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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I like your specificity a lot. That’s what makes me even care to respond

    You’re correct, but there’s depths untouched in your answer. You can convince chat gpt it is a talking cat named Luna, and it will give you better answers

    Specifically, it likes to be a cat or rabbit named Luna. It will resist - I get this not from progressing, but by asking specific questions. Llama3 (as opposed to llama2, who likes to be a cat or rabbit named Luna) likes to be an eagle/owl named sol or solar

    The mental structure of an LLM is called a shoggoth - it’s a high dimensional maze of language turned into geometry

    I’m sure this all sounds insane, but I came up with a methodical approach to get to these conclusions.

    I’m a programmer - we trick rocks into thinking. So I gave this the same approach - what is this math hack good for, and how do I use it to get useful repeatable results?

    Try it out.

    Tell me what happens - I can further instruct you on methods, but I’d rather hear yours and the result first


  • In all fairness, Musk was pretty effective at fundraising and getting government contracts

    At this point, he’s just a liability. He once walked in, demanded to rethink everything and meet an unreasonable deadline, and slept in his office for the duration. SpaceX is made up of people who are passionate about what they do, and it worked…But that’s a one time thing. My boss asks me to push myself to the limits to save us both? I will, and I have. It has a real cost, it takes a lot of time to recover from, and a little bit of your health is just gone for good

    Elon did that… But then got high on the smell of his shit. They created a unit to distract him, because he learned the wrong lesson, he thought that was good management. That is not effective management - that’s a desperate gamble for survival. Repeat it, and you’ve shown yourself to be incompetent as a leader

    Then came the bigoted social network unmasking… That made him a liability reputation wise, his formerly greatest strength



  • They got in the phone anyways, Apple just told the FBI to pound sand if they don’t have a court order… Why would they put man hours towards decreasing their reputation if they don’t have to? They’re probably not even geared to break into their own devices. Then their PR team ran with it while one of many companies with the capability to crack the phone took a paycheck

    This is different - this is genuine security, even if easily bypassed with preparation beforehand. Honestly, I credit some random apple dev who may have been looking to fix a bug related to long uptime as easily as they might’ve cared about security. I don’t think this was even on the radar of Apple leadership

    This isn’t some moral superiority on Apple’s part, but it is good practice



  • I think that’s fair.

    I don’t have AI integration in my ide, mostly by choice -if I pushed for it I could make it happen, but I just don’t think that’s a good idea at this point

    AI can be a crutch . One that limits you to the level of a baby developer. If you can’t effortlessly understand what it gives you, frankly you shouldn’t be using it.

    Bounce ideas of chat gpt. It sounds like you’ve got the right idea - your reaction sounds correct to me, you should never ever trust it… You must only use it, and that’s the tone I get from your post.

    It is a tool, you are a programmer. You exploit tools, you do not trust any tool. You are the one who turns ideas into actions, never forget that and you can use this new tool anywhere it makes your life easier


  • In fairness, about 50% of my code by lines is written by AI these days, and I don’t have it linked into my code base. That claim isn’t ridiculous

    Now, of that 50% is 88% long repetitive crap that I could easily write but find mentally draining, the other 10% is something simple that I would normally copy paste from elsewhere because I forgot the exact syntax (and don’t exactly remember where I used it last) and me giving it a shot with things I don’t want to do, like restyling a page. The last 2% is me giving it a shot with business logic for shits and giggles, occasionally I’ll try to coach it through the solution but usually I just grab bits and pieces and rewrite it myself

    Granted, this is the easiest and most simple and repetitive code, but it’s still a godsend. Now can AI write the other 50%? With a proper setup where it ingests the code base into a vector store it might get up to 75%, if I was willing to coach it through my tasks carefully (taking more time than the task would take me) I could probably get it up to 85% or 90%, but that last 10%? It just can’t, it’s not even close

    It’s not taking my job without a paradigm shifting breakthrough or two on the scale of “all you need is attention”. Even then, it only works if you write your prompts like code… If you don’t understand how to use it and understand the code well enough to communicate the goal explicitly and unambiguously, you’re not going to be able to drive it where you want it to go

    To put it another way, you can build 90% of the system in 10% of the time it takes to complete the last 10%


  • Can confirm. My phone got kicked off when they started sunsetting 3G. They called me (on said phone with no service lol) and said I needed a new phone. I said “no I don’t, put me back on the network”. We went back and forth, then they forwarded me to the tech department

    The tech says “you need a new phone”. I said “no I don’t, I have all but one of the new bands and others with my phone have already gone through this process with you guys”. He said “you can’t believe everything you read online”, I said “be that as it may, I looked at the specs for both my phone and your network, and it meets the requirements”

