Levitz

Yet handles are not shaped like hands. The speakers I use on my computer don't look anything like a mouth, nor does the microphone I use on calls look like a set of ears.

Ultimately I guess this is up to opinion, but in mine, humanizing LLMs is not exactly "conforming to human sensibilities", rather it's trying to pass the LLM as something else to make it more appealing. It is deceitful in this way, and that I completely abhor.

For example, "Please" and "Thank you" come from human sentiment. It's an expression of something underneath, and an LLM using such expressions not only is fake, but makes a mockery of the real thing.

Would you bet money that they won't be good enough for coding in, say, one year?

Just as a call to actual consideration, would that seem a smart bet to do? Because I find it really hard to justify dismissal at this point, sure I don't think these things will improve forever and ever, but come on. The goofy Will Smith spaghetti is a little over 3 years old. Three years. Look at where we are at.

Yes, it damages its image, this is further made evident given the amount of propaganda that follows each time. Why would you invest in claude or codex if you just read how China's stuff is better?

China is known to spread love and kindness through markets with no self-interest, after all.

It baffles me how this can be said without concern for first order consequences.

It's a complex feeling, really.

I've got a friend, I'll call him Bob, mostly because Bob is nowhere near his real name and I'm about to say some not very flattering things about him. He is my friend and not my job colleague or anything, so there's certain objectivity to this, in fact I appreciate Bob and I wish nothing but the best for him.

Bob has been programming for a bit more than a decade. He is, barring the people I know from other countries, the best paid programmer I know, and I know well over a dozen.

Bob has no interest whatsoever in any programming language that is not what he has been using his whole career, nor does he have any interest or curiosity in dipping his toes in other related fields, web development, tinkering with arduinos, home servers... Nothing. Bob has not built a computer, ever, doesn't know how to do it, nor what each part in that object does, beyond the hard drive because he did plug an extra one once or twice.

More anecdotally I played some Factorio and Satisfactory with Bob, now I know these are not excellent representations, but I expected a degree of order, planning and foresight, I was very much surprised when facing the reality of none of that being present, and I very much did not expect to see the same thing the few times I've looked at his code, but I did see that same thing.

I promise you Bob doesn't make up for all of this in social skills.

Now, is Bob a good engineer? I really, really don't think so. Is he a curious person? A bit, not much, I get the feel he just ended in CS with no particular interest for it, but I'll say it again: He is the best paid programmer I know.

Is that frightening? Well yeah, in a way. It's also endearing in a "Well damn if this guy can do it then surely I can too" sort of way. Money is not everything of course, but it's as good of a proxy as any.

I agree that files aren't sacred, they are just another abstraction at the end of the day, but what the other user (I think) is referring to is the trend in which, as smartphone use becomes ubiquitous, users lose sight of the technical side of things.

It's not that the average user is ignorant of the many ways in which data can be stored and retrieved. It's that they are becoming ignorant of such abstractions existing altogether. It's hard to start thinking about how images are stored if all the user knows is "they are in the gallery".

What exactly is there to get used to? Do people really use each model very differently? There's a learning curve as in everything, but there is nothing that comes to mind for me when I use codex as opposed to claude

Hilarious response to concerns about industrial production, thanks for getting us here.

I'm not sure that's quite right, the pendulum has swung to a degree, for sure, but I find it evident to argue that the place the pendulum was at was in the benefit of liberal elites, and rather than reversing, I can see how the opposition to those liberal elites do have more freedom now, but the circles adjacent to the liberal elites have enormous leeway right now, I'm not sure there's even anything verboten.

You can have as much prejudice as you like against white people, argue for ending the concept of family, the idea that the west must cede hegemony on a moral basis, reparations, ending capitalism altogether, implementing any brutally authoritarian form of government you may picture (as long as it doesn't seem right wing), ending borders, dissolving countries, call for the death of the bourgeoisie, and I won't even mention anything related to gender or data centers as I don't want to find out if these comments have a limit on text.

Is there a line? I honestly don't know if there's a line. A renowned Harvard academic could argue tomorrow that all of humanity should commit coordinated suicide and I'd barely be surprised. I wouldn't even bet money that it hasn't happened already.

I'm a liberal myself, really, but it feels the general political current of liberalism has gone through some real excesses and it's bloated and dysfunctional right now.

Do you really not see to what degree you are proving his point here?

