> We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe.
Are we? People saying "have a safe trip" is pretty weak evidence.
The counter evidence is just about everything else going on, at least in the US. Relaxed worker safety standards, weakened environmental protections, and generally moving as fast as possible.
We have 4 kids. Before we had our 3rd, we needed to buy a new vehicle solely because we couldn't fit 3 car seats into the back of our old car. And when traveling with kids, carrying 4 gigantic car seats plus your other luggage is not exactly as easy as you might think! It essentially rules out solo parent travel with all 4 kids. Transferring car seats between two cars, or installing car seats in a taxi, is a serious pain.
Furthermore, the evidence that car seats actually benefit safety is significantly less robust than you might think. The "mountains of evidence" that do exist for things like 70% reductions in fatalities, bizarrely enough, generally compare the rate of fatalities for car seats vs completely unrestrained kids. When you compare the rate of fatalities in car seats to kids wearing adult seat belts, the bulk of the evidence suggests essentially no difference. Fatalities happen when the forces involved are catastrophic and sadly a car seat doesn't help much for kids over 2.
Even a back of the envelope comparison makes this extremely plausible: car crash fatalities for kids 9-12 have declined by 72% from 1978-2017. If car seats and car seat laws save significant numbers of lives, you'd expect that the fatality rate for kids 0-8, who are generally in car seats, to have decreased much more. But it hasn't, it declined by 73% over the same period.
Now, car seats and boosters do seem to moderately reduce non-fatal injuries - huge spread of estimates here, most clustering around 10-25%. It's reasonable for most people to use car seats or boosters most of the time based on this alone, IMO, especially for young kids. But do they justify a mandate? IMO: no. Absolutely not.
Worth mentioning that mandates probably do succeed in one thing: they reduce the number of children born at all by at least 57x more than they prevent child fatalities. Roughly 8,000 kids per year, 145,000 kids since 1980. That's with the (unlikely, as discussed above) assumption that car seats do in fact save significant numbers of lives. But it's also entirely possible that they've prevented hundreds of thousands of kids from being born, somewhat reduced the nonfatal injury rate, and saved essentially no lives.
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 (car seat mandates "led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000")
Note that both the 45% and 59% estimate for injury reduction and the 28% estimate for fatality reduction all come from one research group using a proprietary data set. Everything that's independently reproducible points towards small or zero effect on fatalities and modest effects on injuries.
In the hypothetical scenario where car seats have only downsides, then of course I’m against a mandate.
There is a difference between cherry picking studies that back up your view point and how medical experts set policy though.
Experts review all of the data, and ignore outliers like a paper published in a law journal that suggests car seats are the primary reason families have shrunk from having three to two kids since the 80’s
You’ve funnily proven the point of how willing people are to put immense burdens on others in the name of safety.
There is a non-zero amount of deaths the car seat law would prevent. The burden will discourage larger families and will contribute to population decline far larger than the lives saved.
You’re not only arguing for it, you’re doing it in a way as if preventing death is such an obvious single dimension to optimize that you’re calling people irrational because they are against something that reduces fatalities.
Your same argument is what leads to prohibition and a long list of other things that suck the color out of life in the interest of “safety”.
The evidence that car seats save lives is significantly weaker that you probably believe, as I detailed in another comment in this thread. But look: even if car seats make sense for a typical 5 year old on a typical drive in their typical car (which is a higher evidentiary burden than you might think), a mandate imposes a huge logistical tax that makes many normal things completely infeasible or impractical:
- travel with many kids (nope, physically can't carry 4 car seats plus luggage)
- using a taxi, e.g. to go see a movie (nope, can't carry a car seat into the theater)
- carpooling with other families (I'll drive them, you pick up? Nope, we'd have to shuffle car seats around.)
- rides with grandparents or other family members (sorry, we'd have to deliver the car seat to them first)
- splitting kids between two vehicles for errands (let's spend 10m wrestling car seats from one car to the other first)
The whole texture of independent childhood is altered by car seat mandates! Everything gets filtered through "is there a car seat available?". If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."
> Car seats and booster seats significantly reduce the risk of fatal injury in crashes by 71% for infants and 54% for toddlers (1-4 years old), saving over 11,000 lives in the US since 1975
> Booster seats reduce the risk of serious injury for children aged 4-8 by 45% compared to seatbelts alone.
