to suggest you can't work at this abstraction in cursor or w/e interface, but the features you suggest are hardly relevant to the divide zwaps is identifying.
I feel like perhaps you haven't used Cursor. I use both CC and Cursor extensively and as far as I can tell there is nothing that the CC agent will do that Cursor won't do just as well (often using Opus as the backend) and at the same time I get the advantage of seeing the changes in a full IDE if I want to. Their new agent-forward UI hides the code if you don't want to see it as much, but I and many others think that it giving me a full, colourful graphical editor to view changes in is a huge advantage.
I'm not telling you to go use cursor, just to help clarify that you can drive both solutions with the exact same approach and skillset and get very similar results - the difference is the UI. I personally like being able to paste screenshots into the agent, etc.
Nobody is saying your workflow is wrong, it may even be better. However it is not how people use Claude Code or what its attraction is.
What you mention as advantages and features is not something CC users use or require.
On the other hand, Claude is trained on its harness (all but confirmed by Anthropic) so CC is likely just a bit better at its level of abstraction than in cursor.
And at the end, you can’t yet best the subscription.
Cursor does the same stuff but better in my opinion. It’s got an IDE focus but whatever agent pipeline they built is better at coding than Claude’s is and much much faster. I routinely fear for my career while using Cursor, but when I use Claude I wonder what all the hype is about.
That’s not to say Claude sucks, but I think Cursor is really underrated and not well known. I think the IDE focus hurts them with non professional developers, but try using it the same as with Claude and you’ll be surprised, I bet. You can hook it up to GitHub and never touch the IDE if you want to.
> What you mention as advantages and features is not something CC users use or require
See, this is ridiculous nonsense. I can absolutely code in Cursor without seeing the code, and I've used both extensively, and they're remarkably similar. Why would I not want to be able to paste screenshots? Why would I really not want to have an IDE for when it's time to be a Real Engineer and look at the code?
I get it if you can't code and don't know what all those funny punctuation marks mean but it's pretty helpful to be able to e.g. just select germane lines of code and feed them to the agent as context so that it doesn't have to piss away tokens finding it. I guess if you don't even know your codebase at all then you can't do that - but that doesn't mean it doesn't have an advantage to be able to do it, it just means you aren't capable :shrug:
So that sounds like Claude Code is an inferior subset of Cursor. That Cursor can work like Claude Code, but Claude Code is lacking Cursor’s editing capabilities.
If you install the VS Code plugin, it's the same editing functionality. Cursor lacks a lot of the tooling in claude code that makes the experience a lot more... solid.
It's always funny to see people's reactions to AI because it's the same they would treat junior engineers if nobody was around to raise an eyebrow. I've had a super micromanager who was absolutely insistent on naming variables and whether the open brackets were on the same line or a new line. I've also had people who just gave me the desired functionality and let me figure out the in-between and put in my own creative features, etc with just slight feedback.
We have OG Cursor for the micromanagers (who want to approve/deny every line) and things like Claude Code for those who are less picky about the how, and able to be amazed at what it creates.
I think you are right to treat this with sensitivity, but I do find a lot of what you say here to be at odds. Is this the framing provided to you from the fellow in question or entirely yours? Ultimately you are asking a deeply philosophical question regarding when acceptance of someone's choices becomes enabling, but this isn't really fair to pose on a fellow you respect without agreeing on the terms of analysis. Did they provide some specific examples of how this "understanding" reveals itself? Your account of their account is doing a lot of work here I suspect.
As for my highly personal advice, I could be observed as fitting a few of the qualities you've ascribed to your friend, but would be deeply saddened if the few people who do spend time sharing meaning with me then manifested that experience in the form you've given here. I would advise you to not spend any more time wrenching over the effects of one's phenomenon in isolation and either properly redirect the introspection to yourself (with respect to that person) or engage them in an earnest dialog or other form of communication. It may be taxing but it will mean a lot more than the gunk I just typed out :)
> Is this the framing provided to you from the fellow in question or entirely yours?
The description of how he would describe it is (mostly) his framing, though it's compiled through my so may have some of my biases integrated into it, albeit unintentionally. Since all of it is translated through me, I would assume it to be biased despite my attempt at accurately conveying it.
> I would advise you to not spend any more time wrenching over the effects of one's phenomenon in isolation and either properly redirect the introspection to yourself (with respect to that person) or engage them in an earnest dialog or other form of communication.
To this point, it has been almost entirely introspective. I usually let him say what he wants to say, but I try not give any sort of validation such as, "yeah, I agree with you on all of this" but also not disagreement either, since I don't even know what I think of it. I'm not sure I'm even capable of deciding that, and even if I did conclude that it was either healthy or unhealthy, I'm not sure that conclusion would be valid for anyone other than myself. I guess I do lean toward the "unhealthy" side of it when I imagine myself in that situation, but I know there are things that I do/enjoy/etc that others would think is unhealthy (even just having no religious faith, many would consider horrific for example), so I'm quite stuck.
I don't think I could engage in an earnest dialog either since I don't know what I even think of it (I'm assuming dialog here is two way. I have listened/read what he has to say a number of times).
I often gesture towards this phenomenology when religious folk casually attempt to claim "spirit" as some form of belief they hold over me. I honestly don't know if I've developed the position well, it is almost entirely through the lens of continental philosophy absorbing Hegel, but I use it to illustrate that my concept of spirit, as an atheist, may not be a different phenomenological occurrence than that of a religious framing and even shares the quality of a rich historical lineage I can draw from. I could just as easily retreat into untranslated German that sounds poetic or prophetic to the uninitiated, but that would be doing exactly what I'm asking them not to do, leaning on a vocabulary the other person can't engage with without first conceding the ground it's built on. This seems to effectively persuade them to adjust their vocabulary to a register I can actually engage with without needing to hedge for the axiomatic differences we have.
This is a comfortable mode of engagement and it is one I can share with religious folk, but I do find they often refuse this register and I will admit I can't always articulate why I find their refusal frustrating either.
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