I suspect this happens a lot, and am unsure about what the first and second order consequences are.

Most evidently, positions that are not paraded around face less backlash, so people are just not as equipped to deal with them. But then again, it's also evident that those positions don't spread as easily, often being left to niche spaces, which do have a tendency to become echo chambers, cue polarization.

Intelligence on its own is not very useful though. We put it on a pedestal because it creates huge potential when paired with other things, wisdom, discipline, empathy, but on its own?

No, just aesthetic trivia that can be paraded around to make them look good.

Given how China behaves it should be evident that the only reason they don't apply military force is because they are not in position to. Not abusing military strength is not exactly being the paragon of virtue when your opposition could probably glass the world thrice before the day is over.

Keeps waging an economic war against the entire bloc.

Positions their propagandists right in our middle and does the best to influence our elections.

Exports fascism and finances antidemocratic forces.

Supports the genocide in that certain country.

Oh and they don't honor any treaties if they feel like it.

I don't know how anyone can really mention any of these when trying to paint a bad picture of anyone as compared to China. It's just an obscene exercise in ignorance. I just can't make sense of discourse like this except as a result of propaganda.

Conversely, I also am a user of LLMs (true shocker these days, I know), and am noticing a speedup in areas I was already familiar with, and a quicker introduction to new ones. The obvious benefit cannot be denied, and doing so regardless makes you look uninformed.

My largest concern comes from something tangential to this: I'm not sure we're all that good at deciding what should be learned and sticking to it.

Silly example: regex. LLMs are, as far as I know, well above the average dev when it comes to writing regex. Regex is also one of those things that for many people goes unused for months, but then you encounter the occasional perfect regex problem, and it's really easy to just lean on the LLM to write the regex for you rather than spending some time tinkering and testing. Regex can be frustrating and fickle, I think we've all been there.

But then, you just don't learn regex. So where does the intuition for what regex can do come from? Do you just become unable to write regex with no LLM? People stop writing resources for regex I guess?

My concern is that there's stuff I feel I can just chuck onto the LLM but I'm sure my judgement is not perfect. It's still probably worth it, all in all, but I'm not even sure of what I might be losing along the way and that's an uneasy feel.

But that's not anything new, and even in the same text you can see examples of that.

LLMs are a tool. The brush is a tool, the pencil is a tool. The way we write already is defined by tools. This very comment is remarkably defined by its medium, I can't control its font size! Or the font at all, for that matter, nor the color, hell I can't even control how and where this comment is read! This means I'm generally going to write it in English, a whole different language from my native one! How is that for "defining"???

None of this is new, it's all dictated by human experience in the very same way that the output of a LLM gets dictated by human experience. That's the way memes (as in, anthropology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme?) work.

LLMs don't understand, they just output based on some parameters. We've been here before.

I think it's a little bit naive to think they ignore the association. They know it perfectly well, which is why they are using it. Same thing with concentration camps, same thing with mentions of Gestapo.

I have lived abroad, yes. Does the USA make it easy to become a citizen? If the comparison is China, yes, a thousand times yes. Does language and society matter a truckload? Absolutely.

Short of that, there is a wide spectrum on how countries treats immigrants. This is the most important factor for people actually living in a place.

Yes. Does China treat immigrants better than the US? As I explained, no. There is no contest. The comparison borders on the absurd. The US is a remarkably flawed country in many aspects, but the vast majority of the stigma around its immigration comes from the fact that it's a matter that the US takes very, very seriously. The bar for living somewhere is not necessarily citizenship but it absolutely is a factor if someone is seriously planning to immigrate somewhere.

For an incredibly evident and very current example, the 14th amendment was very recently reaffirmed, with a whole lot of people being horrified it was even thrown into question at all.

How is getting money and support to live in a place not related to immigration?

Because any quantity of money beyond a livable wage has barely any relation to integrating people into a culture. A model of immigration based on money is not immigration at all, that's just hiring foreign workers.

I doubt many of the researchers migrating even want Chinese citizenship and the chains that come along with it, so why do most people (presumably Americans) keep harping on and on about it?

Because it's an important matter regarding immigration. If you want to live in a country, you might want to actually be a citizen of that country. Does that need explaining?

Once you're invited by the CCP for your exceptional research background, you're literally given an open chequebook for both your personal compensation and your future research endeavors.

None of which is related to immigration.