It's from the AI summary because it was the most quotable but the articles I found say pretty much the same thing. Seems pretty solid to me.
> If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."
If you haven't experienced your children dying unnecessarily because it was inconvenient to make them safe it's hard to describe..
What articles did you find, exactly? What primary evidence are they basing their claims on? Many of the numbers you'll find with a google search are unclear about what they're comparing to - I believe both of the fatality numbers above (71% and 54%) are relative to completely unrestrained kids, which is not the relevant comparison.
The 45% number I specifically discuss in the other comment, but every independently reproducible study using publicly available data has found much smaller effects, around 10-25% for minor injuries and no statistically significant difference in severe injuries.
To be clear, I'm not saying "don't use car seats," I'm saying that the evidence doesn't support mandating them through age 8 (or 12!).
Our kids would be much safer if we drove everywhere at 15mph - less convenient, but it would prevent many unnecessary deaths. Unfortunately, it is impossible to do anything in the world without risk. So we're forced to balance convenience against safety every day, whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not.
It notes this, which might be pertinent to your comment regarding how the overall statistics don't show the trends you expect:
> A NHTSA study found that while most parents and caregivers believe they know how to correctly install their car seats, about half (46%) have installed their child’s car seat incorrectly.
> Children in booster seats in the back seat are 45% less likely to be injured in a crash than children *using a seat belt alone*.
That's about as much effort as I'm willing to put into this conversation. I'll finish off by saying I'm not American and these rules exist outside the US as well - I have a hard time believing so many countries would separately implement this (or similar) mandate if it was as unfounded as you claim.
But sure everything would be better if any moron was allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe.
Yes, I think that we'd all be better off if every person was allowed to have their own personal values, deciding what's more important to themSELVES, rather than piling on and trying to force every one into a one-size-fits-all solution.
For my part, I'd much rather have people wishing me "have a rich and fulfilling life" rather than "be timid and careful to maximize your time even if it's boring and unrewarding".
Sure, you can disagree with my priorities, but that's the whole point. We should each be able to have our own priorities.
Do you think it’s okay for people to indoctrinate their own children with religion and other political views?
Far more harm comes from that than tail risk elimination mandating car seats between 8 and 12 years.
Would you be willing to make all new parents submit to frequent breathalyzers during pregnancy and after birth? Drinking is a massive factor in infant mortality at birth and SIDS.
The evidence on car seats is extremely weak and they prevent only a handful of injuries. You'd be better off redesigning roads or having more collision protection systems in cars. As self-driving cars get better to the point where they can communicate and eliminate many human errors, there's probably no need for car seats at all. In many situations they make things more dangerous, not less.
I responded with a mix of mostly B and C answers and got “advanced.” Yet, as pointed out by another commenter, selecting all D answers (which would make you an expert!) gets you called a beginner.
I can only assume the quiz itself was vibe-coded and not tested. What an incredible time we live in.
Or that it's taking into account the Dunning-Kruger effect. In that, if you think you are an expert in all cases, you are really a beginner in everything.
I'm a beginner with agentic coding. I vibe code something most days, from a few lines up to refactors over a few files. I don't knowingly use skills, rarely _choose_ to call out to tools, haven't written any skills and only one or two ad hoc scripts, and have barely touched MCPs (because the few I've used seem flaky and erratic). I answered as such and got... intermediate.
Hey! Thanks for the feedback on the quiz and you're right, the scoring logic has a bug. Already on my fix list.
But the quiz is just the entry point. The real value is the 11 interactive modules and terminal simulators where you practice actual Claude Code commands, config builders that generate real files, and quizzes that explain the "why" when you get it wrong.
Would love to hear what you think of the actual modules.
There seems to be a particular way that people working with LLMs start speaking - its like utterly confident, leaving no room for self introspection, borderline arrogant, and almost always selling the last thing they output. Hm
The commenters here don't care what the article is about when they can't access the article and the much more concerning question not about web scraping is.
Having used both terminal and GUI based development environments, the good GUI environments blow terminal based workflows out of the water.
There are pros and cons to each. Vim can do some neat things, but GUI based IDEs are generally useful and easier to use out of the box for development.
The terminal tools are getting popular because people don’t need to do development. Claude is doing the development task. People just need to quickly review code in terminal.
> but GUI based IDEs are generally useful and easier to use out of the box for development.
