that converts urine from wastewater

[into]…

a $3.5 billion industry

Wait so they’re just going to steal our pee and not even pay us for it

I love it, hate having to check my phone for these, brilliant choice to put the code onscreen

To me it seems fine, especially if there’s still a free version that’s basically the same or it gets released after a delay. I don’t think I’d pay for something like this myself, and maybe they’re taking some legal risk, but if the money lets them spend time making media accessible, how is there a problem that outweighs the good?

What you confuse here is doing something that can benefit from applying logical thinking with doing science.

I’m not confusing that. Effective programming requires and consists of small scale application of the scientific method to the systems you work with.

the argument has become “but it seems to be thinking to me”

I wasn’t making that argument so I don’t know what you’re getting at with this. For the purposes of this discussion I think it doesn’t matter at all how it was written or whether what wrote it is truly intelligent, the important thing is the code that is the end result, whether it does what it is intended to and nothing harmful, and whether the programmer working with it is able to accurately determine if it does what it is intended to.

The central point of it is that, by the very nature of LKMs to produce statistically plausible output, self-experimenting with them subjects one to very strong psychological biases because of the Barnum effect and therefore it is, first, not even possible to assess their usefulness for programming by self-exoerimentation(!) , and second, it is even harmful because these effects lead to self-reinforcing and harmful beliefs.

I feel like “not even possible to assess their usefulness for programming by self-exoerimentation(!)” is necessarily a claim that reading and testing code is something no one can do, which is absurd. If the output is often correct, then the means of creating it is likely useful, and you can tell if the output is correct by evaluating it in the same way you evaluate any computer program, without needing to directly evaluate the LLM itself. It should be obvious that this is a possible thing to do. Saying not to do it seems kind of like some “don’t look up” stuff.

Are you saying that it is not possible to use scientific methods to systematically and objectively compare programming tools and methods?

No, I’m saying the opposite, and I’m offended at what the author seems to be suggesting, that this should only be attempted by academics, and that programmers should only defer to them and refrain from attempting this to inform their own work and what tools will be useful to them. An absolutely insane idea given that the task of systematic evaluation and seeking greater objectivity is at the core of what programmers do. A programmer should obviously be using their experience writing and testing both typing systems to decide which is right for their project, they should not assume they are incapable of objective judgment and defer their thinking to computer science researchers who don’t directly deal with the same things they do and aren’t considering the same questions.

This was given as an example of someone falling for manipulative trickery:

A recent example was an experiment by a CloudFlare engineer at using an “AI agent” to build an auth library from scratch.

From the project repository page:

I was an AI skeptic. I thought LLMs were glorified Markov chain generators that didn’t actually understand code and couldn’t produce anything novel. I started this project on a lark, fully expecting the AI to produce terrible code for me to laugh at. And then, uh… the code actually looked pretty good. Not perfect, but I just told the AI to fix things, and it did. I was shocked.

But understanding and testing code is not (necessarily) guesswork. There is no reason to assume this person is incapable of it, and no reason to justify the idea that it should never be attempted by ordinary programmers when that is the main task of programming.

The problem, though, with responding to blog posts like that, as I did here (unfortunately), is that they aren’t made to debate or arrive at a truth, but to reinforce belief. The author is simultaneously putting himself on the record as having hardline opinions and putting himself in the position of having to defend them. Both are very effective at reinforcing those beliefs.

A very useful question to ask yourself when reading anything (fiction, non-fiction, blogs, books, whatever) is “what does the author want to believe is true?”

Because a lot of writing is just as much about the author convincing themselves as it is about them addressing the reader. …

There is no winning in a debate with somebody who is deliberately not paying attention.

This is all also a great argument against the many articles claiming that LLMs are useless for coding, in which the authors all seem to have a very strong bias. I can agree that it’s a very good idea to distrust what people are saying about how programming should be done, including mistrusting claims about how AI can and should be used for it.

We need science #

Our only recourse as a field is the same as with naturopathy: scientific studies by impartial researchers. That takes time, which means we have a responsibility to hold off as research plays out

This on the other hand is pure bullshit. Writing code is itself a process of scientific exploration; you think about what will happen, and then you test it, from different angles, to confirm or falsify your assumptions. The author seems to be saying that both evaluating correctness of LLM output and the use of Typescript is comparable to falling for homeopathy by misattributing the cause of recovering from illness. The idea that programmers should not use their own judgment or do their own experimentation, that they have no way of telling if code works or is good, to me seems like a wholesale rejection of programming as a craft. If someone is avoiding self experimentation as suggested I don’t know how they can even say that programming is something they do.

