JKolios

When you use an LLM, [...] you get to pay the social tax: you converse and negotiate and convince and sometimes even get angry1 at the so-called tool.

Might be a subjective opinion, but this is how writing code always felt to me, even pre-LLMs. An ongoing inner conversation where I try to convince the text on the screen to match the text in my head. It never really felt like tool use in the sense of manual labor.

It was a tongue-in-cheek comment, not really a perfect analogy to the situation. Still, the author expects teams with different priorities and design philosophies to follow a new standard, that can easily end up in more fragmentation.

1. There are 5 competing standards.

2. This is clearly unacceptable, so we've created the one standard to unite them all™.

3. There are 6 competing standards.

Well, the Matrix did this. Badly. "Machines who have developed nuclear power are using human bodies as batteries"-level badly.

"A rogue AI led to a serious security incident" is certainly a way to write "Someone vibe coded too hard and leaked data".

Now that there's widespread direct connectivity between agents and browser sessions, are CAPTCHAs even relevant anymore?

Casual threats of invasion don't build solid and lasting partnerships? Who knew.

More diversity in the LLM space is always good. In my experience though, speaking as a native speaker of one of the less-used European languages, Mistral's models already use it pretty well.

(the water is thoroughly irradiated from a war that happened 200 years ago)

This is what I always found grating about the writing in Bethesda Fallout games. Their writers think that the war happened last Tuesday and there are parts of the old world behind every other door. In universe, the war happened more than two centuries ago and humanity has moved on, in several strange ways.

For some reason it was very hard for the Victorians who pioneered archaeology to understand that ancient humans were actual human beings and not storytelling archetypes or moral exemplars. This kind of archaeology is just inverted science fiction: Commenting on the present through the lens of the imaginary past, instead of the imaginary future.

The release day of Civilization n is always the best time to buy and play Civilization n-1.

Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency.

So, who's the VC that will fund the 4-9 failed governments we'll have to go through until we get a unicorn?

Even if you absolutely have to use an LLM for some reason, there are already perfectly good LLMs for code generation that you can comfortably run on commodity hardware.

Please elaborate on how "maybe they don't need good infrastructure" can be taken positively. It is, at best, deeply patronizing.

Nice sentiments, but the problem with the Internet in Greece is a runaway oligopoly of three telco carriers and a "business-friendly"(one set of sarcasm quotes doesn't feel enough in this case) government that won't bring down the hammer of regulation on it. No lofty ideals here.

Cheese was, and to a degree still is, stored and distributed in wheels. As a retail buyer you rarely encounter an entire wheel, but it's definitely a common sight in wholesale.

"Many problems that would otherwise seem quite difficult yield to the method with hardly a line of calculation."

This is the furthest from encyclopedic language you can possibly get. Vague, unsourced, flowery and subjective.

Which textbook is that? 1492 is Late Renaissance at the cusp of the Early Modern age.

Or, you know, people understand that their actions have consequences on others and living in an organized society is far better than the alternative. We're not endlessly settling an untapped frontier that exists solely in our heads.

My workspace in Europe is also in some kind of (unannounced) Read-Only mode.

And it's also perfectly fine to point out the rest of the building's entirely true and factual history, without having to accept snide remarks like "byzantine fake news".

That is not even a good example of lying by omission. You directly altered the facts as I presented them by joining sentence fragments. In this case, the grandparent comment is replying to an article that mentions the Hagia Sophia in the same breath as buildings that were built as mosques and have gone through their entire lifetimes as mosques. The comment does not have to restate the article point by point. If anyone is guilty of lying by omission it's the article's writer. They've erased most of the building's history.

What exactly is "false" or "fake news" about the parent comment? All three sentences look entirely factual to me:

The Hagia Sophia was indeed a church. The Hagia Sophia was also indeed a museum. The reconversion into a Mosque was also widely criticized.

Which useful service have you been locked out of? We're several years into full GDPR enforcement. I've only been locked out of some US newspapers, which is trivially by-passable, and some of the worst attention economy addiction boxes, which I'm, if anything, thankful for.

I thought this was a day for lies. This is the stone cold truth.

"Problem X? Who cares about problem X? What about problem Y? Not to mention problem Z!"

There are already several models "in the wild" designed specifically to produce anime-styled "adult material". In Stable Diffusion for image generation, NSFW filtering is basically a post-processing step that can be disabled in a single line of code. I'm sure someone has already done it for Chat* models as well.

Google killing of Reader was the symbolic point where the business plan of the internet moved from "Let's sell stuff to users!" to "Let's sell users to advertisers!".

Do you mean literally public domain or books with permissive licenses in general?

Great news. The current situation is basically a stealth transfer of tax money to certain publishers who abuse their position in an artificial oligopoly. Glad to see it slowly ending.