You're allowed to take your family along with you too, and the language barrier doesn't translate in the professional setting. Racism is a non-issue since I doubt these researchers will even be interacting with elements of that segment of Chinese Han society, unless they choose to.

Are you seriously suggesting that people can literally just not engage at all with the society they live in?

This just reads like deeply, deeply delusional reasoning attempting to paint China as a good alternative.

Whether China is immigration friendly or not is debatable.

Compared to the US or Europe? No it's not debatable.

No dual citizenship at all, most probably no citizenship. Harder residency. Good luck bringing family there.

Not going to even mention the obscene difference in racism OR the language barrier, both of which are enormous factors.

I'm almost certain people are different on this point, but I just want to put this out there in case it applies.

A lot of our entertainments and hobbies, especially in urban areas, are mental to begin with. The most evident example would be scrolling on your phone, which evidently is 100% a mental thing, but there's a lot in this box, videogames, music, reading can all really demand a lot from you mentally.

Explicitly physical things are not so common. Gym. Dancing. Climbing. Running. All of these are things that people who work with their brains often talk about as "relaxing" or "great against stress", even if they can put the body until great physical strain.

It is my experience that when mentally worn out, the "don't want to do anything" really translates to "don't want to do anything mentally", problem being, thinking about doing the physical thing instead is actually a little bit of mental, albeit more emotional, work, but once you ACTUALLY do that, then after spending the whole day focused on deep, complex stuff, being the caveman bench pressing is actually absolute bliss.

That's just not true. Most people forgot Bush by Obama's second year.

You can call it a failure, it's just not a military one.

Hell there's an argument to be made that the US should downsize its military because there's no universe in which exercising its full capability is not either the end of the world as we know it or absolute political suicide.

This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about.

Ah yes, systematic fraud and protectionist practices, free market through and through.

Most of Europe has a "registered building" system, where buildings above a certain age are considered historic.

It feels weird to have to mention this, but although there are a lot of historical buildings in Europe, it's not the norm.

Population grows. There was a noteworthy war not that long ago. The vast majority of buildings are not that old.

It's not an apples to apples comparison. 80%+ of deaths because of heat in Europe are 65+ years old.

When you start handling that range you've to take into account that these people are going to die because of something, save a guy from heat here and that's an extra death because of cancer 4 years later.

Now I'm not saying it's a thing to be ignored, but be wary of playing quick and dirty with statistics.

When you enact 0.1% changes through a population, that's still a 0.1% change.

"If we all do this little thing" thinking is utter nonsense. If all of human consumption or contribution to warming or what-have-you is 1000, applying a change that lowers that to 999 is not doing anything more than that.

This here is not even a 0.1% thing. You could probably get a better result by telling people to read ebooks rather than hardback. It's just absurd.

It's a more nuanced situation than people generally want to accept.

Marketing is made so they you identify with the product or identify with an aspirational version of yourself. Gaming is seen as heavily male-dominated. Expanding that is smart.

This is the most simple and probably accurate explanation. Companies like to make money, untapped markets look like money.

The problem is that then, the current audience, who is primarily male, can raise concerns about the marketing not catering to them anymore.

There's a political arm who doesn't like that at all, and they will not only attempt to enforce collective delusion to dismiss the whole thing (what do you mean? everybody plays videogames, playerbase is split 50/50 pretty much!), but invalidate the very idea that a primarily male audience can have grievances about being catered to.

This makes them look insane and alienates the original audience politically speaking, and ironically, makes the original audience look bigoted, which puts consumers off.

This dance has been going on for like a decade and a half at this point and it's only recently that signs of it dying down have started to show. I can only hope.

Scalping provides the service of exchanging money for time, means, and/or luck. People who have no time to camp, no botting tools or skills, etc can exchange their money instead.

Which, again, hurts both the seller and the vast majority of the buyers.

Scalping is a natural "black" market which always pops up to satisfy market demand whenever artificial restrictions are placed on the market.

Even in this case, there will be scalpers providing for people with more money than luck, who want a day one steam machine.

Scalpers, the vast majority of the time, deal with markets with non-artificial restrictions, and use them to their advantage. In this case, Valve has very intentionally designed a system to prevent scalpers because they want people to have a fair chance of getting a product that is very much not artificially restricted. Valve is free to sell to whoever they want, consumers are free to purchase from Valve, and scalpers are in the middle, exploiting the system for profit, and willingly or not pushing for DRM and for binding accounts to devices.