Kind of sounds like they are just out to get him because he keeps protesting the lack of crosswalks

He also reportedly wrote an email to Charlottesville’s city manager which read: “There is a marked crosswalk now [at the intersection in question] in spite of you … It’s chalk[,] not paint[.] Please replace it with a real one.”

A police report that Cox shared with the news station alleged that officers were unable to determine whether his improvised crosswalk had been created with permanent paint.

Like he explicitly told them it was chalk and also you can just look at it

What is the reason to make one of these instead of wearing a regular respirator? They mention N95 masks being less comfortable, but this thing looks like the part that straps to your face is basically the same as a respirator. Just instead of filters you have to draw air through there’s a fan, but why do you need the fan?

if it were me I’d be conflicted about whether to respond with just “k” or demanding a conversation about boundaries

The officer said there had been a noise complaint about the medical center’s air conditioning units, and cannabis was possibly being cultivated inside, the complaint says.

He repeatedly surveilled the property in 2023 and reported the “distinct odor of live cannabis plant and not the odor of dried cannabis being smoked” — as well as tinted windows, security cameras and two people dressed similarly, according to the complaint.

The officer believed these were signs of a hidden marijuana growing operation, and efforts to expand it, the complaint says.

lol

Depends on the data, some data would be fine being deleted but not fine being leaked, some the other way around.

Doesn’t seem to be the case, some popular servers:

• Ollama written in Go
• llama.cpp C++

And then of course talking to these servers can be in any language that has a library for it or even just handles network requests, although Python is a nice choice. Possibly the process of training models is more heavy on the Python dependencies than inference is, haven’t actually done anything with that though.

That’s why Playtron is excited to announce Game Dollar, the stablecoin built for games and ready to handle massive transaction volume over the next decade,” said Kirt McMaster, co-founder and CEO of Playtron. “Game Dollar will unlock new economic models for developers and marketplaces while enabling consumer incentives only possible via programmable dollars.”

What’s wrong with the stablecoins that already exist I wonder?

as confirmed by a Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT

hmmmmmm

Not even just because people are idiots, but also because a LLM is going to have quirks you will need to work around or exploit to get the best results out of it. Like how it’s better to edit your question to clarify a misunderstanding and regenerate the response than it is to respond again with the correction, because there is more of a risk it gets stuck on its mistake that way. Or how it can be useful in some situations to (if the interface allows this) manually edit part of the LLM output to be more in line with what you want it to be saying before generating the rest.

The argument they make seems to boil down to, there’s various reasons to believe that social media can be a negative influence on teenagers, social media companies are intentionally manipulative and amoral, the idea of this type of social media ban is popular with the public in polls, and the Trump administration opposes social media regulation. So yeah, not all that comprehensive. Notably lacking is a case that a youth ban is actually the right solution and wouldn’t cause its own harms, an explanation of why teenagers and adults are so different here and what that implies, or an acknowledgement of the cases against such a ban (for instance they make an uncritically positive reference to last year’s ban by Australia which is extremely controversial and has a lot of good arguments against it, like the privacy disaster of making everyone prove their identity to post online). To be fair the whole thing seems like mostly a really brief summary of The Anxious Generation, maybe that book makes a stronger point.

It has to be acknowledged that much of what makes up human culture and society is online now, and will continue to be going forward. The real question should be, what do we want that society to look like, and how do we move in that direction? Probably there is a lot more to it than passing laws that ban things. Calling social media digital crack and demanding teenagers to go live in a past that doesn’t exist anymore seems like a very head-in-sand attitude to me.

“There is no formal relationship between the platforms and the workers. If the tasks disappear, they are simply no longer called,” he said.

Fuentes and 19 other Venezuelan taskers have a WhatsApp group where they take turns to alert members when a task becomes available. “If someone has insomnia, they say, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye out tonight,’” she said.

I used to do online gig work like this. The good part is you don’t really have to directly interact with anyone, the bad part is this stuff, garbage pay, and the platforms not giving a fuck about whether clients scam you or falsely tank your approval rating. To even obtain decent tasks you basically have to do what these people did with an active group chat, or cheat and use scripts to automatically snipe them and notify you.

The most memorable ones were stuff like, transcribing videos of maintenance people describing what they were doing, and watching video feeds of surgery robots and rating the skills of their operators.

Despite all the shitty aspects of it, I think it sucks this kind of work is going away, because it is really convenient to have as an option and used to be an effective way to avoid getting a traditional job if you were really dead set on that. And I guess a good option in general for people in countries with very low cost of living.

I eat a lot of rice so that sucks

No, I try to treat that machine like a quarantine zone, I have a two PC setup and that’s part of the reason for it. So basically I don’t log into online accounts on that one (except relatively unimportant accounts for convenience, like Steam), and I don’t do important stuff on it