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Fred Benenson

@fredbenenson.com

currently: investing in technology and films creator: Breadwinner, Emoji Dick, 🦪 formerly: kickstarter, creative commons, y combinator into: bread, data, surfing, literature, art 'not an artist per se' - The Guardian

130 Posts1024 Follower327 Folgt
Fred Benenson@fredbenenson.com · last yr.

There's this thing that's been bugging me about Claude Code: besides being addictive, LLM coding agents are incentivized to generate *more* code vs. better code. Unfortunately, this seems like a problem for the economic model as there are perverse incentives at play: medium.com/p/23efbaf75aee

The Perverse Incentives of Vibe Coding

I’ve been using AI coding assistants like Claude Code for a while now, and I’m here to say (with all due respect to people who have…

medium.com

Fred Benenson@fredbenenson.com · 2y ago

I’m fascinated (and admittedly a bit repulsed) by the idea of blocklists enumerating people who follow a certain account. On the one hand, they have the potential to be a kind of decentralized hell banning, but on the other it encourages herding and siloing since it’s blocking innocent users

Fred Benenson@fredbenenson.com · 2y ago

This is an extremely important point about what kind of populism liberals need to be considering if we are going to win back huge swaths of the electorate. tl;dr: economic populism isn’t going to be enough

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Fred Benenson@fredbenenson.com · 2y ago

Interesting to find myself on a blocklist on here because I happen to follow a controversial journalist. This means I'm accumulating 1-2 blocks a day from people who I don't know but who block everyone on the list. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Fred Benenson@fredbenenson.com · 2y ago

Our film “The Apprentice” is in such a funny place. Trump hates it and doesn't want you to see it. And yet Hollywood is also afraid of it: actors are shunning Sebastian Stan for playing Trump. If you haven't seen it – go make up your mind for yourself! www.thecut.com/article/seba...

Celebrities Do Not Want to Talk About Trump Anymore

Sebastian Stan says publicists are scared to let their clients talk to him about the movie The Apprentice.

thecut.com

Gabriel Sherman@gabrielsherman.bsky.social · 2y ago

Holy shit. I just read that Sebastian Stan won’t be doing the Variety Actors on Actors awards season panel because other actors’ publicists wouldn’t let their clients talk to Sebastian about playing Donald Trump in THE APPRENTICE movie. This is outrageous!

Fred Benenson@fredbenenson.com · 2y ago

So what do like ... people like to post on here? I can't decide if the delta in engagement I get on here vs. Threads is because I'm accidentally more centrist than the median skeeter or because I'm not getting weird enough or because bsky's algo is more parsimonious or ...

Fred Benenson@fredbenenson.com · 2y ago

Apple’s emoji suggestions used to be extremely narrow and only based on an exact text match of the emoji name (e.g. “Smiling” returned only 😁) Over the last couple years they’ve broadened it to be much fuzzier. Now “death” returns 🌵 and 🏜️ among the others. Maybe because of Death Valley?

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Fred Benenson@fredbenenson.com · 2y ago

I had a dumb idea about American politics (i.e., that the binary nature of most divisive topics is the cause of an intractable two party system) and asked Claude to challenge me. It's response was remarkably good.

I have a naive idea about American politics, and I'm wondering if it's channeling any theories that I don't know about. It goes like this: Maybe the reason we're stuck with a two party system is that it's congruent with the fact that most difficult topics have two sides to them. For example, should we have gone to war in Iraq? That largely boils down to a binary answer. Even abortion has this binary nature (you're either pro-life or pro-choice, despite policies having lots of nuance in terms of implementation, etc.) I think this is important because it makes it harder to argue that a two party system is a fundamentally broken way of doing politics. It may actually just be the natural order of things since third party positions tend to be hard to stake out on divisive topics which seems to inspire so much of politics. This is a fascinating hypothesis that touches on some deep questions in political science. Let me break down a few key considerations: First, while many political issues can be framed as binary choices, this framing might be more a consequence of our two-party system rather than a natural feature of the issues themselves. Take the Iraq War example - beyond just "yes/no," there were positions like: Yes, but only with UN approval Yes, but focused on counter-terrorism rather than regime change No, but maintain aggressive containment No, and pursue active diplomatic engagement Similarly with abortion, many European countries have developed more nuanced political consensuses that don't map neatly onto the pro-life/pro-choice dichotomy. Second, there's a well-established political science theory called "Duverger's Law" that suggests two-party systems emerge naturally from first-past-the-post voting systems (where the candidate with the most votes wins, even without a majority). This happens because voters learn not to "waste" their votes on third parties that can't win, leading to strategic voting for the "lesser evil" among the two major parties. ...
Fred Benenson@fredbenenson.com · 2y ago

Hi everyone! So fun to see so many new / old faces. What are you working on today? What is on your mind? Introduce yourself. Especially if we don't know each other already. I'm super excited to get more involved on here.

Fred Benenson@fredbenenson.com · 2y ago

Potentially offensive idea: Aside from the obvious (X is a hellhole, Threads has finally bored everyone to death), I wonder if Bluesky's resurgence could be tied to a certain type of personality feeling more chaste after the election, which has the effect of turning the temperature down here a bit.