The "if" is doing the heavy lifting here. And universe has lot of "ifs". Here's one:

If this was a perfect distraction spun up to distract from Epstein files, it has succeeded and you have been had.

I am part of a forum with many small business owners. One particular owner has been gung-ho about how he built his entire business app using vibe coding. And my first reaction was - All the power to him. It’s his business and he is free to do so.

But then came the question of data privacy rules and he had no clue. This was concerning because the impact went beyond his business. His response when the oversight was pointed out to him was that being ignorant of the law was enough to save him. Still he went to one of the vibe coding Reddit subs to get help. Then came back fuming because devs on Reddit asked him to hire real developers. He believes that these developers are delusional and a dying breed and AI is so ahead that developers are going to be dead in a years time.

Claude on the other hand can be creative. It understands that examples are for reference purposes only. But there are times it decides to off on a tangent on its own and decide not to follow instructions closely. I find it useful for bouncing off ideas or test something new,

The other thing I notice is Claude has slightly better UI design sensibilities even if you don’t give instructions. GPT on the other hand needs instructions otherwise every UI element will be so huge you need to double scroll to find buttons.

GPT doesn't know how to get creative, you need to tell it exactly what to do and what code you want it to write.

For Claude you can be more general and it will look up solutions for you outside of the scope you gave it.

I presonaly prefer Claude.

I used a Visa card to buy monthly Pro subscription. One day I ran out of credits so I go to buy extra credit. But my card got declined. I recheck my card limit and try again. Still declined.

I try extending the Pro subscription. It works. Turns out my card had a "Secure by Visa" feature. To complete transaction I needed to submit OTP on a Visa page. This page appears when I pay for Pro but not while buying extra credits.

I open a ticket and mention all the details to Claude support. Even these details they come back with "We have no way of knowing why your card was declined. You need to check with your bank".

Later I get hold of a Mastercard with similar protection. OTP triggers on both subscription and extra usage page.

I share the finding and response is still - "We checked with our engineering team and we have no way of knowing why the other Visa card was declined. You have to check with your bank".

I gave up trying to buy extra usage.

My experience with Replicate has also similarly absurd. For testing I loaded $10 to my balance. But I keep getting rate limited with error that my balance should be above $5. Responses have been absurd. AI bot responded that my balance had to be above $10. On asking why the message said $5 the "human" support responded that it might be a "temporary hiccup". Later they came back that my balance had to be above $20 for full rate limits. I asked again - why was their rate limit error message not clear enough? No response for past 10 days.

Its like all these AI companies want to replace developers but their own systems is built using super glue.

For some reason I really don't understand, it's a different payment process in the on the Developer Platform page. When I tried to update there with 3 different credit cards (MC, Visa, AmEx) and using Stripe Link, they all got the same rejection. It's clearly some bug / issue on their side.

Their chat bot is honestly an embarrassment for a frontier AI company like Anthropic, generic, not helpful and trying to lecture me on what MFA/OTP implicating "it's you being to stupid to use a credit card".

I'm also waiting already for 2 weeks for a human support on my 2 messages.

This whole thread shows I am (and you are) not alone with this issue, so it's hard to understand how the "engineering team checked" and didn't find anything.

I've been building payments systems for over a decade and just projecting from this thread their support should be blowing up from such an issue - I know in my companies it would have.

So they certainly have a problem with their flow with Visa. I wonder if the payment flow was vibecoded from scratch, never experienced that with any other site.

Well, at least they're dogfooding support.

> 4. Showed everyone in the ME and the world that if anyone messes with them they’ll close the straight. Then gas prices go up. Then your own domestic pop gets pissed. Then your chances of re-election drop.

Everyone knew from the beginning that closing the strait was something Iran would do. But it is current US government that is either inept or too smart for their own good and thought with US producing surplus oil for domestic use, it will not impact them. They didn't care for the consequences and it came back to bite them.

Also, wasn't it that even if the war was stop/ceasefire oil prices will take a long time to recover? If that is true the domestic pop getting pissed might be true even with this ceasefire and it will hurt the current government in their upcoming elections.

> 3. Reminded the anti regime population that they’re not going anywhere and that the US can’t help them.

More like galvanized people against a common enemy. Regime is going to come down hard on the protestors than ever before and some might find it easier to blame the power which claimed to deliver the regime change. Then Americans will talk about how Iranians hate their way of life and the attack was justified.

I have to assume that at least someone in the room was well aware that all oil is not created equal and that US refineries were designed from the beginning for Venezuelan and similar oil rather than US oil.

Given that Iran has been one week/one month/one year away from acquiring nuclear capabilities since 2014 - first Trump Presidency, and they are not any closer a decade later this "buying time" rhetoric is nothing short of "Iraq has WMD" level of absurdity.

Not disagreeing, but Bibi is saying this since 1980s. Now he found US leader stupid enough to believe these tales.

Iran's 60% enriched uranium stockpile is really not up for debate. Iran is happy to tell everyone that they have it. With the proper equipment, 60% can go to 90% in a single month. So the question is how advanced is the Iranian infrastructure for the final enrichment step, and (less commonly talked about) how ready they are to actually make a fission bomb out of that material. The latter task is not considered to be very hard, North Korea did it after all, so the main focus has been on the former. There does seem to be some decent information that the centrifuge array has been under active development at various points, and has been consitently, actively targetted by Mossad/CIA for at least the past 20 years or so. For example, Stuxnet was a joint CIA/Mossad operation that begain in 2005 and continued through both GWBush and Obama.

Unfortunately, even with some nice bribes from Obama, Iran was always a little cagey with the IAEA inspectors, and officially kicked them out in 2021. So after that, the only sources for the state of Irans nuclear infrastructure information effectively became Iran itself and Mossad.

Now you're getting it.

In this case, I think a network of mostly independent actors whose interests happen to align makes more sense. But maybe sometimes those interests are a little different than what people commonly understand them to be.

You live by the sword, you die by the sword. If people were so smart where were they when Musk was hyping autonomous vehicles being just around the corner for years? Or the fact that the board of directors kept raising his compensation to insane levels because he kept threatening them that he'll walk out? The company chose to do this. People didn't. Now that he is tanking the valuation, we don't need to separate out Tesla and Musk. They are one and the same.