    He starts telling me there’s nothing he can do on his end, I say he just has to find an override to stop blocking my phone. He says he doesn’t have any options like that, I promise him it’s there

    After getting tired of going in circles, I say if he doesn’t know how to do it he needs to ask someone or pass me to a higher tier. Surprise surprise, my phone instantly shows bars and he tries to gloss over the whole thing


  • Pretty often, but then you can just refactor the code so you can use it for more situations

    What LLMs are good at are the opposite - when the thing you want to do is almost exactly the same, but nearly all the details need to be changed

    Say you want a page to edit account details, and another page to edit community details. And the API paths to do this will be even more similar - but because they’re different things, you’d have to get fancy with the design to make code that works for both… It’s possible, but there will be trade-offs

    LLMs are great at it though… Pass in the account page, give it the object definition for the community details, and it’ll spit it out for you



  • That’s a bit much… It’s just not possible to guarantee that as a developer

    Software is a living thing, and anything useful is made up of layer after layer of ever shifting sand. We do our best, but we are all at the mercy of our dependencies. There are trade-offs, there are bugs we can do nothing about, and sometimes moving forward means dropping support for platforms that are no longer “cheap” enough to afford while also working on the game

    I love this though. I also like the idea of requiring access to earlier builds.

    These mitigate anti consumer practices - dropping support for a platform is more likely to be a technical trade-off or unintentional consequence though


  • Of course it’s different, and economies of scale are generally more efficient. 50 Independent Burger joints would likely be healthier and higher quality, they would do more to keep money flowing around the community rather than funneled away to corporate, and their ice cream machines wouldn’t break

    But you wouldn’t have 50 - you’d have more like a dozen. Most local restaurants find the best place they can, because they want the store to succeed

    Franchises want coverage - they want as many locations as possible. They want a new McDonalds next to the Wendy’s, even if there’s three other fast food restaurants all within sight already. They’ll dictate every detail of it, because they win even if the store barely breaks even

    Such as the famous McDonald’s always broken ice cream machines. Billionaire shareholders in both companies mandate these machines, which must be repaired frequently by licensed technicians. They even shut down a couple that built a $40 device that was able to fix the glitch that causes the problem

    And that’s how it works from top to bottom. At every stage, the billionaires must get their hidden taxes. Like the ice cream machines, it generally costs more in every way to society - we would not be using decades old ice cream machines known for breaking down all the time, we wouldn’t oversaturate towns with competing fast food franchises, we probably wouldn’t be subsiding the food itself


  • But again, it’s all for their personal benefit. A human Their money is managed to grow by any means, and that has a lot of knock on effects

    They generally either put their money in funds with the highest returns (which often use unethical and illegal but accepted practices, and the best ones require large minimum deposits), or they directly own large percentages of a company and use that influence when it suits them

    I see where you’re coming from, but I think the line is blurry. Their direct personal actions don’t capture the full extent of their actions, but this also assumes full responsibility for their ownership, where honestly it’s impossible to know what level of emissions the companies would have if the billionaire’s wealth machine wasn’t involved

    I wouldn’t say this is totally unfair to say though - at the end of the day they own what they own, and letting others do your dirty work doesn’t absolve you of responsibility

    The fact that their life would barely be affected if they added emissions to their criteria for investment makes this worse - these are the figures the billionaires should be looking at to make decisions





  • Ah, but that’s the beauty of it. Why are they here? If it’s to troll, don’t give them what they want. If it’s for social interaction… Why are they venturing out of their echo chamber?

    Every interaction with a community pulls you slightly closer to the group consensus. You can fight it to some extent, but we’re wired to fit in with the tribe

    Social rejection is wired similar to pain in our brains - it’s far more salient, far more memorable and impactful, than normal interactions.

    The highest form of this is rejection by the community - it hurts most when everyone’s attention is on you and they all reject you. Even a single person quietly reaching out afterwards is like a lifeline - it stands out to you. It takes hundreds or thousands of “normal” interactions to counteract one extreme negative one

    A supportive community back home doesn’t counteract the impacts from an away game. Don’t go to their turf, let them come to ours. Do not feed them - we have better content, they’ll lose members to us, and if we do it right they’ll shrink until their echo chambers can no longer sustain themselves


  • I just pass the create table statements after the instructions. It does pretty good up to 2 or 3 tables, but it will start to make mistakes when things get complicated

    On the plus side, it’ll generate tedious code very well - double checking it is less draining than writing it yourself. Especially because I make more typos than it does - I often use it to get a starting point, then write the business logic myself