This is true, they are much better for discovery and affordance, but as you progress with your tooling and tool usage there is a much higher ceiling on your productivity with other tools and their composability. In my opinion, not putting effort into learning tools ultimately holds a lot of people back from their potential.
Yes, for things like Node, I do use tools like the chrome dev tools for debugging and such.
But find a terminal first approach leads me to other tools like curl and jq usage as I go. I see coworkers using a ton of time trying to repetitively execute the code to see those spots in really inefficient ways. And end up completely lost when they could be using tools like git bisect.
Or another good example devops type support is if one web server out of many seems to be misbehaving, I can use aws command line to get internal ips behind the lb to curl to grep and find it in minutes after others have tried for hours. It makes it second nature if your mind goes there first.
I work 99% in a terminal and fire up a JetBrains IDE when I need to do deep debugging. It’s so rare for me though that it’s worth more for me to get good at the terminal stuff. I’m sure this depends heavily on the type of work being done, game dev for example really needs a good debugger. That being said, gdb and others have perfectly fine text mode interfaces, albeit with a steeper learning curve.
As always, the “best” tool is the one your most familiar with that gets the job done. Text vs GUI doesn’t really matter at the middle of the bell curve.
Composition. I don’t think there’s any GUI that can be used for the git email workflow.
Versatility. In most TUI editors, running an external commands is easy, including piping a part of the text and receiving its output. As this is a fundamental unix principle, there’s basically no barrier between what you’re editing and other data on your system. In GUI, everything is its own silo.
Presentation. Code is not linear, but most gui forces use to use one window to see your text files. And when they allow splitting it’s cumbersome to use. Vim and Emacs has a easier way to divide you screen so that the relevant information can be presented at once. And there’s terminal multiplexers for simpler editors.
Why would you say GUI based workflows are better (ignoring LLMs for now)? I would maybe give you debugging with breakpoints but for anything else I love my neovim with tmux setup
I don't think setup time is a fair comparison here. Any dev who cares to use CLI tools has a dotfiles repo that sets up everything in "under a minute".
I mean yeah, there are tools to automate it. I think you may have a point if both of the following hold true:
1. You very frequently have to install your setup from scratch.
2. Preconfiguring something that aids in installing from scratch is not viable or sensible. (Perhaps you work in an environment where you're not allowed access to your personal dotfiles repo, for example.)
But I think most people will fail at least one of these checks.
I find that (neo)vim enable code navigation to be much faster than any GUI as well, once past the learning curve. If you’re going to work with code long term (eg: years), the learning curve pays off quickly.
That seems a little harsh. GUI tools can give us a more vibrant and useful interface.
But, I think the main problem is that although there have been many attempts we have not gotten to a standard way to compose different GUI tools easily or repeat actions.
I completely disagree. Terminal workflows are superior in a number of ways. Most important to me are that they are more composable and more customizable. The learning curve is tougher, but the "skill ceiling" on them is higher. The ease and speed with which somebody comfortable in their terminal based environment will navigate through the tasks they need to do will always exceed what is even possible in a GUI.
I would say that GUIs are superior for a few specific use cases, but otherwise sub par. Step through debugging comes to mind as a good GUI use case, but even that I'm not sure if it's because a GUI is inherently better, or making a terminal based debugger is harder and so nobody has made a good one yet.
Composability sounds great until you need to onboard three new devs who would rather gouge their eyes out than decipher an 80-line shell script that breaks on macOS because one env var or BSD tool behaves differently.
That cost is not theory.
Terminal skill ceiling exists, but a lot of custom flows are just local maxima that look elegant to the person who wrote them and miserable to everyone else who has to debug or extend them.
GUIs give up some raw power, yet for diff review, history browsing, and getting a team moving without turning every workflow into a tiny priesthood, they are often the better tool.
Put simply, the military should have to ask Anthropic for permission each time it needs intelligence. Time is of the essence for the military and having to argue over these things in the moment is not good. These things should be figured out ahead of time and or properly reviewed afterwards. Working with such a company that demands to embed themself into this process with the power to deny any request is too much power. The risk to the military for companies working with Anthropic is that they can get delays or outages when there shouldn't be which can jeopardize time sensitive operations.
Are we? People saying "have a safe trip" is pretty weak evidence.
The counter evidence is just about everything else going on, at least in the US. Relaxed worker safety standards, weakened environmental protections, and generally moving as fast as possible.
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