I’ve given it access to my small business books for the last few months (attended sessions only) and so far it’s helped me clean up countless errors made by humans, at the expense of a small handful of duplicated transactions that got shaken out pretty quickly.
How do you know those duplicates are the only errors it made? You weren't aware of the apparently countless human errors before, so how would you be aware of Claude's errors?
Redundant verification is built into the workflow, both at the agent-instruction level and downstream. Reconciling a monthly bank statement with your account register in QuickBooks, for example, has the benefit of making sure you haven’t omitted transactions or added phantom ones, and once you finish reconciling a period you lock the register to prevent further changes. I supervise mutations closely and can relax my oversight when I know there are redundant checks for correctness downstream.
The class of human errors I’m encountering most often are ones caused by missing context: misfiling of transactions because my bookkeeper didn’t recognize a vendor, didn’t know a transaction needed to be attached to a specific project or client, lacked access to my calendar, didn’t have my login to pull receipts, didn’t have time to understand a spreadsheet. Claude has ready access to all of these has been remarkably adept at synthesizing that to help it come at accounting tasks with a level of detailed-oriented obsessiveness that no human I’ve ever hired has shown.
I’ll admit this article was enough to convince me to port one of my CLI tools from Python to Rust last night and I got a 30x performance gain with a binary 20% of the size. Not bad!
Intriguingly, ADHD is correlated with crime as well. Some studies would estimate that it's 4-10x (or more) as prevalent in prison populations as in the general population.[1][2]
We could conclude that a lot of people are self-medicating without realizing it.
There's also a significant reduction in crime rate and drug use in people with adhd that are being properly treated. I'll let interested parties do their own research.
I had episodes like this when I was younger. And had them flare up when I was taking Buspirone for anxiety as an adult. They'd last about 10-20 minutes and I always described them as "pure chaos of the internal geometric space."
Never did find any kind of label for the symptoms. I kept a journal of the episodes for a while. They seemed to come up monthly when I was around 16.
At the very least it's validating to encounter others who had had similar experiences.
That all makes a lot of sense. I wonder if those issues could be alleviated by contracting a sufficiently large outside firm to manage therapy services, thus at least creating some separation and objectivity for individual therapists.
My wife has been using an approach called "Design Therapy" (www.designtherapy.org) that uses design thinking methods for self/couples development. This allows mental health challenges to be approached outside of a "disease treatment" frame. I appreciate the approach.
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